Steve: 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.

Steve: On today’s episode of The Tim Faller Show, we will be talking about an effective master schedule with the help of special guest Aaron Enfinger of the Cleary Company in Columbus, Ohio, alongside Tim Faller. I’m your co-host, Steve Wheeler. Here is The Tim Faller Show.

Tim: Hey everyone, I’m Tim Faller, and welcome to the Tim Faller Show. The topic today is one that is near and dear to me because everywhere I go with doesn’t matter what company I’m consulting with. One of their biggest challenges is controlling the flow of jobs as they come into production and as they go out of production, having enough work for everybody or enough cash flow to make sure that all the bills are paid, as well as just controlling it in a way where it works.

Tim: And so one of the things that I always recommend is that they start developing a master or schedule. I tend to call it a macro schedule because it looks at the big picture. Master schedule is what we’re talking about today. So sales usually sells. Then production has to find a way to produce the job. And so a much better way to make this work is if sales and production are working together so that it isn’t such an emergency on either end.

Tim: In other words, we run out of stuff on the production and sales has to hurry up and sell it. And of course we make mistakes when we do that. Or sales get so many great leads, they just jam them through. Production has to hustle up, find a way to produce it. And of course we make a lot of mistakes that way as well.

Tim: And so what we want to talk about today is how do you put together something that helps you in a nutshell, in a snapshot, in a controlled way? How can you look at what’s coming down the pike? What’s going into production? How is it finishing up? And therefore we end up with more of a controlled process?

Steve: Tim. So I’m very excited to talk to Aaron. But in your experience, what are some of the things you did and and, you know, how was it? What did it look like before Excel?

Tim: So years ago when I was a production manager, I used Microsoft projects and it was as simple as, here’s how long the job is going to take. Here’s my lead carpenter. That’s going to be, finishing that job up. And here’s a slot where he needs a spot to go. And we would meet every Monday with our sales force.

Tim: And I would tell them where I needed people, and they would make adjustments, or they would tell me, you know, how their sales was going. Not nearly as complex as what we’re going to talk about today, but I feel pretty good for having done that 25 years ago.

Steve: Well, let’s get right into it. Aaron Enfinger is currently the general manager at the Cleary Company, a design build remodeling firm in Columbus, Ohio. Starting four years ago, Aaron was hired in the role of production manager and as the Cleary company was growing steadily during these four years. It became evident in early 2017 that additional oversight and management was needed in other areas of the organization.

Steve: The role of general Manager was created, and Aaron was promoted to the role to help fill this void. Some of the success that was evident in the production department was in no small part due to the master schedule that Aaron had developed, along with the help of Jennifer Wood, the spreadsheet savant and office manager at the Cleary Company.

Steve: Having a solid grasp of the big picture, scheduling and forecasting aided in creating a sense of stability and predictability in the production department. Welcome to the show, Aaron.

Aaron: Thanks, Steve. Tim, it’s great to see you guys and talk to you. thanks for having me on.

Tim: Hey, no problem at all. You know, we all need somebody that can actually make the spreadsheet work, right? We got the idea in our head, but, somebody else has to make it work. So give us a little background, Aaron, about, where you came from in this business. And just so we get to know you a little better.

Aaron: Sure. Thanks, Tim. I started out, right out of school. Right out of school, and began working with my wife’s family and began in the industry, being in the industry that way. And, they they we did interior woodworking. So that was where I cut my teeth and did all my grow growing in the industry. And, we started building homes.

Aaron: but then about four years ago, I, had the opportunity to come on board at the Cleary company and definitely wanted to, have I can take advantage of that opportunity.

Tim: That sounds great. So what were some of the things that you ran into? I’ll say, what are some roadblocks, some walls, some challenges that made you start thinking about putting together this master schedule?

Aaron: Well, similar to as you were just explaining the sales meeting that you were in on Monday mornings. So shortly after I had started there, we were discussing many of the projects that were up and coming, and so they would turn to me as the production manager and say, so Aaron, when can we start these projects? And it was was kind of a deer in the headlights there.

Aaron: I would look back and say, I need to get back to you on that. So it was, it was pretty quickly, realized that I needed to, to develop a, a forecasting mechanism and an overall master schedule. At the time, the lean carpenters were using the three week written look at heads, which were were working great.

Aaron: but that was kind of about as far as we could go or anything other than that. It was a large guess, you know, we would pull some dates out of the year and just sort of try to guess. So it was pretty pretty. It was evident pretty soon that I needed to try to develop some way I could give solid information to the sales staff on when we could go into contract, when we needed to start new projects.

Aaron: From a revenue generation standpoint, and as they were, talking with clients that were calling, making the initial phone calls, you know, how far out are we? So there was a need right away. And, so that’s when I know right into it.

Tim: So, so just I mean, you’re sitting at your desk one day, you’re thinking about, you know, all this that’s coming down the pike. Do you just kind of like, hey, let’s make a spreadsheet or or how did it how did it actually come about that you started saying, here’s what I want to look at. Here’s here’s how I want to measure these things.

Tim: And, and maybe give us a little bit of feedback on, like from what you had then and what you have now. What what was the progression?

Aaron: So what I started out doing, we didn’t have when I came on staff, we didn’t have any, we didn’t have any, any project management software, yet. And since then, in the intervening time, we’ve used builder trends. But what I did is I started creating our schedules for each of the projects, and I just did it in outlook.

Aaron: It was was simple. Right away. It was handy. So I started creating that, but that was good for the small scale. And in order to have kind of that 35,000ft view that you need to have so you can see the future, so to speak. I kind of was kicking around different ideas, and the spreadsheet is where it obviously landed on.

Aaron: That’s a great tool. So, what developed was a sort of a the Gantt chart or a bar graph style of master schedule that breaks it down, each project by week, a week that corresponds to a week of the calendar year. So as I as I began doing it, as I began to input all the information, and obviously some of the critical points of it were when the project started, how long was the duration of the project?

Aaron: And, as things began to develop, I made it a little bit more sophisticated, and I started adding in concepts about what about weekly production values? Are we are we trying to follow and track? So I made a fairly simple calculation. try to keep it simple. I’m the king of kissing things, keeping it simple. silly. Well, we’ll leave it at that.

Aaron: But, so what I did in for for simple the, purposes of this discussion, for simplicity, I’ll say that in the event that we had a project that was a $100,000 project, and let’s say that it would take ten weeks. just a simple math. That’s about $10,000 worth of production per week. So what I did is I began filling in those weeks on a row of the chart, and in those weeks that it was in production, they would correspond to a week of the year at the top of the spreadsheet.

Aaron: And then for that week of the year, any project that we had in production, those values, that $10,000 number would appear in the cells. that’s in that column for that week.

Tim: Okay. So what is the what does the value, the weekly production value give you? What does that tell you when you have that on your master schedule.

Aaron: So it tells us it tells us a couple of things. one of the easy things it does is whenever we are able to isolate. So we were able to sort the spreadsheet and pull out one particular project and so what we can do is look at all of the projects that he currently has in production to get a to get a good grasp on what is his capacity to produce.

Tim: Okay. So you so you’re using this to help understand, you know, who’s producing what and and what is their capacity.

Aaron: Correct? Correct. So we can look at it in terms of their capacity. But one of the other things that it does and again, it’s keeping in mind that with the background of it helps us plan the beginning and the end of projects, obviously. But what it does also is for each of those weeks, and I was as I was kind of preparing for this conversation, I get I wanted to keep things sort of simple.

Aaron: So, for a company, let’s say that their revenue goal was $5.2 million. If you divide that down by 52 weeks, that’s $100,000 of production, per week. So what what tracking it on each week is able to do for us if we’re producing, let’s just say we’re hitting an $80,000 a week. We know that we’re going to need to catch up a little bit if we’re going to be able to hit that revenue goal by the end of the year, because we need to be at around $100,000.

Aaron: So having each of the having that revenue per week per project helps us in the sense of it’s like a speedometer, okay. You know, right where our speed limit needs to be. So if we’re falling below that speed limit, we might need to pick up another job added in. When one comes ready. And it’s it’s available. Or we’ll also know when we’re pushing it too hard and we’re going to be taxing all of the systems.

Aaron: We’re going to be straining our trade partners, straining our guys because we’re just trying to put too much stuff in. So it acts as a speedometer to kind of give us a good gauge on where we need to be. And, you know, so sticking with that $100,000 figure for, illustration, we’ve built our production department to be able to handle roughly $100,000 worth of production a week.

Aaron: Okay. So, so we know that if we’re going to experience growth, at what point we’re going to need to hire someone else, because next time we’re going to be at $120,000 in production, okay? And if we’re at 120, we’re going to need another Lee Carpenter or another PM or whatever your staffing is going to, to dictate.

Tim: Okay, good. So back a little bit to the maybe the rudimentary part of this. Do you have your project managers create their own jobs schedule and then you bring it over into this master schedule? Or is it an automatic kind of dump in that you have for that?

Aaron: So there’s a couple of different phases of it. Initially, we try to use a, a general revenue because now what we’ve done is we’ve expanded this, calendar to where we also it helps out with sales and design as it, as it’s leading up. But, whenever we were initially telling someone how long it’s going to take, take to complete the project through the sales cycle.

Aaron: Okay, I have a short, a short cut, number. And so we put that in for how much we typically can produce in, in a given week. So again, so.

Tim: So in the master schedule, it’s not like exactly what the job schedule is. It’s more based on what you generally produce per week.

Aaron: Correct. That is up until it goes into production. And then I get that schedule from the project manager.

Tim: Okay. So wait a minute. Let me let me back up a little bit here. So you’re actually, tracking the sales process on this master schedule as well as the production process?

Aaron: yes. Yep. And so what, what we’re able to do. And so one of our conversations, that I’ll, I’ll harken back to from the, roundtable discussions that we have, the conversation often turns to swimming upstream as far as the responsibility. And part of the job of production manager is to kind of swim upstream in the organization to help make sure that projects are developed and packaged or put together in a way to help make production successful.

Aaron: So one of the things that I’ve done in this is I’ve started to track, in fact, it now tracks as soon as something hits our radar at all in a deposit, it shows up on our schedule. And what we’ve been able to do is to. And that the end goal is to try to bring some level of, try to take some of the ebbs and flows out of the sales process.

Aaron: But yes. So what we do is we anticipate in working with the sales staff, we try to anticipate those sales days so that we can know from production and when we can begin the next project. So it kind of became the next generation of this is for our our prediction of what production was going to look like in two or 3 or 4 months.

Aaron: What I needed to know was when these projects were selling. So what we started doing was working closely with the sales staff and finding out those critical dates along the path of the project as it was going through development before it would hit construction contract and then be handed over to production for us.

Tim: So there’s there’s going to be a whole lot of people listening to this podcast that goes like, how in the world do you get your sales staff to work with you on this kind of thing? Because most people in this business, they’re they’re kind of getting handed stuff just all the time as opposed to that good collaborative working.

Tim: So give me give us a little bit of feedback on how you and your team. I’m assuming it was everybody getting on board, but we’re able to work it out where your salespeople are on board with you as production to make sure this all works.

Aaron: so again, part of the, part of it is a little bit of tracking. So it’s it’s more tracking than it is. you know, predicting or dictating those time frames. what we have done is we have looked really hard and long at our, at our sales process to see how long it takes us to typically develop certain projects.

Aaron: And we obviously, we’re our hands are tied to some extent with clients and working with them and making selections. But through the process, we’ve been able to show that we can have predictability in the production department with this system. And what it has done is it’s also helped to bring some predictability. And since since it was able to produce the predictability and production, we were able to get the buy in in the other departments for them to help share the information.

Aaron: And we we come up with these dates mutually. It’s not like these dates are dictated to anyone, because again, there’s no way that we can force a client to make selections and, to, to force their schedule. So we still have to work inside of their schedule. But we give we give it enough time and it’s beginning to it’s beginning to really work at this.

Aaron: This year has been the point in time where we’ve I really did swim upstream and have begun to, work with the sales and design staff to try to hold on to some of these dates and to keep them from slipping.

Tim: So it’s, so it sounds a little bit like part of the challenge is to do some good, accurate data keeping to start with so that you can actually develop something that works for your business instead of like going, oh yeah, the $500,000 project. We should be done in two months with the design. You know, that $500,000 project takes X amount of time.

Tim: Therefore you can, you know, put it predictably into the schedule. The same would be true for production.

Aaron: Right? Right. Exactly. So we went back through and and have looked at it and we know roughly what that five $500,000 projects, how much time it’s going to spend in design. And just so we’re able to plan for it. And and that really that really helps because like with anything, the accuracy, the predictability, the value of this system is only as good as the information that we put into it.

Aaron: Right. And so, you know, good input, good output. And that’s what we’ve been able to do and, and really hone the specific things and the few areas that we really want to know. is does a good job in keeping us informed and helping us make decisions. We can look at this and feel very comfortable making decisions for what happens in the future.

Steve: So Aaron was.

Tim: Really.

Steve: Aaron. This is remodeling. So things do come up. And you’re mentioning my favorite word in remodeling which is predictability. But there also has to be flexibility. So how do you make the schedule flexible if something does happen.

Aaron: So when those things happen, you know, we we just move the inmates, you know, you you extend the time frame and you just make accommodations for it. and you, you’ve now hit the nail on the head in saying that it takes flexibility. And so, you know, we adapt on the fly and keep moving. and this is one of the things.

Steve: Is that project to project that you have to then change, you know, because that’s going to affect other projects depending on the amount of labor you currently have. So, you know, is that something automatically that shifts or you have to go, you know, project to project and go down the line?

Aaron: it doesn’t automatically shift. we have to do it all manually there, there are so a number of things that sort of do references. What makes Excel spreadsheets great. but but what does happen is, once we, once we move things around, we’re able to know what we can move up into its place and, and the level of certainty that we’re able to, again, flexible certainty that, if you will, but, to be able to move things around and, if and like, for instance, the, construction contract date gets pushed by two weeks, which would frequently happen.

Aaron: we can we can accommodate that. We can handle that. We can move some things around, move another project, make sure we have enough time in between the construction contract and project launch, where we have time to mobilize and get things ready for each project. so, yeah, the the structure of it has, has flexibility built into it.

Aaron: So is.

Tim: Is there a meeting like we had my, my Monday meeting, but is there like a meeting where your team goes over this schedule. Is it a weekly thing or do you just get emails from people that say, hey, we’ve we’ve moved our date?

Aaron: so I be on a bi weekly basis with, with the project managers on one on ones. And so once they’ve, once they make their schedule adjustments on builder trend, then we go back and and make updates to the master calendar referencing what they’ve told us is going to happen on the builder trends, schedules. So, then what I do or where I also attend all of the sales and the design meetings.

Aaron: And so yes, I do pull this up and we have it and we can filter it or design or we can filter it for salesperson. So we can have conversations based on solid information. And we’re looking at dates. We’re looking at timeframes. When this project going to sell this one’s going to extend a couple of days. So we we do go over this chart.

Aaron: It’s it’s a reference thing. I have to say that that I use it probably more frequently than anyone else. And I do have, help keeping it updated. And Jeff also keeps it, helps keep it updated so no one else kind of goes in and messes with it. It’s kind of kind of my puppy, our puppy in production.

Aaron: And, but we we do look at it, weekly on with the sales and design staff.

Tim: So what kind of advice would you give a company that’s listening to this that says, wow, this sounds really great. Where can I get a copy of that? what what what advice would you give them? See, it’s my belief that part of the the benefit of these things is actually developing them themselves, because you tend to on the more when you develop them.

Tim: So I’m not recommending everybody just, you know, go out and buy a master schedule or, or steal one from somebody. But what advice would you give a company that wanted to do something like this and was kind of getting started on it?

Aaron: Well, I think you have to obviously go into it with a, a mindset of, you know, what questions exactly are we looking for this to answer? Right. There were a couple of key components that when I started building it, it was looking to answer those questions. now through the evolution of it, it has it has grown and, and and you’re able to take it in a new direction and you can branch it off and learn something new, have it start tracking another, another metric for you.

Aaron: so but I would, I would say finding those few things that are of critical importance for your particular company and then finding ways that, this could, could track that for you or something similar to this can track.

Tim: One of the, one of the the hot topics in Remodelers advantage is, cash flow. And, it’s a big, big topic. I was on a consult the other day, and one of the things we were talking about was just the fact that sometimes the owner of the company felt like he had to push jobs into production just to just to keep the money going so that everybody got paid and so forth like that.

Tim: Does this sort of, schedule help with cash flow? And in some way it does.

Aaron: It really does. And so it’s all by inference is, what again, the king of keeping everything simple. I just use strictly revenue. Sales dollars. I don’t I don’t worry about breaking this down any further to GP or anything else. It’s just straight up revenue dollars. And and so what we do is we annually we track that for us.

Aaron: a couple of caveats. You you do you need you need to be selling projects at a consistent GP and you need to be consistently producing them on budget, which we we do fairly well for both of those. So that that makes this is a nice shortcut where we can just deal with the actual revenue number. And so what it does is, is, you know, again, go I’ll go back to the illustration or the example of the $5.2 million company with $100,000 worth of production, you know, if that if your numbers start falling into the 40s, 50s, $60,000 a week of production, your overhead is not going down.

Aaron: but your production is your cogs. All your cogs will come down as a corresponding amount. But what’s going to happen is you’re going to maybe feel a bit of, of a cash flow crunch. So what that what this does is it at least gives you a heads up. It’s kind of a canary in the coal mine, so to speak, where you can look out five, six weeks from now, if you might be happened to be in a little bit of an, an element of your, of your work cycle instead of, of a nice flow, you’re going to know you’re going to have some shortfalls there, or at least you’re going to need

Aaron: to make sure you have something on hand where you can cover that gap for you. So it’s it has its limitations, but it it certainly it certainly can help raise the red flags.

Tim: So basically what it sounds to me like is that an awful lot of what this does for you is just raise those red flags so that you can make better decisions about how to move things around. you made the comment about if if there’s a delay or something that changes now, you can at least see, like, what do we do about that as opposed to worrying or just throwing something into production?

Tim: So it sounds to me like an awful lot of it is just a great platform for making good decisions as.

Aaron: You move forward. Right? That’s really what it does. Is it it it levels out the the ups and downs and it helps you to, to make decisions, you know, whenever you do see that, that time period approaching and you’re not you don’t have enough work. You’re a little bit below that $100,000 mark. It’s it’s a great tool to tell you that it’s a great tool.

Aaron: It’s very it really helps us on the sales side in predicting when we can tell people that the projects are going to start. one of the things that that that is rule in Ohio on your contracts, you have to tell people what an estimated start date is. Now, we always, okay, have that estimated. But that was one of the things necessary to be able to give people a good, a good, start date.

Tim: Okay. Really good. Okay. As we start winding this down, as we run it, start getting short on time, maybe one little tidbit of, encouragement or a little nugget maybe you can give to everybody about a master schedule.

Aaron: so I again, I’m just going to circle back around to the things that it’s done for us has been to bring a sense of stability and calm to understanding when we needed to bring things into production. And it also helps us predict the times of year of the year when we may need to tighten the belt a little bit because whereas maybe you could be running another job or two, but just don’t have that in the in the pipeline, and it really works well to give you great information to make decisions.

Aaron: And that’s really the bottom line is you you need to be able to make solid decisions.

Steve: Well, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today on the show, and we wish you continued success and look forward to having you back on the show in the future. So thank you.

Aaron: Thank you Tim. Steve, it was my pleasure.

Steve: So, Tim, I’ll turn it to you. What did we learn today?

Tim: Well, this is one of those topics that’s very, very difficult to get a handle on with just audio. But I think the big thing is, is having some kind of structure that helps you figure out when do you need jobs to come into production and when will jobs be finishing up. And that cash flow thing is big for me as well.

Tim: Just knowing or having some kind of a trigger that says, hey, we either need to hit this hard, get some cash in, or everything is good.

Steve: Yeah. And I think for so many parts of the business, it’s going to tell you a story and give a sense of, you know, relief in one sense. But, you know, when you can see that you have this number of projects, you know, in the pipeline, ready to go, ready to be produced, you know, labor, they know they have work.

Steve: They know they can prepare for the work that they’re seeing on the master schedule. it’s just it’s so many different issues within the company. So it’s so it really does.

Tim: And the other thing that I really like about having something in writing or on the computer, is that it takes you out of that frenzy. Oh, no, we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble phase where you can really see it as opposed to just reacting to some nebulous, odd thing going on. Yeah.

Steve: Again, my favorite word predictability. It’s all very bad. So, once again, we want to thank Aaron Enfinger of the Cleary Company for joining us today. And thank you for listening to another episode of The Tim Faller Show.

Tim: Remember, we’re helping the bottom line through production training.

Steve: This has been another episode of The Tim Faller Show. Want to hire Tim and fast track your growth? Visit remodelers. advantage.com/consulting to learn more. And if you’d like more information about roundtables, our world class peer advisory program, please send me an email at Steve at remodelers advantage.com. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to the show and comment on iTunes.

Steve: Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.