If you haven’t downloaded the T.R.U.S.T guide from our site or heard me talk about it, let me give you a taste of how we do business differently from other contractors. At Maddox, we think that by following five basic tenets, we can earn and keep customers’ trust.

In our business, there is rarely an automatic extension of trust, and why should there be? Trust is a reliance on some pretty weighty qualities, including integrity, strength, ability and surety. Trust is often hard earned, but it can also be easy to lose.

No purchasing system, harsh policy or company rule can prevent all of the potential pitfalls related to trust in our field — and perhaps any field. Mediocre and even bad contractors still make it through our multifaceted screening processes. Each of us has at least one horror story about unprepared, unskilled contractors showing up to perform work. We’ve kicked contractors off of our sites because they have failed us in one way or another.

But just because problems that prevent trust from developing can’t be resolved overnight doesn’t mean things can’t get better. On a daily basis, we at Maddox work to earn and maintain a mutual trust with our customers by focusing on five specific qualities and behaviors. We call it T.R.U.S.T., and this is what it means to us:

Transparency: We have nothing to hide. — We will be completely transparent in our relationship with you. Period. Whether we’re collecting facts from an earlier job to figure out why something went wrong or just giving you a status report, we are going to be honest, understandable and communicative.

Reliability: We’ll be there. — A customer told me recently, “It is what you are doing for me today that earns you the right to be here tomorrow.” Unless we earn your trust through reliability, we will not be back tomorrow.

Understanding: We get it, inside and out. — We will ask you lots of questions in order to understand not only what you are doing, but also why you are doing it. If we understand how we can help, we can focus our services on what you really need.

Sincerity: We mean business. — If you believe that trust is built on a combination of personal and professional sincerity, then Maddox will be able to help you in ways that other contractors can’t.

Task Competence: We get the job done. — Industry reps prefer to have as few contractors in their plants as possible. To meet this need and really help our customers, we have to be competent at a wide range of tasks. And we are.

We work everyday to build trust. Our average employee tenure is nine years, with some of us calling Maddox home for more than 15. We have dealt with many of our vendors and customers since the company was founded in 1985. You don’t achieve these feats unless you have built trust as you have built your business. Think about how things might be different if you had a relationship with a contractor whose sole focus was to build T.R.U.S.T. with you on a daily basis.

If you would like to learn more about how we do business, download the T.R.U.S.T. guide or contact us.

A lot of different pieces go into each and every project we tackle at Maddox. One of the most important is the crew of specialists that’s tasked to work on a particular job. By putting serious thought behind the makeup of each team, we have rarely heard a customer say the crew that worked on their project wasn’t the right set of guys. Our teams are assembled so that when our guys get to a job site, they are prepared and ready to get to work.

The first step in pulling together a team is identifying a foreman who can run the work. At Maddox, we don’t juggle foremen from project to project. Our customers have the same foreman on the job during the whole process. The foreman must be a good fit, have all of the skills needed to handle the job and, of course, must be available.

After a foreman is identified, we determine the specific skills required for the job and fill in the gaps with skilled workers. Establishing which specialties a job requires from the beginning means you’re working with a complete crew who can run the whole job from start to finish. If unskilled workers are also needed, we will consider hiring temp labor, which can be cost effective.

Many of our guys have multiple skills that translate well to jobs that require more than one specialty, which really includes most jobs. We may have a fabricator who is also good at rigging, or a certified welder with a keen sense of detail. We are calculated in applying those combinations of skills to each project.

Taking full advantage of our guys’ skills seems like a no-brainer, but evaluating their work and developing their strengths takes time and effort. Reviews of job performance and work ethic determine where a guy can excel and whether we want to develop him. Much of what we do at Maddox involves education to stretch those skill sets.

Being so deliberate in putting together teams of specialists for each job reassures customers. When a customer works with a particular guy on one project and then is assigned another guy for a different project, the customer can be assured that Maddox has chosen that skilled worker for a particular reason. He can trust our process.

Crew development should always be based on quality, not quantity. Evaluating and developing our guys’ skills, and assembling a dedicated crew for each project is time and effort well spent.

No two industrial contracting projects are exactly alike. At Maddox, we have to be on the ball to tackle all kinds of challenges and unusual situations everyday. Finding the best solution is part of the reward. During the next month or so, we’ll be working on a variety of jobs.

Alcoa CSI: As a new customer for Maddox, Closure Systems International is finding out how diverse we can be. Indianapolis-based CSI produces more than 70 billion closures worldwide annually, designs and builds capping equipment and provides related technical services. In June, we removed and replaced a chiller system at its Crawfordsville plant. In August, we will be providing and installing a mezzanine for an electrical transformer installation.

Zimmer Custom-Made Packaging: Zimmer is a long-time leader in the flexible-packaging market with a focus in the areas of frozen novelty, butter/margarine, candy and confectionary. But its way of loading spools of paper onto its process machines wasn’t leading the pack. The machines used inefficient screw lifts to lift the rolls in position. The screw lifts wore out very quickly and were expensive to get parts for, so Zimmer approached Maddox on a design to successfully load the paper without any wear and tear on its machines. Maddox provided the design and will install two different lift tables to replace the old process.

Firestone Building Products: Providing millwright and pipe fitting help, Maddox is currently installing the machines and piping required for a new blending process at Firestone Building Products’ Beech Grove facility.

At the beginning of 2010, we went through an exercise that required us to take a close look at our best customers and provide reasons for why they were doing business with us. After a while, we started to notice that three distinct groups naturally formed: experience enjoyers, overwhelmed overachievers and trust seekers.

Experience enjoyers like the personal interaction side of our business. They learn our guys’ names and form relationships with our people. They see us as an opportunity to upgrade themselves, either by integrating our people alongside theirs, using us for training, or calling on us for jobs that they don’t necessarily want to “experience.” This group also uses us to find answers to their problems. We rarely implement a solution that has already been determined. Instead, we work with individual customers to find solutions for them.

When customers ask for specific people or call us with comments like “I love that guy,” we know that they are experience enjoyers. They genuinely like being around Maddox people at all levels. Whether we are helping them through a difficult issue or carrying out a routine task, these customers are enjoying the whole Maddox experience.

Are you an experience enjoyer? If you have never truly enjoyed working with a contractor, contact us to learn more about the Maddox difference. We’ll show you that working with a contractor doesn’t have to be a benign or unremarkable experience. It can be smooth running, professional and fun all at the same time.

(Stay tuned to our blog for more on overwhelmed overachievers and trust seekers.)

Contractor safety is measured by a collection of metrics, indicators and numbers that reflect an injury rate based on hours worked. It’s a measurement that every contractor and anyone who has ever shopped around for a contractor knows about. But numbers don’t tell you everything.

The numbers most likely don’t tell you the rate of occupational injuries claimed by workers who were employed by a subcontractor hired by a contractor to handle a job. An employer must report injuries, which are most often directly associated with Workers’ Compensation claims. If someone is injured on the job and is working for a subcontractor, the contractor’s record is not affected.

The numbers don’t show what contractors are doing proactively to ensure they’re reaching the highest levels of safety. Contractors can purchase safety packages, put together safety manuals and meet the basic criteria created to standardize safety. But if they aren’t sharing those manuals with workers or regularly enforcing related policies, the value of that safety rating loses credibility — as it should.

The numbers don’t measure behavior, which is the most important aspect of a safety evaluation. Safe behavior is a qualitative measure of how jobs are run, day in and day out, and it’s a fundamental piece of the entire safety pie.

Maddox has stepped up what it means to be a safe contractor. Instead of passively patting ourselves on the back as we watch ourselves working, a third party called Safety Management Group manages and audits our entire safety program — from training to document management. Inspectors from outside of our business make site inspections and work with our people to improve awareness, behavior and safe work practices.

Safety is directly tied to quality and professionalism, so it may be time for you to look outside of your contractor pool and see how your situation could be improved. The numbers are a great place to start, but if you want the whole story, keep digging.

Planning ahead always makes good sense. In our industry, it’s also the most productive, cost-effective way to do business. Whether we’re dealing with a complicated one-year job or a routine two-week one, we always develop a detailed plan and project checklist for each project and customer.

Planning in our world tends to center around the tasks to be completed, the manpower to complete those tasks according to the schedule, the order of the tasks, and the ways we do things in order to meet the budget.

There’s really no difference between a big job and a small one. A big job is simply a string of smaller jobs, so the level of planning is just more extensive. A more complicated, longer-term job might entail a more encompassing contract, more compliance details and necessary forms. It might also require more task arrangements to effectively deliver items with long lead times, fulfill contraction schedules and work around unpredictable weather conditions. In any case, the field foreman is the main author of each job plan, with a check by the superintendent and project manager.

When a contractor works without a written plan, which is often the case, field crews on a job have to wait around while a particular day or week’s agenda is hammered out. While the crew is idle, the customer is still paying for those unproductive hours.

Not all things in life should be planned, but our work isn’t like popping the question. Minimize the likelihood of surprises and maximize productivity when it comes to working with your contractor by always asking for the plan.  A plan is never a plan unless it is written down.