San Francisco North Bay Now Available

We are excited to announce the addition of another coverage area for the Construction Monitor.

San Francisco North Bay!

Just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco City there are more than 1,225,000 people residing in the 4 counties of Marin, Sonoma, Napa & Solano. If your business does business North of “The Gate” or if you would like to, Give us a call and get set up with the latest edition and start marketing your products and services to the people who need your business right now!

For a limited time only, we will even throw in 3,000 free mailing labels to jump start your marketing efforts and make it that much easier to get your company information in front of the people and companies that you need to target today!

Make it a great day!

Justin Harris Construction Monitor

Traffic vs conversion and lessons from a superstar.

I was at the golf course on Saturday with my son Taylor, my Brother in-law Mike and his son Marc. We were all having a great day hitting the ball.

We started talking about aspects of modern day marketing and discussing the importance of putting the emphasis in the right place. I asked Mike, what do you think is more important, traffic to your website or the conversion rate?

With a furrowed brow, Mike offered his opinion (which I value since he is focused on these things all the time in his career and the company he works for did over $500 million in sales last year)

“Traffic is vitally important, without traffic you have no chance of conversion, however if all you are doing is attracting traffic, that can be a great way to deplete your marketing budget because you have no return on investment”

“So conversion is really the key” he continued, “take what traffic you do have and focus on improvements like working smarter and attracting the right traffic, the people most likely to do business with you”

So I pondered on this a while as I hit golf balls. Some of my shots took off straight, rose high and landed near the pin. Some took a wild curve in the wrong direction and were lost.

When I took my time and planned my moves, doing what I knew to be correct and things felt right, I got the results that I sought. When I was hurried, unfocused and just got up and whacked at the ball, well, you know...another lost stroke and missed opportunity.

Near the end of our day we caught up with Deron Williams, superstar point guard for the Utah Jazz and Gold Medalist for Team USA Basketball 2008....My 12 year old son was in awe! (See picture above) We watched Deron tee off and hit the ball straight down the fairway 280 yards landing in a perfect spot for his second shot. Obviously his talents extend beyond the hardwood floor and it was truly fun to watch.

We all know it's a different market out there than we are used to, but we are seeing some bright spots all over the Western US with production builders pulling permits for new subdivisions not just in ones and twos but twenty or thirty at a time. The large custom homes and owner builder projects also continue to show up, in fact, the majority of the new custom homes we see are at values far exceeding half a million$ each with a dozen or more multi-multi million$ homes in our reports every week.

Instead of focusing on what's wrong or difficult about your market, try looking at the traffic you do have. Concentrate on the opportunities that are there and sharpen your organization's skills so that when the moment comes to land that next important project, everybody has their eye on the ball and is ready to hit one down the fairway right at the target.

Make it a great day!

Justin Harris - Business Development Director - Construction Monitor

New 3 Column Format

We have had a lot of comments about names and other information being truncated in the .pdf version of the Construction Monitor. We understand the importance of complete and accurate information and therefore we have created a 3 column version of the Construction Monitor newsletter that provides more space to display the permit information.

This will also benefit those of you who like to make notes in whatever whitespace you can find. There is lots more of that with this 3 column version.

Starting with week 16 the 3 column format will be the default for all area publications. As always we love to hear your comments and any feedback you can provide us is welcome.

It almost seems impossible, but we do actually have a 5 column format that we used many years ago. Imagine viewing all that same information scrunched into 5 columns. Nostalgia.

Thanks to those who contacted us concerning this issue.

Goodbye .dbf file

Several months ago we started notifying customers that we were going to discontinue sending out a .dbf version of the Construction Monitor. Instead we will be sending a more universal and easier to use .csv file.

This change offers many benefits to current and future subscribers to the Construction Monitor. It also gives us more flexibility moving forward as we strive to upgrade and improve your Construction Monitor Newsletter.

Starting this week, the .dbf file will no longer be attached to the weekly email.

Please call or email if you have any concerns or need assistance migrating to the new .csv format.

Thank you,

Dave Jr

Invest In Your Business

Invest in your business and then watch that investment pay off. That's the idea behind today's post here on the blog. How many ways are there to spend your available or disposable assets? The answer to that is there are limitless ways. The Idea is to invest in those things that will have a positive growth effect on your business.

What are you doing that separates you from your competition? What cutting edge ideas and tools have you implemented that will keep your business at the front of the pack?
Does your sales and marketing team have the tools they need to stay competitive in your industry?

I thought I would share the picture above that I took with my iphone camera this morning as I walked down our main hall. We are investing in our company, our people, our technology and our clients by making sure that we have the tools we need to be successful not only for today but for the future as well.

Have an incredible week!

Construction Monitor 20th Anniversary

This July 3, 2009 will be the official 20th anniversary of the Construction Monitor.

Back in 1989 I couldn't have imagined the company covering the entire Western United States.

It has been fun and exciting to see all the growth, especially in the last 7 years. 

We have wonderful managers, employees and independant contractors who make this all possible. 

Serving our customers, helping them find new work,  and treating them with the utmost respect and kindness will always be our mission.

A great big THANK YOU for everyone that has made the Construction Monitor successfull!

Dave Mineer Sr

president

And the good news is....

After watching CNN the other day and being bombarded with the doom and gloom of the economy I got to thinking.... We need to be hearing some good news, something positive that's going on out there. I know we can't just positive think our way out of the current situation, however, hearing some of the good that is happening can not be a bad thing.

I decided to look at the activity in residential construction for just the projects that we picked up last week. I found out a few things.

1. Building permit activity was up from the previous week.

2. Activity was also up consistently each week from the 1st of the year.

3. We collected over 900 new single family home permits last week.

4. Include the residential remodels and additions and that number exceeds 3,000.

My conclusion was that it's good to be concerned and to make smart decisions in this economy, but to bury your head in the sand and wait until CNN and the likes have given you the okay to start working again will only mean missed opportunities and lost potential revenue.

There are new projects out there (over 3,000 last week) and our customers know where they are and how to land them and we will continue to make sure that happens each and every week!