Roofing Crew Management: Master Key Roles for More Profits & Job Site Efficiency

We're going to talk a bit about production Octopus. So the first, the kind of the start of this whole thing is that we kind of need to have our brains, the operation. You got to have that one person in the company that you know is smart enough to run the whole department. Okay. And that is your brain. Okay. This person is your production manager. This is like $8 million companies and below, right. There's more positions that come into play when you start knocking on the door, 15 and stuff like that. But I want to keep that for this group. If you're over 15 million in revenue, definitely talk to us. I can show you more what goes here from there. Right. We need to have our eyes on the operation. And this is the field manager. And there's a reason that we do this when coloring because I feel like it helps people learn. We have our hands of the operation and these are your site supervisors. Now the reason that we need all of these is that this is also the most affordable way to run it. Because when we're looking at a production manager, this person has to be. This person has different qualifications than like say another person in the company you're going to have to look for, right? Because they have to be able to be good at the computer, right? They can't just be a guy who knows how to install roofs. They have to have computer skills because they're the ones who are going to use things like Rivy and HubSpot and Sumoquote and company Cam. So they have to be able to use the tools. They also have to be a leader. Right? And leader is not a reward, it's a responsibility. That's from this new book I read called the Motive and it's been really, really good for me. But they have to understand that they have a responsibility. But they have responsibility to the whole team and to you as the owner to making sure this department is running well. And they have to have good organizational skills because they're in a position where they have to do what's what I call Tetris every day. I'm going to visualize that for you in a second. And then on top of that they have the bare minimum, which is an understanding of roofing. They have to be able to understand, does this make sense from a dollar perspective? They have to be able to look at a roof and know, ah, if that's a 7 12, that roof is going to actually take two days. They have to be able to look at that and know that. But they also have to know who are their crews because they have to answer the question, which crew should I schedule for that? Because not every crew is capable of the same thing. And a good production manager knows that. Some crews work better like this, where their energy levels are good at the start of the week and then they go down. And so that's Saturday and that's Monday, right? They know that here is where they should schedule that 1012 monster. But here, if they want to keep them loyal, they probably want to have them on a 412 straight goes. But there are other crews that are say, building, they're building up, or your crews, your, your guy is getting another crew. And they have to be four 12s all the time, this second crew. And you got to be able to communicate with them and understand that from Monday to Saturday, these guys are only going to be able to do four 12s because they don't have a good guy for that. And there are examples where their energy curve is inverted, where the best work they're going to do the fastest, they're going to get it done, where they're going to have that pending Friday and they want to be done. And your production manager needs to know all of this stuff to be good at his job. Now the field manager, this is a person who doesn't need to be as good as computers because they really just need to know how to use company cam and arrivey. They do need to know how to read a work order and a purchase order or at least a packing slip because their job is to understand what needs to be done, but they also have to be able to communicate with crews. So the value for this skill set is like an 85k a year maybe, plus bonuses. Now when I say that, the big red disclaimer on everything I talk about is that your market may differ. Okay? So whenever I talk about this, I need you guys to know that, okay, San Francisco is fricking expensive, okay? The roofs there are like 30 grand for simple 412 goes. Whereas like Joplin, Missouri is like a way cheaper market. So the cost of living is different. Therefore, these numbers aren't always going to be perfectly accurate to your market. It's more important to understand the ratio because then what is. If a, if a production manager is worth 85k, then a field manager is worth 55 to 60 plus bonuses. Now your site supervisors, they don't even need to know roofing that well. This is where they learn roofing. This is where they learn customers. So they only need very basic training, but this is where they also learn how to get customers because they become lead generators. And that's how you make this position make money. And so we're going to talk more about that, but I want to talk a bit about Tetris. All right, so Tetris is a game where you have blocks that come down your screen. Okay? Some of those blocks are four blocks like that. Some of those blocks are four blocks like this. Some of those blocks are, like, kind of weird shaped with, like this. And then the worst block of all time, if y' all remember, it was this stupid one because it never went anywhere. Not even good at drawing it, but it was like a block that was shaped like a Z, okay? And that block was stupid. And you could turn these blocks any way that you want. And the goal was if you had a line on the bottom screen, you filled it with blocks. If you got it completely filled up with blocks, just like I'm cutting, putting here, what would happen is some little zapper of the game would zap all these blocks, and then you would reset. These blocks would progressively go faster and faster, and you'd have to try and stack them, and then eventually they would build up. And then once it reached the. The top of the screen, once one block reached here, you lose. Okay? And so the reason I like to bring this up is because this in many ways is what it's like being a production manager, is that you have a set number of crews, right? Or you can call them crew days, right? So this is a lot of crew days. Smaller company, you could just say, okay, maybe we have four crews, right? So assortment of blocks. You could. Maybe you're only to here, right? You only have four crew days per day. And then every single one of these as you go up, right? Every single grid as you go is days in the month as your salespeople sell, what they're doing is they're dropping blocks in the top. And so then all of a sudden, you might get a kind of a complex job that's kind of big, but not too bad. But it's a four block job. And so you're gonna say, geez, that one's gonna take up a lot of space. So you end up shoving it down here. You might end up getting a job where it's got a big tear off because it's cedar. Maybe that block looks more like this block. It's got a big bottom, right? Because it's got a big tear off. But then it's pretty simple after that. Maybe you put that here. As your crews start to fill up, you either need to get more crews or you're going to build up towards the top. And your salespeople, if you're doing inside outside sales, are going to be dumping ever more blocks in ever faster. And this stupid block right here is when the roofer salesman sells a fence, if you don't know what that means, it's someday you're going to have a sales guy who gets a claim. And in the claim there's a fence. And for some stupid reason the customer says, well, you do my fence, even though you're a roofing company. And for some stupid reason, your sales guy to get the deal agrees through the fence. And for some stupid reason, even though you know for some stupid reason the roofer salesman, sales fence doesn't tell anybody. And then when you go to get paid, your homeowner goes, hey, what about my fence? Or something like that. And now you're struggling to find fencing contractors and you find out that there's alternating boards, there's the gap between the boards, there's the depth of the piling, there's how big are the posts and all this, right? And so you're like, oh, why'd you sell this darn fence? And it gets you into trouble. I would argue fence, for many of you, that unless you have a very, very, very, very talented production manager, you will probably get yourself in trouble if you sell more of these than these. Because these are simple to line up. These ones are the ones that throw you off. And this is what gives you the possibility of getting those one star Google reviews. If we can avoid it, we would like to avoid it. Not everybody can. Some people are in markets where they absolutely have to do everything. Like Minnesota is a common market where everybody's a remodeling. So we have to think, well, whose job is what in this context, right? Like who does what in this context? So the site supervisors are the ones who take care of each individual block. So that's what a site supervisor does, is they're here to take care of each individual crew day. Now, the field manager, their job is to be the zapper. That's what your field manager does, right? Their job is to say, okay, the production manager gave me these four blocks. My job is to assist the team with whatever is needed to make sure that whatever the production manager had planned is going to work. Because if you were playing Tetris, right, and you knew that you don't want to get anything up here to the red, you would really want to make sure that the zapper works right now. The game. It always works. But sometimes, if you don't have a great field manager, zapper does not work. But the production manager will use blue. The production manager is the one who's deciding where these things go. And as they get busier, there becomes a new role in the production octopus. That new role is the production liaison. This is the production L I A I A S O N. I think, okay, I always mess that one up. But the production liaison is who takes customer communication off the plate of the production manager and assists in the goals. Right. So this can be things like permits, things like forms, things like midday inspections here in Florida, or maybe notice of commencements, if you're in Florida. Right. They can take things off like automated reminders, just basically keeping those things in check. They're the assistant to the brain. Right. So make sure that whatever the brain thinks, the mouth says, and that's where customer communication comes into play, is they're the ones that help become a force multiplier for that. Because at the bottom of every single one of these blocks, you have a homeowner who needs to be communicated with.