-
When you started your business, hiring another employee was a huge step. But you added a carpenter to free you up to sell jobs, order materials, and do the bookkeeping, such as it was. Over the years, you made your daughter-in-law your bookkeeper, your son your salesperson, and you made that first...
-
Jeff Winn has a simple time- and money-saving strategy for recruiting and retaining field staff: he lets his bilingual lead carpenter, Steve Heredia, do the hiring. It's a logical fit, notes Winn, president of Big Sky Construction, San Jose, Calif. “Steve works in the field directly with these...
-
There's no mandatory size past which you must have a controller, but a good time to consider hiring one is when you hit about $1.5 million in sales, suggests Steve Ramaekers, of Mainstreet Restorations & Remodeling.
-
Like most remodelers, Steve Ramaekers wears a lot of hats. The president of Mainstreet Restorations & Remodeling in Birmingham, Mich., not only runs the company and handles sales, he makes coffee and runs to the store when necessary.
-
Next time you need to hire a salesperson, think outside the remodeling box. “Look in other industries,” says Phil Rea, an industry sales consultant. “Our industry is still lagging in sales” compared to industries such as cars and real estate, which revere the sales function and emphasize training...
Several years ago, after almost 20 years in business, I had begun to actualize a planned succession strategy. In doing so, my day-to-day role changed. An unanticipated result of these changes was an eroding of the passion I had for my work. I couldn't understand how this had happened; this is...
The war on terrorism has affected and will continue to affect the lives of Americans in many different ways. As a business owner, Dan Weidmann has felt the effects firsthand. In January 2003, after a week's notice, his purchasing manager, Kris Marshall, a captain in the National Guard, was deployed...
Helmets to Hardhats (H2H) is a national program that helps servicemen and women find careers in the construction industry.
-
Jim Benoit now says that “No good deed goes unpunished.” Sure enough, when he decided early this year to grant a second chance to a lead carpenter who had been falsifying his time sheets, not only was the carpenter AWOL the next day, but so were several items that belonged to the company, including...
-