September, 2007

The Power of Computers

Even smaller businesses can benefit from embracing all the computer world has to offer.

By Bob Heidenreich

I believe people in the lumber and building material industry who aren’t fully embracing and exploring the computer world are selling themselves short.

For a company of our type and size, we’re probably the most computer-literate in the business. We have our own exchange servers, and we have a very, very sophisticated computer system.

But it’s important to remember that a computer is only a tool, and that you still have to use it intelligently for it to work well for you.

For instance, I’m a firm believer in having a robust web site, but you do need to manage it.

People use web sites to shop. If your potential customers visit your web site—and then find your competitors there, that’s not a good thing. I’ve visited a competitor’s web site and followed a link that led me to a manufacturer’s site. And the first name on that manufacturer’s preferred vendor section is mine! I even have several competitors who link to manufacturers’ sites when those competitors aren’t promoted on them! I see that a lot.

Don’t make your web site a portal to the rest of the industry. If you want to promote a manufacturer’s product, ask your vendor for permission to copy onto your site the parts of their site that you want to include. Most vendors will allow you to do that, but you have to ask.

For example, say we sell product through our brick and mortar store from a railing company that also sells direct to consumers. We don’t want homeowners to identify that company as a competitor, so we asked the vendor for permission and then copied the relevant information onto our site. That way, consumers never really leave our site.

Because we own our own exchange servers, another tool we take advantage of is that we can access our personal desktops from anywhere in the world. We can go on the Internet and it’s as if we were sitting in front of our computer at work. It’s very secure, and it also gives us flexibility. We can change desks if we need to with no problems. Or if we have an employee who’s not feeling well but needs to finish one or two critical things, they can do that from home. Or if someone needs to stay home with his or her kids that day, they can still work from home.

We also use e-mail as a tool to communicate with both our customers and among ourselves. We send customers architectural drawings and their material lists electronically. We use e-mail to communicate with our customers, but we don’t spam them, and we don’t share our e-mail lists.

E-mail also helps us stay connected. Our e-mails show up on our cell phones, and that allows us to be mobile. We can answer from our cell phones as effectively as we can from our own desk. I supply cell phones to everyone on the job who needs one, and we also pay for a percentage of everyone’s cell phone.

We also use software that prevents employees from getting on inappropriate web sites or viewing inappropriate content. We use a product called WebSense that lets us screen activity at a high level. It comes with a list of types of blockable content that we can then modify to fit our needs.

For us, computer literacy is absolutely essential—so much so that our employment ads don’t even include a phone number or an address. Applicants have to go online for their initial contact with us, and their first employment “test” is to be able to fill out their application via the computer.