Mark: Today on PowerTips Unscripted, we talked to Paul Kowalski, owner of PK Builders in Charlotte, North Carolina. You know, we’ve had some of our very own consultants on this show to talk about lean process improvement, and that was great. But Paul is the owner of an award winning design build firm that has actually applied lean principles to his business, and he’s going to share his experience in just a minute.

Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to PowerTips Unscripted, where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And I’m here with my co-host, Mark Harari.

Mark: You sure.

Victoria: Are. How are you doing, Mark?

Mark: I’m doing great.

Victoria: Oh, good. Good to do another podcast. How fun. Yes, I love it. And this one is going to be awesome because it’s, not only with one of our nicest roundtable members who has lots of fun, but also on a topic that I think everybody should know about, which is yes for.

Mark: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Lean is huge. And anybody that is anybody is thinking lean for their business.

Victoria: Well, you know, one of the reasons it’s drive and one of the things that’s driving that is the lack of skilled labor and the fact that if these folks want to grow, they’ve got to do more with what they have.

Mark: You know, that’s actually that’s such an important thing to consider. I mean, it is a great way to combat the labor shortage. Don’t need so much labor. So if you need can do more with less you’re just leaps and bounds ahead of others.

Victoria: Yeah. No kidding. You know so you even if you charge the same you’ll be able to make more profits or you might be able to charge a little bit less. Still make great profits. And I’m that much more business. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s good. So let’s get going. So Paul Kowalski, as I said, is one of our nicest roundtable members.

Victoria: He’s awesome in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he’s the owner of Peak Builders. it’s an award winning firm design build that focuses on large scale residential remodeling. And he’s going to be hosting his roundtable group at his offices in a month or two. Welcome, Paul. We’re delighted to have you here.

Paul: Thank you so much for having me. So, so happy to be here as well and happy to share some of my experiences. And thank you for the the warm introduction. The nicest roundtable member. Sorry for all the less nice roundtable members, but,

Victoria: They’re all nice and nicest.

Mark: No. Well, I know you said one of the nicest.

Victoria: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: That’s great. We can’t give them that.

Victoria: Yeah, well, we’re glad you’re here. And you’re generous to just because you’re here, willing to talk to us about it. Because really, you’re just starting on this journey, aren’t you?

Paul: Yeah. That’s true, that’s true. We just got started with the lean process. Well, we’re a couple months down the road, and are anxious to see some of the results. However, we do have some early returns that I’d love to share with you today. but it’s been exciting and eye opening for sure.

Victoria: Well, so to start out, just so our listeners, our listeners are all up to speed with us. Can you define lean for us?

Paul: Yes. Lean is a, principle, basically, a manufacturing principle originally from Toyota and it is the elimination, or the pursuit of the elimination of waste, to constantly improve, processes and improve a business. So try and find finding ways to eliminate waste. and constantly improving and company through that.

Victoria: How did you start to be aware of lean and thought that it might be something for you?

Paul: So, I think I originally saw, a presentation from Doug Howard, early on during one of the, sessions. And, you know, to be very honest and transparent, looked at it and said, well, that’s a great way to look at things, but, never really ventured down that path until, a little bit later, 2018.

Paul: Com came along and we’re a growing remodeling company and started experiencing a few growing pains. And, actually ended up working with Doug Howard, and got reintroduced to lean. And, of course, today we’ll talk a little bit more about it, but, that’s that’s really where, it came to life for us.

Victoria: So what was going on in your company at that time, that what were some of those growing pains that made you look for a better way to do things?

Paul: Absolutely. Yeah. No. So we were experiencing, you know, just some bottlenecks in the design build process. And, you know, kind of learning how to best process, you know, from plan stage to get folks to close on construction contracts. That was the big piece. so we had some issues with our design build process. some cash flow issues came about higher overhead.

Paul: so those type items, hit us pretty hard in 2018. and, we were looking for a way to, well, reduce overhead and be more efficient and more lean.

Victoria: And more profitable than.

Paul: yes, absolutely. And goal.

Victoria: So, okay, so again, like you said, growing pains. A lot of people experience it. How did you start to apply lean principles? How did you know? What were some of the first things you did to put this into place. And and how do you even explain it to your staff?

Paul: Oh, great. Great questions. Yeah. So, a lot of help with Doug. I will say that, and I became a, I hopefully what I would call a relatively quick study, in lean. so Doug really introduced it to me. there’s a wonderful video that hopefully we’ll be able to get to share with the New York City Food Bank, with some of the listeners.

Paul: but that is a really great nutshell video that kind of explains the process and how you can do things. So, you know, the bottom line answer is, is Doug really helped a whole bunch and gave me enough tools and an outlook of how this process would go and how we would execute it. and I ended up sharing it with the team in chunks, gave them an overview, shared the video with them so they could at least understand what we were trying to achieve through this process, and then really got right down to it and started doing, an assessment of some of the problem areas in the companies and in our company

Paul: and really asking, hey, where are there areas where we can improve if X were different, how much better would the world be? you know, kind of thing. So very broad questions to the team and, and, really kind of reaching out to try and find where our hiccups and one of the principles in lean, is that, you know, the people who are actually doing the work or are closest to the work are the folks that are going to have the best input and feedback, on it.

Paul: So involving the whole team was was important.

Mark: Oh, could you share with our listeners how big is that whole team?

Paul: yes. Good question. So the whole team is eight folks, including myself. We have, four project managers and estimator, project coordinator and a draftsmen. Okay. I think I’ve got them all. I missed one. I don’t think so. I think we got them all right there.

Mark: So, so. And then how did how did they react initially?

Paul: Good question. So, you know, I think initially we you know, I think there was an element of why are we doing this again? And what is this going to lead to? however, you know, I did get really good response. I mean, I guess whenever the boss is asking somebody to say, hey, where where are their flaws in our game, they’re happy to share.

Victoria: So,

Paul: So we got we got good feedback, some really thoughtful feedback. And, you know, I think there was a little bit of a weariness of like, you know, where does this end up? but, you know, just keeping them encouraged and letting them know that, hey, this is we’re going to end up finding some of the key pain points and some of the key problems in our business and be able to diagnose them and ensuring them the early steps in the process of kind of detecting this and being open and honest, and looking at our processes, really, would allow for us to identify, the issues and, and then we can attack them

Paul: from there.

Victoria: So it’s just, you know, I think a lot of people think of the whole lean philosophy and processes as being something that’s very complicated to them and detailed and very sophisticated. Is that what you found?

Paul: you know, it’s not. And I will say this. When I first embarked on on lean and learning about it and implementing it, it was a little bit intimidating. However, I will say this once you give the lean process a good one through, it it all becomes that much easier. It is. There is a lot of pre-work and identification of issues and talking about those and talking about concepts early.

Paul: But once you get to the phase where you’re laying out your process, and seeing where the points in the process that you can improve, it, it just becomes something that is enlightening for the whole team. And, I will say talking about a little bit of the potential skepticism early, it all went away when we reached the end of the process.

Paul: And, just a tremendous amount of buy in from the team now. And we really look to make this something that this is going to be our improvement method moving forward. When we identify an issue, using these principles, I think becomes second nature once you’ve run through it. So there’s a little bit of a hurdle and a little bit of intimidation in the get go.

Paul: But once you’ve given it a good try and an honest once through, it’s something the whole team, it’s a mindset at some point really, you know.

Victoria: So Paul, could you take us through the process? Tell us about one of the sticky points you identified and just how the whole thing went?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned before, the design, build process and especially the design phase of our process, seemed to be a bottleneck where we had projects ready to, you know, well, not ready to go. They were in process, and we really needed to bring them to, a contract ready phase. And when we did our, team meetings, it seemed that at least each department had a beef with some phase of our design process.

Paul: So I’d be happy to talk about that. So we broke out the design process. Once we identified that this was something as a team, should be the first thing that we tackle. we, took a look at it and said, you know, okay, let’s spread this out to our current state, which we did with a, with a large, large piece of, two foot paper, two foot wide paper spread it out.

Paul: Post-it notes. Got everything spread out there. And, we found several points, along the line where we could speed things up. a few that come to mind right off the top of my head were engineering. When we got our engineers involved in the process, we had set out a template early on where we would wait for final approval of the plan through revisions before we contacted the engineer.

Paul: Well, even though we had the footprint right, and the rest of the structure right, and we may need to move a wall here or two that isn’t load bearing. This could be going out to the engineer. That piece right there saved us seven days. So just oh, an easy fix. But until you get that thing laid out where the whole team can see it, it’s not as clear as you would think.

Victoria: Now, call back up for just a second. You said that you laid the whole thing out. What exactly does that mean?

Paul: Yeah. So a great, great question. So there’s there’s a part in the process where you have to be able to assign all the steps in the process. And we have a large format plotter printer upstairs. That’s the two foot wide that I mentioned. So we basically had feed on that thing. Our our actual lean process for our design process took 16ft of that paper also.

Victoria: So step each. So each step was spelled out on a sticky piece of paper, a sticky note you got from beginning to end. And whoever was responsible for that was listed along with the task or the step.

Paul: Absolutely. We created swim lanes along that two foot of paper for estimating, drafting, sales, production. And then we put the notes in each of their swim lanes on a timeline. And were I able to identify the lag times in between each post-it note and each step? so that was part of the identification process. And again, I must say that was one of the more illuminating pieces like, oh my God, it takes 16ft of post-it notes to get this done.

Paul: Yeah. And if that didn’t make a statement, I don’t know what would, but, you know, but it was great to be for the whole team to look at it and to see where there was and once another step, once you have it laid out in the current state, you get to ask questions about what does this look like?

Paul: In an ideal world, you know, how how does things change? If we look at this a little bit differently, and the engineering piece was one that jumped off the page, another one that I, that I have to share is, the idea that we had this template and in the template and in our, owners construction calendar, we had revision number one and revision number two.

Paul: Well, if we’re really doing our job in design, why are we including revisions automatically? We’re setting the tone for who you’re supposed to revise this, you know, whereas me. And if we hit it on the head, there’s no need for a revision. So just, you know, simple things like removing that, and, and there’s another piece that ties to that, which is before we turn out this first version of the plan, are we collaborating?

Paul: You know, is our draftsman creating this and handing it off to the homeowner and then waiting for a response? You know, how is the designer bought in? Is our production team bought in? Is this the most efficient way to produce this plan? is our designer looking at it, saying this is going to work best for the kitchen layout?

Paul: So instead of that happening, handing off the plan from draftsman to owner, crossing our fingers and hoping they come back and say we love it, let’s give them a collaborative effort so that if it goes to design later, when the kitchen’s coming in, designer has complete buy in that the walls are in the right spot. So these are just a few of, you know, a few items out of a whole process that we picked out.

Paul: But again, having the team buy into that and say, yeah, you know what, Paul? That would be a great idea to have a team meeting prior to releasing the plan today. So lots of great stuff in there.

Victoria: So once you start, you mentioned the seven days that you saved on that engineering piece. What are some of the other results that you’ve seen?

Paul: So, good. Good question. So if we play strictly by the numbers here, when we mapped out our process, that 16ft piece of paper, it we counted it up. We ended up with, a 124 days was our process how long it would take to get from signing of a design proposal to an actual contract ready estimate.

Paul: now, we did measure that. That is the written paper piece. And for all those who are embarking on a lean journey, please know that that current state, when you map it out, may actually be longer. When we averaged out our actual, design proposal process amongst all the designs that we’ve done, we ended up with an actual days of 97.

Paul: Now that takes a plan that may have gone through a super quick and some ones that lag, but on average it was 97 laid out complete. It was 124 days. Now, where we’re at, from the current state to what we would call the future state in the in the what we’ve conceived as the more ideal state for the process.

Paul: we’ve got it down to 103 days. So, you know, we’re knocking off three weeks off our process. So, that’s, that’s the net return. Now, have to come back, maybe for another podcast or at least update this board. can’t wait to get the actual average, and I think we’ll probably be measuring that as we move along, but I think we’ll have a reasonable amount of designs through by December 2019.

Paul: So more to come.

Mark: Paul, I gotta tell you, you sound like like a kid on Christmas morning. You sound so excited. You sound so passionate about what’s happening for your company. So? So it’s just kind of just coming through the microphone right now. so you’ve obviously bought into the whole idea. And so I’m wondering what’s what’s next? the do you have something scheduled?

Mark: But what’s the next thing you’re going to tackle. What’s what’s the future look like.

Paul: Yeah. No. Great question. So yeah, the future is really that measurable piece that I was talking about. I mean, I think as a team, we’re really excited to see what that average is. and then we get to look back at the process and see, okay, what were the intended consequences? Did this achieve what we want it to, by our measurables, which is how quick do we go from a design to a signed actual construction contract?

Paul: So we’re excited for that. you know, measuring by that and then also getting a chance to look back at our current state and what’s working and what’s not working. you know, with lean, you will get some unintended consequences. Pulling some of those levers, sometimes lead to good things, but, the, the lean idea and the lean principle is it’s it’s constant improvement.

Paul: so we’re always looking at ways to lean this up. So just because we went through it once doesn’t mean this is over. this continues, more moreover and more towards the overall, you know, for the future. you know, I look forward to the team really adopting this as our way to address problems and really have a systematic way to approach this.

Paul: and the whole team knows the process. So, I’m excited, leaning out and excited to lean out a bunch of processes in our company. So, yeah, absolutely. Great question. And I must say, I have to add one more thing. I can’t wait to see the the difference in cash flow with this piece. and, it’s kind of an interesting thing to think about, but, you know, if you have stuff locked up in design, you’re not signing contracts.

Paul: money’s not coming through. so the quicker you can get these projects approved, create compelling designs. you know, the more we can get through the door and the more we can process. So I guess it means, well, money.

Mark: Yeah.

Paul: Let’s talk about that.

Mark: Like money.

Paul: Man, if I sound like a kid on Christmas.

Victoria: Yeah. So, Paul. Okay, so you started on this one. You found this this one area of the design bottleneck. have you started yet? Have you had a meeting on any others yet?

Paul: You know, this was this was a pretty big undertaking. So we haven’t started on anything else yet. at this time, there’s there’s a couple ideas that that are floating out there. more on the production side of things, concerning some of our production processes, but but nothing specific as of yet. I think we’re we’re all really excited and just really starting to feel some of these impacts of some of the changes with the design process.

Paul: So we’re in a happy space right now.

Victoria: Yeah. Well, so how often like, well, what’s the cadence going to be in terms of attacking the next one. And the one after that like one a quarter, one three times a year, one every other month. How are you going to do that?

Paul: That’s a great question. I think it’s, you know, for us right now, I think we really want to see this lean process applied to the design. and measure this out. We want to see that through the end of 2019. So I think that’s going to be on our plate through the end of the year, depending on the pieces that we look to attack next.

Paul: I think the, the size of the issue may depend on how often we do this. However, I think it’d be a great idea, you know, quarterly to kind of look at, and mention this, but our team functions very open in our monthly meetings. so I think if there’s an issue that’s coming up, I think will address it, you know, could be monthly.

Paul: It’s an open door and employees can, can nominate items for, for scrutiny under the lean process. Yeah.

Victoria: That’s awesome. Very exciting.

Mark: Paul, let’s see how good this lean thing’s working for you. Let’s see how quickly you can get through my lightning round. Questions.

Paul: All right, I’ll do my best. Exciting. And now here’s the remodelers advantage. Lightning round. It’s a trap.

Mark: Okay, let’s put 60s on the clock. Here we go. What’s your favorite business book? And why?

Paul: e-myth. Contractor by Gerber. That was a game changer for me. It kind of opened my eyes and got me working. you know, not so much in the business, but on the business.

Mark: If you weren’t the owner of a design build firm, what do you think you’d be doing?

Paul: it’d be hard to podcast me on a set of skis on a mountain, being I would be out in Western, United States skiing. Absolutely.

Mark: What are you not very good at? Ooh.

Paul: saying no to tasty foods and tasty beer?

Mark: to shame.

Paul: A weak point for me.

Mark: Yeah. You just stole mine. Your room, your desk or your car? Which do you clean first?

Paul: desk. Desk? Yes.

Mark: How old is your oldest pair of shoes?

Paul: Oh, I’m going to go ten years now.

Mark: Name a used for a bowling ball. Other than bowling for paperweight.

Mark: Well, you got 16ft sheets of paper laying around. I guess you need a bowling ball for it.

Victoria: I, I know again. Hey, Paul, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this. I you know, I know that you’re going to be reporting, and we would love to have you back and hear more about the results, because as you say, you know, the quicker you can get from design to construction, the more jobs you can do, the faster you get money.

Victoria: Everybody gets happy and excited and pumped. The clients are happier. It’s a win win, win, win win.

Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. And I add to that increased collaboration and just better products by looking at this type process, it makes you a better company. Yeah.

Victoria: Great. Hey, before you go, I want you to share with our listeners your five words of wisdom and why those are your five words.

Paul: Yeah. And so my five words of wisdom and I struggled over this a little bit. But, what I came up with was passion and discipline, deliver dreams. so hopefully that is and, hopefully that didn’t come with too big of a slice of cheese there, but, that’s great. Honestly, I, I really, I really do believe it.

Paul: You know, if you’re, if you’re passionate about something and you’re willing to have the discipline to execute, plans, you’re the dreams that you’re should forget to get delivered. so it’s about it’s about the fire inside, and it’s about the, the tough part, the discipline for actually execute them. And things happen if you keep your nose to the grindstone.

Paul: So that’s that’s where I went with that.

Victoria: That’s awesome. Great great. Five words I like them. And Paul that was great seeing you down in North Carolina last week and introducing me to that awesome Charlotte, beer bar brewery place. That was really good.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. Plenty of, plenty of tough food and beer choices.

Victoria: For that too. No kidding. No kidding. There’s lots of fun and it’s a lot of fun having you on here. So thank you very much. we appreciate it. And, we’ll have you on again.

Paul: You’re very welcome. Enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. All right.

Victoria: Bye, Paul. It makes me excited to use some of the lean principles in our company.

Mark: Yeah, well, you know, like, like I said, he sound. Didn’t he just sound like I was a Christian? So. I mean, he just sounded. You can hear the smile on his face while he was talking about it. He was? Yeah. You said it. He’s fired up. I mean, the thought, I mean, he’s got one of those huge, big plotter printer deals, and he just hit the feed button and had a 16ft wide sheet.

Mark: You know what we should do? I’m going to actually, since we’re done here, I’m going to shoot him back in email and I’m going to ask him if he can take a picture of that.

Victoria: Oh, great.

Mark: We should try to get a picture. I’m sure he still got it. You know, for something like that away. Right? Maybe with a team in front of it or something. Let’s get him to and we’ll put it in the show notes.

Victoria: Yeah, that’d be wonderful.

Mark: I think that would be really cool. and actually, speaking of putting in the show notes, so he referenced a few things. So he referenced a video.

Victoria: Right. and of course we had to put in lean.com Lee in remodeling.com. Yeah.

Mark: So we’ll put we’ll put the video in the show notes as well. So anybody that’s interested in seeing what he was referring to there, we can you can check that out. And yeah. If you go to lean remodeling.com, he was talking about the swim lanes that he did on that big, 16ft wide sheet of paper, which is basically a process mapping tool.

Mark: And we have a free one that you could download on lean remodeling.com. You just got to scroll down to the bottom of the page when you get there. but at the very least, even if you don’t use it, you could get a sense for what he was doing. in real time. But and of.

Victoria: Course, there’s blogs and other resources on that site as well.

Mark: Yeah. But getting there, we just launched that site, so we’ll have some blog posts hitting, I think, in the next couple weeks, but yeah, but no, I mean, that was really great. And like I said, he was just he just you could hear the smile.

Victoria: On his face. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, that was another good one. I like doing these.

Mark: doing these.

Victoria: I learned so much.

Mark: Yes, I like doing these, too. They’re fun. And we get to talk to awesome people. so it’s great. well, can’t wait to hear about his his outcomes in a future episode. And we need to have him on again to give us an update. You bet. we want to thank Paul for being here today. And always.

Mark: We want to thank you for listening. I’m Mark Harari.

Victoria: And I’m Victoria Downing. See you next week.