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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
September 2023 #15290 Page #86
Job Site Success Begins with Good Communication
M
y favorite place to meet with a customer is on the job site. Always has been. I started in this industry approximately 20 years ago as a young truss salesman for UFP in Southern California. My training consisted of building trusses in the yard, creating estimates, and completing engineering packages with our design team. I enjoyed all of it, but the last part of my training was, hands down, my favorite: providing on-site field services to repair damaged or mis-installed trusses and wall panels.
By Landon Boucher Director, Business Design
Looking back, I wasn’t good at any of those tasks. As the first few months of my career passed, I knew I needed to add more direct value to my customers beyond the general knowledge I picked up during my new hire training. My company had great value: great support staff, on time deliveries, responsive customer service, etc. But my value as the new guy was limited. I decided to spend as much time as I could with the most experienced field repairman. He let me borrow his tools and allowed me to get to work learning how to fix trusses. I still wasn’t very good at it, but I earned his respect and, more importantly, the respect of my customers. One of them even invited me to his office to learn how to read plans. This only further added to the value I could bring to my customers, including on the job site. Throughout my career, I’ve held onto the lessons I learned during that foundational stage. One of my key responsibilities with MiTek involves engaging with the Design, Make, and Build communities to develop tools and resources that enable efficient utilization of off-site construction methodologies. In this role, I take every opportunity to be on site and see the products and services we provide in partnership with our CM customers on display. Not a single thing we do at MiTek would be possible without our customers and their customers. On a recent site visit in Northern California, I decided to snap a few quick images with my cell phone. The images show how effective our PosiStrut floor truss system is in shallow depth applications, even when running a high volume of utility lines through the open web area. This project consists of 716 apartment units within 4 floors on 4 different buildings. Known as “The Sevens,” it used the Continued next page
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