Yesterday evening, I attended a casino “boat cruise” (at a lakefront pavilion bar) for a local construction association where we have many relationships and have done much business. Perhaps 100 people showed up for the evening, most crowed around the bar; a smaller number in groups around booths, at the outside patio, and so on. [...]
Give or take
Yesterday, I broke one of my unwritten rules. I allowed a third party organization to take over the Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter to promote a sales/business development training program for architectural, engineering and construction businesses. The program is undoubtedly worth every cent, and the company offering it is reputable. I didn’t bend my rules about [...]
Public bidding: How the numbers add up?
If you haven’t already read the May 4 blog posting, where John Doerr, President of the RAIN Group and William Chamberlin, directory of facilities planning and support services at Northern Virginia Community College, discussed some of the issues behind public sector RFP bidding opportunities, I urge you to read again, register on the Rain Group site, and [...]
The construction marketing forces within, and beyond, our control
On Sunday afternoon, a man in Pakistan pinged me through the Google Plus messaging system. I know him through one of the “other worlds” I inhabit — the Google ad-serving help forum community — but his life has certainly been different than mine. We’ve both had the good fortune to travel to distant places (he [...]
The balancing act: Connecting joy and marketing
Its a quiet Sunday morning. Our son headed off for a school field trip to Washington DC this morning, requiring a drive and drop-off at the airport at 5:00 a.m. This time, however, I wouldn’t be on the plane, so I could return home, go back to bed, and then “get to work” on waking [...]
Maturity, individuality and the team spirit
Quite often, business consultants cite team sports as examples of business team building success. Not a bad idea, on one level, but there are risks in taking analogies too far. Yesterday, for example, in our house we had a Toronto-based relative as a visitor. She has concluded her university education in Ottawa and is moving [...]
The higher purpose, in real life
Yesterday, Michael Jeffries reported this horror story in his Closing Success System blog/newsletter. (Compare it to my report of Wes Gravelock of Tony Olsen Enterprises.) When I arrived at my office on last Thursday I couldn’t unlock the front door. The key just spun in the lock. Fortunately I have a back entrance and was [...]
Choosing our roofing contractor
Sometimes the Construction Marketing ideals are put to a real test because our household needs to purchase the services for which I purport to be a marketing guru. It is one thing to suggest how businesses in this industry should behave to discover and attract business; it is quite another to actually need to purchase [...]
Supplier, customer and community service
Readers here know that I spend quite a bit of time as a volunteer on Google’s help forums for the multi-billion dollar company’s ad serving program, AdSense. This activity may seem strange, since (a) I earn about $100 a month from this source of revenue and (b) I am effectively providing “supplier service” to a [...]
Surviving the CRA audit
On Thursday morning, a “reviewer” (he doesn’t call himself an auditor) from the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), the Canadian equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) arrived him my office. He wanted to examine the company’s books and records to explore the difference between reported payroll tax remittances and the actual amounts reported on our [...]