It’s not to late to attend Pavement Live. This new concept for asphalt maintenance and paving contractors includes 10 live demonstrations, conferences and an exhibit hall with the latest equipment. I am proud to be delivering five presentations starting on Wednesday thru Saturday. Their will be an array of industry experts conducting many different classes.

I will be teaching the following classes at this year’s event:

Wednesday, November 30  9:00am – Noon

W4 Developing a Hands-on Strategic Plan for Pavement Maintenance Contractors

Wednesday, November 30  3:00pm – 4:30pm

A5 Repeat Sales: The Secret to Long-term Success

Thursday, December 1   8:00am – 9:30am

B10 Increasing Efficiency in the Field

Thursday, December 1  10:00am – 11:30am

B14 Profitable Pavement Maintenance Job Costing

Saturday, December 3   8:00am – 9:30am

D25 Gotcha! Attitude is Everything in Sales

Complete details are available at www.PavementLIVE.com or by calling 800-827-8009. I’m looking forward to seeing you!

I look forward to seeing you there!

Guy

This blog goes out to the thousands of contractors across America who are union.

They know you.

They know your team.

They know your strengths and weaknesses.

They know your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

They know whether they want to work for you.

They know whether they want to work for your competition.

They know which brother foremen work hard and perform well…and which ones don’t.

You clients don’t know. Your competitors don’t know. You might not even know.

The union workers know.

This was brought to my attention yesterday while visiting with a union fitter. I asked him about a company that competes against the one he works for. The fitter gave me an ear full about the company’s owner, its project managers, and its current top foremen.

Mind you, this man has never worked for that company but he had knowledge about the competitor’s performance capability that was stunning. The conversation reminded me of a handful of conversations I had awhile back during my time on a large construction project. These union guys are like corporate spies.

Here’s the moral of the story:

If you’re union and you want to be the best – the lowest cost, most productive, etc – you best become an employer-of-choice. You best become the company that the hard-working, well-organized, success-driven foremen and superintendents are dying to work for.

If you become know as an incompetent, uncaring, or simply greedy owner, you will struggle to build a championship team. The great foremen and superintendents will choose not to work for you no matter what you offer them.

It’s as simple as that: be employee-focused or be ready to put up with ongoing performance headaches.

Do Clock Watchers Ever Take Ownership of Their Jobs?

While visiting with a friend over lunch the other day,  we got to talking about a lady we both know and the strange – to us – conflict between her work ethic and her clock watching.

The clock watching in this case wasn’t that she sat around counting down the minutes until she was off. It was the other type of clock watching.

Salaried Clock-Watchers Rarely Stay Past 8 Hours.

She had the mindset of an hourly worker. She wasn’t paid by the hour. She was on salary. But she kept close track of her hours. If she worked late one day, she took off early the next.

What threw us off was that  she made sure her employer got their money’s worth for 40 hours a week. She worked hard and was more productive than several of her peers that put in longer hours for the same pay.

All in all, her employer was getting great bang for the buck – with her. Yet, it brought to mind the three different mindsets workers have.

1. Hourly
2. Salaried
3. Owner

The “hourly” employee figures he is being paid for 40 hours a week. That is true for employees who are LITERALLY hourly. Not so true for salaried employees. Most front line salaried employees think like hourly employees. Some front line supervisors do also.

The “salaried” employee figures he is being paid to do his job, whatever the volume of tasks and the time they take, he has been assigned with.

Employees who think like  “owners” go above and beyond. The only reason they keep an eye on the clock is to meet important deadlines. They strive to make the company successful.

We all thirst for our company to be staffed full of “owner” minded employees.

That’s difficult to pull off – not impossible – but difficult. Naturally, we know how. That’s why our clients hire us.

You need to keep your eye out for  salaried employees who think like hourly employees.

Very, very few of them are like the lady I described. Most are modestly productive at best. Most are true clock watchers. You’ll rarely turn a true clock watcher into a highly productive, owner-minded employee.

Food for thought as you try to grow your business.

A client called in today to share a little union problem he was having to put up with. It was making it very difficult for him to work.

Have to give the union credit for its approach.

My client is a non-union pavement maintenance company. He has struggled to buy mix the last week because his local mix plant has been the target of a rather ingenious picket.

The asphalt plant has its own paving crew, which is unionized. The local decided to put up a pseudo-picket whose method is to make sure that no non-union trucks are loaded.

The plant is taking a beating because its sales are down about 50%. The strategy hurts the non-union pavers as their trucking costs sky rocket as they are forced to drive to an across town non-union plant…the only one in the area.

The union really is playing hardball here as the typical non-union paver works mostly on patching jobs and small commercial jobs. The type of jobs that are almost cost prohibitive when staffed with union workers. Property managers generally will not pay the higher rates, such as driving a $2,000 fix to $3,000.

In all fairness, the union’s job IS to keep as much work as possible for the union. This particular local is deploying a brilliant strategy to do just that. Love them or hate them, you’ve got to give them credit for the strategy. I certainly do.

A couple of months ago, I attended the annual trade show that many of my former employer’s clients go to. It was great to visit with several old friends and meet several new ones. It also brought Guy Gruenberg (Grow Consulting) and I together which is something you will be hearing more about in the near future.

Several of these individuals are avid readers of my newsletter (thank you for the support). Each mentioned he or she was surprised at the frequent focus on sales, marketing, and people management. I was surprised they were surprised. So, being the curious sort, I asked why they were surprised.

They were under the impression my only expertise was data analysis and performance review systems. That perception cracked me up but it did make sense.
The owners of my the consulting practice were SUPERIOR speakers. I mean these two gentlemen were about the best in the industry. Before starting the consulting practice, both had carved out highly successful livings traveling the country delivering seminars. Both were featured speakers at the World of Concrete for years. Both tended to focus on and speak about leadership and management.

So, being the engineer I am, it only made sense for me to slide into the data analysis and system design role while working for them. I was brought on board to balance out the team. And it worked quite well.

It also left our clients with the perception that numbers were my primary interest, focus, and skill.

That is the danger of perception. It can lead you to draw an incomplete picture of your staff’s capabilities and cause you to overlook one of the greatest resources for competitive advantage…the people who are already working for you.

Many of your workers could probably excel at several different types of tasks and in several different roles. Just because a worker is great at one role doesn’t mean he can’t be great at a completely different one.

Be careful making a final judgment on one of your employee’s skills and abilities when you have only seen him in one job. Frequently, employees are either miscast in the wrong role or they are capable of performing many roles equally well. Moving them to a new job often reveals starting new results and alters your perception of the talent you have working right under your nose.