Castellan Systems

There is nothing wrong with that, in fact that's basically what I did initially when I set up Castellan Systems; except that my "trade" was IT and Project Management and I worked from home sitting in from of my computer rather than going to other people's homes.

But when a tradie goes on their own, they do so because of their trade skills and not their business skills. I haven't heard of too many accountants, project managers or CEOs that always wanted to run their own business and start their own electrical or plumbing business. When I wanted to start my own business, it was in software development which is where my skillset lay. So these tradies know everything about the technical skills specific to their field, but not so much about managing a business or managing the work orders they undertake for their customers.

So while they may be able to fully understand, diagnose, design and perform the work, they may lack the skillsets to coordinate the delivery of the service(s) contracted. This all gets even more complicated if they hire additional staff or engage sub-contractors.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not say that all such independent contractors are poor at coordinating the delivery of their services. Some just have an innate knowledge of how to do it; others undertake some training. But a large portion need some assistance.

Tradies need to understand that they are in fact working on projects and therefore they need to manage each work order as a project. Their main form of income comes from selling their time and the time of any employees they may have. So if you bid for some job and obtain approval, you are actually acting as a bid manager who becomes a project manager once the work has started. They may perform technical tasks as well, but they are ultimately responsible for the execution of that project.

What finally shocked the company owner and left him speechless was when I told him that they renovate kitchens and not simply manufactured kitchen cabinets and installed them. That in fact he was running projects with him, or his office manager, as the project manager. That a project had 3 dimensions: Scope, Schedule & Costs. That success of a project is essentially measured by the success of delivering those 3 dimensions; usually reported/measured using the standard "traffic light" system: green, amber and red. But that if any of those dimensions was red, then the whole project was red.

So for my kitchen renovation:

• Costs: as per quote, therefore green.
• Scope: 2 small things were not done; the plasterer said that he couldn't fixed a small hole in the ceiling where the wall was removed (I ended up fixing with a bit of Masonite) and a chip on the architrave of the pantry that had been broken during the removal of the old doors wasn't fixed during that long awaited 1 hour of final work; I would have had to wait again for who knows how long for the installer, so I fixed it myself as I had the painters coming the following week. So it was amber.
• Schedule: I told him that the work could easily had been completed in 3 weeks; their timeline allowed for about 4 weeks; it took 5 weeks. Therefore there was a 25% schedule overrun and in the PM world anything more that 20% made it red.

As I said, tradies need to understand that they are in fact working on projects and therefore they need to manage each work order as a project. They are selling their time and the time of any employees they may have. They may also sell some goods, but this is more as a result of former. When they are quoting for a job, they are acting as a bid manager and not, say, and electrician or plumber. When they obtain approval and start work, they are acting as a project manager as well as performing their technical tasks.

Let's define what a project is. A project is a temporary endeavour designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or staffing) undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

There are three constraints or dimensions faced in every project: Scope, Time, and Cost. They are a part of every project and though they can be limiting, when properly managed they should not affect a successful project outcome. These are often characterised in the Project Management Triangle, shown on the left.

So, a project is about delivering a Scope (What), within in a Timeframe or Schedule (When) for a specified Cost (How Much) to a required level of Quality. Sounds familiar?

The planning would be to ensure that a realistic costing and timeline is prepared where the relationship or dependency of tasks is identified. The end result should not only be a realistic quote but also an input into the scheduling process.

If they are going to be multiple people working on the job and especially if there are sub-contractors involved, it would be highly recommended that this be done in the form of a meeting. These days there is little excuse for not holding it; if you can't all come together in the same room, you could use Zoom, Microsoft Teams or any other such tool.

You may then have to finalise the costing and timeline, but the planning meeting should had given you all of the information.

The end result for the customer is a quote to which the tradie will work. In other words for the customer, certainty.

• The difference between estimated work hours and elapsed time. Just because something has been estimated to take 5 hours, it doesn't mean that it will be completed in 1 day. There may be considerations as to why it needs to be spread over multiple days.
• Dependencies to other tasks; some tasks can't be worked on until other have been done. In the example of my kitchen, the tiling could be done until the old kitchen was removed.
• You need to consider staff availability and workload; not just on this work order but across all the work you have in your books. If one of your team members is working on something for another customer, they can't be working for you. And if they can only work a certain number of hours per day.

The end result should be a realistic and achievable timeline or schedule to which I, as the customer, am going to hold you to it.

The end result for the customer is, once again certainty.

Obviously, this meeting is not required if the tradie is working on their own; but some sort of kick-off is required. I personally would recommend that if a tradie is working on their own, they still have some sort of sit-down, prior to starting work, to ensure that they have everything in place in order to be able to start work.

A kick-off meeting is a good idea to ensure that the whole team are on the same page. This is an extremely good idea of there are multiple people involved and essential of any of them are subcontractors. As I've already said, these days there is little excuse for not holding a meeting.

This is quite simple: if you quote it, you invoice it. Just because you're using sub-contractors, it shouldn't matter to your customer. As far as they are concerned, they are your employees. You engage them; you allocate the work to them; they are your employees.

As I said earlier, if the customer asked your sub-contractor to do additional work, outside your scope, that's between them and the customer and they should invoice the customer directly for that additional work if they wished to get paid for it.

Your customer will expect that you will do everything within your power to stick to the quoted costs; and if there is a chance of any variation from these, that you inform them ASAP. It is always preferable to tell the customer of any variations in costs prior to them occurring than after. I know people say that it's easier to ask for forgiveness that for permission, but that's not applicable here. Surprises can be extremely damaging.

Equipment should be a no brainer; if you don't have the equipment, why are you undertaking the work in the first place? I'm not suggesting that you need to have every piece of equipment that could potentially be used. But if you undertake work that requires something that you don't own, hire, borrow or whatever before you start work. That's called planning.

Materials are interesting. No one expects that as a tradie you'll have in your inventory every possible item that you may use for any job. But you should have what can be considered stock standard and be on top of the other so you can start work.

There have been at least two occasions during our renovations where the tradie didn't have a part available. The first time was a plumber who made a suggestion as to how something should be done; his exact words were, "I always recommend and prefer to do it this way." But when we accepted his suggestion, he needed to go to the nearest hardware shop to purchase some parts. If that was the way that he preferred to do it, why didn't he carry those part as stock? The second time was an electrician who didn't have the right fuse; this was a standard item and you would, once again, expect that he would have a few in stock in his truck.

As I said, no one expects that as a tradie you’ll have every in your inventory every possible item that you may use for any job. But you should have what can be considered stock standard; that's your inventory.

For the "rare" items, you need to purchase them with sufficient lead time so that you have them available when you start work. The customer would expect that when they give you approval to start that you will do some preparation or planning. You've bid on the work and therefore can be justifiably expected to know what materials you're going to need. When we did our kitchen renovation, we told the owner during the design phase that we didn't want empty space above the overhead cabinets; that false-walls or bulkheads were going to be required. When the cabinets arrived, there was no material included to do these bulkheads. The installer had to call the workshop and pick up these materials before returning the next day. That, I believe, was another reason of our 12 days wait for that last 1 hour's work. If he had the materials on the first day, he could had installed them and then on the second day he would have had enough time to complete his work.

This is essentially the management of your equipment resources, as mentioned above. Here you keep track of each individual piece of equipment whether they be hand-tools, power-tools, large machinery or vehicles.

This is different from inventory management which is the process of tracking of the movement of stock that a company stores and warehouses. Asset management is the process of tracking the equipment and supplies that a company uses to run its operations. It covers fixed assets such as equipment and property as well as intangible assets like intellectual property. Simply put, inventory and asset management both keep track of a company's assets. Inventory management, however, involves monitoring the flow of items for sale or needed for the manufacturing of goods.

Obviously selling of assets is important because they are a form of income. Junking them is also important because they represent a lost in capital.

This is a very important area and you shouldn't need any sort of project management training. You have to communicate with your customer constantly. If an issue arises, let them know ASAP, if not sooner. This is particularly important if it's bad news that will impact costs and/or schedule.

When we renovated our kitchen, the tiler, once he removed the old tiles, checked the level of the floor and told us that it wasn't level. He gave us 2 choices:

1. Put an even layer of concrete, which will keep to the quoted costs and timeline. The only problem, the floor would not be level and the cabinets installed would need to cater for this.
2. Put a layer of concrete that would level the floor. It would require more cement and probably more drying time. It would impact the costs and timeline but will make the cabinet installer's job much easier.

But once you've completed you plan & timeline and the customer has given approval to proceed, you don't put it aside and forget about it; you need to monitor progress against this plan & timeline and report the customer any issues. You've provided this timeline to the customer and are perfectly entitled to hold you to it; if issues arise, informing them immediately goes a long way in maintaining your standing with the customer.

We always said in the PM world that a schedule was obsolete as soon as it was published; nothing stands still. Things are always changing and the best laid plans can encounter difficulty.

Status reporting is also a critical process; you don't need to produce detailed status reports like I used to do as a project manager. But you need to keep your customer informed of progress, including issues and potential risks, as mentioned above. If you need them to make a decision, you need to ask for this as soon as you identify that such a decision is required.

I highly recommend meeting with your customers once you complete the work to get a picture as to their experience and how they feel about the quality of the work. You need to ensure that you delivered all that they asked for and that they feel that you did. You should also want to know their feeling about the whole experience of working with you.

If you used sub-contractors, it's also a good idea to meeting with them to review the experience as well. You may want to meeting with all team members at the same time, whether or not they were your employees or sub-contractors. The most important thing to remember is that this is a learning experience and not a witch-hunt; you're not trying to find someone to whom the blame will be attached. You're trying to find out what went wrong and what went right; and how you can do it better next time.

Remember, you learn more from your errors and failures than from your successes. If there were any issues, you should want to know about them so that you can ensure that they don't happen again. You can't stop every issue from ever occurring, but if you communicate promptly, you can minimise the impact or frustration.