Work record / Brand / Xtrata / Questions answered
Xtrata: questions answered
What people ask me about Xtrata, and my answers. The project itself has its own page.
What happened to commercial performance once the pricing basis and parity with wood were set?
More bids came in, and our win rate climbed sharply. People had to see a comparison, and parity with wood was the easiest thing for them to grasp. Same price, better product, and a yes comes easily. It made bidding simple on our side too: hand us your competitor's bid and we will match it. The story got short. We no longer had to describe everything the system does. We only had to say it is a better-performing structure at the price you would pay for wood. Making a very complex story simple was the most effective thing we did.
What got contractors to use the system on their own projects?
Certification and training did not do it. The sales story did. Our pitch to contractors had gotten muddy, so we boiled it down to one line: same price as framing, better product. When contractors could follow it and could see nobody was going to take advantage of them, they were willing to put the system on their projects.
How did you convert installed labor into a rate the bid desk could use?
Hours, and the training. We counted both and kept the data, and it was simple. With crews in training, you can say exactly how much work a group finished in a stretch of time, and compare that to how long traditional framing would take on the same space.
What did the bid data say about the sales problem?
It arrived as a request for lead generation, and the bid data showed the diagnosis was wrong. I put every bid the channel had produced side by side. Prices ran from a premium over wood framing to nearly even, with no formula tying one quote to the next. Deals were not dying from a shortage of leads. They died at the bid desk, on the estimator's second question. Next we put all the bids in one system of record and derived a rate from the company's own numbers. We tested that against the manufacturer's labor calculator. Then we changed the pitch to parity: same price as framing, better product.
What happened once general contractors were trained and certified?
Bid volume rose once the pitch was a single line, and the mix of bidders changed. In the past, most of the work came from owner-builders. They were people putting up their own homes, drawn by how easy the product is to use, and the company had no setup for contractors. The measure I would point to is certification. A general contractor who gets certified has chosen to bid the system on his own jobs.
Which trades took to the block system best?
Masons and stucco crews took to it best, with drywallers close behind. Those were the people we trained first.
What showed that trade skills carried over once crews started installing?
Plain trial and error. We put people on the work and watched how quickly they picked it up. Masonry, framing and stucco bring the same habits to concrete and drywall, so all five count.