THE BEGINNING
For this I can take you on small trip down the road of personal experience. For the sake of time, I won’t go into the years of on the job training I had with those that gave me the experience I now have. Some of it is covered in “My Early Days”. What I would like to cover in this part is what it was actually like to have my own contracting business.
I had been in the building trades for years so I had experience. I had been able to observe the methods that businesses used in their daily operations, how to interact with customers and what customers expected from those they were doing business with. I will add here that many customers are a real pleasure to work with but there will always be some that make you wonder why you ever went into business in the first place.
THE DECISION
Deciding to start a contracting business at least for me – took some time to take root. There were several people who encouraged me to get my General Contractor’s license and finally I did make the decision to go for it. I had been in business with a delivery service for some time and it had done well but this would be uncharted territory for me. Although I had the physical skills and knowledge of the actual work, I would have to enter a whole new arena.
THE FIRST STEP
I asked around to see what I needed to do and found out that I would need to take an exam to be allowed to get a contractors license. As I investigated this I realized that it would be a benefit to take a course to help with that. The head of the building department at the time offered classes on reading and understanding the code book which would be instrumental in getting through the exam.
The exam was an open book exam which to me seemed odd at the time, what became apparent though was that though you can’t possibly know everything there is to know about building – you HAVE to know how to find the answers. I would need to work through the code book to get some of the answers.
The exam was 4 hours long and I made it through half of the test in a half hour! Great! I thought, I will be through this in no time. Well, that thought died an early death and I spent the next 3-1/2 hours getting through the rest of it. Some of the question are (I’m convinced) phrased in such a way that you really have to think through the question and apply the “exceptions” in the code book. They want to see if you really know how to interpret the code(s) and the exceptions.
There were some who had taken the test multiple times and failed, this should by itself, give you an idea of the difficulty of this test. I think all contractors tests are designed this way. I know other tradesmen in electrical and plumbing who study really hard for their tests because they can be so difficult.
WHEW - I PASSED!
OK – what’s next? They wouldn’t give me the actual license until I gave them proof of liability insurance. Some insurance companies don’t want to cover you if you have never had it before. I just kept talking with other contractors and calling and I did find a company to cover me, it didn’t take that long.
So there I was, I had my truck, I had my tools and now I had my contractor’s license. I was ready to go – somewhere. Now I had to find work.
For more on this read: “The work of a contractor”