The business on one page
Lesson 1 of 6 · Construction
Lesson summary
Tallow Ridge Design-Build is an invented firm with 9 people and about 14 jobs a year. Its Space has four folders and two jobs. Job 2614, a kitchen renovation and a rear addition in a house built in 1964, carries all six lessons. Dana Whitlock owns the firm and is the agent manager.
Make one place for each job: a job page with the contract and scope, the drawing register, the schedule, the selections, the daily logs, the change orders and the closeout checklist under it.
Keep accounting in the accounting app. Put the documents, or links to them, on the job page.
Take care of the estimate, the signed change order, the current drawings, the insurance certificates of your subs and the daily log.
Before work starts, open the drawing register. Confirm on site that the set is the current revision, then select Confirmed on site.
Write one rule at the top of ACTVOX.md: no agent sends anything to a client or a sub. A person sends.
Try it now
List the places where the papers of one job are today. Write the one rule for your agents: who sends to a client or a sub.
English transcript · same language as the video
This is Tallow Ridge Design-Build, an invented firm. Nine people. About fourteen jobs a year: kitchens, bathrooms and rear additions. Dana Whitlock owns the firm. She is the agent manager.
Like many small builders, Tallow Ridge kept the paper of one job in six places. The numbers were in the accounting app. The schedule was in a job app. The drawings were on a shared drive. The photos were on a phone. The approvals were in text messages. And the permit card was in a folder in the truck.
In 2018, PlanGrid and FMI asked five hundred and ninety-nine construction leaders about their week. They said that they spent five and a half hours each week to find project data. That study is old. The problem is not.
Dana did not buy one more app. She made one place for each job in her Space. Look at the sidebar. There are four folders: Jobs, Subs, Office and Library. Under Jobs, there are two jobs.
Open Job 2614. It is a kitchen renovation and a rear addition, in a house built in 1964. The job page lists the parts of the job: the contract and scope, the drawing register, the schedule, the selections, the daily logs, the change orders and the closeout checklist. Accounting stays in the accounting app. The job page holds the documents, or a link to them.
Some documents need more care than others. The estimate. The signed change order. The current drawings. The insurance certificates of your subs. And the daily log. If one of them is wrong, the job costs you money.
Here is a small test. It is Monday. Joe Brennan, the lead carpenter, starts the framing for the addition. He needs the current drawings, so he opens the drawing register. Sheet A-101 has two rows. Rev B is current. Rev A is superseded.
Joe looks at the set in the truck. It is Rev B. He selects Confirmed on site on that row. That took one minute. Nobody framed a wall from an old sheet.
The agents read the same place. That is the reason for it. An agent can help only with what it can read. Open Squad. Four people and four agents work side by side.
One rule is at the top of ACTVOX.md, the page that the agents read before they work in this Space. Dana wrote it herself. No agent sends anything to a client or a sub. A person sends.
One more thing. Building rules change by state and by city. This course shows how one firm works. It is not legal advice. Check the rules where you build.
That is the pattern for the whole course. The agent drafts. A named person checks, signs and sends. In the next lesson, Marta, the office manager, moves the papers in.
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Tell us what was clear and what we should change. Your answers shape the next lessons.