This Months Tip

Reducing Preventable Errors

This one's a little embarrassing for me, it is based on what do you do when you make a mistake. The simple answer is that you keep moving forward and acknowledge your mistakes repair what you can repair and move on. We had scheduled an online class and had run a test class the day before that turned into a disaster, my audio drivers crashed just prior to starting the class and for the first time I had to cancel a class – minutes before it was to start – this was an embarrassing experience. The intention was right we wanted to help contractors by showing them a few things to make their lives easier. What I wound up doing was to waste their time. I cancelled have repaired the problem and plan to run another test and then to hold the class on another day.

I received an email newsletter from Wes Hopper who is someone that I subscribe to his web site is www.dailygratitude.com, he has a daily newsletter that I often find helpful. An item that was in today’s newsletter "All great accomplishments require 4 things: A dream, action, patience, and a whole bunch of miracles." Mike Dooley.

This quote mirrors what I have been talking to contractors for the past several years. My belief is to have a business plan for your business, followed by a systematic approach to running your business in a proactive manner. This proactive manner will reduce the amount of reactive time spent which will relieve stress and often times increase profits. I then want a systematic approach that is repeatable for every estimate. With these good estimates the task now becomes a matter of good project management procedures. Below are some of the steps I take to assure both estimating and project management techniques are systematic and repeatable.