Mark: Today on PowerTips Unscripted. We talked to Jeff Talmadge, president of Talmadge Construction in Aptos, California. Designers are a critical part of your remodeling project, but how do you know when they are maxed out? Jeff is here to share his secret to gauging his designer’s workload, and we’ll hear all about it in just a minute.

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

Mark: That’s me.

Victoria: That is certainly you. You know what? This is a good session, a good episode, because it was one that I just picked up on when I was sitting in one of our roundtable meetings with all these smart, savvy business owners. And, you know, you just just start discussing all sorts of cool stuff. And so Jeff talked about this a.

Victoria: You got to share that with our listening audience. This is to just to.

Mark: Cool is to get to keep to yourself.

Victoria: Well, you know the business the everybody’s business has like blossom. Just about everybody that I know has really had a ton of leads and pipeline and so on. But yet there’s only so many people out there. Hiring is tougher than ever. So this was just a cool idea to help you gauge, you know, their workload and make sure you’re not trying to stress out your designers by shoving too much through.

Mark: Well, one of the solutions to the labor shortage is, is being more efficient and better with your existing workforce. That’s exactly right. It’s one way to to handle it.

Victoria: Yeah. So let’s dive in.

Mark: Shall we just jump away?

Victoria: All right. Jeff Talmadge, as Mark said, is the president of Talmadge Construction and Aptos, California. He’s been a long time Roundtable’s member here. And his wife Adela participated for years. And now his son Andrew was coming into the business. So they started their business in 1984. And we’re and was taking over in 2025, which is wonderful. And, we’re delighted to have him welcome.

Victoria: Jeff.

Jeff: Thanks, you guys. Thanks for having me on today.

Victoria: Sure. You know, when we were sitting around in your Nova group, roundtable meeting talking about, you know, everything under the sun having to do with business, right. And I think, I don’t know if somebody asked or you how it got brought up, but you brought up what? Tell our listening audience.

Jeff: Well, we’re we call it the designer load. And it’s just a way to give a point or a point loading system to each designer. So we can, we can tell if we’re giving them too much to do.

Victoria: So why? I mean, what what brought this up? How to help, you know, how do you even come to think about this?

Jeff: Well, there’s there’s a couple of different drivers to this one. It started with our production manager complaining about his inability to predict when a job would be ready. When is it going to come out of design? When is it going to permit? Going to be ready. When can I start? So we were having a lot of trouble telling him when they’d be ready.

Jeff: So we created a design schedule on builder trend okay. But we kept pushing our deadlines out because the designers were trying to predict when they get stuff done. But we just kept giving them more jobs to do, and they kept flailing. And we were still having trouble. And then one day, one of my designers, Dave, he was just frustrated.

Jeff: And he his new he just came on last November and he’s very diligent, really wants to take care of the clients. And he said, how can I how can I take care of these people if I can only work on their job for eight hours every other week? Yeah. That was like, you know, the the gut shock for me.

Victoria: Yeah, I can understand that.

Jeff: Got me. So we’ve been looking at at scrum, I heard about scrum on your podcast and try to figure out how we can use it, in our business, but we were struggling with that because each designer is kind of in a silo. They’re they’re taking the job from the time we sell the feasibility agreement all the way through construction.

Jeff: So it wasn’t really a team based, job. So Dave suggested that we, use some point system to try to meter this.

Victoria: Now, I’m sure that while you. Well, while your production manager was complaining because he couldn’t tell when the next job was coming up, and Dave was upset because he felt that he wasn’t able to take care of the clients properly. What were some of the other or were there other ramifications of overloading your designers?

Jeff: There was that the clients were complaining about how long it was taking to get through the process. So their expectations weren’t set. What expectations they did have weren’t met. So it was just frustration on on that level too.

Victoria: What about details in the job packets and things like that? Was that slip into the cracks too, or was it really mainly a time delay?

Jeff: No, we were starting jobs before the job packet was ready because production needed it. They said, you guys said we’re going to be able to start this now. And I’ve got these guys aren’t going to be able to work these carpenters. So, you know, we just would start jobs without that being ready. So it’s really caused a lot of problems, a lot of chaos all through the whole business.

Victoria: You know, I know that there are companies out there who set sort of guidelines for how many leads to give salespeople, but I didn’t really know of too many others that did that same thing for their designers up until we had this discussion. Do you know of others that do something similar or do something to track that load?

Jeff: I don’t I we, I just thought, oh, it’s just another batch and you can do this, you can squeeze this thing. But it’s not that firms take a lot of time and they then they take away from other jobs that they’ve already started. So I don’t know anybody who does that. We’re kind of insulated in that regard. I don’t know anybody know that they have a system that they’re they’re tracking that.

Victoria: I think they’re probably all use and years now, as we say, R&D rip off and duplication. So Jeff, so give us an idea of how many jobs were your designers dealing with. How many were they assigned at any one time before this tool?

Jeff: They might have 5 or 6 jobs in design and 2 or 3 in construction. So there you have a lot of responsibility during construction too. And that was that just wasn’t computing into our thought process. But they need to go out to jobs at certain points in the in the process to meet with the customers, to meet with the project managers, to check on the quality of the work, to, manage expectations around countertops, seams and various finishes as they’re going in.

Victoria: Okay, so we know what some of the challenges were. We know why you decided to do something of this. Now tell us, how did you develop it.

Jeff: And what you started with the simple spreadsheet and started assigning points for different job types. A lot of our work is whole house remodels that can range from 500,000 to $2 million. So we had to use a range of points, for each type of project. So a whole house remodel might get 6 to 9 points, and then you would add points in for did it have four bathrooms?

Jeff: Each bathroom would get between 1 and 3 points. A kitchen, a laundry room. If it had an addition, it would get a certain number of points where we replacing all the windows and doors and the siding and the roof. Were we doing any exterior work? So all this, all this stuff has to get detailed fireplaces.

Jeff: I thought, well, just a fireplace, but the designers have started looking at their past job plans, and and they’re they’re reevaluating how many points they give to things on their own now. So each each time they take a look at it, they’re using a little bit different system. So right now we have a limit of 80 points per designer.

Jeff: And that right now can be spread across, four jobs in design and three in production. For some people, Dave, for instance, has, five jobs in design and one in production right now, and he has just under 80 points.

Mark: So that’s really a cool idea. And so are the points kind of determined by the end? How many designers do you have first?

Jeff: Well, that’s interesting because one left she had to move out of state. So all of her points had to get redistributed on the remaining two.

Victoria: So are you hiring another one again.

Jeff: We hired another one. We’re very fortunate to find somebody qualified and local and our office manager who’s got experience in interior design. She came in to help with the selections. So that was a great great bonus to have her available for that. So that was an all hands on deck on that one. All right. So everybody got more points.

Jeff: Even our office manager ended up with points. She’s on our on our system two with 12 points.

Mark: And the points universal across the company or like you were saying, I think three points for a bathroom is that across the board or one designers may be two points. Another one’s for.

Jeff: Well, they’re looking at it. If it’s a master bath, with a tub freestanding tub and a walk in shower and a lot of complicated details, they’re going to give it full three points, but it’s a whole bath with remove and replace type of stuff. That’s going to be one point. Powder rooms 1.0.

Mark: That’s really cool.

Victoria: So if so you’re looking at it in two ways, right? One is the the volume of psi is the. And then also it’s the complexity let’s say is it like scope and complexity.

Jeff: Scope complexity. And we have added lines for how hard is it going to be to get a permit.

Victoria: So how does that impact it.

Jeff: Well, we’re in a coastal zone, some of our clients, and that can be a year long process just to get through a development process. Then you have to go through the whole building permit process. So we had one of our jobs. It was a tough permit. We had like five points for the permit.

Victoria: But so if the if the designer sitting there waiting for it to be permitted, it seems like they would get points reduced because they’re just sitting waiting.

Jeff: That’s where the subjectivity comes in. Danielle has 154 points right now.

Victoria: Oh my gosh. Well so how is that work?

Jeff: Well she has we’ve told people well first of all, she has two jobs that are in the development process where she’s waiting.

Victoria: Okay.

Jeff: And she has another job that’s waiting because we told the client that she wouldn’t be available until December to start.

Victoria: And the client wanted her.

Jeff: The client wanted her. She’s been with me since 2004, and she’s got a following and reputation and gets lots of referrals from that nice. And we also added points for the difficulty of the client.

Victoria: Okay. So explain that.

Jeff: Well, some of them need a lot more time to make decisions. Right. You know that. You’ve heard that.

Victoria: Yes, yes.

Jeff: You have to see a lot of things to make decisions. So when we recognize that early, we will assign a few more points based on that.

Victoria: Okay.

Mark: I know a couple people are probably worth 30 points.

Victoria: Right there, right there. Okay. So what do you do when I mean, how are you managing it when you have three designers plus your office manager and you got one designer, it’s got 154 points when 80 is supposed to be her limit. So I mean, are you just are you really using those points to keep it in check?

Victoria: Or is Danielle just in such demand that you’re allowing her to go over? And is that a bad thing? Yeah, I think it’s temporary.

Jeff: I look at as temporary. The new designer still in training, so he has no points right now. Okay, so once he comes out in 90 days, he just started about a week ago. So I expect that he’ll be taking on some of that load. Our office manager is going to move into that position full time. Oh. So I have to hire another office manager.

Jeff: So we need four designers to to meet our goals. So we decided to use three designers and an interior designer.

Victoria: Good. I like that model to.

Jeff: Manage the, selections. So what this really helps us do as a team is recognize that we have light at the end of the tunnel that we’re for Dave and and, for how he feels about, okay, now we have a system to manage and Jeff’s not going to give me three more jobs because I can just tilt my head and say, I already have 80 points.

Jeff: Yeah. When I go meet with a client and and they ask me, well, when can you start on the design? I can say, well, all of our designers are busy and we can’t start until March of 2023. Is that okay with you? So it just it just relieved a lot of pressure points to have this tool. It’s one of the tools we use.

Jeff: But it seemed to take a lot of stress away.

Victoria: Oh good. So how are you literally tracking this. You talked about builder trend at one point, but where do you look to know.

Jeff: We use the iOS model. Traction. And each Tuesday we have a level ten meeting with our designers, our sales manager, and our office manager and our estimator. And so we go through our agenda. And one of the things on the agenda is to look at the designer load, okay. And so that’s when we look at it.

Jeff: And if a designer gets a new job they’re going to score it.

Victoria:

Jeff: And if they have if they have 20 points available, we can give them a 20.25 point job or something like that.

Victoria: Right, right. Very, very.

Mark: Cool. And is it just kept on like a Excel spreadsheet?

Jeff: Just on a spreadsheet. And it’s, updated just on one spreadsheet.

Victoria: Okay, cool. Simple but effective. Like it?

Mark: That’s great. Well, I’m going to, assign three points to you for the lightning round. We’re about to do. How’s that sound?

Jeff: Sounds good. Oh, and now here’s our remodelers advantage. Lightning round. It’s a dry.

Mark: Okay, let’s put 60s on the clock. What is your favorite business book and why?

Jeff: Oh my goodness. I have like 34 business books on my shelf. I’d have to say that it would be traction, but Gina Wick and that book has really helped me communicate with my team and then communicate with me and feel like we’re all working together.

Mark: If you weren’t a remodeler, what do you think you’d be doing?

Jeff: I think I would be teaching kindergartners.

Mark: What are you not very good at?

Jeff: For some reason, I can’t understand my wife when she’s talking to me, because I can’t. Other people.

Mark: You prefer your desk or your car? Which would you clean first?

Jeff: I would clean my desk.

Mark: In one word, describe your high school self.

Jeff: Bushy haired.

Mark: Name a movie you’ve seen more than ten times.

Jeff: There is no movie I’ve seen more than ten times.

Mark: What’s the first four letter word that comes to your mind?

Jeff: Mind?

Victoria: That. Let’s get. Jeff, this has been awesome. Thank you for explaining this process, this tool to us. I just think that it was a brilliant development and really can help you keep an eye on that, that the the potential for overworking, which could be the potential of getting somebody super frustrated, which could be the potential of them quitting.

Victoria: And there goes your team in a handbasket, right?

Jeff: That’s true. It’s, you know, I didn’t want to lose Dave. He’s been a very good addition to the company.

Victoria: Great. That’s awesome. So thank you for sharing this. Now, before I let you go, though, I want you to share your five words of wisdom with our listening audience and tell us why they resonate with you.

Jeff: I like patient persistence. Never give up. I early in my career I was very idealistic and and it took me a while to temper that. And now I use this being nice and patient and persistent to get to my goals without. I don’t want to get upset and start yelling. Just be persistent.

Victoria: All right? That’s awesome, I like it. Thank you so much, Jeff. I appreciate you being here.

Jeff: Thank you for having me guys. Have a great day.

Victoria: Thank you to I really like the concept of having measurable a measurable goal a measurable thing. It’s designers. Yeah.

Mark: Well because it’s such an abstract thing. Who’s your overworked right. Overloaded. Well are you how are you overloaded I mean, I think we should apply points here to everything.

Victoria: I was just trying to think about how would we do that? So it was it was a really, clever idea.

Mark: It’s a it’s a I think it’s brilliant. It’s it’s, you know, most brilliant ideas are so simple. It’s you kind of slap yourself in the forehead and say, yeah. Why didn’t I think of that?

Victoria: Right? No, I like it a lot.

Mark: But it’s it’s a very I could see how powerful tool it is. I was a little confused, I’m sure. Yeah. That’s what I wanted to ask him. How long has he been doing this? Oh, I forget because it’s a work in progress. Obviously you’re not going to come out of the gate knowing it, right? You’re gonna have to tweak some things as you’re figuring out your own point system and all that.

Mark: But I’m sure that it takes a little time and effort. And to me, one of the things because he said one designer had like 157, but they weren’t yet started on a project I would almost want to put. Yeah, that’s point in hold, right? Somewhere. Like maybe the points are.

Victoria: Yeah.

Mark: In the future bank account or something. Right. Because they’re not really on her.

Victoria: So you have the current points for the current projects and then knowing it’s the pipeline.

Mark: Knowing that there’s 57 points coming up. So I can’t overload her because that’s pending.

Victoria: Or you get all of them with the pending at 60 points and you go, I better hire another designer because we’re going to max.

Mark: Right? Yeah. Everybody else, there’s all kinds of drafts.

Victoria: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: That’s right. Cool. Yep. And what a wonderful thing Excel spreadsheets are.

Victoria: Yes. And this was only one of the very good ideas that I heard at that particular round.

Mark: I’m sure we could do five years worth from one round tables. Maybe. But then why would anybody go to round tables?

Victoria: Because they’d have to wait five years to get them all.

Mark: That’s right. All right. Well, this was great. We want to thank Jeff for sharing this really, really smart idea for gauging his his designer workload. And we want to thank you for listening week in and week out. I am Mark Harari.

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