You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialise correctly.

July 2009

Managing in a Down Economy

An article published by McGraw hill back in October 2008 caught my eye the other week. The article entittled "Managing a Construction Firm in a Down Economy" written by author and industry consultant Matt Stevens seemed to perfectly encapsulate the steps contractors need to take to most effectively manage their businesses through the bottom end of the business cycle and to be prepared for the uptick. The key points from this article are especially valid now as we slog through what I hope is the bottom of this recession.

Matt's Key pieces of advice are as follows:

Make sure where you are financially. The stress of a cash flow problem is not the singular reason to lay off core employees. Another important measure is gross profit per manhour. Since we are in a variable-cost businessm this makes economic sense.

What's New in Estimating Technology - An Interview with Jeff Gerardi

At Jonas we have made the conscious decision to stay out of the estimating space. We just do not think that any company can do a great job on the core accounting, job cost and service management as well as estimating for all the different types of contractors that use our system. We have instead built a standard integration which is used by most of the leading estimating packages to upload estimates into our job cost system. One of the more popular packages that we see in use is ProEst from Construction Management Software (CMS.)