Contractor Cuts
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Contractor Cuts
The Difference Between Busy and Booked: Planning Your Pipeline
Proper projection planning is the key difference between struggling contractors and those who build consistently profitable businesses. We share how planning out your work calendar for the coming months transforms both client satisfaction and profitability.
• Most contractors operate job-to-job, causing poor client experiences and lost business
• Laying out detailed project timelines with realistic durations prevents schedule problems
• Scheduling critical path items (like shower glass and countertops) helps accurately project timelines
• Understanding financial implications of project timelines affects cash flow management
• Effective projection planning starts with just one hour of planning before each project
• Using a tracking spreadsheet for jobs with 50-90% likelihood of closing helps manage future workflow
• Weekly PAL (Project Manager Action List) meetings ensure accountability and cash flow visibility
• Communication with clients about timeline changes should happen immediately, not at project end
• Project managers should complete 80% of their work before the first hammer swings
• Change orders must be addressed immediately when scope changes occur, not at project completion
Ready to transform your business with better projections? Visit ProStruct360.com to schedule a free 30-minute consultation about your business challenges.
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Welcome to Contractor Cuts, where we cover the good, the bad and the ugly of growing a successful contracting company.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Contractor Cuts. My name is Clark Turner. I'm James McConnell. Thanks for joining us again this week. So today we are A in a new studio, which is nice if you're watching us on YouTube. Welcome to the new studio, james. Thank you. This is palatial Palatial compared to our old gray walls, old one. But today we are talking about projections and what that means for us. When we talk projections, we're talking about projecting the next few months of business and work. And how do we lay out business, uh, moving forward.
Speaker 2:One thing and what triggered this is when I'm talking with guys during the coaching uh sessions, most guys coming into the into coaching with us are working for the job. That's happening today. Right, it's. It's like a. I'm working on my current project. I got a couple people that said, yes, that I'll call when I get done with this to see who I'm doing next. And it's not a well thought out, planned attack on your calendar. It's not laid out, it's not filling up your calendar for the future. Uh, and as a one man show, sometimes that can work right. Then most guys kind of operate that way. I've got three or four bids out there that I know I'm going to land one of them, so I'll just call them when I'm getting close to the end of this one, which is fine If you're a one man show and you're not trying to grow, if you are trying to get your company to the next level and grow to the next level. This has changed dramatically, so we're we're going to talk a little bit about how it's done, what you should do, and then kind of more real life examples of how we do it in day to day, as well as kind of what, as you start growing and bringing project managers on, what those guys should be doing on a weekly, monthly basis to support that, as well as to really be thinking through the future, thinking past today's jobs, be thinking through the future, thinking past today's jobs.
Speaker 2:One thing, though looping back to contractors coming in and doing coaching and the guys that are going job to job. They try to sell everything right. They get every single job, they say yes to everything, and all they do normally is I'm just going to get five, six, 12 yeses and then kind of pick which one's next, and then, when they do that, there's 11 yeses that are waiting for you, that are calling, that are hey, what's going on, and so the client experience on every single customer coming through there. For from you, with you, is one's going to get a good experience. And the other 11 that you said yes to were like you know, I haven't really heard from James. Like he said, I'm going to give him a call. Well, he hasn't answered my call in three weeks. I guess I need to find someone else. And then all of a sudden you call and it's like hey, yeah, we're ready for you. Oh well, I'm okay, that's fine, right, and so there's not a great customer experience, first off. Secondly, they're going to pick other people. Um, they're going to pick other people. You're going to lose clients that way. You're not going to keep up with them.
Speaker 2:But mainly the mindset of let me know when you're available mindset for contractors that they're talking to homeowners is not the way to do it. So, moving on from that, james, what would you say if it's a guy that's a one man show, he's just him running jobs. If he needs to get a little bit more organized today, where would you start with that? What would be your advice to someone like that? Just to not do it the way that we're doing and we're about to talk about, because that's's kind of you got to really get there and start. It's kind of level 10 in terms of how we run projections and lay it out and think through it. But a guy that's swinging the hammer, that has a couple hours a week at most in the office, what's kind of the minimum you would want to do if it was you.
Speaker 1:I don't think it. I don't think it's all that different. I think that, setting up the way that you want to do things, you need to be looking at first of all, the profit that I am bringing in. You need to be looking at what is the overhead requirement for every month that I'm working, yeah, and when a job comes in, how long is that job projected to last? What's what's reasonable? What are my uh, what do you call them? Critical path items? So like shower glass or countertops or cabinets, things that you know you have like two week lead time on this or a three week lead time on this after template. But I have to get to this point. It's going to take three weeks to even get to template. So I know that my job's at minimum five to six weeks. So I'm at minimum a month and a half. So a month and a half of overhead. So I'm at minimum a month and a half. So a month and a half of overhead. What kind of profit is coming off of this job to tackle that overhead?
Speaker 1:So when I'm looking at, if I'm just a one-man show and I've got just one job running and I'm hoping that this next one lands ideally the goal. Don't play footsie with me. It's real cute. Ideally, you've got a couple of jobs lined up, and if you don't, what you really need to be looking at is how long of a of a of a leash do I have until that becomes a serious problem? It's already a problem because you, you need to be looking two, three, four, five months down the road. Once you get to a, a place where you've got a lot of guys working with you, a lot of project managers under you, you need to be really considering, like, okay, if, if we don't have jobs at this point, we need to. We need to be looking at layoffs yeah, and that's a terrible spot to be in, yeah, so if you bring it all, the way back.
Speaker 2:The worst spot is not even knowing that that's coming, not even knowing. The Grim Reapers next Monday. Yeah, Because you got nothing right.
Speaker 1:And the way that I think you avoid ever getting to that spot is having that mindset as a one-man show. And I know you don't have as much time, but again, you don't need as much, you don't need as much work, yeah, so even if you only have a couple hours, it doesn't take a lot to be to be able to be a man of your word or a woman of your word. Yeah, you let your client know hey, I'm excited to do this estimate for you. Uh, it's going to be three days until I can work that up, or it's going to be three days until I can get on site. So long as you are being the proactive communicator, that's going to be the number one thing that everybody says. Oh, yeah, contractors, they just I'm waiting for.
Speaker 1:Two guys said they were going to do an estimate for me, but no one's responded. They haven't gotten back with me. If you're at least getting back with them, let the chips fall where they may. At that point, you can only do what you can do. You do have to focus on the work that you have going on, but so long as you're letting them know, hey, here's what I'm going to do that, and then you follow up and do that. Yes, that's what.
Speaker 2:I'm going to do that, and then you follow up and do that. Yes, that's, it's really that simple. Well, and going back to the first thing you said, which I I agree, what you just said is is you need to lay out the next couple of weeks and like and my timeframe is five to six weeks on this, and so I know what's when. When do people do that? Right, guys, guys, don't take the time and effort to start thinking through the project. I would say, with what you just said, the number one thing for a one-man show is to take one hour before starting a project. It's not going to take you two days. We're going to lay out a mini Gantt chart, a timeline of like okay, this is going to happen, this is going to happen and this is going to happen. So you're looking at when you think you're getting done. Not, I don't know, this is a four to six week job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you like sit down with your scope and go line by line, and the way I do it is the scope is in linear order. So demo, framing, meps, the whole thing, yep. And so, as I'm looking down the thing, I'm like, okay, demo, that's going to take one to two days, so I'll block out three. So I'll block out three. Yep Framing, that's going to be two days. Yeah, I probably won't block out three there because I've already fudged here. So, like I want to give a realistic timeline, timeline, but I also want to make sure that I'm accounting for all of all of those things. And then, once I have that timeline, that's you're not done. Then you say, okay, let's think about purchases, that's what I'm saying. Materials, think about materials. Are there going to be lead times on that? Do I have any?
Speaker 1:Like the flooring, we just ordered nine thousand dollars worth of flooring. We literally this this morning, kind of resolved this issue. We have a $9,000 flooring order. It's the VA job. Va does not allow you to get any money up front. They also material has to be installed in order to be compensated for. Yeah, and then on top of that, they hold back 20% on every invoice. So, knowing and this is an $80,000 job, so knowing that, okay, our money is going to be tied up for this amount of time, and that's if we invoice and they accept it, which they typically do. The VA is very easy to work with once you get working with them, but there's all these barriers to making that very easy for a lot of GCs to work with them.
Speaker 1:Long story short, it's looking at not just the timeline but how long is my money tied up? Yeah, and if the new job coming in, can I even start that job until I get my invoice from this guy? Yeah, because that's a lot of people get really hurt when they are just trying to grab all the stuff. We go back to the fruit metaphor. You grab all the fruit, but then you don the fruit metaphor. You grab all the fruit, but then you don't even have the cash to get this job started.
Speaker 2:Well, so you go get a deposit from the next job that you think you're starting, yeah, and then you take that to finish the yeah and it goes back into that same same old ugly routine. But I think, with like looking at the future and projections when I'm looking at you know I've got five to six weeks on this job. I need to put my orders in on these times. Like I need cabinets and that's a three week lead time, so I need to order that by next Monday and I need this whiteboard for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, seriously, but laying it all out, I think, also how you said, before you get started. I'm just going to look at my, my demo. The ProStruck 360 software is laid out that way. You've got two tabs the job items, which is all of your list of everything you're doing, and the timeline tab, which is the exact same page just laid out in the timeline. So all you do is click and drag and say okay, demos, these three days, framings, these five days. I'm going to start my electrical here, I'm going to do my plumbing here, and you can lay it out and you hit save. I'm going to start my electrical here, I'm going to do my plumbing here, and you lay it out and hit save, and it sends everyone the work orders for those times. And if you're doing it yourself, no problem, it saves it. And now I can say hey, instead of telling the next guy hey, I can start the first week of September.
Speaker 2:I'm looking at it saying September 26th is when I'm going to be done with this. I can start lining up those next people, not just giving them a it might be and what, even though it's like it's fine, they're, they're good with waiting on me. You know, I'm great, and so people wait for me. That's fine. They don't enjoy working with you. They don't enjoy that, right? You're killing your reputation by doing this and like, yeah, I'm not going to refer you to my neighbor because you're kind of a lot like I've got to manage you. Yeah, but I'll still use you for myself, right? So you're losing that momentum of growth for your company because you're you're not enjoyable to work with. You are a pain to work with. I've got to, I've got to hunt you down.
Speaker 2:You say September 1st and now it's October 1st and no one's here. Still, yeah, you know, and it's just stress and annoying. And you're going to field 17 calls from that client that you said September 1st. Right, they're calling you the couple of weeks before. They're calling you the day of. They're calling you that week. Well, can we do it next week? What about the? And? So now you're spending hours managing this person who you promised something, or ignoring their calls and deleting their voicemails because you just didn't take five minutes to lay out your job.
Speaker 2:And when am I going to actually be done? Yeah, right. So I think projections. The hidden part of that is client satisfaction. More importantly, though, it's when am I going to get money? Am I going to be able to get things done? Am I going to have work in the fall? Right, can I lay out the next three to four months of work?
Speaker 2:That being said, I think on top of that, let's talk about project managers. Let's talk about when we're running, when you start scaling up a little bit beyond just a one man show, the way that we want to do. There's another reason we want to do projections. It's great for customer service reason we want to do projections. It's great for customer service. It's great for making sure that you've got work coming up and for expediting getting things done and making your life easier, because I know when stuff's happening. I can promise people jobs. I'm not dealing with phone calls all the time Once you have project managers coming in the other. The other hidden bonus of doing projections is they now have a timeframe of when they've got to get done, and every day that we're on this job site is a is money lost, right? If, if, if they turn a two week job into a three week job, I'm not invoicing more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I lost a week of invoicing because I can't start the next job and the the reason that I I want to double down on this and the reason that I don't think it's very much different from going from a one-man show to having project managers stuff is you need to, as the, as the lead dog or whatever you are, you need to understand what the ramifications are of not hitting those timelines. Yeah, you need to understand what the downstream effects are of not hitting your timelines. And this even goes into like change orders. Like when a client changes something, even if it's not a material change and when I say material, I don't mean like what type of flooring? They move a wall six inches after it's framed? Yes, it's like same. Well, not even that. Like they're changing a concept. It hasn't even happened yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you still need to then get with your crews. You might need to order different material. You might need to meet back out there with the plumber or the electrician and be like is this going to affect this? Or, worst case scenario, you got to meet back out there with the engineer or the architect and say, hey, we need to redraw this. It might not be a cost, like you might not have to pay anybody for those things, but you're going to lose a couple days and you might forget to tell that client okay, we lost this day, we lost this day, we lost this day and, best case scenario, you lose a week If it's a smaller job.
Speaker 2:That's a significant amount of time, that's a significant amount of opportunity costs that each of those. That's 10 weeks of unpaid work, right, that's 10 weeks that you're not. That's two and a half months of not getting paid when you, when you should be invoicing jobs because you weren't efficient, you didn't order things, you didn't get things laid out. Most of the time it's on you. Most of the time I could expedite this. Most of the time, even though we failed that inspection, I'm going to go ahead and double up these crews because I've already ordered that and I've already done this, and so it really is hurting you financially by mismanaging it. And when you're running around putting fires out constantly because you're causing all the fires, it's stressful and it's it's not fun.
Speaker 1:It's not fun at all. You know how I fix that. If I have like 10 days and I'm out, right, what I do is I start waking up at like three in the morning and I start my first. My first day starts at three and then goes to seven and then my next day, so I'm going to get actually three days out of each day, right? So every week is 21 days for me, so what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Well, you're waking up at three because of the stress?
Speaker 1:Well, maybe that I am going to the bathroom and there's a lot of blood coming out. Is that normal?
Speaker 2:Sorry, that's good. So let's look at how we do things right. So, first off, when I'm coaching a guy on starting projections, I don't need some big fancy board of a bunch of things going on. And I don't need some big fancy board of a bunch of things going on. I don't need three hours every day to lay this out. What we need is we've got a spreadsheet in ProShort360 that we give you in the coaching program when you get to the spot where we want to start tracking these projections, which is fairly early. But that's not where we start. It's usually a couple months in that we start doing the projections together.
Speaker 2:On this sheet we lay out your jobs, we lay out if they're closed or any. Really. We put any job that's over a 50% possibility of closing. If I think, at least more than likely, I'm going to get the job, I put it on this tracker and then I've got and we mark them. They're either approved, 50%, 75%, 90% chance of landing. Approved, 50% 75% 90% chance of landing. And so we can kind of vary under varying levels of commitment from clients but also build a layout Okay, these are what we think we're going to get. If it's over 50%, this is when. And then it's month by month of what we're doing each month, and so you might have a hundred thousand dollar job you just landed. Well, next month I'm invoicing 10 grand. The following month I'm invoicing 30. The following month. So we lay those out At the bottoms. We can kind of see our projected revenue not kind of you do of what the next six to 12 months look like. And what's really cool is we code it to where, if you've got project managers in your company, you put the project manager's name beside it and so it will pull all the data at the bottom saying okay, project manager A, if of the approved jobs has 120,000 next month of all the jobs that you think you're landing, they've got $250,000 of work next month. So that raises the flag saying whoa, that project manager is not doing 250K next month of work.
Speaker 2:Let's figure out what jobs that we haven't said yes to yet that we can reschedule and let them know. Hey, they told me they wanted to start September 1st it's. I'm looking at the calendar. There's no way I can start this job Right, and so we call those clients. Hey, I know you said in September we don't have a signed agreement yet. Our calendar is kind of booked for September. Can we start you October 1st? Let's look at your account and we can start having those conversations to where the client's like, oh, that's great, oh, man, I should have signed. Yeah, I'll go and sign now so we land it, so I can reserve my spot on the calendar. But we utilize it that way, or vice versa.
Speaker 2:The other way that we're looking at those projections is I literally had a client last week that we went over this. We looked three months ahead. They had, like one of their PMs had like $380,000 of work supposed to be done in three months from now. We're like, well, that's not happening. We wouldn't have known that until two and a half months from now, when we're trying to say yes to all this stuff and the person's underwater and all the jobs fall apart because there's too much going on.
Speaker 2:But because of this, we saw it and I said, okay, listen what I want you to do going on. But because of this, we saw it and I said, okay, listen what I want you to do, which one of these jobs and the other thing to note is next month he has like 20 grand of work. They had a job, like two or three jobs that were big, that pushed two months, and so they all kind of stacked up into the same month. So I said, okay, what jobs here? Do you think they'd say yes to next month? And so we started calling those clients?
Speaker 1:which one? Which ones would be okay? Pushing to next?
Speaker 2:yes when that we had scheduled out three months. Can we pull up sooner? Um, and if they can't get any, we first start calling through those people. Oh, who can we start sooner?
Speaker 2:yes, yeah because next month we had 20 grand and in three months we had 380, something like that. So I was like call through every single person that starts in three months and say, hey, can we get you going? Like, we got some openings next month, can we get you rolling, can we get it started? And if none of those people can do it, next thing we're gonna do is start saying, listen, that month you're double booked. So either we start now or we're gonna have to push you started.
Speaker 2:I'd love to move you up on the calendar, but you had other people signed before you that actually reserved those dates, right, and so I'm trying to move people around, help them understand what's going on. Then, if that didn't work, we're going to call through every single job that's not approved but between the 50 and 90% approval that we have marked on there. So we have a bunch of jobs that are potential maybes and like call through them. We only got 20 grand of work next month, so call through these guys, offer them a 10%. Like do whatever you got to do, cause we can't say yes in three months, right, we're going to be booked for the next six months. Next month we got openings. Let's call through these guys and give them discounts. Let's start moving. And so we were making all of these decisions over the next six months of the company just because he laid out when the jobs were he believed were going to be invoicing.
Speaker 1:Here's another way that you could utilize that, and this might be controversial, but we all know what happens on the last stretch of a job the last 10% is just a bear, it's all the little piddly things. And then you have a client give you a list of like. Here's everything that I don't like, that I haven't told you guys about since day one, that I want fixed. And you're like, oh boy, okay, not really what we talked about, but hey, we're going to make you happy and you've got $20,000 this month that you're going to invoice. That's not going to hit your overhead. And then you've got all these jobs about to start.
Speaker 1:So, depending on where we're at, depending on what the necessity for the company is, if I'm in that situation, I might even look at that and say, hey, we're going to spend this month finishing these jobs out really strong, really tight, because they've already pushed. I've got the money in the bank we're going to, we're going to invest in, in making sure that we keep our name tight, we keep our reputation tight. We're going to exit. We're going to exit well. And so instead of saying, hey, who can we bring into this month, I'm going to say, let's kill this month. Let's look at that $380,000 month and let's see how we can spread those people out and not even touch this month. Who can we do the next month? Who can we push further down the road and say, hey, things are pushing, and people understand when they have enough time to make the adjustments necessary for their schedule, when things push, and they appreciate getting a three-month heads up.
Speaker 2:Three months in advance, that's fine.
Speaker 1:The week before.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to start your job when we thought but we're three months away from that. Here's what's going on. They're going to be like great, no problem, thanks for giving me the communication, great heads up. So yeah, I might be burning a little bit of cash, but I'm saving my project manager. Heartache, headache, everything, I mean. You know how that goes.
Speaker 1:You got two jobs that are closing out that are going to take all of your attention, and then you're trying to start these other two jobs that need a lot of your attention and you've got all the equity already built up with the client.
Speaker 1:Instead of burning cash and burning equity, let's just burn cash, keep the equity and get those jobs finished out well. And then, while you're doing that, if you have an office person, if you are not running jobs anymore and you're in the office, you can spend some of your time helping get those jobs that haven't started yet, build them out well for your project manager. These are when I think we should do the orders. Here's the timeline, here's the crew. I'm going to get a couple other crews to give us estimates, see if we can work a little bit on the budget there and make some more profit on this job. We got some time to massage those numbers. That might be another way to approach it, but you don't always have that luxury. Not everybody has, you know, a stack of cash sitting there for a situation like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I tell every single guy that I coach and it's legit 80% of the work you do should happen before swinging the first hammer, before anything happens. As a project manager, if you do 80% of your job before the job starts, 90% less fires happen during the job. It's very easy to. You're lining up everything and so all you're doing is knocking those ducks down that you've already lined up Right and so like that, just like that. Thank you, the.
Speaker 2:By doing that, though, by prepping it, that means hey, in three months we've got this big workload this month. You're kind of slow right now. Let's approach those clients, let's pull permits, let's finalize all the drawings, let's start picking out your material, like all the stuff that, once you hit, go. You guys mostly most guys are starting to do october 1st for the job that starts in october, yeah, you can plan all that stuff out. Hey, I'm gonna go walk my crew and figure out on site where are we dropping materials, where are we cleaning brushes out. Let's prep as much of that stuff as possible. So October 1st we're not starting to think about it, october 1st we're swinging hammers and executing. So the job doesn't take seven months. It takes five months, because I spent two months in the front end planning and getting it all laid out.
Speaker 1:Yeah and hey guess what A pod costs 120 bucks maybe.
Speaker 1:Like, if you pitch that to your client like, listen, we're going to, I'm going to have, and you don't even need to have a pod on site for them, you can have a pod delivered to your office, fill it with the material for that job that the client's paying for, ship it back off to pod, have it dropped at their house when the job starts and pull all that material out and put it in the garage or leave the pod there.
Speaker 1:You should have already communicated with the client about where we're going to stage stuff, but you could very literally have all the material that you need so that your crews are not waiting on you. There's not 15 trips to Home Depot and Lowe's every week to pick up odds and ends, like they're going to have to go there to get the right screw or the right nail that they use for their nail gun or whatever. But you can have all that stuff set up. And if you don't typically do that, this is a good opportunity to say, hey, instead of just bum rushing this, let's slow it down, let's get really prepared. Because if we can close this job out, what? What's your numbers If you can close it out two weeks early, two weeks earlier than you were anticipating 10% If you take one day off per week 10%.
Speaker 2:Four days instead of five Yep off per week 10%.
Speaker 1:Four days instead of five Yep. So 20%, Whatever bath that is for a $20,000 job. $30,000 job, $120,000 job. It's a significant amount of profit that you stand to gain by just being prepared in bonus.
Speaker 2:The clients are always happier when things move smoothly like that. Yeah You're. You're making a better name for yourself as well as making more money and getting things done quicker Like I don't. I don't know why people don't do it more. I get it.
Speaker 1:Procrastination pays sometimes but and it's and it's not easy. Like it's not an easy, that there wouldn't be a. We wouldn't be talking about it if it was like an easy thing to manage. It's like it. If it was like an easy thing to manage, yeah, it's like doy, but like, sometimes you need that reminder. Like slow down, like what would you tell like one of your project managers if you're the, the head guy and you've got a project manager just like run around like a chicken with a head cock? Hey, stop, yeah, think about what you need to do next. Don't just think about what, where you can go to spend time. Hop in the truck and go. Yeah, what can you do right now? That's actually going to help you, yep.
Speaker 2:So I think that's good. I think moving on to having project managers, I'm not ready to move on.
Speaker 2:I really want to take any. Keep going. No, you're good. Now the with, with what we're doing. The. The last step of projections is hey, we've grown, I've brought in a project manager. The last step of projections is hey, we've grown, I've brought in a project manager.
Speaker 2:The last step of this is we put on our project managers to build out projections and bring them with them weekly to our PAL meetings. We meet with them once a week we suggest doing it on Fridays a project manager action list meeting, a PAL meeting. In that meeting, the very first one of the month, I want them to lay out what they're going to invoice that month. What's coming next month, what do you think is happening for this month, and tell me why and how you got there. Secondly, every single weekly meeting, I want you to tell me what you're invoicing this week. I need to know for two reasons One, accountability. Two, cash flow. I need to know what's coming in, what's going out, how much I'm spending, how much I'm making, so I can manage my company and know, hey, they're sure that we're getting 20K from that client. They might be able to invoice 30. We'll see. That's good for me to know so I can budget to spend 20 on paying the line of credit off. They're doing that and, ok, that money is going to come in for payroll and then I've got this money. So that's the big reason for projections. But the secondary reason for it is your project manager is now thinking through what's coming up For the first time, sitting down like, okay, tomorrow in our panel meeting I've got to get projections.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this job I need to be invoicing. I got to invoice something from it. I'll do five grand. Oh, I'll go ahead and order the flooring. Great, order the flooring. Invoice five grand, spend four grand. We just made it like that's great, figure out what you can do. And now they're starting to think through next week and the rest of the month. And what am I going to get done? Stuff starts happening quicker and more efficiently and tighter oh, I forgot to even call that guy. Yes, tighter, oh, I forgot to even call that guy. I need to get him out there, yep.
Speaker 2:And on top of that they bring the projections to you and they sit down and say, okay, on this job, I'm doing five grand. And then you, as a, as the head of construction owner of the company, look at it back over and say try again, make that 10 and I'll show you how right. And so you get to coach them. This is the probably out of every part of the pound meeting, the most coachable time of the meeting of all. Right, let let me see how you game planned your jobs and let me come at it from a different angle. Let me come at it from a 30,000 foot view that isn't stuck in the weeds on the job like you are, and give you some coaching.
Speaker 2:And this is where you sit down. It's like, hey, what if you did this? Hey, have you ordered that? What? Have you switched that dumpster out? Have you started having those conversations, looking forward at each of these projects that you think, okay, I should have it 100% invoiced by the end of the month. And I say you haven't even ordered cabinets. There's no way this is going to get done. So let's reframe when you think this is going to get done. Let's pull out your timeline, your Gantt chart. Let's look at when you think, because it's not going to be the end of the month. You think, because it's not going to be the end of the month, let's look at your completion date and communicate today to your client that it's not going to be, because I'm guessing yesterday you told the client it was the end of the month, just like you just told me, right. And so this is where the client care comes in, this is where the planning comes in.
Speaker 2:This is where the um, really the coaching up your PMs come in, is looking at what they think is going to happen and saying, okay, confirmed, you're right, good job. Or hey, no, that I don't see how that can happen. Explain that more. Let's dive deep into it. So the projections with a PM are the last thing we do. Right, we train them up, we learn everything, and the last thing I usually introduce the PMs is doing the projections, cause that's that's. Uh, take some mental gymnastics to understand exactly how to do projections and to look forward, but it's not that hard. It doesn't have to be down to the dollar, it doesn't. We've had guys show up that are like, uh, $19,343, I'm invoicing next week. I'm like, okay, I don't care. Uh, you know like I need round numbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I need round numbers, I need why, I need how. And while they're doing that, the timeline is getting shorter or longer every single time, and so we're going to communicate every Friday after that meeting to every single client confirm what's going on. This is what's happening. Hey, just so you know. I think we picked up a couple of days at the end of this, but I'll let you know in a few weeks to make sure we're still there. Hey, your timeline slipped about a week because X, y and Z and remember the tiles you wanted are discontinued at floor and decor.
Speaker 1:So now we gotta go pick up new ones. I think that, right there is among the most important parts of that. Well, I don't know, clients will not ever remember all of the things that they did to affect the timeline in a negative way. Yeah, they will remember all the positive effects they made on the time I took this off the scope and I brought this material on site and I helped you guys do this. I'm kind of managing the whole thing if I really think about it. Yeah, they never remember the things that they did to affect it negatively. Like a month into the project changed the entire plan. Like that's a real thing. I, that's a project that we were working on, but you hadn't started that room yet I know we haven't started it.
Speaker 1:I had to re-talk to everybody. I had to talk to the, I had to talk to the architect, I had to talk to the engineer. I had to go back to the city. I had to change the trade.
Speaker 2:You went from subway tile to a high-end design from Italy, tile that has all these diamond shapes and all this detail that you want in it.
Speaker 1:That's four days. We had a client choose probably 13 different selections of tile. Beautiful tile yeah. Four of them were the terracotta style, where you have to soak all the tile and then you have to. They're all different thicknesses, they're all different thicknesses they all have.
Speaker 1:They're not the grout line. You need to be prepared. The grout lines are going to be funky and you have to seal them before you grout them, like there's a two-step sealing process, so it's like all of this stuff. They didn't give us that list until we tile started showing up right and so then we're like well, number one, this is a change order.
Speaker 1:There's. This is not grid style, which it says in all of our scopes. This accounts for grid style or brick pattern tile work. None of it was that we had rework, that we had to look through all of the directions. It was a 15-page packet of tile instruction. Hey, this is a significant time crunch thing, because now we have to redo due diligence on how we're going to do your tile. We have to go talk to the tile guy. What's the increase going to be on this? Probably changing which guy I'm using for tile? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of changes. Which guy I'm using for tile? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of changes. And if you don't address those things on a weekly basis or as the project is unfolding, you're not going to go at the end of the project five months down the road and say, well, yeah, we are three weeks behind, but do you remember when you did this? Do you remember when you did this? It sounds petty at that point.
Speaker 2:The tile fiasco at 2025. You don't remember this.
Speaker 1:You don't remember the tile fiasco. But if you're bringing it up as you go. It can be professional, like we are going to lose some time because of the tile changes. We are going to lose some time because of this, but I'm happy with the timeline still Like we're good. These are some change orders there. Because of that, there's a way to bring that up.
Speaker 2:Well, and you said change orders In the PAL meetings. I don't know how many times sitting in those meetings have I said, hey, they asked you to do what with the tile. That's a change order. They're asking us for additional labor. You need to talk to them today, as opposed to most contractors at the end of the job say, well, it took us three extra weeks because we had to do some extra stuff, so I need an extra 10 grand. And the client's like I'm not paying you anything. Nah, pal.
Speaker 2:I'm going to rip it out? Nah, pal, well, I'm going to rip it out. Yeah, exactly, and that's where it ends up, and you've lost your reputation because the client changed their minds on what they were doing. And so if we're doing it along the way, like Well, that's not fair.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, that's what they say. And so if I'm going along the way and I'm saying, hey, listen, if we're going to have to do that next week, that's going to extend the timeline. We can't invoice anything because we got to figure this out next week. So there's no projections of next week. Let's look at our timeline, let's look at what has to change and we need a change order. We can't just do an extra two weeks of work because they changed their mind. And we need to have the conversation today.
Speaker 2:Because if I tell them today and they say, oh, I didn't realize that we're fine with the brick pattern, we didn't realize it. We were just trying to think through and I saw something on Etsy and I really liked this thing on Pinterest. Cool, I'm fine with it, brick pattern, if it's going to change the price, right. And so they have the choice to spend the extra money. If I do it at this time, at this time where, if I just do what they say and send them an invoice for an extra five grand, at the end they're saying, hey, I'm not paying, I didn't know that that was extra.
Speaker 1:Or I didn't know that that was extra. Or even two weeks later, or even one week later. It's like you have already started going down that road, and not only if they say, actually, if it's going to be more, we'll just go with the brick pattern. Well, you've already spent that time reworking it, talking to the crew, getting organized on the front, and then you have to undo it.
Speaker 2:It's like talk to them about it right then and say that I walked with my tile guy already two weeks ago. He's prepared, he's blocked out his calendar. I now have to push him because we got a special order and soak these. It's going to take a couple of days. We've got to. All of that stuff happening makes sense before I do it, yeah, After the fact it's like, oh you just suck at your job and you're just looking for money, yeah.
Speaker 2:So again we're talking about change orders and and issues that happen. This all bubbles up to the top when we're looking at projections. Yeah, because when I look at a PM and he's like, uh, this month or this month I should invoice 110,000. I say, great, month, week three of four in that month. And they're like, uh, this this week I should invoice 110,000. I say, great, week three of four in that month. And they're like, this week I should invoice another 10. And I look at their numbers and I say, so, if you do 10 this week, it'll be the end of the month and you'll be at 20,000 for the month. What's going on? You projected 110. Well, this client made me do.
Speaker 2:And all of this stuff bubbles up as to what's costing us time, what's costing us energy, what's costing us labor, what's messing up our timelines and all stuff that we can change order for or help coach our PM to do better next time. We're doing this. So please start looking at projections If you want our paperwork, want to look at it and really kind of work on how do I plan out work to where I don't have seasons of rain and sun, and you know it's a great. You know I'm killing. I got all these jobs, although all of a sudden I look up and there's no jobs.
Speaker 2:If you want to get out of that mess, talk to us. Come to go to pro truck three 60.com. Go to the contact. Us set up a time. I love to have a conversation with you, whether you're ready for coaching or not. Let's have a call, free, 30 minute phone call. Love to talk to you about your business and if you're ready, we're here to help. So if you want to jump in with us, go to pro shot 360.com. Hop on a phone call and I love to chat with you. All right, thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next week. Bye, thank you.
