You’ve been working at improving your shop processes and employee morale, and things are going smooth. Sheds are flowing out the door and materials are flying off the racks. You pick up the phone to order some more OSB and get the bad news: “A hurricane is headed toward the[Read More…]
Bradley Kimberlin
Bradley Kimberlin is the general manager at Colorado Shed Company. He can be reached at contactme@bradleykimberlin.com. Please feel free to share feedback or ideas for this column via email or fax to 719-784-1330.
Trade Show Strategies for Professional Shed Builders
The Big Shed Show is coming up on October 3, and this is an opportunity not to be missed. But who needs to attend and how can you maximize your time at the show? WHO SHOULD ATTEND First, let’s look at who needs to attend: Shed Business Owners—You may think[Read More…]
Effective Shed-Building Processes
It would be foolish to start out in business wanting to have ineffective processes. Instead, we attempt to create the most effective processes we can. However, how do you know if your processes are effective or not? Let’s explore some ideas together. MEASURE TIME METRICS If your shop had nothing[Read More…]
Outsourced or In-House—Which is Better?
Think with me for a minute about the various aspects of running a shed business. You have production, transportation, on-site construction, sales, marketing, accounting, human resources. and rent to own. Your business may do all these things, it may do some, or may do just one. How do you decide[Read More…]
Training New Builders
You’ve been blessed, and your shed business is growing. Your years of hard work seem to finally be paying off. Growth brings its own set of challenges, one of which is how to train new builders. When you first started building sheds, it was probably you and few of your[Read More…]
Finding Good Help
The phone rings, interrupting your work. You take a deep breath and answer. It’s a sales guy, wondering when customer Smith’s shed is going to be ready. You check the sale date—it’s already been three weeks. You frown—that should have been done by now. That’s the fourth building this week[Read More…]
Building Teamwork on the Shop Floor
By now you’ve improved your inventory and ordering process, so it’s been a while since you’ve run out of anything. Good for you! Hopefully now the builders won’t be so upset with you all the time. But it still seems like something is missing. You don’t feel like the shop[Read More…]
Customer Reserve Accounts
Rent-to-own agreements provide a great value for customers by allowing them the flexibility of a monthly contract, which can be terminated at any time by returning the rental property. The entry into a rental agreement is typically fairly low, with no credit checks being a common practice, and low monthly[Read More…]
