Roofing Production Manager: Hour-by-Hour Task Breakdown for $8M Companies

Well, James, it's a good question you're asking. He says it seemed like the production manager is doing a lot of logistics and talking with a lot of people. I wasn't sure if they have the time for reconciliation too. So let's break this down to a list of batch of activities, right? So if you're doing, you're doing 8 million a year, right? Let's do the math. But I just want to talk about busy. You're not pre fluffing. You're pricing to the market that you're going to be in when you go to order the material, not when you sell it. It doesn't matter how much the material costs when you sell the job. It matters how much you the materials cost when you go to buy it. So, so let's start with an $8 million company. Okay, so an $8 million company, right? Now let's say that, well we'll divide that. We'll do 8 million divided by 16,000. Now you're going to say, well we have some repairs just in $16,000 jobs, right? That translates into 500 jobs a year. Well, let's say we're only doing 7 million of that is roof replacements. So divided by 16,000 that's 437. So, so that's 437 replacements. And then if we go a million divided by average repair of 1,800 and if you're not getting $1,800 per average repair, we got to talk. That's 555 repairs. Right? So that would be. That would be a busy production manager. That's a good size business right there. So if we're going to now break that down to what is the work that's required to do that. So we have 437 replacements to do. We work an average of 210 days per year. So 437 jobs divided by 210 days a year, that equals two jobs per day. Now these jobs require a lot more work than repairs. But let's look at the two jobs per day worth of work. So what do we have to do? Right, for every job, what is the list of tasks? We have to review the job file playbook. Right? We've got to review that. That's going to take how long? Say they take 10 minutes. They have to review. Sumo quote. That's going to take three minutes. They have to review and put in the comments if there's anything I'm missing. Review the company count. Let's see, that takes five minutes. This Is the answer of the question, what do I need to do? What they're really trying to determine at this point in their game of Tetris is they're trying to say what kind of block is this? So we know that this is this type of block, all right? It's an L shaped block. So then the next thing they need to do is need to review the schedule, right? They need to look and say, where does this fit? Right? Where, where does this little block fit in my list of jobs, right? Like where can it fit? And he goes, ugh, if I put it here, right? Well then I would have my blocks like this. Then I would have a gap here, so I can't put it there. So he goes, ah, actually I could give it to these guys and then it'll fit nicely in here, right? So okay, we found out where this fits. So what's that going to take to do? Right? If they know their schedule really well, they're going to probably take what, 5, 10min to say where does this fit? Right now they gotta think, okay, that's my hypothesis. I think that it could go there. Because if this, if each one of these things is crew and these are days, well then how many crews do we have and how many days are we booked? Right? That ultimately determines how much money we can make. So if we say, okay, we gotta review our schedule for 5, 10, see where does it fit then as you say, okay, well I gotta see, does that work for the customer? Right? I got to think that, does that work for the customer? I want to put them into the second week of September. That's what this particular line means, right? Second week of September, working for Joe. Right, in this group. So then you want to talk to the customer. So then they're going to have to call the customer to confirm. Are they going to get a hold of the first time? No, they're probably going to have to call the customer a couple of times. So let's say they make 3x1 minute calls and then they talk to the customer for 5 minutes to just confirm. Yes, yes, yes, I did see that you got the shed included. Yep, I know. Notice that you got the upgrade for the ridge vent. Yep. I saw the rose bush on the back. We're not going to break your rose bush. Okay. So at this point we've now confirmed it. So we can set that thing on the schedule. So that's going to say set it. That's going to take one minute. So now we've set it on the schedule in our system Whatever system that is, right, only takes a minute. So we've now answered the question, when am I going to do it? We've answered another one of the critical questions that we have to answer now. From there we have to go to the next thing and say, okay, well how am I going to do it? So what do we need to do? What do we need to do now? Well, we have to do a material order. So an assumable quote that's going to be create order, delete some stuff, maybe split it and shop stuff. It's going to take five to eight minutes, right? Maximum, maximum could take 15 seconds and we got to send it, split send. Then we have to do a work order. So again, simple quote, they're just going to go create order, maybe pick a template, write some stuff, then send with an email. Now that takes another five to eight minutes. Again, could take a long time. So now when this happens, then the job is scheduled. Then we have what do we have to do next? Well, you're going to have a two days out, two days out call, right? So you're going to let them know, hey, you're two days away, roof's coming, make sure you move your trucks out of the drummer or you have to send the email, right? That can usually be automated. So that's another what, five minutes that we do that. So then install day happens. When install's done, we're going to then maybe do the change order. If there's a change order that's five minutes. We're going to do an invoice payment call, we're going to review subcrew pay sheet, review the install checklist. What's that take? So the invoice and the payment call, review the subcrew pay sheet, five minutes, review the inspection, five minutes, reconcile. So they're going to read one and see it was 3200. They're going to read another, see it was 3600. Let's say 50% of the time there's something wrong, which would be freaking massive, but let's just say it's that, right? So then they have to do a five minute call, let's say 50 minute call, let's make it a long time, but that's going to 50% of their jobs. So let's total up our minutes here, right? They have to do this two times a day. So let's add up our minutes. 10 minutes plus 3 minutes plus 5 minutes plus 10 minutes plus 3 times 1 minute, plus the 5 minute call, plus 1 minute plus 8 minutes plus, plus 5 minute change order. Plus 5 minutes. Plus 5 minutes, plus 5 minutes, plus 15 minutes. So 93 minutes to do these things. Right. And I was thinking we were doing 50 minutes on every job for reconcile, which we'll just leave it at that. They have to do that twice a day, which equals 186 minutes divided by 60 is three hours. Three hours of their day. Now they still have to do 551 repairs which do not take as much time as this. Right. But if they did have to take this much time, that's another three hours. So that's six hours a day. Six hours a day to run an $8 million production department for planning, review, conversations, month end reporting. Now, by the time you get to an $8 million production department, you're going to have a production liaison. So you're going to get this other role. That production liaison is going to handle this. They're going to handle this. They might handle this. They'll handle this. They'll handle this. And they'll handle this. So what's that? Half the work? What's the production manager cost? Somewhere between 85 to 105k a year for the best of the best production coordinator between 45 and 65K. So at the high end, 105 plus 65 divided by 8 million would be 170,000. Divided by 8 million. 2.1%. It's not that much revenue. Okay, so let's say that's our day batched, right? So you got blue jobs. So let's say blue jobs are job file playbook review. A job file playbook review triggers what we have to review the schedule and schedule jobs. So let's say that these are review and schedule. Right. Which triggers what? Material orders and work orders. Right. And then install jobs require all of our get paid stuff. So closeouts. Right. And some job file playbooks result in reviews and schedules. Reviews and schedules sometimes result in orders. But think about context switching, right? So switching from contexts is like, okay, so we do a job file playbook review because we came in in the morning. Then we review and schedule. Oh, we heard a job is done. We got to pay crap. Okay, we got to order some materials. I'm going to order my materials. Oh, how many of those do we have? Well, oh, sales guys just sold a job, wants to know when it can be done. So I'm going to go that and then I'm going to review and schedule. Oh crap. We got to do some closeouts. We need to get paid. Boss said we got to get paid. So I'm going to do all the rest of my closeouts, but then I'm going to do some ordering right? So I did my order right, but then I have some more reviews and schedules to do, and then I'm going to do other job file play. Just the time that you're watching me go from here to change my colors and then back over to here is kind of like a meta example of what it's like for your production manager when he doesn't batch his work together. So you want to try and create an environment with those task cues where you can batch your work.