Your Crew Going Over Estimated Hours Regularly

Estimated Hours

Let’s say you’ve estimated and installed your own jobs as the owner-operator of your business and gotten pretty good at estimating the correct amount of labor.

It feels good, finishing the job, and your actual hours are right in line with your estimated hours.

Then…

You realize you need to build up a team, so you hire a crew and train them on how to install.

All is going well until you realize that it’s taking them longer.

The actual labor hours from their jobs keep running past your estimated labor hours.

So what’s up?

I see this issue a fair bit as we work with contractors from all across North America at SynkedUP.

The Reality

The reality is… as the owner you started this business, you are the one with the most experience in your team.

Not only the most experience, but you are the owner. You just have that extra “care” and “want to” that employees don’t always have.

Suffice to say, if completing jobs efficiently was a competition in the Olympics, you’d probably win almost every time.

Meaning, estimating jobs by your actual hours track record is best case scenario.

Your crew’s actual hours are almost always going to be a bit longer. At least in the beginning.

Over years with great training, equipment, and focus on installation and logistical efficiency, they may eventually grow to beating your own track record as the owner.

But that takes years.

This leads me to what motivated me to write this.

I see owners getting extremely frustrated when their crew consistently takes longer than what they had estimated.

They blame the crew. Blame the weather. Blame whatever.

But like a stubborn mule, keep right on estimating jobs according to their own (best case scenario) track record of how long the job should take.

At their own demise.

Every time they go over hours, they lose money.

This is the part I don’t understand.

I mean I get it, you want to build your crew up to be as efficient as you are.

But that’s going to take time.

Why Keep Doing It?

Why condemn yourself to losing money over that “building up” period?

Meaning, why continue to estimate hours according to your track record?

Why not start estimating according to what your crew can actually do?

So that you buy yourself time, and don’t lose profits, while you build up your crew.

The point is: you need to estimate labor for jobs according to whoever is doing the job can actually do.

Doing anything else is just creating misery for yourself (and your bank account).

If your crew consistently takes 20% longer than it did when you were running the crew, by all means start estimating 20% more labor.

Shoot, estimate 30% more!

You should always be estimating jobs for “worst case scenario”, that’s rule #1 when estimating jobs.

Stubbornly insisting that the job “should only take this long” only hurts you, your profits, and your attitude.

Which probably makes you less fun to work for.

Start estimating labor for jobs according to what your crew can actually perform, and then focus on helping them unblock logistical and production efficiency issues.

As a team.

Together.

While still making profit.

Need Help?

If you need a bit of grease in the gears to pull this off, I created a production rate calculator spreadsheet that lets you plug in the work you’re building a production rate for, and how many actual hours it took your crew to get the work done.

Which lets you find the production rate for that work for your crew.

Example:

Let’s say I want to find the production rate for how many hours it takes my crew to install a patio.

I go find the last couple patios my crew did, and enter the square footage of the patios, and the actual hours it took them to complete.

The spreadsheet averages it all out and shows you the production rate of how many man-hours it takes per square foot to install the patio.

Easy peasy.

You can download it here.

Here’s a quick video showing how it works.

Let me know how it goes.

Contractor Summit

With that, I want to invite you to our Contractor Summit event. At this event you’ll be in a room with your peers, who are in the grind of business just like you are. And you will inevitably glean and learn things like my tips above at this event.

It just happens by default when you get into a room with your peers and lean in and engage.

Attending industry events like this is one of the top things I attribute my own professional growth to.

It unlocked so many opportunities for me, as well as allowed me to learn from other people’s mistakes and lessons learned, and shortcut my own learning curve dramatically.

This year’s event will be hosted by Jeremy Swihart (JSquared Outdoor) in Dayton Ohio, October 3rd & 4th. (That’s a Thursday/Friday.)

He runs a top notch pool and outdoor living space construction company. If you don’t already, you need to follow this guy on Instagram. He’s got a sharp mind and the things he comes up with to make his crews, shop, and production more efficient is amazing.

More details and tickets are here.

The entire SynkedUP team will be there, as well as a bunch of SynkedUP users (and non SynkedUP users)

Be there.

Your future self will thank you 🙏

Cheers!

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP CEO and co-founder