Tasks Tradespeople Can Automate to Improve Efficiency – If you are in the trades, you probably work hard and long hours.
Although you are skilled at what you do and can make a great income in a fulfilling way, you probably don’t consider your occupation to be something that can be automated.
However, when talking about automation, we are not referring to replacing someone’s job with robots.
In fact, there are numerous ways that tradespeople can automate their roles to improve efficiency—and getting more done in less time is crucial for everyone these days, especially in the difficult COVID-19 economy.
Therefore, in this article, we will talk about various ways to automate and at least make your processes more efficient.
This has many benefits such as increased job satisfaction, happier customers, and more income by spending less time on each job.
So let’s get started on point number one.
Table of Contents
Use Better Scheduling Tools
Tradespeople only have so much time in each day. They can’t afford to be inefficient with scheduling.
Therefore, if you are not using the right tools for this very important function, it is often equal to leaving revenue on the table.
The solution is to have a scheduling tool in place that reduces downtime in between appointments.
It should be automated, so that it won’t schedule meetings with too much time in between or too little time.
Thus, ideally, it should have AI and other machine-learning features that can be customized.
Finally, ensure that your tool is easy to use for any layman.
Your team members are likely not computer scientists, so the software should be approachable and learnable in a very short time frame to keep your people doing what they are best at: their trade.
Reduce Learning Curves
Every trade takes years to master. This creates a barrier between those that have the proper knowledge and those who don’t.
Usually, this difference is one of time.
When relative beginners compete with master tradespeople who have spent years doing the same thing over and over, newcomers are at a disadvantage.
Therefore, if you or your team is new, you need a way to compete better.
You can raise your rates and get jobs in less time, as well as win jobs from competitors by reducing the learning curve. In the end you can boost sales this way.
A great strategy to reduce the learning curve is to implement an educational system.
The more experienced tradespeople in your team can have weekly sessions where they train the younger ones.
You can also automate your training so that it is available online. This way, your team can access it anywhere, at any time, to get ahead.
By giving your team the benefit of superior learning strategies, from sales to workplace safety, you cut the learning curve in half.
A team well trained in this manner will give you a competitive advantage over others in your industry. And you can fill up your schedule with new customers every day.
Analyze Customer Quality
No matter what kind of trade business you have, there are good customers and bad customers.
By focusing too much on bad customers, you have more problems and wasted time — this causes lower sales numbers in the end.
However, when you identify your best and worst customers and only focus on the best ones, your profit margins can increase.
It is often worth it to cut the 80% of customers at the bottom of the barrel and only keep the top 20% of great ones. However, far too many businesses fail to do just this.
Therefore, start to keep customer scores.
This will be a gauge to determine if they are worth putting effort into or not. There are many factors that can go into a customer score.
For instance:
- Number of referrals provided
- Revenue per visit
- Employee satisfaction/ease of working with customer
- Distance from your office
There are many more factors that you can take into account.
The key is to define the characteristics that are most important to your business from internal metrics.
Then, keep a spreadsheet or spreadsheets and even put the info into a CRM to keep track of your customers that way.
Keep Your Trade Tools Fully Operational
This may seem like a simple tip, but it is surprising how many trade businesses don’t follow it: keep your tools in top condition.
If your tools are not fully operational, you never know when they will slow you down because they aren’t working.
Every time you have to repair a tool instead of just keeping it maintained, it costs time and a lot of money — mostly in opportunity cost.
Think of all the time and hassle it takes to bring tools to a job and get started.
You don’t want to have to cancel a job and start all over again, so keep those tools ready to go.
Develop a Business App
If at all possible, every trade business should have its own business app. This is essential for improving internal communication between your team, as well as your communication with clients.
Without such an app, things can get complicated fast.
The last thing you want is to see important information falling through the cracks because you don’t have a powerful system in place.
Thus, faster and more secure messaging is one of the primary benefits of a mobile app for your business.
You likely don’t have the expertise within your company to produce a high-level app that will meet your team and your customer’s needs.
Therefore, consider outsourcing the development of such an app.
That way, you can rest assured that, even though the cost may be higher, you have an asset that will do what’s designed to do for your trade business.
Conclusion
Whether you’re an employee or a business owner, improving the efficiency of your trade work will ultimately be essential going forward.
However, this process is surely easier said than done. Most businesses overlook the common ways that they can automate their trades peoples’ roles to improve efficiency.
Therefore, carefully review the five important tips above.
They will help you implement a solid plan to automate your workflow. Instead of wasting time, you will cherish it and be able to accomplish more with less.
The end result will be a thriving business that enjoys increased revenues in the future.
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Heather Redding is a content manager for rent, hailing from Aurora. She loves to geek out writing about wearables, IoT and other hot tech trends. When she finds the time to detach from her keyboard, she enjoys her Kindle library and a hot coffee. Reach out to her on Twitter.