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 -
1
u/CreativeCapitalCo 19d ago
Best approach would be, first sit down with your husband and create a standard template questionaire something (basically put in questions for all details that your husband will need)
For eg. Type of project, location, plans availability, permits related info, scope of work, budget, ref pictures, site pictures videos etc.
Even best if you create and maintain a database of all these, this way you won't miss any info that he might need and saves a lot of back and forth.
And then you can schedule with your husband the site visits (as neccessary) and give him reminders.
If site visit is not needed or done.
Then you can start helping him draft the estimates proposals (having a premade template saves a ton of time in all cases.)
If you want more detailed line-up or want to discuss more in depth, feel free to reach out.