You’ve no doubt heard many pitches proclaiming how information technology can help you run your business. But can IT help you when you’re getting ready to retire or seek a new opportunity?
As it turns out, information technology helps the specialty contractor sell his or her operation and realize a higher price. The biggest monthly expenses contractors see are for … Read more
In October 2006, I traveled from Seattle to Indianapolis to visit my mom’s cousin. He owns one of the largest home building firms in that market, Arbor Homes. My contracting business was still in its infancy and I was searching for some inspiration about “how to become a real company.”
I spent three days shadowing him and some of … Read more
I always find it amusing when someone calls our office and asks, “do you guys do free bids?” Are there actually any contractors that charge to perform bids?
The whole “free bid” thing is a curse on our industry that will probably never go away. Nevertheless, although this is what consumers expect and demand, we should always be analyzing who … Read more
Getting paid and managing cash flow can be an ongoing struggle for contractors. While chasing down certain customers to collect payment is a struggle that will never go away, one priority we established at our contracting business was that we must have our own clerical house in order.
More specifically, although we perform over 1,000 separate jobs each year, we … Read more
We use to have paper time cards. Employees would fill out their start time, stops time, break time and which project they worked on (for job costing).
Before running payroll every two weeks, our General Manager would sit down after dinner and enter all this information into the computer. During our peak employment in the summer — when we have … Read more
We have a saying that’s developed around the office in the last few years: “sometimes the easiest decisions are the hardest ones to make.” When faced with these types of issues, being able to pull powerful and relevant data can be the best thing to make rationale, rather than emotional, decisions.
When it comes to sales, it’s difficult to fight … Read more
The best place to look for new leads is often among existing customers. We periodically review our Job Management System (JMS) to help our estimators prioritize what relationships are worth rekindling. Storing job data in a JMS also helps us preserve our customer relationships when estimators move on to other employment.
We completed such a JMS review earlier this month. … Read more
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