Many fabricators put their heads down and do the hard work, never getting the chance to look around and ask: where could we be improving?
If you’re a growing shop, now is the time to take the time to find out. You can’t set realistic goals and plan for pain-free growth until you know where you are right now.
Shop Numbers to Track
For growing countertop businesses, it seems like there’s always a fire to put out. How can you possibly get to the next level when you have bottlenecks in your current process? While in a perfect world, you’d be tracking everything from quotes per day, to CNC utilization, to upsells and customer complaints, it’s much more manageable to start small.
After talking to thousands of fabricators, we’ve landed on one metric that reigns supreme: square foot per man hour.
If you need to start somewhere, start here.
Square Foot Per Man Hour
Square foot per man hour in production is often referred to as the “key” for knowing your shop’s profitability. There’s a bit of work on the backend to come up with a square footage figure.
For example:
- Does the project include a tear-out of the previous kitchen?
- Are modifications required to accommodate plumbing or electrical?
These factors can be quantified into a square footage figure.
Using Moraware’s job management software, you can start documenting how many man hours it takes to do a job, from start to finish. You can ultimately know in real-time how many square feet you’ve produced.
This is a metric many shops look at weekly or monthly. While it isn’t everything, It gives you a birds-eye view at how your business is doing.
Analyze Your Quoting
An even simpler place to start is quoting. Quite simply, how many estimates are you putting together per week, and on average, what percentage of those turn into a paid job?
If you aren’t yet using CounterGo, our estimating software that makes it possible to draw, layout, and quote a countertop in three minutes, then improving this step might be tricky.
For example:
- Is your closing ratio low because you take too long to deliver the quote?
- Are you unable to quickly get the numbers because it relies on gathering and reading through paperwork that’s all over your office?
For these reasons (and so many more), using CounterGo can help you get a handle on your estimating numbers. Since you quote faster and more professionally, you can not only close more jobs, but you can quickly access reporting tools that makes goal setting much easier.
We recommend looking at these numbers monthly:
- Quotes per week
- Percentage of quotes that turn into a paid job
Analyze Your Jobs
Systemize users can get a handle on their scheduling and job numbers without spending hours putting together reports and tracking down information.
Some examples of easy reports include:
- Installed sq ft by month
- Revenue by week
- Number of jobs by week
- Reasons for going back to job sites
- Sq ft by individual
You can gather all of this information through Systemize by diving into the Reports tab.
You just need to start by asking yourself: what do I want to know?
If your biggest growing pain right now is remakes and reworks, isolate that information in Systemize and find out the cause of the issue.
If it’s a fabricator who seems less productive than anyone else, you can measure their workload against everyone on the team.
Knowing your numbers – and being able to easily gather them from Moraware’s software – can help you make better business decisions and reach your goals.
Be Consistent
When we see a shiny object, it’s easy to start running reports and getting excited. But when it comes to looking at your shop’s numbers, it’s best to be consistent.
There’s little benefit in pulling a report on how many jobs you did this month if there’s nothing to compare it against.
If you’ve never done any tracking before, start small and pick one area to focus on. Then, start tracking it over time to become better at it. A good place to start is with how many jobs did you do this month last year. Are you up or down? Do the numbers you’ve been tracking show you why?
Consistency is key to almost anything, and keeping tabs on your shop’s numbers is no exception.
Conclusion
It’s nearly impossible to get to the next level in your shop if you don’t know what level you’re at now. By knowing your shop’s numbers – and being able to compare them to past numbers – you can streamline your jobs and continue growing.
Your numbers might reveal opportunities for better productivity, lower costs, or better profit margins. But you won’t know any of that until you start tracking them.
Build a process for looking at your shop’s numbers, and you’re well on your way to more manageable growth.
Our software solutions – CounterGo and Systemize – make solving your bottlenecks that much easier. As long as you’re putting good data into the system, you’ll be able to pull the good data out of it.
Schedule a demo to learn more about how Moraware can help you start track your shop’s numbers so you can take your business to the next level.
