Hello, everyone.

This is Enta.

For every good thing, there's a bad thing.

Come to think of it, does life ultimately end up being a wash?

To those of you with more life experience! What’s the real story here??

Actually, when you look back on things now, how did you handle the balance between work and your personal life?

Getting married is a plus, having a kid is a plus, the kids leaving home is a plus, and getting divorced is a big minus? (lol)

Ultimately, the margin of error between the positives and negatives in life is a subtle one—some people are in the positive right now, while others are in the negative.

Today might be negative, but tomorrow might be positive.

I wonder how it'll all turn out in the end~ lol

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But that's beside the point.

Secure at least one more job site.

Basically, if companies don't achieve positive growth, small and micro-enterprises will go out of business.

That said, a cash crunch (when you run out of cash)

It doesn't quite work out to be plus or minus zero.

Back in the day, people used to say, “We don’t have the money for this job right now, so we’ll do it on the next one,” but that doesn’t happen anymore, does it?

I don't have another gig lined up yet, and even if I did, I don't have the money (lol)

What I mean is that I want to settle things properly as they come up.

Lately, the number of new students has dropped significantly—Low-Price Bid(Fixed-price sales) are better than they were for a while.

Even though I say "more," it doesn't feel like it's low anymore. (The proportion of low entries has increased.)

Actually, the general contractor’s contract price hasn’t changed that much from before. Or rather, it’s actually gone up.

That's because labor costs have gone up quite a bit.

So, the contract prices for us subcontractors haven't gone up that much. Why is that??

 

Well, since the overall volume of construction work has decreased, it’s only natural that the general contractor will face cash flow problems when there’s no work.

When you think about it, it’s kind of hard to make unreasonable demands as a subcontractor, isn’t it? lol

What's more, subcontractors have a lot more responsibilities than you'd expect.

When I think about it, I really do want the general contractor to make a profit.

 

So, when I think about how we can get more work, is it just down to politics?? Or should we pray to the gods? lol

As public works contractors, we work under the government, so there are some things we just can't help.

But if I just sit around doing nothing, I'll just end up failing, so I'm going to do what I can.

 

Slope engineers tend to travel for work.

When I was younger, I was always traveling for work, too.

It was quite common for me to go from a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism site in Kagoshima to a NEXCO site in Niigata right after a project was completed.

 

That means going where the jobs are is the quickest way to find work.

Other ways to secure work include taking on projects in other trades or using your company’s proprietary construction methods.

If you take on work in other trades, it will take time and money to learn them thoroughly, so it’s not a good idea.

If we sell the construction methods we’ve developed in-house and use them for our projects, we may be able to secure exclusive rights to that specific aspect.

That way, you can work in the Blue Ocean without getting caught up in the Red Ocean (fierce price competition).

I'm making it sound easy, but it seems like a pretty high hurdle, lol.

I feel like for a small business like ours, this is probably the only way to survive.

There’s no way we can compete with the major franchise operators, and we’re not doing anything different from other companies.

I'm just an ordinary nori shop.

If you want to figure out how to turn your next project into one that can be completed successfully, you need to have your own construction methods.

This is strictly speaking only if it were actually incorporated into the design, though lol (I tend to let my imagination run wild, haha).

 

So, starting this year, we’re going to get serious about developing our own construction methods (lol).

Our plans for this year include various administrative procedures and trial construction.

Since I've been working on this for the past few years, I've got it pretty much down, so now it's just a matter of experimenting.

When the time comes, I’m thinking I’ll share some details and try to recruit some fellow slope-work enthusiasts so we can all work together.

To land even just one more job!

 

See you later.