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Host Scott Lollar is a 35-year veteran of the painting industry and founder of Consulting4Contractors. The 'Success Beyond The Brush' Podcast serves as a touchpoint to painting contractors who have hustled, sacrificed, and worked hard to get their business to where it is today. Now, you need the guidance, expertise, experience, and team to make it into the multi-million-dollar company of your dreams. You'll hear stories and interviews from "Brothers of the Brush" and "Sisters of the Sprayer" who have been where you are and are charting a new course for their company's success. Listen in and go beyond $1,000,000!
SBTB Ep 10 | The Scheduling Mistakes That Quietly Cost Contractors $150K+
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[00:00:00]
Introduction to Scheduling in Operations
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Mark: Scheduling is operations. A hundred thousand dollars a month doesn't matter what your people are feeling, or if your sub had enough people show up, or if they had to go get their kid from daycare. The mechanical side of the business says, we need $100,000 of production.
Scott: If you don't have the manpower available, you mathematically will fail, so just saying "my board's full" is not necessarily the statement we need to make. We need the board to represent the number.
The Importance of Efficient Scheduling
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Mark: We can all think of those five or six jobs, but what we don't think about is how much lost revenue we may or may not have had due to inefficient or just plain bad scheduling.
Scott: A lot of companies will be a, anywhere from $150K to $200K in lost revenue because of that little fact.
And then what happens the last day. They go, that's right
we need another week.
The other thing that I see a lot of people do is they say, well, they didn't quite finish, so we're going to send them back tomorrow.
No, I would say, try not to do that.
We have something else planned for tomorrow and we're not going to let you do that. And [00:01:00] so you need to do that in an appropriate way, but you should not be tolerating that behavior because it's screwing up your production.
Welcome To Success Beyond The Brush
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Welcome back to Success Beyond the Brush, the podcast for contractors and home service business owners who want to grow companies and not just own their jobs. In today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about a topic that is quietly affecting everything that you do, namely scheduling. Because scheduling isn't just moving jobs around on your calendar, it's really all about your capacity. It's your capacity that's going to determine whether you hit your revenue goals, whether you protect your margins and whether you keep your team running smoothly.
You're going to hear a practical breakdown from Scott and Mark today of what really throws your schedule off, how your jobs going over budget creates a double hit to your revenue and why saying something like the board is full can really be a dangerous illusion, and what disciplined operators do differently to keep their production moving. Let's dive into [00:02:00] this episode. We hope you find it helpful.
Mark: Welcome everybody once again to, sorry, I almost went into the Beyond A Million. I was like,
Scott: Success beyond the brush success, beyond the.
Mark: Success Beyond the brush. All right, we'll start over.
All right.
Diving into Scheduling Challenges
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Mark: Welcome everybody to another great episode of Success Beyond the Brush Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Black here with Scott Lollar today. Welcome Scott.
Scott: Hey, thanks Mark.
Mark: So every once in a while we get to talk about something you like to talk about. One of the pleasures of being the host is that I usually get to choose the topic, and of course, I'm going to gravitate to things that I like, such as sales and marketing. Things that are touchy feely and make me feel good. But you, sir, like to talk about operations.
Scott: Isn't that crazy? You're one of those people that like to talk about how much you sold, but your bank account needs to talk about what you produced and how we got it done.
I think that's darn important.
Mark: You always [00:03:00] come back with the data and it has to actually pay for itself, and I don't love that part.
Scott: I'm a buzzkill.
Mark: We do get to talk about an operational reality, though that all of us as contractors and business owners, we run into this problem all the time.
Operational Realities and Capacity
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Mark: So the big topic today is scheduling.
Scott: Yep.
Mark: Boom, boom,
Scott: yeah, scheduling is critical and, you know, most of you know, or if none of you know, I'm a operational person at heart. That's my real passion, is how do we run this. Sales? I could do it, but my jam is operations and we talk a lot about project managers, project management, you know, we do a lot of this at C4C, and part of what really needs to happen is we need to push the pace of production all the time. Pedal to the metal. Fitting all the jobs in like a puzzle, but all the while not letting your team know we're putting the [00:04:00] pedal to the metal because it's exhausting and overwhelming.
But a good production team, a good operations team, is maximizing all of their time and that's the critical component in order to get the revenue and profits that we're looking for out of our business. And that's a super hard thing to do.
Mark: You are exactly right. I would also make an amendment to your statement just so our listeners know a little bit more about Scott, with every episode: you don't like operations, you're obsessed.
Scott: Yeah. Yes.
Mark: had the either pleasure or displeasure depending on how you look at it, of going to Walt Disney World with you a few times, which of course is an operations person's just fantasy land.
Because they are known for their operations and how smoothly everything runs and thinking about all the systems and processes that have to go just right to create this magical experience. And I love to watch your eyes light up as you watch those operations and, just a [00:05:00] well-oiled machine.
Scott: You're right. I love it. You know, Peter Moon likes to make fun of me that you know, I get my Mickey Mouse ears and it's not so much about my love for Mickey Mouse. It's my love for this production, this well-oiled machine that, when you step in that place, they make you feel a certain way and you don't know what's going on, man, is that great?
And I think we want to do that for our customers too.
Mark: That's right. Every one of us. Maybe Disney isn't our jam, but every one of us are trying to create that magical experience for our customer. We're trying to generate emotions and feelings and thoughts in our customers that they had this wonderful experience with this painting contractor that they hired.
Scott: Yeah,
Mark: and if you're not focused on that, you probably should be in your business. We are trying to create an amazing experience, not only this time, but keeps those customers coming back again and again.
The Impact of Over-Budget Jobs
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Mark: So, on this topic of scheduling, I had heard it said that, you know, most of us can look back over the last year and come up with three, four, or five [00:06:00] examples of really bad jobs.
And actually that's something we do at our Christmas party. Every year we talk about what were the three worst jobs of the year, and the guys have fun, you know, thinking back to these horrible jobs, either bad customers or just the job itself was abysmal or it was hot, whatever. We can all think of those five or six jobs, but what we don't think about is how much lost revenue we may or may not have had due to inefficient or just plain bad scheduling.
What do you think about that?
Scott: Yeah, it's true. And I'm cognizant of the fact that, Mark, you and I really, spend most of our careers in the employee model role with the W2 employee model.
And yet it's very common today that people are more in the subcontractor model, but I think we can speak to both, which is you have capacity, right?
And capacity is really what dictates revenue. If you can't get work done, then you don't get [00:07:00] revenue. So, no matter what you sold, you got to go get it produced. So if you have a crew, and it doesn't matter if it's a one person crew or a five person crew, we're still doing math and no matter who you are, you're breaking this down into time, whether it's hours, man-days, whatever it is in your language, in your company. But when we calculate a job and how long it's going to take, we're assuming that block of time is going to be sufficient for that amount of revenue, which is what we charge the customer and we're going to go to the next one. If we don't, then we're essentially, think of it like a store.
Hey, guess what? We're closed today. We're not going to make any money today because the crew that was supposed to come today is stuck on the last job. Now you could say, well, it doesn't really matter because my sub crew makes the same amount of money no matter what. That is a true statement. But the fact is they were supposed to do a certain amount of revenue last week, and they're counted on to do a certain [00:08:00] amount of revenue this week. And when they don't produce it as. You were expecting, whether it's a sub model or an employee model, then you essentially forego some of your time and you won't you won't be able to have revenue for whatever that is.
And that's why it's so important that we hit our budget, that our estimates are accurate, that we don't bid eight hours for something that takes 12, and that we keep this machine going on count, because that's really how we meet our goals. So days turn into weeks, turn into months, turn into quarters, turn into years, right?
And that's how we build this model. And we all have a goal of an output. The output is not going to happen if you don't do this consistently in perfect step if, it was a perfect world and it's not.
Mark: No, it's certainly not. And I love how you touched on there too, whether it's a sub model or a W2. Often business owners overlook or we downplay how devastating it is financially to us when a project goes [00:09:00] over budget. We at our company think in terms of hours. So if it's a 32 hour job and it comes in at 40 hours, I tend to have an attitude of, eh, it went over a little bit, but it's not that bad.
But you're suggesting that the truth is that's an eight hour difference, which is a whole man-day, that I just lost out of my month and when we're looking at this at a monthly scale and what was my budget need and we needed to hit this, not only did I lose eight hours on that particular project, but I took eight hours of potential away from the next project that he should have been on, that now we don't have revenue for that. It's a double whammy.
Scott: That's exactly right. And if you map that out, Mark, even your example of eight hours or 40 hours, 40 hours is a equivalent of one painter for a week.
You know, if you did that week after week, that's the equivalent of a one full-time painter or whatever. I mean, a lot of companies will be a, anywhere from $150K to $200K in lost revenue because of that little fact.
So it's really critical. One of the KPIs that we probably haven't [00:10:00] talked about a lot, because it's kind of, it's in the weeds, but we talk about billable hours, right? So we know that companies have unbillable time with their employees. Sometimes there's training, of course, sometimes there's PTO or holidays that's unbillable. And sometimes there is company meeting. So there's a little bit of that we build in and we know it's going to happen. The rest of it, we were, we're talking about billable time, and your company does this. I think it's a little bit of an administrative nightmare, but it's worthwhile for you, which is once the job meets the budget, say it's a hundred hour job, once it hits hundred hours, they no longer count those hours as billable because everything over a hundred, think of it as free.
We're not getting paid. So like, you know, some people, like, like you just said, say we're close. It's just a little bit, it's not so bad. That's what people say when it's not important to how much money we make.
And so a hundred hour job [00:11:00] is only scheduled for a hundred hours.
Once it goes over a hundred, we are doing work for free. And that's really the mindset that you need to have. not exactly the same for a sub model, but like I said already, if they don't get to the next job, then we don't get a bill for that job either.
So you are still reducing your revenue. It doesn't cost you more, but there's lost revenue. So I would suggest it actually does cost you.
Mark: You're exactly right, and, I'm cognizant of the fact that people could be listening right now and think, all right, it's just, you know, two guys in the painting industry talking about how important it is to be on time. Yes, of course there's a financial component to not going over budget, but again, as we're talking operationally about this idea of scheduling, what we're really talking about is capacity.
And, of course that translates to dollars, but we're saying you reduce your capacity or you may say, Hey, I have plenty of manpower, I have 16 people in the field. Well do you? You may have 16 physical people, but if you are overproducing jobs, you're producing as if you have [00:12:00] 13 people. Because they're not all billable hours.
Scott: That's exactly right. Yeah.
Mark: It changes the dynamic. So getting back to our scheduling component and capacity, what other dangers are there in the world of scheduling or maybe having the wrong person, do your scheduling. Or what are we not thinking about that can also cost us big as contractors?
Optimizing Crew Sizes and Job Efficiency
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Scott: Well if we're talking in the residential world, right, is I would be careful not to overload your jobs. In my opinion, the best, most efficient crew size is one. Well, that's very safe for one, and you'll take a long time if you had a thousand hour job, but the truth is there's less inefficiency, right?
That person is managing themselves. They have a sequence. They're not waiting for this, they're not waiting for that. So, we know that's impractical, but I do think a two person crew size is more optimal than, say, a four person crew size. So packing projects with manpower for the wrong reason.
So we hear this a lot. Well, I need [00:13:00] somewhere for Joe to go, so I'm just going to send him over here. Right?
So that's an inefficient scheduling function, which is we need to figure out how to break crews up or, you know, separate them to the point where they're efficient. This is where I'm an advocate, and everyone should know that I'm an advocate for, commercial work. And in fact, we wrote a commercial course with Eric Barstow about this very topic, which is how do I get into commercial painting? Because a nice commercial job, 50 grand or whatever, is a nice anchor project, where that's a place you can send Joe for a day, right? Because there's a million doors or there's a whatever.
So, packing jobs or over staffing jobs is really a very bad practice and you should avoid that at all costs. Now, if you pack a job or if it's a huge job, I would advocate you send four people, but work them like two crews of two, right? Here you people take that area over there. You two take this over here. And so it really still can run efficiently, but when [00:14:00] you overstaff projects, it's really bad. And also the math is different and so depending on your average job size, which is really important, we can do the math, for two people it's 80 hours in a week, 16, 32, 48, but if you put three people on a 80 hour job, you don't have five days anymore.
You have to get that done in three.
Or three and a half,
or, you know, the math doesn't work anymore. So I think understanding the size of the job and staffing it appropriate is really important.
Another thing that I see immediately, and I'll speak to subs as well, but for employee models, is that we get at least the full 40 out of every employee. If they are hitting 36 hours a week because you know, they don't really care about the money and their wife makes a bunch of money and they just want to get to the bowling league or whatever it is, you know, four hours a week times 10 painters is the equivalent of one [00:15:00] full-time,
right? So not hitting 40. And I also think that we should let them work a little bit more than 40 and pay some overtime. Some people get really hung up on overtime. You know, I got to get out. Boss says, no overtime, so eight, eight hours and I'm out of here. Well, that actually can be costing you a little bit money when, just working an extra half hour can really wrap a few things up and just accelerate the completion.
So having people that have some flexibility in their schedule. Now I'm not advocating that people miss picking up their kids from daycare or, I'm not saying that. I'm saying could we just be a little bit more flexible that hey, I had 42 hours this week and they're going to pay them a little overtime. And that's fine because you got the production and quite frankly, you very likely made more money.
So having people make sure they hit their full 40, nothing less is really important as well.
Mark: Yeah, and I find that companies such as ours who have a lot of legacy team members, we've got a lot of team members who have been with us a [00:16:00] long time. Our culture has slowly shifted more and more where it's, you know, 36, 37, 38 hours. They're fine financially because they make a lot of money per hour and they're not quite as motivated to get a full 40, but you're exactly right.
When you look at that at scale, that is a whole lot of money over the year.
Scott: So people that think that's a culture issue, I don't think it's a culture issue. I'm not telling them to change their lifestyle. I'm asking them for 40 hours. That's what the job advertised at. That's what we hired you at, and that's what we'd need for this company to work. It doesn't work at 35.
We need the full amount. Now on the sub model, you know, it's harder to track this. But when we're working with sub model contractors, which we have lots of them, we still are talking about what I call full-time equivalent or FTE. We're still counting hours, so I need to know if the sub has two people or three people, or if they said they had three people, but only one showed up today, we still need our [00:17:00] operations team to be checking in and just making sure they showed up, how many people do they have with them, because that's going to gauge how long this job's going to go. And just because they're a sub doesn't mean you shouldn't understand how much manpower they have, because that is going to determine your next project and how you schedule.
So, yes, I understand we're not going to micromanage. Like how come you don't have this many people? Or where's so and so? I understand that's not the role. We still do need to understand the full-time equivalent on a job site every day so we can do that math and tighten up our scheduling so we know, hey, they're going to be behind because two of their people were no-shows today, or whatever that is.
We need to understand that because that's going to be how we pack our schedule and keep it tight.
Well, a quick break in the middle of the show here. If this episode is making you rethink how you schedule your jobs, here is your bigger takeaway. Your scheduling is not a calendar problem. It's a capacity problem. And when your [00:18:00] capacity slips even just a little, it shows up as a couple different things. Missed revenue.
Rushed jobs, your crews are stressed out and it's really that constant feeling that you're playing catch up. So if you want help building a scheduling and production system that actually matches the goals that you've set for your own business, that's exactly what we focus on at Consulting 4 Contractors.
So if you're getting any sort of value from this episode, go ahead and share it with another contractor who you feel like may always be booked, or somebody that might still feel like they're behind all the time. As always, please check the show notes or the video description for additional resources and links for all these things related to capacity and scheduling and how we can maximize those for your business.
Now back to the conversation with Mark and Scott.
Balancing Operational and People Components
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Mark: I'd like to pause for just a minute and say the reason I enjoy talking with you, the reason I like this podcast, [00:19:00] is because we represent the two sides of business. I think there's two sides of business. There's a machine component that is somewhat cold and calculated. It doesn't matter the excuses.
There's a machine component. This is what my business is. This is how much revenue I need. This is how much profit I need because the expenses don't care if your kid is sick, right? So there's this cold machine component, which is the operational side. Sorry buddy. That's you. That's you. Not that you're cold and unfeeling, but you represent that and you connect with that.
And then there's this warm, fuzzy peopley side. There's a people side to business, which of course is my wheelhouse, and that's what I love. Neither one of us should run a business entirely at one end of the spectrum or the other. Business is both. There's a cold, hard calculated operational component, and then there's a people component.
But what I'm suggesting is that this subject of scheduling, so many companies, too many companies [00:20:00] operate their schedule from a warm, fuzzy people side. It needs to be centered in the cold mechanical side. Scheduling is operations and scheduling. Doesn't matter. I need to schedule whatever it is for your business.
Let's just say it's a hundred thousand dollars just for nice easy math. I need to do $100,000 of business this month. Now I realize we've got a lot of listeners that are like, I wish I only had to do a hundred thousand. A lot of our, your customers are several hundred thousand dollars a month. I've heard of million dollar months.
But we also have perhaps listeners who are on the small scale and they can't imagine doing six figures per month, but a hundred thousand dollars a month doesn't matter what your people are feeling, or if your sub had enough people show up, or if they had to go get their kid from daycare. The mechanical side of the business says, we need $100,000 of production.
Can you speak to that then as we schedule, and how important it is to schedule with the end goal in mind, and that's [00:21:00] our job as business owners is the end goal.
Scott: It's one of our KPIs that we've talked about on these podcasts before, and it's something that we build into what we call our scorecard. So as we talk about a client's goal for the year, we do this in November or December proceeding. We're talking about money is what we're talking about.
What's the revenue goal? So that's where we start. I don't care what the number is. You could tell me I want to do a hundred grand. You could tell me I want to do a hundred million, but that's going to translate into a time period. We have 12 months and they don't have to be flat. We don't have to have equal, like you could have it smaller in the first quarter and it can grow, but that revenue goal will, translate into manpower in some form.
Even if you're into subs, you know, I know people say, well, I pay a day rate. It's fine, pay a day rate, I don't really care. That's still a measurement of time, guys. don't, tell me it's not. And so let's just make it simple. You want to do $200,000 a month for a $2.4 [00:22:00] million year.
It's fantastic. Let's just pretend it's going to be flat. You live in somewhere very beautiful like Florida or California, where it never rains and it's always sunny. So that 200,000 dollars per month, there's a sales goal, but then there's a production goal. So you need manpower that equals the production of $200,000.
The Importance of Manpower in Achieving Revenue Goals
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Scott: If you don't have the manpower available, you mathematically will fail, so you already are going to fail. If a person can sell it, then you have to produce it, and that's what we. really find people fall apart on because I'll ask this question to a lot of clients you need 15 painters.
Do you have 15 painters? Do you have 15 painters? You know, they just get tired of me asking, but, well, no, I don't, I have 12.
Mathematically, you're eliminated, you're off the island, whatever you want to say, you're not going to hit 200,000 with less than that number with whatever the number is for your company, depending on your bill rate, you have to have them.
Understanding and Expanding Your Production Schedule
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Scott: so production schedule is tracking back to that revenue. And so I [00:23:00] hear people talk like this, like, our board is full.
I'm like, interesting. That's cool. What's a board? Well, it's, you know, it's on the wall or it's a spreadsheet or so whatever, like, okay, great. It's full. What does that mean exactly?
Well, we have all of our painters scheduled out for a month, and that's, we're really feeling good about that. I'm like, that's great. How many painters is that? Oh, that's, you know, 8 painters. I'm like, oh man. Well you need 12. So what are we going to do? Should we reduce your goal? And have a lower revenue goal?
No No, no We don't want that. Oh, okay. then, we need to expand your board. So just saying my board's full is not necessarily the statement we need to make. We need the board to represent the number. Now there's another component here is a lot of people schedule crews. I like some concept of crew scheduling, but it doesn't always give me enough data.
I still am counting heads. I need this many bodies to working this many hours, this many days that will get me my revenue. So we're always [00:24:00] pushing that. And then I'll make one more statement here, and this is really more like in the hiring, HR is, you need to, very likely, overstaff your company because this is very common when people say, okay, Scott, you said I needed 15. I got 15. I said, good. Go get two more.
Well, you said I needed 15, not 17. I said, you know what's going to happen? We all know what's going to happen. You go ahead and tell me. It's someone's going to quit or get fired tomorrow.
And guess what? You worked like a dog to get 15. You did it. You're like, okay, we're done, right? No, you're not done. You need more because of that. So we need 15 to constantly work every day, every month, all throughout the year. So this idea of, well, we only have 10 right now. We'll make it up later. No you won't. Mathematically you are going to struggle to make up a reduced headcount when that's what you need.
So that's why these steps are important and we actually give people a lot more runway if you needed to go say from [00:25:00] 10 painters to 15 and we're going to plan for a soft first quarter, and then April 1st we're going to go gangbusters, how many people are going to hire five painters between the last day of March and the first day of April?
None. I mean, you're, you know, so you're going to have to go, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make sure we add one in February. We're going to make sure we add one in March, and then we're going to add one in April, and then we're going to add one in May, and then by June we'll have our 15. Well, we better make sure that our budget reflects that, or better fix it.
Right? So I'm not saying you can't do it, and I don't care how you do it, but you have to understand there's a direct correlation between the headcount and the revenue.
Mark: That's exactly right. I have visited probably a dozen paint companies all over the US. Love to see their operations and especially their office setups. And you said it best, almost everybody I visited has a board. A lot of times it's a big whiteboard or a magnetic board of some kind, but it's usually some sort of visual calendar [00:26:00] where they're moving the chess pieces, as it were.
And I, think you're right, we fall into that trap as business owners all the time. You've get your color coordinated as long as every box is filled, we feel good. My month is booked, or you know, my quarter is booked or whatever. It makes us feel good, but I know that we're not scheduling to the budget because if I asked any of those owners that I visited, how much money do you have scheduled right now?
None of them would know that number right off the top of their heads.
Scott: They don't, and we actually track that number. We track it on Monday.com. And that revenue number is more important than your hours, in my opinion. It can mathematically back into hours, but we actually monitor how much revenue, how much sales sold business do you have that is not yet in process, both into your next year. Because you know, if you're a cold weather climate, it doesn't matter if you have a million dollars of exterior, that's just not going to help you today. So that is a true statement where, you know, the [00:27:00] dollars matter for sure.
The Role of Technology in Scheduling
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Mark: Now you mentioned the Monday.com. I was going to say, some of our listeners may be saying, Scott, please tell me there's tech out there that can help me with my scheduling nightmare.
Scott: Well, there is for sure. There's lots of operating systems and each of them do something well. We use Monday.com mostly to track our projects and our progress of our projects and in some dates and we can move them around based on some of these criteria. But, you know, using a tool to help you track this stuff more than just a whiteboard can be really helpful because it gives us a more central place to keep everything together. So our clients all use Monday, actually I think every single one of them. That can really help you stay organized. So we, like a tool for that more than the manual process. And I'll tell you another thing, Mark, why I really want people to use technology for these tasks is because as you grow, and that's most of our audience is growth-minded business owners. It can't be in the conference room whiteboard or [00:28:00] something like that. It has to be cloud-based where everyone has access and we can manipulate it from anywhere we are, and it's real, live data that we can manipulate in the moment and make changes so that everyone can see. And if we do this back shop whiteboard thing, man, it's really tough to communicate that and it's really not a system that's you can scale with.
Mark: No. And to your point there was a time of our business, it was several years ago, but we literally ran our calendar off of a whiteboard. Each individual crew member had their own color of marker and I remember several evenings where we were shifting people around. We were moving people and we would send a picture out to the group chat four or five times an evening because we had erased something on the whiteboard.
To your point about it being cloud-based and just a totally inefficient way of mapping it out.
Scott: And today's workforce does not like those ding dings in the middle of
Mark: They do not.
Scott: the middle of their evening. That's not [00:29:00] okay. You know, we'd like to set it and forget it and get your act together and get that schedule done earlier in the day.
Effective Project Management and Communication
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Scott: But understanding that progress of the jobs. Now another thing I'll just say too is that in our project management needs to be really keeping tabs, either visually making job site visits, or at least through a system. Ours would be daily reports through Monday.com So we would be really tracking the, progress, percentage of completion to the hours spent. Because sometimes people will tell you every day, yep, things are good. We got a thumbs up, we're on budget, this is good. And then what happens the
last day. They go,
Mark: That's
right
Scott: We need another week. You know, another,
Mark: more days. Right, right.
Scott: You're like, no. What happened? Five days in a row? You said it was great and it's because. they don't know when it's not great. So there's a lot of things involved there, which is you know, we think the sequencing and helping them support them with the roadmap can be helpful and that's really a different podcast. [00:30:00] But, keeping tabs on that so that you know at 50% of their time usage, are they 50% done. The other thing we can do is we can push them and help them, encourage them to work, more focused and try to complete things sooner because then the last day or so is easier. You know, all of us. Are shocked how much we get done the day before we go on vacation, right, because, why? There's no one more day, right?
You're going to get on a plane. That plane's not going to be like, oh yeah, we'll just wait for you to come back tomorrow. No, and it's the same concept, which is the last day comes and there's like, yeah, we just didn't finish. So this idea of pushing that schedule a little bit so that the last day is easier. But the other thing that I see a lot of people do is they say, well, they didn't quite finish, so we're going to send them back tomorrow.
No, I would say, try not to do that. I would say have the crew leader go to the next project, set them up for prep or whatever it is, and then the crew leader can go back and wrap up the last couple hours.
Because the worst thing that happens, and we see it happen, of course [00:31:00] all of us have, is it's only supposed to be a two hours and it takes them all day. Why does it take them all day? And then on top of that, you had three people there. So I would say, let's push the schedule. Let's not allow them to do that and say, Hey, no, we're not going to let you come back tomorrow. We're going to push you to the next job, and then you can go finish the job. Tell the client you'll be nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, and just break apart that you know, ability or flexibility or crutch to say, yeah, we're just going to all come back tomorrow. What's the big deal?
The big deal is we have something else planned for tomorrow and we're not going to let you do that. And so you need to do that in an appropriate way, but, you should not be tolerating that behavior because it's screwing up your production.
Mark: I was going to say, that also speaks to the culture too. If you have a culture of push it off, we'll come back the next day. Or do you have that culture of saying, no, we have a responsibility to the budget, the monthly budget. We can't push that job tomorrow. And you had already mentioned earlier about the overtime.
Maybe we lean into that we need to [00:32:00] stay another hour and a half tonight, guys, we're going to get this done tonight. But that's got to be crew driven and, ultimately it's the owner driven, but that's the culture that you set for your company.
Scott: But I also do really advocate a nice communication between the estimating team and the production team. And of course, that's a classic, two departments that, you know, typically hate each other, but letting the field, even a subcontractor, give you honest feedback about the quote, because we do want to allow sufficient time for the work to be done.
We're not, we have years and years to do this we can't just be like, pedal to the metal, go crazy every single day. But if you're telling me you can't get a door painted in the time allotted by the sales team and nobody in your whole company can, and everyone's complaining, we need to have an honest conversation estimator or with, you know, we're just having a hard time meeting this budget. But the reality is if we've given them sufficient time and we've given them 80 hours for a two man crew to complete a job, they should be able to do that. And they [00:33:00] know that starting day one. So that's really about, you know, we talk about culture, well, that's a culture of accountability, responsibility, self-management, all these things that that are important. Now, I can find out inefficiencies from a crew by just looking at QuickBooks, at the vendor store visits. I can run into, look into Hubdoc and look at receipt management.
And I look at the values. I can see somebody went to this store four times in a day, and I can see his amounts are small, 26 bucks, 36 bucks. I dig into that and like, well, of course this guy can't produce stuff because he's at the paint store all day. And, you know, so there's some teaching there. So there's a lot of reasons why, you know, our schedule gets wonky and you have to look at all the, all those time leaks.
Mark: Yeah, and you brought up estimating earlier, which of course is close to my heart. I love the sales process. Salespeople can screw up the schedule in a hurry as well. At our company, we hate to see certain numbers. The number [00:34:00] 38, I should never see that on a bid. The number 27 should never be on a bid, and people are saying, well, why do, why does it matter?
It's because it's inefficient with my crew. If a guy has an eight hour workday, then we're thinking in eights, two men on a job is 16, a two day job is 32 and then 48 and, anything outside of that creates a scheduling problem because now we sent two guys for two days, but they bid it for 37 hours.
So now I've got five hours left on this job. How do you schedule that?
Scott: Yeah, you don't, and I agree with you that we, are always on the sales team to round to the nearest eight and even, odd days are a problem, right? If we have a two man crew, but a five day job that's a, that's, something we might have to, we have to work around depending on your size.
But, you know, in my recent past we identified that, quite frankly, under, 32 hours, it was, we weren't even going to think about it because it just wasn't even going to work for our size. This goes down to, you know, [00:35:00] minimums and these types of things. Some, you know, I would never even schedule in a half a day increment.
And, I see this all the time and you know, like, how did this sneak through? Well, it, was a front door and, you know, bid it at four hours or three hours, but okay, so the person has to get the material or come to the shop or whatever, get there, do the door, put it back together, then they have to drive to another location, and then get eight hours. I mean, it doesn't work. It's just not going to work. You're going to have to charge eight hours for that door. And then they say, well, there's no way I'm going to get the door.
Then stop doing the door.
then your company is, we don't do doors. Because I can't, I'll do it for eight hours.
because that's what it takes. And what, employee out there says, no, I'm thrilled with working five hours. I'm just going to, don't worry about it. My, I don't need to pay my bills. No, they want to work. They're eight hours. So when you build in these weird, you know, budgets and say, well, you're going to only have a half a day today because you know, the, they're like, no, I want to work a full day.
So why do you even play that game? The [00:36:00] estimator needs to pack that, you know, bid to the full, you know, increment that we work in. And at that level, the, customer's not going to say no for an extra hundred bucks. And if they are, then you got a sales problem.
Mark: That's true. Alright, one last topic, sir, I want to get your opinion on.
Addressing Skill Levels and Cross-Training
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Mark: So I hear a lot of owners talking about various skill levels in their company and so it creates a scheduling problem because we can't send every crew member to every job. We have to only send them to this type. Can you just speak into that whole component with scheduling and skill level?
Scott: Yeah, I don't buy into scheduling around people for the most part. Okay. Oh, that person doesn't do this well, or, oh, we can't send this person over there. Oh, you know, everything is a workaround because you know they can't do this and they can't do that. I think your team should be cross-trained and they can either paint or they can't. Now the caveat is there is typically someone that's really, you know, skillful at, say, in spraying. You might have [00:37:00] some specialty finishes or something. And there might be some occasions where it makes sense, but at the end of the day, train people, cross-train people and work them all together in all circumstances and get them better. You know, Mark, I know you're in southern Illinois and you have a lot of texture. I'm in Chicago suburbs. Everything is smooth here. So I don't have any orange peel. I don't have any knockdown. I don't have any, you know, I don't have any of that here.
But I know that you struggle with a variance of these textures and not everyone can do it. So what I would really push people to do is really spend a lot of time training so that everyone can do it. Is if you keep working around them, they're never going to be good at it. The other thing you can do, and we've done this with crews and with subs, this can be really great with subs, is to create a spreadsheet and put your main skills across that are important to you. Spraying, interior, exterior, or, you know, drywall repair, whatever, right? And then put a proficiency on each one of them so that you know, [00:38:00] and, any scheduler that is in your company.
Because often we really want just the operations team to schedule this and it's not like voodoo, like it's just schedule the stuff. I have a 80 hour job, go grab two people. Well, we got to make sure they can spray and we got to make, you know, and oh my gosh, it's just, well, you.
If you go run 30, 40 painters and start playing that game, and that's going to be pretty tough. So, you know at the most what I would do is kind of give a little bit of a cheat sheet that says, Hey, this person it's great on exteriors. They can do exteriors all day long, but we don't put them inside of a house or this person's great at spraying or this person's not.
But maybe a few things like that I'm, I would be okay with, but for the most part. We need to just let people go and do the work and not work so much around, are they good at this or not? We just going to go schedule people and go get it done. So I'd be careful about working around, anybody with the exception of, you know, a few of the specialties. Because we hear this a lot [00:39:00] where people are trying to put a very complex puzzle together and they're like, okay, what are we going to do with Joe? Joe can't do this and Joe can't do that and we can't send them with so-and-so because they don't like each other. And, now you just have all these components that are unnecessary. You know what, we're going to get along with everybody. We're going to help you get along with people. That's culture. We're going to train you on all the aspects of painting. That's training. And we're not going to focus on where people can and can't go. We're sending you and you're going to paint something and I'm not going to spend a lot of time figuring that out.
So that's my 2 cents on that. And if you spend a lot of time agonizing that, where to spend, send someone and where not to, you've got a problem. And I'd fix that right away.
Mark: It's well said. It's a big subject. Scott, appreciate you spending some time breaking down several of the components in one of the trickiest part of all of our businesses, which is scheduling. Always good talking to you, sir. We appreciate your time.
Scott: Yep. Thanks Mark. Great conversation as always, and we'll talk to you next time.
Mark: Okay. See you next time.
[00:40:00]
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Well, that wraps up this episode of Success Beyond the Brush. If there's one message to take with you today, it's this, that your schedule is a financial system. Tightening it up protects both your profit and your peace of mind. So if this conversation helped you at all today, make sure you are subscribed to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and consider leaving us a quick review.
It really does help more contractors like you find the show and get the help they need. Don't forget to check the show notes or the video description for additional resources and links that are going to help your business today. Thanks again so much for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of Success Beyond the Brush.