President's Message: Good Customers Are Complainers

Good customers call and complain. If they’re upset with your product or service, they get you on the phone and tell you how they want it fixed. Now, there’s always negotiations that follow, but the point is that they care enough to give you a chance to make things right. The worst customers just go away without ever giving you a reason. How can you improve if you don’t know what went wrong?

The same thing is true of SBCA membership. I want to know what we can do better. That’s why I’ve been calling every component manufacturer (CM) who decides to walk away from the association. That list isn’t very long, but I have found the conversations very helpful.

For instance, I recently talked to a long-time member who decided not to renew. He explained that he was concerned the building code did not sufficiently address snow loading conditions in his area. Following recent collapses after heavy snows, he went to his chapter to argue they shouldn’t be using code-permitted load reductions. One of his competitors agreed with him. Another said that as long as the code allowed a reduction, they would continue taking it.

The CM I talked with came away from the chapter meeting with the impression that SBCA condoned CMs taking every allowed reduction. He was mad at his competitor and he was mad at SBCA, so he dropped his membership.

I understand his anger; I’ve had plenty of experiences when I didn’t like something my competitors were doing. However, I explained to him that SBCA does not dictate what individual members do. In the end, all SBCA members decide how to run their own companies.

I told this CM that what SBCA can do for its members is provide best practice guidance and sound engineering analysis. If the issue is with a code, SBCA can evaluate the options and advocate on both the local and the national level for changes that are in the best interest of the industry as a whole. Therein lies the value of a trade association.

I think of it like buying insurance: you pay premiums not because you hope you’ll have property damage or someone will get hurt, but because you need a safety net just in case the worst case scenario happens. SBCA, much like your insurance policy, provides a support structure you can rely on when you need it. If you aren’t a member yet, I’d love to talk with you about how you benefit from being part of the association.

You know, if I hadn’t called that CM after he dropped his membership, it may have been a while before SBCA learned of the different member perspectives on this code issue. Now that we know, we can take action. So I encourage all of you to speak up if there’s something SBCA could be doing better or if there’s a market issue you’d like help with. And if there’s something you don’t like, be a good customer: call me and complain so we can improve.