time management
Contractors of all types are notorious for setting impossible-to-keep schedules, thereby disappointing clients and damaging their own credibility in the process. Sometimes, however, situations arise that require landshapers to shrink their established installation timetables, a necessity that will turn up the heat on even the most accomplished of contractors. For the project profiled in these pages, my clients had something come up that (from their perspective, anyway) necessitated completion of the project much earlier than anyone thought: They were expecting a baby and insisted that our delivery date should happen before theirs. The challenge we faced with the new timetable - just five months rather than the planned eight - was huge: It required truly constant interaction and communication with the clients and sub-contractors as well as intensive coordinating and expediting of a mind-boggling number of simultaneous processes - enough to drive us all crazy from time to time, but ultimately a
During the five years I've been writing this column for WaterShapes, I've been asked by a number of people how I manage to find the time to write this column, make presentations at trade shows, teach at Genesis 3 schools and conduct my own design/consulting business. I get the distinct impression that these questions have much less to do with curiosity about the power of time management than with questions about why I'd even bother to extend my focus beyond my primary business of
I don't know if it's because I work in the pool and spa industry or if this is common to other fields, but I know a great many people who run businesses who are ill-prepared to do so. Architects and landscape architects might have taken some classes that introduced them to basic business principles, but their counterparts in the pool and spa trades are far less likely to have taken such classes and tend to run things by the seat of their pants. In my case, I've learned what I know about business through seminars and business-oriented reading. I've made
