Your worst weeks are on a schedule

A cabinet shop outside Grand Rapids, Tuesday morning - and the owner's business planning horizon was, quite literally, the whiteboard behind his desk. Every card on it was something that had broken in the last two days. I asked what had been up there a month ago; he laughed and said he wipes it clean every Friday.

My own company ran on a board like that for years. I would have told you I was on top of things.

The week that runs on whatever caught fire

He was not a disorganized man. The shop was clean, the crew was good, and he could tell me the margin on any job I pointed at. What he could not tell me was what the third week of next month looked like. The information was not hidden anywhere. Nobody in the building was looking that far out.

That is the shape of it. A business that handles everything and anticipates nothing. The work gets done, the customers stay reasonably happy, and the owner ends every week tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

You probably know already, but a few signs:

You could not say today, without calling someone, which jobs are running in the third week of next month and who is on them.

Your revenue goal for the year lives in your head as one number, and nobody else in the building could tell you what it means for this week.

The same two or three things wreck your schedule every year, and each time it lands like the first time.

There is a business plan in a drawer somewhere. You could not say when you last opened it.

Your managers bring you problems that are already burning, because there is nowhere for a small problem to get caught while it is still small.

Why the operations manager did not fix it

Owners almost never bring this to me as a planning problem. It arrives as a people problem, nobody around here thinks ahead, or as a volume problem, once we get through this stretch I will get organized. Then they act on it. They hire an operations manager, buy scheduling software, or take two days off-site and come back with a plan document.

All three fail the same way. The new manager inherits a business with no record of what went wrong last month, so within six weeks he is fighting identical fires with a different face on them. The software schedules the week you already know about and has nothing to say about the week you cannot see. And the plan document, which is the thing owners feel guiltiest about, is the least urgent item on the list.

Underneath all three sits the same pair of gaps. A planning horizon shorter than the slowest input your business depends on. And no written memory of what already broke.

There is a second mistake, and it catches the owners who are sharp enough to accept the first one. Once a man decides planning is his problem, he treats planning as an event. A retreat, a quarter-end session, one big push a year. Planning done as an event produces a document. Planning done as a repeating appointment produces decisions. The owners who climb out of firefighting are rarely the ones with the better plan. They are the ones who kept the appointment during the busy season.

Count them before you fix anything

Start here, this week, and it costs you about four seconds a day. Tape an index card inside your truck door, or open one note on your phone. Every time something stops work you had planned, write one line: the date, what stopped it, who it pulled in, and how many hours it cost.

Collect first. The instinct is to start fixing on day three, and if you give in to it you will fix the loudest one instead of the biggest one. Four weeks of lines, then sort them by cause on the fourth Friday and add up the hours in each group.

Most owners find six to ten causes behind about seventy percent of the lost hours. The top two have been there every year.

Nothing on that card is new to your business. It is just the first time anyone wrote it down twice.

What four weeks of cards will tell you

Two things, and the first one is uncomfortable. Write down your four slowest inputs with a number of weeks next to each: material ordered to material delivered, job sold to crew scheduled, person hired to person productive, permit applied to permit granted. Take the longest number. That is the minimum distance your planning has to look forward.

If a productive hire takes you nine weeks and your week runs three weeks out, you will be short-handed every busy season and it will keep feeling like bad luck. It is arithmetic, and you can fix arithmetic.

The second thing is the price. Say the cards show material shortages stopping work four times in a normal week, each one pulling two people off the job for about forty-five minutes, at an average wage of twenty-six dollars an hour, plus a rush delivery charge that averages sixty dollars a week.

That is one line on one index card. There are five to nine more causes on that card, and the man running that shop had been describing all of them as a busy stretch.

Costs like this land on delivery, not on selling. A business in this condition can sell more work than it can reliably deliver, because the delivery capacity keeps getting eaten by scramble and rework. Which is why pushing harder on sales in this state makes the company worse instead of bigger.

Forty-five minutes, same time, every Monday

The card earns you this. One page, four blocks, the same forty-five minutes every Monday, in the same order.

Five minutes on three numbers: revenue against the weekly target, gross margin, and capacity used.

Ten minutes on what slipped last week and why. Five lines, maximum.

Twenty minutes looking forward three weeks, week by week, across jobs, crew, cash and materials. Circle every hole.

Ten minutes writing six commitments. Each one gets a name and a date.

Your weekly numbers come out of the annual goal, divided by forty-eight working weeks rather than twelve months, because nobody works fifty-two. Add gross margin percent. Then add one capacity number in the unit your business actually runs on: installs, billable hours, truck-days, tons. That capacity number matters most, because it is the only one of the three a crew can influence on a Wednesday.

The failure mode is worth naming. The week you cancel this because you are slammed is the exact week it would have paid for itself. Once it moves twice, it is gone.

Your slow season is not weather

Pull three years of monthly revenue and mark the two worst months in each year. They will be close to the same months. Now you know sixty days ahead what those weeks are for: training, maintenance, the systems work you never reach, selling into the season that follows. Slow months are the only place improvement work fits, and most businesses spend them worrying instead.

What changes by week eight

You will notice the absences first. The six o'clock phone call about tomorrow's crew stops coming. Monday stops starting with a scramble. Your managers begin arriving with things that have not caught fire yet, which feels strange for a while.

The cabinet shop kept its card for five weeks. Material shortages and a single supplier accounted for most of it, and the fix was a standing order and a different vendor for one product line. He still has the whiteboard. He stopped wiping it on Fridays.

An owner who can see three weeks out is a different man to work for. He interrupts less, he decides earlier, and his people stop guessing what he wants. That is the part nobody tells you about planning. It reads like an administrative habit and it lands as a change in temperament.

Planning and Direction is nine statements in the Business Check-in, and this article covers most of them. If you want to see the rest of what is quietly capping your business, the check-in is free and takes about ten minutes.