How to Hire Top-Tier Talent

Hiring talented individuals has become the latest in a long line of routine challenges for many business leaders. Whether it is exhausting the new channels of social media or tapping old relationships in the recruiting world, firms have made it a full-time job to increase the capacity in their personnel pipelines. Too often, the pull of “just in time” labor seems to take precedence, short-circuiting the need for process discipline and strict adherence to higher standards.

Avoid Losing Valuable Employees to the Competition

Currently, there is less than 2 percent unemployment for project managers, estimators and field supervisors in the construction industry. Keeping your best talent should be your top priority. Let’s review a few causes of great employees leaving good companies, and what happens when business owners can’t let go of control.

America’s Largest EPA Contractor on How to Avoid Equipment Downtime

Imagine maintaining 300 pieces of rolling stock plus 200 pieces of equipment spread across the entire United States, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. That’s the challenge Tim Bland, assistant operations manager at Environmental Restoration LLC, faces every day. For 20 years, Bland and his staff have provided emergency response services, site remediation, government services and industrial cleaning to various commercial, state and federal clients.

How the Los Angeles Rail Project Benefits from Emergency Exit Doors

Construction business owners face challenges daily. Whether it’s a delay in materials, finding skilled labor or keeping projects on budget, there is no shortage of obstacles.

7 Ways to Leverage Licensing for Profit & Growth

Increasing profitability is a key challenge for construction companies of all sizes. One area that presents tremendous untapped growth potential for construction firms is business licensing.

A Trip to the Dark Side and Back Again

A break in, or a ransom letter. An invitation to the dark web. It sounds like a movie plot, but it played out here last month.

A computer hacker waited until about 7:20 pm, when our office would likely be cleared out, and found an opening in our firewall, creating a username. He or she then virtually made their way through all our computers and locked them down. Around 6 am the following day, the team member who handles our IT noticed something wasn’t right, and kicked the hacker out. Unfortunately, a lot of damage was done in those overnight hours. Beyond our individual computers, the servers with our accounting files and job information were frozen. Plans, pictures, records. Everything.

As I understand, this was a “brute force attack,” where an individual rather than a virus does the work. We received a ransom letter that started out like this:

“All your files are encrypted, making it impossible to recover files without the correct private key. If you are you are interested in getting this key, you should proceed with the following steps.”

It went on to demand 3 Bitcoins. Fortunately for us, we had planned ahead. Our servers are backed up each hour in a Linux-based operating system (intentionally different from Windows) and stored in the cloud. If the building caught on fire, flooded or, in this case, got hacked, we are covered.

We resumed operations after a long weekend deleting all the encrypted files and implementing the backup files. Needless to say, an ounce of prevention, or maybe more, saved us. In this world we live in, anything is possible. I never would have dreamed we would be hacked, but because of the preparation, it was more like an attempted kidnapping.

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What Not to Do in Your Next Meeting

So much of life and business runs parallel because business is life. Picture this: It’s the weekend, and you have a lot to catch up on after a busy workweek. A friend who just happens to be in town contacts you, and the decision is made to meet for lunch. You’re having a great time, enjoying the good food, atmosphere and conversation. Then, for whatever reason, you get distracted. It could be a stranger passing by your table, the pinging smartphone next to you or any number of other causes.