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| What’s in a name?
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ARE YOU A WAL-MART or a Tiffany’s? A strong brand identity can help close sales with the kind of clients you want.
Ken Wong, associate dean of the Queen’s School of Business, holds up a small object: the remote control for his laptop. He asks the seminar audience to tell him everything they know about it. Answers are called out from around the room. “It is black.”
“It looks like it is made of plastic.”
“It is electronic.”...more
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| SELLING with DESIGN
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Stop us if you have heard this one. A man and a woman walk into a flooring retailer. A salesman greets them and asks if he can help. The man says they are looking for flooring and are leaning toward hardwood. The woman says she likes oak. The salesman dutifully...more
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| Waterborne floor products
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AS OF SEPTEMBER 9, 2010, it will be illegal to manufacture or import any architectural coating containing more than 250 grams per liter of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Two years after that, it will be illegal to sell any such substance. This regulation under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, entitled Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) Concentration Limits for Architectural Coatings, will effectively ban five of the 31 products on Green Seal’s 2005 list of recommended wood coatings, along with many dozens of other stains, sealers, glazes, and finishes on the market today....more
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| The Economics of Quality
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Quality has become a sacred word in the business world. No mission statement is without a commitment to provide only the highest quality products and services. Every manufacturer of every product promises superior quality. Millions are spent annually on quality seminars, quality consultants and quality certification regimes. Yet, in the real world, we see quality often falls short of even minimum standards. There is a gap between rhetoric and reality, and when we see one of those, it is usually due...more
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| Red Tape
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Canada’s small businesses are groaning under a crippling burden of regulatory paperwork, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) tells us. In a 2005 survey, the Federation found that almost 65 percent of respondents said government regulations were the number-one issue facing their businesses, second only to the total tax burden....more
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| Installation’s future
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The guys with the aprons at your local, big-box hardware store will tell you there is nothing to flooring installation. Just buy product X, watch this short demonstration, and, presto!, any Saturday-morning Joe Homeowner magically gains the ability to lay perfect carpet, tile, resilient or hardwood. Flooring professionals know Joe Homeowner runs a pretty big risk of making expensive mistakes, b...more
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| Sales slip-ups can cost you
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We may never rival the United States for slip-and-fall lawsuits, but just google the term and you will find that suing people over falling down is becoming so popular in Canada that dozens of lawyers market themselves as specialists in the field. You can bet there is money in it, or they would not bother. A CTV report from last winter quoted insurance sources and the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses as saying that both claims and insurance premiums are on the rise because of increased litigation over falling injuries....more
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| Understanding VOC's
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We do not
live in California, and we do not have Los Angeles’ smog problems, but soon, Canadian flooring professionals may be forced to meet tough standards for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and formaldehyde that originated on the Left Coast. Suppliers of finishes, adhesives,...more
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| Turning to China for… quality?!
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In his 18 years in the flooring industry, Thomas Baert, president of Shanghai-based Chinafloors, saw a frustrating trend in the efforts of flooring manufacturers that tried to take advantage of China’s low labour rates by outsourcing production there. “Quality was never seen as a selling feature,” he remembers....more
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