Business Operations

As distributors and retailers of quality building materials throughout the West, one of your primary goals is to keep your customers up to speed on current trends and products.

The push to more eco-friendly behavior is changing how we live. It’s affecting our choices in small, incidental actions like using re-fillable coffee cups and recycling plastic bags, to larger life milestones such as the kind of cars we drive or the materials our homes are made of.

Are you adapting your marketing to ensure it remains effective in changing times? 

What is the cost of a sales team? Most remodeling companies that use hired salespeople see it as a must have, especially if you’re going to scale the company (grow it to the point of profitability beyond the cost of overhead). If you are the owner of the company and you don’t have people skills, it may be an absolute requirement to have a salesperson.

Chances are good that if you’re reading this, you’re an entrepreneur. An essential aspect of entrepreneurship is the idea of capitalism and, thus, a clear understanding that profit is not only the “carrot” that drives ambition, it provides the necessary resources to grow one’s business in good times and perpetuate it when times aren’t so good.

Every day as contractors and custom deck specialists, we seek out new ways to not only make ourselves better, but also to set ourselves apart from the masses. Clients will do their searches and call on half a dozen or more local (and sometimes not-so-local) companies to get their price quotes, estimates or proposals in an effort to maximize their purchasing dollars.

For many of us being charming is work. So while we are churning out the calls, let’s also work on churning out the charm.

In an effort to make online education more dynamic, the Western Wood Preservers Institute has released a new narrated version of its preserved wood training course.

Now I know a pile of folks who own construction businesses and will install anything the customer asks for. This represents the path of least resistance and does make it easy in the sales process. That said, if you have this mentality you are missing out on a bunch of good stuff, especially money.