Some perspective on growth.

After crunching a few numbers on our coverage based on metropolitan market area expansion over the last 19 years I was able to put together a simple chart showcasing our growth.

Check out the graph below, I think I see a trend here!



It's good to be a growing company in a shrinking economy, I have to believe that is based on several key factors two of which I feel are;

1. Our commitment to quality and excellence and going the extra mile for our customers.

2. Sound leadership and direction.

Here's to twenty more years of growth and excellence!

Justin Harris
Business Development Director
Construction Monitor

Database Change and new CSV file

Last Thursday we made a change to our database. We changed the data type of the permit number field (pmt_number). This field has always been a numeric type. Initially we thought this would work great because it sorted correctly and cities in the areas we covered used numeric values only. Over time it has become apparent that many cities use both numeric and text characters in their permit numbers. For some time I have been removing any non numeric characters from the permit numbers before we published in order to accomodate the differences.

No more. The change in this field will allow us to show the permit numbers exactly as they appear on the permits. This will provide better accuracy for you, our clients, as you search the data and reference the permits with the actual cities or in other situations.

This may have an impact on you if you automatically import the electronic file into your own system. So please be aware of the change.

Also, we now offer a CSV file for download from our website. This is a very common format for sharing data and importing and exporting that data. We plan to move completely to this format by the end of the year. Many of you will not be affected because you have been converting the old .dbf file to csv before you use it anyway. This just eliminates that conversion step. However, some will have to do some work to accomodate this new format. Please let us know if you have any questions or may need the legacy .dbf version beyond the first of they year.

Thank you,

Ready, Set, Go!

Here we are, twenty years in business and an information and internet business at that and we are finally entering the blog world.

Okay, now that we have that over with, here is what we hope to provide in this communication tool;

More Information!

Yep, more data. Mostly business related, sometimes whimsical, occasionally tech minded but mainly focused on the reason that you would spend your valuable time reading our rants ie; Business building tips, hints, training and informative info you can use to help evaluate your business needs, marketing options and how to get the most out of the Construction Monitor.

So here we go.....

Tip #1 - Watch the Tutorial Videos on the website!
Like the seat belt commercials used to say " You can learn a lot from a dummy".

I created web videos to address the main usage outline of our most popular tools.
We do get a lot of the same questions all the time, well after the launch of the videos, we are getting a lot less....

All these tools can be a little complicated to learn at first, data, data, data and more data and then we give you all these options, what's a new subscriber or new website user to do?

Watch the videos.

The little blue video camera pic at the bottom of the homepage will take you right there, wait 12 and a half seconds and sit back and enjoy. Sorry about the occasional fade in and out of the audio and my voice.... I got a brand new multi-media PC that will be fixing that very soon.
(watch for updates)

I go over the basics of "Mailing Labels" for your direct mail needs and "Powersearch" for your custom search and reporting needs and the "Weekly Edition" for plain old download fun.

Each video averages 5 minutes, It's time well spent to get you started - I promise!

Maybe over the Holidays I will get to start producing some new videos, you are welcome to leave comments on the subject... Let me know what applications you would like to see demo's on and what needs more in depth discussion - we are listening.