The customer is always right. Correct? Wrong! The RIGHT customer is always right for your business. Unfortunately most of us don’t know who the right customers are for our business. So we take on board anyone who has a heart beat, without ever identifying the right customer profile for our business. But who is the…
You have a great sales person. They close a high percentage of deals and you rely on them to keep your production machine fed. Your company literature, website and other staff talk about core vales of “honesty” and “integrity”. Your star sales person uses bribes and back-handers to land some of the deals. What do you…
I was watching a BBC documentary the other day on reductions in the death and serious incidents rates in surgery and it struck me how the key idea was very applicable to construction. That idea? Simple checklists. The program featured a top surgeon, Dr Atul Gawande from the US who was asked to investigate the death/serious incident…
Your “purple cow” is also known as your unique selling position, or USP. It is a sentence or phrase that explains what makes you special. It gives your prospects a reason to do business with you rather than your competitors. A good USP that is properly used makes your marketing a lot more effective, because…
One of my Facebook followers in the South Island had this video on his Facebook page. Thought it was definitely worth sharing!! Anything else tradies never say?
Do you understand your responsibilities and liabilities as a company director? Are you aware of the potential jail time if found guilty of (seriously) breaching those duties? There are some 600,000 limited companies in New Zealand, all of which have at least one director ultimately responsible for the conduct of the company. Not many I…
I was interested to read the recent BRANZ report on small construction firms in NZ. A lot of interesting stuff in there. One statistic I found particularly interesting was a possible source of easy additional profit for construction company owners. That statistic is the number of hours that owners and employees waste each week. Just looking…
By late this year the new consumer protection measures that have been drafted as part of the Building Amendment Act 2013 come into force. Are you ready for this from a practical point of view? Do you have the disclosure documents, checklists and processes established in your business to both comply with the law and…
There are two distinct sides to the health & safety issue in a construction business: ticking the “We have a H&S system” box, and actually making it an active part of daily operations. Paying for an off-the-shelf system and putting a sign up is a good start, but it will do little to prevent accidents…
Anyone who saw Fair Go on the 21st of May would have seen the segment on the Certified builder from Smith & Sons and the unhappy client. The client was complaining about a bad outcome on a building project and also unhappy that Certified Builders was backing the builder and not brokering (read, paying for)…