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
How better to get an edge in an old-economy business than with new-economy tools. Rainier Asphalt & Concrete was founded by my brother Tom in 2000. It has steadily grown to generate more than $4 million in annual revenues and withstood the furor of the Great Recession. Tom invited me to manage finance and IT in 2007. We’ve experimented with … Read more
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