Made any New Year resolutions this month? By any chance were they the same ones you set last year, because they were the ones you didn’t quite reach the year before? Are you wasting your time with New Year resolutions and are they just pipe dreams that won’t make it past February? If you are…
Despite recent advances in construction, such as pre-nailed frames, nail guns, lasers, etc., the basic method of nailing timber together to build a house hasn’t changed a lot. Prepare for a quantum leap in construction however. It won’t happen next year, but it will happen in the not too distant future and will make the…
So it is late November, 2014. The year is fast drawing to a close and 2015 is just around the corner. A chance for a fresh start and to really achieve better results than last year. So what are you going to do different in 2015 that will actually make a change in your situation…
You have a great sales person. They close a high percentage of deals and you rely on them to keep your production machine fed. Your company literature, website and other staff talk about core vales of “honesty” and “integrity”. Your star sales person uses bribes and back-handers to land some of the deals. What do you…
I was watching a BBC documentary the other day on reductions in the death and serious incidents rates in surgery and it struck me how the key idea was very applicable to construction. That idea? Simple checklists. The program featured a top surgeon, Dr Atul Gawande from the US who was asked to investigate the death/serious incident…
One of my Facebook followers in the South Island had this video on his Facebook page. Thought it was definitely worth sharing!! Anything else tradies never say?
I was interested to read the recent BRANZ report on small construction firms in NZ. A lot of interesting stuff in there. One statistic I found particularly interesting was a possible source of easy additional profit for construction company owners. That statistic is the number of hours that owners and employees waste each week. Just looking…
By late this year the new consumer protection measures that have been drafted as part of the Building Amendment Act 2013 come into force. Are you ready for this from a practical point of view? Do you have the disclosure documents, checklists and processes established in your business to both comply with the law and…
There are two distinct sides to the health & safety issue in a construction business: ticking the “We have a H&S system” box, and actually making it an active part of daily operations. Paying for an off-the-shelf system and putting a sign up is a good start, but it will do little to prevent accidents…
Anyone who saw Fair Go on the 21st of May would have seen the segment on the Certified builder from Smith & Sons and the unhappy client. The client was complaining about a bad outcome on a building project and also unhappy that Certified Builders was backing the builder and not brokering (read, paying for)…