As your stone fabrication business gets bigger, you may start facing some new growing pains. It’s not unusual for new issues to come up as you start producing more jobs with more customers and more employees. These may include communication issues, scheduling headaches, inventory mishaps, and potential leads falling through the cracks.
What we’ve found by talking to hundreds of fabrication shops across the United States is that staying organized and efficient is the single hardest part of growth. To help you keep growing your countertop fabrication business, you have to streamline your operations. Here are the different areas of your business worth diving into:
- Quoting
- Communication
- Fabrication scheduling
- Installation scheduling
- Managing and following up with leads
- Tracking inventory
- Reviewing your metrics
Our software, developed with input from hundreds of fabricators, addresses each of these challenges so you can scale your business more efficiently.
1. Provide Better and Faster Countertop Quoting
If you don’t make your quoting process fast, accurate, and appealing, it’s going to be hard to drive substantial growth. Some of the initial problems fabricators experience involve quoting issues like inconsistent pricing or too much time spent on hand drawing. If this sounds familiar, technology can help.
Moraware’s countertop quoting software allows you to draw, layout, and quote a countertop in just 3 minutes. This allows you to present the quote while you’re still in front of the prospect. This helps you get instant feedback so you can make any adjustments in real time.
By utilizing CounterGo, you’ll save yourself time, which ultimately will save you money. Many new countertop fabricators hire someone to take care of quoting, but with quoting software, that’s not necessary.
You can read a lot more about this here: 4 Key Ways Countertop Fabricators Can Give Better Quotes
Quoting just became much simpler and easier.
2. Improve Communication Between Sales and Operations
Through our work in the stone industry, we’ve observed how miscommunication and disorganization can create workflow bottlenecks as a shop grows.
When a client calls in, does your sales team know what stage the production process is in? Did a customer communicate something meaningful with the install crew, but they failed to let the sales team know? A lack of communication between sales and the rest of your team can lead to frustrated customers and stressed employees.
For Aaron Crowley, a long-time Moraware customer, communication was a massive headache in his shop before they centralized their job information. When customers called in, they had to wait on hold for someone to find him in order to know the status of their job.
Check out Aaron Crowley’s story here
Research consistently shows that when sales and operations align, customer retention rates are higher, and organizations grow faster. By using job management software for your countertop shop, the sales team will have a bird’s eye view of what the labor force is working on, and the production team won’t miss any steps. This helps everyone get on the same page.
Housing all your job information and calendars in one place (and ditching the whiteboards and file folders), gives your team all the information they need at any time with just a few clicks.
Since Cache Valley Countertops started using Moraware software, they estimate that they save up to four hours per day on tedious tasks that have been reduced or eliminated by using the new system!
Learn more about Systemize, Morware’s scheduling and job management software for countertop fabricators.
3. Streamline Your Fabrication Scheduling
Without a structured fabrication scheduling process, key tasks can easily be overlooked. For example, the templating was completed, but someone forgot to schedule the fabrication. It’s bound to happen, especially if your doing significantly more jobs. 
Systemize’s AutoSchedule feature addresses this challenge directly. While scheduling order varies by shop, most customers start with templating and use AutoSchedule to set tentative dates for next steps like fabrication and installation. Need three days between templating and fabrication? Another three days before installation? Want invoices sent automatically the day after completion? AutoSchedule handles this scheduling automatically.
Beyond saving time, AutoSchedule prevents costly oversights and scheduling conflicts. It eliminates overbooking and backlogs that force overtime payments to install crews, protecting your profit margins.
4. Streamline Your Installation Scheduling
As your countertop business grows, you might run into installation efficiency issues. Here are some questions you want to ask:
- If you have two installers working, are they going to homes that are close together, or are they driving across town and crossing paths unnecessarily?
- Did you factor in the time it takes to drive from one installation to another, or is your crew overbooked?
- What about timeframes? Have you scheduled enough time for the installation or not enough time?
- Did you accidentally schedule the installation before the fabrication was even completed?
Systemize can help your scheduling process become smooth and efficient. AutoSchedule prevents installations from being scheduled out of order and ensure that there’s enough time to complete the template and the fabrication. The Mapping Service optimizes installer routes to minimize travel time.
Centralizing job information creates additional benefits beyond scheduling efficiency. Sales teams gain real-time access to project status, enabling proactive customer communication throughout the entire process.
5. Effectively Manage and Follow Up with Leads
It’s frustrating when a qualified lead falls through the cracks. That’s lost revenue. Research shows that 79% of uncontacted leads never convert to sales, while nurtured leads generate 47% larger purchases on average.
Effective lead management requires systemic follow-up, a challenge for growing countertop shops with limited staff handling multiple responsibilities. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system provides the necessary structure and automation.
Systemize functions as both scheduling software and CRM platform. It automates follow-up lead communications, appointment scheduling, tracks lead sources, and maintains detailed interaction histories. This lead management capability is included at no additional charge with your Systemize subscription, eliminating the need for separate CRM investments.
6. Tracking Your Inventory
Tracking inventory is a huge pain point for growing fabrication businesses. It’s hard to track what you have on hand. Over-ordering colors that are already in your slab yard can cost thousands of dollars. Also knowing what you have in stock digitally can be a big time saver. It eliminates having to physically walk over to check inventory.
With Systemize Inventory Edition, an upgrade for existing Systemize Standard Edition users, all of these pesky issues are solved.
Systemize Inventory allows you to:
- Stay on top of what you need to order
- Track the material on jobs
- Use slabs you already have
- Keep track of the shop from your office – or anywhere
While tracking inventory can be manually managed up to a point, once you start rapidly growing, you’ll need a better long-term solution. That’s where Systemize can really make a difference for your business.
7. Reviewing Your Metrics
If you’re not a numbers person, reviewing your metrics can be stressful. But reporting is essential to understanding areas to ripe for improvement such as how many leads turn into sales, how efficient your installers are, and even which crew generated the most repair calls.
You can find out all of these valuable pieces of data using Systemize’s reporting options.
Reviewing your key countertop shop metrics provides a better idea of where potential problems exist. And if you’re growing, you don’t have time to figure this out manually. Automating this process and getting organized with powerful scheduling software will help you figure out where there are issues, where you’re excelling, and what you need to focus on to improve.
Additional reports you might want to run include:
- How many square feet of countertop space have you installed this week? Is it trending up or down?
- How many installs have you completed per month this year? Are you growing, staying stagnant, or losing momentum?
- Which customer is sending you the most business?
- How many phone calls have your sales staff made this month?
- How long does it typically take you to go from templating to installation?
- Which salesperson is generating the most customers?
All of this data will help you run your business more effectively. You can thank the people who are helping you grow, and you can pinpoint any employees who aren’t.
Stay Organized with Systemize
All of the pain points we’ve outlined here have informed our development of Systemize. As a growing fabrication business, you need automation to work for you. Gone are the days when you have time to do everything manually. The post-it notes, messy whiteboards, and scattered Excel spreadsheets are no longer enough. You need more robust organization, and your team needs to be in the loop in real- time.
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