7th Annual Contractors Networking Reception and Expo

The Networking Reception was great. We got to meet a lot of good people who in turn had good companies. There was plenty of food and refreshments. Patricia Jones was awesome, before we even saw her face to face, all the way to the time the show was over she made sure everything was ok. The HUB is truly a great group of folks along with the N.C. M/WBE Coordinators.
We talked with companies and contractors big and small. Gail with Barnhill came by the table,Russell Parker with Clean Touch pressure washing out of Greenville talked with us. I got to talk with Jonathan Graham the President of Horus Construction Managers, they have offices in N.C. and FL. even in my home town of Tampa. Darmel owner of Lee electrical Enterprises chatted with us for a while and enjoyed our table. Many many more came by and stayed a while and talked. Hopefully we will be able to keep in touch and help each other along the way.
Tina LaBoo you did a great job with the WatchDog table much thanks. Dan the Man came thru with the computer stuff as always, the best tech man in the business thanks a lot. Don the youngest guy in the building got his feet wet a little, thanks job well done.
Check out our pictures, you may be up there and we will be back next year.

So Sue Me!

When you start a website that is based on complaints the first thing that you hear from people is “That’s a great idea but you’re going to get sued.” or, “That’s a great idea but what are the legal ramifications?” and comments like this. In a society where everyone sues everyone for everything, everyone thinks they can get sued for anything. Everyone also feels like the only way to know anything is by hiring a lawyer. For a small business, a lawyer can be a more immediate and daunting expense than the law suit that you higher him to protect you against. Though this is an option, it is not the only option. If your business has any success eventually you will probably wind up using the service of a lawyer. But there are many things, such as forming an LLC and drawing up a partnership agreement, that you can do on your own. There is also a lot of information out there that you can find out for FREE.

For example, when it comes to the question of whether or not you can get sued for publishing someone else complaint on your website, there is a little thing called the Communications Decency Act. To summarize what the act states it basically says that if you provide an interactive web service (such as a forum, blog, or website where you publish info that people report to you) you cannot be held responsible for the portion of the web content that comes from other people. That explains how web base consumer reporting agencies and blogs are able to operate.

What does this mean for us? It means we can’t be sued for the service that we provide. With the advent of the web, publishing as we know it was completely changed. Now, anyone with a computer and half a brain can get a blog through a website like Blogspot and all of a sudden they are a one man newspaper. Fortunately, however, thanks to the Communications Decency Act, they are not held to the same level of accountability as a newspaper when it comes to reporting info that is submitted to them.

Does this mean that you can say what ever you want about whoever you want with total immunity? No! The Communications Decency Act doesn’t protect you from stuff that YOU say on your website, only from things OTHER people say on your website or submit to your website or blog.

So bloggers, blog on. Lawyers, sit tight, we still need you for lots of things, just not to answer this particular question. By the way, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, just my interpretation and opinion. To read some info on this for yourself check out this link http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/immunity-online-publishers-under-communications-decency-act . (I had to include that last sentence so that I could not be suedJ.)

Misconception

What is a misconception about your job that you would like to clear up with the public?

Who Cares?

We’ve all said it, we’ve all felt it, but how much money could these two words and the attitude behind them be costing your business? For the past couple of weeks, one of my business partners has been trying to reserve a block of rooms at a hotel for an event that we have coming up. The gentleman at the hotel that was handling the room arrangements would not take his calls or call him back. For weeks he tried to get in touch with this guy. It wasn’t until he the receptionist found out that the rooms were for Watch Dog Contractor Service, a company that is in the business of reporting complaints, that my partner got a call back from the hotel. Perhaps they were afraid that we would post a complaint about them on our website. Well of course we won’t do that because that’s not the type of complaints that we post on our website. But we are going to call them out in this article. I’m going to hold off on mentioning the name of the hotel because the event hasn’t been held yet and I don’t want them to try and get their revenge on us by putting itching powder in our sheets.

Obviously the man at the hotel didn’t care enough to return our phone calls. But what makes employees so apathetic? Are people really being paid so little nowadays that they can’t be bothered to do their job? How much money does behavior like this cost employers on a daily basis? I haven’t done any research on this but I would be willing to say LOTS! Employers go through so much trouble to keep their employees from stealing from them, only to watch their money walk right out the door when employees have a “who cares?” attitude.

Another example of this occurred when we tried to order pens for our company. We ordered the pens from a company called National Pen Company, who someone else referred to us. We requested that all of the pens be a specific color and design and we paid for our order. A week later, when no pens had arrived, we called to check on their status. When we asked to speak to Chase Hatchett, who was handling our account, you would think that we had asked to speak to Santa Claus. As a matter of fact it probably would have been easier to speak to Santa Claus than to this guy. We never did get to talk to Chase, all we got was an email explaining that the color pen we wanted was out of stock and our choices were either lose our money, wait months for the pen to become in stock, or get a different color pen. Needless to say we weren’t thrilled about these options. But even more annoying than the options was the way they were delivered to us, in an email. Here we are, a company, a new company but a company none the less, who orders hundreds of t-shirts, pens, and other marketing material, who could give this company thousands of dollars of business, and he couldn’t be bothered to give us a phone call. Just an email. Thanks a lot Chase. Next time we place an order with your company we will leave you with our cell phone number and you can just send us a text message to let us know that you can’t fill the order. Or better yet you can just Tweet it and we can read it on your Twitter page. Ok, now I’m being ridiculous.

I wish that instead of reading this you could hear it read in the voice of Andy Rooney from 60 minutes. That’s the tone that I have in my head as I am writing this.

What’s the solution to this behavior, this apathy that drives profit down and drives customers crazy? One option is to have robots replace humans in all customer service jobs. I don’t know how you feel about that but don’t worry, I have some other suggestions. Profit sharing and commission based programs seem to provide a powerful incentive for employees to do their best. A friend of mine recently shared with me his experience as an employee of two different companies which supports this suggestion. He said that when he worked for a concrete company on days when it would rain he and the other guys couldn’t do much work and didn’t really make any attempt to do any work because they were paid hourly so it didn’t matter to them that the company as a whole was losing money when they weren’t working. However, when he worked as a delivery driver for an electrical supply company he was always concerned about how much work was getting done. Why? Because they had profit sharing. So when the company was losing money, he was losing money.

We got our pens and we got our hotel rooms but we won’t be doing business with those two companies anymore and we will continue to talk bad about them whenever we get the chance. Not because there was a problem with the rooms, not because the color pen we wanted was not in stock, but because when we called about these issues someone, in an office somewhere, under their breath or out loud or even in their head said “Who Cares?!”