Nailing the Niche: Strategies to Attract, Advise, and Retain Construction Clients to Grow Your CAAS Practice

As we covered in the first article in this exclusive series for Woodard, Construction is a massive industry where operational challenges abound. The good news is that many construction business owners need the help that you, as a bookkeeper, accountant, or business consultant with expertise in streamlining operations and accounting tasks, are very well positioned to provide.

The bad news is that there are several quirks to the construction industry, and you’ll need to be aware of these issues if you want to serve construction clients successfully. Since co-founding Knowify nearly a decade ago, I’ve been directly involved with or overseen thousands of construction business software onboardings. While this article is by no means exhaustive, the sections below will share with you some of the important lessons I’ve learned along the way.

When selling your services, make sure you speak their language.

There is a specific jargon to construction. You need to know it. There are a few pesky words like “estimate” that can have different meanings depending on the context. If you’re talking to prospective clients in construction, these words are going to confuse you if you aren’t aware of their multiple meanings. Knowify has compiled a brief glossary of common construction terms, if you want help getting started.

Even more important than learning specific words, though, is developing an intuitive understanding of how the industry is structured. What’s a GC? What’s a subcontractor? Why do subcontractors send RFIs and submittals to GCs? What are the most common common change order work flows? These and other questions can be answered by reviewing the materials available on the Knowify glossary above.

Having a good understanding of the structure of the industry and of the common workflows happening between the players will enable you to anticipate the challenges prospective clients are facing, address them in the technical language they’ll expect, and, ultimately, win more business.

It’s a huge, fragmented industry; consider focusing on one or two specific business types (eg, residential GCs, electrical contractors, etc).

 Construction is huge, generating over three trillion dollars of revenue every year in the USA alone. Indeed, the industry is so large that it will likely benefit you to focus on just one vertical within it—say, electrical contractors, or maybe residential remodelers. While no two construction businesses are exactly the same, within the same vertical, they do share many common features and challenges.

By focusing on a vertical, you will develop a deeper understanding of the day-to-day realities of running that business type. Over time, you will also develop your own set of best practices, and that’s when you’ll really be able to deliver big value to the clients you’re serving. Once you’re able to combine your existing knowledge of accounting/operations with domain expertise in a specific vertical or trade, you’ll end up being an invaluable—perhaps indispensable—partner for the construction businesses you serve.

Work on a clear priority list with the client. Don’t be afraid to be assertive.

Construction people are no-frills, no-nonsense. Most of the ones we interact with are extremely busy, so they don’t want to waste time on fluff. They want to see value in the time they’re investing in you (or your product/services) quickly so they know that it’s time well spent.

When working with construction business owners or office managers, you need to approach your engagements as if every hour you spend will be evaluated, with the client then deciding whether you’ve done enough to earn another hour. Their time is precious! Ergo: get right to the point! We’ve found that construction business owners and office managers are much happier when we’re direct with them.

When we drive implementations, we put together clear checklists, and we work with the client to prioritize certain goals over others. That means—and the client usually understands this—that we will not get to everything all at once. By being assertive, we’re able to retain control over the onboarding process. Clients come to appreciate that they’re on the receiving end of a process honed over many years and thousands of implementations. Your ability to control your engagement with them and your focus on addressing any matters directly and delivering measurable value every step of the way will ensure that the engagement will remain on track and the client will see it through to the end.

Do not bite off more than your client can chew!

 Related to the above: make sure that whatever changes to process or tools you have in mind for your client are implemented in the right order and at the appropriate pace. I wish I could give you straightforward advice on how to do this—alas, it’s impossible. Even after thousands of customers, there is no obvious proxy for the right pace of implementation or even the right scope of implementation. It’s not company size, and it’s not trade; it’s the team.

You need to get to know the business owner, the processes they follow, their appetite for technology and operational disruption, and the team they’re working with to keep their business on track. Remember, technology needs to solve problems to be valuable; if your client doesn’t consider siloed estimating to be a problem, then replacing old, spreadsheet-based processes with more modern, cloud software-based ones may actually end up introducing more headaches and disruptions than they’re willing to accept. The reality is that many people in construction are still slow to embrace technology, and forcing it on them will often go badly. Focus on the problems, and keep the changes right-sized.

Identify the ‘resisters.’ In the early innings, don’t fight them—adapt to them.

Lastly, and this one can be a bit of a challenge, you’ll need to identify the ‘resisters’ early and learn to adapt to them. You know who they are: the guys who have been doing their job a certain way for the better part of three decades and who have become rather attached to the way they do things. Owing to their seniority, a lot of these guys occupy important positions at their companies, and upsetting them is usually a pretty quick way to find yourself on a one-way express train to losing the client. You can’t fight them—accept that fact. It’s time to adapt.

What does adapt mean? It means finding ways to allow them to continue using the processes they know, while perhaps feeding their outputs into the newer systems/workflows you’re designing. It’s stitching together old tech (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘old guy’) and new tech and doing your best to make that as seamless as possible. Will things get lost because of this compromise? Absolutely. But, as the old cliche goes, you can’t make perfect the enemy of the good. Focus on what you can accomplish in the engagement as you work around the resisters. If you’re clever about it, chances are you’ll still be able to make a significant impact. And, perhaps one day, you may find that the resister reaches out to you because they’re finally willing to give the new tech a try!

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