Happy Tuesday, Reader!
If you're trying to get your homebuilding business organized, you may not have given much thought to your construction schedules. After all, your houses need to get built.
And you may have built houses the same way for years.
Maybe you're proud of the number of days it takes you to build a single house typically. Or maybe you like the thrill of figuring things out as you go.
But - if you're looking at a single house schedule every time you build a new house, you're missing the bigger picture.
I'm not judging. I did the same thing for years - and I built hundreds of new homes.
When I started out, I took out a piece of lined tablet paper and literally wrote the dates from Monday through Friday down the left side of the page for the remaining weeks of construction.
I did this once I was told the drywall completion date (since I thought the period from excavation through drywall was pretty much uncontrollable).
Then, embarrassingly enough, I would send that handwritten page to my customers - proudly giving them their "move in" date.
It worked. But not great.
What I didn't realize then was that I was never really learning anything about how our homebuilding business really managed our overall construction.
I got to the end of the job (after a lot of manual work, sweat, and tears) and handed the keys to the Owners.
Then....I did it again for the next Owners.....and the next....and the next.
Sure. Homeowners got into their new homes, but I kept working harder and not smarter.
And that's the problem with most smaller Home Builders. They know how to get each job done. If they're a little more savvy, they are actually documenting their schedules somehow (Excel, paper, some other type of software).
But that's where it stops. They just keep doing what they are doing, because...well...that's what they know how to do.
Maybe that's you?
I'm going to be diving into construction scheduling in the next few weeks and will be sharing my thoughts on best practices with you while I go.
I'm curious, though, how are you doing your scheduling now? What tools are you using?
| What are you using to schedule now? |
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Looking forward to hearing from you! Happy building!
-Brad