On occasion, you’ll have an urgent or unexpected situation come up on the jobsite. Some concerns are related to safety, but others simply require you to address them promptly. Having a plan in place can help you avoid the worst complications. Here are a few tips to ensure that you always know exactly what you need to do.

Plan Ahead
You may have heard people say that a failure to plan is a plan to fail. To a large degree, this is true. If you want less guessing or panicked reactions in the event of something unexpected, you should create a plan to handle it in the first place. In the beginning, your plan may not be particularly accurate. It may raise concerns that you will have to address later. But having a plan gives you a set of instructions to follow, which can be particularly useful if you are having difficulty focusing in the moment.

Keep Reference Guides Handy
As a general rule, plans to handle unanticipated or dangerous situations may require you to follow certain protocol. Organizations like OSHA often have guides that you can use to help you figure out what you’ll need to do. However, it’s not reasonable to expect that either you or your employees will have that information memorized. It’s also not reasonable to assume that you will have internalized it so completely that you can remember it while stressed out or distracted. Keep those reference guides in a handy place so that you can grab them whenever you need them.

Duplicate Knowledge
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that you are the only person in the company who has certain knowledge. On the other hand, duplicating some of your experience is crucial to solving problems. If you are out of the office or away from the jobsite and something happens, you want the people working there to be able to manage it at least partially in your absence. Make sure that everyone working for you knows the general rules for dealing with any situation that is likely to come up. It’s wise to have anyone functioning as a supervisor or team lead in a position of knowledge about the right protocol to follow.

Practice Addressing Problems
Whenever you see a team of paramedics or firefighters on the scene of an accident, you can see that they don’t spend a lot of time figuring out what they need to do. They have practiced a variety of different scenarios to the point that they know what to do in the moment. They don’t have to think about it as much. In your contracting business, you can do the same. Each month, devote some time to learning, testing and reviewing standard practices for dealing with emergencies and other urgent situations. The more you practice, the faster you will be able to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Revisit Past Problems
Having a plan in place and practicing it regularly are crucial to success of the plan, but so is the ability to revise it as needed. It’s possible that your original plan may not work exactly as you expected once you have to carry it out for real. It’s also likely that you will, in retrospect, come up with ideas for ways that you could make it more effective or efficient. After the problem is under control, give yourself a day or two to think about it and take a few notes. If you need to revise the plan, you should do so and notify everyone related to the situation.

Dealing with the unexpected is just part of running a contracting business. Getting your contractor license is another. For expert exam preparation tailored to the California state licensing requirements, visit CSLS today!