So my daughter is 5 (5 and 1/2 as she would be proud to tell you)…A couple of weekends ago we were walking up the steps to our home when she stopped dead in her tracks, looked down at the partially dead catnip plant sitting on our step and proclaimed that it was a very “hearty” plant. It made me stop dead in my tracks too – partly because I don’t think I had ever stopped and actually paid any attention to the plant, but more because of her choice of words – “hearty” hit me as a good, solid word. Hearty makes me think of comfort food. Food that has depth, warmth and bits of steam tumbling off the top. Food eaten best with family in a cozy atmosphere.

The plant is hearty to live (at least partially) through the cold stretch…but it also has heart. Not that different than the balance we all strive for in the current environment. We need to be hearty to live through the “cold stretch” but we also need to have heart. We need to remember each and every second that we are dealing with people’s lives – the lives of our employees, the lives of our clients, the lives of our subcontractors. The good news is that we aren’t truly in the line of fire such as those in our armed forces, firemen, policemen and other heroic endeavors. But we need to find the right balance of being “hearty” while also having “heart.”

On second thought, maybe the two are one in the same?

In response to my Baltimore talk “The Dollar Based Business” I was asked a very good question that I wanted to share here. A remodeler approached me and asked what should be done if something is accidentally missed during the estimate. How do we account for the omission? Well, if we miss something on the estimate, what we do about it depends on when we catch the missed item:

PRE-SALE: All projects/estimates are reviewed before they are sold. If a missed item is caught at this stage, we put it back in the estimate/price

POST SALE/BUT EARLY IN PROJECT: We do pre-construction walkthroughs and other “early project” steps to ensure the project starts off on the right foot. If we catch something at this stage, we look holistically at the project to see how we can make up for it – in other areas, sub vs. in-house labor, etc, etc. But we do not go back to the client unless it is something that we could not have known about (i.e. stack running where medicine cabinet was going to be recessed, etc.). We have a “concealed condition” clause in our contract that allows us to charge for such items.

END OF PROJECT: This is on us – at this point we have missed all the gates pre-sale and early in the project….so we have to use it as a “learning experience” to ensure we don’t do it again.

Hope this helps and good hunting!