5 Tips to Standardize Your Contracting Business Practices

A contractor wearing a hard hat and holding a laptop.

In the first year or two of your contracting business, you’ll have to revise your business practices on a regular basis. At first, it might be as often as project to project. But once you get experience, you’ll want to standardize good business practices so you can repeat them each time. Here’s how.

Write Down Processes
Chances are, you’ve worked with someone who never wrote anything down. It was practically impossible to follow them or repeat their processes because it was all locked inside one person‘s head. You don’t want this environment for your business, because you’ll find good processes so much harder to repeat. Investing the time to write down your processes helps you to clarify what you expect and the best ways to determine whether or not you meet your standards. Once your business involves a handful of employees, having a set of written processes makes it much easier for them to follow your instructions.

Debrief After Projects
As you start to build experience, you may find that you discover new business practices that work much better over the course of a project. If you don’t incorporate them into your business processes, they may simply fade into the past. Instead, give yourself some time to debrief after a project. It may help to bring in an employee, partner or even a friend to help you evaluate. Small projects might only need an hour or less to take a few notes. Larger projects could require multiple days of documenting what worked and what didn’t. In either case, you’ll want to have the sense that you know what happened and how you can improve it.

Set Standards to Measure
In order to standardize your processes, you must create standards. The type of standards you create depends on a variety of factors, including:

For example, if you’re trying to adhere to a new standard for project completion time, you must clearly identify the standard. That will make it easier to determine the best ways to measure your adherence to the standard. In this case, you might add a schedule with unique and detailed plans for each stage of the project. Once the project is complete, you can go back and evaluate how well the schedule worked, and whether or not you were able to meet the standard.

Keep References Handy
The hallmark of a clearly-run business is transparency. In short, if you want to improve adherence to standardized business practices, you have to make the standards easy to find and reasonable to follow. It’s not a bad idea to set goals that require you to stretch a bit in order to reach them. However, they should not be so lofty that you are constantly in a state of failure and panic. These days, it’s easy to keep documents in the Cloud and easily available from any smartphone or mobile device. Make sure that your standards are within quick reach for anybody who will be working on the project.

Set Reminders to Make Adjustments
No process is so perfect that it will never need adjustment. As such, you should remind yourself to evaluate each process periodically and determine if it needs to be changed. You don’t need to stay up into the late hours or spend every weekend tweaking your practices. Constant adjustments can make standards harder to follow. Instead, choose an interval that is appropriate to the length of your business and your experience. At first, you might revise your processes every couple of weeks or once a month. Over time, once or twice a year may be enough.

Good standards for your business practices will help you keep your business running for years to come. To find out more about starting your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!