If you read business books, you know that in order to run a successful business and to maximize impact across any industry you need to have a solid mission statement. This not only provides a meaningful purpose to your staff (or founders in our case) which gives them motivation to persevere but also helps your prospects and clients understand what they are buying into and what your company’s ultimate goal is.
Sound great, but how do you create a solid mission statement that actually means something?
Yeah, this is a tough one and requires company wide brainstorming and thought. We wanted our mission statement to resonate with our industry and address some of the biggest problems that our target market is facing, so we asked ourselves “what big problems are we addressing?”.
Four big ones stood out.
“I never saw that!”
In the land development world, there’s a lot of information that gets shared between owners, consultants and contractors; including but not limited to drawings, contract documents, change orders, invoices, payment certificates and site reports. Typically, shared by one of many file sharing platforms or by email. The problem is that project managers, land development managers, architects and engineers are so busy that some of these emails slip through the cracks (and it’s understandable, some of these individuals get 100-200 emails a day and a lot of the works gets done in between meetings on their mobile devices).
Slipping through the cracks could just mean this individual needs the document resent or a simple reminder to get something done but if we are talking about a contractor using an old drawing set, this could be a painful outcome.
If you’ve been there, you know what I mean and you know we need a better way to share and store up to date documents.
“I’m swamped, I’ll send you the change order tomorrow”
During the construction tendering and contract admin stages there are a tremendous amount of numbers that get generated and communicated on bid forms, quotes, progress reports, invoices, change orders and payment certificates. While reviewing and analyzing these documents is part of the contract admin process, the frustrating part for consulting firms is not only having to transcribe bids into a bid review spreadsheet or copying a change order, it’s having to get busy people to do it! There always seems to be more important things to do than a payment certificate or change order right?? It’s quite common.
Typically, this isn’t an issue but if this causes work to stop or even worse the contractor to demobilize because they don’t have their change order or they haven’t been paid in a timely manner, you can imagine the client isn’t too happy.
Eliminating double data entry would be a big win!
“Why hasn’t he gotten back to me?”
Land developers, their consultants, and contractors get a lot of emails. Currently, keeping track of who responded to which email can be tricky. We’ve all thought “Hey, I sent that guy an email 3 days ago and he hasn’t replied yet! Did I miss it?” Then you double check and sure enough, no reply.
It could be a contractor waiting for a change order to proceed or a land developer waiting for answers from the civil engineer or any other possible scenario.
Why don’t we have a tool to keep track of this yet?
“I like the idea of your product, but I can’t justify paying so much”
ContractComplete is a software as a service (SAAS) product. We know, that can have a negative ring to it… We hear these questions all the time:
Do I have to pay per user?
Your software does a lot, do I have to pay a huge cost up front for the whole package?
Will we have to pay a huge training cost?
All valid questions so we definitely want to make sure our product is affordable and low risk.
“Finally…”
After putting a lot of thought into the biggest problems that our product solves, it became a little easier for us to formulate a mission statement that properly depicts what we are trying to do day in and day out. We love it and we hope you do too!
Our mission:
To provide a low cost/innovative approach for all stakeholders in the land development sector to share information, automate processes and keep each other accountable in order to accelerate project schedules and save everybody time and money.
Stay tuned for how we intend to solve these problems in our next blog.
