As this issue of Roofing Contractor hits the street, we find ourselves in the middle of the college football season. What’s that got to do with your roof-contracting business? Not much, but a few parallels do come to mind.
Here’s a scary statistic for every business owner: “The average organization loses 15 percent to 35 percent of its customers each year, primarily due to poor service.”
In last month’s article, “Safety Training That Works with Latinos,” we set a base of understanding. We learned what training is and what it does, and we learned some important factors to consider when teach-ing safety to Latino laborers.
In this article, I want to move into more specifics regarding safety training with Latinos. There are three very specific concepts you must understand and implement if you are to have high levels of success in training safety with Latino employees.
Every year in the United States, chemical and thermal burns account for an estimated 700,000 emergency room visits, with more than 45,000 patients requiring extended hospitalizations for treatment such as skin grafts.
This year marks my 20th year in the roofing industry. In this time span, I have seen many significant changes in all sectors of the industry: contracting, manufacturing and consulting. As we close out 2007, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on some of these changes and provide a technical perspective on how these changes will affect the future of the industry.
Few things can be more annoying than running a dead-end sales call. Yet, if we do not visit the customer, how will we know if the lead has a chance to turn into a good job? There is no magic rule for qualifying leads, but applying some simple logic can help improve the odds in your favor.
The January 1990 issue of Plumbing & Mechanical magazine had a cover story titled “The Manpower Crisis,” written by me. It featured interviews with apprenticeship recruiters and other industry experts addressing a skilled labor shortage that had already started to rear its head. Demographic and social trends indicated the problem would only worsen in years to come.
My story probably isn’t unique to many of you reading Roofing Contractor, but sometimes I find the lessons that are the most powerful are the ones that have been in front of us all along. When we finally have our eyes opened to see them, that’s when the real impact hits home.
Let’s face it; more Latinos are getting hurt on the job than is necessary or appropriate. I have frequently cited an Associated Press study documenting that for the Latino worker, safety accident rates are four times that of Anglos. (Some studies have put the ratio as high as 8:1.) Many companies struggle with the actual development and implementation of a safety program, while others struggle with the actual nuts and bolts of teaching safety to people from another culture.
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