By: Benjamin Martinez Newman and Hannah Ford
Contractors play a central role in your success. They are extensions of your enterprise: collaborators on whom you rely to meet commitments, uphold standards, and advance your mission. Their competence and well-being have a direct bearing on your own performance. Investing in their skills, tools and capacity yields smoother delivery, higher quality work and steadier growth. This kind of investment simply reflects smart, strategic business practice.
GRID Alternatives: A Case Study for Contractor Investment
GRID Alternatives (GRID) is a national leader in expanding access to clean, affordable solar power and solar jobs. GRID hires contractors for solar, energy storage, electric vehicle charging, and energy-efficient infrastructure and installation projects. The organization recently expanded its contractor capacity to scale national impact.
GRID’s Contractor Services support small and diverse contractors across the clean energy sector and adjacent trades through services that are designed to help ensure that clean energy deployment is equitable, high quality, and rooted in the communities it serves. The GRID team connects participating contractors to lenders, capital sources, technical expertise and procurement strategies that help them scale their business.
GRID’s capacity-building model guides contractors from targeted outreach and screening through onboarding, compliance, and project matching. At each stage, firms gain access to new business opportunities that strengthen both their growth and GRID’s partnership network. Public Works Partners is helping GRID design how it supports contractors, developing strategies that can produce economic and clean energy benefits.
3 Steps to Build Contractor Capacity
Many organizations struggle to know where to begin. We see three core capacity building principles that any business can implement:
- Contractor Identification
- Needs Assessment
- Financial Support
1) Contractor Identification
Finding reliable partners at a fair price is the key objective of your procurement strategy. This starts with clarifying goals and values. When contractors share your core objectives, decision making is streamlined, and work is executed more effectively. Assessing financial strength is crucial as a measure of reliability and risk mitigation. Geographic alignment is also important, as your target territories should complement each other. You should regularly review the RFP process, evaluation criteria, and interview methods to ensure that partners fit your evolving needs.
2) Needs Assessment
A needs assessment can help identify strengths and gaps, uncovering issues that can be a barrier to future growth that both sides want. It also demonstrates a time investment in their business, which builds trust and increases contractor buy-in. By assessing a contractor’s growth areas, you can understand how your organization can support them either directly or by connecting them to other partners. You should establish clear touchpoints to both create a baseline when you first start working together and then reassess needs periodically.
3) Financial Support
Financial support does not have to mean providing direct funding. You can refer to partners that help contractors access capital and resources. The Center by Lendistry has partnered with GRID to help identify financial products that can help contractors scale up their operations. The needs assessment can help determine what kind of financial support is meaningful to your contractors. Your role should be to convene and make connections, contributing time and guidance.
Setting Your Organization Up for Success
At its core, running a business is an exercise in managing uncertainty. That is why a robust network of partners is not merely advantageous but essential. A disciplined approach to identifying contractors, understanding their needs, clarifying your own value, and connecting them to the right financial support yields real dividends. Enabling your partners to grow is one of the most reliable ways to secure your own success.
