coming in when things get tight. This could
mean focusing on one or two niche areas
or expanding your current offerings to offer
more to your clients.
Keep your best people
Construction employment hit a 10-year
high in February 2020 and has been inching
ever closer to prerecession numbers.
Despite that, the construction industry is
still dealing with a skilled labor shortage.
New workers coming into construction
don’t have the same experience and expertise
as the veteran employees lost during
the last recession.
If you want your business to survive
another economic downturn, you’re
going to need your best workers to get
you through. This means offering competitive
wages or other incentives and winning
enough work to keep them busy.
Know your costs
Rising material and labor costs combined
with increased project complexity and
shorter timelines has resulted in razorthin
profit margins for companies that
don’t understand their actual project costs,
including job costs and overhead costs.
Better knowledge and understanding of
Even if another
recession
doesn’t hit as
hard as the last
one, building a
resilient business
that can weather
any hardship
is always a
smart move.
how much each job costs will lead to better
estimates and higher profit margins.
Play to your strengths
What sets your company apart from your
competition? Is it the quality of work, your
ability to deliver projects on time and within
budget or expertise in a niche market?
Are there certain types of projects or service
areas that are more profitable for your company
than others? If work starts to dry up,
you’ll want to lean into the type of work that
you excel at in order to weather the storm.
Cut the fat
Take a good hard look at your current operations.
Are you overextending by taking on
too many projects at once? Do you have
equipment sitting idle for months at a time?
Do you have employees that aren’t pulling
their weight? Are you spending money on
things that aren’t directly related to your
strategic growth? If you answered yes to any
of these questions, now is the time to cut
the fat and get your company into a lean,
mean, recession-fighting machine.
If your construction company is already
having issues or struggling, a recession is
only going to exacerbate those problems
and force you to close up shop. Now is the
time to work on things like tightening your
cash flow, increasing your productivity on
projects and improving how efficiently your
company runs. t
This article was originally published on
ConstructConnect.com and is reprinted
with permission.
BUSINESS
98 | ISSUE 3 2020 www.piledrivers.org
/6-tips-recession-proof-construction-company
/ConstructConnect.com
/www.piledrivers.org
/
