Stuff certainly happens! We’ve all heard this statement, or some variation of it to imply that mistakes are inevitable and we shouldn’t worry too much about them. But as British Petroleum is finding out in the Gulf of Mexico, mistakes can be extremely costly.

While it’s unlikely that any of our kitchen and bath firms could sustain the kind of catastrophe that BP is dealing with, we should not ignore the impact on our profitability that mistakes, even minor ones, can have on our short-term and even long-term business. There is a tendency on all of our parts to dismiss mistakes and errors as simply a part of the cost of doing business and not really focus on the actual cost of them as they pertain to our respective bottom line.

But these are very real costs and, in many cases, they are actually avoidable costs. This month, we will look at some ways to raise our awareness of the errors that infect the design and remodeling business and possible ways to prevent, deal with and/or reduce them altogether.

Before you embark on the process described below, try an experiment of just making a note or log of all of the errors and their attendant costs that occur in your business over the course of one month.

If your business is typical of most of us in the remodeling business, you will be appalled at how much money is slipping through the cracks each month,
let alone over a year!

SHINE THE LIGHT

Actually highlighting the things that go wrong and the mistakes that are made is a tricky area since it often includes an element of placing blame on individuals for mistakes that they have made. Getting around this issue will require a real sales job with your employees and assurance that the process is not intended as a means to weed out poor performers.

Begin the process with an educational session with your entire team to discuss the actual costs that can arise for different types of errors and mistakes.

For instance, issues may arise as to whether a measurement of a kitchen may have been off by nine inches on the width because a measurement was transposed? Or perhaps did your firm fail to account for the cost of putting a new window through a brick veneer wall? Perhaps we ordered the new door with the wrong swing, or did we order the wrong color plumbing fixtures?

All of these things will most certainly have a cost associated with them, sometimes just the time it takes to exchange the fixture, sometimes the cost of the unusable part plus the time it takes to get the correct one to the job.