Our local ABC chapter was kind enough to let me put on a short seminar on estimating. The presentation went well. We obviously hit a nerve as verified by the feedback and the request for a more detailed workshop.

Estimating is a great topic as it forces several related topics to be discussed such as:

• Overhead allocation
• Job costing
• Tracking labor productivity
• Software
• Pricing

If you don’t have a firm grip and complete mastery of those systems, your estimating is not going to be accurate. Sloppy or lazy estimating technique leads to blown bids and the landing of undesirable work. If you are not 100% sure you’ve got these things under control give us a call. We are experts at putting them in place.

If you, or someone in your office, is running QuickBooks and doesn’t know how to get it to produce the reports you need to run your business profitably, boy have I found someone you need to call!

Need QuickBooks Help?

Pam Newman – 816-304-4398

I visited with Pam Friday and have to tell you, she is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!

If you’ve been following us for very long – reading our frequent complaints about the lack of solid support for contractors from the accounting community – you’ll know how thrilled we are to find someone who:

1. Totally understands contractors (she used to be one).

2. Totally understands the management reports business owners need.

3. Totally understands how to make QuickBooks sing and dance.

Pam has a fabulous personality.  A great pleasure to visit with. She’s not one of those dry, boring, accounting types.

She is remarkedly well educated (accounting degree and MBA). She is certified. And most importantly, she is down to earth.

She knows the type of information business owners should be looking at weekly and monthly.  As she was reciting her recommended list of managerial reports , I was grinning from ear to ear.

It was as if she had bugged conversations between Guy and I from weeks and months back. Wow!

To get ahold of Pam, you can call her at 816.304.4398; email her at pam@rppc.net; or browser her site at www.rppc.net.

Pam provides both consulting and training services. In person or via the telephone and internet (just like we do).

We hope Pam becomes a close member of our Contractor’s Business Coach team in the near future but don’t wait for that negotiation to complete. If you need help, call her now before we raise her rates. Seriously, she is WAY too cheap.

As always, keep beating the bushes and wishing you the best.

Ron & Guy

And the beat goes on.

Last week, I heard two more stories of woe from contractors who had taken on partners or turned over the management of their firms to individuals who turned out to not be worthy.

One of the contractors ended up in bankruptcy court and lost everything. The other is desperately digging his way out and is going to end up partnering with someone to keep himself out of bankruptcy.

This brings my 2008 total of such stories to an even dozen.  The split is about 50/50. Half turned over their business to someone who wove a grand tale, gave them near full authority in all matters, stopped paying attention to what was going on, and found themselves without work. A couple of those that did land work,  stole money (embezzled).

The other half brought on partners who turned out to be horrible salesmen and financial managers. They had track records of really poor financial performance that they inevitably blamed on someone else, couldn’t bring any money to the table to buy their share, and grew the business with complete disregard to the profitability of the work.

Moral of the Story:

Do your due diligence before joining up with someone new. Put in place monitoring systems to ensure he or she is taking care of your best interests.

Attention AOL emailers:

AOL is de-listing YOU from my newsletter AUTOMATICALLY!

This morning I noticed that a HUGE amount of new readers had de-listed after receiving one newsletter. It put me in panic mode. What did I write that hacked off everyone so badly?

I was getting ready to email each of these new subscribers individually to find out what I had done and then noticed 95% of the de-listed emails were AOL accounts.

I dug around a little more and discovered AOL has unsubscribed EVERY AOL newsletter reader. How nice of them to take care of their customers that way. Automatically taking them off of a mailing list for something they double-opted in for.

I pay for and use an email delivery service to avoid this very problem. It’s not like the newsletters are filled with SPAM warning signs. This service warns me before I que up the newsletter whether I’ve written it in a way that will alarm the SPAM filters.

Hopefully, that service will get this AOL problem resolved and will re-subscribe everyone that was automatically unsubscribed. They will probably succeed getting back on AOL’s approved list but I’m not very hopeful they will let me re-activate the subscribers AOL unsubscribed.

If you are an AOL emailer and would like to receive the newsletter, get either a Gmail account (google mail) or a Yahoo Mail account and re-sign up. I have accounts on both and the newsletters arrive without hitch.

AOL’s Big Brother move is very disappointing as a large percentage of the newsletter members signed up under AOL email addresses and can’t receive the newsletters.

2-24-09 Update

I’ve got to hand it to AOL and Aweber. Yesterday, their customer support groups really took the bull by the horns and got to the bottom of the problem. It’s a valuable lesson for all who use the internet to market their business.

One single link, a friend’s, that I always included at the end of the newsletter has been blackballed by AOL.

(Honestly, I suspect it has something to do with a legal war my friend is in the middle of. The other party has done some amazingly unethical things to stop my friend’s lawsuit from moving forwards. Getting AOL to blacklist his site wouldn’t even be in the top 10 of the tricks they’ve pulled.)

Anyway, if Aweber lives up to it’s word, it will be re-instating all of the AOL members it took it upon itself to de-list. I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to so far. Now it’s up to them.

This gives me an opportunity to remind you that when you don’t investigate an apparent problem, such as a sudden increase or decrease in crew production, you’re bound to be missing a serious problem that may have a very simple solution.

While arguing with a union boilermaker friend of mine the other day, something he and I enjoy doing, our conversation swung over to a serious quality incident we were both aware of. I am not a liberty to share the details but suffice it to say the problem was caused by a crew feeling pressure to work faster. This brought to mind a very important point.

Every task involves three variables: the resulting outcome, the time it takes, and the procedure used. Let me translate that into construction language.

Every construction activity involves quality, speed, and safety. You only get to control two of the three.

In our situation, the construction crew felt they had to work safely and felt they needed to work rapidly, so they skimped on the quality…which created a structural problem.

Why am I bringing this up? Because so many of us pay lip service to safety but our actions scream QUALITY and PRODUCTIVITY. When we stress those two variables over and over again, we de-emphasize safety.

This is one of the reasons I implore my clients to tell their crews “Go at your usual pace. Just hit the production numbers you always do. Just don’t be worse.”

Yes, that is saying productivity, but it’s really whispering it. It leaves room for my clients to scream QUALITY and SAFETY. The same applies to you and your crews. That’s the only way your people will work safely while keeping your customers will be happy with the end result.