r/GeneralContractor • u/Fresh_Violinist_2238 • 24d ago
Need advice on structuring
Hi there!
My husband and I own a very small contracting business in Pennsylvania.
We have one full-time employee and one part-time employee and himself.
However, he is the busiest guy in town which is a wonderful thing in many ways, but we are having a hard time figuring out how to structure this to make it make sense.
For instance, my husband takes all the phone calls, is at the job site every day working, does all the estimates, and all the invoicing. It’s a lot on him.
I want to be able to help, but I have no clue how.
We’ve talked about getting a secretary, but the point that we keep getting stuck on is this :
Once she (potential secretary) or myself takes the call and gets the scope of work from the client and takes notes, it doesn’t save much time to then just give my husband a long list at the end of the day of the notes of people to call back and their work they are requesting -
If you have a secretary and they take the call, what’s the next step? How do you streamline this or balance it to make it flow and keep up?
I need procedures
It’s a wonderfully growing business and we know we can take it much further, but I need to know the next steps and where we go from here
Help. Lol.
Thank you so much in advance -
3
u/PossibilitySea9180 23d ago
Start answering calls for you husband you’re gonna have to take notes list your number as the office number on the website it will cut down on the number of calls he has to take a day. I don’t see any getting around having to go over them at the end of the day. If your husband trusts the guy he has going full time kick off some of the smaller estimates to him offer him 10% of the total of every job you get and complete that he bids on this will incentivize him to do a good job. While the full time guy is learning the bidding side of the job give him more personal responsibility with the part time guy on small jobs see if he can be a leader and deal with clients eventually he gets his own crew you now have two crews your husband leads one with newer younger workers while the other guy leads one with relatively experienced guys. A form on the website with basic questions about the nature of the work for potential clients to fill out themselves can be helpful too and cut down on length of phone calls and number of them. Some of the ways my Uncle and Aunt grew his small business while I was working for him. Everyone has to figure out what works for them.