Technology — Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It - 11/22/2004 - Real Estate Education Training Schools Conferences

Technology — Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It

During our 14 years in business, we have endured five hard drive failures, several lighting strikes that have burned up our printers and telephones, PDA crashes and yes, two cell phone crashes in the last two years — no, neither was dropped off a roof or run over by a company truck, they just crashed — highly unusual, we were told.

The hard drives crashed both with and without backups. Each time, none of the data was salvageable, although we were consoled in learning that this too was highly unusual. Of the PDA crashes, one crashed out of the country at the same time the computer in the office with its backup data crashed.

Yet, like the carpenter who jambs a nail gun while framing a wall, we have a job to do and can’t pack up our bags and give up. We have choices. The frustrated carpenter can buy a better framing gun or go back to hand driving 16-penny nails. He knows, though, that over time he will be more efficient using the latest nail gun technology.

And like the carpenter, we as business owners also know that our investment in technology will pay off if we persist. So, enough talk about our technology failures. Let’s talk about our successes.

A Fully Equipped, High-Speed Wireless Office

Everyone in our office has a computer. That may not sound like much, but I know there are many of you out there resisting the investment. Don’t.

The computers in our office are for our administrative and sales staff as well as our two production managers. Each location has a high-speed DSL connection to the Web and each has a color printer (marginally more expensive than black and white printers but infinitely better print capabilities). Three of the computers are laptops for use by those who take their work on the road. And everything is wireless.

That’s our hardware setup. Here’s how we use it.

Technology Makes Us More Efficient, Professional and Profitable

All our proposals and bookkeeping are kept on the computers. This makes our paperwork look more professional, easier to store and more accessible than handwritten alternatives.

We use QuickBooks Pro for Contractors for our accounting. QuickBooks Pro makes our job costing and balancing our checkbook each month quicker and more accurate. There is no program easier to learn or more reasonably priced than this.

We use homemade Excel spreadsheets for all our scheduling. While there are numerous scheduling products on the market, we like to keep it simple, and using Excel gives us exactly what we need.

And our Web site? Take a look: www.BrothersStrong.com. Yes, it is a marketing tool, but is also management tool we use to streamline the selections process (through our password-protected “Preferred Partners” section).

So, while we are back to using paper calendars again and often resent the notion that we need to use more technology in our workplace, we know deep that down inside, like you, at the end of the day the odds will pay off.

Using technology on our terms enables us to build a stronger, more efficient and more profitable business for our employees, our business partners and our customers to enjoy.

Michael Strong, CGR, is vice president of Brothers Strong, Inc. in Houston. The company was voted as the 2003 Houston and Texas Remodeler of the Year. For more information, contact Strong via e-mail.