These guides will help your surveying company succeed.
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Everything from starting your company, to getting more clients.
Actionable tips to speed up your report turnaround
Hi, we're The King Brothers.
Our software helps you create high-quality asbestos survey reports in minutes.
Do you want to see how?
These actionable tips will help you speed up your report turnaround and increase your profits.
Why is fast report turnaround important?
We live in a modern age where clients have high expectations from their suppliers.
As technology gets better and your competitor's systems get slicker, clients expect a high level of high quality from their suppliers. And they don't want to be kept waiting for reports.
The asbestos surveying industry and others are highly competitive, so you need to be as fast as your competitors. But the good news is that fast report turnaround benefits your cash flow, too. The faster you can turn around reports, the faster you get paid!
Before heading to a site, it’s important to ensure all jobs and site details are fully set up in the system.
Having everything ready to go—like client details, the scope of work, and even floor plan templates—saves a lot of time on-site and reduces the chance of missing something crucial or having a costly site revisit.
Before heading out, make sure you’ve got clear instructions from the client about the scope of work.
There’s no point in doing more than what’s asked for—it only delays the process. It's much more efficient to stay focused on exactly what’s required.
This is a fairly obvious one, but make sure you confirm the appointment before visiting the client to ensure you can get access.
The cost of turning up to a building and not being able to get access could mean a costly revisit and a lot more driving. It could also add days or weeks to the turnaround time.
Is this a re-inspection of a site you've previously surveyed? If so, save time re-entering everything from scratch by copying your previous survey.
You can make any changes you need before heading back to site, then simply rock up and 90% of the work is already done for you.
Learn More About Re-inspecting Properties and Copying Reports
If you have a large job, you might want to consider splitting your team into groups.
By surveying different parts of the building simultaneously, your surveyors will have less idle time. You'll get through the work faster and reduce site re-visits.
Having a reliable, up-to-date device for entering data is a game-changer. The last thing you want is for your device to fail or run out of battery halfway through a job, which could mean resorting to carrying out the survey using pen and paper.
Writing everything down on paper and re-entering it later wastes time and increases the risk of errors, so keeping your device ready and operational is essential.
Always carry a battery pack or portable charger, just in case.
Read our Guide on Extending Your Device Battery Life During a Survey
Using a laboratory that can turn around results quickly is absolutely vital. Ask your lab their SLA for sample turnaround and try shopping around to see if others can offer a faster service.
Send samples off the same day they're collected to keep things moving smoothly. This simple step makes a big difference in speeding up the whole process.
Have you linked your surveying software with your laboratory?
If available, this "sample exchange" feature means you can send lab results to your external laboratory at the press of a button. You'll still need to send the physical samples of course, but this feature can significantly reduce bottlenecks with the lab.
Ps. Flow Mobile Surveying has a sample exchange feature with Alpha Tracker Labs. Get in touch to learn more.
Switch-tasking is a productivity killer. Whenever you jump into a new task, you need some time to adapt mentally —that's time wasted. Block out parts of your day and avoid multi-tasking during that blocked time, and you'll get much more work done!
If you're a bigger company, you can silo your workforce to improve productivity. This means giving each team member a clearly defined role, such as floorplan drawing, and ensuring they only work on that activity.
By having staff work like this, staff productivity should increase as they become masters of their chosen discipline. For example, a floorplan drawer will learn shortcuts to speed up their work. Doing floorplans every day means they'll remember these shortcuts more easily than someone who just dips their toe into floorplan drawing now and again.
How Division of Labour Grows Your Surveying Profits
Many surveyors swear by a simple approach to floorplans. They say the quickest process is:
Preparing floorplan templates in advance should also help a lot.
Alternatively, you could outsource your floor plans to another company to save even more time.‍
Read Our Guide on Outsourcing Your Floorplans
An average asbestos survey takes around two hours to create in Word.
By automating your report-writing using modern software like Flow Mobile Surveying, the same report takes minutes.
Do you have separate software for scheduling, invoicing, customer relationship management, and surveying?
Consider integrating your software. You'll have less data entry to do. Your workflow will be smoother and faster.
Sending invoices to clients well before issuing the final report can speed up your report turnaround, especially if you withhold reports until the invoice is paid.
This gives clients time to make a payment while you're finalising the report. Then, as soon as the report and lab results are ready, everything can be sent out without any delays waiting for payment.
A primary reason why small businesses fail is a lack of funding or working capital.
By improving your report turnaround, you'll get paid faster and improve your cashflow. You'll be less likely to run into financial difficulties.o
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