Practical Realities Fundamentally, the production manager is instrumental in turning the business plan into practical reality, Lemons says. “It’s up to the production manager to look at the company’s goal expectations, then break them down into manageable pieces and say, ‘How do I put the pieces together?’” he explains.
At G.M. Roth Design Remodeling, in Nashua, N.H., “the production manager oversees the whole job, from the minute it’s sold until close-out,” says operations manager (and former senior production manager) Ed Campbell.
The job is similarly broad at Norton’s Quality Exteriors. “The production piece is handled by production from start to end,” Feurer says, and includes dealing with customer concerns. “In the past, when we had an upset homeowner call in, one of the owners went out to meet with the people. That doesn’t happen anymore. It’s a production issue. The production manager is in charge of whatever it takes to make that customer happy.” And, he says, “the job is not posted as completed until the money is in. That’s a key piece.”
All this demands an impressive set of skills, experience, and personality traits. “An absolute key is a can-do, will-do attitude,” Feurer says. “Our new production manager comes in early and stays as late as it takes. He will meet customers whenever necessary to make them happy.”
“A good production manager is multitalented and multifaceted,” and is a team-builder, adds Gorse. He has to deal effectively with salespeople, installers, customers, and other managers, plus keep everyone working as efficiently and quickly as possible on many jobs at once. “He has to make them feel they’re part of a team working together.”
In addition, he will be detail-oriented but able to focus on the big picture. It’s not the best installer who necessarily makes a great production manager, but rather “somebody who constantly has his eye on the ball, who can look at all these balls in the air and see how he can keep them from colliding,” Lemons says. And he doesn’t have to be technically proficient. “It takes very little technical background to be highly productive [in the job],” he adds, “because you have a team of experts working for you.”
Above all, the production manager must have superior communication skills. All the players at a home improvement company — customers, salespeople, installers, management — “look at things through a different set of glasses,” Gorse says. There are bound to be communication gaps. The production manager has to listen to them all “while maintaining an effective production flow. And that takes some really strong communication skills.”
The other essential is the person’s ability to manage homeowners and their expectations. “Remodeling is so different from new construction and commercial work,” Campbell says. “We’re in people’s houses. There’s chaos. And I have to prepare the homeowner. I can’t just write that on a piece of paper and have somebody spew it out.”
It’s essential, Campbell says, “to have people who can read a homeowner and take their temperature,” to determine, finally, the level of customer satisfaction, because so much depends on that.