Why Scrum?

What is Scrum and why use it?

Scrum is a way, a framework, to complete projects.  These honestly can be any kind of project that you’re working on from simple to complex.  It was created as a framework to push out complex projects.  Before scrum they were just projects and done in a linear fashion and once the project was finished it was pushed out to the public in the form of a service or product.  Certainly there are variations on this, but that is the general gist of how projects went.  Nowadays this method of dreaming up a project or product and doing the entire thing and releasing it once it is done is called the waterfall methodology. 

Basically you do all of one thing before moving on to the next thing.  While this is nice sometimes for the customer it has its pros and cons. 

Agile allows for rapid iteration on a product.  It also limits time to work on a particular part of a project to a set short period of time.  This allows for trying things quickly and getting them out quickly.  The last thing you want in a product is something that isn’t needed in the marketplace anymore.  Also I feel like the agile method lends itself to more emotional wins within the team that is actually working on the product. 

If a team is assigned to work on the product at hand and they miss their waterfall deadline of having it out the door after 6 months vs 2 weeks for the next most valuable thing in agile, then it just feels like a bigger problem though theoretically it is possible to do potentially the same amount of work in the same amount of time.

What do you think of scrum vs waterfall methodology?

May 2018 Recap of Painting Business

This last month was an interesting one for us in the business.  I may do a brief update now and then when our books are reconciled on the 10th maybe I'll do a snapshot of how we did and then from there on out I'll try and do the monthly update mid month so that I have the numbers to review as well.  Maybe I'll YouTube updates on what we're doing new in the business.  I'm not sure, but its something I've thought about because then I get more out faster.

Thinking about it right now too I think I want to structure these monthly updates so there is a structure and people can read what they want and skip the rest or bits and pieces.

Good
The biggest thing we worked through was finally coming to a consensus on needing to hire another person to take over Production Management and Estimating in the business.

I think I already mentioned this, but I was already feeling a little bit of burnout on doing the residential estimates for our clients.  I really like meeting our clients and the challenge of needing to figure out new things as they come along because getting out of your comfort zone is what it is all about.  But its starting to not be a challenge and it really is just listening to what they want, make some recommendations, take some measurements and pictures, walk them through our process, then follow up with them.  Pretty easy and people really like our process.  It takes a little bit to learn the software, but really not that much and you're up and running after a handful of estimates.  After that it is just nailing down creating forms for all the estimates that you just do over and over again.

The amount of driving around just feels tedious to me when I could be paying someone else good money who wants to do it while I work on more systems based things that need to get done to really get this thing to scale to make a lasting impact in our customer interactions and just growth.  So we met with a guy who actually applied as a painter of ours to take over estimating for me on top of doing actual painting.

Then on to the production management role, or pm as it'll be referred to from here on out.  This is what Renee has excelled at and managed on her side of the business.  She's always been a do it your selfer and just making things happen all my growing up, but for us to go to the next level I basically plead with her to make some changes and then lots of discussion led to us both saying we really just need to offload her job to somebody new who can give it the full attention it needs.  This includes follow up each day, sometimes twice a day, with customers, ordering paint, finding, vetting, and hiring painters, running the schedule, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of right now.

We reached out to some people we knew from applications for the job when we were still Rocky Mountain Painters, but that wasn't ideal as the role had been advertised differently than what we need currently, which essentially is a full time person.  The guy that we hired to paint and do estimating for us also had management experience prior to coming on and so we said to him that we wanted to promote him and have him now only do estimating and production for us.  So we're going to run with that for now and see where it leads us.

I think it'll take a load off of both of us and once we're able to flush out more business system's things and hire more quality painters that we'll actually be able to turn on more leads and hire a marketing coordinator who will then setup appointments for our estimators to go out and proactively sell to pre-set appointments.  After those things are done then it is just rinse and repeat in my opinion for growing the business.

Another thing we decided to do is switch from an LLC to an S Corp.  Now instead of being overtaxed for any profits we take out of the business we'll instead be employees and the company will pay a portion of our taxes and then anything after that we'll then face the full force of all the taxes so that should help the sting of getting paid, but having to deal with taxes.

With that change it required an upgrade in our bookkeeping service too.  We feel like we need more hands on attention at the beginning right now to get a better handle on our reports and goal setting and tax planning and then once that is squared away we may back it off to the level we were at previously.

We won a big apartment complex job in south jordan and we originally thought it'd only be for phase 1 of the project and then we'd go from there.  When the contract showed up however it was for the full project¸ which took us both by surprise.  So while winning the original phase at 80k was cool, winning 400k+ is even cooler.  Cool though = tons of prep work we've got to do in terms of getting crews ready for it.  With our new PM we hope to be able to tackle that thing with ease while still maintaining growth and getting into the commercial repaint segment.

Bad
We're still learning how to be better at estimating.  A lot of jobs are over on their costs and so one thing we said we're going to do going forward is to just add two hours of prep to each job.  One hour for painters discussing the project with the customer and getting paint and what not.  The second hour is for travel time that we're going to start paying out to painters when they have to travel beyond a certain point for any kind of job.

We've been having clients upset about our communication and workmanship at times too.  So the big thing we did was decide to hire another PM to help systematize the communication with everyone.  Then the second thing we've done is started having weekly calls with all the painters to discuss things that we need to improve on.  I think those training meetings will be beneficial to helping us improve and get better and more profitable of course.

I made the "mistake" of reaching out to people I'd met at the painting conference I went to in January and the guy who put it on threatened legal action if i didn't stop talking to those people.  The main culprit I believe for his angst and anger was that I'd reached out to my contacts asking if they wanted to do a mastermind group for painting business owners to discuss the things they were wanting to do first, second, and third in their businesses, but for free amongst ourselves.  That was pretty deflating to get that from the conference organizer, but one thing i want to do is find a group of business owners that want to improve and then meet to discuss what to do first, second, and third.  Doing that, and hopefully having some big dawgs in there, will help inspire and lift people to do better.

We're coming up on a big transition period where we're going to guide our new guy on how to do our jobs and give up control there, but once we do I think it'll be for the better because then we can focus on higher value things in the business.  Interesting times indeed!

April 2018 Recap of Painting Business

April was a fun month for us.  We got to take profit for the first time, get our first bookkeeping accounting reports sent to us, and we made some good choices for hiring people and doing new types of bids.

I've been doing all of our estimates that we've been bringing in.  It's been interesting learning the in's and out's of how to do it, what you actually need to pay attention to vs just kind of rolling it into the price on things like caulking and what not.  It still gets done, but instead of measuring to the inch you're fine to account for it, but without pinpoint accuracy.  After doing it for two months though now and pretty much having nailed down the process for how to do it and what to say there is maybe only one other iteration on it and that would be using an iPad to show content like the customer book and video testimonials.  Beyond that though...I'm kind of bored with it.

It is very straight forward especially since we upgraded to our new estimating software that has pretty much completely eliminated WAG (wild ass guessing).  Prior to the software it was $100 for this wall and $125 for that ceiling etc.  Now you take measurements, enter it into the software, add estimated prep based on each individual situation, and then the production rates from our software that are based on the pdca standards (Painting and Decorating Contractors of America), take our labor cost and material costs and accurately spits out our cost to the customer in a few minutes.  It's excellent, but because literally anybody could do it it has me really thinking I should hire this out and focus on other business building activities that could add additional revenue streams to the business without too much additional effort.  So that is something I'm actively focused.  That will happen sooner rather than later I think once I've got some business foundation things setup and scheduled and systematized.

Numbers from last month.

So we've got our statement of cash flows above for the first two real active months of the business where we were doing estimates and producing jobs.  It is skewed though currently because we've been taking advantage of Sherwin Williams' "test drive".  We're still a few months out from having some trending numbers that will show a better prediction of actual cash flow or not.  We're going to be banking a good chunk of our cash flow as a cash buffer to build up our working capital so we can weather our bills should things slow down.  It was nice to see that big of a net cash flow positive bump in our first couple of months of business though.  I'm excited for the future too because in the contracting class and just by reason of logic overhead costs are never higher than at the beginning of the business since you can't take advantage of the scale of your production and systems as much as you can later when you have increased lead flow.  If we were done building up working capital last month's income would've been more than we've ever made, which was cool to see.

One of the bigger jobs we landed at first was this commercial ceiling we did in Kaysville.  It kind of blew our mind that we won it, but that excitement wore off after a few days and I started feeling nervous.  A couple weeks ago I made some follow up calls and had one customer follow up with me to tell me that they'd decided to have us do their work, which on that one day alone ended up being about a 3/4ths of what that big commercial ceiling ended up being and it dawned on me that while the big wins are nice the small ones are also nice and just as real.

Bid a huge apartment complex.

One of the interesting leads that came our way last month was a request to bid a 237 unit apartment complex.  A good friend of mine helped me with his take off software and I imported all of the apartment's blueprint plans into the software so that I could measure all of the surfaces and properly account for materials and labor.  It took me hours and hours to do.  All in all I've probably spent close to 15-20 hours on this one bid, especially if you consider travel time.

Our first bid came in around $750,000.  I followed up with the contractor and he straight up told me our price was too high and that he couldn't use us.  What was interesting is that he was pretty open about the other prices that had come in.  I adjusted my prices to undercut all of them and I have a meeting with the contractor this coming Monday to discuss the project.  I think we're 95% of the way there and if we land the job we'll have booked our revenue goal for the year in our first 4 or 5 months of being in business.

I am nervous to win the job for the income potential, but also the loss potential.  If we mess this thing up it could sting pretty bad.  I think we'll be good though and with the margins looking like I think they are even if I mess up by thousands of dollars there is enough padding to hopefully absorb any issues that arise.

It was interesting as the contractor followed up with me amidst an email chain he'd asked his project manager to follow up on the competitor to try and get a response from them.  It was weird to me to actually hear that.  Maybe the competitor was already busy and maxed out, but by my calculations the money to be made is nothing to sniff at.  Let alone the learning experience and portfolio piece that it would add to anybody's portfolio.  We'll see what happens.  If we land that it'll be all hands on deck to figure out how to hire everyone we'll need.  Should be interesting.  If we don't land it I'll be pushing to potentially hire a project consultant in Utah county so that we can start getting jobs and leads and revenue and income from there.  I'm also wanting to learn how to do estimating for sheet rock hanging, texturing, and then of course painting it.

Appointment Setter

One thing that I knew pretty quickly into our busyness was needing to hire an appointment setter.  Some days I wouldn't get anybody calling in to see about us coming out to give them a quote and other days I'd have 4 people call in.  Either of these days I'd either be at home super busy trying to build up the business with foundation tasks or out giving bids to people.  Regardless of what was going on it was really annoying to have to stop everything that you're doing to return a phone call and hopefully set up an appointment.  Or after being out on bids all day to then come home, with the kids going freaking crazy, the wifey is ready for help, but unless you just wanna blow the money on leads to never contact them you better call them back to set up their appointment and then get all of the paperwork and data entry done too so you're not late the next day when you need to go on the bid.

So I drafted up an ad and posted it the local ksl classifieds and also had Ashlee post it to her social media.  We started getting applicants right away, but we also had an old neighbor friend that lived just up the street from us say she was interested and that she could likely get it done for us and be ok with the somewhat erratic frequency of when calls would come in.  So we hired her and it has been amazing.

She text me today saying that in the current pay period she's setup 22 appointments.  At an average time of 25 minutes for being on the phone and data entry in the last 12 days she's saved me over 9 hours of work.  Yes I've had to pay for it, but quick math...call it 10 hours in two weeks.  20 hours a month.  240 hours a year.  That would be the equivalent of me working for SIX straight full time weeks just answering the phone and setting up estimates.  She's been great at it, super willing to adjust to things I notice and recommend she tweak, and I get my time back and we're still converting leads to estimates to jobs at a great rate.  Also all of this at a fraction of the cost of hiring an answering service.  We're even going to offload even more tasks on her too going forward so I'm excited to do that and see what else I can get done going forward.

Need to schedule biz building time.

One thing I want to do is block out my schedule each week to do business building activities whenever I can.  Just having clear tasks and dedicating time to them that will help us dig out of our backlog of work and do so with quality workers will be amazing.

Folders

A small thing that I love that we did last month was creating folders that are super professional that I can gather all of the documentation from the consultations into so that they're not loose and flying around in the wind.  I love how they turned out and I think make a huge difference in how we're perceived.

I'm excited to report in next month for you!