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5 Tips for Starting a Successful Contracting Business

If you want to start your own contracting business, check out this blog for some helpful tips on what you’ll need to get started.

So, your years of experience and interest in have inspired you to start your own contracting business.

The only thing holding you back?

The fact that you have absolutely no idea exactly how you should get started!

Don’t panic — we’re here to help to walk you through it.

In this post, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about how to start a contracting business that generates revenue and makes a serious impact on your target market.

Read on to learn what it takes to succeed, and get ready to become a force to be reckoned with!

1. Beef up your Education Credentials

The first step in understanding how to be a contractor that knocks the competition out of the water?

You need to take a hard look at your current education and certification levels.

Sure, you might outsource the physical labor to other professionals with the proper hands-on training in construction work.

But what sort of business education have you received that will help you understand, for example, how to and secure funding?

Do you know when you can expect a profit, the number of employees you’d like to hire, and how you plan to advertise your contracting business?

And what about the current contractor licensing requirements within your state? If you don’t have them, you could be met with serious fines that will make it difficult to continue to grow your business.

Will you need to pass any sort of licensing examination? Or, will you only need to provide registration as a business in the state where you want to practice?

Above all, how does your personal and professional background give you a leg up in understanding how to start a contracting business?

If you don’t have the level of experience you know you’ll need, another option is to shadow a successful contractor for a few weeks or a month.

This way, you’ll be able to properly evaluate whether or not you truly possess the skill set needed to succeed in the business.

Plus, when you’re ready to start your contracting business, you’ll have the perfect connections within the industry ready to go.

2. Study your Target Market

After you’ve taken a hard look at your current education levels and credentials, it’s time to take the next step in learning how to start a construction business.

Now is the time to conduct some seriously thorough research in your target market.

This means, in most cases, that you’ll need to get to know the ins and outs of your local community’s construction needs. Take a look at business development trends in the area if you’re mainly interested in .

Are they mainly industrial, requiring specialized buildings and warehouses?

Or, are they mostly standard office buildings?

If you’re interested in focusing mostly on residential buildings, identify the neighborhoods where you expect to get the most work.

Above all, studying your target market will help you to narrow down your niche.

Especially when you’re just getting your contracting business off the ground, you need to focus on serving a segment of people who need help with construction and installation — not every person in your city that might one day need your services.

As you continue to build up your customer base, the types and levels of services that you offer can grow along with your company.

You’ll need to be able to prove to potential investors that you’ve taken the time to do some thorough market research if you expect to be approved for any sort of funding.

Without proof that you’ll have customers waiting, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have any business to pay back a loan!

3. Get to Know your Competitors, Too

If you want to learn how to be a contractor, you have to get to know the other players.

This means that you’ll need to conduct research not only on your target market, but also on your competitors.

Sure, this is important because you might be able to catch them doing something wrong or learn from their mistakes.

But there’s another, even more crucial, reason why studying your competition matters.

You need to make sure that the way you run your business, as well as the services you offer, is different enough from what they’re doing.

Are you serving the same demographic? Are you working within the same neighborhood? Do you both own the same pieces of machinery and have the same areas of specialization?

Yes, competition is great for business.

But when you’re just starting out?

It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have the same amount of resources to really make it a fair fight between the two of you.

Since 20% of new businesses fail within the first year of operations alone, you don’t want to run this kind of a risk.

Instead, take a look at your competition and figure out what they’re not doing. Then, create a business plan and model that allows you to fill in the gaps.

4. Build a Website and Blog

One of the best ways to make sure that as many people as possible know about your contracting business?

Start building your website and your blog content before you open up your doors.

Creating a blog doesn’t just give you more indexed pages — AKA, more chances for Google to put you higher up in the search engine results. It also proves to the people reading it that you’re an authority within the contracting industry.

This way, even if they don’t need your services right now, when they do in the future, they’ll know exactly where they should go.

Plus, having a blog also allows you to include more keywords on your website, especially those that are location-based. This means you’ll be much more likely to make connections with the people who have the highest chance of doing business with you.

You’ll also have the chance to beef up both your internal and your external linking strategy.

If you’re looking to discover more about how the best contracting services create engaging and easy to navigate websites, check out how the team at Garage Craftsman built their site.

Not only is it packed with valuable and informative blog posts that help potential clients to find exactly what they need.

It also contains a detailed table of contents that includes reviews of popular models, the basics of what different products and tools can do, and much more.

It even includes links to where people can purchase the tools that they need online for the best possible price.

5. Get Active in your Local Community

If you really want to master how to be a contractor, you’re also going to need to focus on how you can become a presence within your local community.

When people know your name, and feel like you have a vested interest in elevating and improving your community, they’ll want to work with you.

For example, maybe you could sponsor a local sports team. You’re not just giving back — your company’s name and logo will also be on the back of every jersey.

You could also offer to build a few things in your local park, or even think about donating to a charity that’s important to the community.

If you can’t afford to do those things, don’t worry! There are lots of other ways that you can get your name out there.

We also love the idea of hosting an event or even a public lecture in your community. You could speak on the red flags to look out for that indicate a shoddy contractor service, for example.

That’s information that many people would love to know.

How to Start a Contracting Business: Wrapping Things Up

We hope that this post has helped you to better understand just a few of the many steps that you need to take when you want to know how to start a contracting business.

Remember to conduct both target market and competitor research. Do everything that you can to beef up your credentials and education, as well as your name recognition within your local community.

Above all, start blogging and building your website sooner rather than later.

Looking for more advice about how to grow a successful contracting business in any market?

We’ve got you covered.

Be sure to keep on checking back with our blog for more tips on how to sell more, optimize for SEO, and the templates you need to .