there are a lot of ideas that are floating around. some good, some a killer if you want to stay in business.
take building ponds.
there are a lot of people now building ponds. landscapers, garden centers, the joe schmo that mows your yard, the bunch of guys that are out of work, looking for a score and something to do. all are after a certain pool of money. that pool of money has a cap, so while every one wants a slice, there is only so much to go around.
take the landscapers. they build ponds like they landscape, lots of rock, little imagination, no thought to what the owner will have to deal with down the road. garden centers are pretty much the same way. both have employees that are sitting idle, so they are interested in having money come in, regardless how much or little.
then you have those that will pretty much do anything for a buck. and if you let them talk very long, you will see they really dont have a clue. and some, never having built one, take customers around showing them stuff other people have built, claiming it was their job.
then you have someone like me. the pro that not only looks at the finished product while new, but looks down the road for what the customer actually wanted and needs. someone that guarantees their work from start to finish, with customer satisfaction in mind.
at first, i wanted all of the business. and i priced myself to where i could compete with the joe schmo's. problem is, they cut costs by cutting quality to keep their profit margins up, something i refused to do. so that cut into my profit margin way to far. on several large projects, i actually lost a ton of money.
so after looking at the whole scheme of things, i began to realize that i could be covered up with work, 7 days a week, 16 hour days, but would not be making money. but is that what i wanted? not hardly.
so i priced myself fairly. I am not interested in installing that preformed thing a customer picked up at Lowe's for 60 bucks. i am also not interested in bidding against someone else on a job that is BMW quality and size, but with Yugo pricing.
what the customer gets from me is fair pricing on a quality job with no excuses. if they want to look at the details of what they are getting for the extra money, i can show that i am hands down the better value, but i will sure not be the cheapest.
to translate that into the business at ups, we dont want everything that is out there at the price the customer is willing to pay. we want what we can make a profit at. a decent profit. for some businesses, we will trim that a bit, but for what they get, we provide great value.
when roadway first rolled out rps, there was great disdain among management, and a great underestimation of the possibility of success.
problem is, a lot of their management came from our ranks. so they had a ready trained workforce in many areas. the center manager here was an exups center manager for instance. and one of the ups employees they lured away, brought with him a copy of all the pick up records for our whole building, complete with how many packages each shipper shipped that week. it seems he just got it out of the trash one friday night.
only problem was that roadway never pushed it as far as they could have, and then let it slide, at which time fedex picked it up.
sorry for the length.
cutting a dollar off each package is foolish when we are only making 85 cents or less off each one. that is one sure way of going broke, unless the drivers want to take a 20% cut in pay to off set the losses?
i didnt think so.
d