Saving money is always a positive thing, whether it’s to improve your profit margins or to use that spare money to reinvest in your business. However, you have to be careful about where you’re cutting these costs, as the last thing you want to do is compromise on the quality of your work. Short term this might improve profits, however you are likely to reduce your return custom as a result. Luckily, we’re here to introduce a few simple tips to help you cut costs without compromising on quality!

Hire Some Machinery

Firstly, you should hire any machinery that you don’t need for every project. As you’ll know, some projects require quite a niche piece of machinery, whether it’s something more compact than usual to fit a specific site or a different attachment for an excavator that is rarely required. Unless you’re a large construction company with a significant budget and large storage areas, buying a new piece of machinery everytime you need one isn’t usually accessible. Or, people make the mistake of choosing lower quality, cheaper machinery to cut costs, yet inevitably that has an impact on the quality you’re able to offer.

So, a good solution to help you maintain the quality of machinery, access the right machinery for every job and also save money, is to consider plant hire. Companies offering plant hire services will have a range of power tools, construction machinery and site equipment, so you can pick and choose what you need and have it for as long as you need. Just make sure that you’re choosing a company who offers the best quality machinery from market leaders. This can save you a significant amount of money over the course of a year, through the direct saving of hiring vs buying, as well as requiring less storage space.

Use Construction Material Price Comparisons

Another thing that you can do to save a significant amount of money over time is to use construction price comparison sites. We’ve all seen them for phones, internet contracts and insurance, however there are also options to help you find the best deals on construction materials. You can type in specific brands and it’ll tell you the cheapest provider which is great. This can be so helpful for small to medium construction sites. When you’re working on larger construction sites, it would likely be more cost effective to go directly to bulk providers, but make sure you still cost up your different options so you’re definitely accessing the most cost effective options. This could take an hour or so to find the best deals for your supplies, yet it will add up, trust us!

Utilise New Technology

Another thing you can do to cut costs for your business is to utilise new technology. Whilst this will require some upfront investment, such as downloading new software onto iPads or tablets, over time it will help you to save money as a business. Here are a few different examples of the kinds of technology you could utilise to cut costs and also improve the efficiency and quality of your work:

• Virtual and augmented reality have made serious waves in the construction industry, providing visualisations of sites to not only improve accuracy, but also reduce building costs by identifying adjustments to plans that could have been missed. A large proportion of the planning process can be automated, to streamline the process and therefore the labour and materials that are required.
• Drones help to provide real-time aerial imagery to improve site inspections, construction safety on site and the data from the drones can also be integrated with other platforms. The options are endless with drones!
• 3D laser scanners can very accurately scan and analyse objects, without the need for manually measuring anything!

There are plenty more examples, and not every business will be able to access all of them as a result of budget restrictions, however even something like utilising free job costing softwares will simplify the process!

Final Thoughts

We hope we’ve shown there are some really simple things you can do to streamline your business, reduce costs and improve efficiency all at the same time. Just make sure that when you’re deciding the areas to cut costs, it’s not going to impact the quality of your work.