Is Your Company A Well Oiled Machine?

ruskent

This is my third year in business and i am running a completly different business then what i was 2 years ago. It seems that the bigger i get the more i see i need to learn! I know my company is not running any where near 100% efficently. I am getting held up on inspections, materials, subs, etc, etc. etc.

And its all my fault. I did not plan ahead on everything and its costing me money. But i guess this is a learning game.


So how long did it take to get your company running like a well oiled machine?

dirt diggler

im actually staying on schedule a lot better this year

took a bad experience and a long talk with a client ... literally changed things overnight


still much more improvement to be made - but im (secretly) happy

Mike Finley

Growing pains -

What worked last year won't work this year. I've always tried to avoid work arounds as much as possible, trying to implement systems that could scale. It's not so much a problem of the systems in place not scaling up, it's the need for more systems!

I'm sure you are like me and as you grow you just are facing not just more of the same, but more of things you didn't have to deal with before. I'm hoping for some sort of plateau that lasts more than 6 months eventually.

What's scary to me is considering the time and effort I place into all this organization and still have issues staying on top of it, I can't even imagine the enourmous cluster *****s that must be going on in the run of the mill contracting businesses!

MKamis

I've learned to spend a little extra "unpaid" time to organize my material lists more accurately. Spending 1 day on organizing saves me 3 days worth of trips to the store, and a whole lot of aggrivation. My biggest hang up is still trying to maintain something that resembles a schedule! There are way too many add-ons during my remodels.

SeanATL

well oil cluster fck is a better desciption for me.

We're new, got jobs coming left and right, scrambling to schedule things.

The price of business is going up. I booked $35k worth of paint work in the last 7 days, to be completed over the next 2-3 weeks.



You know what I mean?

Chris Johnson

I'm 21 years doing 'various' construction work, I started out as a tile setter when I finished high school, I thought it was great and I would be doing that forever, till a recession @ the end of the 80's/early 90's, went from tiling in new construction only to bidding private jobs, this entailed kitchens and bathrooms, this opened me up for plumbing/electrical/framing/insulation/drywall...you get the picture, commercial work started to roll in and I slowly got into the GC seat with my earned knowledge of other trades. Finally wrote my builders exam and started building complete houses, discovered ICF's as a way to stay ahead of the competition and set myself appart, liked ICF's so much made that the mainstream and spent more effort promoting and working that, still GC once in a while, now I have added steel framing to the list as well, still prefer the ICF's but do steel framing if needed. - Yes, my business has changed erratically over the years, but for the better and I continue to educate myself on new and different products.

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Chris