Finding the One Finding an effective production manager isn’t easy. Probably the best place to start looking is in-house — that is, among employees or trusted subcontractors. Feurer, for instance, tapped “a siding installer who was particularly detail-oriented and really motivated to make customers happy.”
At Southern Industries, the production manager is an employee who ran the company’s window crews for many years. Gorse advises looking for an experienced installer who “understands the relationship between sales, installation, and service and who wants to get out of the day-today installation end of it and move up to managing a lot of crews instead of just one.”
Campbell seeks out installers who ran their own business or someone else’s, so that they have “some management behind them.” A production management job can be an attractive alternative for them because production managers can “work 40 or 50 hours a week instead of 80 or 90 and get benefits and a good, steady income,” he says. In many cases, compensation includes a salary plus various performance-based bonuses and commissions on change orders.
Individuals with military backgrounds also can be likely candidates. Gorse says his production manager was a former non-commissioned officer and “very used to commanding people.” Feurer believes a lot of his production manager’s positive attitude and commitment “was learned and groomed in the military. As an Army Ranger he was responsible for planning and expenses on missions,” he says.
Several owners report that after looking for candidates inside their own business and personal networks, the Internet has proven effective. Company Web sites can also work well. One of the benefits of including recruiting information on your site is that “potential applicants know the type of people we are and the type we want,” Campbell says. In addition, employment sites such as Monster.com and Craig’s List (www.craigslist.org) are increasingly productive, contractors report.
Radio can also be effective; print advertising, less so. “The newspaper isn’t turning anything; neither is the ad at the local lumberyard,” Lemons says. “There’s a different class of person out surfing the Internet for a job vs. looking in the local paper.”
However accomplished the candidate may be, contractors agree that finding an effective production manager is essential for putting, or keeping, a home improvement business on track for quality, customer satisfaction, and growth.
“If you have a small company, then I think you can afford the luxury of finding a production manager who can start small and grow with the business,” Gorse says. “But if you’re running 100 jobs a month like us, you can’t put in a neophyte. It’s not a good position for someone to go on a learning curve.” —Jay Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Jamestown, R.I.