How to Scale Contractor Management for Larger Contractor Pools

When you’re dealing with just a handful of contractors, things are generally pretty straightforward. But what happens when five contractors turns into 50 – or when 50 turns into 500? As you can imagine, it can get messy pretty quickly.

If you don't have the right contractor management system in place, this growing pool of contractors can be difficult to administer. Companies that aren't prepared to handle it will face problems like lost or misplaced documents, lapsed certifications or insurance policies, and administrative delays and backlogs.

In this article, we'll go over the challenges that come with scaling up and what you can do about them. With the right system in place, you can increase your contractor pool without increasing your stress levels.

Common Challenges When Scaling Up

As your contractor pool grows, so too does the amount of work you have to do in managing and prequalifying them. Whether it’s time logs, contracts, training documents, or insurance requirements, someone needs to make sure that everything is kept organized and can be retrieved quickly when needed.

Maintaining manual records of everything for one or two contractors might be doable, but it becomes a massive task once your operation grows. Every business will reach a point where constraints in their contractor management make it more difficult for them to scale up further.

Communication can also start to suffer when contractor pools grow. This can lead to contractors (particularly those who have been with you for a while) feeling disconnected from the business.

Scaling Smoothly: The Software Solution

While you can theoretically scale your contractor management using manual processes, you’ll eventually reach a point where your administrative staff simply can't handle the growing workload and complex record-keeping system.

Online contractor management systems, however, are designed to be scalable from the outset. They offer the same functionality for a group of 10 contractors as they do for a pool of over 100.

Investing in a contractor management program is one of the best ways to ensure your business is ready to scale up. Here are some of the key benefits of investing in this solution.

1. Reduce Overwhelming Paperwork

Growing your small business is exciting – until you see all the paperwork that comes with it.

The sheer amount of paperwork involved in manually managing a large group of contractors is anywhere from overwhelming to impossible. And in addition to being inefficient, relying on manual contractor management systems means that, inevitably, some documents or records will get lost.

Using a contractor management system to move these processes online puts everything at your fingertips and makes it easily searchable. It also reduces the potential for mistakes and streamlines data entry so you don't have to enter the same details into multiple spreadsheets.

2. Easily See Who Is Compliant – And Who Isn't

Using a reliable online contractor management system means no more sorting through stacks of paper, emails, or insurance documents. The software keeps track of all this data for you and may send you notifications and reminders when certification or insurance is out of date or approaching expiration.

3. Sustain Regular Communication with Contractors

Contractors may not be under your employment, but that doesn't mean they don't want to feel embedded in your company. Good communication will help them feel included and supported.

Contractor management programs allow you to easily stay in touch and collaborate with every single one of your contractors, no matter how many you work with. Ultimately, this should translate into an increase in morale, improved productivity, and the ability to retain top talent year after year.

4. Standardize Onboarding and Training

Onboarding and training sets the tone and lays out the expectations for any employee or contractor who steps foot on your worksite. A contractor management program helps you ensure that everyone who joins your team receives consistent, quality onboarding and runs through the same preliminary processes.

Conclusion

Scaling contractor management isn’t always easy, and it will almost certainly involve some learning curves. If you’re looking to invest in a software program to make things simpler, remember to dedicate at least one employee to fully learning how to use it (software makes your life a lot easier, but it doesn't run itself).

Bringing your contractor management online will simplify your administrative tasks and allow you to easily add more professionals to your pool of contractors. With the right software system, you can grow your business without worrying about the paperwork becoming unmanageable.