We’re really excited that Moraware is co-sponsoring the 2011 MIA Fabricator Benchmarking survey. It’s a great way to analyze your countertop business and compare it anonymously to your peers.

Survey sign-up: http://www.marble-institute.com/survey2011/

This benchmarking information can make a huge difference by showing you how your company’s key performance indicators match those of other fabricators. And, the more fabricators who participate, the more valuable the data will be for you.

Since we’re subsidizing most of the cost, you can sign up online for just $25 (which covers printing, shipping, etc.) Or, check out last year’s executive summary (for free) from the survey page, here: http://www.marble-institute.com/survey2011/

We think this is a great opportunity to improve your stone or solid surface countertop business, and we’d really appreciate your participation.

We co-sponsored the MIA stone industry education seminar last week, held at Daltile’s Seattle Showroom and warehouse. The turnout was good – there were over 50 people there.

This one was a little different that past events; it was much more of a group discussion. It’s amazing that a room full of direct competitors was so open and willing to share about how they run their businesses.

Although the overall theme was “Business Success for Fabricators”, the group covered lots of topics, including:

Quartz versus Granite – how to sell both and still differentiate the products for the consumer? Although there was no consensus on how to present the differences, most of the shops agreed that educating customers about the pros and cons of the various materials is the best approach.

Diversification – Although most of the fabricators just concentrate on countertops, some have diversified their businesses to include wall cladding, flooring, and cabinetry.

Sealers & Resins – Setting customer expectations about how sealed granites or granites with resin will look seemed to be a big deal, too. Especially with lighter colors of stone, staining can be an issue.

Safety – ensuring the health and safety of everyone in the shop is a huge concern. Most of the fatalities in the stone industry are people who have years of experience, so ongoing safety education is essential.

Fabricator Forum – My favorite part of the day was the fabricator forum. Joey from Mario & Son, Bill from Creative Countertops, and Robert of Precision Countertops shared their experiences. They told stories about how they made the switch to having digital templating, the CNC machines in their shops, and how they organize their offices.

After the seminar, Daltile hosted a very nice dinner that included steaks right off the grill, great drinks, and conversation with lots of peers in the industry. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.

On September 14th, we attended the Stone Education seminar hosted at MSI in Jessup, MD.

The speaker was MIA president G.K. Naquin, of Stone Interiors in Loxley, AL, who shared his experiences as a high-end countertop fabricator who’s company produces about 45 kitchens per week.

The workshop included group discussion and sharing over a wide range of topics, which included the following conversations:

Reducing Costs

The general consensus among the fabricators at the seminar was that survival is the key part of how they’re viewing the industry, tellingly phrased as “There are never enough competitors going out of business”.

There are conflicting forces at work – none of the shops in attendance want to compete on price, but the market seems to be turning granite countertops into a commodity in the eyes of consumers. So, most of the fabricators are turning to more automation to reduce their costs.

Production Efficiency

G. K. shared some of the metrics that drive his shop. For him, everything is measured in the square foot cost. Although his shop is located in a low-cost labor market, he wants to keep his labor cost at or below 30% of his overall cost per sale. Specifically, he spends:

• $3.95/sq. ft. in production labor.
• $1/sq. ft. for template labor.
• $4.50/sq. ft for installation labor.

Growth

The vast majority of the fabricators in attendance were experiencing modest growth, compared to the trend nationwide of a drop over the last few weeks. There were a variety of ways that they’ve been achieving the growth – typically by going to higher-end products or by expanding their product lines.

G.K. has found that the primary driver of his own company’s growth has been their specialization on marble kitchens, which are becoming a trend among high-end customers.

Future of the Industry

G.K’s personal results with adopting technology in his fabrication business were inspirational. Although it took effort, training, and time to overcome the resistance to new ways in his shop, the numbers have made the change worthwhile.

Stone Interiors thinks of their whole production process and capacity in terms of $/sq. ft. By analyzing at the dollars per square foot of labor, material, and overhead they’ve made huge strides toward improving the profitability of the business.

Everything Else

There was also lots of discussion about using resinated granite slabs, safety in the shop, keeping employees happy, and even website marketing. In a meeting like this, all of the participants get a chance to learn from their peers, which is great for the overall stone industry. We’re happy to be sponsoring an event that helps everyone share their best practices.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.

We’ve found one reason people are happy with our software is that we keep in touch. Picking up the phone and checking in is one of the best ways to make sure we’re doing a good job.

But, just “checking in” or “touching base” isn’t very specific or useful, so we have a reason for every call.

For us, there are three distinct phases of calls – before you buy, getting started, and then our ongoing relationship.

Before you buy.

Over the years, we’ve learned how to have a sales process. It’s incredibly important to talk about what our customers need, show what our software does, and explain how to get started successfully. I’ve written a bit more about our sales process, here.

Getting Started.

It turns out that giving us a credit card for low monthly payments and a 90-day refund guarantee is actually pretty easy for lots of countertop fabricators. But, that’s when the work begins. For us, this is the most critical time in our relationship with our customers.

We need to make sure they’re getting value quickly and with as little pain as possible. So, we have a number of structured calls that we make.

1. Training. We schedule short, daily calls with new customers for the first week. Even though we say this is “training”, it’s really a way to help our customers build the habits of logging in, adding new jobs, and scheduling their activities every day.
2. Sales Follow-up. In addition to training, we have another type of call to double-check that we’re solving the business problems we identified before the sale. This involves making sure that you’re progressing on the training, getting the support you need, and eliminating the system you used for scheduling and managing jobs before you bought Moraware JobTracker.
3. References. We want every one of our customers to be a reference, and we don’t consider a customer “sold” until they’re happy and willing to tell their friends about our software. This helps us focus on providing value, but it’s also a driver for our business. More than half of our new customers are the direct result of referrals.

The long-term relationship

It turns out that we’re in a long-term relationship with our customers. We keep providing them with a valuable service that helps them grow, reduce the time they waste, and adapt to the changing needs of the countertop industry.

In return we get money, but we also get more happy customers who help our business, suggestions for new features and products, and (I know it sounds cheesy) we’ve made personal bonds and friendships, too.

Just because someone is happy and willing to be a reference isn’t the end of the road in terms of calls. We still have reasons to call:

1. New stuff. We’re adding new features to Moraware JobTracker, and building new products like RemnantSwap. We want to make sure that people know.
2. Up-sell. We have multiple editions of our software, from just the bare-bones of scheduling to an enterprise solution that includes quotes, purchasing and inventory. If you originally said you wanted Enterprise, but started with Basic, we need to check in and see if those needs still make sense. Which means, we start with our sales process again.
3. More training? Your employees might change, or maybe you need to solve new problems in your business that you hadn’t considered before. We need to offer to help, and a phone conversation is a great way.
4. Make us better. Once a customer has been using our software successfully for 6 months or a year, they have deep insight into what we could do better. We like to ask the question “If there’s one thing you could change about Moraware, what would it be?”

So, that’s how and why we are obsessed with making phone calls to our customers. It seems ironic that in a time of electronic communication we spend so much time and effort on it, but there’s no substitute to talking to someone directly.

If you haven’t considered talking to your own customers after they buy from you, you should.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.

We’ve talked to hundreds of countertop shops that use Excel for scheduling. It’s a decent way to keep track of your templates, installs, and even stone fabrication. Usually fabricators move to spreadsheets when they’re sick of whiteboards and file folders, but even excel doesn’t fix everything in your schedule…

Yes, it’s vastly better than not using a computer at all, but it still has major problems when it comes to scheduling… problems that you probably never even considered.

1. More than one user? Excel is okay when there’s a single person who’s in charge of the schedule. When two people need to make changes, it gets more difficult – you can’t even have lots of folks looking at the schedule at once without jumping through hoops.
2. Too many columns? When you first start organizing your jobs with a spreadsheet you keep it simple – customer name, date, color, edge profile. But over time, something happens. You keep adding columns. Which truck are you using? Is it a solid surface or granite job? How many square feet? Eventually you run out of columns that you can look at and manage in a useful way.
3. History? How would you know if your customer reschedules that install from Thursday to Friday? There’s not a good way to see when a job changed. And once there’s more than one person making the changes, it sure would be nice to know who is changing things, too.
4. Pictures, CAD drawings, faxes? Excel is good for text, numbers, and drop-down lists, but countertop jobs have more detail that’s not easy to write down. If you have pictures, drawings, or other paper with a customer’s signature, how do you keep track of those and the details of the job?
5. All job info in one place? If a customer calls and wants to know the status of their job, your spreadsheet doesn’t have all of the information. This means entering some details at least twice, and having the chance of an expensive mistake.

If you’re using a spreadsheet to manage your countertop shop, and you’re running into any of these problems – let us know, we can help.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.

We’re trying to improve our communication with Moraware users, prospects, and even within our company. One of the ways that we reach people is by sending email newsletters with tips and news.

Here’s an hourly chart of traffic on our help site over the course of a few days. Can you spot when I sent the email newsletter?

So, there’s obviously an impact of sending out emails. That day we got about 3 times our normal traffic on the help pages, and that week was about double the average. But it’s not enough.

I’ve gotten specific requests from customers for more information, best practices, and how to use new features… and those same folks haven’t looked at the newsletters.

I’m guilty of the same thing – I get regular emails from other companies that I care about, but if I happen to be busy I mark it to “read later“. Now I’ve got over a thousand of those emails. So how do we make this better? I’ve got some ideas, all with pro’s and cons.

• Real mailings, not just electronic. Pro: will sit on your desk for a while. Con: costs money for unknown effectiveness
• More frequent email. Pro: more chance you get it when you’ve got time. Con: takes more effort, we don’t want to be spammers
• Special offers, contests. Pro: probably increases engagement. Con: gimmicky, and might just attract folks who want free stuff.
• More targeted emails. Pro: More relevance is more interesting. Con: More work, harder to manage (?)

Making sure we’re helping our customers and talking to our prospects is incredibly important to our business. My goal is to make sure we’re reaching every person who wants to hear from us, with the right information, at the right time… and the more we can automate the process, the better. I’ll keep you posted.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabrication shops. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite slab remnants with fabricators near you.