How I’d Love To Keep You
By Customer defection rates are clearly a leading indicator of a company’s short and long term profit direction.
…Frederick Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. published a study in the Harvard Business Business Harvard Review Review which concluded: “Companies can boost profits by almost 100% by retaining just 5% more of their customers.” *
PIMS study concluded: “A dissatisfied customer would tell between 7-10 people while a satisfied customer would recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends.”
According to Bain & Company: “U.S. corporations now lose half of their customers in five years, [and] half of their employees in four
Ordinary Course Of Business
By “…you can make a preference claim into a better situation by knowing the options and keeping and reviewing your invoicing and payment records.”
Bankruptcy! It is a word that elicits fear, disgust, and even embarrassment to most business owners. Bankruptcy court is the last place the business owner wants to be, but what about the owner that gets unwillingly drawn into another business owner’s bankruptcy proceeding? It is especially troublesome if the last few payments were received prior to the other business owner’s filing for bankruptcy and the invoices were for valid goods or services and were due and owing. …
Small Business Web Hosting
How to choose what’s best for me?
Small businesses should be careful when choosing the right Web hosting company. Choose right and you’ll end up saving your business a lot of money and a lot of headaches down the line. Choose wrong and, well, the results could be expensive and disastrous.
Let’s step back a moment and learn exactly what a Web host is. If you have a Web site or e-mail on your own company domain name (example: bill.gates@microsoft.com), you have a Web host. A Web host is a company that “hosts” your Web site on their servers. A …
Where’s the Money
By Douglas DeRubeis as featured in Construction Today
Successful contractors see the recession as an opportunity for improvement.
You were certain you had done everything right. You won the bids. You generated the sales. Revenue was great, even in this economy. You had dreams of finally taking that vacation. And then, the end-of-year numbers came in—and you actually lost money. You couldn’t believe it. You made the accounting department run the numbers again, but they were right. How could this have happened?
It may sound like a bad dream, but for too many construction companies, it is reality. They seemingly …
Get in Control
By John Emerson as featured in Construction Today
Having a good grip on your business practices will help you steer the company in the right direction.
The vast majority of construction company owners believe they are not in control of their destiny. They argue that outside forces, recessions, strikes, materials shortages, natural disasters and the like can cause them to fail and there’s nothing they can do about it. One of the most difficult accomplishments for business advisors is to convince owners that they do in fact have a great deal of control and can achieve the results they want, …
Survivor Style
By Dan Light as featured in Construction Today
In tumultuous times, leadership skills could be the guiding light to steer your business out of the storm.
Just as basically healthy individuals recover more quickly from illness, so, too, do healthy businesses recover from a few bumps in the road, such as an economic downturn. Among the retrospective measures that reflect the company’s health are items on the balance sheet and income statement, including cash flow, net profit, growth rate, productivity and return on investment rates. Unfortunately, by the time such historical data indicate symptoms of trouble, it may already be …
6 Sins
By Dan Schneider as featured in Construction Today
Owners can make SIX CRITICAL MISTAKES in managing their businesses. Are you making any of them?
Surviving in today’s business world is more difficult than we have witnessed ever before. Small- and mid-sized businesses are failing at a rate that has not occurred in more than 60 years. An analysis of the reasons for this high rate of failure quickly points to the following fundamental errors made by business owners.
A passive sales process.
Business owners rely on their existing relationships—usually one or two customers—to provide them with enough business to pay …
Tick-Tock
By Tom Camarda as featured in Construction Today
Proper Time management increases productivity and profit.
Time is a finite, valuable resource, and managing it efficiently is critical to the successful, on-time completion of construction projects. How managers and employees manage their time affects performance, productivity and profitability. Accordingly, failure to deliver projects on time usually has negative financial consequences for construction companies and their clients. Although the principles of time management are not rocket science, they are easily forgotten in the rush to put out daily fires.
Here are 13 best practices in time management that can help ensure efficiency …
Paradigm shift
By Dan Schneider as featured in Construction Today
An owner’s mentality can drive company culture to either inhibit or stimulate innovation.
More than 400 construction company owners and various contractors who were recently surveyed were asked, “What business are you in?” Only one business owner answered the question correctly. The wrong answers went like this: “I’m in the construction business.” The right answer came from a plumbing contractor who said, “I’m in the sales business, and I just happen to be really good at plumbing installation, service and project management.” That plumbing contractor is doing very well at a time …
Back to Basics
By Al Moores-Warren as featured in Construction Today
Project management can be easy if you pay attention to three critical stages.
Sound project management can make the difference between being profitable and losing large amounts of money. If done well, it can assure the sustainability of a firm. Conversely, if done poorly, it can threaten its very existence. In fact, many professionals in the industry believe that the management of a project and the ability and skill sets of the project manager are directly proportional to the profitability of any moderate or large-scale construction project.
Project management, if done properly …