A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
October 2019 #11243 Page #88
Time to Step Up Your Game
By Gary Fleisher
W
hen you look out the window at the constantly evolving building industry, not only in the US but around the globe, you see change, innovation, and entirely new ways of marketing and selling your product which have sprouted up like freshly planted corn.
Yes, there are plenty of weeds also, those things that showed great promise in changing the way our industry could do things but soon fell flat on their faces. Remember when “Green” was the catch phrase? That was replaced with “High Performance,” and that has been replaced with “Sustainability” in the latest reports on the construction industry. Hotels used to be built on site as were dormitories, senior living complexes, condos, and apartment buildings. Today, wood and steel modular, timber, and prefab construction is the answer being promoted by everyone in the commercial construction field. Foreign modular and prefab factories are passing us in both design and production. Many have begun shipping volumetric modules to the US simply because we haven’t kept up with demand on the commercial side. Foreign modular housing factories are eyeing the US as the low hanging fruit. Think it will never happen here? Think again. All you have to do is look at the American auto industry. Japan, Korea, Germany, and other countries opened factories here. Even our Big 3 automakers are manufacturing cars and trucks with transmissions from Asia or Mexico, engines from Europe, and steel fabricated offshore. If the old guard in the offsite housing industry wants to keep up with what is happening in the new hi-tech world, they need to take these two steps: Identify Goals. My father used to say, “you can’t get lost if you have a map.” Even though today’s map is the GPS on your phone, many in our industry are lost as to what to do next. Today, a factory simply can’t have just a “sales goal” that is handed to the Sales Manager and arbitrarily passed on to the sales team. That puts the company in survival mode only. Sure, winning a contract for another 200-module apartment building is great, but at what expense? Unless your factory has a separate line that builds projects (some do), then not only are you in a dangerous position with your single family home builders but also with the sales reps who will not be making commissions on their builder’s houses. We, as an industry, need to identify what our industry should be in the coming decade. Will we continue on the same path we have for the past 30 years or will we look for new business opportunities and build more capacity to meet it? Continued next page
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