While staffing a construction company has probably never been easier, many business owners are increasingly concerned about how to find reliable and highly skilled employees. Industry leaders are using social media and other online technologies, such as talent acquisition services, to successfully grow their businesses and attract top young talent.

Social media provides a direct line to prospective employees and has become a necessity for most businesses, regardless of their size. More than 85 million results appear in Google after searching the phrase “use social media to find jobs,” and each article advises job seekers to engage in sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hiring managers should familiarize themselves with this still-evolving recruitment method. Today’s job seekers not only have shorter attention spans, but they also have instant access to an ever-growing number of information sources, making them increasingly harder to reach through traditional advertising media.

A report released from The Nielsen Company in early 2010 showed that Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time on social media sites and blogs. And, by all indications, this number will only continue to increase.

Reaching top recruits requires a defined strategy, which should include social media and other online technologies, such as talent acquisition services. Keep 
these tips in mind when contemplating your online recruitment strategy.

Focus your efforts.  A multitude of social media networking outlets exist, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. This can make it difficult to determine which ones make the most sense for your recruiting efforts. Maintaining one social media forum well will return significantly higher dividends than dabbling in several platforms poorly.

Do your homework.  Mistakes usually result from jumping into the social media realm too quickly without having enough research or knowledge. This can result in using the wrong tone in your writing, focusing on the wrong demographic or targeting the right demographic with the wrong message.

Start simple.  If you are just getting started, pick one social media outlet that is the easiest to navigate and maintain—and one that you are most familiar with. Then, make it an integral part of your overall marketing effort. You can strategically plan to expand to other social media outlets as appropriate.

Consider niche networks.  Many recruiters have gotten into the habit of using broad-market online talent services to reach the masses. But niche services provide a more targeted approach to recruiting by delivering news of your open positions to the virtual doorsteps of the most qualified candidates.

Today’s online recruitment services go beyond the “online job board” model and offer candidate sourcing and scoring services for hiring managers with too little time or staff to produce the all-important candidate “short list.”

Since niche providers are industry-specific experts, they will more likely help ensure your job postings and search processes are compliant with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) and other agency regulations—which prevents a liability from occurring.

Focus on quality versus quantity. Particularly in today’s employment environment, the construction market is crowded with job seekers. Quantity of applicants is not the issue. Quality, however, is another story. A good online recruitment strategy pushes your company farther away from the “panic hires” that are a reality for many construction business owners. A more defined approach allows you to find better people faster through proactive and ongoing recruiting methods. Remember, the goal is to “sift out” unqualified applicants, allowing the solid matches to rise to the top.

Do not abandon your website.  Your company website is still the bread-and-butter of comprehensive information about your business. Your social media strategy should incorporate the specific pages of your site that are most important to potential candidates. Likewise, your website should push visitors to your social media efforts, introducing them to the most up-to-date information available about your company, its achievements and the opportunities to join as an employee.

Stay engaged in conversation.  The reason marketers have fallen head over heels for social media is because tools like blogs and YouTube allow a company to showcase not only its news and expertise, but its personality as well. Therefore, do not use social media solely to broadcast your company’s jobs openings. Find ways to engage your followers, and add value to their conversations.

To attract and maintain a social media audience, genuine and compelling content must drive your efforts. Interact regularly, and provide a rich content base addressing high-profile topics and key issues within your industry. Top job prospects want to know that the company they are interested in (or is interested in them) is on top of current events, provides a welcoming work environment and is aware of how the industry is evolving.

Good news! Now is the time to take a hard look at how your company does business. Why wait? When you start a company, you’re happy getting some work and making a little money. Then it grows into the company it is today by doing what it does relatively well for the few customers it has acquired. As an expert on entrepreneurial companies, I can tell you this is not the right way to design and build a great company that maximizes its potential market share, resources, people and bottom-line profits.

Make a list of top companies who are leaders in their marketplace. Your list might include: Apple, Caterpillar, Walmart, Microsoft, McDonalds, Ritz Carlton, BMW, FedEx, Forbes, Starbucks or Google. What sets them apart from the rest of their competitors and allows them to continually maintain market share, growth and profitability?

Owning a company that offers the same basic services or products as most of your direct competitors will keep you busy during good economic times. But as the economy struggles or shrinks, business becomes more difficult, harder to grow and make a profit-especially when you offer almost exactly the same thing as most every other company you compete against. In order for your company to become the leader in your marketplace, you have to offer something different than your competitors. You also have to be passionate about your vision and where you want your company to go. You need organized systems and a professional management team that consistently delivers the same results for your customers. And you must be clearly focused on hitting your targets, goals and financial numbers. With these characteristics, your company will make an above average profit margin and have extra funds leftover to invest in wealth building opportunities.

Is Your Company Great?

When studying market-leading companies, you’ll find they have eight traits that make them stand out and stay at the top of their field.
Take this True/False Test to determine if your company has these traits.

1.     1. Our company has a written passionate vision that is prominently displayed for all of our customers and employees to see. Every manager and employee knows exactly what the company stands for, its values and where it’s going.
2.     2. Our company has written targets and goals for the overall operations, each department and every project. These goals are tracked every month so adjustments can be made quickly.
3.     3. Our company has a structured organizational chart clearly describing the accountabilities and responsibilities for each position in the company. Every employee knows exactly what they’re responsible for and is fully accountable to make it happen.
4.     4. Our company owners and managers are focused on achieving the numbers required for the company to hit its financial targets and goals. Our company makes a very large profit compared to the industry average and our competitors.
5.     5. Our company has a unique delivery system, product or service that attracts customers who will pay more to buy from our company than our competitors.
6.     6. Our company has an ongoing, systemized and pro-active sales and marketing program to find, contact, attract, retain and service our customers. Our sales and marketing system has allowed our company to grow at least 15 to 20 percent or more per year.
7.     7. Our company has written operational systems and procedures for all employees to follow that ensure all workflow is completed in a similar standardized manner by all employees without exception.
8.     8. Our company’s bottom line delivers significant excess profits that allow us to seek investments and find opportunities to grow and build our equity and wealth.

Did You Score More Than Four?

Great companies have at least seven of the eight traits. Companies that are less than great tend to only possess four traits or less. As entrepreneurs grow from one employee to five or twenty, they are often too busy to stop and write down their vision, goals, organizational chart, job descriptions, employee accountabilities, operational systems and sales and marketing implementation plans. They get too busy doing everything themselves and don’t have enough time to focus on their numbers or seek investments. And because their service, product or delivery system originally was entirely dependent on themselves to produce the work, they never developed a differentiating factor that set them apart from their competition. Over time, most average companies eventually outgrow the entrepreneur’s ability to hold it all together without written goals, plans and systems in place. And they don’t provide something different from their competition except the owner’s personal attention to detail, which is not enough to stand out as their company grows.

Trait 1-Start with an Exciting Vision

What do you want to happen with your company and where do you want it to go? Leading companies start with an exciting, focused and passionate vision connected to the specific results they want. Some companies have a vision to be the best company in their marketplace with the biggest market share. Others want to be known as the best service provider, provide the best quality or offer the lowest price. Great companies ramp up their visions with more excitement. Exciting visions of great companies read like these:

•     -Be recognized as the leader in customer service.
•     -Be No. 1 in building difficult technical projects.
•     -Finish jobs 10 percent faster than our competition.
•     -Be known for helping customers make a profit.

Remember, Bill Gates of Microsoft had a big vision to put a computer in every home. Ask your employees and a few customers, “What’s the vision of our company, and what are we trying to accomplish?” If they don’t know, you’ll never become a great company. What is your passionate vision that will excite your customers and employees?

Trait 2-Write and Track Your Targets and Goals

After defining your exciting vision, specific results must be written down and targeted to quantify exactly what’s expected for your company, departments, people and projects. For example, if your vision is to be the best service provider, determine what specific measurable results would enhance your bottom line. Some targets you can track include: obtaining a referral from every customer, receiving only 5 percent callbacks, having no installation errors or maintaining 98 percent on-time completion. Without specific, clear targets, your people really don’t know what “make 10 percent gross profit,” “do quality work” or “be the best” really means.

What are your top priorities and specific targets your company is shooting for? You need to monitor and track the progress if you want to achieve your company, department and project goals. Ask your people what results are important. You’ll probably get seventeen different answers if you have seventeen people working for you. To get the results you want, write down and track your targets to get everyone on the same page from top to bottom.

Trait 3-Draft Your Structured Organizational Chart

Company managers and employees without written, detailed job descriptions don’t know what they’re 100 percent accountable for, don’t have authority to make decisions and don’t have an understanding of the clear lines of communication in your company and can’t be held responsible for producing the results you want. Without a structured organizational chart and a list of accountabilities for every position in your company, your people will wait for their boss to tell them what to do next. This limits employee growth, enthusiasm, production and efficiency. Plus, it stalls the company so it can’t grow beyond the owner’s ability to make every major decision for everyone.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to lay out your perfect organizational chart. Each position’s duties and responsibilities must be considered, detailed, described, outlined and assigned. List the accountabilities and expected results desired and required. Only with these clear descriptions can people help the company grow and become great.

Trait 4-Know Your Numbers and Make Big Profits

Many business owners are too busy to be bothered with watching and tracking their numbers. Can you imagine the CEO of a major company not knowing his/her company’s revenue, direct costs, fixed costs and profit? You can’t make a profit if you don’t know what to charge and how much you need to bring in. Many companies shoot for moving targets by attempting to make as much money as possible or more than they are currently making. These are not clear targets or goals – 5 percent, 10 percent or 15 percent are not clear targets either. As your sales and job costs vary each month, your total markup earned changes, while your fixed cost of doing business remains the same. This causes your net profit to move up and down like a roller coaster.

The owners of great companies spend a lot of time making people accountable to achieve the numbers. They set specific targets and keep track of the progress toward them. Annual sales of $5 million, overhead target of $600,000, and a net profit goal of $200,000 are specific fixed targets you can shoot for and hit. With specific targets for sales, costs, overhead, accounts receivables, cash flow and net profit, you stay focused on the lifeblood of your company.

Trait 5-Set Your Company Apart from Your Competition

When I drive down the freeway and see contractors’ trucks, they often have signs on them like: “Joe’s Electric-Commercial, Industrial & Residential.”  I chuckle and ask myself: “What do they excel at, what kind of jobs are they the expert in, and why should I hire them?” Based on my experience from working with thousands of contractors, my best guess is they chase any kind of work they can get and don’t make a lot of money doing it.

Are you in the “yes” business, taking any kind of job or project thrown your way? Experience shows that companies who specialize in a specific type of project or service do better work, are more competitive, have more loyal customers and make a lot more money than their “jack of all trades” competitors. Perceived experts are the first called when a customer needs a professional to complete a tough or special project. Experts get the first chance to propose on jobs that require complex engineering or technical knowledge.

To set your company apart from your competition and get hired at higher prices, you must be the perceived expert in your market and offer more than your competitors. According to a survey from the Society of Marketing Professional Services (a national association of construction sales and marketing professionals), the top two reasons construction companies don’t get awarded projects are:

1.     1. Their inability to market and properly present the differences between themselves and their competition
2.     2. Their lack of expertise in a particular project or service niche. When you continue to be and do everything for everyone, you won’t have enough time to satisfy your customers and you can’t make enough money for all the different types of work you attempt to complete.

Trait 6-Install a Proactive Sales and Marketing Program

There are many ways to improve your profit margin. These include cutting costs, reducing overhead, improving field productivity, conducting accurate estimating, making no field mistakes and having an excellent training program. All of these will give you small improvements in your bottom line, but not enough collectively to make a significant difference.

The easiest way to make more money is to create it! Profit starts with revenue. The more profitable revenue, the more bottom-line profit. Revenue comes from customers. To make more profit, develop more profitable customers. Are customers your No. 1 priority? Do you have a written sales and marketing plan that delivers a consistent flow of loyal customers, profitable revenue and new customers? While doing good work is important, it will not deliver the revenue you need to become a great company. You also need a proactive sales and marketing program that constantly attacks customers, generates inquiries, gathers referrals, seeks new business opportunities and gets potential customers to only call your company when they need your product or service.

Trait 7-Replace Yourself with Operational Systems

A systemized business produces consistent performance and the same results every time. How much money are you losing by relying on your people to do their best without standardized written operational systems and ongoing training? When your employees and customers rely on you to make sure everything is done right, you get stuck at the level of what you can control.

Great companies have and maintain written systems and procedures for all employees to follow. Organizing and systemizing your company requires time to get everyone doing business the same way. But the end result is worth it. Systems will allow your company to be the best in what you do and allow your company to grow. To make it happen, you’ll have to dedicate the resources to put all of your important work processes in writing and create a “Do” manual of pictures, checklists and guidelines for your employees to follow.

Trait 8-Seek Investments to Build Equity and Wealth

The outward indicator of a great company is steady growth and profitability year after year. Every new entrepreneurial company that becomes great should create enough significant excess profits within the first five to seven years to start seeking wealth building investments. Wealth building investments deliver positive cash flow without much effort or attention, like real estate properties, joint ventures or stock ownership.

If you can’t find enough annual profit left over to invest, perhaps you need to change how you do business. Companies that continually struggle generating profits and never seem to get ahead can’t become great. For whatever reason, these owners have decided to shortcut most of the traits required to be great. These companies struggle for decades, run by owners who shoot from the hip and manage by the seat of their pants. These poorly run companies ruin it for the great companies by charging too little, doing the minimum to get by, providing no training for their employees and delivering less than expected by their customers.

Be great!

It’s not too late to be great. The choice is yours. What you do and the decisions you make deliver the results you get and determine your future. Not making enough profit? Not growing 15 to 20 percent per year? No money left over to invest? Take a look in the mirror. Take a hard look at how you do business. Look at your people and organizational chart. Look at your company systems. Look at what sets you apart from your competition. Look at your profitability and focus on finances. Do whatever it takes to figure it out. Hire a business coach or a new general manager, controller or business development director. Stop postponing your potential, install all of the eight great traits, and your company will become great.

In order to grow, we must continually focus on the eight traits of great companies. It is also important to hire right and believe in your people. Let go and delegate.

2. Secrets to working with three owners:

The best thing is being able to break up your company management into three distinct categories: administration and finances; equipment management; and estimating and production. This way one can all focus on attention to detail and the ability to trust things are being taken care of. If in doubt, attempt to have fun with it!

3. Secrets to building a great team:

Hire up; explain the mission; provide clear goals for customer satisfaction, safety, quality, and the budget; systemize; ongoing training; and manage the process.

4. Secrets to doing quality work:

Focus on the details, explain, and train expectations

5. Secrets to keep your perfect safety record:

Mandatory daily safety meetings on every job, weekly tactical meetings on every job, provide regular safety training sessions, discuss potential hazards at the beginning of every task, and create a safety culture by embracing quick hazard recognition and corrections.

6. Secrets to making money in the type of construction you do:

Focus on the details, communicate production expectations, execute work superbly but quickly, please the client, and beat the estimates.

7. Keys to sustained growth:

Companies have had success with holding a two day strategic planning retreat every year and update it every six months to stay on track. Knowing what future projects are being funded to keep the pipeline full. Focus on bonding growth.

8. Any other tips for other contractors to succeed:

Management- Focus on execution; that’s where the money is made.

Field- Focus on execution; that is where the money is made.

Production- Do it right once!

Scheduling- Tie the construction schedule directly to the budget durations.

Financial- Secure enough operating capital to support growth & bonding.

Equipment- Rent unless utilization provides an equity position.

Estimating- Create a thorough scope and then price the scope.

It’s no secret that construction companies that develop and exploit a particular specialty niche tend to see a greater degree of success than those who try to be all things to all customers. A survey performed by North Carolina-based construction industry management consultants, FMI Corporation, found construction companies that specialized in serving a particular segment won bids nearly twice as often as those that did not.

Given that sort of advantage, if your business lacks such specialization, it may be time for you to re-evaluate to whom and how you’re marketing your services. Of course, a lot of companies still have reservations about narrowing the focus of their business, afraid they’ll push away other opportunities in the process. This just isn’t the case. In fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.

By focusing on serving a particular segment—say restaurant or chain construction, high-end residential projects or sustainable “green” building—your company gains a golden opportunity to own that market space. You benefit not only from decreased competition for bids, but you’ll also come to be seen by future and repeat clients as a “go-to” expert in that space. The result: Increased growth in a field that suits your company’s specific sales goals and identity.

Finding Your Niche

When determining the niche your business will target, make sure it’s an area in which you’re both comfortable and capable. A good place to start is in considering your current and recent customers: Who is good to work with and why? What sort of projects does your company excel in completing, and which bring the greatest returns for your efforts?

Answering these and similar questions will give you a good idea of where you should be directing your marketing energies, allowing you to build the business most desirable while pruning that which veers from your overall goals. Having a formally developed, ideal prospect profile will aid your next steps immeasurably. In essence, ask yourself what the ideal customer looks like, what their specific needs are and how your specialization would fit into what they’re looking for. Solidifying your goals in terms of desired (and realistic) growth will also help determine the scope of your marketing efforts.

Once you have clearly identified your target niche, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to the work of developing business intelligence on the companies and/or individuals who fall into this market segment and meet your profile. For instance, you want to know who they are; where, when and how they do business; what publications they read; and where they congregate (i.e., trade shows and industry events). Of course, this is in addition to gathering statistical information on the overall size and saturation of the market, active competitors and growth opportunities.

Pre-existing customers whose qualities guide development of your ideal customer profile can be a wealth of actionable information, helping you to zero in on the hot-button issues faced by those in your target niche. Armed with this understanding, you can more accurately communicate your differentiating factors to other prospects who fit the bill. More importantly, this information will help you tailor your services more and more effectively to meet the unique needs of the niche.

Identifying Your Prospects

With the ideal prospect in mind, the next step is lead generation. The form and scope your lead generation efforts will take depends on a multitude of variables, including but not limited to the size and nature of the niche, the scale of your own operations and your pre-determined revenue and growth goals. Obviously, the larger and more complex these elements are, the larger and more complex lead generation becomes.

There are some constants, though. You’ll want to find those prospects that most closely match your ideal profile, identify the key decision makers you’ll need to approach and gather as much contact and background information as possible. If the niche is a sizable one, chances are you’ll be able to find directories, contact lists and research sources to help you build your prospect database. Even smaller, localized markets will have common points of contact, and these can provide direction as well.

Regardless of its size or scope, methodically developing and maintaining a clean database of prospects gives you a roadmap to follow as you begin to communicate with that niche. Remember though: Contact data is a continually moving target. Statistics show that more than 70 percent of people change one or more elements on their business cards each year. Keeping your database clean and accurate must be an ongoing affair.

One of the key benefits of targeting a specific niche is that it makes allocating marketing dollars easier and more effective. Rather than blindly casting the widest possible net and hoping for the best, you can intelligently focus your efforts, messaging and face-time on those prospects who represent the highest potential return over the shortest timeframe.

A Roadmap for Success

Now it’s time to map out a plan for connecting with these prospects, whether through advertising (print and/or online), direct mailings or over the telephone. The best approach is a coordinated combination of all three. Ideally, all of the above should address the specific needs and interests of the target niche and be geared toward transforming that initial contact into a relationship.

Frequent (but not oppressive) meaningful contact with the filtered prospects in your database will help you secure the face-to-face meetings with decision makers that make deals happen. It’s therefore important that each subsequent contact build on prior communications with a prospect. This is known as nurturing the prospect, and it’s important to see it as an ongoing process rather than a single action.

For example, information requests coming as a result of ad placement should trigger subsequent contact with more information. Likewise, initially targeting your ideal prospects with a direct mail offer should be followed up with a telephone contact. Telephone representatives can reference the initial communication and further nurture the prospect relationship, asking questions that enrich the prospect database while also answering questions and communicating your company’s unique value proposition. Each subsequent contact then becomes a means for deepening the relationship and breaking down any potential barriers to the in-person sales calls that follow.

Of course, the telephone specialists you enlist to make initial and follow-up contact with your prospects must be well-trained. Their role is to essentially begin a conversation between your company and the prospect, not close a sale. While they’re not calling to engage prospects in deep discussions, they should be capable of delivering your message with enough detail to solicit the desired action.

Desired actions may include getting the prospect to accept further information on your company’s offerings or to schedule a follow-up call or meeting with a more experienced sales professional, depending on where the prospect is in the decision-making process. The key takeaway here is the compounding value of repeated, sequential and meaningful contact to build a relationship. Even if you’re not turning prospects into customers immediately, you’re still penetrating your target niche and keeping your company at the top of prospects’ minds.

Delivering Your Message

Successful niche marketing depends on clearly defining your niche, gathering business intelligence on ideal prospects and then reaching out to the niche in its own particular language, addressing its own particular needs. By profiling and gathering intelligence on these ideal prospects, you’re able to use marketing dollars much more effectively and efficiently, generally gaining greater penetration at a lower cost than wide-reaching marketing efforts.

The quality of the prospect database is a key component to effective niche marketing, and it’s in your best interest to make sure it is as clean, accurate and up-to-date as possible. Your database will give you the opportunity to act quickly on marketing opportunities to those prospects who fit your niche, and it will make establishing a calendar of mailings and other contacts much more feasible and easier to manage.

Of course, once you’ve gathered the necessary business intelligence and developed your database of qualified prospects, it all comes down to persuasive and informative messaging. Take the time and invest the necessary resources into crafting your messaging, making sure you’re addressing the hot-button issues of your niche and clearly delineating your company’s unique value proposition.

Depending on the size and sophistication of your niche market, it may make good sense for you to engage marketing communications professionals to help you craft your messaging. In fact, partnering with such professionals can give you a clear advantage in successfully achieving all the requirements and aims of your niche marketing efforts. Regardless of whether you partner with a firm or go it alone, the steps outlined above will help you make the most of your marketing dollars and see great gains in capturing new business in your niche market.

The easiest way to make more money is to create it! Profit starts with revenue. The more profitable revenue you create, the more profit you make. Revenue comes from customers. Profitable revenue comes from satisfied customers who want what you provide and will pay a little extra for your excellent service. To make more profit, you must find and keep more profitable customers. Are customers your No. 1 focus? Do you have a business plan to take care of your customers and put them first? Studies show it costs and takes five to seven times more money to find new customers than to keep existing customers satisfied. Maximizing profit is dependent on satisfied customers-current, repeat, loyal and future.

Are You a Money Maker?

Are you focused on making or saving money? What do you spend most of your time doing? What are your top priorities? Do you really care about your customers and what’s best for them? Do you keep your commitments? Return customers calls immediately? Man jobs properly to finish on-time? Do you keep your customer’s jobsites clean? Schedule jobs based on what’s best for your customer or what’s best for you?

Money makers are focused on making money. Money is made by taking care of customers. Look at the hotel business. The large successful hotels are 100 percent committed to giving their guests a great customer experience from the minute they enter the front door until they checkout. They treat customers as guests and strive to give them what they want. These hotel managers don’t focus their time trying to save as much money as possible or scheduling people based on running the most efficient hotel operation. They focus on creating satisfied customers who’ll come back over and over again. This customer focus creates profitable, repeat loyal customers. It also stops customers from shopping price when choosing a hotel chain to frequent.

The cheaper budget motels, in contrast, are money savers and do whatever they can to save every penny possible. The furniture is bolted down to the floor, you only get one thin towel, you don’t get a morning newspaper, you can’t remove the clothes hangers from closet rods, the hot water is turned down to warm and the hotel clerk’s goal is to make your life miserable. These motels offer poor service, average quality and cheap prices. Guess what? These cheap hotels are like most small businesses. They sell low price and don’t have loyal customers. They also constantly struggle making a significant profit.

What’s Your Focus?

What do you do to give your customers a great customer experience? Have you forgotten where your money comes from? As your business grows, you get busy and don’t have time to take care of your customers the way you really want to. But those who make customers their number one priority make 100 percent more money than those who provide mediocre service. The vast majority of small business owners and managers focus their energy on getting work done and saving as much money as they can. They don’t focus on making money by creating profitable revenue and satisfied customers. Meeting their customer’s needs and providing great customer service is an afterthought in their every day activities. Small business owners start their company with a dream of working for themselves, calling the shots, making a lot of money, having some freedom and extra time off. They were good at running jobs, estimating or installing materials. But they never spent much time focused on taking care of customers.

The typical business owner is a good worker and builds a good product or service. So when they start their companies, they don’t have trouble getting customers. They get busy doing the work and then hire some workers to help them get the work done. Because employees aren’t as efficient as themselves, the owners scramble to get everything done and forget to take care of their customers. They get overwhelmed, overworked and don’t have enough resources to hire enough qualified people to stay ahead of their workload. This causes customers to get upset as deliveries and completion dates begin to slip. This causes their overall company operation to leak customers, people, money and profits. The business owner is now stressed-out and doesn’t know what to do to fix it. He works as hard as he can, but it isn’t enough to keep all the balls in the air.

Business owners mistakenly focus on saving money instead of making it. What’s your focus? Are customers your No. 1 priority? How much time do you spend satisfying customers? Do you have a customer service training program? Or do your customers seem like an interruption?  I once heard a customer tell a rude store clerk: “You don’t get it! You’re overhead, I am profit!”

Do You Lose Customers?

Have you ever been to a store and waited in line to pay while the clerk talks on the phone? What do you do? Scream and yell. Wait patiently. Tap on the counter. Look for another clerk. Go to another cash register. Give them a lecture on customer service. Ask for their supervisor. Studies show that nine out of ten men and four out of five women have stopped using a store forever because of long lines or long waits. What ticks off your customers?

• -Not returning phone calls

• -Lack of instant e-mail contact

• -Slow service

• -Missing deliveries or scheduled installations

• -Leaving a mess

• -Punch-list too large

• -Not enough men on the job

• -Don’t show up when promised

• -Not protecting adjacent work

• -Not properly funded

• -Untrained crews

Customer Focus Test    (Rate on scale of 1 to 10)

____ We regularly survey our customers:

- To find out how satisfied they are

- To ask for suggestions to improve

____ We regularly review these suggestions and make positive changes.

____ We have a customer mission statement.

- I can recite our customer mission statement.

- Everyone in our company can recite it.

- Everyone understands it.

____ We track customer satisfaction:

- Quality

- Service

- Errors, problems and call-backs

____ We continually train our entire staff in customer service at least four times per year.

____ New hires get an in-depth training which includes customer service.

____ Our compensation and incentive pay includes customer satisfaction.

____ We regularly reward and recognize for great customer service.

____ We don’t have any stupid rules that are not customer friendly.

____ Everyone has the authority to do whatever it takes, to satisfy our customers.

It Pays to Please!

According to surveys satisfied customers will pay up to 10 percent more. Satisfied customers also tell two to three people about your great work. The bad news is that dissatisfied customers will tell ten people how bad your company is. It is imperative to remember that satisfied customers are the No. 1 reason for your daily activities, your job and your company. Your customers are not interruptions, distractions or problems. They are why your company is in business!

Your customers don’t care how busy you are or about your employee problems, your cash-flow issues, your broken down equipment, your chain of command or your company rules or policies. They hired your company to perform, not make excuses. Your problems are your problems, not your customer’s.

Are You Leaking Cash?

Where is your company being held back, clogged or stopped up? What is blocking you from achieving your maximum bottom-line potential? Where is your weakest link? This profit pressure point causes your company to leak cash. You are not making the money you should if everything was working properly. You work hard to get signed contracts. Then during projects, things go wrong and your customers don’t get what they want or expect. This causes conflicts and hurts your bottom-line. I call this the “profit pressure point.”

In order to unclog your pressure point and stop leaking $$$, look at your company systems, policies, people, service, quality, technology or training issues that restrict the flow of your operation. These clogs and obstacles don’t allow your company to take care of customers and cost you lots of cash.

Check Your Calendar!

Think about what happens every day. Most business owners and project managers spend at least 90 percent of their time doing the work at hand. They multi-task as they manage employees, subcontractors, suppliers and projects. Their only customer contact is during project meetings, bid negotiations, haggling over change orders, fixing field problems and scheduling crews and materials. They take repeat customers for granted and assume if they do a good job, their customers will put them on the bid list for their next project. This may be enough to build a business in good times, but what about during a slower economy?

When new customers call with project opportunities, you immediately drop everything and put them first. You call your existing customers and cancel meetings to allow time to wine and dine potential customers. You put on your best clothes, take them to the finest restaurant, and present them your shiny brochure filled with glossy photos of your company’s accomplishments. All while current customers wait for you to return their calls or fix a project problem. Sound familiar?

Your calendar doesn’t lie. How much time do you invest creating satisfied customers versus getting projects built? Do you take time transforming current customers into repeat customers by finding out what they want and then delivering it to them on a regular basis? Or better yet, do you make time to take your loyal customers out to lunch, a ball game or a monthly round of golf to get to know them better?

Does your company have an action plan to make every customer satisfied? A customer satisfaction program takes concentrated effort and will return big-time to your bottom-line. You can be a repeat customer of K-Mart or Wal-Mart, but you aren’t satisfied, so you’ll shop anywhere the products are available. Satisfied customers will use your company over and over again and pay you more than your competition. People want to help those who help them. Look for ways to help your customers make more money. Be more of a business partner than a provider of services.

Time is money. How you focus your energy will decide how much you make. Meaningful time satisfying customers is big money. Make it your priority to invest at least 50 percent of your time focused on satisfying customers. This will return more profit than you’ll ever make ordering materials, scheduling crews or supervising operations. Rearrange your calendar, put customers first and watch your bottom-line grow!

BLS’s  latest monthly employment update, released on Feb. 3, also showed that construction gained a further 21,000 jobs in January, after adding 31,000 in December.  That brings the industry’s total employment to its highest level in two years, according to Ken Simonson, Associated General Contractors of America chief economist.

January also marked the 16^th-straight month in which construction’s jobless rate was lower than its year-earlier figure.

The BLS industry rates are not adjusted for seasonal variations. Construction’s rate generally worsens in winter months, when the volume of building drops.

Nearly all construction sectors posted gains in jobs last month. Heavy and civil construction was the lone exception, recording a decline of 1,400. Another encouraging note came in architectural and engineering services, which added 6,900 jobs last month. Design services numbers are not included in the BLS construction category.

AGC’s Simonson said the construction’s industry’s two-month 52,000 job gain is “great news,” but cautioned that the increase came during periods of unusually mild winter weather.

He said, “It will take another month or two to see if the recent job growth reflects a sustained pickup or merely acceleration of homebuilding and highway projects that normally halt when the ground freezes in December and January.”

Simonson noted that construction employment is up by 116,000, or 21%, over the past 12 months, but is still down 28% from April 2006’s peak of 7.7 million.

Anirban Basu, Associated Builders and Contractors chief economist, said, “Clearly the recovery in private construction has been accelerating.” Basu said job growth was especially strong in the manufacturing, commercial and power industries. But he noted that “the impact of strained public finances also continues to be apparent,” pointing to the reduction in heavy-civil construction jobs last month.

There were other negatives in the BLS report—construction’s jobless rate was the highest among major U.S. injury categories and also was more than double the overall U.S. level.

The current downturn in real estate has spread throughout the economy, causing tougher lending standards throughout the construction industry. Contractors need to get ahead of this curve by reviewing capital requirements and bank covenants against their business plan for 2012 to ensure that compliance issues are predicted and re-negotiated ahead of time. Lenders hate surprises. If possible, negotiate a larger credit line to provide a cushion even if it means giving additional collateral or guarantees. These can be re-negotiated when this business cycle turns around.

Update Your Business Plan, with Recession in Mind.

Re-evaluate every aspect of your business plan from a new point of view-how it should change if the economy takes an additional sharp downturn in 2012. Every contractor should go through the exercise of running financial projections that model what happens if your revenues are 10 or 20 percent less than in the previous year. Look critically at each business line to see if this is the time to exit those that are marginally profitable or unprofitable. If your business is considering expansion into a new line of business or a new geographic area, consider partnering with an existing business to minimize risks.

Retain your key people.

If you think times are tough, think about how they would be without your key people helping you manage your business. Every contractor should take aggressive steps in the areas of reward systems to make sure that your key people feel appreciated and well cared for. Most surveys show that compensation, while important, is not in the top two or even three critical factors in job satisfaction. Look at compensation as a qualifier that keeps your key people from looking around, but then look to earn their loyalty through innovative benefits, deferred compensation, team building and participation in plotting the strategic direction of your construction company.

Evaluate Your Bank.

Contractors should critically evaluate the strength of their bank and that bank’s knowledge of and commitment to the construction industry. When credit tightens, banks that do not have a deep commitment to contractors may pull back from an entire industry, regardless of the underlying credit-worthiness of their customer. Be prepared to move banks before that happens.

Control expenses by out-sourcing.

Having resources in-house can be an expensive luxury. Whether it is technology, fleet management, human resources or a host of other skill sets, contractors should look to out-sourcing to reduce risk, reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Watch for Acquisitions.

Contractors in financial trouble often step on the accelerator during a recession by bidding work cheaper and managing their risks more loosely. Contractors who have a solid financial base should be alert for acquisition opportunities, not only for their competitors who are facing liquidity issues but also for expansion or other purposes. Competitors may be available at bargain prices, or they may be forced to liquidate assets at less than fair market value.

Beware of short-term investments.

Overnight investment of excess cash has become significantly more complex as auction rate securities (corporate or municipal bonds with long-term nominal maturity  or preferred stocks for which the interest rate or dividend is reset by an auction agent through bid process known as “dutch auction”), once thought to be as liquid and safe as a savings account, routinely fail in auction. Contractors need to reassess the safety and liquidity of any short-term investments, particularly cash equivalents.

Review spending.

In this environment, contractors should closely review any expenses that are discretionary for opportunities to defer or reduce cash outlays. In conjunction with this, a capital expenditures budget should be reviewed. Equipment purchases that can be delayed without hampering ongoing business should be considered.

Actively manage employee benefits.

Once thought to be a fixed expense, contractors are awakening to the fact that they can reduce costs and achieve the same level of employee satisfaction with their benefit package by re-evaluating how those benefits are delivered and packaged. For example, health savings accounts may be an attractive option to your workforce. At the very least, re-visit cost sharing and funding of benefit levels.

Follow these ten tips to ease your stress during challenging business years.

Here are 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated:

1. Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.

2. Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action.  Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.

3. Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.

5. Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.

6. Act with a higher purpose.  Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is wasted effort–and should be avoided.

7. Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

8. Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

9. Don’t wait for perfection; do it now! Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life.  Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.

10. Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don’t achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.

11. Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow’s failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.

12. Avoid weak goals.  Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with “I’ll try …”  Always start with “I will” or “I must.”

13. Treat inaction as the only real failure.  If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can’t even learn from the experience.

14. Think before you speak.  Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.

The above is based on a conversation with Omar Periu, one of the world’s best (and best known) motivational speakers.