Quietly Re-Thinking Out Loud: Exploring New Paradigms for How We Manage What We Build
My collection of thoughts and ideas on the state of the Building and Remodeling industry and its future with regard to topics like: Technology, Project Management, CRM, Open-Book Management, Business Models, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), The Theory of Constraints (TOC), Systems Thinking, JIT, TQM, Lean Construction, CPM and the Lead Carpenter System.
No Man Ever Steps In the Same River Twice — Heraclitus
No Man Ever Steps In the Same River Twice — Heraclitus The central idea of Heraclitus' philosophy (~500 BC) is the unity of opposites and the concept of change. He saw the world as constantly in flux, always "becoming" but never "being". He expressed this in sayings...
Marcus Sheridan on Balance
Longtime (well since at least 2017 when I read his book They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer) on the topic of "Balance". Great Reading or Listening from Marcus Sheridan:
The Practice Of Putting Your Prices For Sample Projects On Your Company’s Website
An online colleague in one of the FaceBook Groups I sometime visit created a topic and discussion regarding the practice of putting your prices for sample projects on your company’s website I got to thinking about something I wrote about the topic in another group...
I Want A Breakdown
So I was “cleaning” my office today looking for one particular article I printed and saved years ago on estimating and I ran across a print out of another old article I had printed out that belonged in my “Markup & Pricing” file bucket. Frank Blau is to Plumbing...
The Paradigm Projects: Activity Based Pricing Seminar
How Much Should I Charge?
Activity Based Markup & Pricing for Builders Remodelers & Contractors
Back in the later 1980s I took a one day seminar sponsored by New England Builder Magazine (which later became The Journal of Light Construction) taught by the late Irv Chasen called How To Survive & Prosper in the Contracting Market in which I was introduced to the PROOF Pricing Methodology which a few years later I would see described in David Gertstel’s 1st edition of his classic book Running a Successful Construction Company as Capacity Based Markup. In the 35± years since then and numerous other seminars it remains the most important and most memorable training seminars I ever took in regards to running a building and remodeling company.
30 Plus Reasons Why Contracting Businesses Fail
I originally wrote this blog article back on Dec 11th of 2005. To the best of my recollection I was reading the Construction Contractors' Survival Guide by Thomas C. Schleifer and chapter 2 was entitled Elements of Contractor Failure and was inspired to do more...
The History of Markup Methodologies in the Building & Remodeling Industries
So while spending some long days of waiting in doctors waiting rooms I decided to dig around and try and see exactly what this COPE stuff was so I listened to The Contracting Handbook: Michael Anschel of OA Design Build on the Cost of Project Execution (C.O.P.E.)...
Book: Full Price: Competing on Value in the New Economy
From the October 2000 book "Full Price: Competing on Value in the New Economy" by Thomas J Winneger he divides potential customers into three categories: 1) 17% "Custom Clients", they are "wonderful people". 2) 56% "Vacillating customers", they don't know what they...
Read more“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.
We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
― Desmond Tutu
John Boyd & the OODA Loop – Winning in Business and Life – YouTube
It was back in the early 00s that in one of the project management email list groups I was subscribed to I was turned onto a book entitled: “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” and discovered the OODA loop and it clicked,… it mattered,… it mattered a...
