The main point of starting your own business is to finance your life while doing good work and being your own boss. Of course, you may have to wait until the money starts rolling in on a consistent basis. In fact, it may be a few years before you can predict how much money you will earn in any given month. Although this is common for any small business, it does make it harder to know how to pay your bills. Here are a few tips.

Figure Out Expenses
When you work for yourself, you have to figure out what to pay yourself. In essence, you have to build your salary from the ground up. One of the easiest ways to do that is to figure out your expenses. Make a list of all your personal expenses for:

• Housing
• Food
• Utilities and other services
• Transportation
• Insurance
• Healthcare
• Incidentals, like clothing or home maintenance

This should give you a fairly good idea of what you need to be earning on a monthly basis. It may be less or much higher than what you think you can pay yourself. But at least it gives you some specific numbers to work with.

Set Minimum Income Limits
With a list of your expenses, you can start to build what you think your income could look like. In most households in California, people need at least two incomes. After all, we’re not known for having inexpensive housing or a short commute. So there’s a high degree of probability that your expenses may exceed your income, especially at first. But like many other independent workers and sole proprietors, you need to set minimums for your income. If your income is extremely variable, to a level of thousands of dollars’ difference from one month to the next, you may want to set a minimum and a target income based on the interval in which you want to get paid.

Create A Regular Payment Schedule
Once you have a sense of how much you think you can reasonably pay yourself, you should aim to set a regular payment schedule. Choose an interval that works best for your expenses. Many people choose to pay themselves once or twice a month, but you may prefer to do it weekly as well. If you are outsourcing payroll services or using ACH for direct deposit, you’ll need to make sure to start the payment process early enough. Whatever you do, make sure that you are still taking care of the non-payroll expenses for the business, so you can keep it running.

Set Aside Excess for Slow Periods
Many people who have run businesses before will tell you that until you get established, you’ll encounter periods of feast and famine. What this means is that you will have months or even a year where you have more work than you can handle. But if you don’t take care in your decisions with the money, you’ll find yourself stuck when work becomes slow. It’s a tricky balance. You have to pay yourself or you won’t be able to keep the business running. But if you take out too much when times are high, you won’t have enough to keep going when times are low. When you first have excess funds, work on building a cushion to get you through the next light month.

Forecast Changes Over Time
As you get established, you’ll notice that your income needs and expectations will change over time. For example, if you decide to offer a greater variety of services to build a more reliable clientele, you may end up with a higher income. Although you should focus on preserving cash flow and making sure you have some savings to protect you, this doesn’t mean that you have to work at the same income for the whole of your career. Examine your business spending and your income every few months or twice a year. If you feel comfortable, you may be able to adjust your payments upward.

Building a business means getting used to unpredictable income streams, especially at first. These tips make it easier. To find out more benefits of running your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!

Decades ago, being unhappy with your workplace was simply part of the experience. These days, experts know that the way you approach mental health for yourself and your employees can be the key to long-term business success. Here are a few factors you should consider, as a way to promote a healthy work environment that is as positive as it is productive.

Reasonable Workload
Construction is not typically known for being an industry with a reasonable workload. People tend to work long hours, especially at times of the year when business is high. Although this may seem like a dream for productivity, it can trigger problems over time. People who aren’t dealing with mental health struggles can still experience burnout. And the worse it gets, the more likely it is that people will rely on unhealthy coping mechanisms. An excessive or unpredictable workload might also trigger mental illness that is poorly managed or sitting just beneath the surface. Controlling the workload to a reasonable level, and giving people the comfort of a schedule they can expect, can make them feel more stable at a tough time.

Flexibility
Employers need to offer consistency to their employees, but also flexibility when it is needed. Research indicates that when employees feel like they have the power to control the conditions of their workday, they tend to be happier and even work harder. Sometimes, this means allowing someone to take a couple of days off when they are dealing with a complicated family issue. At other times, it means tailoring an employee schedule to fit their natural preferences. If you think about it, it’s easy to understand. Most night owls don’t enjoy getting up for work at 5 a.m. And someone who gets up at 5 a.m. probably doesn’t want to still be working at 9 p.m.

Positive Feedback
Mental illness isn’t necessarily created by a person’s environment. However, the way that you create an environment for your employees can certainly affect how they manage their mental health. Positive feedback can make a big difference, but this depends on your management style. Some business owners like to minimize the amount of time they’re telling their employees what to do. But sometimes, that means you’re not telling someone anything unless you have a complaint. In other cases, bosses spend a lot of time giving feedback to employees, but they don’t pay attention to how much of it is positive. Making sure that you give good feedback and keep criticism constructive can make it easier for workers not to get stuck on it.

Building Support Systems
Helping yourself and your employees means that you need to build a support system that people feel comfortable using. Mental illness still carries a hefty stigma, even if many mental health advocates have been trying to minimize it. People often assume that they cannot get help for even common mental health concerns like anxiety or depression.

In construction, it’s important to understand how big of an issue it can be. Experts estimate that as many as one in five construction workers struggles with mental illness. In fact, construction workers are much more likely to die by suicide than they are from a fall, which is the most common source of physical injury in the industry. Experts suggest reaching out to employees on a regular basis, and considering programs like employee assistance. Larger firms are starting to offer these benefits as a way to attract and retain long-term employees.

Employee-Focused Improvements
Ultimately, it’s not enough to make changes based on what you think your employees need. You must consult them to get their input. This is tricky because sometimes people have suggestions that aren’t realistic to carry out. Think about how you would handle a problem that you want to solve personally. You take your own perspective into consideration and make a choice that is best for the company. Now, apply that to any employees who might have input to share. Get their opinions and then see what you can put into action.

Caring for your mental health and that of your employees is a great way to ensure your contracting business survives. To find out more, visit CSLS today!

Sometimes, in-person communication can seem like the most difficult form. This is because you have to know what to say on the fly, and you can’t delete it and say it a different way. The good news is that you can learn how to manage difficult conversations for your contracting business. Here’s what you need to do.

Write Simple Scripts
When you want to learn the best ways to deal with conflict in a conversation, you may want to start by thinking of people who have to deal with conflict all day long. For example, imagine the last time you had a conflict with someone who works at the DMV or the company that provides your Internet access. In most cases, these employees have simple scripts that they have been taught to follow. These scripts help them to avoid saying more than they should, or offering more compromises than they can. Although you don’t want a general conversation to sound completely scripted, you can come up with a few sentences that help you to clarify your meaning and avoid causing further conflict.

Practice Dealing With Conflicts
If you don’t feel like you have a lot of experience dealing with conflict in a conversation, you may want to practice with a friend or relative. Make sure that the person you’re practicing with knows you well enough to avoid turning it into a personal disagreement, but can also help you stick to the exercise. Try it out with a few different people, since you’ll have clients with different communication styles that you may have to deal with. Make notes about what works and what doesn’t, and keep practicing until negotiating with someone feels more natural.

Record Your Voice
Have you ever had a moment where someone told you to speak louder or talk more softly when you thought that you were maintaining a reasonable volume? It’s a matter of perception. Sometimes it’s difficult for you to tell how you come off to others. While recording devices may not capture tone and volume perfectly, they can give you an indication of your tone and volume in relation to someone else’s. Position your phone or another recording device at a central place in the room. Record your conversation, perhaps a test conversation that you’re having with a friend. Afterward, listen to it and see if you can identify changes in tone or mood based on what you hear. You may be able to spot a few problems that you can fix this way.

Ask for Feedback
One of the hardest parts of handling conflict with people is to ask for feedback. While you may not want to ask a disgruntled client for feedback about a conversation, you can certainly do this with friends and relatives. If you’re worried that you will take criticism personally, ask them to start by identifying things that they think you do well. That will make it easier to digest anything they have to say that identifies things you may need to change. It’s a smart idea to get lots of practice giving and receiving feedback. You’ll have a lot of opportunities to do this during the running of your business, so you might as well get used to it.

Lead With Compassion
Ultimately, the way that you see the conflict or problem is going to shape the way you carry out a difficult conversation. For example, if you perceive that the client or employee that you have to talk to is intentionally making things harder for you, you may have less patience or willingness to work with them. On the other hand, if you think about where they are coming from and why they may have the views they have, you may be in a better position to come up with a compromise that will work for both of you.

Having a difficult conversation lead to a successful conclusion is an important skill to learn as a contracting business owner. For more information about running your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!

When you first start talking about opening a contracting business, you’re going to get lots of advice. Some of it might be very useful, coming from people with decades of experience in the industry. On the other hand, you might get tips from people who wouldn’t know success if it ran over them. Here are five tips you can use to help you accept advice and determine if it will work for you.

Take It In
The first thing that you want to do when you get some business advice is to make it relatively easy to accept. It’s tempting to reassure people that you have all the experience you need and that their advice is unwarranted. But sometimes, you turn out to be wrong. In order to decide which advice is useful and which parts don’t apply to you, you need to listen to it and take a few mental notes. This doesn’t mean that you need to pay attention with a rapt expression to anyone who feels like you’ve got it all wrong and they need to set you straight. But if you can allow the information to sink in, you’ll have a higher chance of being able to use the relevant bits.

Consider the Source
Of course, not everyone has good business advice to share. And that does not necessarily stop them from trying to share with you. This is why you should consider the source along with their advice. Someone who has started five businesses and had all of them fail within a year may be a great source of learning what went wrong. They might not be the best person to tell you what to do to succeed, however. Sometimes, people who don’t have the facts can share something that would be practical for you to apply to your business. It’s relatively unlikely, so you can take this advice with a grain of salt.

Question Your Gut
There is a lot out there in self-help circles that tells you to trust your gut. The problem is that when you’re debating whether or not to follow your gut instincts, you still need to consider the source. If your gut instinct comes from 5-10 years of experience in this field, you might be on the right track. On the other hand, if your gut instinct is based on what you found by searching Google for five minutes, your conclusions might be suspicious. It’s important not to disregard your own opinions. You should just make sure to scrutinize them as much as you would anyone else’s.

Evaluate Information
Once you get some advice, you have some work to do. In some cases, people make claims that are so unlikely or outdated that you can handily dismiss them as irrelevant. What worked for someone’s retail business might not apply to yours. In other cases, you need to determine how right they are. This calls for research. It’s tempting to trust the advice of someone who’s been working in your industry for decades, especially if they’ve acted as a mentor to you. It’s still good to follow up on their claims, so that you understand it better than you did.

Decide After Consideration
When it comes to big decisions about your business or the best way to run it, you need to make decisions after consideration. It is so easy to jump the gun when someone with business experience tells you to absolutely do one thing or completely avoid another thing. Unfortunately, taking this kind of a hard line position eliminates your flexibility, which you may need most in the early years of your business. With every piece of advice you get, take the time to consider it and determine whether or not you want to follow it. Keep in mind that most people advise you because they want to help. But if it doesn’t help, then it’s probably not worth following.

When you first start your contracting business, you’re going to get a lot of advice. Learning how to interpret it is part of surviving. To learn more about building a successful contracting business, visit CSLS today!

Complete the Process
Becoming a licensed contractor starts with an idea. But for years afterward, you’ll be spending your time picking up the skills you need and building experience in order to pass the exam and get your contractor license. Once you become a licensed contractor, you have a lot of flexibility in the way that you work or run your business. But all of those benefits aren’t available to you until you pass the exam. Taking the exam and getting a passing score are some of the last steps of a years-long process, something that you may have been working toward for more than a decade.

Know What to Expect
If you have the right knowledge, and you take advantage of exam preparation experts, you have a better chance of passing the exam. But for some people, a good chance isn’t enough to quiet those test-taking nerves. Sometimes, there’s no replacement for the real thing. In this case, taking the contractor licensing exam may tell you more than all the online research you can perform. Having taken the exam before, you’ll know what to anticipate in the format and the types of questions that you can expect. Taking the exam also helps you build a foundation of knowledge and experience that you can use to take other exams when you’re ready to add to your license.

Make Yourself More Competitive
Although many people who become licensed contractors decide to run their own businesses, you’re not required to take this path. In fact, becoming a licensed contractor gives you a lot more options than you may have had otherwise. It makes sense if you think about it. If you were hiring for your business, and you had to choose between someone who is a licensed contractor and someone who isn’t, who do you think you are more likely to choose? Having taken the exam and passed it gives you a bargaining chip that you can use to secure higher wages and other benefits.

Achieve Your Goals
When you start to get really close to achieving a goal, you may get nervous about the last few steps. After all, if you invest all this time and you’re not able to achieve it, that may seem like a waste. This kind of thinking comes up for a lot of people, but you don’t have to let it derail your progress. Being this near to achieving your goal doesn’t mean that the next few steps will be the hardest of all. You’ve already put in the time to build your skills and experience that you need to become a licensed contractor. For many people, taking the exam itself is simply a small, partial-day commitment on the road to their new careers.

Be Ready to Start Your Own Business
In a lot of cases, passing the exam and getting your contractor license are tools to help you do the thing that you really want to do: start your own business. All of the benefits of being your own boss are sitting right on the other side of this exam. Do you want to specialize in the services that interest you? Are you looking forward to making your own decisions about the running of the company? By the time you’re ready to take the exam, you’ve already got a lot of the skills you need to make your business a success. Taking the exam and passing it lets you cross to the side of building your business for real.

Are you getting ready to take the contractor licensing exam? Exam preparation from the experts can help. For more information, visit CSLS today!

Ask anyone who runs a business, and they will tell you that managing their overhead is one of the most difficult parts. Keeping your expenses under control is vital to ensuring that your business can even survive, much less make profits. Consider these tips to help you save money on your contracting business expenses.

Plan Your Budget
In many ways, running a business is a lot like handling your own personal finances. If you don’t have a budget, then you won’t know if you’re spending too much. Creating a budget requires an analysis of your income and the expenses that you can expect. It’s an investment of time, but it pays off. By knowing what your expenses are at any given point in time, you can tailor your purchases to your available funds. That way, you’re more likely to have the money that you need when you need it. In the first year or two, you may need to revisit your budgeting on a regular basis, so that it’s always current.

Skip the Excess Fees
You know how gym companies make so much money? They persuade people to sign up for memberships that they won’t use. Then when you go to cancel it, you find that it’s complicated, so you let it run for a few months. You might be surprised to learn that there are lots of businesses that keep their finances up this way. Rental companies charge late fees or refill fees if you fail to return the equipment in the same condition. You can avoid all of these by investing the time to fill it up and return it on time. You can also do the same for other services that you need for your business. Sticking to a schedule makes all the difference.

Minimize Debt
When you were a kid, your parents probably had a lot of discussions with you about the difference between needs and wants. When you run your own contracting business, you might end up blurring those lines more than you should. And then in a lot of cases, that means you’ll have extra debt. Incurring debt for your business isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you should be strategic about it. It’s easy to spend a loan or line of credit on equipment and supplies that are nice to have but not particularly necessary. It’s only when you’re paying interest on the debt that you realize it’s more than a convenience. Create a list of conditions under which you’ll be fine with going into debt, and you’ll save yourself a lot of money.

Shop Around for Services
Finance experts often say that people would save a significant amount of money if they were only willing to shop around for services. There are some industries that have made this clear. For example, if you wanted to save money on your car insurance, you could get quotes from different companies, and see which one gives you the best value. This practice also applies to the running of your business. If you need insurance or a rental workspace, it makes sense to consider a variety of options to figure out which one fits best. It won’t always be the one that charges you the least, but at least you will know that you’re making the best decision.

Update Your Inventory and Price Research
Quite a few of your business expenses relate to knowing what you have and understanding what you’ll need to pay to buy more. If your services require you to keep a regular inventory of supplies, you should research a reasonable inventory system that you can update regularly. That way, you know what you have and are less likely to order more than you need. When it comes time to order supplies, make sure that you have the most current price lists. Use this pricing in your estimates, where applicable. With the right information, you’re less likely to quote a price on a project that cuts into your profit margins.

Saving money while you run a business is a good way to keep it afloat for another year. To learn more about running your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!

On occasion, you’ll have an urgent or unexpected situation come up on the jobsite. Some concerns are related to safety, but others simply require you to address them promptly. Having a plan in place can help you avoid the worst complications. Here are a few tips to ensure that you always know exactly what you need to do.

Plan Ahead
You may have heard people say that a failure to plan is a plan to fail. To a large degree, this is true. If you want less guessing or panicked reactions in the event of something unexpected, you should create a plan to handle it in the first place. In the beginning, your plan may not be particularly accurate. It may raise concerns that you will have to address later. But having a plan gives you a set of instructions to follow, which can be particularly useful if you are having difficulty focusing in the moment.

Keep Reference Guides Handy
As a general rule, plans to handle unanticipated or dangerous situations may require you to follow certain protocol. Organizations like OSHA often have guides that you can use to help you figure out what you’ll need to do. However, it’s not reasonable to expect that either you or your employees will have that information memorized. It’s also not reasonable to assume that you will have internalized it so completely that you can remember it while stressed out or distracted. Keep those reference guides in a handy place so that you can grab them whenever you need them.

Duplicate Knowledge
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that you are the only person in the company who has certain knowledge. On the other hand, duplicating some of your experience is crucial to solving problems. If you are out of the office or away from the jobsite and something happens, you want the people working there to be able to manage it at least partially in your absence. Make sure that everyone working for you knows the general rules for dealing with any situation that is likely to come up. It’s wise to have anyone functioning as a supervisor or team lead in a position of knowledge about the right protocol to follow.

Practice Addressing Problems
Whenever you see a team of paramedics or firefighters on the scene of an accident, you can see that they don’t spend a lot of time figuring out what they need to do. They have practiced a variety of different scenarios to the point that they know what to do in the moment. They don’t have to think about it as much. In your contracting business, you can do the same. Each month, devote some time to learning, testing and reviewing standard practices for dealing with emergencies and other urgent situations. The more you practice, the faster you will be able to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Revisit Past Problems
Having a plan in place and practicing it regularly are crucial to success of the plan, but so is the ability to revise it as needed. It’s possible that your original plan may not work exactly as you expected once you have to carry it out for real. It’s also likely that you will, in retrospect, come up with ideas for ways that you could make it more effective or efficient. After the problem is under control, give yourself a day or two to think about it and take a few notes. If you need to revise the plan, you should do so and notify everyone related to the situation.

Dealing with the unexpected is just part of running a contracting business. Getting your contractor license is another. For expert exam preparation tailored to the California state licensing requirements, visit CSLS today!

Interest in the Company
Ideally, you would hire people who enjoy what they do and like to see the company succeed. As you interview prospective employees, it’s worth gauging their sense of interest in your business as well as the field in general. Although working provides more benefits than simply full-time entertainment, it’s good to know that your employees can feel fulfilled by the work you’re hiring them to do. Ask them how they got interested in the field and why they continue with it. Their answers will give you a sense of how invested they feel in the job that they could do for you.

Attention to Detail
The construction industry is full of responsibilities and tasks that are crucial to the health and safety of the people who will work or live in the buildings. Employees who have higher attention to detail are more likely to do the work correctly the first time. They’ll also be able to identify errors that could be harmful if they aren’t caught early enough. Although it’s tempting to test an applicant’s ability by quizzing them or giving them a bunch of information to sort through, you might not get the results you’re looking for. Instead, ask them to give examples of times that their attention to detail saved them time or solved problems on the job site.

Communication Skills
The ability to communicate is a soft skill that many employees need in order to function within a company. For example, you need an employee who will let you know if they need to take time off or give you important details about a task they’re working on. The skill to get the message across and do so in a timely manner can save you a lot of hassle and confusion. Ask applicants about their communication preferences, and inquire about their willingness to interact with you across multiple platforms. Someone who depends mostly on phone calls and doesn’t feel comfortable texting might not be a problem unless texting is the way that you prefer to communicate.

Ability to Collaborate
When your contracting business is large enough that you are starting to think of it as a team, everyone needs to be able to function like they are on a team. The ability to collaborate is important because you won’t always be the one making all the decisions. Sometimes you need a qualified partner who can help you brainstorm ideas to solve a particular problem. An employee who likes to collaborate will be happy to help you. They won’t let minor conflicts get in the way of finding a successful and efficient conclusion. In many cases, an employee who works hard to learn and works well with others may be a better fit than a person with tons of experience who doesn’t know how to take direction.

Self-Driven Work Ethic
Ultimately, you’re hiring employees so that they can perform the tasks that you cannot necessarily do on your own. If you have to stand over them the entire time to keep them working, you’re not going to be able to complete your own parts of the project. That’s why being self-driven is such a useful attribute. A self-driven employee knows what they are supposed to do, and they will ask questions if they are not sure. They have a plan in mind for where they want to go, and they can get the job done with the right amount of support and encouragement.

When you hire employees for your contracting business, you want to be sure that you find the ones that work best. For detailed advice about how you can meet the requirements to become a licensed contractor, visit CSLS today!

Early to bed, early to rise, they say. Except it doesn’t work out for everyone. When you’re in a field that prizes being awake with the roosters, being a night owl can feel like an occupational hazard. But it doesn’t have to be. If you like to burn the midnight oil, here are five things you can do to take advantage of your focus in preparation for the contractor licensing exam.

Embrace Your Sleep Schedule
One problem with living in a world that starts early is that you may end up running a longer clock than most people do. If you have the flexibility, embrace your sleep schedule. Allow yourself to sleep in when it makes sense to do so, as much as you can. The best thing that you can do for your routine is to find a schedule that you can keep. If you’re consistently waking up at nine or 10 and staying up until midnight or later, your body will adjust to it. This will give you the advantage of a full night’s sleep, which can make those later nights more productive.

Prepare in Advance
On the upside, staying up late to do your studying gives you the advantage of a quiet house in a generally quiet world. As people pack it in for the day, you’re less likely to be bothered. However, this might also mean that you have less access to people to ask questions or get help setting up your study environment. Take time earlier in the day to figure out what you’re going to need, so you can have it ready to go once the late evening hits. This removes potential obstacles to your studying, with the added benefit of outlining your objectives for the evening.

Find a Rhythm
Everyone has times when they feel like they can generally be more productive than others. Doing it a different way doesn’t make it incorrect or ineffective. In fact, by identifying the times of day when you are most likely to achieve your goals, you can target your most important work for those times. People who try to live on someone else’s schedule often find that they don’t thrive in it. By comparison, finding your own rhythm gives you the greatest chance of success. Just make sure that you build a habit in the first place, so that it feels more natural to start working late, even as everyone else is winding down.

Snack for Learning
There are tons of advice guides telling people what they should be eating when they first wake up in order to have a productive day. There isn’t as much for people who get their most productive periods 10 hours after they wake up. Fortunately, the foods that get people going in the morning will usually work at night as well. It’s tempting to go for mindless snacking on carbs after dinner. But if you want to focus, try to give yourself a combination of protein, fat and complex carbohydrates. This balance can help you feel satisfied without giving you a huge boost of energy and a crash shortly after.

Avoid Burning Out During the Day
The thing about trying to study at night is that you’ll probably still have commitments that you have to meet during the day. People who do well staying up late are still at risk for burning out as the day wears on. Unless you’re a person who thrives on six or seven hours of sleep, and most people aren’t, it’s best to pick your battles. Set a schedule that doesn’t require you to do as much first thing in the morning, if you can. Take a break for an hour or two in the afternoon, to help you switch gears. That way, you get to the evening feeling reasonably refreshed and ready to hit the books.

Studying what you learn is the best way to prepare for the contractor licensing exam. To find out how our classes can help, visit CSLS today!

When you get some experience running a business, you realize that there’s a big difference between a lead and a sale. You might have lots of leads but only some of them will convert into actual business for you. At first, you might struggle to get people who are interested to commit to hiring your services. Here are a few things to look at to help you figure out what is going wrong.

Targeting the Wrong Customers
You have a service or a product to sell. There are customers who need the product or service and may be interested in buying it. The trick is to make sure that your sales and marketing attempts are reaching the right customers. For example, if you are focusing your business on business clients, residential property owners are probably not the right fit. Similarly, offering a luxury service may not land well with prospective customers on tight budgets. Consider clarifying your available services so that when customers see an advertisement or visit your website, they can identify quickly if you can do what they’re looking for.

Reaching Leads Too Early or Late in the Purchase Cycle
Anyone who is looking for a contractor will go through a cycle as they make a decision. Securing a customer’s commitment depends on where they are at in the cycle once they find you. If they are in the early stages of research, still determining what they want, you should provide detail about your available services and other information. If they are just about to make a decision, you should be giving them information that helps them feel comfortable choosing you. Meeting them where they are is the key to giving them what they need.

Failing at Follow-Up
Failing to follow up on a lead is one of the biggest reasons that businesses lose out on conversions. Sometimes, you’ll get a call or an email from a prospective customer that you can’t address at the moment. Within a day or two, you’ve forgotten all about it. And by the time you get to it, they have concluded that you weren’t interested and moved on to someone else. It may seem ridiculous that contractors would leave possible clients on the table this easily, but it happens more often than you think. Set a reasonable response interval for new leads, usually one or two days, and make sure that you follow up on them.

Sales Tactics Are Too Pushy or Lukewarm
As a general rule, customers don’t like feeling pressured to buy something. They may need to have you sell them on your services, but there’s a right balance in approach. You’ve probably experienced it yourself many times. Trying to buy something when a salesperson is so pushy and doesn’t seem to care what you want feels exhausting. On the other hand, trying to get a salesperson to respond to your questions when they seem disinterested can be just as frustrating. Aim for a balance between pushing people to commit and acting like you don’t care about getting their business. Responding attentively to their needs is the best path to securing a commitment.

Price Doesn’t Fit the Service
Anyone who works in sales can tell you that there is the price that you want to charge for something, and there is the amount the people are willing to pay. If you’re offering a service based on low cost to customers, then the price should reflect that. If you’re emphasizing custom work or high-end materials, you need to make sure that the customers looking for that service can find you. Sometimes, customers are hoping to get the gold standard but they aren’t willing to pay for it. If all of your customers seem to fit this category, then you probably need to change your pricing structure or your services to suit.

The future of your business lies in your ability to turn potential leads into paid work. With these tips, you can solve possible problems and make your sales efforts more effective. For more information about building your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!