Greg: Welcome to the Tim Faller Show, where production is paramount and we discuss the tools, time and people associated with getting jobs done and making a profit.

Greg: On today’s episode of The Tim Faller Show, we will be discussing calculating capacity with the help of special guest Chris Peterson of Schloegel Design Remodel in Kansas City, Missouri, alongside Tim Faller. I am your co-host, Greg Woleck. Here is the Tim Faller.

Tim: Hey, everyone, Tim Faller here and welcome to another episode of The Tim Faller Show. As I’ve always done for the last five years or so, invite you to send in ideas. I love to hear from people. If you just like the show, send me an email. If you don’t like the show, send the email to somebody else because I don’t really want to.

Tim: I don’t really want bad news. So I do want to emphasize though, today that we are doing sort of a series. It isn’t really calculated, but it’s a series on the capacity of production to handle the jobs that you have. And I just want to anybody out there that is doing this in a way that works for their company, they have figured it out.

Tim: I would love to hear from you and maybe have you on the show. Maybe not doesn’t. It’s up to you. But this is kind of a, I don’t know, a passion of mine right now to try to work out what is capacity within a company. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. So along with this, the first part of this series, if you will, was a few episodes.

Tim: Back with Chris Fox of Fox Home Innovation. And the topic was Capacity Beyond Demand. And we talked about all kinds of different things. But the main thing was giving people the right amount of work but not overtaxing them, not not making it such a burden that they had no time to even think about what they were doing. And I think as we talked, we realized that I’m doing air quotes here.

Tim: Everybody, the right amount of work was really hard to define. It’s very, very difficult to get a good definition on it. Now, the industry has tried over the years to do this with dollar volumes. The question was how much volume can a project manager do in a year? And everybody wants to quote a number, but it falls apart when one company is doing $750,000 projects and another company is doing $100,000 projects, they’re just not the same when you look at them.

Tim: The numbers of jobs running concurrently, like how many jobs can a league carpenter handle at one time that falls apart for the same reasons because dollar volume size of projects really changes that. And then of course, there’s just the difference in people whether it’s a league carpenter or a project manager. Some are able to handle more of the details, the capacity and dare I say, the stress better than other people can.

Tim: And then of course, we have this challenge which we’ve been dealing with a lot lately on the podcast of does the sales team get you good information? Obviously, the better the information is, the more jobs somebody can handle. And so there’s always a variety of that within a company. So the solutions probably in your computer. Okay. And I’m just going to tell you, you got to drag it out now.

Tim: It’s going to take a lot of work and it’s going to take a lot of effort. But in the long run, it’s really going to be worthwhile. And what I’ve seen with companies that have done this, that given the hard work, the pay off is extremely beneficial, better morale, better planning for future hires, long term commitment from employees because we’re not burning them out.

Tim: And guess what everybody gets when we get all those just better piece of mind. And so there’s probably other companies out there that are doing this. I know of one particular and we have one of the owners for that company on today to share what they’re doing. And like I said earlier, if you’re doing something like this, maybe a little bit different take.

Tim: I would love to hear from you so we can get a number of different points of view on here and really push this out into the industry. So Greg, let’s welcome our guest.

Greg: Thanks, Tim. Chris Peterson holds a litany of professional credentials and is a co-owner of Schloegel Design Remodel, the award winning Kansas City based Design Build Firm focuses on creating the ultimate client experience during every project. Chris started his career as a craftsman and continued to climb the ranks with his attention to detail as management skills and his love of the industry.

Greg: Chris participates in remodelers advantage and is persistently advocates for industry growth. Chris His greatest passion, however, is barbecue. He actively competes in Kansas City competition and has brought several awards home. He also loves to spend time with his wife and two daughters, as well as his 16 month old granddaughter. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me, Tim. Greg, it’s great to see you both.

Tim: Yeah, so we were just yakking before we got on the air, so to speak. I think this is Chris’s fourth time on the show with us. I think he holds the record for repeat guests. But just in case anybody missed you before. Chris, give us a little more information about Schloegel and how the company there operates.

Chris: Sure. Sure. Well, I thought maybe my fourth time was going to be like your retirement podcast or something, and especially not the door kind of deal there, but, well.

Tim: We can still work that out, too, you know.

Chris: We’re a $15 million company, second generation, a true residential design build firm. The 15 million is in, you know, blended between design, build and handyman, as well as our in-house design department. Last year we did almost 11 million in design build and 4 million in handyman with a couple hundred thousand in the design department. So now I’m Charlie, second generation Charlie and I bought the business from Jake in about six years ago in 2018.

Chris: And currently work routine is somewhere between 65 and 70 people between you know, again admin production staff, sales and design. And we run a kind of a hybrid production system. Mostly carpenters and project managers, which I know you’re not a fan of, but it works for us. It’s a little top heavy, but it works for us.

Tim: You know, actually, Chris, I’m a big fan of it. As companies get bigger and bigger, they just don’t have the capacity with straightly Carpenter or straight project management. And that’s sort of a trend in the industry. So we’re going to focus on capacity here. And you and I have had conversations about this several years ago as well as just recently.

Tim: But if you would start back at the beginning and kind of give us the thought process that you guys had that said we need to we need to focus on this, we need to measure this. And and how did that all get started?

Chris: Sure. Sure. Well, it’s it’s sort of twofold, really. And I this didn’t even hit me until you started talking there. But part of it is is around our or VW or volume per week which that’s not really capacity, but that is a very standard metric that we found over the last five, six, seven years of how long it should take to produce the project.

Chris: So your how does that tie in to capacity? Well, I think some folks are out there chasing capacity in their team, as you mentioned earlier, stressed out. Well, how much of that stress starts because they’re expected to produce a project in such a short amount of time that it isn’t realistic to begin with. So now I’m already under stress.

Chris: Now the current job is running over schedule. You want me to start my next project? And it’s just that that that inherent stress is there. So we started by by trying to see how long a phase should take. It started with cabinets. One of my lead carpenters 12 years ago said, you know, I said you’re over on our for cabin installation is like, how long should it have taken.

Chris: Like that’s a great question. Let’s ask the designer. They’re the one that sold it. So he was you know, we talk a lot about the disk profile and this this person was a high C, so he was about the details. I’m not always about the details. I’m about people. So I work my hands and talk fast. But anyway, we sat down and figured out how long it would take to install kitchen cabinets.

Chris: You know, how many feet per hour, how many hours per hours per feet, that kind of thing, and realized that that was a great benchmark and kind of went, Why don’t we have this for the overall job project and not just a phase code. So we started by looking again, this is probably in 2016, somewhere in there we looked at the previous year’s revenue and the jobs schedules and really just Steve, it’s $100,000 job and it took five weeks to produce.

Chris: That’s $20,000 a week in revenue. I mean, we just sort of started with what were we producing, whether that’s right or wrong, that was our that was sort of our benchmark. So we started there and sort of broke it down. And we started with, you know, $100,000 increments. So 0 to $100000 was this, you know, took this long to produce one, two, two, two, two, three are not and pretty quickly realized that there were a lot of anomalies in the under $100,000 category.

Chris: And so we played with it and monitored it, looked at it. And the current model is basically, you know, I won’t get to the whole thing, but under $25,000, we’re about 70 $500 a week, 25 to 50. It jumps up about 80 $500. And it’s $25,000 increments of volume up to the $200,000 mark. And it starts it again, about 70 $500 a week.

Chris: And then up at the $200,000 mark, it’s culture, $15,000 a week that we’re producing. So, again, you just as soon as the sales team comes and says, I got a job, but it’s X amount of dollars, divide it by the volume per week. And there’s the amount of weeks that that that that job will take. Now, are there some, you know, outliers or there’s some other pieces to it?

Chris: Yes, But really, we just we just sort of look at the averages. If there’s if there’s a really high and a really low, we’ll kick those out because excuse the numbers too much, because we are looking for these these averages and really the place, you know, we don’t break it down by kitchen and bathroom and room additions and all these different facets.

Chris: It is more just about the volume and, you know, again, up in that and we don’t have as much data on that $1 million it out. I think we should be producing twice what we are there, but we’re calling in about $28,000 a week and you sort of get on the larger projects, there’s more trades, There’s you know, we’re working on three stories in a home.

Chris: So there’s there could be 20 tradespeople in there, whereas a, you know, a 20,000 or a project is probably a powder bath that our whole the work is all being done by our our team in-house. So there’s just not as many bodies in there. You’re not producing as much volume. So that’s at a at a base, that’s sort of what it is.

Chris: And then we’ve sort of taken it from there. So now we know how long these jobs should take. And there are some, again, you know, hand scraped, hardwood floors, faux finishes would skew it one way, high dollar appliance packages, you know, Viking Thermidor, subzero. Those are our products that don’t take a whole lot longer to install. So there’s there are some things that history tells us that we need to sort of change and adapt with this.

Chris: But big picture, Tim, it’s I mean, it’s almost magic. It like it’s amazing how well it works and how often we’re able to finish on schedule. So so again, that’s sort of where it starts is a realistic schedule. And then we kind of went into capacity after that.

Tim: So let me just kind of dig in here a little bit. So what you’re saying is, instead of calling all year, let’s say there were 30 people out in the field at that point bringing them in and putting up a big whiteboard and saying, okay, how long should a $7,000 job take or how long should an $80,000 job take?

Tim: You actually dug into the data and then tell me a little bit more how did you find the anomalies? In other words, what did you notice when you started looking at, you know, the difference between a $100,000 project and a $50,000, what what bells went off and how did that rise to the surface? Because I can see a lot of generalization could have taken place.

Tim: And so I’m kind of wondering how did how did you get keyed into that, those differences?

Chris: Yeah, So great point. And some of it is just when you see the spreadsheet, you know, like because this is all spreadsheet driven, which I’m not a, I love to look into spreadsheets, but I don’t create. And so this, this information was all brought to me. But as soon as you look at it, you just go, okay, so, you know, maybe there’s two jobs that are within a $500 of each other, but one took seven days longer.

Chris: Well, but but one of them was within this median range of these other 12 jobs. And this one is just way out. Like we just would take the one that’s way out and and just just remove it from that the average, if you will, because the couple that we really dug into and you go, why is that? What happened there?

Chris: Usually there was something there was more to it, right. Like maybe we we said it took three weeks. But really that last week we were only there one day because it was a back ordered product. Well, now we’ve refined that a little more. And you know, when we do our project presentation, that’s the end of our job. Now, if we go back three days, three days more worth of work because of backward items, But that wasn’t until two weeks later I’m calling that three days on the schedule, not two weeks.

Chris: So I’m not trying to cheat the system, but I’m trying to be realistic because what I don’t want is backordered or delayed time to impact these these numbers. And I think that some of what we found early on there. So again, anything that’s really high or really low, we just sort of throw out because it skews the numbers too much.

Tim: And so when you’re when you’re using let’s talk about how you use this data or maybe less less. Before we get to that, let’s talk about you mentioned you have project managers and you mentioned you have lead carpenters. And I’m in my intro, I kind of had that, you know, like, hey, some lead carpenters, you know, we’ll look at it this way.

Tim: We’ll be able to handle this amount. Some project managers like I’ve heard they got five or six jobs going and other people are going like, I got two and that’s all I can handle. How do you use this data in combination with the personalities that you have?

Chris: Yeah. So this is one where I wish there were more science or math to it, but some of the some of this now is is the data and the gut feeling maybe sort of coming together. So again, I, I hate having to explain this, but some of it is we sort of push people to find their limits, right.

Chris: We people usually as we work up the, you know, the corporate ladder, we we work to our level of ineptitude. We work ourselves out of a job. We get to a point where we just we can’t do it anymore, whatever that level is. And it’s different for all of us. So so that’s part of it. But again, with all these things we have, we our managers have pretty good, again, gut feel on folks.

Chris: Hey, this person is just stressed all the time or this person is really laid back and just takes everything in stride. So oftentimes it starts with an accident like, okay, so we had the VW, we, we scheduled your next job to start, but late in the job we had a $40,000 change order on the project. So that extended that time.

Chris: We’re not going to push out your next start date because we’re we’ve committed that to our client. So here’s our trial where these two jobs overlap for three weeks. We’re going to we’re going to see how you handle this. And look, some of our team comes in is like, man, that went really well. I actually feel like I was more productive with with having more things to do and sort of it’s almost like if your calendar is you look at your calendar in the morning, it it’s it’s booked for there’s no time for it.

Chris: It’s like you have to stay on track If you wake up in the morning, look and there’s nothing on there like your first thing takes all day. It’s just that it’s just kind of human nature. So. So that’s that sort of started it. And then again you go like, okay, this person handled that really well, so let’s see if they can.

Chris: You know, we did these bonus green dots last year. We just we had to increase productivity. So we just were like, you as a as a project manager, you own this job, get it done with your team. Well, they were having to figure it out and they would see their team members that could rise up. And kind of what it comes down to is, okay, so we’re running $1,000,000 job and we’re in drywall and then hardwood and then, you know, cabinetry.

Chris: Well, there’s four or five weeks maybe of work there that’s subbed out. So our, our, our lead carpenter maybe doesn’t need to be there all day. So we sent him to work on another job and look that’s great. But like what if we could send him somewhere to produce more volume? So that’s that again is sort of that next deal.

Chris: You go, okay, you’re doing this eight month long project. We’re going to fill in a little four week bathroom or a you know, a smaller project and see how it goes. And again, some of our folks excel. Actually, I think I think their efficiency improves. It’s really it’s really weird to see and other folks don’t. I mean, you can see some folks just like that whole four week overlap.

Chris: They’re just down. I mean, they’re there by they can’t they just they just can’t handle it. So some of it becomes that again, it’s that we sort of test them and see how they handle it and but way better to test them on these smaller projects as an overlap or a double up. They’re on to, you know, 300,000 jobs right out of the chute.

Chris: Of course, then it’s the whole well, if they’re going to do more, they’re going to expect more. They want more, right? They want more money. They want more pay. So we had to sort of get into that whole avenue of why is this role worth more than the other roles? And obviously to management and ownership, if we can get more volume done without any more overhead, that that’s where we got it.

Chris: But we have to be looking for at all times to be more efficient.

Tim: So I’m just sitting here listening to you and I think you’ve painted the picture pretty well with in House staffs. But I just if you would comment a little bit about how it’s going to change when you’ve got strictly project managers and then all subbed out kinds of things, you got any any thoughts about how the VP W might shift around a little bit with that?

Chris: In theory, the DPW doesn’t really change whether it’s in-house or subcontracted. It’s still is is volume like a tradesperson who does it all day, every day might be a little more efficient than we are. But at the end of the day, since they’re averages, some of that is is just sort of baked into the VW, if that makes sense.

Chris: So I haven’t really personally got my wheels turned. I haven’t really I haven’t really dug into it from a standpoint of the more in-house versus trades, but I haven’t seen it in the in the data from the VW either, you know, like we’re hitting our jobs and they’re, they’re producing at a good cheap.

Greg: So with that data that that volume per week data, have you gone back and looked at it? Has it has it shifted at all from price point to price point?

Chris: Yes. So the courier which it’s funny, I dug into a little bit this morning, I don’t look at this. This most of the team is running this information now. So I did my homework this morning. But there are more breakdowns that that $25,000 sort of layered tiers. That’s new from the last time I saw it. Last time I saw the under 100 had those extra breakdowns.

Chris: But then I think it was in 50 or 75,000 or increments past that. And so Tony Carver does all this for us. He’s he’s seen those for every. And the answer, Greg, is in January every year this is updated. So because this is done not off whip jobs but off of closed jobs. So we wait till they’re truly closed.

Chris: And we know 100% accurately where they finished and the gross profit and all those things. So in January, he takes all of the close jobs from the year before, updated. And in theory, we should it should grow every year. We should do more. Some of that is is just inflation, right? A sheet of drywall costs more this year than it did last year.

Chris: It doesn’t make it any longer to hang it. But if it’s costing more, we should be able to hang in the same amount of time. So we are volume should be increasing every year by what is cost of living is 3% or whatever. In theory it should go up by that. I would also say we should be better next year than we are this year, so we should be a little more efficient just because we should be better.

Chris: But that said, and this becomes a great metric for management to drive within, if I want to make a pretty quick change to increase our gross profit was one way in production. We can do that. Shorten the production cycle, right? If it’s a ten week job and I can cut a week off of that like that inherently drives up that gross profit.

Chris: And if I don’t change my overhead, it drives up the net profit. So if I look at our numbers across the board and they’re they’re low, we need to increase them, just just increasing that DPW and nothing else should drive that change. But we don’t do that as much as we might in in future years. Right now it is a little more reactionary, but it gives us control.

Chris: I will also share that since we’ve been using this in, I think it was 2017, we’ve had 2 to 4% grip on our gross profit every year since we’ve been using this. So it’s the whole like, does it work? Yeah, it works. Like I would challenge anybody. Come now. Are there some flaws in it? Yeah, you can pick some holes in it.

Chris: But again, I go like last year, 62% of our design bill jobs beat gross profit by 2% or more because that’s what it takes for our production bonus to pay out and not to get too far to the numbers, but back in 2015, the first year we tracked it, it was 48%, I think 46%. And as soon as we changed the VW in 2017, it jumped to over 60% and it’s been over 70%.

Chris: So like, I feel like I’ve got data that proves that it’s work.

Tim: Yes, I’m trying. I’m sitting here trying to think of an example, but I’m thinking about your team. And when you first roll this out, did you get anybody that said, you know, Yeah, that. Yeah. Your computer says it should only take me eight weeks, but this is a ten week job for sure. And then and how did people kind of rally around the fact that you’re now measuring their production instead of like, hey, you know, good job.

Tim: Maybe we can speed up a little bit or something like that. How did they react to the measuring part of this? Yeah.

Chris: Well, I think I think we do a good job of explaining and selling things and maybe, maybe setting up clear expectations. So generally, by the time I rule out any any new process, procedure or anything new, it’s we’ve already done it two or three times. So like before we went to the group and said, hey, we’re rolling this out.

Chris: We had already done it on the previous three jobs so I could kind of go, Hey, here’s this new thing we’re trying here. The first three jobs we have, we can it seems to be working. But also when you when you explain it to them again, like, hey, you guys, the way we came up with this was it’s historical data.

Chris: So like, we’re not when we first came up, we didn’t tighten it. We didn’t try to improve on where we were. We literally just started with with where we were and we sort of explain to them what they should do is make your stress level even out. Because because the feedback we got before we did this, some people go, Man, I finished that job and like that.

Chris: That’s not like it was easy. That was a breeze, you know, like the last three days, that job, I just, I was kind of coasting. Or then they tell me to go. The next job like that was brutal. Like, I think I actually had three more weeks for that job. So we were able to say, Look, we took the highs and lows out of it, we balanced it out.

Chris: And again, I sort of said, Do you have a couple of jobs? Let’s see how it works. And if it works, we’ll keep doing it. If it does, it will readjusted. We can we can lower the volume per week. So, you know, in true parallel, probably production fashion, because this is the way I was, I was like, All right, let’s go do it right.

Chris: I’m I’m still going to go build the job for you. And then what happens is they do one and they they beat, met or exceeded the schedule. And it wasn’t crazy stressful. So then you you create you encourage that. Hey, how did that feel? How did that go? Rate the job on a 1 to 10 how you’re you know, what was your stress level those kinds of things.

Chris: And I think a lot of it as I went back to the whole push them to their breaking point and I don’t really mean that. But again, go to this. I think this is where like an AI. S personality comes in. Like this is a this is as much as a lot of it is. C about details you really I see isn’t reading the room as much as it varies is to know like this person is stressed.

Chris: So like whoever is managing these people really needs to have sort of their their some on the pulse to talk to. And again sometimes it’s just it’s the way we carry ourselves. You walk in the office and you just tell so-and-so’s grumpy, you know, and some days we have personal stuff at home, whatever it is. But, but watch those trends because you can burn people out.

Chris: But I interestingly, I think was just in the last month I read something that talked about people can be bored out just as easily as they can be burned out. And I think I like went back and read that and I didn’t read that right. But when I read through it, it makes total sense. I mean, I, I think we have some folks that are probably underperforming because we’re not utilizing them to their fullest potential.

Chris: And I think that’s another time. Again, I think that that analogy of the calendar, when it’s empty, like I don’t get anything done and let’s feel like I get more than what’s on my list done. So yeah, so I think that’s something to keep in mind too. I think we’ve had a couple people that were newer to our company.

Chris: One of them was a referral of yours here in the last month. He didn’t take the job, by the way, but he came from a much higher capacity role. So we bring him in here and go, You just got to manage one job. I mean, I think this guy is going to get bored and want to move on.

Chris: So he’s one of the people that we’ve we’ve figured out will be one of these run two jobs. You know, So I think we’ve got to keep people sort of hungry and grinding and out there chasing it.

Tim: So how do you use this information for project ing sales? And in other words, I mean, I know you have a big sales operation for 15 million. You have to have a big sales operation. But how do you use this to monitor or maybe control sales so you don’t have like 25 jobs dumping on January eight? Right. And then nothing happening for the next four months and everybody is all stressed and then everybody’s bored and, you know, how do you use all this information for that?

Chris: Sure. Well, okay, so here’s how we use it. But but there’s still some of the some of the ups and downs there. There’s just this book way less reacting with the current long term schedule that we have than the way it was, you know, 15 or 20 years ago. So so all of these systems sort of tie together.

Chris: But where you’re going is I’m looking at my long term schedule here in front of me. So again, we have these jobs based upon the VW. I know when they’re going to end. So then we leave a buffer week for, you know, guys to get their gals, get their mind right again, but just a little trickle in, whatever it is, finish one job strong, start the next one strong, and then that job starts.

Chris: And again it goes out per the VW. Well, at the end of each of these jobs, there’s a green dot and that’s the next potential start date. So whether it’s that we have a double up. So there you know this job is here and there’s a start date and then there are other jobs going out three more months and there’s a start date there.

Chris: So each of the double up lead carpenters would have two green dots and a sales says, Hey, we sold the Smith job. It’s a 400,000 of this. And I think it’d be a great job for one of these three people. And you’d go, Well, here those three green dots, which which one do you want? But this is stopped.

Chris: Back when I first started doing this, before we had the green dots, it was this. The salespeople came to my door like I sold. I will start in two weeks and I would just go, okay, And we start a job, you know, And it took however long. They told me that they sold it that it would take and then we would get into issues with overlaps.

Chris: And at one point, Jake just flat out said we are not overlapping jobs. One lead carpenter finishes a job and then starts the next one. And that was it. Was that way for several years, which is where the green dots sort of started. But then we realized back then we were doing a lot more work in house. We have again kind of another hybrid model where we’re selling a lot of work out right now, including some of the finish work, the carpentry that that we used to do all of that in-house.

Chris: So again, instead of sending these folks to work on other jobs, we sent them to run another job and instantly our volume goes out.

Tim: So just to clarify, and I and maybe I just want to make sure everybody in podcast land hears this, but basically you as the production manager and now your production manager is the one that says this is when we can start the next job. Yes. Not sales.

Chris: No. And new hires. Okay. So yes, I’ll help re-emphasize this. Yes. To me, product owns the start dates in your business. And again, I didn’t for years. We didn’t until we flat out said, no, this is how this is going to go. Now that said, though, Tim, to some degree, you need a pretty healthy backlog to be able to put your foot down on production, too, because for years I was like, Give me what you got.

Chris: I’ll take you thing, you know, give us the half baked plans and let’s get these guys off the bench and you’ll build this thing. We’ll figure it out. So yeah.

Tim: So let’s just talk about the half baked plans, because I, I put that in the introduction. How do you as a team, ensure that for the most part, what’s coming through to a project manager and a lead carpenter is relatively consistent. I know there’s always going to be little differences and we’ve spent several podcasts recently talking about how to get this stuff through.

Tim: I’m just kind of curious what you guys do just to make sure that that job’s really ready to go If production says we can start, you know, April 25th, how do you know everything is going to be ready on April 25th?

Chris: Sure. We hope we cross our fingers. We hope a lot. No, we do have I think the reality is, are all the design is done in-house. We have degreed architect and she has two full time dressed people. So our plans are generated in-house that are consistent. You know, when I was in the field and we had an outside architect plans and they had one verbiage in our contract had a never another verbiage.

Chris: And I’m like, What light fixtures are we putting in? Because to me, these are both binding documents, but they’re not in cahoots. So everything in our plans is copied and pasted to our contract, which is, you know, copied and pasted from our are trade partners contracts with us. So there’s there’s consistency across the board. Our plans are all look the same so our team knows where to go, you know, for the same information.

Chris: It’s, it’s just repeatable. It’s I know you’re huge about checklist it’s that kind of thing. Like we all know what what an ideal package is. And like we set one aside, we go, this is an ideal package. Let’s review it with the sales team. You know, here it is. Here’s the checklist. It’s got all the pros, all the subcontract agreements, the plans, the everything.

Chris: I kind of see that like when the design team does their job right and hands it off to us, it’s it’s really just a puzzle that production is putting together. I mean, we have to, you know, the out of out employment out of square and all that. But like, we shouldn’t be designing, we should be coming up with things.

Chris: We should just be putting together the beautiful puzzle that the design has worked through for us. And generally that’s the way it works. So again, it’s clear expectations. Here’s what a complete package looks like. But the other thing I think we’ve sort of embraced is, yes, you need to come to this hand off meeting 100%, complete with all these answers.

Chris: And you’re like, okay, you both are smiling. You know that that’s not realistic. But like knowing what we don’t know is, is so huge. Like if they come to that and go, here’s our to be determined list, these are the four things that right now I’m not really sure. So you need to keep in mind X, Y, Z, you know, the mantle may change.

Chris: It might be wood, it might be stone, whatever. Right. But now we go, cool, These are the four things. And then we can look at our schedule and go, Awesome. I get that you don’t have that, but I need that answer by March 15th, because on April 1st, like we’re moving forward that mantle, whatever it is. So it to us being on the same team, I think that’s part of it.

Chris: Two years ago it felt like sales versus production. So we had the amazing Tim Flower come in and help us figure out what we’re doing wrong. And I think things like that have really centered us as a company and as a whole, and there’s way less finger pointing and there’s, you know, we’re in this together. We have some year end bonuses that incentivize people, you know, for the same goals.

Chris: And there’s a lot of those things that sort of tie together. But that’s where it starts is is we’ve all got to be in this together and on the same page in if production. We have to be comfortable going to sales and going, Hey, thank you for your hard work on putting this package together. It looks like it was an intense amount of work, but I feel like I don’t have this or I don’t have that or this.

Chris: What can I do? Maybe to help you get that right show that we’re not just there to pick them apart. We want to help them, but we do need this information, or at least we need to know when we’re going to get this information.

Tim: Yeah, so I said earlier on that I am making it kind of a mission to get this idea of capacity out there in front of the public and get everybody thinking about it in So we’re going to wind up here. Chris, We’ve we’ve taken quite a bit of time to kind of look at all these different things. But just any thing that you would just say to the listeners in terms of encouraging them because this takes effort, energy, time and all that means money to make this happen.

Tim: You’ve cited a couple of statistics in there about like, yeah, you got the money back, but any encouragement to the listeners then we’ll wrap this up.

Chris: Yeah, I mean I think this, this whole concept is is can be overwhelming. So like, dumb it down, strip it down. I think starting was like the volume per week or revenue per week. Some sort of a a gauge helps because again it’s it gives you a realistic schedule and I think what you see them and you repeat them that you do you remove some of that stress and look the reality is take the last ten jobs you’ve done, how long it took you to do them.

Chris: Do the math. There’s your starting place. You know, I kind of don’t overthink it now. Build a schedule based upon that. Produce the jobs that works out, you know, and I am oversimplifying, but like, start somewhere. You know, again, we probably utilized 100 jobs because I had somebody on staff that that had the time to do that. Just just pick ten jobs, do the math, start from there and move on.

Chris: And that. So that’s more about the length of time for the job. Or to me, capacity is not as much how long, but how much. But now if you have that sort of tied down now you can go, okay, can we overlap some jobs? Can we do some things? I think when you have that information, you can sort of use the information to help you figure out when when you double up, when you can run more jobs or and or who can’t.

Chris: The other piece of that is always be assessing your staff. I mean, I think as managers, we always know worst case scenario, if there is a layoff, who that first person is, those kinds of things. But to where I’m one more distressed piece, we’ve got a couple of really high performers, but I think they perform like, no, you know, million dollar projects.

Chris: But I think if we put those two these guys in particular on multiple jobs, even if they’re a third of the size, I just the way their process works, I think their head would melt like going to like I don’t know what it is even though I mean, our job is like running for 250,000 jobs. There’s something about being at one address and one homeowner and some of those things.

Chris: So you know your people and then but start with some sort of revenue or volume per week to get the schedules down, then.

Tim: Well, Chris has been fantastic. Thank you very much for helping us get a little bit of a handle on this thing. And as I suggested earlier, I hope some other people will chime in and continue this conversation. So thanks so much.

Chris: Absolutely. Pleasure to do it.

Greg: A lot to learn today, Tim. Good.

Tim: My goodness. Talking about your head melting, I’ve got a page of notes here. And so I’m just going to I’m not even going to wait for you to say, what did you learn, Tim? I’m just going to jump right in. I love the point about watching your I just wrote down, watch your people pay attention and to stress levels and the whole idea I mean, what I want everyone to get out of this is that data will tell the story.

Tim: But then Chris was really clear to say, you know what, the data is one thing, but you got to have the gut that says, yeah, that person’s burning out or that person’s struggling or that person’s down there. And I think that’s a part of me that I don’t think enough managers really pay attention to is really looking at how people are doing and asking the right questions to find out what’s going on.

Greg: So I think I like the concept of bored out and burned out. I think that was a really neat way to look at it. And again, it’s the gut, it’s the art in the science of doing this. And, you know, I like numbers and I just like the way that Chris has done so much with the numbers and and tells the story with the numbers.

Greg: I think that’s that’s probably the biggest thing I took away from this one.

Tim: I love that part about the sales design team. You know, usually when I’m doing a seminar, I’ll say you look through the does the scope work and you get rid of all those to be determined, you know, because why are they even there? But I think, Chris, his point is really good and it’s something that I have been, you know, sharing with companies is that one of the most important things in that handoff from sales to production is all the things that we don’t know yet.

Tim: And where did we where did we give back some money and where did we what did we promise that we need to be sure gets taken care of? All that kind of stuff typically doesn’t go into a handoff meeting. It’s sticks and bricks and timeframes and dollars, you know, But those other things are as important to the process as getting the plans right.

Tim: So the volume per week and this is the backbone of the whole system that they’re using. And I just want to reinforce to everybody, take time to start doing this. And as Chris was talking about, you know, they had somebody that could do this. But I thought immediately, especially for those of you who are in college towns, there’s got to be a college student somewhere around that loves spreadsheets and can, you know, analyze data, maybe somebody that’s in statistics or something like that, maybe a college project, maybe even a high school student, but somebody so it doesn’t take all that all the time from your small staff necessarily.

Tim: The data is all there. Start mining it so you can start getting this information and make better decisions about capacity for people in your company.

Greg: And this person must love spreadsheets as much as Tim Faller.

Tim: I do love them. I just do. I just don’t have all the knowledge of how to create them. I love having them and I love working them, but I don’t always know how to write the formulas to make everything work out well.

Greg: Once again, we want to thank Chris Petersen, Tim Schloegel, designer model for joining us. And thank you all for listening to another episode of The Tim Faller Show.

Tim: And remember it’s Tim. Our show we’re working hard to eliminate. It is what it is from your vocabulary.

Greg: This has been another episode of the Tim Faller Show. Would you like to hire Tim or myself to help fast track your growth? Please send me an email. Greg Apple modelers advantage dot com. For more information about our production manager and design manager roundtables to get more information about consulting for your team or if you’ve ideas for the podcast, please subscribe to the show comment on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Greg: Thank you so much for listening.