Should Crew Leaders See Estimated Vs Actual Hours on a Job?

Should crew leaders see estimated vs actual hours on a job?

You might think that’s none of their business. They don’t need to see the estimated vs actual hours on the job, right?

Or you might think that you want them to see it, ya know, give them a finish line and goal to beat.

I want to share my story as a crew leader as to what happens when you flip the script and show your crew leaders info like estimated vs actual hours on the jobs they are working on.

Back in the day, in the early days of my running a crew at Tussey Landscaping, we were tracking time on paper timesheets, and job costing manually in spreadsheets to see if we made any money on the job, and if the original estimate had been accurate on hours, expenses, etc.

10 years later, we were tracking time in the SynkedUP app and could see live estimated vs actual progress bars, and see how we were tracking on the job in real-time.

Here’s what it looked like in the early days.

We finished the job, filled out the last paper timecard, threw receipts into the paper job folder, and moved on to the next job.

Weeks and weeks later, the salesperson finally finished pulling everything together and plugging it into the manual spreadsheet.

…and… occasionally my phone would ring.

I pick up. It’s the salesperson.

“Hey, we didn’t do so well on that Mrs. Jones job, any idea why? Was my estimate wrong?”

We had wrapped up that job 6 weeks ago 😅

My stuttering response:

“Ummm… well… I’m not sure… maybe this, maybe that.”

I was on my 4th or 5th job since Mrs Jones’s job, and my memory was dim.

Now, let’s flip the script.

We’re tracking time in SynkedUP, and every day I see the live estimated vs actual hours on the job.

Now, when we didn’t do so well on a job, I called the salesperson before the job was even finished! Not the salesperson calling me.

The conversation sounded something like this:

“Hey, we’ve been crushing it out here on the job site, things have been going well, but we’re only half done and already 80% of the way through our hours. We’re going to go over. There are not enough hours in the estimate. Just want you to know for the next estimate, so you can get it closer to reality.”

Or,

“Hey, you may have already seen, but yeah, we’re going to go over hours on this job. Don’t worry about it though in regards to your estimate. This one’s a one-off. We got hammered with rain, the client is nitpicking, materials not showing up, etc… Don’t factor this job’s overruns into your next estimate for similar work. It’s an anomaly.”

See the difference in this estimated vs actual?

Because the estimated vs actual report was live, in real-time, the quality of the learning went WAY up.

We knew before the job was even done how we were going to make out. And we’d immediately start discussing, seeing what we could do to “save the day” with this job, maybe pull off an upsell, whatever it took to lessen the blow.

At minimum, we’d be making note of the overruns, and adjusting production rates or estimates for similar work in the future.

And that’s all that winning looks like.

Screw up less.

Win more.

If you repeat the screw-ups and never know it, it’s really hard to overcome and win.

I mean life is real. Screw-ups will happen.

But what’s important is to learn from them.

Learning skyrocketed when crew leader could see estimated vs actual

And that learning skyrocketed when the crew leader could see the live estimated vs actual progress, and speak into what the causes were.

Curious what your experiences or stories are on this topic? Do you have anything to add? Any war stories?

Pitch them into the thread here. Either hit reply or leave a comment.

Cheers!

Weston