The latest issue of the Canadian Design and Construction Report is now online, though it will be a few days before the cadcr.com website is prooperly updated, two weeks before it will ?port? to the MagCloud service and a few weeks more before printed copies will be available. There?s some useful content including a close look at the window and door industry and some of my thoughts about pricing and value.
Our capacity to publish hybrid electronic and print magazines is certainly improving, though we have a ways to go before we get all the features and elements in order. The learning curve has resulted in some delayed expectations. We originally scheduled to publish an updated U.S./International edition of the Design and Construction Report ? in May, with results of the Best Construction Blog competition, which concluded in February/March. Here, I needed to make some pragmatic business decisions. We have virtually no immediate revenue from the U.S. version of the publication, while sales and overall business volume have been growing well in our conventional print and for the Canadian version of the magazine. With staff shortages ? caused by the recessionary cut-backs ? I needed to focus energies where we could achieve the greatest immediate return. Even now, we have an interesting challenge: While we had the sales to produce the CaDCR a couple of months ago, editorial and production delays have held things up until now ? even as we actually have enough orders (and quite of bit editorial) in the hard drives to produce another issue of the Canadian magazine. I expect that edition will be ready in late July or early August.
These delays and challenges relate to issues, I expect, virtually every contractor, sub-trade, architect or engineer must resolve. How do we correlate our piorities, goals, ambitions and the real circumstances we need to resolve day-by-day? Sure we have business planning cycles, systems for prioritizing, go-no-go rules (these are absolutely vital in practices competing for RFPs where the preparation costs can be huge), and the necessary ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and in all of these regards, our decisions have been based on the priorities within our business systems. Still, it is somewhat painful to me to look at websites that haven?t been updated in months, even as we work on rebuilding and developing new ones. But things are getting better.
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