How do we improve our business processes? For us, it’s all about collaboration. We have been members of Remodelers Advantage for the past three years. Remodelers Advantage brings remodeling professionals together to share ideas and advance the industry as a whole by enabling companies to improve their business processes.
They host annual summit events (large, informative industry seminars for 700+ attendees) and biannual roundtable events (small groups of 10 – 12 company leaders who meet regularly). The roundtable members come from a wide range of remodeling companies. We represent organizations of varying sizes from 1 million – 30 million in annual sales from all over the US and Canada. We serve as sounding boards for each other and act like each other’s board of directors.
Jeff receives the Remodelers Advantage Roundtables MVP award in April, 2019.
We transparently present all information about our companies, including marketing plans, sales statistics, financial statements, and reports. We provide candid feedback to each other and identify blind spots. After each roundtable, each leader makes three to six commitments to improve a specific aspect of our business. For accountability, a micro-board made up of three to four members meets every three weeks to follow up on how we are meeting these commitments.
The members of this small group get really close. “There’s camaraderie, support, and tough love, and we all hold each other accountable; it’s really helpful,” shares Jeff McLinden, President of JM Construction. “They say things like, ‘You really need to make these changes,’ and they push me to do it.
”One of our commitments we made at this past spring’s roundtable, was to analyze our workflow, from beginning to end. We saw the need for checklists and a flowchart for each manager at each stage of the process, from back office, to sales, to design, to production, to the final walkthrough. We shut down the business for a week in September 2019 for reboot sessions, which allowed us to work on this objective and evaluate our business practices in detail.
But the ultimate peer group experience is yet to come. All roundtable members host the micro-board group for a thorough business evaluation onsite. One business is selected each year. We look forward to when our peers will travel to Massachusetts to focus their attention on our company for a couple of days. They will review our processes in house and will interview our team members for further insights into our company. We are looking forward to receiving this helpful peer analysis when it’s our turn to host –– 2020 could be our year!
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