We’re proud to say that in all the years of renovating, landscaping, and remodeling, we’ve always been on time and under budget.
However, our latest interior renovation for a client was a nightmare—and I’m not making excuses when I say that it had nothing to do with us.
A lot has happened in recent years that has shaken up the world and made it difficult for businesses of all sizes to operate, let alone survive.
Supply Shortages
To put it simply, many businesses are dying because both demand and supply are too low to suffice. It’s a huge blow to profitability if people can’t access or afford your products or services, either due to extenuating circumstances or macroeconomic factors that trickle into micro effects that affect households or individuals.
The business also cannot survive if we cannot produce or deliver the very products or services that customers pay us for.
Unfortunately, supply shortages have been driving our team crazy.
Like many businesses, we haven’t been able to get the supplies we need due to both domestic and global shortages. Certain raw materials aren’t available for delivery, or the delivery and logistics of those raw materials have been in deadlock.
Rising Gas And Diesel Prices
I’m sure many of us have been feeling robbed each time we fill up our cars at the gas station. What’s more shocking about the gas prices is that diesel prices are even higher.
The problem with high diesel prices is that trucks and some ships are fueled by diesel. Nearly everything is delivered via trucks—and the effects of expensive diesel cascade throughout the economy. Groceries have become more expensive not just because of the cost of production, but because they had to first get delivered to the store you shop at. With each passing day, it is becoming more and more expensive to merely make products available for sale to consumers.
Political unrest in certain parts of Europe has caused significant increases in prices of wheat and wheat-based—as well as natural gas.
Trucking Industry Risks
When it comes to our industry, the home improvement industry, we heavily rely on outsourcing to acquire the materials we need to get the job done. We’re a small business that keeps our operations lean, which means that we do not have a large warehouse to store inventory. Rather, the supplies we order and stored in our small warehouse for a short amount of time leading up to a project’s start date.
Rather than stockpiling, we rely on our suppliers and their trucking companies to deliver within the specified time frame.
The custom tiles we ordered for our last project were not only dispatched late—they were damaged in transit. As you can imagine, broken custom tiles aren’t something that you can salvage.
Thankfully, the delivery and logistics company of our supplier had truck fleet insurance, which provided coverage for the cost of the damaged goods that they were liable for. I later learned that it was S.W.A.N. INSURANCE SOLUTIONS which works with the delivery company for their trucking insurance. You can give them a call today.
S.W.A.N. INSURANCE SOLUTIONS
2148 Fourth Ave, San Diego, CA 92101