Process Improvement

Ep.98: How to Structure and Run a Profitable Design Department with Chris Landis

February 5, 2020 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Financial Management 00:27:50

Jobs are won or lost during the design process. With so much on the line, it’s clear that your design department should be running at peak performance. But there are so many ways the process can get derailed.

It all depends on how you structure your design department, and what metrics you use to hold them accountable.

In this episode, Chris Landis discusses about how to build and run an efficient design department with Victoria and Mark.

Chris is a partner (with his brother Ethan) in Landis Architects/Builders in Washington, DC, and is a longtime Roundtables member. He’s a registered architect in four states (MD, DC, VA, NY). Chris graduated from Vassar College, and earned his M.A. in architecture from Columbia Architecture School. Chris is a member of the American Institute of Architects, and has 28 years of experience in residential architecture. He is a current member of the DC Historic Preservation Review Board and past president of the DC Metro area chapter of NARI.

Chris has a design department of nine people after 30 years in the business. When the company got to the point of having three designers, Chris hired a manager for that department to ensure that the work was standardized and high quality. He talks about how to set up your own design department for success and create a quicker process, including:

  • The metrics to gauge success
  • The designer’s role in his company
  • Recruiting and hiring for the department
  • Working back from net profit
  • When to hire a design manager
  • His three-phase process
  • How he charges for them
  • Figuring out a healthy close ratio
  • Taking on a design-only project
  • Why to conduct a feasibility study — sometimes
  • Working with design sub-contractors
  • And more …

Design can be a profit center, not a loss-leader, and you have to know how much you should be charging for it — even if you don’t.

MasterClass: Design Process

You can learn how other successful companies manage their design business, and you’ll go home with new ideas to exceed your clients’ expectations and boosting profits on every job. We’ll be holding our next class here in Baltimore, May 18-19. You can find more details and register here: Building An Effective Design Process.

Ep.96: Tiered Growth: Understanding Metrics and Recognizing Signs to Set Profitable Sales Goals with Michael Hodgin

January 22, 2020 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Financial Management, Human Resources, Sales 00:25:24

Most people would consider a company jumping from $1.5 million to $3 million in revenue a growing organization. However, when we look beyond gross sales, those numbers don’t necessarily mean it grew. It could even mean the company is less profitable — and ultimately less successful — than it was before. 

Michael Hodgin says planning for, and implementing, tiered advances are a better strategy for deliberate, healthy growth.

In this episode, Michael discusses his tiered increase growth strategy with Victoria and Mark. For healthy growth, he says you have to set and meet certain goals for sales, job costs, systems and performance before taking the next step.

Michael is a general contractor and business consultant living in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon. He started his first construction company as a one-man-show in 2000, eventually growing Coleman Creek Construction to include a successful team of 15. Michael joined Remodeler’s Advantage in 2016 in an effort to deliver the greatest possible value to his clients. Investing in the development of efficient systems for his own business inspired the creation of his consulting agency, Maestro’s Toolbox. 

Micheal says that your company’s gross sales should bump up to the next milestone only once your teams have mastered sales, pre-construction, and production systems at their current revenue level. That puts a company in a stronger position to handle the inevitable increase in workload. He talks about how to accomplish healthy, tiered growth for you remodeling company, including:

  • The infrastructure milestones to hit
  • Taking deliberate steps
  • The importance of setting goals 
  • Focusing on hitting those goals
  • Proving your success 
  • Nailing down all your job costs
  • Managing slippage
  • Building the foundation for growth
  • The metrics that tell you that you’re ready for the next step
  • Stepping away and delegating
  • And more …

Planning your growth, setting targets, and understanding why and how you hit them will spur the right kind of growth for you and your company.

EP.91: [Unscripted Back-up] Expert Panel at Extreme Business Makeover Shares Insight

December 4, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Financial Management, Human Resources, Marketing, Production, Sales 00:48:05

As we wrap up 2019, we’re looking back at some of our more popular episodes and this one was a huge hit.

For our 50th episode in January, we gathered a panel of industry experts and took questions from the audience at the Extreme Business Makeover event. It capped off an intense two days of learning, sharing, and networking among the remodelers attending and our Remodelers Advantage team.

In this episode, Victoria and Mark directed the lively discussions with our panel. Panelists included:

  • Michael Sauri of TriVistaUSA Design + Build and the 2018 winner of the Fred Case Remodeling Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
  • Doug Howard, RA’s CFO and Director of Consulting Services, a.k.a. “The Fixer”
  • Judith Miller, Financial and QuickBooks “Guru”
  • Tim Faller, RA’s Senior Consultant and “Master of Production”

We covered profits and payroll, cash flow, the owner’s role in a growing business, margins, staying top-of-mind in your marketing, smart lead qualifying, planning and making decisions on your job sites, and the power of asking “why?”

It’s an insightful and all-encompassing discussion of how to run your business to get bigger margins, more profits, and creating a real life/work balance. If you missed it back in January, you need to listen to this episode.

And Don’t Miss THIS Year’s Extreme Business Makeover Event;
New Content, Fresh Ideas

On January 28-29, 2020 we will gather once again at the BWI Westin and present 2 days of interactive presentations, breakouts and expert panels (like the one featured in today’s podcast). We have Super Early Bird pricing in place until 12/15/19 so Click here for more information and Register Today!

Ep.82: What Can Be Learned from Success with Wayne Rivers

October 2, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Production, Sales 00:16:44

We’re just back from the 2019 Remodelers Excellence Week, Remodelers Summit, and Roundtables meetings, and our opening video was about thinking like a child, and allowing yourself to fail so that you can learn from what went wrong. It’s all a part of evolving as a business, as a person, and the art of growth.

Then we came across the latest video blog from our friend Wayne Rivers.

It dovetailed nicely with our main takeaways, while also turning the concept of learning from failure on its head. It’s devoted to learning from your successes, and then building on them.

So in this episode, we’re picking up the audio of his blog. If you’d like to watch the video, you can find it here.

Wayne is the co-founder and president of The Family Business Institute Inc. He has authored four books on the subject of family businesses, and is part of the peer group Victoria and Mark attend. Wayne has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, BusinessWeek: WEEKEND, and on the Retirement Living Network.

Wayne talks about how overlooked, yet powerful, success can be as a teaching tool. Instead of always concentrating on what didn’t go right, he tells you how to learn from the good, including:

  • What you can learn from the Blue Angels
  • Why to focus on the process more than the outcome
  • Conducting a post-mortem on every project, good and bad
  • Analyze for successes and failures
  • Realizing that success is almost always a team effort
  • Why to benchmark in every department and process
  • Getting an outside perspective and objective opinion
  • And more …

There are opportunities for learning and improving everywhere — you have to look for them and then build on them.

Click here to take a look at our Summit kick-off video.

Ep.77: Recession-Proofing Your Company with Dave Edwards

August 21, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Financial Management, Human Resources 00:41:14

It’s easy to be successful in a great economy. You can get away with a lot of bad habits, lack of systems, and high overhead when jobs are large and margins high. But when the economy contracts, job sizes shrink, and margins erode, those bad habits can have a huge affect on the health of your company.

Focusing on the right things when times are good are key to recession-proofing your business.

In this episode, Dave Edwards talks to Victoria and Mark about the lessons he learned and the changes he made to create a healthy company following the last recession, and how that positions it to survive and even thrive in the next downturn.

Dave is the founder and president of Earth Bound Homes, a home-building and remodeling company in San Jose, CA. Before he joined Remodelers Advantage Roundtables in 2014, Dave spent 12 years learning all the different ways to not build and run a profitable construction company. 

His path to recession-proofing his company came after watching other remodelers and builders go out of business in the last recession. After his company almost went bankrupt in 2011, he joined Roundtables and also went to counseling. He talks about his path to success in business and in his personal life, and how he has built a company that can withstand an economic downturn, including:

  • Focusing on others’ happiness as the key to achievement
  • His metrics for success — it’s not all about money
  • Recognizing when someone else has better ideas, and running with them
  • The Stop/Start meeting to improve the company
  • How to bill like a lawyer
  • Making project management a source of income
  • Working with a tight subcontractor market who need extra management
  • Helping architects get their project packages together
  • Identifying bad habits and how to fix them
  • How unbilled labor can cut into your profits
  • Why he cut his field staff to boost his revenue
  • Getting the best people and keeping them happy
  • The power of diversity in company culture
  • And more …

Dave says the three big ways to ensuring your company’s survival are figuring out how to live on your salary as a business owner, banking your cash to be able to pay and retain your team during a downturn, and reducing your mark up to still be profitable.

Ep.76: [Unscripted Back-Up] Managing Your Customers with Chip Doyle

August 14, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Production, Sales 00:38:02

It’s time for another Unscripted Back-Up. It’s a chance to revisit some of our best and most informative episodes. They’re jam-packed with information you can use — so if you missed it the first time around, here’s your chance to catch up.

This is one of our most popular episodes, and digs in to a part of your remodeling business that few people really consider — managing your clients. 

If you — and especially your designers — aren’t managing those customers you’re wasting time and losing out on potential profits, says Chip Doyle.

In this episode, Victoria, Mark and Chip discuss how to speed up the hand off from design to production. Effectively managing client expectations, setting clear goals and deadlines, and guiding clients intentionally, gets you out of having projects park in design and selections. 

Chip has been in the sales industry for 29 years, and training with Sandler for nearly 17 years. He’s a sought-after speaker and co-authored Selling to Homeowners The Sandler Way. Chip has a licensed training center and trains companies of all sizes in Pleasant Hill, CA, helping them reach their full potential, exceed expectations and continue to grow.

Empowering designers to guide, and ultimately lead, clients through the design process can increase your profits by 25 percent. Some of the ways to get there include:

  • Cutting design time in half, without cutting corners
  • Giving designers the right role models
  • Managing “genius attacks”
  • Setting clear meeting goals and timely next steps
  • The importance of deadlines — for clients
  • Getting projects through that would otherwise stall
  • The traits to look for in a designer — toss the DISC assessment
  • And much more …

Need More Help?

If your designers, project managers, and other customer-facing team members need guidance on how to deliver excellent client services effectively, Chip is leading a course, Client Management Training for Designers & Architects, to address it all. It’s not a sales course, it’s specifically designed to give your team members the skills they need to get selections and designs past the bottleneck and into production, while creating and excellent customer experience.

Ep.69: How to Protect and Grow your Business with Performance Testing with Corbett Lunsford

June 26, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management 00:30:06

Physics and chemistry affect the interior of every home, every day. Performance testing can enable remodelers to predict and prevent health, safety, and comfort issues, earn more for your work, and predict and prevent callbacks, claims, and lawsuits.

As a remodeler, you have two choices. You can test for and design performance controls into your projects to predict and prevent side effects. Or you make assumptions and hope for the best.

You might make problems worse, and take the heat for it. 

In this episode, Corbett Lunsford talks about home systems, performance, and testing with Victoria and Mark. Home performance is the invisible “stuff” that happens inside a home — how it feels, smells, and sounds. 

Corbett loves investigating invisible dynamics using high-tech techniques and tools. He’s the co-host of the PBS series Home Diagnosis, the Building Performance Podcast, and the author of Home Performance Diagnostics: the Guide to Advanced Testing.

Every remodeling project will affect how a home works — for better or worse. Building inspections are about the static state — what’s there all the time. Performance dynamics have to do with all the actions of the house while it’s working. You need testing to be able to predict that. Remodelers deal with and interfere with these dynamics as part of their work — there will be changes. Corbett says the first tests to do are a blower-door test, using infrared cameras to pinpoint roof leaks and moisture detection, and other reasons why home testing can improve your projects, business and client satisfaction, including:

  • Tuning a home like an instrument
  • Taking the guesswork out of the home performance
  • How pressure issues can cause mold and mildew
  • Why home interiors affect health
  • Atmospheric draft, water heaters, and range hoods
  • Charging more for optimizing home system performance
  • Testing for the invisible dynamics
  • Load calculations and energy models for HVAC choices
  • Why testing also makes homes more energy efficient
  • The marketing opportunities for you
  • The power of statistics
  • And more …

Corbett warns that your clients may know about the importance of performance testing because they’re watching home-improvement shows like his — and you have to stay ahead of what the general public knows or lose credibility. As a first step, you can download his ebook, Proof Is Possible: How to Keep an Eye on Your New Home Construction or Home Improvement. 

You can also see his tiny house and more on his YouTube channel: https://YouTube.com/c/HomePerformance.

Ep.67: Kicking Off Slippage Awareness Month with Tim Faller

June 12, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Production 00:26:49

Here at Remodelers Advantage we set aside the month of June to focus on an issue that plagues most service-based businesses, but can be a critical metric in looking at the success of a remodeling firm. This is our third annyal “Slippage Awareness Month” and this year you’ll see content submissions from our consulting, sales, and production experts here at R/A. Enjoy!

Every remodeling business owner wants to add more money to the bottom line. Reducing slippage is the lowest-hanging fruit to pick in your quest.

In this episode, Tim Faller talks to Victoria and Mark about reducing slippage in your remodeling company. Slippage occurs when your estimate is lower than the real costs of the job. Reducing it takes a change in mindset throughout the organization.

For 17 years, Tim has worked with hundreds of remodeling companies to improve profits by creating smooth, efficient production systems. As a Senior Consultant and Master of Production for Remodelers Advantage, Tim’s field and business ownership experience is vital to his additional role as facilitator for Owner and Production Manager Roundtables Groups. He’s also  a published author and popular industry speaker, Tim is co-host of The Tim Faller Show, a weekly podcast focused on “Improving The Bottom Line Through Production Training.”

The biggest challenge in reducing slippage is getting your whole team involved in the effort. Tim says slippage is too often brushed off with “It is what it is.”  That’s where the change in mindset comes in — the attitude should be “It is what we make it.” Slippage is controllable, but it takes a company-wide awareness and work to corral it through realistic and accurate estimating,  job scheduling, and building in time to de-bug a job before it starts. He talks about the ways to reduce slippage in your processes, including:

  • Finding the slippage
  • The perfect planning process
  • Building in time, and how much
  • Developing a critical eye, not a critical attitude
  • Why realistic estimating geared to your team is key
  • Why you need long-term, short-range, and daily planning
  • Killing schedule creep for better net profit
  • Building extra time into the schedule
  • Figuring out days-per-job overhead
  • Controlling the client
  • Doing change orders properly
  • And more …

Cutting slippage is possible — and will make a big difference in the health of your business.

 

Ep.64: What Healthcare Can Teach Remodeling about LEAN with Liz Moisan

May 15, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management 00:26:58

Toyota pioneered the LEAN manufacturing system, and we know — houses aren’t cars. But neither are people, and the LEAN concept of continuous improvement is used by hospitals too. 

So even if remodeling isn’t brain surgery, we can learn a lot from how LEAN has been applied in healthcare. You can get some of the best help with your business by looking at how other industries use continuous improvement.

In this episode, Liz Moisan talks to Victoria and Mark about using LEAN principles in healthcare and how it can be applied to remodeling. She says Kaizen or LEAN principles give you a common language for things we already know, creating a foundation to move forward.

Liz is a product innovation specialist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, and has been a practitioner of the Virginia Mason Production System since 2008. She teaches, facilitates, and works to continually evolve how Kaizen is applied in a health-care setting. She’s married to R/A Roundtables member Matt Moisan.

The hospital employs daily Kaizen, so even the smallest roadblock can be eliminated, as well as  higher-level applications. She shares some real-world examples, including cutting down on waiting times for patients (yay!), working with vendors to get what the hospital needs when it needs it, The Five Ss, and how to look at a particular process to improve it, including:

  • Where to start
  • Staying true to the tools
  • Identifying and eliminating waste in processes
  • The evolution of continuous improvement
  • Breaking the status quo and getting buy-in
  • Understanding supply and demand for materials
  • Onboarding new employees in LEAN principles
  • Training at the management level
  • Finding the “rock in your shoe”
  • When and why to get help
  • And more …

Here are those two books Liz recommends for getting started understanding the Kaizen principles:

  1. The Toyota Way
  2. Transforming Healthcare: Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience

If You Would Like to Learn More About LEAN For Remodeling…

Consider attending our online course, “LEAN For Remodelers” where our “LEAN Guru” Doug Howard helps you improve your profits & grow your business by mastering continuous improvement through LEAN. This 6-session class, meets weekly & is a combination of online instruction and hands-on exercises, in a virtual classroom setting. Classes start on July 10th, so click here for more information & registration.

 
 

Ep.61: How I Revamped My Design Process with Chris Fox

April 24, 2019 Remodelers Advantage Business Management, Human Resources 00:27:03

Systems and processes rarely scale when your business grows. So you have to go back and create new ones that will — at least for now. Your design process is no different.

When hiring a new or additional designer, it may be time to revamp your process in preparation for that new team member.

In this episode, Chris Fox talks to Victoria and Mark about what he found when he dove deep into his company’s design process. He learned so much from his examination that he created a new self-guided training plan for designers that doesn’t require constant oversight and management by supervisors.

Chris is the founder of Fox Home Innovations in Manhattan, KS. Chris started this company during his junior year of college and ran multiple projects and crews while completing his degree in entrepreneurship from Kansas State University. In school, he met Matt Carlson, who later bought into the company. Today, they both run the organization with Chris focusing on sales and design, while Matt is the general manager.

The old design process was often on the fly and not totally repeatable at all times. They had nothing to train to or repeat when it came time to hire another designer. There was no time to train, either, because everyone was so busy. Chris details what they did and how they did it, including:

  • Evaluating the process you’ve got
  • Creating a trainable, repeatable process
  • Building in the details
  • How to create a training document
  • The time it takes, and why to take the time
  • Involving your whole team
  • The significant changes it made
  • What the onboarding and training looks like
  • Creating teachable moments
  • How to boost competence and confidence
  • And more …

The process is working well, so Chris plans to use it as a model for onboarding and training new hires for other roles throughout the organization as it grows.

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MASTER NAVIGATION

This website is part of the Remodelers Advantage Network.

Visit our other properties: