During its life cycle, a residential remodeling company faces several moments when it must change if it is to grow and stay profitable. The most obvious moment is when a company founder recognizes they can no longer keep up with the needs of the business while also working in the field. This is when they trade in their toolbelt for sales training and spreadsheets.
The lead carpenter system was born out of the baby boomer generation as it aged into prime earning years. Company founders faced this transition by coaching their high-performing employees to run projects with their toolbelts on, just as they had done, and the resulting lead carpenter system has proven to be a more scalable alternative to a founder leading one or two project crews at once. However, as project size and complexity increase, some companies are beginning to shift toward a project manager–based system or a hybrid system with both lead carpenters and project managers, in hopes of maintaining scalability and profitability.
TDS Custom Construction, where I am the production manager, began the shift to a hybrid lead-carpenter and project-manager system about two years ago, and we see our ability to create project teams with both lead carpenters and project managers as vital to executing a higher number of complex projects each year. We moved in this direction in reaction to ever-increasing administrative requirements during the contract and preconstruction phases. Pulling lead carpenters out of the field or having upper management execute administrative and planning tasks did not prove to be as scalable as adding a layer of project managers to the team.
How It Works
Our project teams—made up of in-house design staff, project managers, lead carpenters, and our production coordinator—form after the design team signs off on the schematic design. Each team member has a repeatable set of responsibilities; using JobTread construction management software, we track these and create a project package for the lead carpenter.
The project manager is the first production team member to get involved while a project is still in the design phase. They conduct site walk-throughs, take the lead in developing trade-partner and vendor scopes of work, and solicit pricing for the subcontracted portions of the project. This early involvement gives the project manager time to develop a deep understanding of the project goals, the client, and the design intent, which in turn provides a strong foundation for carrying the project from design through to completion with the lead carpenter.
Post contract, the project manager teams up with our production coordinator to “buy out” the project by issuing purchase orders to the selected vendors and trade partners with whom the project manager worked during the design phase.
The production coordinator sets up the project in JobTread by building the baseline schedule, uploading important project documents, ordering items with long lead times, and setting up the budget for job costing. During this preconstruction phase, the project manager focuses on building a field team that meets the needs of the project and prepping the client and their home for the work ahead. The lead carpenter typically gets their first look at the drawings and specs of the project during this phase by attending meetings with the project manager and the design team.
Armed with an understanding of the design intent and the project goals, the lead carpenter works with the project manager to source non-purchase-order materials and set up the site requirements—dumpsters, construction toilets, and rented equipment—for the project start. During the build phase, the lead carpenter directs all work on the site, schedules deliveries and trade partners, orders materials, and manages the client’s day-to-day needs. Project managers focus on job costing and managing the overall schedule using JobTread, in addition to leading a weekly meeting with the client. Our project managers also participate in weekly tactical planning meetings at our office where I work with them to build three-week and quarterly look-aheads to manage our labor pool and the start-date expectations of future clients.
This division of labor enables our project managers to serve as the bridge between the office-based employees and the field-based build team, while maximizing the number of projects that our teams can run concurrently. Each project manager handles four to six remodeling projects at once, depending on job size, and each lead carpenter runs the sites for one to three projects, based on their level of experience. Like the move to the lead carpenter system before it, the transition to a hybrid or project-manager-based system is an important step in the evolution of remodeling companies aimed at increased profitability and efficiency.
