Tara Landes, President, is a sought-after, engaging speaker. She speaks on a wide variety of timely topics, relevant to small and mid-sized business. Contact Tara today to see if she has a message that’s right for your company, conference, organization or audience.
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Upcoming Events Q1 2012
EVENT: BUILDEX Vancouver
WHERE & WHEN: Vancouver Convention Centre West, February 8, 2012
EVENT: Business Development Bank of Canada: Business Transition Seminar - How to Buy a Business: Preparing for a Successful Business Acquisition
TOPIC: Building Value Post Acquisition
WHERE & WHEN: Hilton Vancouver Metrotown, February 9, 2012, 7:30am
EVENT: Member Forums Facilitation at the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs
WHERE & WHEN: Location TBD, Tuesday January 24, 8:30 am – 10:00 am & Thursday, March 8, 9:00 am – 10:30 am. Vancouver.
EVENT: BC Food Processors Association Sales & Marketing Committee Meeting
TOPIC: Tradeshow Best Practices and Strategy
WHERE & WHEN: Golden Boy Foods, Burnaby, January 17, 2012, 2:30pm
Selection of Past Events:
“Dealing with Change Orders: The Delicate Balance between Job Profitability and Customer Service”
Sub Contractors often face the choice of whether to make a small change gratis in the name of customer service versus ensuring a change is properly documented and signed off on by all relevant parties. The most profitable sub contractors walk a fine line between being perceived and ‘change ordering their way to profitability’ versus being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous general contractor, architect or consulting engineer. This 1 hour seminar will focus on best practice techniques in the area of dealing with changes to the original job specs.
· Developing a process for determining when a change order is required versus when to complete a small change in an effort to build a strong relationship moving forward.
· Dealing with Change Orders in an efficient and effective manner.
· Dealing with the potential trade-offs between job profitability and customer service.
Instructors: Peter Pocklington from Management Research & Solutions
When: Thursday December 1st, 2011 9:00am to 10:00am
Where: GVCA, 25 Sheldon Drive, Cambridge
Cost: $25 +HST per member $50 +HST per non-members
* All profits will be donated to GVCA’s Conestoga College Building Fund on behalf of Management Research & Solutions*
TEC Associate Group: November, 23, 2011, Vancouver
Channel Next
Topic: “Benchmarking your business”
Speaker: Tara Landes
Where & When: Channel Next: Solution Provider West 2011 – October 24-25, 2011, Whistler, BC
Is your company’s performance the very best it can be? Process benchmarking has a strong record of accomplishment. It identifies and targets areas to improve and assists business owners to prioritize by developing an implementable plan. This seminar will explore why process benchmarking works. It will show which companies are poised to gain the highest return from benchmarking analysis, and also why it does not work in some environments.
Participants will be exposed to the proven methodology MRSI uses to uncover opportunities for improvement and how it develops implementable strategies to capitalize on them.
CTMA Toronto Chapter Tour & Dinner Meeting
Three Kinds of Estimating Error and What to Do About It
David will explain how you can improve your pre-tax profit by 2 – 5% using an integrated approach that addresses the causes of estimating errors such as quality errors, rate errors, and errors of omission.
Franchise Forum:
Process Benchmarking for Franchisors
Can you improve franchisee performance or is the size of the gap between the best and worst unavoidable? Process benchmarking has a strong record of accomplishment in identifying the specific implementable practices that reduce the gap by improving performance. What we hear from franchisors:
- We have created great systems – why don’t they just use them?
- I wish we could find better people.
- They keep saying, “it can’t be done here” as if they are unique – but the evidence that it can be done is overwhelming.
- Some of these owners just don’t use common sense.
This seminar will answer what process benchmarking is, which companies are poised to gain the highest return from a Benchmarking Analysis, why it does not work in some environments, and the specific methodology used to uncover opportunities for improvement and develop implementable strategies to capitalize on them.
FoodPro West 2011:
Business Growth: Developing a Sales Strategy to Capitalize on Retail Trends.
Production: A Production Strategy to Meet your Sales Targets.
BC Food Processors Association:
How to Select the Right CRM for Your Business.
Ontario General Contractors Association Construction Symposium 2011:
The Winners Curse: “Whoever makes the biggest mistake wins the job.” Avoid the Price Game Mindset & Establish Profitable Bidding Habits
Buildex 2009
How to Optimize in Tough Times 2009
Outsiders have little appreciation for how difficult is to profitably grow a construction or contracting business. Sure, it is pretty manageable if you are able to be at every job site to directly oversee the work, but as you continue to get further and further removed from wearing a tool belt, it becomes exponentially more difficult to bring jobs in on time and on budget. While many business leaders are masters of their trade, they usually have lots of questions about how their most profitable competitors avoid nasty surprises like:
- Missing out on converting verbal change orders into cash in the bank
- Holdbacks not released because of punch lists being dragged out
- Time wasted daily due to poor staging of materials or scheduling of equipment
- Cost overruns on manpower and materials that always seem to appear when a project is nearly done
At the end of the seminar you will have the tools to immediately to improve your bottom line.
Recruitment, Retention and Motivation: How to Get and Keep The Best
A good definition of management is the ability to get things done efficiently through other people in the same manner that you would do it yourself. Contraction in the labour market, however, has caused many companies to experience a high turnover rate, perceived favoritism, low morale, and as a result, low productivity. What we sometimes hear…
- There just aren’t enough good people to go around.
- My people keep making the same mistakes.
- I do things that other people should be doing.
- I seem to keep hiring the wrong person for that position.
- There’s no loyalty among workers in my business…they’ll leave for an extra buck an hour.
- I’ve got one great producer, but the rest are just here for a pay check.
Attracting and training the right people, however, will increase confidence, increase morale and greatly decrease cost through lost time, equipment damage and rework.
