METALCON Matters: The Business Of Building With Metal

By Claire Kilcoyne, METALCON Show Manager

Your business depends on your ability to constantly improve your existing products while developing new ones. METALCON is committed to giving you exciting and innovative new ideas every year. This is why you exhibit and participate in METALCON year after year – you need to ensure that you stay on top of the latest products, processes, and technologies and find out who is leading these efforts.

This year’s conference program delivers the network and information you need to meet your business goals. METALCON has expanded its roofing, framing, green building and the basics of metal in construction program to include two exciting new tracks. First, you’ll have the opportunity to learn specifically about gutter technologies through METALCON’s gutter track, which complements our new Gutter Pavilion. I am sure that the new gutter track – along with METALCON’s other expanded program tracks – will provide you with essential tools and resources for growing your business.

In speaking and working with you and your colleagues in the metal industry, we learned that many of you want to improve your management skills. As a result, we have also created a new business track at METALCON. This new track will take you beyond the fundamentals of managing a construction business and help you master the skills necessary to make dramatic improvements in all aspects of your business operations.

The business track gives you access to METALCON’s long-standing network of the most effective consultants to the design and building industry. This year’s conference program features Barry LePatner, a well-known speaker and author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America’s Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry. Barry will help you leverage his expertise on how you can be more profitable in the metal industry. Barry tells me that the construction industry consumed $1.17 trillion last year but wasted at least ten percent of that. So we are on a mission to help you reduce or eliminate losses that affect your specific business. Barry has been advising businesses in real estate, design and construction on management and legal issues for over 30 years. He is facilitating his session on Thursday morning, October 2nd (TH30 - America’s Construction Crisis in your Conference Program). Barry will highlight the importance of construction to our economy and tell you how you can gain greater control of your businesses and be more profitable. You’ll learn how to avoid the pitfalls of the low bid process, mitigate your risk in standard agreements, and overcome many more of your business challenges. I have known Barry a long time and I guarantee that his session alone makes attending METALCON this year a great investment.

The conference program also features Anthony Burruano, Director of The Burruano Group, and Jayme Broudy, head of the Contractor’s Business School. Anthony is offering an interactive session in which you learn to charts your “survivability index”, to help you recognize your specific business strengths and weaknesses and what to do about them. Anthony has developed this proven discovery process over 35 years working for and with construction companies. (WE06 - Measuring Your Survivability Index in your Conference Program).

Jayme is presenting her fascinating approach to a common problem on Wednesday, October 1 (WE14 - Why Contractors Work Too Hard and Earn Too Little in your Conference Program). After the session, Jayme is offering free individual sessions in which she’ll help you determine an initial set of actions for helping your earn what you are really worth right now.

Jayme is also facilitating a new program this year on Thursday, October 2nd (TH22 - The Accidental Leader in your Conference Program). In this program, Jayme will help you develop the expertise you need to help contractors master the people management skills essential to leadership. If you are looking to develop skilled tradesmen with some leadership qualities into true leaders in your company, this program is for you.

On Friday, design and construction industry veteran Ken Tichacek will help you increase your profitability by developing a greater understanding of what your customers need and show you how to work with them to solve these critical issues (FR38 - Learn How to Think Like Your Clients and Customers in your Conference Program).

As always. we also have a lot of fun planned for you too. After you develop your action plan to improve your business process and be more profitable, stroll the exhibit hall and find the people, products, and services that will help you reach your goals. On the exhibit hall floor, you can think about going down some other paths when you register to win the Harley-Davidson FAT BOY motorcycle or the free trip to the 2009 METALCON in Tampa offered at this year’s event.

METALCON has more than ever for you and your business this year, so visit www.metalcon.com for the complete line up of conference sessions and list of exhibitors. Online registration is now underway, so sign up now and chart your course for a great time at METALCON – Wednesday, October 1 through Friday, October 3, 2008 at the beautiful Baltimore Convention Center.

Claire Kilcoyne, is Vice President, Trade Shows for PSMJ Resources Inc., producers of the annual METALCON International Conference & Exposition, sponsored by the Metal Construction Association. As METALCON's Show Manager and Conference Director, Claire has been instrumental in shaping METALCON into the premier global event for metal construction products since its inception in 1991. To contact Claire, call (617) 965-0055, ext. 134 or email to ckilcoyne@psmj.com.

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