How to Schedule Jobs During Spring Rush!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Handes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care and copilot CRM. Today I'm going to be talking about the spring rush. And for the vast majority of home improvement businesses, there are three to four months in the year where we have a massive spike in how many leads are coming in, amount of jobs being accepted, how many employees we need, and how many estimates need to get executed on and actually get out. And so this spring rush is pretty universal. All home services. And I took really five to six years of figuring out exactly how to handle the spring rush. And I really do believe the mismanagement of the spring rush is really what causes most home improvement businesses to fail. It's not a matter of their industry being bad. It's not a matter of them not being able to get customers or not knowing how to do marketing. It's not them having problems with their labor or finding employees. It is simply mismanaging and scheduling incorrectly during the spring rush. Three to four months out of the year, I consider when a lot of new leads come pouring in and you have tons of work. Now I'm going to consider the off season as everything that's not the spring rush. So the other eight or nine months of the year, I'm just going to consider that as the off season. But today I want to talk about five different things I learned the hard way and made a bunch of mistakes, and it caused me ultimately to not make a lot of money, if any money, my first five or six years in business because I mismanaged the spring rush. So going into a spring rush or if you're in one right now and you're, you realize you have mismanaged and you're overworked and overbooked and employees are walking off the job because there's too many jobs in the schedule. If that's. Regardless of where you're at. Here are the five things that I learned and I hope you can implement it to avoid the pain that I had to go through to learn these things. Number one is know your budgeted hour capacity, or at least what capacity and number of customers you can take on without completely overworking your crew and overworking your trucks and equipment. I really believe that you can determine how fast and how much you can grow based upon what I call capacity based growth, which means based on the amount of trucks you have and the number of employees you have, there are certain amounts of revenue that if you go above that, you're going to be above capacity. If you only have two employees, you're not going to be doing $500,000 in monthly revenue. It's not possible if you're charging $100 per hour to the, to the customer. So you can determine how many hours do I expect the average employee to complete per week of budget hours, how many weeks are in a month. Then figure out how many budget hours per month you expect each employee to be able to perform. Multiply that by your hourly rate, and there's how much labor revenue you can expect of every team member on inside of your business. And so if you have three employees, multiply by three. This there's your capacity for labor. The same thing is true with trucks. If you have two or three trucks, you can determine exactly how much revenue you can produce. And then as you go into the spring rush, you need to know what those capacities are. Because if you know what those capacities are, and as you approach those capacities, you'll know that at that point, when you cross capacity for trucks and employees, you have an option. You have two options. You can either raise prices and make more profits and entering what I call profit mode. Or secondly, you can buy more trucks and hire more employees so that you can increase capacity. It's very simple. Everyone always asks, when do I raise prices? It's when you hit capacity. At capacity, you either have the ability to raise prices and increase profits or increase your capacity and continue to grow the top line revenue. It's very, very simple. But knowing that number going into spring rush is important so you don't overbook yourself and all of a sudden find you have way too much, too many jobs and way too many estimates for the amount of crew members and trucks that you currently own. All right? The second thing that I learned about the spring rush when it comes to scheduling is prioritization of time sensitive and recurring jobs. All right? Time sensitive jobs are jobs that cannot be pushed off months out into the future. Recurring jobs is you get payments every week, every other, every two weeks, and they're constantly on the schedule. I want to prioritize those during spring rush for two reasons. Number one, I only want to do the projects, the time sensitive projects, because I have to. Because if I don't do them, I won't get the work. And I only want to do recurring jobs because I want to be able to make money the rest of the off season. If I'm selling mowing services and I'm selling paver patios, I would rather focus on selling the recurring work of mowing during the spring rush and then scheduling the time insensitive projects and the one off projects into the off season. And that might mean that you have to tell customers, hey, look, we're two or three months booked out on paper patios. But it allows me to ensure that during the spring rush I don't get overbooked because of all these one off projects and instead can focus on building my recurring revenue that's going to feed my family the rest of the year. It's going to continue, keep recurring revenue and paying the bills and making sure my overhead is covered throughout the off season. And that's why so many small businesses and home improvement fail, is because the off season we don't have enough revenue and we actually lose money and all the profit we made gets sucked out the door during the off season because we don't have enough revenue coming in. And that is in part due to the fact that you're doing a bunch of one off projects in the middle of spring rush when we want to be trying to capture as many recurring jobs as possible. So the recurring revenue continues throughout the rest of the year. Again, for mowing, I can't, I can't schedule the job out in three months. It is time sensitive. If I can't get that job done within a week or two, it's very likely I will lose the customer. So I want to focus on what projects, what jobs are recurring payments and time sensitive. If it's a one off job and I can schedule it two months or three months from now, that's my goal. So that way I can push as much revenue into the off scene as possible when, while being able to capitalize on all the recurring work that's coming on during the spring. The third thing that I learned when it comes to scheduling the spring rush is expect delays and expect emergency jobs. Your best customer is going to have a job that you must get done or else you will lose them. Especially commercial projects, especially high touch customers that make up a big percentage of your revenue, if they all of a sudden need something right away that's an emergency, you must go do it. And so leave that in your calculation of how much capacity you have for the schedule. If you think you can complete 200 budget hours per week, don't schedule 200, schedule 180. So that way if an emergency comes up, if a first, first time customer comes that needs the product done right away, you have a little bit of flexibility and you're able to capture all that revenue and lock in new customers that you can then get recurring payments for the rest of the year. So don't overbook your schedule or even book it to capacity. Leave space in there for the fact there's going to be delays and emergency jobs. There's going to be jobs that go over budget hours. There's going to be times that employees walk off the job. There's going to be times when because of the weather, everything slows down and everything is delayed. Bake that into your calculation and I'll give you what. What percentage you should be focused on in terms of kind of having a bit of a fudge factor in there. Number four when it comes to scheduling the spring rush, and something I really messed up is anticipate employee churn. All right? So just expect that if you have 10 team members, one or two of them is going to leave every month or two. You'll know over the course of several seasons what the churn rate kind of looks like. I promise you your churn will be less if you don't overbook them and make them work crazy amounts of hours during spring rush and asking the week work weekends and evenings and holidays. So what I recommend is stagger start times when you're hiring your team for the spring rush. For example, if you know that spring rush starts March 1, don't start hiring on March 1. That's when all of your competition and every home service is also hiring laborers. Start potentially in January and then offer them a position to start in February and then train them up maybe part time, and then have a start date that's closer to your actual dur Demand curve starting to take off. But don't wait for demand. Don't wait for a bunch of leads before you go out and get more labors. Get labors off in their position. Stagger their start times. So if you need 10 new team members, don't have them all start in the same day. Have them start over the course of a few weeks as your spring rush begins to take off. So that your demand curve as it begins to take off for spring rush is matched by your supply, I. E. Your labors. And that is also matching. It slowly increases because it takes a few weeks to. To get people trained up and they're going to fall off. There's going to be people that only last a few weeks, a few months, and making sure you actually anticipate that means you will over hire and then churn will actually correct itself throughout the spring rush, but you won't be left with your pants down. In other words, having scheduled all these jobs and budget hours and then not have the employees because you you hired the right number of people and if only they would have all stayed, it would have been perfect. Just count on some of them leaving and some number of them leaving every month to make sure you're overstaffed. And then as they get more efficient, there'll be people leaving and it'll just kind of naturally take care of itself. The fifth and final thing that I learned the first five years and honestly, why I truly believe so many home service businesses fail in the first five years is not any problem. Other than that it takes a while to understand the demand curve and when to hire and when to start marketing. But when it comes to scheduling, I, I expect to have an efficiency score of 75% for my team. This is due to waste and the fact that people are going to do no shows. What that means is even if I'm going to have my team members work 40 budgeted hours or sorry, 40 hours in the week, I'm gonna have them clocked in for 40 hours. I don't expect them to get 40 budget hours worth of work done on the customer's property. I expect a 25% waste. And as well as the fact that people are going to no show, be sick, call out, etc. And so what that means is I'm only going to schedule 30 budget hours for every 40 hours that my team is clocked in. So when I'm looking at the schedule, I have 10 team members, I can get 400 budget hours per week. No, I'm going to schedule for 300 knowing that some people are going to be inefficient, there's going to be training involved, there's going to be waste like drive time, load time, as well as the fact that, that some people aren't going to show up. Because I have a sizable enough team, I can almost count on the fact that someone's going to be sick, someone's going to call out, or someone's not going to show up. So if I just would have known those five things, it wouldn't have led to the overwhelming feeling of having way too many jobs on the schedule. It being Thursday afternoon and you realizing that you have enough work to keep the entire crew busy Friday, all of Saturday, and you'll be picking up all the slack on Sunday afternoon. That sort of over like just insanity is what so many home service businesses quit because it is overwhelming. And you have that massive spike of spring rush only to be followed by an off season of another six to eight months that is very slow, hard to get leads. And now all of a sudden, it's like the opposite of spring rush. So instead of having a feast and famine, kind of no ups and downs and crazy amounts of leads, and then no leads at all, use these five principles to even out your demand curve and make sure that you're planning for your spring rush using these scheduling tactics. I'm Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care and copilot, CRM. We'll see you next time.