Editor's note: Today, taking a turn in the editor's blog chair is Ron Kubitz of Brayman Construction. Please join me in welcoming him aboard.

First let me start off this my inaugural blog contribution by thanking National Driller and its editor for allowing me to contribute to the Foundations Report eNewsletter via this blog contribution. Some of you may recognize my name having read my blogging diatribes on the Site Prep Dirt Talk Blog or through my role as recruiting/training manager for Brayman Construction Corporation, a large, nationally recognized heavy civil and geotechnical foundations contractor. Brayman, among other services, specializes in drilling and grouting, marine/piling and caisson applications for geotechnical and foundations construction. I am hopeful that this inaugural blog will establish the foundation for an interested readership of my musings and will not cause the editor of this fine newsletter to wonder what the heck he was thinking in asking me to contribute.

So, it was with great interest that I read this morning that professional golfer Rory McIlroy has broken off his engagement with professional tennis player Caroline Wozniacki. After seeing the wedding invitations go out this past weekend he came to the realization that he was not ready for marriage after all. Glad to see he had this whole marriage thing all thought out! On the bright side (with apologies to my lovely wife) there is hope now again for me to win the heart of the lovely Caroline!

So why do I bring this up you ask? In the last eNewsletter editor Jeremy Verdusco wrote a great piece congratulating International Construction Equipment on their 40th anniversary. He also correctly pointed out that most new companies fail in their first year and a scant few ever make it to five years. So Rory, my good man, in the world of love I see a double bogey in your immediate future. Why do many of these businesses (relationships) fail?

Many new businesses fail as a result of:

• Lack of a well thought out business plan and future goals/objectives.
• Poor hiring plan and a lack of key talented employees.
• Ignorance of the importance of safety to an organization.
• No marketing and public relations vision or foresight.

Points A through D above are the topics that I am most concerned about and I enjoy sharing my expertise in them as they relate to our industry. For example, conduct a Google search on “construction labor shortage” and you get over 1 million hits. Many of these articles pertain specifically to drillers and the geotechnical world that we live in daily. The last edition of National Driller had 20+ ads specifically from companies seeking drillers. Our industry as a whole suffers severe manpower shortages due to the uneducated stigma that sadly our industry faces among the young and impressionable future workforce.

Safety is another important facet of our industry which often gets minimized in the never ending pursuit of profitability. Not a day goes by that we do not read about some tragedy, incident or OSHA/MSHA violation that in most cases could have been prevented with more emphasis on a well thought out safety effort. I love how you can read most websites of companies in our industry and they tout their safety culture or commitment to safety (blah, blah), but how many actually live up to these hollow words?

Another area I spend a great deal of focus on is that of social media, and its benefits to our industry and individual companies. Industry studies show that we in construction lag well behind the norm in the use of social media for recruiting, human resources, marketing, sharing projects, sales, etc. I will hope to share in upcoming blog posts how we as an industry can better use social media for the long term benefits of our companies.

So, in summary, you now know some of the topics and issues that will be forthcoming in future posts. Let me warn you in advance, however, that at times my blogs are quite honestly about nothing substantial in nature but are quite humorous (at least to me) and they seem to pique the interest of my readers. Thanks for reading this and I am hopeful that after this initial effort that you do not get the desire to break off our future engagement. Oh well, now it is time to call my good friend Tiger and I am hopeful he can get me a certain newly single tennis player’s digits! Thanks for reading!