Mike Andes tells Matt, who runs a seven-person handyman business, that dividing into specialized teams too early creates dangerous single-person bottlenecks. Instead, standardize your two or three core services first, eliminate what slows you down, then split into divisions once you can staff each one with multiple people.
What are some of the things you've seen that they just failed miserably trying to get from generalists to more build departments?
Quick question, just so I can clarify, Matt, how many technicians do you have in the field?
7 at once. Yeah, 7 guys.
Yeah. So I think when it comes to handyman, a lot of people go into divisions too quickly. And by doing that, they splinter the amount of people in each division, meaning you only have 1 or 2 people that know how to do specific tasks. And so you actually create key man risk. And so until you have a certain size, Divisions actually make way more key man risk because if one person leaves or maybe someone calls out sick, all of a sudden we're in a world of hurt. And so the generalist concept, it's the same thing as actually the admin where I also require them to do all these different things. I can't really get just someone for phones, just someone for payroll, just someone for AR, just someone for AP. Like I can't do that until I'm large enough. I think I've seen people do is they hit up against 7, 8 employees, always where they feel the pressure. They'll division, they'll do divisions as a Band-Aid fix instead of how can we simplify and standardize this and then be able to get to 20 technicians and then do the, the divisions and actually like 3, 4, 5 people in an apartment, for example, like outdoor, indoor, commercial, residential. You know, you can start breaking up and splintering it however ways you want. But I think that most people could take your current services. Okay, let's say we offer 15 things. What are the 2 things that are constantly pulling you back in and constantly pulling in specific people that the generalists can't get done. Those would be the things I'd be trying to chop because I then, once I do that, I can then triple or quadruple the business in size doing what can be more standardized. And in your business, it's less about simplification and more about standardization. 'Cause like simple doesn't happen. It's like, it's all over the place. But can we standardize what kind of gutters, what type, which ones we're able to touch, which ones we're not gonna touch? And you know the 20% that causes 80% of the problems. And if you've cut that, usually I see handymen because the claim to fame is we do everything, they box themselves into basically usually a 7 to 10 person shop because everything, it ultimately still hinges on one person knowing everything. And so I would try to remove those bottlenecks and then scale it to the point where then dividing and making the divisions is, is actually permissible.
Perfect. That really helps. Appreciate that.
