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As another year rolls around, those of us in the construction and trade industries continue to face somewhat unpredictable times. One thing is certain though; businesses have needed to work smarter than ever to get ahead and stay ahead, and for many 2022 will be no exception. But how? We sat down with our GM of Sales & Marketing, Gary Richardson to get his thoughts and advice on 22 things tradies should think about as we head into 2022.
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You are going to get busy, as we all do, so sometimes you might be tempted not to bother calling back a customer who has left you a message. It could be because you know you can’t take on that job, or believe them to be tyre-kickers, but it’s just not right.
Always give people a call and at least let them know you can’t help. You could even suggest where they can go for help – trust us, they’ll remember that you helped them. Failing to return a phone call means they could be sitting at home waiting, and the damage you could do to your personal brand is great. Plus you never know, one day you might need that customer!
So you think you already know it all? Already winning heaps of work and consider yourself an expert in your field? Sweet….yeah, Nah. Don’t kid yourself.
Things are developing and changing all the time. Not just in how you perform your trade, but in what the industry (and your customers) are looking for, and what’s important to them. So get along to the local meetings in your industry, introduce yourself to new people and stay open to change. You’ll find heaps of positive, knowledgeable people to connect with (and don’t be surprised if you learn…a lot).
Once you’ve won that job and completed it, don’t be tempted to ignore back costing. You’ll really want to know how much profit you actually made. Ask yourself what crept up on you? What changed during the job, that you can learn from for your next quote? Look back at all of the materials costs and don’t ignore the labour and management time either. Take the lessons into 2022 for a more profitable year.
When you need to hire an apprentice or even a new tradie, one of the things you’ll want to know is where they came from and who trained them. Don’t let others in the industry carry all the load. Train your own team and bring apprentices into your business. Yes, some of them will leave once you have trained them, but some won’t. Either way, it can be hugely satisfying to train or mentor up-and-coming talent.
If you aren’t in a position to do that, find other ways to help. Call your industry body and get involved or help with training program development. Check out our top tips for training an apprentice.
Social media is not just a place for you to check out Taylor Swift’s latest album. It’s an important tool for marketing your trade business in 2022 and beyond. Social media marketing isn’t going anywhere, so you need to make sure you have a plan. Show off your business, tell people what you can do, show them what you have done. High-quality pictures of the latest jobs are always a winner! Don’t be afraid to get personal and talk about what matters to you and your business.
Thankfully, you don’t have to be on social media every half hour. With so many scheduling tools available, you can plan a month’s worth of posts in just a couple of hours each month. Check out scheduling tools like Facebook Creator Studio, Hootsuite or Sprout Social. If you need help when it comes to talking about your business, don’t be afraid to reach out to marketing partners who can help you to put together a content program. Don’t forget to keep an eye on which posts your followers are most interested in to inform future posts, and promptly reply to comments and messages. For more tips, check out our guide on the best social media channels to grow your trade business.
It really goes without saying, doesn’t it? Where you can, and where it makes business sense, support local businesses. Not only will that help NZ get back on its feet as we climb out of covid, but you’re also more likely to get reciprocal support back from them (even if it is just a shout-out on their social media).
You’d be surprised how much that can sway someone’s decision when trying to find a contractor to use.
I am constantly surprised at new developments that come along. At times it seems that new apps, systems and technology are available monthly. Some of this tech is not for us – but a lot of it can be.
Recently I helped my daughter set up as a sole contractor and things that used to cause headaches, like managing tax, ACC, KiwiSaver and student loan repayments can easily be sorted now thanks to tools like MYOB and Hnry.
My advice would be to set a goal: once a month, set aside an hour to pick one area of your business that gives you a headache and see if you can optimise it. See how others are dealing with it and if there are tools or apps that can help simplify it or make it less painful. Read reviews and try new tools that offer free trials. Now if only there were a tool to write my monthly report!
Disclosure: yes I work for Hirepool, so of course I am going to advocate for hiring assets instead of buying them. But seriously, you’ll often find our sales team talking to customers into buying pieces of gear because it does make sense for them. If you use something every day of the week, then often the best solution is to own it. Just make sure you factor in the hidden costs of gear maintenance, such as servicing, storage and insurance to name a few.
Think objectively about your assets – sometimes being locked into a 5-ton excavator, when you really could do with a larger one and get through the job in half the time, might not be ideal. Talk to your Hirepool rep, to figure out the costs and flexibility they can offer.
Gone are the days when you could buy discounted newspaper ad space over the phone and call it marketing. It’s something you need to think about and plan for to stay ahead of your competition. To get started:
Whatever you do, be deliberate with your marketing efforts. Good marketing doesn’t happen by accident. 
We were horrified a few months after we launched our new website to find that a couple of the links that we had on the website were broken, and had been from day one. They had slipped through what we thought was a quite rigorous checking process, and the end result could have been a number of customers who wrote messages that got sent into the great void of cyberspace…not to us! Luckily we found them and fixed it.
The lesson to us was that you need to look at your website and social media pages on a regular basis.
Some things to check for:
There is nothing that raises my eyebrows (sorry Judith) more than a page called ‘check out our monthly blog’ that hasn’t been updated for 2 years. Or a news section that highlights how you just won a contract last month to build a road that was finished in 2015 (you know who you are!).
One of the second-best things we ever did at Hirepool was set up a post-hire survey system (see #13 for the best thing!).
Using this, we send a net promoter score (NPS) survey to customers, asking how we did. We get a good response rate, and lots of nice things are said about us, but the coolest thing is when I get the negative feedback surveys.
I’ve set them up so they come directly across my desk. These are great, even if they can be frustrating. Why? Because we get to fix our mistakes while it is still fresh in both our mind and the customer’s mind. We get to right the wrong quickly, which often leads to customers giving us a second chance after they find themselves impressed with how we’ve resolved the issue.
Imagine if we didn’t find out they were unhappy? They would simmer away with a bad taste in their mouth for months, telling people they didn’t like us. Seeking out honest feedback (even if it’s not always positive) shows you where you have room to improve, and gives you the opportunity to fix issues quickly. Send a survey, follow up with a phone call, or email your customer after the job is done, and ask ‘how did we do?’.
I’ve made my share of mistakes implementing policies in our business over the years. Often we rush to a solution that seems obvious, only to find out a week later that we hadn’t thought of all of the outcomes. So we make a few adjustments to the policy, and then a few more. All of a sudden you have a very complex solution to a very simple problem - not ideal!
Get into a good habit of asking “‘How can we make this simpler?”. You’ll benefit from not overcomplicating solutions and often make life easier for you, your employees and customers.
We all know who our competitors are, we sometimes lose business to them at the tinderbox, right? It’s easy to assume you know all about your competitors and how they trade. But if I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me ‘I know how they will be approaching this…they always do this…I bet I know how they will be pricing this…they have no idea what they are doing…’ I’d be a rich man.
Many of your competitors may actually be smarter than you think, and often will be learning from you every time they meet you. Don’t take them for granted, instead keep an eye on them!
Checking their website is a great place to see what is going on in their business, where they are heading strategically and what they are investing in. Schedule a time to take look each month, you’ll be amazed how often you can pick up quickly on developments you were not aware of, and change your own plan accordingly.
The best thing we have done is invest in systems which allow us to know our customers. Not in a creepy ‘we know where you live and what you had for breakfast way’, but more in a way where we keep relevant customer information digitally and centrally, so the whole business can benefit. An example – if we have a customer who works across several regions, we want to know what they are working on in those regions, how we provided gear to them, how well that job went, and what they are working on next. Often information like that will help our teams in other regions as they bid for work.
It helps our customers too! Often their team move around the country and we can tap into details on where they are, so we can stay in touch. We know which accounts they want to use and administratively how to operate. Also, if later on, someone wants to know ‘who the hell approved that?’ we can often answer that question!
There are so many benefits, but if you are just starting out you can start with a spreadsheet. Keep details (and back it up!) of who the key contacts are within your customer’s organisations, where they are working and notes about your interactions.
There is something about starting the day in a clean and tidy environment that just makes your day go better. Not to mention it’s handy being able to find something when you’re looking for it!
More than that, it sends a good signal to customers. If the first impression of you is that you are a slob with a dirty uniform, junk all over your desk, and your ute has a carpet of pie wrappers on the floor, does that scream ‘yes, this is who I should trust to build this project’? I would say no. So be the best you can be and take 30 minutes once a week to clean up your environment.
Sometimes we can get a bit short with those at work, especially if they haven’t delivered something as you intended them to do. Yes, it is a problem, but remember, they are people just like you. They have families and relationships that don’t always travel smoothly, their cars break down at the wrong times, the dog gets under the fence and the kids slam the doors. So, take five, and think about your team, and where they are coming from.
Yes, you have a business to run, and you need to make tough decisions with people sometimes who might take advantage of your good nature, but look through their lens at the situation, and treat them as people first. I’ve always found that more times than not, that gets a better outcome. Check out our trade guide for more ways to support your team’s mental health on the job site.
It sounds like a bit of an odd thing to say, ‘check the cadence’ but it was said to me by a boss many years ago and a lesson was learnt. What I mean by this is, we all get into these convenient cadences and rhythms at work, typically weekly and monthly, and this can constrain us. For example, if you have a weekly team meeting, sometimes a problem will be introduced in week one, we assign it to someone to report back in week two, they apologise in week three and then get to it in week four…you get the idea.
Before long, it takes a month to resolve something that could have been done in days. Chances are, they are not working on that all the time - it might be a quick fix, without needing to report back for a week, it takes longer. Take a look at the timeframes it takes you to complete or resolve issues and if they can be improved.
Just like how you should look at the things that are working well and try to replicate them, it’s wise to look for things that aren’t working well too. Set aside 30 minutes for your team, brief them in advance, and tell them to come in as a team and bring in one issue in the business that bugs them.
They don’t need to have the solution (although often they will) but if they all do that, you’ll have a shopping list of things that need improving. Pick the ones to work on and get cracking.
Oh, and I just about always find that because these are issues that bug your team, it will make their life easier, which makes your life easier too.
Look at how much time you have to spend dealing with different suppliers to your business each month or year. One of my customers told me they were dealing with 24 hire suppliers across the country. That was 24 payments to be made each month, 24 relationships to deal with, 24 price books to negotiate and more…you get the picture. You might be doing that to save a little money, but if it costs you more in administration, is it really a saving?
So if you have sorted out a bunch of the things above, you will be running a pretty good organisation. But, if you are like us you still won’t be entirely on top of it. Is customer satisfaction not where you want it to be?
Regularly review the touchpoints of your business – that is, every time along a customer journey where your business interacts with customers. This could be reviewing email templates, social media, instructions or quotes, to name a few.
One we found recently was the letter that we send to customers after they open new accounts with us. We were all focused on what happened once the account was open, ensuring that things ran smoothly, but we overlooked that the steps leading up to that weren’t working well. Customers were not getting a great experience at the account opening time, they often fell into a bit of a communication hole, where they were not sure how the application was progressing. Once we realised that, it was an easy fix, but something that makes a big difference to our customers.
I’ve sort of covered this above, but it is worth saying again. Be willing to learn…from everyone Just because I have been in sales and marketing for donkey’s years, it doesn’t mean that I cant learn something from the newest recruit in our business who might work in a workshop.
In fact, we have set up a system (ours is called ‘Bright Sparks’) where employees can send in ideas. They go straight to the most senior people in our business who undertake to investigate and get back to them directly. And the number of times we have been stopped dead in our tracks and thought…’ how did we not see this before’…trust me, it is a lot! So have an open mind in 2022, make sure you have a method for your employees to talk to you and learn from them.
OK – last piece of advice as we head into 2022. We are not Instagram models. We do not live in a world where we seemingly all go to the gym, dine at the best restaurants and drink with celebrities. All that social media stuff is, well…fiction, a lot of the time. Or at the least, carefully crafted and well-planned posts made to look natural, often with money changing hands somewhere in the background.
This is a long way of saying you don’t have to be perfect all of the time. It’s OK to eat a little bad food, to go to work a little tired occasionally…we are all human! You won’t always do your best work, and you might snap at your workmates from time to time. That just means you are like the rest of us.
I’m certainly a long way from perfect, but one thing I am trying to get better at is just realising that you can’t be perfect all the time. Just be honest, try your best, and pick yourself up and try again if you screw up. You’ll get through it. Here’s to a great 2022.