Welcome to the finale of Season 01! Throughout the last eleven episodes, you’ve been challenged on how you can improve for your coworkers, family, and yourself. Today, Alex is going to walk you through where we are in the industry today, and how you can equip yourself to be ready for what’s coming down the road.
Welcome to the finale of Season 01! Throughout the last eleven episodes, you’ve been challenged on how you can improve for your coworkers, family, and yourself. We have covered topics such as managing stress at work, why you can indeed foster a “have it all” lifestyle, and why leading with empathy and compassion is critical in today’s workplace.
To wrap things up, on the Season 01 Finale of No Bullshit with Alex Willis, Alex is going to walk you through where we are in the industry today, and how you can equip yourself to be ready for what’s coming down the road. As budgets get tighter and tighter, it’s critical to understand where you can empower yourself and your team in order to continue to achieve great results on every one of your projects.
In our second segment, The Level, Alex dives into how to set your leadership up for success. “Plans are always changing. They’re very useful, even though you’re always changing them”.
Tune into our next segment, The Foundation, where you’ll shift gears to emotional intelligence. Leadership involves change management, coaching, and time management. When it’s over, you’ll know how to make your team full of heroes.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts as well as the YouTube channel to watch full video episodes and be notified as soon as the next episode is live.
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[00:00:00] Alex Willis: Hey, hey, my friends, welcome back to episode 12, our grand finale for season one, where we're really discussing the state of leadership in the construction industry and talking about all the challenges and some of the things that we have before us that we need to think about that we can prepare for, right?
I love this quote that I've heard like from one of the generals at our military army who said, you know what? Plans, plans, right? PLANS, PLANS are always changing, right? But, but they're very useful even though you're always changing them. I mean, they're useful. You gotta have them. And so as we talk about challenges in our construction industry, you gotta have plans that comes with your leaders.
And so. In this segment, I really want to talk about what are those things that you need to focus in on, right? And one of those things, one of those things that we have to focus in on is productivity. Productivity. And so, it's something that we haven't necessarily talked about. We've talked a lot about production.
You gotta focus and get your leaders thinking about production versus productivity. What, what the hell is it? What is production versus productivity? Well, I want you to think about this. Most companies, most leaders think from a mindset of production. Right. Hey, we got that room done. Yes. Great job. Right.
Or hey, we got the conduit placed and done. Yes. Finish. Right. Well, but hear me out on this, my friends. Production only tells you the past. It tells you where you've been. Oh, look, hey, we've got that done. Right. But it says nothing for productivity. So oftentimes, we're checking things off the box. But we're not thinking about productivity, right?
And productivity does something different. Productivity tells me where I'm going. And how close I am to getting there. Now, in a tight economy, you want your leaders to be strategic thinking, right? So, one of the skill sets that you have to really, really master is having them be strategic. So, we offer a course on strategic planning.
In Season 2, we're launching Form in the University, right? Well, we're going to really begin to teach Form on how to think strategically and think about things like productivity planning, right? So, with productivity planning, you're thinking about, Hey, okay, I see where we've gone. How long did it take us to finish this part of the production, right?
And then how long did it take us to do that? And then how much time did we allocate to finish the entire job? Now, based on that, you can then begin to calculate and say, okay, well, if we continue at this same pace over the next several weeks, we're going to be here by the finish. Now, if you could know that early on in production, my friends, Or early on in your job, you are golden, ah, because now you can make the right adjustments.
I want you to think about it from a sports standpoint, right? Coaches are always looking, engaging their team where they are, what's going on in sports, and they're willing to call a timeout very, very fast if they need to so that they can make corrections and make changes. In construction, oftentimes, we allow things to keep going and it gets so bad.
To the point that we can't make changes. When it gets that bad, my friends, there's nothing you can do. If you can't catch a job up front and really begin to track your productivity up front, you are screwed if you wait too long. And somebody may say, well, what's too long? Well, usually if you get to about 40 percent of that job, research shows, and we've talked to some industry experts, if you get to about 40 percent of the job and you realize how far you're behind at that point, I don't want to say the word, I want to say you're Yeah, you know, but you are.
You're a screw. If you can't do it, the earlier you can figure this out, the better you can be. Let me give you a real life example, a real life example. So, three days ago, we got our roof done at the house. And so this is a residential project, right? So, got our roof done at the house, and the contractor, you know, said, Hey, listen, I was gonna do the roof, cool, got it.
Came in to do it. He began to talk to me about profit margins. He found out what I do, you know, I'm always pumping the show. Hey man, you should check out no bullshit with Alex Willis, the go-to source for leadership development and construction industry. And he's like, man, wow, I need that because I'm struggling with leaders.
Right? So we started talking. He already talked about profit margins on the roofing jobs that he's doing. He said, My margins are very, very small, very, very slim, man. So, we have to run a tight ship. We gotta run a tight ship. We have to get it done because our margins are so small. Got it, got it, got it, right?
So, hear me out. So, here's how this went. So, he said, hey man, the job's going to take us one day. We're gonna be able to get your entire roof done in one day. So, I want you to think about this. From a production versus productivity, right? Production versus productivity kind of mindset. He said, Hey, the total job is going to take them eight hours, eight hours.
We'll get the total job done. Now with that being said, sent the crew out. They had the materials delivered the day before the job. So materials came to the house. They loaded the materials up, right? Set them up. And they came up in on a Saturday and they started doing the work right now. As they're doing the work, I'm watching, I'm watching and I'm seeing, I'm like, dude, it is no way.
They are going to get this job done in eight hours because I'm watching them, I'm watching the efficiency. I'm watching some of the systems and how they're doing things. And I'm like, there is no way they're getting this job done in eight hours, right? Lo and behold, my friends. By the end of the day, they didn't have the job done.
So, the project manager comes out and talks to the foreman and says, Hey listen, I see you didn't get it done, how much longer will we need tomorrow? Alright, here's what the foreman does, the foreman looks around, Uh, you know, uh, I think we need about four more hours. Four hours tomorrow, we'll be done with this job.
Alright, they take that at face value, they leave, they come back the next morning. Well, they came back the next morning, my friends, instead of four hours, It took them about 10 hours to do the job, right? So think about that. Well, the owner of the company had been out for eight hours, took about 18 hours to do that job already behind knowing that profit margins are very small on this job, right?
So he lost his ass on this job. Why? Well, because of lack of productivity planning, right? Think about this. He came out to a job and told his foreman, Hey, you have eight hours to do the job. Here's what we find, my friends, as things get tight. And as you have to have great processes in place and great systems in place, you have to do a hell of a job of tracking what you're doing.
What do I mean by that? Well, you don't want to give your teams huge blocks of hours like that, right? And this is just a small job. This is a mini job. So imagine on a multi multi, you know, 100, 000 hour job, right? That's going to get real crazy. But you want to break your hours down into small bite sized increments, right?
Now, the company would have done a better job Had they taken, instead of saying to the foreman, Hey, you got eight hours to finish this job, Said, hey, listen, you know what? We got eight total hours, but let's break it down, this job, into bite sized chunks. Hey, you have two hours. To set up and prep, right? So, so we got two hours to set up and prep.
After setting up and prep, hey, you got another two hours to replace any rotten wood that's on the roof. You got two hours to do that, right? And then hey, from there we got two hours to do this. Hey, then we got three hours to do this. Hey, and this is kind of how we're going to map out our time. Now, if the foreman had come in with that kind of thinking, with a project broken down into small bite sized pieces like that, all of a sudden I'm able to look and see and measure my productivity.
And small increments, right? Because think about this. If I look up and I see, hey, two hours is going by and we haven't prepped and set up yet. I'm able to say, oh shit, we're already behind schedule. Now, at that point in time, within two hours of the job, the foreman can look around and call audibles and say, hey, listen.
I need more people to get over here to help prep, set up because we're already pushing it tight on our deadline, right? Now, if you're able to track projects like that in small, incremental pieces, my friends, all of a sudden now, you can begin to look and gauge where we are with the job compared to how much time we allocated to it.
And because you're not talking about huge blocks of time, right, which has major arrow when you have huge blocks of time, because you're talking about smaller blocks of time. You're margin for error smaller. I want you to think about this. All right, if they had made observations at two hours and messed up at two hours You're not talking about that much of an error, right, versus 8 hours or some of the projects that some of you work on, 100, 000 hours.
So breaking the project down in small bite sized chunks with hours allocated to that allows us to track production. As well as productivity and then guesstimate where we think we're going to end up. So, one of those huge, huge, huge skills that you're going to have to drill into your people. You're going to have to change their mindset and change their thinking.
Change all school thinking of I don't pay you to think, so I need you to be a master thinker and strategist when it comes to doing this damn job, right? So, so, one of those major tools that I want you to think about, and we're offering some master level courses, some crash courses on strategic thinking for construction workers, right?
That you have to think about so they can kind of start doing that, giving them projects kind of like the one I just described to you. Where they have some mobile training to understand how to practice that. So they come into a job site with that kind of mindset being very, very strategic. If you can begin to implement just that one skill, it gives you a leg up over the competition because you have your leadership team.
Thinking about what they need to do, how they need to do it, how they need to delegate the job to other people, breaking it down in bite sized chunks, ultimately being successful as we do it. Alright, now, in the next segment, the foundation, we're going to talk about some foundational skills that you need to add to that strategic thinking.
Alright, some things that you, you need your foreman, your superintendents, as well as some of your journeymen, as well as some of your apprentices thinking about as they begin to work on some of these tighter jobs with tight deadlines. With bigger pressure, bigger stress. In our next segment, we're going to dive into some of those, really begin to paint a clear picture for you of what the foundation of winning looks like.
So I'll check you out in the next segment, my friends. Hey, I want to personally thank you for tuning in to No Bullshit with Alex Willis, the number one go to source for leadership development in the construction industry. And hey, don't forget to hit play on the next segment.