Let’s face it: Few people are starting with such wealth that they can begin a business without having to scrimp or go into debt. While opening a ton of credit lines and borrowing lots of money isn’t necessarily the best choice, neither is avoiding debt as if it were the plague. Like most parts of business management, a good balance is key. Here’s how to determine when going into debt is likely to be good or bad for your business.

Sources of Funding
When you start a business, you’ll usually have a few sources of funding, such as:

• Savings
• Other income
• Investor funding
• Loans

Before you have clients, you may not necessarily have income. Some people choose to keep a side job or even a full-time job while they build their business. This isn’t necessarily an easier task, depending on the type of work you do. Savings can be difficult to accumulate, but has the benefit that it’s freely available and never needs to be paid back. Maintaining a variety of possible funding sources, including crowdfunding or investment money, makes debt less of a risky proposition.

Steady Income
One of the first things you have to establish before you take on debt is how you will pay it back. In some industries, people can start a business and find paying clients very quickly. This depends heavily on your location, your competition and the type of work you do. Otherwise, you’ll need to figure out how you plan to pay yourself and your debts, plus other overhead expenses like equipment or materials. This is why a lot of people will build a contracting business more slowly at first, so they can keep other income opportunities flowing at the same time.

Limited Spending
If you’ve been waiting for years to be able to start your own contracting business, it’s tempting to start spending as soon as you have the opportunity. But if you rack up a bunch of debt before you have reliable clients and income to pay it off, you’re going to find yourself with too much overhead and not enough profit. Getting into debt on a limited scale to help you get established can be helpful. It will be easier to manage if you can stick to what you need instead of what you’d like. For example, you’ll spend less to pay for rentals on equipment that you don’t need daily than you would to buy them.

Type of Loan
When it comes to getting into debt for your business, the type of loan matters significantly. There are a variety of lending options for businesses, including:

• SBA loans
• Secured loans for vehicles or other equipment
• Credit cards or other lines of credit
• Cash advances

The interest rates that you’ll pay vary depending on your credit and the type of loan. For example, a loan that is secured by an asset, like an auto loan, tends to have the lowest interest rate. Credit cards and cash advances usually carry a higher risk to the lender, so they have higher interest rates. This affects how much you have to pay each month and how long it takes to pay it off. As such, getting one type of loan may be more practical than others, depending on the purpose.

Plan to Pay Off
As a good general rule, you should develop a plan to pay off all debts that you accumulate for the business. This is true for revolving debt like credit cards, as well as loans with a set amount and a defined term. The last thing that you want is to spend the next 10 years making minimum payments on a debt that you could have paid off within a year. Formulate a plan in advance to handle the debt before you take it on. This can help you make sure that you actually need to make the expense, as well as give you a path to manage it.

Funding your business wisely is one way you can ensure it will last. Getting a great education is another. To start building your contracting business, contact CSLS today!

Like most industries, construction has times when it’s easier to get established and times when there’s a lot of competition. But since it’s such a large industry and doesn’t evolve as rapidly as others, you’ll find a lot of flexibility. If you’ve been thinking about getting into construction and you’re not sure when is the best time to start, here are a few factors to consider as you make a decision.

Regional Development
As you might expect from almost any job, construction goes through periods where there is a lot of demand for projects and times when there aren’t so many. And while a lot of projects in the pipeline can be a good sign for your career prospects, you wouldn’t necessarily want to come in right at the end of it. Do some research and figure out what the capacity is for new development and renovation in your area. This will help to give you an idea of the likelihood of getting a good job in your chosen field. It can also highlight regions with a lot of potential that you hadn’t previously considered.

Long-Term Career Opportunities
If you have a pretty good idea of which field you’d like to work in, then you’ll need to scope out what the demand is for professionals in that field before you make a choice. People who invest years of work into a career have a pretty good chance of continuing on until they retire. Right now, there are lots of professionals leaving construction after decades in the business. This means there may be plenty of available spots in the type of job that you would like to do. Easing into a new role at this time could be a great opportunity to find your feet with less competition.

Future Growth
Of course, knowing what the region has planned for the next couple of years isn’t going to be enough to last you for a whole career. If you’re thinking about taking a path that you could travel for 20 to 30 years or more, you want to be sure that there is plenty of future growth waiting for you. The good news is that construction is a field that will always have some degree of demand. The trick is finding the types of jobs that are most likely to thrive with technological innovations and updates to construction practices. If you’re ready to make use of construction technology or perhaps even create some of it yourself, now is an excellent time to get started.

Personal Plans
Starting a new career path requires a fair bit of flexibility. This means that you’ll need to consider what your plans are for the next 5 to 10 years and balance them with your life as it is now. It’s not always clear when is the best time to make a big decision like a new job. And yet, they say that the best time to start something that takes years is to have done it already several years ago. The second best time is now.

Ready to Commit
Ultimately, the most valuable and competitive jobs and construction usually take a commitment of at least a few years to get yourself established. In a way, it’s not unlike going to college and then starting a career. If you want to get the most from the experience, you need to be willing to invest the time and effort to make it a success. If you are ready to commit to the work and study that it takes to become a licensed contractor, you’re already on your way to improving your life and building a career you’ll be glad to have.

Almost anytime is a good time to start a career in construction. The time you invest is what makes it a valuable decision. To get started, contact CSLS today!

When you think about waste management on and off the jobsite, it’s more than an issue of cleaning up a mess or making sure you dispose of hazardous materials in the right way. It’s a matter of your own safety and the people around you. Here are a few factors to consider as you decide if your waste management strategy is ideal, or could use a reboot.

Environmental Risks
Whenever you work on a construction site, even if that place is a warehouse or your own home, you may have a variety of environmental concerns to worry about. Since this is heavily dependent on your working location, you’ll need to inspect each site and conduct testing as required before you can establish the type of environmental risks you’re facing. For example, you might have to deal with high levels of certain contaminants in the soil, like radon. The presence of a free-flowing water source nearby may make prompt cleanup more important, to avoid contaminating that water supply.

Population Concerns
You will also need to pay attention to the people who live and work around your construction site, and how the production of waste may affect them. In 2020, many construction workers in California have been invested in renovating or retrofitting existing hospitals to accommodate increased numbers of patients due to COVID-19. However, doing construction work in a hospital that has patients in it presents unique risks to a highly vulnerable population. You should consider the impact that dust and debris can have if they shift from the area where you are working before you have a chance to clean it up.

Cleanup Intervals
There are many different approaches to waste management on the construction site, and most of them have a different cleanup interval. If you are in the habit of cleaning up when a project is completely done, and not one minute before, you may be putting yourself and others at risk. The chance that dust and debris can blow away from an open jobsite is relatively high. But you should also keep in mind that it can create a slipping or tripping hazard while you continue to work in the space. Setting a more frequent cleanup interval, as often as every hour, keeps the excess out of the way.

Disposal Practices
Although cleanup at the jobsite is a major part of your waste management strategy, it is not the last step. You also need to dispose of your construction debris and garbage on a regular basis. Knowing how to dispose of materials is a vital skill that you as a business owner must master. In many cases, being able to control all aspects of site cleanup is a matter of following the law. If you haven’t thought about these practices in a while, now may be a good opportunity to re-evaluate them. You may have more options for recycling or local disposal than you did in years past.

Employee Training
As in many industries, you may discover that there is a significant difference between what you are supposed to do and what people are actually doing. In a lot of cases, this is an indicator that people are unaware of how to dispose of waste on a construction site. Since this can be a serious matter of health and even life or death, training should be an important component of your business practices. Make sure that you know how you should handle site cleanup depending on the site and the type of project that you are doing. Then invest the time and money to confirm that everybody you work with has that knowledge as well.

Waste management is a time-consuming task, but one that you need to do for your health and the security of your contracting business. For more information about building a successful business in construction, contact CSLS today!

You probably know that if you want business success, you’ve got to have an online presence. But in order for your potential customers to find you online, they need to be able to find you in a search. Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a way of targeting the content you put online to help your business in a search. You can pay a marketing company to handle this for you, but there are a few things you can do for yourself. Here’s what you can try.

Search for Common Terms
In order to figure out where you would like your page to show up, you need to figure out what’s there. Some keywords are overused, and it’s hard to tell how much until you start searching for them yourself. For most small businesses that operate within a limited location, your ideal keywords will be the type of services you offer in your broad location. If you live in a small suburb or in a rural area, you may need to search for multiple nearby cities to get a sense for what may work. Search terms that don’t bring up a lot of hits may have a need that’s not met, or a lack of demand. Use your best judgment to determine which is the most likely scenario.

Try Various Types of Keywords
There are many different ways to approach keywords. Potential clients may use a variety of them, or stick to just one. For example, you might have clients who search for “plumber in Los Angeles,“ while others search for “plumber Los Angeles.” There’s been a resurgence in the use of long-tail keywords, which are long key phrases that encapsulate what the user is looking for. You may have more of an opportunity to increase your search rankings by using them yourself. You might try creating a few different pages that each focus on a different keyword style.

Answer Questions
To improve your search engine rankings, adding value is the thing you need to do most. When you search for something on Google, you’ll often see a list of similar questions that people search for, related to your topic. These snippets can be an excellent way to get your business onto the first page. You may have to make a few guesses as to which questions are most important to your prospective clients. But if you can answer them better than other companies, you might be able to get a big reward that way.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Years ago, many companies aimed to bring their search engine rankings up by cramming each page with the same keyword dozens of times. This is an old trick that may have worked in 2010, but is likely to cause problems for you in 2020. People visit your site or your social media pages because they are looking for relevant information. A page full of nothing but keywords isn’t likely to get them what they need. As a result, Google tends to penalize pages full of keywords with lower rankings. Aim to keep the content natural, with a handful of keywords sprinkled in. Using them in headings or near the top of the page can be the most helpful.

Track Your Progress
Although you’re trying to do this on a tight budget, that doesn’t mean you should just make a bunch of random efforts and hope that something sticks. You still need some kind of a strategy. In order to know how well your SEO techniques are paying off, you’ll need to track it somehow. Social media platforms may have easy ways to track visitors and engagement. If you want to track the performance of your website, it might be worth signing up for something like Google Analytics. Many of these services offer a free version, but it’s usually pretty limited. Consider it a way to evaluate your options and decide which one is worth making an investment.

SEO is one way that people can find your business, but it doesn’t have to break the bank. To discover how becoming a licensed contractor helps you build the business of your dreams, contact CSLS today!

As you start to think about construction site safety from the vantage point of a business owner, you’ll spend a lot of time reading rules and guidelines. But once you start to master them, you’ll find that you need to be able to assess the situation regularly and quickly. If you use your five senses to your advantage, you’ll see how your natural instincts can tell you what could be wrong.

Sight
What you see on the jobsite is probably your first indicator of its safety. For most people, sight is the first or possibly the second sense they rely on to understand their surroundings. You can use your vision to evaluate the surrounding environment for each task you’ll be doing on the site. It’s important to get a 360° view, because it’s likely that there may be hazards behind you. For example, if you’re working in a busy warehouse, you should know if there will be equipment in use behind you, or people moving through with small vehicles. Working with multiple people helps to increase the likelihood that someone will see a disaster before it happens. But this isn’t guaranteed, so you’ll want to evaluate it in advance.

Sound
Sounds on the construction site can be trickier to navigate than what you see. This is because many pieces of construction equipment generate a lot of noise, and that isn’t necessarily an indicator that something is wrong. In some cases, the task you’re doing produces so much noise that you need to wear protective gear to reduce sound levels. This means that other people, who might call out to you to get your attention in case of a hazard, may not be able to get through. Tools for construction safety often use a combination of indicators, like a loud beep and a bright flashing light, to get someone’s attention even if they may can only hear or see it.

Smell
If you have ever walked into a room that had left natural gas running too long, you know the unmistakable smell. This scent exists to warn you of danger. In some cases, a bad smell is an indicator that disaster is about to strike. A strong burning smell may come as the result of a natural construction process, or it could be an accidental fire. Unfortunately, people are often trained to ignore bad smells because it is sometimes impolite to comment on them. But it’s better to make a note of them than to tune them out. Of course, for contaminants like carbon monoxide, you may not be able to smell it at all. That’s why you install things like carbon monoxide detectors to alert you, in the event that the room is not properly ventilated.

Touch
You’re less likely to rely on your sense of touch when you can see and hear clearly. But if you can’t, your sense of touch may be the difference between safe passage and a fall. Falls on construction sites are one of the most common sources of injury or even death. They’re more likely to happen in places where people cannot see clearly, or where they are distracted by the task at hand. When you’re working above the ground, make sure that you can keep both feet flat. If you start to feel that you don’t have a firm grip, you may need to use additional safety equipment or temporarily suspend work.

When to Trust Your Instincts
When you’ve got a long day of work and you’re most of the way through, it’s tempting to ignore your instincts just so you can get the job done and go home. Statistically, this is when accidents are more likely to happen. You don’t need to be on constant alert to the point that you can’t focus on the task. But you should certainly take breaks to evaluate your environment for possible hazards. That way, you can manage them before you start the task, and ensure that you leave the environment safe for the next person.

Trusting your senses is one way to keep your contracting business safe for years to come. To learn more about taking the contractor licensing exam, contact CSLS today!

If you want to work in construction, you should have some idea of what you can expect. Of course, it’s easy to look at construction professionals on TV or in the movies as a starting point. But those depictions aren’t always accurate. Here are five ways that your construction career won’t be like what you see on TV.

You’ll Probably Run Multiple Projects at Once
Licensed contractors on renovation TV shows may invest all of their time into working on one project before shifting gears to the next one. In reality, there’s a high likelihood that you will be balancing several larger projects at the same time. This might not be the case for repair jobs or other fields wherein most of your work can be completed within a day. But you’ll still have to handle things like scheduling and consultations, even in those instances. As such, you’ll have to build experience in balancing the needs of several clients at once.

You Can’t Work 24/7
You know how it is with these budget renovations intended to provide a big surprise reveal at the end: Everyone works nonstop until it’s done. But if you do this as a licensed contractor, you’re going to run yourself into the ground in very short order. In most cases, what you see on TV isn’t even true. They stage it so that it looks like everything is done in a very short period of time. In fact, you may have to stagger the work to accommodate the needs of employees and subcontractors. There’s also the fact that some jobs can’t be done in tandem, so you’re going to have to wait for someone else’s schedule.

Progress Happens in Pieces
If you are a regular contractor, focusing all the progress toward a surprise reveal at the end could be a nightmare. In the real world, clients may want to see progress throughout the project. That’s because it is important to confirm that everything is happening according to specification. The last thing you need is to get to the end and realize that there is something that the client isn’t happy with, and you could have saved yourself a lot of time if you found that out earlier. Instead, you may have progress that happens in stages, with breaks in-between while you work on other projects or continue negotiating with clients.

There’s a Lot of Activity Behind the Scenes
When you own your own business, you’ll have to do a lot of things beyond showing up to a job site and performing a construction task. The TV shows also have a lot of activity going on behind the scenes, but they make it seem as though there isn’t. They want to give the impression that what you see is truly what you get. But in construction, if you don’t do the necessary tasks for administration, permitting, or inspections, you could have a project that fails or a business that can’t keep going. As a licensed contractor, you may have to wear a lot of hats unless you can hire people to do that work for you.

You’ll Need Lots of Practice
It’s a little horrifying to watch the host of a TV show just start slamming into walls or breaking countertops, especially if they don’t have a lot of skills or experience in the field. If home renovation TV has done any damage, it’s the sense that anybody can do construction whether they have the training or not. In truth, people spend years just developing the knowledge that they need to run a business on their own as a licensed contractor. They will also spend their entire careers learning and refining their skills. You may be handy to start with, but you’ll have a lot of room to grow.

When you first start to get into construction, it can be tempting to see it the way it is presented in media. But you’ll soon see how different it is, especially as you work toward becoming a licensed contractor. For more information about courses to help you prepare for the contractor licensing exam, contact CSLS today!

In 2020, the construction industry took a big hit when many states seriously limited businesses due to the pandemic. In 2021, the Delta variant of COVID-19 has slowed construction spending, particularly as case numbers remain high. While this situation is rare, periodic slowdowns in construction are not. With these tips, you will know how to keep your business going despite a lull in construction.

Check Your Cash Flow
Ultimately, the biggest problem that you’ll have when income is low is the ability to keep paying your bills, including yourself. The way that you manage these two factors is called cash flow. In short, the more bills you have, the more money you need to keep the cash flow in balance. When you have the time, take a detailed look at your regular expenses and determine if any of them are unnecessary. Cutting out waste is a great way to improve your cash flow. Re-organizing your expenses may also help. For example, selling a piece of equipment you never use can give you extra funds at the moment, and make it easier to rent the same equipment for less.

Refine Your Processes
After each project, it’s common to take a few hours to think about problems that came up and how you would like to handle them in the future. For example, if you ended up buying too many materials for the project because you lack an efficient inventory, you probably spent more than you needed to. Refining your processes during the slow season is an efficient way to tighten them up. You can explore new building technologies and practices that help you decrease the amount of waste and complete work more quickly. Both of these can save money, especially if you keep improving over time.

Improve Your Marketing
The best way to ensure a steady supply of new clients is to maintain your marketing strategy. At slow times of the year, you’ve got more room to focus and more need to make your marketing effective. It doesn’t have to be extremely complicated or expensive, especially if you’re just starting out. If you don’t have much of a social media presence, or if you do but you let it go while you were too busy to keep it up, now is an opportunity to revisit it. Pay for a few sponsored ads and start engaging with the community. You might be surprised how many people will notice you.

Add New Services
Many contractors offer a variety of services that give them the option of running large and small projects. It’s common to spend the busy season working on projects that take up to several weeks and fill in the gaps with tasks that take less than a day. Think about the services the clients are likely to need after you’ve completed construction for them, like maintenance, upgrades, or repairs. If you live in parts of the state with cold, icy or snowy winter weather, consider jobs that you can do indoors. Demand for these types of projects tends to rise during the winter, so you may be able to fill your time better that way.

Keep Up on Administrative Tasks
If you’re running a business while simultaneously getting work done for clients, it’s likely that you will be struggling to stay ahead of all the administrative tasks. When you have to be careful about how you spend your time and money, those administrative tasks become even more important. Plenty of things that are hard to do during the busy season might be much simpler to schedule at other times:

• Training
• Invoicing clients
• Equipment maintenance
• Employee time off

Taking care of these things when you have minimal work available ensures that you are ready for the next busy season.

Keeping your construction business going throughout the year requires a practical strategy. By focusing on these aspects, you’ll have a better chance of getting through. For more information about running a contracting business, visit CSLS today!

The average age of a construction worker is 41. A few years ago, it was a bit less than 40. Construction’s aging workforce shows that the labor shortage isn’t bringing in enough younger people. There are a variety of ways that businesses are trying to get younger workers’ interest. If you have been wondering whether you should start a career in construction in your 20s, here are five reasons you’ll be glad you did.

You Can Start When Demand Is High
On occasion, you’ll probably read something about the labor shortage in construction. For almost a decade now, the construction industry has had a significant shortage of qualified workers. Starting in the industry when demand is high can offer a lot of benefits. The more that companies need workers, the more likely they are to offer enticing benefits like higher wages or upward mobility. Of course, if you wait too long, then you might miss out on some of those opportunities. Answering the call at the right time could set you up for better career choices in the future.

You’ll Have More Time to Pick Up Skills
Although people learn new skills and change careers throughout their lifetimes, there are certain benefits to making that decision earlier in your adult life. When you are younger, you are less likely to have the same kinds of obligations that people have in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. As such, you may have much more time that you can devote to studying and mastering those skills. Put in that time while it is easy, and you will see it pay off. By the time you’re ready to add more personal responsibilities to your plate, you may already have an established business.

You Can Establish a Reliable Income Faster
These days, building a career is as much about reliable income as it is about job fulfillment. Lots of jobs out there aren’t predictable or reliable, and you’re more likely to end up with those in your 20s. By comparison, construction has lots of opportunities that don’t require as much to get started. The earlier you start, the sooner you will see benefits in the form of a higher, reliable paycheck. While your friends from high school are still trying to find good jobs, you might have years of steady employment experience and a future that will keep improving upon it.

You’ll Have More Time to Build Your Business
Businesses take years to establish, and it’s better if you have more time in which to do it. Take a look at people who started a business in their 20s compared to people who switched careers and started a business in their 40s or 50s. The business owners who started earlier have more time to learn from their mistakes and turn that knowledge into larger profits. People who start later still have potential, but they’ll have to balance it with other responsibilities and the pressure to prepare for retirement. The difference might mean the ability to sell a successful, lucrative business, instead of simply closing it when you’re done.

You’ll Have a Better Chance at Early Retirement
Most people don’t start a business just so that they can leave it. But thinking about your plans for retirement is a good idea to do at any age. Financial experts say that if you like the idea of retiring in your 50s to enjoy a longer life, you need to start as soon as you can. Businesses often offer more growth potential and the ability to increase profits than standard employment. The earlier you begin on your career path, the longer you have to plan and save to make your goals easier to achieve.

Are you ready to find out the advantages of working in construction? One of the best ways to get what you want is to become a licensed contractor. For more information, visit CSLS today!

COVID-19 certainly gets a lot of attention these days, but there are plenty of common colds and other viruses that make their way through the workplace every year. If you find that you often get sick at work, particularly during the fall and winter, your contracting business might benefit from implementing a few healthy practices. Here are five easy ideas to consider.

1. Avoid Sharing Food

One of the best ways to minimize the spread of viruses is to stop sharing food. You probably already know not to split a drink with your coworkers, but this practice should extend to other types of food as well. If you’re participating in a shared meal, make sure there are adequate implements for each dish so that no one uses their hands to serve. For communal eating arrangements, keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. After all, food poisoning is often caused by bacteria or viruses, which can also be spread from one person to another.

2. Make Hygiene Easy

In order to keep people from spreading illnesses in the early period before they show symptoms, you should try to improve your hygiene options at the job site and regular workspace:

• Keep tissues, paper towels, and napkins handy in the break area
• Make cleaning supplies readily available, and ensure they are well-stocked
• Put up signs with hygiene tips in the bathroom and break room

Your goal is to make cleaning up after eating or using the bathroom as routine and quick as possible. If people have to search for the next roll of paper towels or deal with a clogged soap pump, they probably won’t do it.

3. Encourage Healthy Habits

Disease prevention involves promoting healthy habits. After all, if you are in better health, your body can usually fight back harder against viruses. As such, you can encourage the people you work with to take steps to improve their overall health:

• Eating healthy food
• Regular exercise
• Wellness checkups
• Updated vaccinations, including tetanus, flu, and COVID-19

These steps don’t always stop the spread of viruses, of course. But they make it easier for people to check in with themselves and know when something is wrong. That way, they learn early when they get sick and can take action sooner.

4. Clean Frequently-Used Surfaces

Most viruses like the cold or flu transmit by droplets in the air or by contact. As such, people who are contagious may touch a surface, then spread the illness when someone else comes in contact with it. You can minimize this problem by cleaning high-touch areas, especially around hygiene and eating stations. A little more attention toward cleaning up break areas and wiping down doors or keypads can make a big difference. Keep in mind that a wet paper towel won’t be sufficient. A spray or wipe with antibacterial and antiviral cleaning agents is best.

5. Offer Flex Time for Illness

When people get sick, you really want them to stay home. Sick people are more likely to make mistakes and could possibly get injured or injure others by accident. That’s on top of the fact that people who have a cold or another virus will spread it to more people if they have to go to work. Instead, consider offering flex-time that people can use when they get sick. Paid time off is a great option, but flex time is too. With this option, workers who are too sick to work on Monday might be able to put in more time later to make it up. They don’t lose income, and you and the other workers on the job site are less likely to get sick.

Preventing the spread of disease seems like a big deal, but it really can be quite simple. When you follow these tips, you may notice that cold and flu season isn’t as disastrous for you or your contracting business. To learn more about the steps to becoming a licensed contractor, contact CSLS today!

When you get focused on a task at your contracting business, it is easy to forget everything else until you are done. But breaks are important, especially on long days. With this information, you’ll understand why you should take breaks, and the best ways to do it.

You’ll Be Safer
On a construction site, focus can be a great thing. It can also be a dangerous thing, particularly if you are so lost in your work that you lose the ability to acknowledge your surroundings. Not everyone has this concern, but if you do, it’s an even better reason to take breaks. You don’t have to switch to something else every 15 minutes, of course. But it’s a good idea to break up your flow at least once every couple of hours to check in with yourself and the site. If you’re ever working alone or far away from others on the job site, you’ll be glad you did.

You Won’t Burn Out on Tasks
Any task can turn into burnout if you do it often enough and long enough. Some people thrive in the kind of environment wherein they do not stop until they are done. But for most people, that’s the quickest path to disaster. Even if your brain understands that you’re trying to get something done, your body doesn’t. As such, you may notice that your body is responding in negative ways, such as:

• Distraction
• Burning muscles
• Stiff joints

Your body will remember these effects long after you finish the task. And the next time you try to do it, you’ll be more likely to experience them. By taking a break before you reach this point, you short-circuit that whole problematic spiral.

You’ll Avoid Overusing Muscles and Joints
Of course, there are many things that can go wrong with repetitive tasks that aren’t related to your ability to focus. Many people in jobs that require a lot of manual labor end up with repetitive stress injuries. It’s a common problem for professional athletes, as well. Those long work sessions that never seem to let up put additional pressure on your muscles and joints. Over time, if you do not give yourself the opportunity to rest and recuperate, you’ll notice that what used to be an occasional pain becomes a daily one. In this case, you’ll want to take a break well in advance of starting to feel these negative effects.

You Can Look at the Big Picture
As a contracting business owner, you’ll probably have a lot of your own work to do while you supervise others. You may find that it’s difficult to tear yourself away from what you’re doing to relax or refresh. But even if you aren’t very successful at that, you need to take breaks to supervise the people who are working with you. It’s a smart idea to end your task at a good stopping point, sure that your station is safe, and take a look at everything else that concerns you on the job site. You may be more likely to spot problems, and you’ll have an opportunity to see progress as it happens.

You’ll Have Better Focus When You Return
If you’re having trouble focusing on a task, sometimes taking a break is just what you needed to hack your productivity. Lots of people find that they struggle to pay attention to their work at certain times of the day. And instead of recognizing that as a natural stopping point, they end up punishing themselves for failing to produce. Instead, those times give you a golden opportunity to take a break guilt-free. You can take a break, knowing that you’re not wrecking your focus or losing momentum, and return to the task refreshed and ready to keep working.

One of the most important parts of your construction workday is your break. When you learn how to use them, you’ll have a better week. To learn more about what you’ll need to have a successful career in construction, contact CSLS today!