Last night I attended a great contractor networking event at EM NARI in Natick. Ten contractor coaching clients and friends joined me and the 120 plus attendees. The featured speaker was Adrienne Zoble. She is a nationally known networking expert for the remodeling contracting industry. She was fantastic and shared excellent ideas on how to obtain great results by networking effectively. She also offered strategies on how to maximize results from your existing customer base and the importance of staying in touch with all leads. Everyone I spoke with said they were very satisfied that NARI provided a great speaker and the networking topic was perfect considering the current economy.

With the winter upon us, now is the perfect time to work on your business. With a down economy and the normal slowdown of remodeling work during the winter, now is the time to be reviewing and analyzing our entire business. We can be proactive and use this time to make changes to our business to be in a competitive position when the slowdown is over. The economy will turn around and those companies who are prepared for the inevitable increase in leads and business, will be ready to take advantage of a new and ever demanding customer. They will be anxious to catch up on long delayed projects. Many people are holding off on desired projects due to the uncertainty in the economy. This pent up demand will be released and the professional improved companies will be ready to take advantage of the opportunity. If you are not prepared you will miss out.

We always hear about the bad stuff, like poor service and unfriendly people, how about something different for a change?

We don't have to look hard to know that our world is experiencing some challenging times. All we have to do is turn on the TV news or weather and we are quickly bombarded with the realities around us. Things that blow up, crash, burn, crimes, job losses, scams, war all lead the news and dominate the broadcasts. We can protect ourselves from these programs easily by turning the channel or hitting the off button on the remote control.

After the holidays, homeowners in the market for home improvement services, start calling residential contractors to set up work for the spring. Do you have a procedure for the inbound lead call and a form to capture vital prospect information about them and their requests? Or do you use any available scrap paper, post it notes or the proverbial napkin to write down the information and struggle retrieving and reading the chicken scratch later? Who will answer the phone, talk to your potential client and will they know what to do to make a professional first impression?

2008 was a challenging year for contractors in the residential remodeling industry. With declining home values, tightened credit, lack luster new home construction, smaller remodeling projects and erosion of consumer confidence many contractors are facing uncertain futures. The time and need for change has never been more apparent than now. We need to analyze our businesses and make sure that we are able to deliver outstanding products and services to the Next Level Consumer.

To all our readers, friends, residential contractor clients and business associates we hope your New Year is filled with prosperity and happiness.

Owning and operating a residential contracting business presents unique challenges for contractors servicing the homeowner market. These challenges are unique because the industry has very little structured business training for residential contractors who provide services to a savvy, demanding and educated consumer. Contractors with formal business education or experience from the commercial construction industry tend to do better with today's homeowner consumer if they use and apply, industry best practices and systems.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about writing your business plan for 2009. How are you doing? We have a few more days until the New Year, will you be ready?

First a bad economy and now residential contractors have to contend with the media portrayal that contractors never show up when they said they would? Can you believe it?