5 Soft Skills to Learn Before Starting a Contracting Business

You may already know that running a business requires a lot of skills. Some of them you have learned over time, or you may feel as if you were born with them. Others you will need to pick up or outsource to someone else. While you’re waiting for the ability to open your business, you can start working on these soft skills. Here are a few to help you get started.

Communication
When you start a business of one person, you may be surprised by the amount of time you spend communicating with other people. It might seem like you could do a lot of the work on your own, but there are a lot of emails, text messages, and phone calls that you have to make to coordinate each project. Your ability to secure jobs with clients depends heavily on your communication style, as well as your skill in meeting your clients’ communication expectations. Practice sending professional emails, and research tips on professional text messages and phone etiquette. You’ll have a better chance of making a good first impression that way.

Time Management
It’s an old adage that you can’t teach someone to be on time, but time management is certainly a skill that you can learn. Not everyone is good at paying attention to the clock. If you find that you get distracted easily, or if you lose yourself in a task and forget the passing time, you may miss out on important meetings or other things that you need to do. Time management involves an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses regarding task management and planning. Try different techniques to help you remember, such as using reminder apps or scheduling work tasks in timed intervals. The more experience you get, the better you’ll be able to impress clients with your efficiency.

Social Media
You can certainly hire a company to handle the social media for your business, but it’s not a bad idea to get some personal experience with it. Social media is something that you can engage with as a consumer, as well as a business owner. It doesn’t cost anything for you to participate, and you can invest as much effort as you like. If you don’t spend a lot of time on social media, give yourself the opportunity to explore new platforms and get a feel for how they work. Even if you don’t plan on managing your social media for your business, this experience will help you understand the role that social media plays in reaching future clients.

Delegation
Many people decide to go into business for themselves because they don’t want to interact with others regularly. But as your business grows, you may find that you work regularly with subcontractors and even employees. At that point, you’re going to need to be able to delegate tasks. It may seem like delegation is an easy skill to pick up, but it takes practice. Good delegation requires you to understand what each person brings to the table, and which tasks are most suited for them. It’s not just about ceding control to another. Delegation allows you to spread out the workload while ensuring that every task gets done with a high degree of accuracy and quality.

Conflict Resolution
In the day-to-day running of your business, you may not face a lot of conflict. But from one project to the next, you’ll have moments where you have to negotiate a disagreement with a subcontractor or deal with a frustrated client. The way that you handle these situations can make or break working relationships, which can help you grow or cost you money. If you find that your working style shifts too far toward conflict avoidance or aggressive posturing, it’s a good idea to come up with ways to move toward the center. Being able to collaborate, to find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is a great tool in negotiating contracts and resolving disagreements.

Becoming a licensed contractor calls for a lot of formal skills, but plenty of soft skills as well. For expert exam preparation as you get ready for the contractor licensing exam, visit CSLS today!