Steve Payne
Send us your biggest business challenge – and we'll send you a personal reply from our contractor training expert, Mike Draper
Canadian Contractor BusinessSend us your specific reno business challenge. If you'd like to remain anonymous, please email the challenge to me at spayne@canadiancontractor.ca. If you'd like to go public please post a comment below. Either way, Mike Draper, our contractor coach, will send you his experienced viewpoint on some potential solutions you might consider.
Here at Canadian Contractor, we work closely with two of the best reno contractor training experts in North America: Mike Draper at Renovantage and Victoria Downing at Remodelers Advantage.
If you read our print magazine, you will know Mike Draper as our “Contractor Coach.” Mike writes our Contractor University features.
Mike has offered to reply personally to ANY ongoing business challenge that you’d like to share with us. Either post them below, or email them to Mike care of me at spayne@canadiancontractor.ca.
Challanges that Mike can help you with include:
– Working too many hours in your business without sufficient profit/income
– Being stuck at the same revenue and profit figure for more than a few years (plateauing)
– Feeling constant wrenching stress from “flying by the seat of your pants” on too many projects at once
– Feeling you can’t cope because you have to “do it all yourself”
– Being beaten up by cash competitors and “having” to sell your services at low- or zero-profit prices
– Lacking a retirement plan for your business (no way to sell the business or pass it onto someone else)
– Not being able to afford more help, but knowing if you don’t get help, you’ll go under
– Customers that beat you up financially – or psychologically
– Customers that won’t pay you your final cheque
– Not knowing where to get more business without paying huge sums on marketing
– Not knowing how to sell
– Not knowing how to close the sale even if you do make a good impression
– Not knowing the basics of gross versus net profits
– Not knowing the basics of mark up versus margin
– Costs out of control
– Projects running constantly late
– Quality control problems
– Angry clients
– Difficulty balancing home and work life…
And more…
ADD YOUR PARTICULAR CHALLENGE to this list, below, or please email your specific challenge to spayne@canadiancontractor.ca.
We guarantee a reply from Mike Draper.
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Any ideas on best practice for finishing a job? Using a punch list or not? If we use it our carpenters tend to leave all small things to the end making the list too large.If we don’t use it we have to come back for small repairs numerous times.
Thank you
We’ll ask this in our coaches corner video segment, but let me put in my two cents. When I was doing renovations, I found the best guy to handle deficiency list was a subtrade that had the setup that he could do just about anything required to close a job. He could plumb, do electrical, fix cabinetry, redo tile…everthing. Because he was a sub, it was easier to have higher expectations of him. At the end of the day, it was his job to get close the site and he did it well. See if you can find yourself that guy. It also frees up your guys to get away from a job and a customer that they are frankly sick of and move to the next, new, exciting job.