Send the Crew That Can Do That Roof, Not the One That's Free

The problem in one breath

The 12/12 with four valleys went to whichever crew was open Tuesday. Three days turned into six, the homeowner called the office twice, and you were up there yourself on Friday redoing a valley. The crew that would have laid it clean was on a walkable ranch across town.

Why it happens

Dispatch runs on the one fact you can see: whether a crew is free. What a crew is good at isn't written anywhere — it's in your head, and half of it is only in your foremen's heads. Nobody ever put on paper that one crew has never set a piece of tile.

So the schedule asks the only question it can answer, and the hardest roof of the month lands on the crew that finished early. That isn't dispatch. That's a coin flip with your warranty on it.

The play

Write down what each crew can do, grade every roof before you send anybody, then match the two.

1. Write a crew card for each crew. One page, one crew: foreman, how many men, the squares they put on in a real working day, what they're fastest at, the steepest pitch they'll walk and the steep gear on that truck, tile or metal or low-slope, how they leave an occupied house, who talks to the homeowner, what language they work in. Write what they have done, not what they could probably handle.
2. Grade the roof the day it sells, on three things. Hard roof: pitch, how cut up it is, layers, material. Hard house: lived in, tight drive, landscaping, solar on the deck. Hard homeowner: home all day, particular, or filing her first claim. One line on the folder — easy, medium or hard, and which of the three makes it hard. A steep bare gable and a fussy homeowner are two different problems.
3. Match hard to able, and make a crew earn the hard ones. The crew that has done it gets it. A crew that hasn't earns it on an easy one first, with the foreman who has done it watching a day (Module 3, Play 4). When one step keeps biting — the dead valley, the chimney cricket — it gets its own how-we-do-it page and stops being one crew's trick (Module 3, Play 8).
4. When the only crew that can do it isn't free, you get three honest moves. Move the date — the board's one hand moves it — and tell her the week straight (Module 14, Play 5). Send that foreman and two men to lay it out, then hand it off. Or buy the roof from a company that does that kind all day (Module 12, "Your Crew Or His, Priced On One Real Job"), with the scope on paper before anybody rolls (Module 12, Play 2). "Send whoever's free and hope" is not a fourth move.
5. Price it, because the wrong crew costs money before it costs a callback. A crew that's slow on steep burns hours you already sold, and those hours are what your labor number is built on (Module 10, Play 4). Two extra days on a steep roof come out of that job before anybody ever comes back.
6. Update the cards off the job debrief, not off memory. Every job gets talked about after (Module 3, Play 1). When a card turns out wrong — faster on tear-off than you thought, slower on cut-up — fix it that week. A card two seasons old is memory with a border around it.

Do this this week

Twenty minutes, one card per crew, straight out of your head. Don't research it and don't ask around — what you already know is enough to start, and the next debrief fixes what you got wrong. Hang them where the ten-day board is (Module 14, Play 1).

The tool

One card per crew, hung by the ten-day board, read before you write a crew name next to an address. Your first pass is off your own head. Sit down with each foreman after his next debrief and re-tick it against what his men have actually done — only that gets ticked. The DON'T SEND THEM ON line is the one that saves you.

THE CREW CARD — what this crew can actually do

Crew: ______________________  Foreman: _____________________________
Men on it: ____   Updated: ________  Updated by: ___________________

FASTEST AT
  [ ] Straight asphalt tear-off and lay   [ ] Repairs, small jobs
  [ ] Cut-up roofs: valleys, dormers, hips
  Squares on the ground in a real working day: ______

STEEP
  Steepest pitch this crew walks: ______
  Steep gear on that truck: __________________________________
  [ ] Has done one this steep    [ ] Has not

DONE IT BEFORE — tick it only if this crew has actually done it
  [ ] Two layers   [ ] Three or more   [ ] Deck and rot work
  [ ] Skylights    [ ] Chimney and cricket   [ ] Dead valleys
  [ ] Around solar [ ] Gutters and wraps
  Tile:      [ ] Has done   [ ] Has not
  Metal:     [ ] Has done   [ ] Has not
  Low-slope: [ ] Has done   [ ] Has not

AROUND THE HOUSE
  [ ] Clean job with people living in it: pets, kids, cars, garden
  [ ] Tight drive, no dumpster spot, hand-carry
  [ ] Leaves the drive and the yard the way they found them

THE HOMEOWNER
  Who on this crew talks to her: ____________________________
  Language the crew works in: _______________________________

DON'T SEND THEM ON: _________________________________________
NEXT ONE THEY EARN: ____________  Who watches: ______________

GRADE THE ROOF BEFORE YOU MATCH IT
  Hard roof: pitch, cut up, layers, material
  Hard house: lived in, tight drive, landscaping, solar
  Hard homeowner: home all day, particular, first claim

If your crew is 1099

With a sub crew you're picking a company for a roof, not a man for a job. Keep a card per company just the same — what they roof, how steep they go, how many they can put on it — and send the roof to the card that fits. What that costs you against running it yourself is priced job by job in Module 12, Play 1. You don't get to say which of his men show up, and the card stays about the company, not the men on it — a record of what you've bought from him, not a personnel file. Before the season starts, have your accountant look at how you're hiring subs.

One more thing: this play is how we run a shop — it's not legal advice. Rules change by state and by contract, so before you act on the legal-sounding parts, run them past your own attorney or accountant. It's your business, and what you do with any of this is your call and your responsibility.