Education Will Smooth Out Market Fluctuations
By Shawn Zuver, editorial/content director
How’s the market doing today? Up, down…even? As I’m writing this, on August 14, 2007, the Dow Industrials closed down 1.6% and the NASDAQ had done just a little bit worse than that. Despite that 207 point drop in the Dow and nearly a 1,000 point decrease over the past month, we’ll all get up tomorrow and carry on as normal. We’ve come to expect that there will be good days and bad ones, and it’s not until we see the bigger picture—whether it’s a week, month, year or decade—that it has some true meaning. In many ways, it’s the same thing in the world of design and construction.
You may have made a great presentation yesterday to a large potential customer to design all of their buildings in the region. Everything clicked. They loved your models and were clearly impressed by the way that your designs expressed their brand. Despite the warm reception, you’re smart enough to know that tomorrow might bring the dreaded call that they’re going in a different direction. And, with that in mind, you’ve already begun work on a handful of other proposals.
Maybe you spent the past couple weeks doing re-work on a roof that you installed a few months ago. There was nothing wrong with the materials and your procedures and practices have been well-honed, but you were reminded once again that every job is at the mercy of your least-skilled or impossible-to-motivate worker. So, you bite the bullet and turn your comfortable profit into a small loss. Disappointing, sure, but you know that standing behind your workmanship may result in bigger contracts with this customer and his friends sometime in the future.
If you’ve been involved in design and construction long enough, you know that there will be ups and downs. Some days are good, some are more challenging. It can vary from week to week, month to month, or even year to year. And, if we’re lucky to live long enough we might even be able to recognize a clear difference between decades.
The key is to keep forging ahead and sticking with your core principles, and by keeping in tune with the industry’s best practices.
I’d like to call your attention today to our Technical Articles section which offers more than 100 papers that can sharpen your knowledge and help to hone your company’s best practices. You’ll find some excellent advice on Metal Roofing, Metal Walls, Metal Building Systems, Cold Formed Steel Framing, Insulation, Expanded Metals, Perforated Metals, Substrates, Paint Coatings and a variety of other topics including Cool Roofing and Green Building issues.
Please take some time today, or sometime soon, to review the list of Technical Articles broken down by categories. These articles are likely to be more interesting than watching the stock market and sure to have a direct effect on your company’s future.
Shawn Zuver is editorial/content director for DesignandBuildwithMetal.com. He has been covering the metal construction industry, including residential and non-residential construction, since 1985. To contact Shawn, call (419) 581-2051 or email shawnz@designandbuildwithmetal.com.