Hello Fellow Cabinet Makers/Capitalists

Currently I handle walk in customers or any other customers that contact us through our website or referrals. Design, estimate, g code, order all doors drawers materials and hardware including finish materials, field shop questions, finishing questions, measure job sites and coordinate with plumbers and electricians, schedule installers and communicate with builders if involved, field questions from the shop, coordinate delivery etc. We're trying to determine a logical break point to hire a new person to relive me of some of this work. Should it be a full time sales person with a category of responsibilities? Should it be a designer and estimator? How have you guys with small shops, (ours is 5 full time employees including myself and the owner) found a good way to divide labor. We have me, 3 shop guys and 1 finish gal.
Or anticipating growth, which we are, a way to divide the front office responsibilities for growth. Owner handles all book keeping.

Hope everyone is well!

We have a designer who also gets everything ready for cnc and he orders materials, drawer boxes, pullouts, and doors. He also meets with customers in the showroom with design meeting once we know we have the job. I normally handle most everything else on your list. Our painter gets a set of plans and orders all of his own paint based on how much he thinks he needs. He is a good judge based off looking at plans.

We have 7 guys in the shop including 2 painters, but 2 guys are part in the shop part on the road.

Hi Ryan,

So you've basically divided those duties into two positions. Other than delegating the finish selection work also. Does your finish person meet with customers about paint or stain colors or just order finish materials and product after you or the designer work that out?

What about instead of splitting the project into tasks, you split projects. Hire another person to do exactly what you do. You take one project, they take one project.

Just a thought.....

Hi, from experiance. We are a 10man shop and 3 of us in the office. If i was hiring a person to relieve you from some of the daily responsibilities I would hire you a Purchasing agent. I would make that person responsible for following up on all the small "unimportant" items also. I feel that the small items hold take up a lot of time and are usually easily forgotten.
Responsibilities for Purchasing agent:
Order Materials for project
Make sure materials are available way before final approvals and order any lead time items.
Order Hardware for project
Line out specialty fabrications; Steel, glass, Door orders, drawer box orders etc..
Keep track of samples and order finishing material.

Also to ligthen the load on order shop materials see if your current supplier offers and inventory program. Our supplier visits us 2x's a month to make sure we are fully stocked with sand paper, screws, installation hardware, adjusble feet, glues etc.. pretty much everything needed to keep us going.

Your responsibilities would now be more of an operations manager. Making sure the new help is trained up and set up for success. You would be responsible for overseeing him/her and continue to also project management and focus on making sure the project meets all deadlines.

Responsiblites:
Meeting with client for project and making sure the scope of project is up to date.
Field measuring
Catching any field roadblocks and addressing them to the appropriate party.
Drawing submittals
meeting with client on drawings and on finishes.
Generating samples
Updating construction documents
Fabrication drawings and documents
Specialtiy CNC programs
Handing off project to Shop forman
If no shop forman than the job captain/leader
Making sure your new help has all the information to order needed items for the project.

This would be a good start point. If you guys grow more than you might need another person to help out with some of your responsibilities and other related task. Another drafter would probably benefit you guys. Even a freelancer to take on a project here and there. We use one all the time.

Good luck!

For what it's worth :-)
I would consider not allowing the designer to be involved in project management, or any work with immediate dead-lines/ fixed commitments, unless in a support role with flexible time-frames.

Otherwise, design/ordering will too often suffer because project management/crew management will often become the fire to put out, and versa visa. They compete.
... As volume ramps up, both these workflows become less tolerant of hit-n-miss thru-put.
It just seems that design-flow & project management are always locked in battle for attention & the same available hours, unless kept as separate roles, done by seperate people.
... The trap is that, at first glance, they seem to go well together, requiring an individual with similar skill-sets.

I would have the design/sales segregated, handling initial client contact and selections. I would keep them out of production and purchasing. The main reason being if you want to grow, that is what needs to grow first. It is pointless to ramp up your production capacity by 25% and not get the sales to support it. If that narrow focus wouldn't keep a full-time person employed, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, that time could initially be used to develop more contacts and revenue streams.

One way to share work is to pass off jobs you're bad at. Bringing in someone to help where you're weak would give you more time to do what you're good at.

Another option is to see who is looking for work, and look at what they could bring to the company. Sometimes a person with some of the right skills at work, but a good fit working with other people, will make a big difference.

Finally, it might be easier to bring in a new shop guy, and move one of the shop guys up. Again, dividing the work would depend on who is good at what.

Our painter does not meet with any customers. He makes samples that we ask for and then we get them to the client. He gets a complete list of all the approved colors at the start of the job and room plans as they come out.

I like aspects of all these so far. I'm thinking. Shop Foreman can order materials, new designer can design and estimate, I can move to meeting customers as initial intake and follow the job through the whole process as a PM. That would mean hiring one new person, a person which we have in mind is already experienced as a designer and estimator.
At that point we would have two front office people and 3 shop people and one finish person. The owner handles book keeping.

The thing about building a business is that you are really building an organization.

An organization is really about dividing up the hats and assigning people to those hats. You might to look at the book "E-myth"

One way to attack this is to write down each task/function on a piece of paper and then decide what hat/person can perform what tasks

The short answer IMO is that you need a shop foreman who will be responsible for ordering material. This job is not well suited to a purchasing agent.

The owner is wasting his time doing bookkeeping which is easily subbed out

His time would be far better spent doing sales or planning or or or

Pat,

I have itemized in detail each step of the process from initial contact to final walk through of installed cabinets. A couple times over the last year. This really reveals the work loads and how they may be lopsided. I can think of 10 different ways to categorize these. But, that's the beauty of the Woodweb, you guys might have already done it and be willing to share what you did that worked. Some great answers and one that keeps coming through is to have the shop foreman order materials. That's a big load off me to begin with. Next we're looking for a designer/estimator. I can then handle initial customer contact, sales, and follow the jobs through the process. That's what we're thinking will work now. I'll re visit that book also.

Hello Nick.
Maybe the core logic that drives your work-batch design... which also drives the work-release logic for the timing & distributing of work to the shop... would be the best batch-logic for all the subsequent job design/ job prep/ & project management phases.
... So that way, there is congruent alignment, and a constant release of "just in time" batches through the entire process... with all default work batches, and work schedules for every role, ideally being generated at the very point of sale for all office & shop roles at the same time, all the way through to final installation. The system would start with default estimates, then be tweaked as exact design and details emerged.
... The secret sauce may be in the strategic logic of the batch-work design, so it delivers a winning advantage of some sort, and then merges insightfully with your scheduling system & buffer logic...
... then just extrapolate the resulting batch system design, sizes & types, to the entire design sequence & supply chain.
... Such a system may be the Holy Grail of flow & profitability!!
Piece Of Cake!!?? _ haha
... Easier said than done! :-)
BTW...
I think Gerber, in is book, missed a primary macro-phase.. the one that may mean the most in terms of profitability- the one you are asking about... The "hyper-prep of work" phase inserted before the final "fulfillment of sale phase".
Just my opinion.

Bobby,

As son as I translate that from Greek to reality I'll post a response. LOL. It seems you're speaking from some proprietary work flow system I'm not familiar with.

I have different approach...

Define the growth you anticipate, what is it? volume or profit? If the growth you anticipate is production of cabinets, then sure, go find more help, and produce more.

If profit is the desired growth, and it should be, raise the price of new jobs 10% today. You may lose a job (but probably not) The shop will do less work for the same money, or the same work for more money. Shop crew stays to same, the office crew stays the same, but there's more profit. A smart business puts some of that profit back into wages.

Now there's a thought, and I knew that, but I forgot. I guess at some point I still need to face the dilemma because there's a limit to how much you can raise the prices. But I will do this to start, thanks Lucas.