Greetings!
 January turned out to be a "slow" month for us. We lost a week due to the snow storm, I got sick, and I gave up a few days of work to finish up my graduate course at Columbia Univeristy, New York, NY. Also, we have another website. Finally, I have been issued my license in Canada.
The snow storm I wrote about in the last newsletter, and as many of you all know, I've been sick off and on all winter. Finally I went to the doctor, and I had a sinus infection. I was put on antibiotics, and by day 2 I had a funny feeling in my head - it was a lack of pain. My sinuses and right ear for the first time in 3 months stopped hurting. I felt kind of stupid, since I could have been less manly and saved myself a lot of headaches (literally) much earlier. There seems there should be a lesson in there somewhere..
The graduate course was more painful than the sinus infection. It was titled "Elastic and Inelastic Structures" and involved some very difficult problems and mathematics. It was even harder because I took it online (and 30 years after I graduated the University of Maryland), so I didn't have the advantage of interacting with other students or the professor. I did make a trip to New York to see him at one point, and did several telephone conferences. I passed the course, and my knowledge of structural theory is a lot deeper than it was.
A few months ago I took off all the foundation investigation and structural rehabilitation information off our website at the advice of a business consultant since it made the site confusing. He advised setting up a separate website, and I finally got it done. Here it is: www.runklestructures.com . The name was the result of a number of discussions with clients. I'm working on building traffic up to the website, which I will cover in this newsletter.
At some point in the future I may issue another newsletter aimed towards homeowners, I haven't decided yet whether to do so or not.
Sincerely,
George W. Runkle P.E., PEng, MIEAust.
Runkle Consulting Inc.
678-225-4900
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Your Website and Marketing
I've learned some important lessons in using the web for marketing, which I would like to share with everyone. We'll assume for a start that you have a website, and understand it's importance in marketing. If you don't, check out this link: Building a Website
Beyond that, these are important lessons I've learned:
1. UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE! Some of you have had the same website since 2005. Yes, it "works" but so does wearing the same shirt to work for a year. If you don't update your site, it falls in search engine results. I was getting 120 visitors a day, and this winter I got very busy with a couple of projects and my graduate course, and quit updating my site. It fell to about 60 to 70 visitors a day. I updated it this weekend and it went up to over 100 visitors a day immediately. Apparently Google's algorithm goes also on how recently you update your site. So, make changes to your website every now and then, even if it is just changing the background.
2. Make your site easy to understand for your target audience. I'm struggling with that on the RunkleStructures site - that site is aimed towards homeowners, and I'm having to make sure I explain clearly what an engineer is, why they would hire me, and why I "don't do the work". Watch that you don't throw in excessive technical terms and jargon that only you understand.
3. Videos are good, Flash graphics are bad. Skip the annoying flash videos at the beginning of your website, it slows down loading the site and is annoying. Web designers seem to like them and put them in to impress themselves. No one wants to see the "cool" intro video to your company.
However, videos showing projects or different things you do can really help drive traffic to your site and explain things clearly to your audience. I have a YouTube account that includes various videos I've uploaded on my projects, and I've embedded them in various places on my website and blog. It really has helped get information out to past and present clients.
4. Facebook pages are a great way to interact with present and future clients, and get out information on your company. My Facebook page is embedded in my website. Watch what you post on Facebook, if you are OK with the entire world seeing it, OK. Otherwise don't put it up there. I advise leaving out your political and religious views, and your misadventures in high school and college. Not everybody is tolerant as we often think they should be.
5. Finally, links are important. Put out as many links as you can to your website on the net. Post to blogs, put your contact information and site in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Directory services are good too, like HotFrog.com. Anything to get links back to your site, it helps search engine rankings, which is why I keep putting links in my newsletter.
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Into the Dragon's Den...
One of my clients, 3twenty Solutions, was featured recently on the hit Canadian TV show, the Dragon's Den. On that show various
entrepreneurs appear before a group of venture capitalists and compete for investing capital. The video is fascinating, and you'll have to watch it to see if they got the cash.
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About Runkle Consulting Inc.
Runkle Consulting Inc. is a structural engineering firm that specializes in buildings made from recycled shipping containers, modular construction, and structural design for architectural metal products.
Runkle Consulting Inc.
930 New Hope Road, Suite #11-145
Lawrenceville, GA 30045
USA
1-678-225-4900 (US/Canada)
(03) 9016 8943 (Australia) |
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Getting the Cost Down
So far I haven't seen anyone build a low cost container residence. The house Glen Donaldson is building down in Atlanta and that we show in the videos attached to this newsletter does not pretend to be a low cost house. However, to build a long narrow house on a lot like he has with the open floor plan used, the cost would be much higher than he has run into. I designed the structure of a house up the street from him that required some really strange structural detailing to keep it from moving laterally in a windstorm. In fact, I had a major dispute with the designer about my detailing where I formally threatened to walk off the job. The designer actually asked me "really what are the chances of a 90MPH wind hitting the house?" when I told him that was what the Code required. Well the answer came up a year later when the neighborhood was hit by a tornado. The answer was 100%.
With Glen's container house, it wasn't difficult detailing it to take the wind loads, the containers provided themselves provided a lot of lateral resistance. We did have to add some cross bracing, but it was simple welding to put them in.
Recently I was asked for a proposal on a house and I was sent a proposed rendering. I almost choked - it was hanging out from the side of a hill, cantilevered to such an extent we'd need to anchor it in the ground to keep it from tipping over. The cost would be obscene. I gave them an engineering price which was appropriately in orbit and never heard back (whew!). That's not really the point of using these things.
I'm working on a project in the Northeast, and I think my client is actually going to hit the $60/a square foot range, which seems to be the Holy Grail of costs. We did it by kicking around ideas back and forth constantly during the design, and keeping the design simple. This house does not have any fancy cantilevers, obeys the laws of gravity, and is using as much off the shelf stuff as possible. So, it can be done.
I get a bit irritated when I see the concepts for container houses that are supposed to be "green" that require not only an extreme amount of steel and welding, but are so complex you need to use new containers (so much for "recycling"). In such case we are making a much larger carbon footprint of the house than the much derided Mc Mansion, which is actually built from timber that is farmed, thus renewable. Adding a green roof doesn't make up for that.
If you really want to be green and build houses that are affordable, keep the thing simple!
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