The construction business is growing all the time and improving how it operates every year. Progress has been spectacular, particularly in the last 20 years. Companies are transforming how they operate and throwing up buildings in record time at higher levels of quality than in the past.

However, despite all these advances, firms in the construction industry are still getting things wrong. They’re making a bunch of basic mistakes that are undermining their profitability and ability to grow.

In this post, we take a look at some of the top mistakes and what you can do to avoid them. Read on to learn more.

Mistake #1: Failing to Hire Skilled Workers

Unskilled workers have a part to play on construction sites. They’re able to take up the slack when you have a lot of material to move or you need extra hands to provide backup services for your skilled workers.

However, if you don’t have skilled workers in the first place, you’re going to struggle. There will be too few people conducting the construction effort, and too few who know how to apply the best techniques. The result will be a shoddy building that doesn’t meet the needs of the client.

Mistake #2: Lack of Available Cash

Even if a client promises to pay you a large sum of money for a project at completion, that doesn’t matter much if you don’t have cash on hand today.

Suppose, for instance, that you have a six-month project and, at the end of it, it’ll pay $3 million. That’s a lot of money and, depending on the specification, almost certainly a project you’ll want to take on.

However, if you don’t have sufficient cash, the project will never get off the ground. Three months in, you might run out of money to pay suppliers and wages. Then what?

Here’s a pro tip: Always make sure that you have sufficient cash throughout the build period to meet the needs of your clients.

Mistake #3: Failing to Protect Your Construction Site

Most construction firms put massive effort into protecting their construction sites. During the build phase, they can become a magnet for all manner of petty crime. However some don’t, and it ultimately comes back to bite them.

Install a construction site camera system and put up a tall barrier between the site itself and publicly-accessible areas around it. If you can afford it, hire somebody to monitor the site overnight when workers are at home.

Mistake #4: Poor Scheduling

Don’t assume that your building project will just proceed naturally. Instead, schedule every aspect of it, checking off milestones as you go along.

Mistake #5: Failing to Manage Your Documents

Construction projects require a surprisingly large number of documents to complete successfully. There is planning permission, designs, plans, invoices and supplier agreements. You need to ensure that you have all of these in one easily-accessible place and that you create a system for managing them. Firms that fail to keep on top of their paperwork will eventually experience operational issues.