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 talking about capacity beyond demand with the help of special guest Chris Fox of Fox Home Innovations in Manhattan, Kansas, alongside Tim Faller and co-host Greg Woleck. Here is the Tim Faller show.

Tim: Hey everyone, tim, Valerie here and welcome to another, I hope great episode. Keep sending your ideas in. Love to hear from you. Yes. Want to tell me how great the show is? Yeah. Send me an email. I’d like to hear that too. Tim Remodelers advantage dot com. So in episode 181, January seven, 2022, on this show, I took some time.

Tim: I was speaking with Chris from Fox Home Innovations in Manhattan, Kansas, and we were talking about the challenge of hiring an estimate. And in that conversation he made a statement that kind of stuck with me, and I brought it up at a couple of different times with different people in different scenarios. Well, we were asking him, like, why now for the estimate?

Tim: Or and he his designers had been doing the estimating. And so he his he made this comment. He said, I wanted my designers to have capacity beyond demand. And that just struck in my head. And that the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how it might be really important for us to talk about that again.

Tim: So I thought about how demand it, particularly in the production side of things, but in sales as well, has dramatically increased over the last several years. And we continue to struggle with bringing on skilled help. And so I thought this might be a good time to talk about this concept. So what I see typically in companies, and primarily if they’re driven by sales and I hate to say it like this, but you know what?

Tim: Mostly companies are driven by sales. There’s an increase in sales, but there is not a an increase that matches up in the capacity of the production team to actually produce those sales. And what I hear quite often from project managers, lead carpenters, either business owners. The conversation kind of goes like this. Sales is selling more work, and so they’ll pull the project managers or lead carpenters together and they’ll say, Hey, do you think you could take on one more job if everybody if the three of you could each take on one more job and it might be five versus four three versus two or six versus five, it doesn’t really matter.

Tim: But almost everybody within a company will say something like, sure, no problem. But deep down inside and I think in hindsight, maybe more so because we’re all company, we’re company players, we’re willing to, you know, help out any way we can. But what we find out is that when we do that, it seriously compromises the ability to manage the jobs, the number of jobs that we’re already working on.

Tim: And then we have that inevitable frustration with budgets slipping, the client experience dropping. We see that quite often, and very often the morale of the team just slumps off. And so this is often we try to correct this with what I’m going to call a pep rally meeting, rah rah, we’re great. You know, we can do this. This is, you know, let’s we can we can make this this is only for a short time.

Tim: We can win this game. Hopefully I didn’t overdo that. Or maybe we offer money like we can do a bonus, you know, if we do this or maybe just is simply is like, let’s take everybody out for a beer. We’ll we’ll have a good time and everything will be resolved and the solution really is to figure out what the capacity for different components of our company is and then stick with it.

Tim: Don’t exceed that. So I know everybody out there. I hear you yelling at me. Easy to say. Very hard to do. And so I’ve asked Chris to come back on and not put too much pressure on your Chris, but answer all my questions and serve all the listeners problems. So life will be grand from here on out. Greg, let’s go ahead.

Greg: Thanks, Tim. Chris Fox founded the company Box Home Innovations in 2009 as the face of the company. Chris leads the sales department. He and the leadership team are looking to hit their big goal capital letters of 90% self perform revenue by 2026. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Thank you for having me, guys. Happy to be here. I don’t know if will solve all the world’s problems, but hopefully we can at least plant some seeds and create some ideas. So.

Tim: You know, I find sometimes just talking about them creates solutions. You know, you get this conversation going, Yeah, we’ll start their brains kick in and they start thinking about and that would be my goal for this podcast is.

Chris: Absolutely.

Tim: Turns out they’re sitting down and saying, What do you think about this and how do we determine capacity within within our company?

Chris: So absolutely.

Tim: Really quickly, Chris, we got a little bit in the in the intro, but tell us about Foxconn innovations, the volume, the people you have that.

Chris: Says, yeah, so we’re in a small market of Manhattan, Kansas, about 50,000 people. We do about five and a half million in total revenue. We’re design build. So we’ve got two designers on staff and then we’ve got a smarter on staff that supports the front end product development team with sales design and estimating. And in the production side, we set up where our general manager, my business partner, Matt Carlson, oversees kind of the company at the general manager level, but he also sits in the seat of the production manager piece, and then he has to project managers that he direct reports with him and then each of them have carpenters out in the field.

Chris: So that’s kind of how we set up. As kind of Greg mentioned, you know, our one thing we recognize is we’re definitely a people center business. We’re all about our people are the community that people work with as well as our customers. And so to be able to serve more families, we have this big idea of self performing more work to create more experiences both internally and externally, to make make our lives better, basically.

Chris: So that’s kind of what our big move is and it’s a direct lead. And just as you hinted there, Tim, on this idea of, hey, maybe just sitting down and thinking about this, someone can get some ideas, Well, the biggest problem is no one has the capacity to sit down and think about it critically. Right. So we’re we are big on.

Chris: Okay, why not? Because those are that 5% of time that you find the years usually were that were were the sausage made or those big things come up in those initiatives. Cart driving from. And so how do we get in bolster more of that Okay.

Tim: So when we talked about the designers getting out of the estimating and bringing on the estimate or you mentioned this phrase is these three words capacity beyond demand. And so what is that and what were you looking at with your designer of what were you trying to achieve by taking the estimating off of them and getting into this capacity beyond demand?

Chris: Yeah. So I think the where it starts is, you know, at the end of the day, there’s there’s just a designer, one person, right? There’s just you two. I’m just, just means. Chris Right. And we can only give ourselves so much like there’s so much that we can give to our work, our family, our faith, our hobbies, all that type stuff.

Chris: So trying to understand, you know, that’s the time that we don’t get back. Where is that being spent? And so in the designer specific area we are growing. We were seeing a lot of added demand on the work side of things. And so it was either, okay, we’ll look at the the tasks that they are doing inside of a project lifecycle and take stuff away to increase capacity to do the things that they’re really good at or we hire more of them.

Chris: And that’s kind of the old thing, right? I mean, the same thing can go be applied to project managers, carpenters. Really any position in any industry is one of the tasks they’re doing. Can they get rid of them? A lot of times are exercises where you go through is delegating elevate. So we have all of our key people, you know, basically create a a task list every year of what are some of the things that they are doing and then recognizing what are the top four or five things and hold them accountable that, hey, I want you to delegate these four or five things this year and over time that turns into another position or

Chris: it turns into an automation with software, whatever the case may be. So it really is kind of people centered on this idea of making sure that they have the capacity to do what they’re good at, what they enjoy doing, as well as the big problems. Right. And so, you know, if a designer in this specific case is completely taxed out and we have a sales as a unique opportunity to get a project done and a timeline to make a customer experience, you know, through the roof and production has the capacity to do it.

Chris: But our bottleneck is design. Well, that poses a big problem, right? So having that capacity or headroom, as we’ll call it, to take on projects as emergency for professional development and training or, you know, the other idea of like you lose a designer in that case and now you’ve got one person there has to juggle that. Well, if they’re already maxed, Max, Max, Max like it’s it’s just not going to be done or not done well And so that that’s a big thing that we look at.

Tim: So I’m kicking off a little bit your comments as you were leading into this, where we all have this, Max capacity. And if we’re just work and work and work and work and work and maybe that big idea doesn’t generate and I remember when I was a production manager, you know, people ask me all the time like, how did you think of all the things that you teach other people now?

Tim: First of all, I didn’t think of all of them. I stole them from some.

Chris: yeah, absolutely.

Tim: But I did when I was a production manager, I had what I call free time. And so when I was in the office and I didn’t have a task to do, I was allowed the opportunity to think about, like, how can I make this better and what would what would improve this and what would you know, how can I.

Tim: And and it was out of those moments that I tried a lot of things. Some of them didn’t work, some of them did work. But I got the opportunity to think beyond what I just I have to get this task done. And I think that’s another kind of component of this.

Chris: Yeah, I agree. And I think like that plays directly into your your phrase of let’s remove the language of saying it is what it is, right? It’s like, let’s not look backwards, let’s look forwards, let’s not focus on the solutions. You know, look the problems that are right in front of us. Let’s focus on the problems that we’re going to see 3 to 6 months down the road.

Chris: And if we solve those inherently, that’s going to trickle down. And so that’s you know, that’s a huge key thing. And it’s there’s many books written on this idea of the urgent but unimportant and the urgent important and the very important, but not urgent. And so the more time we spend in that, not an urgent, very important task, the more time that we can think critically in that area.

Chris: That’s that’s good for both personally development and growth. But also usually the organization gets some really, really great returns from creative. That capacity of thinking critically that way.

Tim: All right. So save that thought because I want to get back to what are the returns for a business owner. Don’t know what. Hey, you’re asking me to spend, you know, not more overhead dollars to put somebody in a position so my designer can just sit there and daydream?

Chris: Yeah.

Tim: You didn’t say it that way, but I can again feel that feel the world behind me saying these kinds of things. But you’re a business major, right? When you were in college. Yeah. So is is this a business concept that the remodeling world has missed, or is this something that you in your think time came up with?

Chris: I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, I think the idea is it comes down to scalability. So when you look at scaling a business, scaling, you know, whatever you’re trying to scale, you’ve got to recognize what are the widgets that goes into that to create that scalability point at our industry’s construction especially, it’s it’s time, it’s skilled, it’s skilled time on projects, critically thinking and that type of thing.

Chris: So if that’s our if that’s our route, you know, definition of what we’ve got to scale, then there’s always the way to look at it more efficiencies and create different efficiencies from that automating type of thing. But the they still have to have more people if you want to do more things. And so what we set out on or we shot our foot in the past is, you know, five or six years ago, especially, we were in a situation where we were growing, we were growing, we’re seeing all these project opportunities and then we would lose a designer because they had a family move and then it shot at the foot.

Chris: And in six months worth of revenue that we had to figure out and work ourselves through or we found out that we had to, you know, we lose. It’s a lot easier to lose, have three project managers and lose one opposed to have two and you lose one and some of that comes in to risk analysis as well.

Chris: Yeah. Do I want to carry another salary on on half? I need to. Well no. Obviously the goal of business is to increase freight the biggest role we possibly can. But at the same time, when you factor in risk of that and what can happen if you do lose those key people, you know, it’s it’s not pretty. I mean, I’ve had several years in the past.

Chris: So we go we’re steaming right along. We lose a key person and next thing you know, a quarter is just completely shot. You know, the revenue isn’t there, The the production churn isn’t there, but yet the overhead expense still is. And everything else is kind of kind of gone. So kind of, you know, from a business principle standpoint, it’s really alleviating risk.

Chris: That’s a big piece of it. The other part of it is, is culture based. To burn out is a big thing. So when people are rocking and rolling, you know, 99% of the time and there’s not that capacity to take a breath or life hits or whatever the case may be, that adds stress, kind of creates that that next level area where now your move from proactive thinking, doing my job, now you’re in survival mode.

Chris: And so we we recognize you know and culturally, both internally and you know here in the U.S. that, you know, people when they get in that survival mode, usually they’re not making the best decisions, looking for any shortcuts they possibly can. It’s negatively affected on health, family, all of it. And so if we can try to keep our people out of operating in that, you know, top 10% of survival mode, then it’s better for them, which in their in return is better for us.

Chris: And so that’s that’s kind of where that whole principle is kind of born from a lot of pain. Kind of went through that whole thing. And I’ll be honest too, I’m a I’m a very much a person of like, how do we get it done the quickest, simplest and cheapest way possible, where that’s where a really good balance of Matt and a business partner is, is he’s very much, you know, like big vision, Hey, we need all these people doing these types of things.

Chris: And when we have that figured out, imagine the things that they’re going to be able to do with that extra capacity. Now and be able to go to that next level or whatever the case would be because there’s capacity created for that.

Tim: So so just following up on that, how do you how do you create this for an employee that they show up at seven in the morning and they’re not there working until seven and you keep telling them, look, you know, that’s not your workday, your workday 7 to 330 or or that kind of thing. But it’s just in their brain that if they don’t work 12 hours, they really haven’t produced.

Tim: How do you get them to think about.

Chris: Its task.

Tim: That shut down time, if you will? Yeah.

Chris: That’s tough. I mean, you know, obviously we want to create, you know, anybody that comes to work with us, we want you want them to have a really good work life balance. And typically, you know, all of our direct reports that we have that we’re working with and our, you know, we’ll do a monthly one on one check.

Chris: And basically in my reports, I do a weekly check and see kind of what’s going on. And usually it’s, you know, half of the time is spent talking about what’s going on in their lives, what’s happening. And the longer someone works for, you can recognize, you know, what’s stressing and what’s not stressing with that type of stuff. And I’ve had employees in the past where they’re very task driven.

Chris: They just don’t feel like they’ve succeeded unless they’re taxed their task or checked off. They don’t feel like they can go home unless those tasks are checked off. Right. And because that’s what they’re living for, that’s that that that central of of recognizing that there’s Sacerdote there. So it’s our job as leaders then is like, okay, well then if that’s how you’re going to operate, I got to recognize and I got to decrease your tasks and so, you know, I’ve got to step in and have a little bit more control on that, whereas other people, it might be more of just a permission thing of like, hey, you know, we’re going to be okay.

Chris: You don’t need to do this. I would love for you to plan some time to get out of here at 2:00 the next couple days or the next couple weeks, right? So some people it’s like, hey, I know I’m taxed. I know what’s going on. I know it’s busy, but I don’t have permission. I don’t feel I’ve had that communication.

Chris: And they’re not willing to come forward and say, Hey, I need a break here. I’m I’m over done, right? Because they don’t want to pass up a promotion opportunity or raise opportunity or feel like they’re not contributing as a team member. But it’s our job as leaders to make sure that they feel welcome, that they can kind of have that.

Chris: So, you know, based on that personal profile and how they that relationship, you can start to recognize, you know, what where you know, how you can help them. And I think with every employee and my experience is that’s always different. And we have to invest in our people because everyone everyone takes off, you know, clicks, clicks the box differently.

Chris: Speaking to production itself, that’s a little bit harder. Yeah. Because, you know, you see the whole global and all here’s this project. It’s got to be on schedule. This is the project. More or less than two years is even one of my priorities. Manager right now is running with some pretty big weather delays that we’re running into. And she’s like, I put this schedule in place for the company.

Chris: I put this schedule in place to the client. I’m stuck in the middle and there’s things that I can’t control. And yes, there’s some things I can look forward in the future to condense and get back on the track. But that pressure right is real that’s there. And yeah, I’ve had product managers say, okay, I’m just going to work in the field three days a week to get us back up on schedule.

Chris: That’s fine to a point. And sometimes there’s a reason for that or a need for that. But I’ve also had a product manager in the past that would, you know, would go to his home, would shop at night and weekends and would start building mantles and all these little things. He we had this project a couple of years ago where we had this little shed we were doing for a client, a past client of ours.

Chris: And he, he preassembled and built it all in his shop and disassembled pieces and put it on a trailer on a weekend so that he could just go his guys could just pick it up and go through it together in a couple hours. So, you know, that wasn’t asked to him. That was, you know, one of the case in me.

Chris: But that’s where that pressure came from. And so that’s that’s a tough thing, especially because capacity is not quantitative. Yeah, that’s probably the biggest the biggest, hardest part, which you kind of hit on in your interview, is like, how do you measure it? What does that even what does that even mean? Right.

Tim: Yeah, Yeah. So I’m wondering, do you have any examples I know that mean for the listeners out there, Chris and his estimate or come on and help us with in estimating class that we do and in that discussion they can point very specifically to the, the betterment, if you will, of the net profit because they put an estimate in place and let the designers design any kind of measurable things that you could point to that says we believe or we know that the client experience is better because of this or their net profitability is better because of this is there anything like that you can share with us?

Chris: You know, I think the biggest thing that we could see is, you know, special. The production side is the schedule. When there’s capacity in our own field labor and there’s capacity in subcontractors, scheduling is easy. It just goes that goes to schedule, right? There might be there’s going to be small tweaks in here and there. But, you know, if the schedule goes, you know, if we’re on schedule, then we’re we’re being profitable because those tasks are lining up.

Chris: And if we’re being on schedule and we’re profitable, we’re we’re happy. And and also the clients have because there’s product their projects on schedule. So that sense of stress of running to one thing, right, is completely decreased when all that stuff happens. And so that’s probably the biggest one. It’s a little bit intrinsic, but at the same time, like you can definitely feel it like right now currently we’ve got several projects that carried over the winter longer than we wanted to.

Chris: We had some natural attrition with Labor between November, November and to now basically, and we decided to wait to hire everybody new new replacements until after the first of the year. So that’s what we’re going through right now. Well, our project managers have really felt that lack of labor in the field because scheduled hours don’t meet, don’t match available hours to, you know, and that type of thing.

Chris: So that’s a that’s a feeling that we’re getting. And if you one of the metrics that we track every single week as days on our schedule, so our metric is ten days. So we look at all of our projects, our project manager has to put together a report every week on where that or they’re out on their schedule if they’re ahead or behind.

Chris: And then we average that. And so the last probably year we’ve ran anywhere from plus two days ahead to minus five or six days behind collectively. And this morning, our numbers came out and we’re at negative ten. And that’s kind of our OC What’s going on here? Now we know that the main problem there has to do with, well, whether it’s one and two labor availability and so we’re fixing those things, but that’s probably one that we can definitely quantitate.

Chris: Right. And really that’s what we’re looking at capacity as a whole, not mostly individual positions, but the production team as a whole, what’s that capacity look like? And if I came in, I’ve, I get came to them from sales and said here’s this project that’s ready to go. I needed to start February 1st. They’d say, How the heck do you expect me to do that?

Chris: Right?

Tim: So it is it by that was going to be my question, like everybody tells me, and they go like, how many jobs can a project manager run at one time? And in my world, sometimes I deal with companies where the project managers are doing $1.5 million projects. And I know for you guys it may be more like 120,000 projects.

Tim: And so I know there’s a lot to do, but how do you define how many jobs a project manager can take on? And then how do you control the process so they don’t sort of get another one because we can’t say no?

Chris: Yep, Yep. Good question. So when we think about projects, we kind of go back to our core values and communication was extremely important to us and the expectations and set with our client around communication, you know, that’s what makes us unique. That’s one of our big uniques here is how we communicate our clients, what that looks like, and that takes that personal touch and it also takes investing in that relationship with that customer and that sort of thing too.

Chris: And what they found over the years is that one person doesn’t matter what position are in, they can effectively provide that level of communication with 5 to 7 people at a time, you know, from from a from a weekly basis. And so, you know, our designers manage 5 to 7 clients at a time, no more than seven, ideally five and anything else that goes in backlog and it slides in once the other one’s done and we treat production the same exact way they run in 5 to 7 projects at a time, anything else is in backlog or in queue and we’ve automated some communication touchpoints around that with our customers to kind of keep them

Chris: in the loop of, Yeah, we’re still on schedule for starting today or whatever the case may be, but that that’s what we’ve found is successful. Now as a benchmarks. One of the things that we’re we’re really open and honest with each other and we have a team meeting every single week that’s production. So it’s both product managers, it’s both designers, it’s the estimate here and it’s both salespeople.

Chris: So all key players when it comes to project development and project execution is in a room and we treat each other all as equals and that trust is build there. So if one of the speakers sees up and says, I cannot physically get this project ready for handoff, when you’re planning to start it, you know, okay, well, is there things that we can do to change that to help support you so that can happen?

Chris: Or is that just reality and will adjust accordingly? And so having that open communication is probably the biggest thing. And creating that trust, like that whole side of assumption, all levels of the team trust is first, then conflict. So if we have trust, in other words, everybody believes that they can bring up their own issues and that sort of thing, then we can have that conflict if it makes sense to take on a project or not.

Chris: And sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I’m as a salesperson coming in or I get my heart broke because I’m like, Guys, this is such a cool project and opportunity, but we have to have it done by September 1st or for that to happen. We got to start now on this piece of it. And they’re like, No, no, no. And it’s like, okay, for the betterment of the team and what we’re doing here, then that’s what it’s going to be.

Greg: So it. Chris, I was curious as, as you’re rolling this out and you’re building this buffer in for your team’s lack of a better term, have you had any direct feedback from, say, the design department? Are they feeling a feeling better about the work they’re doing? And is the work better? Is is there a, you know, a customer experience part of this?

Chris: I think absolutely. I think the you know, you met Becca a little bit. Becca has been with us for, gosh, eight, nine years now, a long time. I mean, she is she is the sole one that helped us create a design department. And what’s interesting about Becca is she’s she’s a very task driven person. And so if it’s in front of her, she’s just going to do whatever it takes to get it done.

Chris: And that’s something we had to work a lot together on in the past of, you know, managing those expectations with reality. We’ve also been in situations where we’re ramping up to hiring people and a designer. We have a designer move three or four years ago laws and she had to take the brunt of absolutely everything. And it was a very big, noble thing of her because typically I myself in my background, I would step in and take projects on and I would be a designer and run, run projects and that type of thing.

Chris: But she was like, that’s not the best for us and me and the customer that’s going to get. You’re not giving the best experience of what a designer truly does and how we do it. And so I’m going to choose to take it all on. I’m going to manage a schedule and make it work. And then she busted her tail for six months until we got someone I ran onboard to to help her out in that role.

Chris: And so I share that just because when we think about, you know, recognizing if you know, if people are beyond that capacity, you know, they’re not going to do the tasks that the best they possibly can. Right. And so the output isn’t going to be near as clear and near as it could be. One of the things that as you ask, if someone ever brought that to you, like I remember Becca coming to me specifically and like, hey, I am losing the capacity to think, you know, outside the box.

Chris: Like I am looking at what’s the least path or resistance from a layout option that checks all the boxes. I am losing my point to be creative and it’s like, okay, well, that’s why they’re coming to us. So that’s a problem. Like it’s our job to recognize what their pain points are and create solutions. But it’s also it’s very much just to present solutions in different ways, you know, different layouts, different options.

Chris: So, you know, in our design process, we present three different layout options based on every project, and that just wasn’t able to happen at that point in time, that extra time and energy. So we were just servicing our clients in that perspective, you know, And there were some small tweaks and that they didn’t like it. Obviously we’re not going to force them into into it, but at the same time, we we lost that ability to kind of create credit creatively and how that that directly correlates is Becca’s in that specific example, we would present an option for a 100,000, one for 150 and one for 200,000.

Chris: And most of the time the client would go with the higher the higher cost option because it’s like, that’s really cool. That’s really make this product everything that I want. And so, you know, the added revenue and profitability that we’ve created just through design and areas like that, to be able to think creatively, not being able to do that definitely, definitely goes down to the bottom line and the total revenue as well.

Tim: So you you said something that made me think about the problem that I see with so many production managers, and that is they have a project manager leads and so they have to jump back in to managing jobs. Yeah, I’m starting to see that as a capacity problem. In other words, they’ve got the project managers just booked solid capacity, so you cannot the other two project managers can’t pick up what the third one was doing.

Tim: And so he has to do it. And so the capacity beyond demand thing is starting to hit me with like stay in your lane, you know, keep people focused on their job, but make sure that the people that are doing subordinate to them, if you will, I don’t even like the word, but right under doing that report to them, make sure they have that capacity that when something does go wrong, it doesn’t create a big trauma that pulls people backwards into another another really.

Tim: So so I want to finish up, end up with this. Chris and I and everybody listen to the podcast knows we have a little conversation, you know, ahead of time getting ready for this. But you mentioned trades and this can be another big problem because I know when I was a production manager, we were growing and you go, I go to the plumber.

Tim: I said, Look, we’re going to be doing like ten more jobs next year. Are you going to be able to do all of our job? yeah, yeah, no problem. You just make sure you just tell us about that and then we get into it. And sure enough, we had we waited, you know, we waited till they could do it, But not when we needed it done.

Tim: So how do you deal with the capacity of trades?

Chris: That’s so tough? I feel like that’s like if I mean, we just got we do a send out a review questionnaire for all our past clients after our products, complete warranty period and kind of celebrate it. And we just got one back from from this morning and glowing reviews highly recommend on every single thing. And one of the questions is like, if there’s one thing that we could change that would make it better, what would it be?

Chris: And their response was, well, the trades were just backed up and schedule is hard and although it’s out of your control, it pushed us back. And that was like one pain point that they had, right? It’s probably the number one reason why our vision is this idea of creating a self performing environment of 90% or greater so that we have control and accountability to what that looks like.

Chris: But one thing that we’ve struggled with over the past is we’re in a small town. You know, there’s there’s your established trade, but there’s not funds and even the established ones are, you know, their four or five guy outfits there for at least. And one of the things we’ve gotten really good at is building relationships and really, you know, diving in to that relationship to almost like letting letting our growth transfer to them and when they really didn’t want it.

Chris: You know what I mean? Right. And we’ve had issues in the past, so it’s like, hey, I appreciate all the work, but it’s just it’s just too much like I can’t can’t do it in that conversation is always like way after the fact, right? It’s never like looking ahead and being proactive. It’s always a way when there’s a problem.

Chris: But one of the problems we run into in the last couple of years is our project size has grown so much and you know, that has been a huge problem because there’s still these crews that, you know, electricians, for example, we’re doing a house project right now. We’re a typical new home. Electrical or big remodel electrical package might be $20,000 or something like that, $30,000.

Chris: Well, this one’s $120,000. Wow. Of just electrical work. And it’s a big project, right? So but it’s like, okay, in our trades that we’ve been to address, like, I want to I definitely want to. It’s a big project, right? But they don’t recognize that. that requires four guys on site for three weeks at Ross and to make us successful.

Chris: Right. And so we have to have a lot of those conversations. Geno does a really good job of that stuff in the estimating piece of it when he’s selecting trades bid and look out at is like, This is your commitment. That’s what this looks like. And so one of the things from a accountability standpoint we started doing is as we receive all our bid packages and build builder train, that’s how we kind of receive all those now and require our our trades to give us a projected number of days that they need for rough end and finish and make sure that it makes sense quantitatively to the project, make sure it fits in our schedule.

Chris: And then when the project managers get to schedule it like I’ve got you for 15 days, you told me it’s going to be 12. I know there’s things that happen. I want to put 15 here, 15 here, but I need it done in that 15 days, you know what I mean? And so that that’s that’s how we handle that.

Chris: It’s gotten a lot better. But yeah, that’s, it’s tough. And depending on what it is like painting has been a challenge. Drywall is always a challenge. I feel like it’s a never ending saga in our industry. It’s drywall, but in a well.

Tim: Crisis been absolutely fantastic. I, I just think if nothing else, we can at least get the conversation going and get companies talking about like, what do we have to do to seriously think about the capacity of our team and allowing people a little bit of breathing room and and making sure that, you know, the mental health as well as the just the family life as well as just all that problem of when somebody leaves you know, what happens to their jobs.

Tim: I think that’s a really key point of this. I didn’t really expect to come out in this, but it certainly does. So I want to say this for being here. This has been great, stimulating the conversation and getting giving us some of the answers anyway.

Chris: Absolutely. Hopefully was a little helpful for the listeners for sure. So.

Greg: All right, Chris, I want to thank you for joining us today on the Tim Fallon show. We wish you continued success. I certainly hope hit that goal you’re looking for and self performing work and look forward to having you back on the show in the future.

Chris: Awesome. Those great guys, I appreciate it all. And keep doing what you’re doing.

Greg: So, Tim, what did you take from this today?

Tim: Well, there were just tons. I mean, there was so much that came out of it. I love the little the little catchy phrases like Delegate to Elevate, you know, that sort of that that rings a bell with me. But I think this whole idea of scalability and what we deal with as our biggest problem is I think what Chris said, skill, time, time of skilled people is our biggest challenge to scalability.

Tim: And so learning where in your company that this is what a person can do or a a position can do really is a unique thought. I think we tend to just go like, push, push, push. The more I push, the better off everybody’s going to be. And kind of looking at that scalability, I really like the idea of of giving people the time and maybe another good example would be, Hey, we need you get 8 hours of work done, physical work done, but we also need you to upload pictures and we need you to do job logs and we need you to communicate with the client and we need you.

Tim: Then we need you that we need you. And so like and now you got to do 9 hours of stuff in your regular eight hour day or 10 hours of stuff instead of saying, you know what, maybe the capacity is less because we’re asking particularly like lead carpenters project manager to do more administrative stuff. So the capacity of building something has to has to give way.

Greg: I agree. And I you know, so many of the owners within remodelers advantage, you know, their core values. You know, Chris mentioned that those are important to to run in the business. And I love the fact that he he uses that when he’s, you know, thinking of his of his people. So it’s a great place to be.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, just the question of how many jobs can you do? You know, it wasn’t like, well, we can do each project manager can do $1,000,000 worth of work a year or 2 million or 5 million or whatever it was. It was like, well, when we talk about that, we talk about communication and I want it like communication.

Tim: It’s like, that’s not the thing. But when you stop and think about it is a thing. And and you’ve got this person who, this business owner, Chris, who’s saying the key thing for our business is the communication. And so what we want to think about is not dollars, not, you know, site meetings, not, you know, none of those structural things, but like, how many clients can a project manager, a designer work with at the same time and still do effective communication?

Tim: Now they’re number, you know, 5 to 7 I think he said we prefer five which I do, which I would prefer to, but still, they’ve done some work with this and they have a number that they’re comfortable with. And then, yep, yet couple that with this meeting that they have of the stakeholders on a weekly basis. And I’m going to we’re going to have to trust Chris on this because the ability for someone to say No, Chris, you got that great idea.

Tim: It’s a wonderful job. But no, you can’t promise them will be done by school start because that’s not possible with what’s going on, the ability to talk like that and work together. And here’s the kicker for me, and I want everybody to know I love people to run businesses. It is hard. It is hard to do, but sometimes you got to get out of your own way and your team help you, especially if you’re selling.

Tim: Because sometimes we can overrun the capacity of our team. They’ll try hard, but they fail and we just have to let them help us not get ahead of ourselves. I think Chris is doing a great job of that.

Greg: All right. Well, once again, we’d like to thank Chris Fox of Fox Home Innovations for joining us. And thank you for listening to another episode of The Tim Faller Show.

Tim: And remember the Tim Faller show we’re working hard to eliminate. And Chris even mentioned it in this this podcast that M.E. brings. It is what it is from your vocabulary. Take care, everybody.

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@remodelersadvantage dot com For more information about our production manager and design manager roundtables to get more information about consulting for your team or ideas for the podcast, please subscribe to the show Comment on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.