WHAT WORKS It’s also important to have a high enough volume of work to keep the tradesmen busy doing what they’re paid for. Even then, there may be gaps in the schedule, which means the tradesmen will likely have to do double-duty. Santerre has found cross-training a good way to keep his paint team busy and involved.
“The painters really enjoy it and it keeps them fresh,” he says. “The first couple of years, it was a challenge because we were saying, these guys are painters, that’s all they can do. Then we started saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute — is there any reason this guy can’t help a carpenter and start learning that by osmosis?’ Or if we need to organize the shop or do some other miscellaneous things, we can have these guys be a little flexible and pitch in.”
Of course, Santerre’s tradesmen are lower-skill, lower-wage employees, so he doesn’t have to worry about throwing off budgets. Adams, too, will occasionally round out his tradesmen’s hours with lower-skill work. He acknowledges that with the more skilled workers, this leads to cost inefficiencies, but says it’s worth the small change to make his in-house trade program work.
WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT? Peggy Fisher, a Virginia remodeler whose Fisher Group keeps an electrician on staff, says that in the end, a specific set of circumstances will dictate how a company is structured. “Different companies do extremely well with very different business models, so it’s just a matter of finding what business model works for you in any given market situation,” Fisher says.
Michael Howes, owner of Woodside, Calif., MCB Remodeling, is a case in point. Howes recently tried and gave up on keeping a full-time tiling crew.
“We like to have a lot of control over the details of the tiling we do; we have pretty high standards and do fairly complex layouts,” he says. “In working with a sub, it was almost like we were meddlesome because we were asking for a higher level of quality than is typical. It was easier for us to bring it in and have direct control.”
Howes set up the tiling operation as an independent profit center, and quickly found he’d created a successful second business. But that meant taking a whole new set of responsibilities that distracted Howes from his remodeling work.
“It’s kind of like this whole parallel universe we were trying to run,” he says. “We could have had a lot of business, but in the end I decided that it wasn’t worth the amount of time it would take; it would effectively take me too much away from my core business. It was a great profit center, but my own business would have suffered for it.”
Instead, Howes went back to basics, and took a new look at tiling contractors. This time, he refrained from trying to enforce a set of standards on the job. Instead, he and the tiler met to exchange references and discuss working styles; Howes asked to see extensive examples of the tiler’s work and asked the tiler to study MCB Remodeling’s projects, all before ever agreeing to work on a trial job.
Though “it was kind of a pain in the butt,” Howes recalls, the effort paid off beautifully. Howes knows he can count on the tiler to deliver, and the tiler knows that an MCB Remodeling job means exacting specifications.
“Most business owners have a certain amount of the control-freak gene in them,” Howes says. “So it’s attractive to have the control in your house, rather than somewhere else. But the reality is that with proper planning you can establish your expectations and have that control with your subcontractors, as long as you bring them on as equals and don’t just try to feed them your point of view after they’ve given you their price.”
David Zuckerman is a freelance writer based in New York.