We spend a lot of time in this space doling out advice on how contractors can do their jobs better. I’ve talked about everything from building healthy financial statements to hiring the best the millennial crop has to offer. Now I want to flip the script and hear from readers: What advice do you have for us?

As I write this, the National Ground Water Association’s annual Groundwater Week event sits fresh in my mind. I cherish the opportunity to hear from readers and advertisers. We got a lot of “I love the magazine” and “It’s the best resource in the industry” comments. I appreciate the kudos, and surveys we do of readers every few years confirm we have a good reputation.

But mama didn’t raise a fool. I know plenty of people won’t deliver bad news or criticism in person. Heck, people who don’t like us probably wouldn’t even visit the booth to share their $.02. As honest people know, critics make us sharper. That brings me to back to the original question: What advice do you have for us?

Doing Better For You

As a brand, we work to reach people where they live. They might live in the cab of their work truck. We have a good mobile website. They might live in the office, where we reach them with the print magazine or our desktop website. They might live in their inbox, in which case we have eNewsletters focused on news and our ever-popular classifieds.

Are we missing anything? Is there somewhere we could reach you, where we’re not already? Let us know.

Let’s talk topics. I’ve led National Driller as a “generalist” magazine. That publishing term translates to “something for everybody” in layman’s terms. I let our readership profiles inform and steer things, which means we cover a lot of water well-related stuff, but we feature everything under the big tent of the drilling industry. As a reader, does that work for you? What topics do you want us to cover more? For example, should we pay more attention to geotech or geothermal? Oil and gas? Tells us what you want to see.

Doing Better For Everyone Else

Circling back to a point from a few paragraphs back, people hate delivering criticism directly. As readers, you probably know people who subscribed to us, but stopped for one reason or another (even though free is an excellent price point). They probably had their reasons. What could we do to get these folks back on board?

Lastly, you probably also know people who never subscribed. I know you’ve done all you can, telling these friends and peers in the industry about how great National Driller is. But what can we do? What elevator pitch would bring these folks into the fold so we can start serving them, too?

As close as we stay to the industry pulse, we’ll never have the frankness of a conversation from one driller to another. That’s where you come in. When you talk to other drillers about National Driller, what do you say? If you praise us, thank you. We enjoy hearing about that. If you think we can do better for you and have ideas about how we can help and serve other soon-to-be-subscribers, we want to hear that too.

Our goal, as always, is to bridge the gap between the people and products in this industry. We do that by working to reflect the industry, as it is. You read these pages every month. What advice do you have for us? Send an email to verduscoj@bnpmedia.com and let us know.

Stay safe out there, drillers.