President's Message | SBC Magazine

Not Again, Dad! – How to Find Great Employees

According to an SBC One Minute Poll, CMs name finding and retaining good employees as one of their top challenges as business picks up.
Good workers are all around us and a lot of them are still looking for a job that is worthy of their devotion and work ethic.
Implementing recruiting strategies in and around your community can produce some of the best results with great, long-term employees.

In just under 10 years, BCSI has evolved from the booklet into Summary Sheets, JOBSITE PACKAGES, online courses and the much larger book.
Including the JOBSITE PACKAGE or BCSI book on invoices is an excellent best practice in case a project heads in the wrong direction.
SBCA Chapters have developed great relationships and reaped many benefits for their time and effort through BCSI educational programs in their markets.

President Steve Stroder gives an example of how SCORE helped reduce accidents at one of his company’s facilities.
Collectively, the industry can raise the bar on safety through the SCORE program.
The goal of SCORE is to provide industry best practices and generate data to help CMs track and manage their facility, following the belief that, if you measure something, improvement will follow.

SBCA brought concerns over SYP visual grades to the forefront nearly two years ago.
SPIB conducted testing, without requesting input from SBCA and other interested parties, which resulted in a recommendation to reduce Southern Pine design values by as much as 30 percent. This could have a considerable negative impact on light-frame construction and the U.S. economy.
The key to solving this issue is communication; SBCA is working with a strong coalition to develop a more reasonable solution.

Meet SBCA’s new president, Steve Stroder.
SBCA developed SCORE and other programs to help CMs run their companies as safe, productive, and risk-free as possible.
Banding together and implementing these tools not only benefits individual companies, it elevates our industry.

Determining production cycle time, the amount of time required to process an order from start to finish, is key to meeting customer needs.
The old paradigm suggested that similar jobs be manufactured at the same time; the new paradigm focuses on meeting customer needs with a “just in time” mentality as efficiently as possible.
Is an urgent request viewed as a pain-in-the-neck rush job or an opportunity to exceed expectations and have a customer for life?

Lack of available credit for building projects is a major barrier to the homebuilding industry’s recovery.
Congress is considering a measure to address this barrier in the Home Construction Lending Regulatory Improvement Act of 2011 (H.R. 1755).
SBCA Legislative Conference attendees had the good fortune of being on Capitol Hill the same day the bill was being introduced.

Joe Hikel’s main focus for this year was to establish better connections with the supply chain. The foundation has been set.
Collaborative work on the lumber design value issue and forging relationships at all levels of the supply chain goes a long way toward helping the industry survive today and thrive in the future.
Hikel’s personal return on investment on time working within SBCA has been invaluable, both in business opportunities and the personal reward from the relationships formed.

The fact that ten truss technicians may come up with ten completely different designs for the same project is evidence that components are not commodities.
It is very important to confirm that the applied loads are the loads that the EOR or building owner has specified.
Using unique ways to share design best practices is a great way to develop skills and build strong teams.

SBCA’s vision for a testing facility is to create new methods to value engineer structures.
Finding out about load paths through building components has been the focus of SBCRI’s work.
The ability to do forensic testing in SBCRI is a useful risk management strategy.