Weather the Storm

This is an excerpt from an article I found entitled "Weathering the Storm - Navigating a Turbulent Market." This piece looks at the current state of the construction market and was delivered to me from Butler Mfg., our pre-engineered metal building supplier. Below is the portion of the article that looks at positive actions to be taken while we all "weather the storm." I hope you find this helpful in preparing strategies for dealing with the slow economy.

We are living at a moment when things taken for granted about our world are changing. What those changes might be and how they might affect your business can serve as a starting point for building possible scenarios for business in the next five to 10 years. We offer a few basic scenarios of possible futures for the construction industry to fit the current planning horizon. These straightforward examples are simply drawn here, but each scenario used for planning your strategy should have the elements of being probable within some range of likelihood, challenging, different from each other and contain enough information to allow real decision making. Furthermore, scenarios should be generated based on your particular business, not merely copied from others.
Scenario One
• Markets fall.
• Credit crunch stalls construction.
• Consumer spending tumbles.
• Backlog stagnates and pulls back.
Overcapacity of contractors leads to record business failures.
Prices fall severely, threatening already thin profit margins.
Scenario Two
The market shock is largely over in 2009.
Credit stabilizes for good contractors.
The cost of credit squeezes mediocre contractors out of business.
The Obama administration spends $200 billion on infrastructure over the next five years, creating stability for public and civil-construction markets.
Scenario Three
Traditional construction markets continue to slow, but new opportunities open up for green construction.
Government programs and tax incentives cause a boom in alternative-energy solutions.
The automotive industry is completely restructured, leaving only two major U.S. manufacturers. Closed automotive plants are sold for pennies on the dollar to entrepreneurs who will retool the manufacturing floor to build “the car of the future.”
A growing number of larger contractors are becoming developers with capabilities of delivering integrated projects to design, build, own and operate facilities.

January 22, 2010 - BizTimes

January 22, 2010 - BizTimes
It is nice to see our Eco-Industrial Park getting some postive PR. A great and fair article by Andrew Weiland of the Biz Times about the progress of this project.

Winter Storm Managment for Buildings

Here is some free advice for the management of Winter Storms on Buildings in climates like ours in WI. Feel free to pass along to your maintenance crew, tenants, clients, owners, etc.

Redefining the Industrial Building in a "green" leaning world.

This to me is the ultimate question and has been my ultimate quest for the past 6 years. Folks that are in my industry are finding it a necessary requirement to advance some sort of "green" service to their business, if you haven't then you are being left way behind. The problem I have with this though, is the lack of education and misleading information concerning the "green" movement and for that matter "global warming".

A broker friend of mine, Brian Parrish of the Dickman Company, Inc. ran an online poll via LinkedIN and asked owners of businesses the question of going green and whether or not they would be willing to pay more, less, or the same to become or to be called "green". The conclusion of the poll came down to this; businesses are willing to go "green" but not if it costs them additional money to do so.

On the surface this presents a potentially difficult challenge to those of us in the design and construction industry. Is it possible to deliver a "green" design and building that does not cost more than a non-green version of the same? My answer to that question is yes, yes, yes it can be done, and in the case of industrial buildings it can be done rather easily and I might argue for less than the typical industrial buildings being built around the seven counties comprising SE Wisconsin over the past 10 years.

Over the next few weeks I will go into detail complete with pictures and other data to support this claim. Please feel free to share this and other blogs on this subject especially to those you might know that could take advantage of this information.