How to run a construction business: preventing job site problems

Problem: on installation day the job site wasn't ready. Half a day lost for three technicians, with no chance of catching up until the end of the year.

Solution: a list of risks for each type of job, transformed into procedures and checklists to be executed before sending the team to the site.

Result: from 8-10 half days lost per year down to 1-2 at most. More than 10.000 € in technical time recovered and margin saved.

The job site that wasn't ready

Last September. A client in the province of Brescia calls me on a Tuesday afternoon. Three technicians had arrived on site at 7:30 am to fit 12 windows in an apartment being renovated. You arrive, unload the van, go up to the third floor. And the screed is still wet. Laid the day before.

You can't install anything. You can't even rest the profiles on the floor without risking ruining everything. You reload the van, head back to base. Half a day burnt.

The immediate cost: 3 technicians for 4 hours, about 420 €. But the real damage is something else. The diary was full until December. That installation couldn't be rescheduled for 11 weeks. The end customer started calling every three days. The contractor complained. And when you finally went back to install, you had to deal with an angry client instead of working in peace.

All this because nobody made a phone call on the Friday beforehand.

Job site problems rarely depend on you

This is the part that makes you most angry. In the majority of cases, job site problems are not your fault. They are someone else's fault.

The screed wasn't ready because the floor layer was a week late. There was no power because the electrician hadn't pulled the cables yet. The scaffolding had been taken down the day before. The wall where you were supposed to fix the subframe wasn't plastered yet.

The point is that knowing whose fault it is does not give you your lost half-day back. And it doesn't change the fact that you are the one picking up the bill, because you pay your technicians anyway.

So the right question is not "whose fault is it?" but "how do I find out before I send the team?".

The first step: the list of everything that can go wrong

Take a piece of paper. Better still, open a file. Write down all the problems you've had on job sites in the last two years. All of them. Even the small ones, the ones that caused a half-hour delay.

Then divide them into two columns: problems that depend on you, and problems that depend on others.

You solve the left-hand column through internal organisation. You solve the right-hand column with just one thing: a phone call or a check before the job.

Turning the list into procedures

A list of risks is useless if it stays in a drawer. It has to become an operational procedure. A checklist that somebody actually executes, every time, prior to every job site.

Concrete example. For window installation on a renovation site, the pre-installation checklist might be:

• Call the customer or the site manager 3 days beforehand. Confirm that screed, plaster and electricity are ready.
• Verify that the electrician has prepared the contacts for the alarm, if applicable.
• Check that the lighting points near the windows are already in place or that the electrician will be there before you.
• Confirm access to the floor: working lift, scaffolding available, stairs clear.
• Check the materials list loaded onto the van the evening before, not at 6:30 am.

Five points. Three minutes on the phone and two minutes checking in the warehouse. Five minutes in total that save you 4 hours of downtime for three people.

The problem with procedures on paper

Many companies working in the construction industry already have procedures. Maybe not written down, maybe in the head of the owner or the most experienced site foreman. The problem is they stay there.

When the experienced foreman is on holiday, nobody makes the phone call. When you hire a new technician, they learn the procedures by osmosis, i.e. by making mistakes. When you have 4 active job sites on the same day, something slips through the net.

Procedures only work if they are written down, shared and tracked. It's not enough that they exist. You need to know if somebody has executed them.

BAU Gest

Digital checklists you don't forget

With BAU Gest you create pre-site checklists for every type of job. Every item is ticked off by the technician, tracked with a time and date, and if something is missing you get a notification before the team sets off. No more unready job sites discovered at 7:30 in the morning.

See how it works

Swiss
Made

BAU Gest

Net margin24,2%

Active jobs8

Hours deviation+12%

Optimising technicians: the real goal

Procedures and checklists are not bureaucracy. They serve one purpose only: to keep your technicians working as much as possible on productive activities.

A technician costs between 30 € and 40 € an hour, all inclusive. If out of an 8-hour day they spend 6 hours actually installing and lose 2 hours on waiting, travel and problems, you are paying 25% more for every job site than you had estimated.

Multiply that by a 3-person team, for 230 working days a year.

One extra hour a day of productive work per team. You don't need to perform miracles. You just have to eliminate avoidable waiting times: the job site not ready, the missing part, the coordination that nobody sorted out.

From the individual job site to the system

When you have the risk list and checklists for one type of job, replicate them for all the others. Installation, maintenance, after-sales assistance, technical survey. Every type of activity has its own specific risks and its own checklist.

The quantum leap happens when you stop managing every job site as an isolated case and start treating them as repeatable processes. Not because job sites are all the same, but because 80% of the things that can go wrong are always the same ones.

That 20% of genuine unexpected events, the ones you couldn't foresee, you manage better precisely because you aren't already chasing problems you could have avoided.

Where to start tomorrow morning

You don't need to revolutionise everything in a single day. Start with three things.

First: take the job sites over the last six months where you've had problems. Write down what went wrong and whether it depended on you or others. Even just on an Excel sheet, the important thing is to do it.

Second: for the type of job you do most often, write out a 5-7 point checklist to verify before sending the team. Give somebody the task of executing it for every job site.

Third: after a month, count how many problems you have avoided. Not how many you've had, how many you've avoided. Because that's where the margin sits that you are currently losing without realising it.

If you want to see how a system of digital checklists integrated with job site management works, take a look at BAU Gest. It saves you time where today you are throwing it away.