What to Focus On in the Off-Season – Templates and Production Rates

I’m going to keep on flowing on my “what to focus on in the off-season” series, as there is just no end of opportunities to use this time to set yourself up for success during the busy season. Today I’m going to hone in on templates and production rates for estimating.

What does a template consist of?

At its most basic form, a template is a checklist for a certain type of work, ie patio. So you don’t forget any materials, equipment, etc while putting together the estimate.

Advance one step further, and your template will also include pre-canned customer proposal descriptions and internal notes to your team.

Become a template using powerhouse, and your templates will also include production rates.

If you have never used templates, dude, just start.  Your future self will thank you. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Just start simple, and build a template in a spreadsheet or your software for the type of work you do the most. Do a lot of patios? How many times have you built an estimate and realized you missed something, and now it’s coming out of your profit? Build a checklist of all the products you use on every patio, so you don’t forget the edge restraint, the joint sand, or some other random little detail.

On the customer proposal descriptions, you know how it is, it’s late, you are trying to wrap this quote up, and your well of inspiration just runs dry when trying to fill in the customer-facing description on your proposal. Sit down, and when your creative juices are flowing throughout the slow winter season, write out nice descriptions for all the types of work you commonly do. When you finished doing that, add in internal notes to the crew for each type of work you do. Maybe when you start a patio, you always need to dump a trailer to haul dirt out from excavation on day one of the jobs. Don’t rely on your memory to include that each time. Make it easy, just add it to your internal work area notes on your template for patios.

Production rates

This one is where the most bang for your buck is. There’s a lot of leverage here.

What is the production rate? It’s essentially building a formula to calculate the quantity of something, like say stone for your base material. Instead of making yourself do that manual calculation for how much stone you need on every single quote you produce, build a production rate, aka a formula, where you can just enter your square footage, and bam, produce the total ton of stone you need. Every time. Without touching a calculator. I’m telling you, once you do this you’ll never go back.

I have an article here where I go into more depth on how to build production rates.

Benefits of using templates and production rates:

Speed up quote turnaround time.

Study after study proves how vital a quick response is in converting that lead. Every day that goes by without you getting that quote back to your lead lessens your chance of winning that job dramatically. Obviously, it depends on how crazy custom you go with your work, but many of you have no reason to not be giving your client a quote before you ever leave the driveway.