Motivational speakers will tell you that you have the power to be what you want to be and the power to make a difference and change the world. Well, this may be true, but I am not going to use such motivational rhetoric to blow smoke at you. Besides, if it were true that you are what you think about, most 17-year-old boys would turn into a can of beer or a 17-year-old girl. Such motivational thoughts can be great to get us out of a funk, but rarely do they have any real impact on our success.
Environmental issues continue to be at the forefront of the roofing industry. These issues and regulations are having an impact on the design and application of roof systems and materials that we will be using well into the 21st century. Groups such as the U.S. Green Building Council, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency are forming regulations that will eventually become part of the building codes. Roofing contractors should be aware of these regulations and have an understanding of them and of the impact that they will have on the industry.
All over the United States, in thousands of companies, there are two or more very powerful (and mostly frustrated) people in the precarious position of daily choosing loyalties between management and their countrymen.
This is not the column I had planned to write for the October 2005 issue of Roofing Contractor. October 2005 ushers in changes to the roofing standards put forth in
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has estimated that 33 percent of construction trade fatalities are due to falls from heights and 6 percent of these falls originated from a ladder. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's 1994 study, more than 90,000 people in the United States received emergency room treatment for ladder-related injuries and 300 died. Underwriters Laboratories estimates that over 222,000 portable ladder accidents requiring professional medical treatment are reported every year in the United States.
Make it a point to spend a little more time training employees in customer service. Most business owners pay lip service to customer service, but most don't really regard it as an important business function. Most contractors don't even pay lip service to it. They think the only thing that counts is that their people know how to work with the tools of the trade. But a surly employee can cost you many jobs.
Much is written here and in other forms of media around the roofing industry about large projects and large roof-contracting firms. The reality, however, is that the roof-contracting industry in this country remains largely fragmented. The majority of the roofing jobs, commercial and residential, are performed by a large number of relatively small contracting firms.
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