As a general contractor for a construction firm that does business between $50 million and $250 million, you know how tough it can be to succeed in a competitive field. While there are many firms that are much smaller than yours, many of which have their localized niches, there are plenty of larger enterprise companies that loom large over the construction landscape.
According to the research paper, "Creating and Cultivating the Next Generation of Construction Professionals," published in The National Academy in Sciences, the U.S. construction industry has unique competitive challenges, including global rivals for projects, diminishing resources, and a historically low level of laborers. At this production level, your firm has to take every single effort to trim overhead and improve efficiencies to boost revenues and grow the company.
Internal and External Scalability
At this size, your construction firm has experienced growth, but there's room in the market to spread your wings. According to the Associated General Contractors of America, construction spending in August 2015 surged to aseven-year high, and demand is only expected to increase. Growing a medium-sized construction firm requires taking advantage of economies of scale to truly boost profit margins and expand into new markets. In order to reach these economies as a general contractor, you might need to simultaneously oversee jobs located in different counties, states, and regions of the country. With so many diverse chess pieces across a global board, it can be difficult to ensure materials, subcontractors, and equipment are at the correct job site.
With a cloud-based construction project management solution like Procore, you can easily collaborate with all project members in one platform. In addition, Procore stores all the documents, drawings, communications, RFIs, punch-list items and more for every project in a single, easily-accessible repository. And with their mobile app, you can access all of this information from any location. Procore gives general contractors for medium-sized firms the ability to greatly boost their business bandwidth, allowing for more jobs, subcontractors, and clients, while simultaneously keeping tabs on all of these far-flung projects.
The only way to truly stand out on a competitive landscape is to ensure you have the best quality products available.
Improve Project Quality
Trying to juggle the diverse client base that could possibly span multiple countries can hurt the quality of your product. Subcontractors and field teams on faraway jobs might feel less inclined to put in a full effort since you might not be at the construction site on a daily basis to inspect and approve of the work. Thankfully, with a project management platform like Procore, project managers on site can photograph and upload pictures of all finished work and instantly share them with you or any other relevant parties. This allows you to keep a close eye on your projects to ensure all work is completed to your high standards of quality. The only way to truly stand out on a competitive landscape is to ensure you have the best quality products available.
Get the Best ROI
While there are computer programs that allow construction firms to input data into spreadsheets and perform some number crunching, many enterprise resource planning software programs require significant time to implement and even more time to learn. On top of the resources and time needed to get an ERP integrated, it can also cost a large sum of money to continually license the software for the firm's many users. By utilizing an intuitive and easy-to-use solution like Procore, you only need to pay a one-time purchase charge with no additional licensing fees, and don't need to spend precious resources on extended training periods.
Leave a Reply