Staying competitive with cost and quality

MCS Influencer Emily Marshall says that if you're great at what you do, you're going to get enough projects.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Emily Marshall of Mr. and Mrs. Post Frame. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Alex Tolle: Hello, I'm Alex Tolle with MetalCoffeeShop.com, and I'm back for another influencer response. I'm here with Mrs. Post Frame. So today we're talking about mergers and acquisitions, and our question is, how can contractors remain competitive and differentiate themselves in markets experiencing significant mergers and acquisitions?

Emily Marshall: Sure, this is a really interesting question, especially so for us being in the barndominium market. We're seeing that a lot in the post-frame industry, the barndominium market. We're seeing that bigger companies — one of the ways that they're focusing on growth is to acquire smaller building companies or even substantially sized ones, to just keep moving across the country, trying to expand the territory that they can service. And so this is definitely something that people need to keep their eye out for and understand how you can benefit from that when it comes to that in the marketplace.

So, there's a couple of different thoughts I have had on that. One is, if you are the bigger fish that is acquiring the companies, you can get that competitive edge because you're the one that is moving through the market. You're expanding your territory area. So being able to acquire companies — say you work in Iowa, but you want to be able to work in Missouri. Finding an established business there is obviously a great way to automatically get your business up and running in that new state. And then you can implement your company's customer service policies. You could probably glean something from that company that you've acquired. You probably don't want to acquire a company that there's nothing to learn from, because otherwise it wouldn't be that valuable to you. You can learn a lot more, a lot quicker, versus trying to place your own team there first and trying to get established. And so that's a great way to stay competitive.

But then on the other side, let's say you're a smaller builder and you are suddenly finding yourselves competing with that bigger building company that's moving through and taking up your territory. One way that you can stay competitive is going to be from a cost perspective. We always tell people the bigger the company, the more they're going to probably have to charge because they have a lot more overhead. And so, you can stay competitive by just adjusting some of your price points.

Another way that somebody can stay competitive if you're a smaller company and you don't want to get pushed out is by focusing on quality — letting the pricing thing go. Even if you're not super competitive that way, if your quality is exceptional, you will have a market of people that will choose you over a company that's gonna have to move quickly because their overhead is so much higher than yours, and they're going to have the nature of the beast. The more projects a company does, the more quality control issues they're going to have.

So if you are a smaller company, you're able to maintain that quality, you're able to get better at what you do, you're going to get enough business to satisfy your company without a doubt. If you're great at what you do, you're going to get enough projects. People are going to say "yes" to you because they're going to say "yes" to that quality. That's my personal opinion. That's how we have operated, is that when we didn't want to get bigger and bigger and bigger, we just focused on quality. And so our customers came to us because they wanted an end result, not because they necessarily were focused as much on the pricing.

Alex Tolle: I love it. I think you nailed it. Thank you so much Emily, for your insights.

Emily Marshall: Absolutely.