Field Manager Logistics: Daily Tools, Trucks, and Route Planning for Roofing Success

This is where we lead into the logistical challenges, right? These are the things that you want to minimize the impact that your sales team could have on these logistical challenges to make sure that they own their only challenges and not uncrossable obstacles. So daily job site lists and work orders, they have to know where they're going every day and what the work orders are. Now there are tools like Arrive that help with this a lot. I don't want to be salesy, right? This is not a sales webinar. This is just, this is the tool that we use. But you could just as easily do this with Slack. You could do this with project management software. You can use this with, you could do this with HubSpot if you really wanted to, right? It'll be a little more work, right. It won't quite have some of the geolocation aware features. You could do this with screenshotting Google Maps. You know what I mean? Like there's ways to get these logistical challenges overcome, but they have to be overcome, which is why route planning is optimal, right? So if you have six jobs, the site supervisor wants to plan their route in an effective way. And you can do this even with Google Maps. I'm going to give you guys a little demonstration of how to route plan Google. Now if you have a ryvee, you're not going to have to worry about it. I'm going to just show you this because it's an important skill to have. You guys are going to learn way too much about me. But let's say I got to go to my sister in law's house so I can go 172 Lamont, my place. Now thing is, is that I also, I like to, I want, I always like, you know me, I love my, I love my Zonic. So I'm going to stop at Circle K to go get some of that. My sister in law, she probably wants me to grab her bottle of wine because it's coming over, coming over for dinner. So if I go to, I don't know, wine store, I'm going to, I don't know where I go for this kind of stuff. Okay. All right. So we got the liquor store there. We're all pretty close. You can see I don't travel far from home but let's say we have to go to the Red Deer College. So now you can go in here and you can slide these things around, right? So you can, you can slide these destinations and move them around until it makes the most sense for you. So in a closely packed area it's not too bad because all this stuff is pretty close. But as you move this around, then you can send these directions to your phone. You can copy a link to these directions, open up a new browser, and now it's preloaded with this route. So this is just one way to, you know, me trying to make it. So you don't necessarily have to have something like an arrivi, right? You don't have to. If you just punch in all the addresses now. Yeah. You have to manually copy the addresses in. You have to do some more work. And that's why it's nice to have a ry, because you can just pick the tasks, right? He's like, I got to do this, I got to go do this. I got to go do this, I got to go do this. These are the places I got to go. The other thing is internal communication tool for planning drops and pickups. So arrive is a great place to communicate with with the team, right? There is a way to communicate with the team only in arriving because you can send customer messages and you can send messages that only the team can see on a particular task. But, you know, so if I go into an arriving task, but here you have addict, you can type something and add a customer note, or you can just add a note, right? And this task will be saved to this particular task in arriving. So you can have a dialogue in here. But you might also find that slack is a great way to communicate. In fact, I think I like slack a little bit better because it allows you to just have, like the chat for the day. I don't like group text and I really hate email for internal communication. Slack is great because it's kind of like just a chat and it doesn't have to be linked to any particular task because you might want to say, hey, when you're on your way to Beth Brown, I want you to stop at. I want you to stop over at Christine Good. But before you get to Christine Goode, I want you to stop at this Home Depot and grab this stuff. You can also dispatch with a ry so you can set a task to go pick up material and drop off. You can have a task type of a pickup and you can even have depots that are on the map. So you can pick from your depots, like ABC or whatever. I think you can set up to five depots where these are places where you go to get stuff and so you can make it easy to do, but you want to have some way for planning drops and pickups. Now they're going to need something to drive. You can use pickup truck or service van. I know that everybody wants to give people trucks. It's such a nice thing for people like. But I would highly recommend getting service vans because they're so much cheaper. First of all, like you can get a Ford Transit van for like so cheap, right? And you can put a 40 foot ladder on the roof of one of these things, right? You can get so much more material packed into one of these things and you also get to keep everything kind of covered from, from the rain and you can stock materials in there. Like there's just so many ways to get these vans for a low, low, low price. So you can kind of get everything you need packed into one place. I mean don't always feel like you need to grab pickup trucks. You'd be amazed. And this won't hold a 40 foot. These things like run forever. These little transit connects. We had one of these things and they're awesome, right? And this is Canadian pricing, so US dollars, that's like 40k, right? But you can buy like base, base, base model version of these things. You don't need the ones with the windows. I'm trying to find the cheap ones. But like even something like this, you can put sheets of plywood in here, you can put ladders on here, you can put, you put all kinds of vents and everything in here. You can have rolls of rolls in here, right? Like there's a lot of stuff that you can put into these things and pack away and you know you're, you're going to be in really good shape. And then also don't sleep on grand caravans like a lot of people want to get, you know, the fancy vans. But a Grand caravan is probably one of the best values that you can get for a vehicle. I mean go get the old ones and they're like, they're super cheap. And I mean if your logo is blue, go and get one of these things. I mean you go buy a $10,000 vehicle and you wrap it for 1500 bucks and you've got something you can fit an eight foot sheet of plywood in. You can pack full of it, you can put a ladder rack on it. They're ridiculously good on gas. And you can kind of store all your, your vents and rolls and stuff like that in there and it keeps it out of the weather and keeps it from prying eyes. Like less people steal stuff, you know, the windows kind of give it away. So I wouldn't keep $400 Hitachi roof nail is in there overnight. They need something to be able to get around, right? If they're hauling dump trailers, then yeah, maybe you got to get them a truck. But even then it's like you don't have like don't restrict yourself from launching this department because I've seen people do that where they feel like they have to get these people $90,000 three quarter ton diesel. It's like no, you don't, you know, you don't need to do that. You can get a regular cab, long box, three quarter ton truck that's super cheap and you can get this done with just that. The next thing is they need to have a tool set, right? Simple fixes. They got to be able to be like oh you know what? We didn't have a venture or we didn't have a 4 inch plumbing rubber or we didn't have a thing that we finished that job. We want to get paid. Field manager can go pop in, replace a crooked cap cock some nail heads, pop in a vent if need be, right? Can just do that quick little five, ten minute thing to, to finish off a job. Leaf blower, magnet rake. Like the ability to just kind of take something across the finish line if need be to get the, to get the company paid. If they're going to be helping with change orders, they should have access to your configure price quote tool and some quick training on it. If they don't, then this falls back to people like the production manager. Don't put it back on sales because sales is busy out getting new business. But they need to be able to get a quick change order done. You can do change orders in arrive, you can do change orders in sumoquote. You want to put this on the production side for change orders because it's not a sale anymore. Now it's a change order then a company card or some kind of account access for material pickup. Nothing worse than not having the ability to go get the stuff you need, right? If it's not available at ABC or ABC is closed and you got to go to Home Depot or something like that to get the stuff. You can get these prepaid Visa, MasterCard things. You can, you can call your bank and get a $2,000 limit swapped over to a new card. So you take your $30,000 limit, you put 2,000 on this card and then they have a $2,000 limit. Reconcile it, make it so they get receipts scanned in. Pretty simple, you just get scannable hub doc, you can scan in receipts. You know there's all kinds of ways to make sure that they, that they manage those expenses properly. You don't want to have it so that they can' cruise what they need because they can't go get it from a place where you have an account. They have to be able to go get it from a place that they don't necessarily have an account. So get them a company card, get them a prepaid Visa, get them something, a Shake Pay app on their phone where they can like, like you can just load up. You can load up a Shake pay. This is like something that I've seen a lot of reapers use. I'm gonna, I'll get you guys the link because it's so simple because then you can just load up now. They don't have the need to, they don't have the need to show up and like have money that is theirs to do it and reconcile it. You can just use this. I'll put the link in the comment. Right, but it's like a simple way for you to give them a card that they can load money up on. You can just e transfer or you know, however, put some money in there and then now they've got a thousand bucks and then that you get all the transactions of all the receipt of all the times they've done it. So you can reconcile that at the end of the month and they can just pay with tap at Home Depot. So simple. But just get them away that they can pay for things. And the nice thing about that is like that's not a credit card they can lose. It's not a credit card their kid can accidentally take and put the credit card numbers in to buy Roblox bucks or whatever. Like it's not, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to steal from that thing, right? So that's a really good option. And then the other thing is be empowered to make decisions with training and development. They have to be able to let someone go if someone's not conducive to helping them with their goals. They need to have a pathway to be able to let people go. But they also have to have time to be able to train and develop their team. This can be safety training. This can be install training. This can be having a, you know, a day where they get to sit down with a manufacturer of a certain material and learn about how a material is supposed to be installed. Because if you're going to start say installing Euro Shield, right, A new kind of like that rubber roofing material, well, there's Certain install specs that need to be held. And what business owners will do in the roofing industry is make sure the sales team knows how to sell it. And they'll, they'll ask the crews and say, do you know how to install it? And the crews will say yes, and you'll believe them. But then if your crew knows more and your sales team knows more about what it's supposed to look like when it's done, than your field manager and your site supervisors, you're going to be vastly underprepared. And so by having the sales team set up to properly estimate, sell, present the value, and communicate to production what was sold, and then production managers have the tools needed to set up a schedule that makes sense. And they have the time to be able to analyze the jobs and make sure they understand exactly what was promised so they can set up a schedule that has every reason to be able to be produced. From there, the site supervisors managed by the field manager should be able to create predictable production growth. Because like we were talking about yesterday, it's very easy to sell $670,000 in a month. Very easy. It's a lot harder to build it and collect it in that same month. The only way you do that is by beginning with the end in mind and putting these things in place. Because then once you've done 670,000amonth, then it's just a matter of having duplication ability, right? You're now you're just duplicating and it gets a lot easier after that. From 8 to 25 is pretty easy. From 3 to 8 is difficult, right? I'm talking like million revenue per year. Three to eight. Probably one of the more difficult runs because it is 100% on the owner. To be able to duplicate the systems and processes and to replicate the human DNA that got them to three. From three to eight is really saying this is what worked. We got product market fit. We sell this, but not this to these people, but not those people for this price and not that price. And we don't sell this if it's not a hell yeah, it's a no. Okay, what systems and processes support that product market fit. Great. That's our systems and processes. Now we need to have standards and expectations and we got to replicate the human DNA, the goddess, to 3. But we need to duplicate that across 11 people. Now that's how you go from 3 to 8, from 8 to 15, from 15 to 25. Those are far easier, far easier than the 3 to 8 million dollar run. Simple but not easy.