How to Use Checklists in Your Remodeling Business
Nothing is worse than getting home from a store and realizing you forgot the very item you went there for. Or opening your suitcase to find out you didn't pack a swimsuit on your vacation.
These are things that happen when you don't use a checklist to keep track of your tasks.
And while these may seem like relatively minor inconveniences, when those behaviors spill over into work life, it can mean the difference between being profitable or bleeding money.
Why People Make Mistakes
Residential construction work is a complex process with many moving parts, which means there are many opportunities for errors to occur.
Errors that can result in costly rework leading to delays.
As a professional remodeler or custom home builder, there's nothing more frustrating than seeing the same common types of mistakes happening over and over on job sites - and knowing that your profit is shrinking as a result.
And it can make you wonder why those errors happen when your team is well-trained and generally good at their jobs.
The truth is that highly-skilled people in all types of industries make avoidable mistakes in their work because it's impossible for one person to always get everything right.
We get distracted by other tasks, conversations, or other parts of our lives
We forget steps in a process - even when we know them by heart
We try to do too many things at once, dividing our attention and compromising our focus
Residential construction job sites are full of distraction, creating a prime situation for mistakes causing wasted materials, costly rework, and frustration for you and your client.
And it can be easy to shift the focus of that frustration onto your construction teams because it feels like they're making sloppy mistakes. But they aren't. They just need a better system that helps them stay focused and remember all the steps in a construction process.
Mistakes are Human Nature
We often think that if someone is making mistakes, it means they aren't trained properly and must be taught again. But all the training and expertise in the world is no match for the fact that, as humans, we're fallible, and how good we are at our jobs doesn't prevent us from forgetting things.
The solution to that problem isn't just more training but a different strategy acknowledging a person's expertise but compensating for their "being human."
Pilots & Surgeons Use Checklists
For example, the introduction of checklists during the pre-flight process in the aviation industry has been instrumental in improving safety measures and preventing accidents caused by human error. When you're boarding the flight, the captain and co-captains are in the cockpit following a series of checklists to ensure that all necessary systems are functioning correctly before takeoff.
These checklists cover crucial items such as fuel levels, engine performance, and control surfaces. By systematically going through the complete checklists, pilots can do a risk assessment to catch and address potential issues before they become critical problems in the air.
Healthcare is another industry that has benefited significantly in reducing complications and mortality rates through the use of surgical checklists. These checklists are designed to ensure that all necessary steps are followed before, during, and after a surgical procedure.
From verifying patient identification to confirming the availability of essential equipment and emergency tools, these checklists are effective ways to help to minimize the risk of errors and improve communication among the surgical team.
Research has shown that the implementation of surgical checklists has significantly reduced surgical complications and mortality rates. By providing a structured framework for the surgical process, checklists enable healthcare professionals to work more efficiently, enhance patient safety, and ultimately save lives.
So if pilots, surgeons, and other professional industries benefit so immensely from using checklists as best practices, let's explore how this applies to the residential construction industry.
How Checklists Help Reduce Mistakes
So, how do you prevent repeatable mistakes in your construction projects?
Use checklists.
Checklists are an incredibly valuable tool for construction companies, providing a step-by-step guide of what needs to be done at every point in a process. By following each checklist, your project teams can ensure they aren't missing steps or details and create a standard operating procedure for every job.
When it comes to residential construction, checklists can help in many ways:
Alleviate the burden of memory - Using checklists helps to unburden your team from remembering everything, which inevitably leads to forgotten things. With a checklist system in place, your teams can defer that responsibility and focus on getting the job done right.
Quality control - Checklists help ensure that each step in the construction phase of a project's scope is completed to the standards you expect from your team. This avoids disappointed clients and time/money spent on rework.
Avoid missed steps - When you use a checklist for a specific task, like framing a bathroom shower, for example, you ensure that no critical steps are missed, like remembering to keep the center of the wet wall open and framing studs on 10" of either side of center. Missing a step like this can quickly make your plumber's day go sideways.
Consistency - With everyone following the same steps, you can ensure that your team performs consistently across all job sites and that construction schedules are adhered to.
Cooperation - Checklists help teams prepare working spaces for trade partners coming onsite to do specific work so they aren't delayed, which can cost you money and strain your trade partner relationships.
Accountability - A checklist helps assign individual responsibility for specific tasks, ensuring everyone knows what is expected of them.
Communication - Checklists help improve communication between all project participants, like project managers, site supers, trade partners, and team members, keeping everyone on the same page and reducing confusion and misunderstandings.
Prioritizing safety - Checklists help ensure all safety measures and protocols are followed. Construction sites can be hazardous, and using checklists to ensure the safety of your team and avoid potential risks helps eliminate injuries.
How to Get Started
To harness the power of construction checklists and streamline your residential construction projects, getting started is easier than you might think.
Begin by outlining the various major phases of your entire project, from the initial planning stage to the final inspections.
For example:
Pre-construction planning
Lot clearing & site preparation
Groundwork (shoring, piling, excavation, and footings/foundations)
Superstructure (framing and structural steel)
Rough in's
Exterior lock-up/dry-in
Interior insulation & drywall
Interior finishing
Exterior finishing
Finals & close-out
Post-construction
Then, break down each phase into "blocks."
For example, let's breakdown Groundwork:
Shoring
Piling
Excavation
Footings
Foundation walls
Sub-slab drains
Sub-slab prep
Concrete flatwork
And then break down each block into specific tasks.
Let's breakdown Excavation:
Schedule locates
Surveyor to mark over dig positions
Client approval on orientation/location on the lot
Site hoarding for safety
Tree protection/burn area requirements/ravine or erosion protection
Remove fencing or adjacent neighbor sheds to prevent damage from machinery
Crushed gravel installed for machinery
Write each checklist for the specific tasks inside of the blocks, and when doing so, think about the preparation needed prior to that activity occurring, during, and after completion. Make sure to order these in chronological sequence so you can predict the steps in order of importance.
Also, consider having one checklist in-between each of the blocks that lists all of the things you should be thinking about while you're going through the next major task.
For example, when starting to insulate a home, this is the "trigger point" to ensure that you have the interior doors, hardwood flooring, and tiles on order and scheduled for delivery. Things like interior doors often have a lead time of several weeks, so remembering to order prior to the block is key to a successful project.
Next, share with your team and get real-time feedback about the order of operations and any potential omissions. It's also important to continually evolve these checklists and consistently think about making each checklist smaller and smaller by breaking down specific tasks into smaller subtasks where needed.
Keys to Building Successful Checklists
Processes with too many steps or moving parts often fail to be adopted because they feel too complicated, sending people spiraling into a 'complexity of doom' where they think it's too hard and just abandon it.
Avoiding that downward spiral is critical for achieving successful results. Here are some key things to consider when building your own checklists:
Keep checklists simple and user-friendly
Ensure they fit on one page
Don't use excessive colors or distractions
Include only concise, actionable checklist items
Make sure they have a clear and logical structure that guides users through critical steps
Avoid unnecessary complexity
Even with our Construction Checklist Package, we recommend starting with 3-5 of them and slowly integrating the rest once you gain team adoption.
Looking for a Headstart?
If you're looking to short-cycle the process and get started with a pre-built set of construction checklists, then you can purchase the Construction Checklist Package, which is a comprehensive checklist system that helps residential construction businesses decrease errors and achieve repeatable results the first time so that you can stop costly rework.
It's a culmination of over 21 years of my own experiences in this industry to help keep you from:
Making simple errors
Feeling frustrated
Disappointing clients
Watching profit bleed out of your business
It looks at every aspect of a remodeling or custom-build project, outlines each step from the pre-construction checklist to project close-out, and provides a checklist for each block so that your team knows exactly what to do - and when to do it.
The Construction Checklist Package is a great tool that saves you from having to remember all the details, giving you peace of mind while also taking the burden of memory off your team so they focus on getting it done right the first time.
The Bottom Line on Construction Checklists
Whether you're working on large construction projects or small renovations, running a residential construction business is a tough gig, and it's hard to ensure that everything is running smoothly all of the time. And there's nothing more frustrating than hearing that something was missed, or done incorrectly, resulting in rework and profit bleed for your business.
You can stop this from happening today by purchasing the Construction Checklist Package and customizing them to fit your unique business needs so you can start leveraging repeatable results for all of your construction projects.
When we put repeatable systems in place for our teams to follow, we reduce their stress because they don't have the burden of remembering everything, and we give them the tools they need to succeed and get the job done properly.
They stop making simple errors
They are happier and more productive
Clients aren't frustrated by delays and increased costs
Your business is more profitable
I created the CONSTRUCTION CHECKLIST PACKAGE to give remodelers and custom home-builders like you a comprehensive yet easy-to-use checklist system to ensure you and your team don't miss any important steps in the construction process.
Click the button below to learn how the CONSTRUCTION CHECKLIST PACKAGE can help your team adopt repeatable systems to avoid making costly mistakes that cause frustration for everyone and affect your bottom line.
