Masonry Magazine January 2007 Page. 71
Even if your business is not at fault, you can virtually never take back an admission of responsibility once you have offered it.
Remind them straight, and remind them what their contract documents say about resolving such a situation.
Know what else? You'll find that many CMs and GCs actually will give up before you do. I just went through this with another CM; after a few letters back and forth, the CM gave up. Pretty handy if you ever have to go through a claim or to court!
Coach Gary's Rule: Always be persistent; always try and get in the last word; always do it with respect; always be willing to win; and always smile big while you're doing it!
It can be a happy new year, team!
Gary Micheloni is a working project manager, consultant, speaker and author of the new book, "Get Paid for a Change! For more information and insight on the Full Contact Project Management approach, simply send an e-mail to coachgary@fullcontactPM.com.
Copyright © 2007, Gary Micheloni and Full Contact Project Management
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The Employee Performance and Sales Connection
MASONRY NEWS CONTRACTOR TIP Do your employees know how much you are selling each day? Do they know that your company's sales can only be equal to the amount they produce and no more? And, if so, are you making sure a portion of their pay is a based on those sales?
It's Christmas Eve and I am trying to catch up on my work so that I can spend most of next week deer hunting with some friends. With the office quiet, I finally have time to write a Contractor Tip based on the one thing that has benefited my companies the most during the last 21 years: paying people based on results.
There is a story I tell at my Rewarding and Challenging Employees (RACE) seminars. It's a hypothetical tale I created in an effort to show mason contractors how important total labor sales are to our companies.
The story focuses on a snack food company that travels the interstates, stocking vending machines at the rest areas. The sales of the company were consistently dropping and it was about to go out of business. So, the company hired a consultant to come in and see why they were losing so much money.
The first thing the consultant did was to ask the company's employees what they thought was wrong-something we should all be doing on a regular basis. While asking one of the employees why sales were dropping consistently, the employee said, "I know exactly what's causing the problem. The employees all make sure they stock the items that are the worst sellers."
"Why would the employees stock the worse-selling items?" the consultant asked.
The employee replied, "It's because they are thinking about themselves. They have to carry the snacks from the box truck parked on the curb all the way to the vending machines. They know that if they stock the worst-selling items, they won't have to make as many trips back and forth the following week when they come back to restock the machines."
So the consultant went back and informed the company's managers that they could get the higher sales they desired simply by basing a portion of the employees pay on sales.
The company followed the consultant's recommendation and changed its payroll system so that a portion of employee wages is based on sales instead of solely by the hour. After doing this, it made it beneficial to the employees to make the extra trips from the curb to stock all of the products, especially the top-selling ones. With the renewed focus of benefiting employees based on their efforts, sales went through the roof and the company became profitable again.
How does this story relate to the masonry job site? If we are paying our employees based solely by the hour instead of basing pay on units installed to Increase total labor sales, we probably are like always getting what we are paying for: "more hours worked." On the other hand, if we pay our employees based on labor sales (results), as they produce more, sales naturally get higher, and both the employees and the company will win in the process.
Damian Lang is the author of the book "Rewarding and Challenging Employees for Profits in Masonry" To order a copy of his book or to attend one of his seminars held specifically for mason contractors, call Kerri Huck at Lang Masonry, (800) 417-9272.
Provided by Damian Lang. President of Lang Masonry Contractors, Inc., and EZ Great Corp.