So, you’re considering getting a new countertop. You’ve gone to a few countertop fabricators to get an estimate. But, it seems like black magic trying to understand how they came up with the price.

So, how does it work? What do you look for? Since we help hundreds of countertop shops with estimating, we’ve seen the whole range of pricing. Here’s a few to look for, and to look out for.

How nice is your car?

Some fabricators use the “parking lot test” to figure out the price of a countertop. They look at your car, and try to judge what you’re willing to spend. Since there’s tougher competition for kitchen remodels than ever before, this is increasing rare. But, it’s something to be on the lookout for.

“From $29/sq.ft”

In many cases, this is the ultimate bait & switch. Sure, it’s $29 per square foot if your only kitchen countertop is a perfect rectangle and you want a pre-fabricated bullnose edge profile.

But chances are that you have something more complex. So you’re no longer anywhere close to the stated price. Or, you want a color that doesn’t make you dizzy every time you look at it. Go with the expectation that your kitchen won’t fit into the bottom rung.

Incredibly complex formula

Some fabricators try to figure out their production costs, down to the penny. Then they add a profit margin and that becomes the price.

The only wrinkle in this incredibly complex formula is that it’s impossible to really know the exact cost of a job before it’s made. Overall, this system tries to be fair based on costs, but those costs are fickle.

The open book

It’s like getting a price list. Here’s the price of the material, here’s the price of fabrication per square foot, and here’s the price for radius corners, cutouts, etc. This approach is the scariest for granite fabricators.

Maybe competitors can undercut the price by a few bucks. And maybe, all of the information is too much for a homeowner to understand. After all, most people only buy a counter top once or twice in their lives. Finding an open book is great, but make sure you educate yourself on what it all means, too.

Reasonable, plus extras

Almost every one of our customers claims to hate competing on price, and would rather compete on service – “we’re the fastest”, most beautiful, friendliest, or cleanest.

So their pricing is a good reflection of what’s fair if you shop around. (probably within a few hundred dollars of what you’d find from the competition) But, they will sell you their unique proposition. This is great if you care about the extras they offer, but you’ll probably move along if you don’t.

That’s 5 of the secret countertop pricing methods we’ve seen. Have you heard of a better one? Tell us about it!

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 countertop remnants with fabricators near you.

I gave a presentation at ICE, the international countertop expo, all about using technology to improve your countertop fabrication business.

Here’s a copy of the slides, but they only tell a small portion of the story. The rest is below…

Slides 1-7. Skip over these, it’s setting the stage for why I’m going to talk about software for countertop fabricators rather than technology in general.

Slide 8. When we’re going through our sales process, there are 3 steps we cover. What you need, what we do, and how to get started.

If you use our software, it’s going to be a great long-term relationship, like a marriage. So, we need to be smart about dating and make sure we’re mutually compatible.

Slide 9. The first step is for us to understand what you need. We rely on having happy customers and the only way people are happy is if they’re getting more value out of our software than they pay for.

Slide 10. When we first started selling our software, people would call up and ask for a demo, and we’d oblige. Believe me, I can demo our software all day long without taking a breath. But, it turned out that we had no idea if what we were showing was relevant.

Now, when we schedule demos with you, it’s really a trick – we want to have a conversation instead. And what’s really important are your answers to these 4 questions:

What are you doing today?
What works?
What doesn’t?
What’s the consequence of not changing?

The more specific we can get, the better idea we’ll have of how much we can help your business.

Slide 11. Skip it. I got audience participation in the seminar by asking questions, and giving away copies of Aaron Crowley’s book – Less Chaos, More Cash.

Slide 12. Typically, the problems in your shop boil down to 3 things.

• Wasting time –like searching for paperwork when a customer calls to find out what’s going on with their job.
• Making mistakes – like showing up at a house at the wrong time, or worse fabricating a countertop out of the wrong granite or with the wrong edge profile.
• Missing opportunities – what’s the cost of not following up with your sales leads?

Slide 13. The most important questions you can ask yourself when you’re looking at software, again. And if you haven’t tried to write down the consequence of not changing, do that – try to put it in terms of money or time.

Slides 14-16. Skip them again. If you want, imagine me telling some awesome jokes.

Slides 17-18. What we’ve discovered is that there are some big red flags when people are investigating our software.

• If you’ve never tried using free software to fix your problems, you’re probably not going to spend money on them.
• If you’re making big changes to the rest of your business, it’s better to wait on implementing job scheduling software.
• If your office manager or production manager don’t agree to use software, it’s better not to buy it.
• And the biggest single factor that determines success is – time. Uninterrupted time to think about the business and how you can apply software to make it better.

Slides 19-20. Skip these, too. It was fun to do the “quizzes”, and I think it forced everyone in the audience to pay attention, too.

Slide 21. The hidden cost of buying our software is your time. Because we feel so strongly about getting started on the right foot, we schedule 5 ½ hour calls with you for the first week. Our goal is that by the last call, you’re up & running on our scheduling, and pretty close to throwing away your whiteboard, spreadsheets, and some of your job folders.

…and that’s it. It was really fun to give the presentation, and I’m hoping that I get a chance to do it again at future stone industry events.

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 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.

For years, we heard that we should make the Moraware.com website better… we were invisible on Google, and even countertop shops looking for scheduling and estimating software couldn’t find us easily. But, we finally changed what we were doing last fall. Here’s what we did.

WordPress.

We switched to WordPress for our entire website. In about a day, we went from a painful environment that only one person could use to a site that could be changed easily by multiple people. We’re also using the Genesis framework (actually that’s $60, not free) – which meant that we got all of the tools we needed to build a nice-looking website. Just a little bit of tweaking, and we’re really happy with the design and layout.

Page titles.

This was the simplest change we made, but it had a major impact on where our pages ranked in search results. Now, every one of the titles of our web pages is descriptive, and includes the keywords that are relevant to the page and our overall site. For example,

Before: Moraware – JobTracker
After: Countertop software – Moraware JobTracker

Blog.

There are 3 reasons we write on our blog: Communication with customers, search engine optimization, and thinking about our business. Even though it takes some time every week to write a post, it’s totally worth it.

I’ve found that it helps clarify the way we talk about our software and company. And, after writing hundreds of blog posts, our website can offer something valuable to our customers and prospects on a wide range of topics.

Analytics.

How do we know what’s worth it? By looking at the numbers. Google analytics is free, and it lets us figure out what’s working on our website and what’s not. You can see which pages are getting traffic, how much, and from where.

We also use a free Firefox plug-in called Rank Checker that lets us know where we rank for various keywords. We want to make sure that the customers who’re looking for us on the web can find us when they search for phrases like “software for countertop fabricators“.

Updated pages.

Before we made these updates, our website only got updated every few years. For example, we hired a designer to give us some prettier buttons in 2006, and that was the last time we really changed things. Now, we can keep improving the website in little steps, which is much easier and actually gets done.

Once it’s easy to make changes on the website, it’s important to actually make updates. Every page we have can be clearer, more specific, and have examples. It’s a never-ending process.

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