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Does keeping your operational processes running smoothly feel like a challenge as your company grows?
Contempora takes immense pride in its corporate slogan and reputation: Solid Building, On Time, On Budget. However, rapid growth began to strain their internal operations.
The Challenge: Upstream Friction Points and Balancing Capacity After working with George and Jason and their management team for a few years, their processes were experiencing natural strain under the pressure of increased volume. The primary challenges were occurring right at the front end of the client experience:
Because their workflow wasn't fully standardized, the amount of duplicated effort in design and estimating was increasing. And George, who was also carrying the weight of being the primary salesperson, found himself heavily involved in the daily mechanics of operations. 1. Understanding the Whole System To navigate this, the team needed to transition from being "time tellers" to "clock builders," treating their business as an integrated flow of interdependent functions rather than separate departments. Early in our work together, we mapped out their Key Function Flow Map (KFFM) to visualize exactly how work moved from an initial prospect into the company and down to the job site. As volume grew, this bird’s-eye view helped to surface that front-end delays in Pre-Construction (Sales, Design, and Estimating) were impacting the downstream Construction team, shifting project start dates and delaying in-year revenues. 2. Diagnosing Operational Systems At one point, we used the KFFM Heat Map traffic-light system to diagnose their primary operational constraints. While the downstream Construction team initially showed Red, that diagnostic exercise revealed that the core bottleneck was actually a friction point upstream, being Pre-Construction. Furthermore, as we dug deeper, we discovered a constraint within that constraint: within the Pre-Construction process itself, the Design department was the ultimate bottleneck. Pushing proposals through with varying procedures was stretching Design's capacity and reducing their ability to turn sold jobs into usable drawings for Construction. 3. Process Mapping and Optimization I coached the Pre-Construction team through an exercise to map their current workflow. We quickly discovered that projects were being handled differently. There was no single process being consistently followed. This lack of standardization caused occasional rework, extra touch-points with prospects, and delays. Rather than spending time trying to map a variable current process, we immediately hashed out what the standard, optimized steps should be. We standardized exactly how work should move through each stage of proposal development. By creating a predictable sequence, the team would be able to balance the workload in Design and Estimating, ensure more predictable turnaround times, and reduce the time lag between a signed contract and the Construction hand-off. 4. Employee-Involved Change Leadership Optimizing processes can never be a top-down exercise. Originally, George considered asking his new salesperson to design a sales process to present to the managers. I counseled him instead to actively involve his pre-construction team from the start, because “people support what they help to create.” George and his pre-construction team all fully engaged in the process optimization work. Together, they worked through their varying departmental perspectives, aligned their approaches, and arrived at a standardized Pre-Construction process they all thoroughly understood, believed in, and were committed to living by. The Turnaround: Navigating the Implementation Phase Transitioning a business toward systemized excellence is a journey, and it often requires course-corrections along the way. The team initially created an implementation plan to improve scheduling of Design and Estimating work to better manage department capacity. However, they initially found it a challenge to execute the scheduling piece due to a skill gap in their pre-construction team. Recognizing this constraint, the company made a strategic pivot. They hired a dedicated Pre-Construction Manager who possessed solid scheduling skills alongside a deep understanding of sales, design, and estimating. This new leader operationalized the process, bringing accountability and scheduling discipline to the system. The Result: CEO Freedom to Scale By designing a disciplined system, Contempora protected and reinforced its reputation for delivering Solid Building, On Time, On Budget.
If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.
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