Business Advice Needed

[RubiconRic]

Weekly - but can do daily and that possibly- good thought

I was going to say the same as RMETeeJay. Not sure how you're collecting hours today, but there's got to be software / an app for small companies such as yours that deploys to each worker's cell phone for submitting a daily timesheet where they're forced to enter those fields you need, attach a picture, etc., before submitting.

 

[sab]

Andy, I think you're asking too much from skilled trades personnel, and it appears to me that you are at a point where your org chart needs to be re-vamped because, as you scale a business, you can't just use the same structure. Running 14 projects is a near-impossible task by yourself. As several others have pointed out, you really need to find some management help. Here's how it works in the civil construction side of our land development organization, from top-down:

VP Construction - responsible for all construction activities
Project Managers and Asst. Project Managers - liaise between the VP Construction and the Superintendents/Foremen, mainly handling schedule-tracking, budgeting, materials acquisition, and equipment mobilization
Superintendents - responsible for all aspects of day-to-day operations for a region (usually 2-3 projects) - advise/oversees the Foremen
Foremen - functional leads for a crew (for us, excavation crews and utility crews, because we don't do vertical construction, meaning buildings), responsible for doing the actual work safely and efficiently
Crew Members - perform work under the direction of the foremen

I think what you're needing is project manager(s). Construction management is a sub-discipline of civil engineering, but at some schools, it's a separate degree. A good way to start might be to talk with a university near you and see if you can find a student to work part-time or in an internship or co-op, and then, if you treat them right, and you do your part to train them, you could hire them upon graduation. It's not cheap, though. However, as with TJ parts, you get what you pay for.

 

[bucky]

Maybe you need some type of carrot to put in front of them. Either financial or some other type of perk. When I was a framer the boss would give us a beer party if we finished a project on time. My crew got a lot of beer because of this. You just need to develop a metric that they need to meet and be able to track it.

I find that people who say “I don’t have the time” really mean “I don’t want to make the time”.

 

[NWPA Jeepy T]

My 2 cents Andy, what if you treat that check in as their time clock punch out? If they don't check in/punch out, they don't get paid for that day. It'll only happen once.
Granted my single crew is much smaller than probably any of yours, so I'm not sure how that works on a "small business " scale. It works on my micro-tiny business scale

 

[AndyG]

Andy, I think you're asking too much from skilled trades personnel, and it appears to me that you are at a point where your org chart needs to be re-vamped because, as you scale a business, you can't just use the same structure. Running 14 projects is a near-impossible task by yourself. As several others have pointed out, you really need to find some management help. Here's how it works in the civil construction side of our land development organization, from top-down:

VP Construction - responsible for all construction activities
Project Managers and Asst. Project Managers - liaise between the VP Construction and the Superintendents/Foremen, mainly handling schedule-tracking, budgeting, materials acquisition, and equipment mobilization
Superintendents - responsible for all aspects of day-to-day operations for a region (usually 2-3 projects) - advise/oversees the Foremen
Foremen - functional leads for a crew (for us, excavation crews and utility crews, because we don't do vertical construction, meaning buildings), responsible for doing the actual work safely and efficiently
Crew Members - perform work under the direction of the foremen

I think what you're needing is project manager(s). Construction management is a sub-discipline of civil engineering, but a some schools, it's a separate degree. A good way to start might be to talk with a university near you and see if you can find a student to work part-time or in an internship or co-op, and then, if you treat them right, and you do your part to train them, you could hire them upon graduation. It's not cheap, though. However, as with TJ parts, you get what you pay for.

You are correct that we have scaled beyond our administrative capability and that pretty much happens in residential construction the minute you leave the job because nobody’s going to look after things like you-

To make things worse my assistant is out a good bit with a back issue and that is the key to my business model working

We know we’re going to reduce the job count in 2024-

But for right now I am just trying to get people to communicate consistently-

Hopefully once I get them in the habit they will do it well and some of them already do but I think some of them don’t understand the need for it and I think I’m micromanaging when I’m just trying to manage

 

[mjbcomp]

As a small business owner myself here is my gut reaction to your OP. I would have a company meeting 'in person' with every single employee in the same room and say to them what you said in your OP. Let them know that the success of the company is attributable to every single employee and their ability to organize themselves and report back to you the things you need in order to setup the next set of jobs.

Sometimes workers don't have a real sense of how their job interacts with everyone elses. If you let the employees know that there isn't a lot of room for error and that communication is key to the success or failure of them having a job maybe that will help.

If your message still falls on deaf ears then you need to make decisions about replacing employees. Don't let their failure to follow what sounds like a very minimal set of guidelines ruin your reputation as a business and have you constantly worrying about not being able to set expectations to future customers.

In a small business, every member of the team plays a critical roll to success. If an employee isn't willing to conduct themselves like they own the business themselves then they probably need to not be there.

 

[AndyG]

As a small business owner myself here is my gut reaction to your OP. I would have a company meeting 'in person' with every single employee in the same room and say to them what you said in your OP. Let them know that the success of the company is attributable to every single employee and their ability to organize themselves and report back to you the things you need in order to setup the next set of jobs.

Sometimes workers don't have a real sense of how their job interacts with everyone elses. If you let the employees know that there isn't a lot of room for error and that communication is key to the success or failure of them having a job maybe that will help.

If your message still falls on deaf ears then you need to make decisions about replacing employees. Don't let their failure to follow what sounds like a very minimal set of guidelines ruin your reputation as a business and have you constantly worrying about not being able to set expectations to future customers.

I like it - I remember having a boss one time he said let me tell you how this works

Train

re- train

REPLACE

 

[AndyG]

I am going to tell you some other things that we’re doing it this is not meant to sound arrogant but it’s just necessary for survival-

Keep in mind we treat our customers like gold.

We are going in the direction of not taking any work in occupied homes, Or working in any situation that requires constant daily updates- The real truth is and we all know this as business people that comes at a cost. The time it takes to extract information and relay that information is absolutely consuming a good part of my day and most of the time it’s not doing anything but making people feel like they were in the loop.

At the end of the day it doesn’t get their job done any sooner- My point is I have reached a place in my business where I’m about to make the decision do I want to do something productive or do I want to sit in the truck and text people about what I think the electrician is going to do next Wednesday then go back-and-forth with them about what color outlets are available.

I’m just getting at a point where I don’t have to do that to make a living and I’m probably not going to continue doing that and it will eliminate a lot of this entire problem we’re talking about altogether-

I’ll still keep people generally in the loop but all this is to say one other thing that is tied into all this :

We are absolutely taking no more work where we don’t have full-time access to the worksite during business hours. It nearly takes paying somebody a full-time salary to coordinate getting people in and out of houses around people schedules and deal with the ramifications of not being able to get in when they need to creates. It is nowhere nearly as simple as folks think- If the sheet rock guy shows up at 10o’clock on Tuesday and he can’t get in and he’s got to make payroll for the week he’s going to go start a big house Wednesday and he’s not gonna come back for four days and that just threw the whole project behind. Now multiply this by about 15.

And in every situation the customer that complicates access and progress will be the one that screams the loudest.

Keep in mind this is coming from a guy who stresses communication is the key to success and Believes it is the alternate courtesy when you’re tearing up peoples houses and taking their money- It really is sort of a question of can I move away from white built my business now that I’m more established.

I know one contractor that started buying his own properties and doing the work so that he didn’t have to answer to anyone during the process.

Keep in mind if you’re holding on to being a tradesman you have to make a decision because the administrative side quickly takes over.

 

[JustDandee]

I will add maybe to try to put something in a simple upfront contract as a go forward for your subs to work on subsequent jobs. Try to set those expectations in writing seems to have a little more weight and thought. You could tie that to payment compensation or deductions? But either way you have something to fall back on in the course of those reminder conversations that they signed agreement on expectation. It’s your business model, the service levels is what allows your pay what you do, and to be a part of your team /partnership send a frickin update!

 

[AndyG]

I will add maybe to try to put something in a simple upfront contract as a go forward for your subs to work on subsequent jobs. Try to set those expectations in writing seems to have a little more weight and thought. You could tie that to payment compensation or deductions? But either way you have something to fall back on in the course of those reminder conversations that they signed agreement on expectation. It’s your business model, the service levels is what allows your pay what you do, and to be a part of your team /partnership send a frickin update!

I’ve got one right now I am so hot around the collar
I’m about to see red-

This person texted me 70 words trying to explain why they didn’t have time to text me 20 words a few times a week-

So the customer sends me a picture of this evening of the job and in 10 seconds I can see the trades work will be done about Wednesday, We need to have trim planned, We need to have a painter lined up after that, we need to make sure there’s not a conflict with other jobs to serve for then as well, And that leads me to the following week the electrician and plumber need to be ready and we need to have everything they need in hand -

This is how a job gets finished- It’s simply planning and it doesn’t happen by accident.


We pay this guy $350 a day to manage that trade for my company-So you can’t tell me money is the issue.

How hard would it be to simply get me a picture? That is perfectly doable-

 

[John Cooper]

Maybe you need to hire a pervert, one that it is good at managing people.

Maybe even 2 perverts, split the jobs between them and they can spend time at each job, then get you the end of day report.

 

[John Cooper]

Maybe you need to hire a pervert, one that it is good at managing people.

Maybe even 2 perverts, split the jobs between them and they can spend time at each job, then get you the end of day report.

Everyone knows perverts work cheap!!!!!

 

[AndyG]

Everyone knows perverts work cheap!!!!!

They are on jail too much. Trust me, I know some.

 

[JustDandee]

Maybe you need to hire a pervert, one that it is good at managing people.

Maybe even 2 perverts, split the jobs between them and they can spend time at each job, then get you the end of day report.

honestly there maybe a perverted idea there to extrapolate. Hire a highschooler / college student to run a route a to document. A solid kid part-time- run the route and take pics. They love it.

 

[AndyG]

honestly there maybe a perverted idea there to extrapolate. Hire a highschooler / college student to run a route a to document. A solid kid part-time- run the route and take pics. They love it.

Quality idea.

I considered asking clients- most of ours are real tech savy-

It would work if it was explained at the sell of the job- but not presented that the client has to self manage the job-

 

[John Cooper]

Quality idea.

Glad I thought of it

 

[red02tj]

I’ve been in your shoes. Trying to scale from small businesses where you can be everywhere every day to something bigger. Where your name/past performance is your strongest selling point , your best source of revenue is existing clients buying more or in your case referrals.

You’ve got to make some hard choices, You know you can’t be everywhere you want to be everyday so you’ve got two paths.

1) crack the whip, If trades don’t report what you ask, they don’t get assigned to the next job. Downside is you lose some good trades who are crappy managers and communicators. This will cost you time, money and stress in replacing them with someone you hope will do what you ask and with the right work quality.

2) as others have suggested, put in a management level, someone who will uphold your standards, expectations and has enough on the ground experience to call BS with the trades and can make nice with the client.

Most times #2 works best, my best engineers were shitty communicators and hated to talk to a client, but give them a good PM to be the buffer, and the client would request that team every project.

Other not great options like paying a bonus for doing the job basics or profit sharing, will eat you up.

Going back to #2, some of my best sales people ended up being PMs because they spoke to the client every day, knew what needed to be done, and were empowered to make the customer happy. Want to change a part from A to B that cost less than C on a project valued at X? PMs were empowered to make it happen. If it was over C they always said yes, but let’s get the boss to draw up a change order so we’re all on the same page. You get someone to deal with the day to day, who’s empowered to make the client happy, and you focus on the real issues and new business.

 

[AndyG]

I’ve been in your shoes. Trying to scale from small businesses where you can be everywhere every day to something bigger. Where your name/past performance is your strongest selling point , your best source of revenue is existing clients buying more or in your case referrals.

You’ve got to make some hard choices, You know you can’t be everywhere you want to be everyday so you’ve got two paths.

1) crack the whip, If trades don’t report what you ask, they don’t get assigned to the next job. Downside is you lose some good trades who are crappy managers and communicators. This will cost you time, money and stress in replacing them with someone you hope will do what you ask and with the right work quality.

2) as others have suggested, put in a management level, someone who will uphold your standards, expectations and has enough on the ground experience to call BS with the trades and can make nice with the client.

Most times #2 works best, my best engineers were shitty communicators and hated to talk to a client, but give them a good PM to be the buffer, and the client would request that team every project.

Other not great options like paying a bonus for doing the job basics or profit sharing, will eat you up.

Going back to #2, some of my best sales people ended up being PMs because they spoke to the client every day, knew what needed to be done, and were empowered to make the customer happy. Want to change a part from A to B that cost less than C on a project valued at X? PMs were empowered to make it happen. If it was over C they always said yes, but let’s get the boss to draw up a change order so we’re all on the same page. You get someone to deal with the day to day, who’s empowered to make the client happy, and you focus on the real issues and new business.

Man thats an awesome post. Will get reread by me.

 

[AndyG]

And just so you guys know -

One, totally appreciate the posts. Read them all.

Second, I am making changes short and long term- all this is a symptom of too much growth too fast or too little infrastructure.

I’m all for lean. But not chaos.

 

[John Cooper]

And just so you guys know -

One, totally appreciate the posts. Read them all.

Second, I am making changes short and long term- all this is a symptom of too much growth too fast or too little infrastructure.

I’m all for lean. But not chaos.

You got this bud!! You didn't get where you are by accident!!