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Titled: Being A Great Versus Simply Good Contractor- Making The Grade Get the Business category RSS Feed

Being A Great Versus Simply Good Contractor- Making The Grade

Article Summary: For a contractor to succeed in today's marketplace they cannot be satisfied with being simply good enough; they need to constantly strive for greatness. This article outlines some of the basic areas that contractors need to address if they want to go past merely being "good enough" and achieve contracting greatness.

Hard work and long hours are important to any businesses success. Years and years of continued hard work and long hours with mediocre results usually points to a bigger problem; the contractor may not be managing efficiently. They may simply be settling for good, but not really reaching for great in their management efforts.

Good contractors keep accurate records and manage cash flow. Great contractors review data with experience and insight in order to better understand their firms' performance and identify areas for improvement.

When you are calculating and putting numbers into a table you cannot beat a computer for speed and accuracy. With a low-cost computer today, a contractor can manage and keep on top of more data today that his father could have ever hoped to keep track of just 20 years ago. Today job costing, estimating, and accounting can be done with an amazing degree of accuracy and detail.

But managing your company's finances goes beyond simply keeping track of income and expenses and making sure that more money comes in than goes out. Good judgment must be exercised, and decisions must be made every day. That requires an understanding of financial statements and the ability to use that information to make better decisions, both short and long-term.

For example, compare day-to-day productivity with long-term productivity. When you include call-backs and reworks in performance, you might find it better to budget additional hours upfront to get the job done right the first time.

Also, along this line, how many times have you started into a job and realized that you had bid the job much lower than you should have bid to make a profit, but after realizing your error, jumped into the job on "all fours", took the "bull by the horns" and managed to squeak out a meager profit? After getting by with the skin on your teeth, you vowed never to get yourself into that situation again only to find yourself there sometime in the future.

We have a tendency to finish the problem job and go right on to the next job without considering the consequences of failing to properly identify the problems and mistakes that we made with the last bid and correct them BEFORE we have to deal with them on the next bid.

We have all heard the saying, "Insanity is doing something the same way over and over again and expecting different results.Unfortunately, it would appear that many of us are pointing fingers at what someone else may or may not be doing, but are not closing our own barn door concerning the history of our own estimating bids versus our actual results on the job!

Forecasting is another key activity. It might be considered planning for future financial management. While no one can predict the company's future with certainty, it's important to make some thoughtful estimates from time to time. Those 'best guesses,' such as whether to buy or lease equipment or improve your internal computer software tools, can be factored into decisions made each day.

A truly great manager realizes and studies the factors that create successful construction projects, versus the shortcomings that lead to failures, and quickly find that "squeezing a dollar" too much today can be "penny wise and pound foolish" tomorrow when they have to spend far more to correct what they could have averted with better money management at the beginning of the project. By actively managing the company's financial affairs rather than just keeping good books, contractors can build and maintain a strong foundation for future prosperity for both the company and its employees.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
Phillip Gilliam
Phillip P Gilliam is a devoted husband and father to three daughters. He has lived in Florida for over 20 years and originally comes from Dayton, Ohio. He has a passion for business management, marketing and finance and has been utilizing software and technology for over 37 years. He is currently the President and CEO of Discover Software Inc., which is a construction software company. http://www.easyestimating.com