You cannot hold him to a job you never gave him

Nobody here takes ownership in your company - I mean, in mine." Curt runs an electrical contracting business on the north edge of Wichita: twenty-six electricians, service work and light commercial. He said it at quarter past seven in his own parts room, reel rack behind him, holding a coffee he had stopped drinking.

I asked who owns the service side. Rhonda schedules, Tim runs the techs, Curt prices anything over five thousand. Then I asked which of those three answers for it when service loses money three months running.

"I guess I would sit down with Tim." He turned that over. "Although he would tell me he cannot control the schedule or the price. And he would be right."

Everybody had a piece of it

Tim was right. He answered for a number that the schedule, the price and the crew all move, and he controlled none of the three. That is the shape of a lot of companies this size. Four hands on every job and no name against the result.

It does not blow up. It leaks.

Two men order the same material from two branches of the same supply house. A permit renewal that one person always quietly handled sits until the morning it stops work. And the small things nobody owns walk up the stairs to the owner, because he is the one who cannot let them drop.

Some of this you can check before lunch:

You can name who does the work on every job, and not who answers for the result.

The only written description of any job here went into a help wanted ad, two hires ago.

Somebody waited on you two days for a thing you would have settled in ten seconds, and work you could pay eighteen dollars an hour for is still on your desk at six.

A foreman is nominally over nine men at four addresses, so most of them are supervised by whoever shouted last.

Your chart, if anybody drew one, would be a picture of your hiring history.

Nine cards on a folding table

There is an exercise I run in the first hour and it costs eleven minutes. Everyone with a title or a phone that rings gets an index card. Write the three things you would be fired for not doing. Not your duties. The three whose absence would finish you here. No names, no talking, four minutes.

Curt's table came back with nine cards. Two said dispatch in nearly the same words, written by two men who had each spent a year privately irritated at how the other did it. Duplicate work, paid for twice, on no report anywhere.

The bottom of the pile was worse. Nobody had written collections, and the company was carrying seventy-one days of receivable on service work. Nobody had claimed the apprentice sign-off before an inspector arrives. That gap costs a contractor a license, not a week.

He read them twice and said what I hear in every one of these rooms. "I thought that was understood."

Understood is the word that does the damage. A job that lives in your head was never given to anybody, so nobody can fail at it. They can only disappoint you.

Curt was waiting for the work to thin out

He had his explanation ready and it was the schedule. Two apartment blocks running long, a school package behind them, and when the work thins out he will sort out who does what. I have heard a man say that with one set of jobs in front of him and say it again two seasons later with a different set. The work does not thin. A company where it thins is a company in trouble.

Then comes the buying. Another project manager, a new title handed out on a Monday, a Sunday spent drawing boxes with every name in one. All three fail the same way. A box says where a man sits and nothing about what he must produce. The new hire walks into the job that spat out the last one, and by his ninth week he is asking the same permissions.

Busy did not cause this. At twelve employees you can hold the company in your head and cover the gaps by walking around. Curt did that for nine years and it worked. The gaps did not open at twenty-six. They stopped being coverable by one man on his feet.

The owners who accept that go straight to job descriptions, and out comes a list of duties. Oversees purchasing. Assists with scheduling. Every line is an activity with no result under it, and a man can do activities all week while the thing you hired him for never happens. Then the tasks go out and the decisions stay in. A manager who cannot decide is a queue with your name on it.

Three people had passed through that service seat in two years and Curt had started calling it a hiring problem. When a seat has chewed through three people, it is the seat. The people were the part that kept changing.

Two stops a week, priced out

Price the narrow piece, the one you can count. Say work stops twice in an ordinary week waiting on an answer only you can give, and each stop holds two electricians for roughly forty minutes. A journeyman on thirty-two dollars an hour costs the company a little over forty once you add the payroll taxes, the insurance and the overhead that rides on every wage. The hours count twice over, once for the time and once for the work that did not get done. That comes to about $10,800 a year, out of two interruptions a week, in a company everybody describes as busy.

The rest never shows up on an invoice. Seven hours of your week go to work that belongs two levels below you, and those hours cost you the estimate you did not check, the foreman you did not train, the general contractor whose call you returned on Saturday.

All of it lands on delivery. Curt can sell more than his company can hand over, because handing it over stops at his desk for a decision only he is allowed to make. Selling harder buys a bigger version of the same jam.

The call you have been avoiding

Pick one seat this week. Start with the one that has burned through three people, or with whatever function turned up on nobody's card.

Now call the last person who held it. Not a text, a call. If he left angry, call anyway. Most of them ring back and talk for half an hour. Open with the truth: you want to fix the job itself, and he is the only man alive who has done it.

Then three questions, and go quiet after each one. What did you believe you were on the hook for? What did you have to ask me about before you could move? What kept landing on you that you never thought was yours? Write his words as he says them. The silence after the third question is where the money is, and most owners fill it themselves.

Curt called on a Thursday. The man had been losing most of a day a week chasing material for jobs he had not scheduled, because the supply house had his cell number and nobody else picked up. Curt had been paying a manager's wage for a parts runner and calling it an attitude problem.

Write the page within two days, while it still stings.

One page, and the half everybody skips

Name the seat as a function and never as a person. Service Coordination, not Rhonda. A seat named after somebody gets rebuilt around his habits, and when he leaves the job walks out with him.

Under the name go three to five outcomes, each worded so a stranger could tell whether it happened. Every service call dispatched by seven thirty with a named tech and a parts list. Every finished job billable inside three working days. Loose wording is how good people end up arguing about effort.

Then decision rights, the half that makes the other half mean something. Five lines, each with a number on it. Under three hundred dollars he spends it and tells nobody. Up to fifteen hundred he spends it and it shows up in one line on Monday. Up to six thousand he decides and tells you first. Above that he brings two options and says which he would take. Hiring, firing and any change to a price a customer already has stay yours at any figure. Use your judgment is what an owner says when he has not decided, and the man hears ask me every time.

Hand the page to whoever holds the seat now and ask him to cross out anything he does not agree is his. What he crosses out is the conversation you have been circling for two years.

The calls that stop coming

Six weeks out, what you notice is quiet. The seven-forty call about who is going where does not come. "I thought Tim had that" drops out of the vocabulary. Monday runs shorter, because half of what used to be argued there got settled Thursday by the man who owns it.

Something else arrives that is harder to describe. A number gets missed, and the conversation takes four minutes and no temper, because the result was on a page before it was missed. You stop having to be angry in order to be understood.

Curt spent two years believing he had a people problem, and he was fair about it, and he had never written down what he wanted from anybody. Men will carry a heavy job for years when they can see its edges and know what a good day looked like. Take the edges out of your head and put them where somebody else can read them. That is the difference between a company and a job you cannot quit.

Structure, Roles and Accountability holds ten statements in the Business Check-in, and about six of them are in this article. If you want to see the other four in your own company, the check-in is free and takes ten minutes.