Your Construction Budget: 7 Ways to Ensure Money Is Going to the Right Place
Where the money goes in business might often feel like something that you have no control over – you spend money on what you need, after all. However, for a business that wants to be truly competitive, your outgoing costs have to be finessed as much as possible. This is where your budget comes on – something that you work on with your financial team to constantly edit and monitor so that you know you’re always on the right track.
In construction, what this practically ends up meaning is slightly different, and you have to make sure you’re constantly aware of changes that are specific to your industry.
1. How’s Your Toolshed?
When it comes to construction, there’s no arguing on the importance of the tools that you’re working with. As good as your employees might be, you’re talking about materials on an industrial scale, and that’s going to require you to have a hold of some competitive machinery.
When you’re a smaller business, you might find it difficult to keep pace with the larger, more established brands in your field. However, there are a multitude of ways you can approach the tools that you use. You might think of focusing your resources on just those that are most relevant to the kind of work you do, or you might think of how you can hire or outsource some functions so that you’re not missing out on certain types of work. Knowing when to deploy which technique can start by understanding the full scope of application for any given tool, such as what portable batching systems for concrete offer and why so many brands utilize them.
2. Employee Training
It’s important that you don’t disregard your employees, however. Any tool is only as good as the person operating it, and in order to get the most out of the technology your business has available, you’re going to want people on the job who know what they’re doing. Again, if the size of your business is on the smaller end of the spectrum, you might feel as though you lack the establishment to pull in the most qualified workers. Fortunately, that still leaves you with the option of cultivating talent from within.
Offering your employees plenty of opportunities for training not only means that you can end up with the qualified workforce of your dreams, but it can also help to entice people towards your company in the first place. If they feel as though their job is providing them with professional development, that can also help to improve the happiness they feel while working with you.
3. On-Site Premises
Not every business – even within construction – is going to have the same concerns when it comes to on-site premises. Even if you only have a small office where you occasionally meet with your staff, this is something that’s going to make an impact on your budget. This is naturally going to lead you to ask questions about the nature of your space – whether it can be smaller or removed entirely. There might be other models that have been showcased by construction businesses that offer you an alternative vision of things. While shifting to something like that might be appealing, you have to ask whether it makes sense for your brand and also if the act of shifting towards it could be a costly venture in its own right.
In construction, you’re doubtlessly also going to own a lot of tools, even if you do try and outsource the majority of the larger machinery. That makes having some sort of storage facility or unit necessary – one that is within reach of your employees so they can get what they need and go. Furthermore, while not necessarily the same kind of consideration as a whole office, it might be that your staff require work vehicles to operate effectively, which is also going to be a potential cost. However, if it makes a big positive difference to how your business operates, it could be worth your time.
4. Financial Aid
Figuring out your budget can be time-consuming and difficult. There are more factors to consider than it can first appear, and the importance of getting it right might cause you to doubt your own process. Getting the right financial aid can help you be much more confident that the approach you’re taking in this area is the right one. Professionals can help you understand what kind of money you have, how your prospects are looking, which of your outgoings are more necessary than others, and what you can do to change all of that. It goes far beyond your budget, and ensuring that you’re paying the right kinds of taxes and meeting the right standards is crucial for your business.
The issue, yet again, is the kind of availability of such services for smaller businesses compared to larger ones. Outsourcing is a possible solution, or you could perhaps wait until your company is more established and you are working with more income to hire a dedicated in-house accounting team.
5. Business Growth
It might feel as though growing your business is often the only thing on your mind, so having to remember to spend in that area could seem bizarre. However, the issue is that the practical reality of your business might be much more concerned with staying afloat. In construction, you have jobs that need doing and a constant understanding of how to handle these practical tasks with as much efficiency as possible without sacrificing the result. This is on top of everything else that requires your attention, of course.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to the problem of how to get out of this rut and start moving towards a stage where your business is actively growing. Some might point towards wise investments, but that, again, could be a consideration for your financial team. Another avenue to consider is how training your staff to take on more managerial responsibilities could put them in a prime position for delegation. If you have trusted team members who can take up a greater share of responsibilities, you can focus your attention elsewhere – all while having the benefit of allowing you to cultivate the kind of trust that comes with hiring from within.
6. Your Marketing Approach
The obvious candidate for more spending might be your marketing budget. Many businesses will cite marketing as the primary method of getting your name out there and bringing in more attention to your brand – ultimately increasing the amount of money that you have to work with. As with anything, though, this isn’t a problem that is necessarily solved by throwing money at it. You need to be smart about how you go about your marketing, and you need to be aware of which types of marketing are typically more effective for construction brands and how that aligns with your own target audience. After all, while you are a business in this industry, you are also unique from the other brands that surround you, meaning that your strategy will be completely individual.
It’s also worth thinking about what kind of impact you want the different marketing approaches to have for you. You might allocate more money to your marketing fund, but where is this money going? Is it going towards video marketing, which can help you to have a more active presence across different digital platforms like social media channels? Or is it instead going towards search engine optimization in the hope that awareness of your brand will increase across the board?
7. An Up-to-Date Budget
You have so many different things you need to be doing at any given time that the idea of constantly refreshing your budget to fit your shifting circumstances is obviously going to be unappealing. However, if you’re working with an outdated budget, one of the obvious consequences is going to be that you’re spending money in the wrong place – or worse, you’re spending money that you don’t have.
This goes back to the idea of having a financial team filled with advisors who can properly analyze your own money and help to inform you based on that. However, it’s also important to recognize how this is distinct in how it’s the central document of your spending. When things are looking up, that means you can begin to put money somewhere new, potentially securing something that can help to keep things that way or exploring a new avenue for business growth. However, when the pendulum shifts in the other direction, you need a financial budget that reflects this as well. After all, ignoring this might leave you in a situation where you’re spending more than you can afford to, making your situation worse. You don’t want a minor dip in your circumstances to snowball into something worse, and that means that you have to stay on top of your spending and what your budget tells you.
