Have you had a chance to hear our recent podcast with Tom Droste? Listen to the audio here, or search for Estimate Rocket Radio on any podcast app. Enjoy the transcript below of our conversation!
Kathy Droste
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Estimate Rocket radio. My name is Kathleen. I'm the Director of Sales here at Estimate Rocket. And I'm always joined by my very dynamic co host, Chris Shank, who is the leader of education Engagement here at Estimate Rocket. Hi, Chris, how are you today?
Chris Shank
I'm good. Looking forward to seeing something trying something new today.
Kathy Droste
I know I'm excited to We're always excited when we have our next guest on because he doesn't have a lot of time to do things like this, but he makes time for us. And most importantly, for all of our Estimate Rocket radio community, we have Tom Droste. Tom is the founder and CEO of Estimate Rocket. Tom has been a software architect and engineer for over 35 years. He's not only owned one successful software company, he's done it a second time with Estimate Rocket. During that 35 year career, Tom has always had a strong focus on developing software that had a sales acceleration focused project management and of course, always profitability. I'm doing a little bit of bragging here. But I think everyone needs to know this. Tom over his 35 year career has saved his customers almost a half a billion dollars in revenue. So this is a man who knows what he's talking about. When it comes to running a profitable and very successful business.
Chris Shank
We talk with Tom about team meetings, accountability, how do you do it? Right. I think everybody wants to know how many meetings are too few? How many meetings are too many? And really, how do I hold everyone accountable in a way that creates team alignment that empowers people instead of draining them. Tom hits all these topics and more.
Kathy Droste
Hi, Tom, and welcome to Estimate Rocket radio. We're so excited to have you here with us today.
Tom Droste
Hi, Kathy. It's absolutely great to be here today with you always love me when I get an opportunity to come on and chat with you guys.
Chris Shank
Okay, so Tom, we are talking through big ideas, we're gonna do a few podcasts with you. And these big ideas are things that we hear coming up again, and again, with contractors, the contractors, we work with the contractors that are having issues all the way out from beyond our audience through all different trades. And one of the things we hear people needing a lot of help with, and some of them we are learning here at Estimate Rocket is Team accountability meetings. So let's talk about how most companies do meetings, are they effective overall.
Tom Droste
They can be, but you definitely have to have a structure or rhythm and good agendas. And I know, this is something that's kind of near and dear to my heart, because I have spent a lot of time in a former company that I was with and in our current company with a very poor meeting. And unfortunately, once you get the hang of the right meetings, they really become, you know, enlightening and empowering and they really work. But boy, if you got a bad structure that just everybody dreads them, and they're boring as hell and nobody wants to go home and, and they end up being a waste of time, instead of an opportunity to really, really get your company dialed in and all aligned and working together. It's really about the alignment.
Kathy Droste
Yeah, that almost sounds like music to my ears, alignment, team alignment. That's what everyone is searching for. Right?
Tom Droste
It's funny that you say that, because in our experience as a company, we have, we have, you know, weekly and monthly meeting rhythm and we also have a quarterly meeting rhythm. So the quarterly meeting is when we review what happened in the past quarter, and we plan for the next quarter. And when we first started this process, and I'm going to tell you that get this process working for you, it's not instant, okay, you got to stay with it. You got to tweak it a little bit when you needed to tweak it, but it's not instant. And we would go to our first few quarterly meetings we had, we'd come out feeling exhausted and not really sure that we got everything you know down the way we needed to and In the end, once we got the hang of it, we would get to the end of the meetings.
And these are two day intensive, you know, eight hour meetings. And we get to the end of it. And we do a little review at the end of the meeting, and everybody talked about alignment, and we weren't as tired, we weren't as exhausted, and we felt 100% Better about where we were going, like, it wasn't just we'd gotten everything out or, you know, aired all the things that we needed to air, we actually started talking, you know, aligned and, and talking in the same direction. It was, it's a huge, huge thing for your company, when everybody walks out of that when your leadership team walks out of the meetings, and knows where they're going, and they're all working together. And then those team members can push that information down to the, to the, to their teams, and just did make some it's a magical thing.
Kathy Droste
And just think about going on a road trip, right? A summer trip with your family. And you haven't, you don't know where you're going, you know, it ends up, it could be the vacation from hell, you know, but having a roadmap is the first part, the first piece of the puzzle to success. So it's really, really important. So let me ask you this, what kind of accountability is often lacking in a business?
Tom Droste
The A- word: accountability. Yeah, it's, I think it's a misunderstood word in a lot of cases. So accountability, obviously, is who's accountable for what and it is important to hope for people to be accountable for the things that they've taken responsibility for, and assigned responsibility for, hopefully, they're taking responsibility for and, but in order to, in order to, you know, work with accountability, you need to know who was supposed to do what and when. And you also need to know who the people are, they're involved in various aspects of your projects, to put it in, you know, into a contractor context. Every project has a group of people working on it, the salesperson working on it, the estimator working on it might be the same person might be different people. It has a project coordinator working on it, it has a crew leader who's running it on the field, and then it has a bookkeeper who's doing the invoicing and taking care of that aspect of it.
And again, that in some companies, that's one person, in some companies, that's five or six different people. So being at the end of a project, and all of this stuff, if you don't care what your results are, then all this stuff is meaningless. It really doesn't have it's own, it's purely a tool to help you get better at what you're doing. And to be able to, you know, be better than your competition. And to have a long thriving successful business. That's really what this stuff is all about. That really is what is fundamentally, you know, why we're doing that stuff. But anyway, when you get down to reviewing things, and you and it's time to say, okay, you know what happened on this project, or what happened on that project. And it could be what happened in a good way, or could be what happened in a bad way, because you can learn, absolutely learn from both of those, if something went wrong, you know, if you start out with a plan for a project, even each project has a plan. And that's usually your estimate that has the you know, what you're expecting, how long you're expecting it to take to complete the project, how many man hours, what the cost is, what the materials are going to cost, all of those things. With that plan in hand, when the project is complete. And even while the project is progressing. If you know who the team members are, who are responsible for their various aspects of that project, then it becomes really easy in your short meetings. If you have regular meetings along the way and a review at the end, it becomes very easy for people to communicate and get the understanding. Hey, well, how come we're a little behind on that anybody? You know, what's, what exactly is happening? Well, we couldn't get the materials for that.
And it gives you opportunities to do things like oh, well, maybe if we're waiting for materials, can we shift another project back and start a shorter project? Get that done in the interim? So you know, we're not so we're making sure that we're keeping everybody working and productive. There's all kinds of decisions you can make when you know who's involved in each project, and it's easy to see, hey, let's you know, we're having a meeting with those two people today. Let's make sure that we discuss where we're at with these three or four projects. Then when the project ends, you know, at the end of a project, you need to pull the appropriate group Oops, into a room and say, hey, you know, what happened? Why did we? Why did we not make what we thought we were gonna make on this project? Or why don't we make twice what we thought we're gonna make out of that? How did that happen? You know, did it take half the time we thought it was going to, you know, what was it? And so either again, either side you can learn, you can learn, Hey, what are we? What can we do better next time, and what can we learn? Damn, we got to do more of that because that's really working for us. So, you know, really, really get by knowing who's doing what on each project, it gives you the ability to look at those things and, and, and make changes and decisions based on those results.
Chris Shank
If people were looking at their company and trying to assess Do I have the meetings that I need to have for good accountability, maybe a high level view, if maybe even think of an outline, like, what meetings do I need to have? And maybe this is an overly simplistic way of thinking about it. But you know, we have annual meetings, quarterly meetings, monthly meetings, weekly dailies, you know, is there, is there something you'd say? Well, when you look at the high level of your company, you should at least see these types recurring?
Tom Droste
Yeah, I mean, there are some pretty standard rhythms out there. And again, everybody adjusts them, you know, based on how your company is made up and the type of work that you're doing. But one of the, one of the, you know, general rhythms, and I'm just gonna throw this out there as a general rhythm that has become popular is daily stand up meetings, each day, your team, your various teams, and maybe you and your production leader, and your sales leader, as the owner of the company talked on a daily basis for about 10 minutes, just a time to for everybody's not to review everything that's going on in your life, it's a time to say, hey, I need some help on this project were blocked or stopped on this. In fact, a lot of the standup rhythms talk about the things that you talk about are things that are what do you think you're going to do today? You know, and what's blocking you? So is there something blocking you, if there's something blocking you, you want to get that out on, you know, sooner rather than later, so that you can make adjustments, right, if you don't know about it, nobody can adjust.
So short standup meetings daily 10-15 minutes tops. And that can be that might be again, you and your leaders or might be your project project managers, and their crew leaders or might be you and a series of crew leaders. Again, depending upon the size and number of crews and the levels of management that you have there. You want to do a stand up at each level, so that everybody gets an opportunity to say, hey, you know, and even the guys in the field talking to the crew leader 10 minutes in the morning, what are we going to do today? What you know, what, what, what are we we have any problems yesterday, and is anything blocking us, you know, oh, yeah, I need I need materials for this, I need I need brushes, or I need shovels or whatever it is that you need those things stop a project from working. And obviously, if we get those out, the sooner we get those out, the better opportunity, we have to keep things rolling along. So short standup meetings daily. And then weekly meetings for team leaders. So again, that weekly team lead meeting might again be me as the owner of the company with my sales leader and my production leader and my accounting or bookkeeping leader to cover you know, any any big thing you know, big things that are going on, or things that we need to worry about for next week or, you know, new things that have come up, whatever, you know, comes out and discussion. And for each individual meeting in the second, I can give you a kind of a list of what kind of the agenda for these meetings.
And then finally, a monthly meeting of some sort. And again, it depends upon your company as to who comes into that meeting. Obviously, you want to have people in the meeting, attending the meetings, so that the information that you're going to go over is going to be relevant to you don't want to pull people into meetings for no good reason, because that's just a waste of time. The meeting, you might have a monthly meeting for your entire company, depending upon how your company is. And again, this might be a half hour or 45 minute meeting where you cover company oriented things. Again, there's no hard and fast rules here. You got to design something for your company, but a short stand up daily and weekly meeting with your team leaders. And I want to say a monthly meeting for project performance review are probably good things to start with. And then in terms of you know, how do these meetings go from an agenda standpoint? First thing is always good news. You know what, what's happening good, anything good? Then find it personal, professional, whatever it is. It's a good way to start things we never we don't spend enough time on. Thinking about our wins, we spend way too much time thinking about our losses.
And it's really important to have to sit back and go, what's good. And I will tell you, there are many days when I struggle with, oh, shit, what's good. I mean, I can't remember what happened yesterday, that was good, or this week, or whatever. But it's important to do. So the next section, and again, everybody uses different ones. If you go look online, you'll see 100 different potential agendas for meetings. At some, there has to be some space in your meeting for what we call IDs, identify, discuss and solve. So those things are, you know, hey, here's a problem. Okay? How's it a problem? What's it all about? What's involved? What's the solution? So that's one of the other, you know, important things to cover in your agenda. And then, another one is, I'm going to call the parking lot. And I thought this was really unique, when we found this in the meeting rhythms that we had, the parking lot is for things you're not going to get to today, but they seem important. So your parking lot is sort of this ongoing list of stuff, that if the other things in your meeting again, in your huddles, you're probably going to get your daily huddles, or stand up meetings, you're gonna get good news and identify discussions all that's about all the time you got in your huddles.
And that's what therefore, in your longer meetings, like in your weekly meetings, especially your monthly meetings, that's when you're going to talk a little bit more about problems, things that you need to change, you know, that bigger changes not not unlike a change on this project or that project. But hey, we want to make some changes to how the steps are in our sales process or in our operations process. So a little bit a little bit bigger things. And then the parking lot is those things that you don't get to so you know, they're important, but just not going to get to them in this meeting. And the final thing, as you really get going here, is KPI reviews. So, you know, key performance indicators or goals or priorities, you know, they're similar things, KPIs, and usually number oriented. But it's really important to work those into your meetings as well, especially into your longer meetings. Again, you wouldn't cover your KPIs, and in a huddle, but in either weekly or monthly meetings, you might have a few key KPIs that you review, just to see how you're doing. I mean, our sales tracking where we think they're going to be, is our is our, our cash flow working the way we think it's supposed to stuff that, you know, you need to know, in order to make sure we're getting enough leads that we're getting enough? Are we doing enough estimates? Are we closing enough sale deals? And are we producing enough work, and getting it billed and paid, those are kind of the four areas of popular KPIs that, you know, pretty much everybody should be tracking in some way or another. And then there's all kinds of other KPIs that you can add over time as you get, as you get dialed into this, that can help, you know, move the dial for you, and improve certain processes or things in your company. I could probably ramble about this.
Kathy Droste
You know, and I wanted to say that one of the great things that can come out of the daily huddles, and our business is no different than yours is that sometimes I get put on a special project. And when I know how big the scope is for that project, and I have a deadline, I might not be able to meet that scope of work with that deadline with just myself. So I'll go into a daily huddle. And I might say to Tom, when I meet with him, I'm doing really well on this. But if you were insistent on meeting this particular goal, I might need to borrow an hour here or an hour there of someone else's time from another department. And I can see that being hugely valuable on a project that you're doing. You know, if you're not going to meet your deadline, it might be useful to get another crew member to come in and help with a particular job that you're doing that day. So daily, huddles are hugely valuable.
Tom Droste
Yeah, especially in a production environment. That can be a very handy tool where, you know, you identify that yeah, we're a little behind on this and one of the other crew leaders can say, Oh, hey, you know what, this one slowed down a little bit. And we're kind of waiting on this, we can send a couple guys over to your job to get that, you know, to work on that and get you caught up and then back to the other jobs. So that's a really good use for the daily stand ups is to get an idea of, you know, what, I'm being blocked by this, Hey, I got some capacity. I can help you out with that. And really, you know, maximize how you're using your team or how your team is using your resources.
Kathy Droste
So Tom, are there any particular tools that you would recommend for people to be able to log their meetings, and then have the record of that for the next meetings.
Tom Droste
Yeah, we use a tool, there's a lot of, there's a variety of different tools for that out there. You, we use a tool called metronome, which works pretty effectively for us. And it does have a whole, the whole meeting rhythm concept all built into it. So it's a, it's a pretty good structure. You could also do it in a, in a product like Basecamp, in terms of, to track your meetings and track your KPIs and things. That you, you know, as one of the other things you do need though, is you need the information about who's doing what and who's working on what and keeping track of your projects. For that I would highly recommend this product called Estimate Rocket is really a great tool for tracking your projects and keeping track of who's doing what. That's one of the things Estimate Rocket does is it does keep track of who is the key person for the various aspects of the project. So when you do get to these review processes, you can go look at a project and see who did which parts of the project, which truly which crew members worked on it. And all that information that you need to be able to make good, good decisions and evaluations about it.
Chris Shank
We hear people using Estimate Rocket to project it up on the wall or to have some screen on to say, Hey, what are we all doing? You want to look at your calendar, your schedule? Yeah. How did we do last week? What were the closing rates? What salespeople did in the city? Where are we in most? Or you're kind of mapping out where we're going to be? What's the reason why you may want to use something to just bring up? What is our brain? How do you visualize that? There's so many, whatever people are using, know that people are using our tool for that very reason. So it's helpful to have that as content for your conversations. Because, you know, they say that, you know, when you're dealing in abstract ideas, what I want to do, what we hope to do, or we think we did, you need numbers, you need figures, you need to make that a little more concrete to say, right? Actually, what we did is actually what our plan is for today, you know, so it helps to have real content in your conversation. So it doesn't become too inflated with abstractions, right?
Chris Shank
Yeah, for true accountability. That's right. So Well, I think this is a topic that a lot of people are trying to figure out. And a lot of times you're building that bridge, as you cross it, you know, estimate rockin with me this morning a little bit. You said like, well, we've this stuff we've learned and this stuff we're still learning, I'm like, well, that's perfect. Because we always try to Estimate Rocket, as a business as a model for how business can be run, because a lot of people are kind of looking for ways to do it. So we're sharing our own learnings here. And as an Estimate Rocket employee, I've come in and been with these meeting rhythms and the quarterly meetings and stuff. And it's really neat to see it evolve, and it does evolve. I mean, would you say that it grows with you your style of meetings and accountability does evolve over time and change with you?
Tom Droste
Yeah, it needs to, if it's working, it's going to grow. And it's going to evolve into, you know, into a better process, you'll find as you dedicate yourself to this, you will find that your meetings get better and better and more and more effective. Like, for example, a stand up meeting, in some cases, it's just that everything is good. I'm doing this today. And I'm doing this and this today, and it's great. We're done. And sometimes it's not.
Sometimes it's Oh, wow, we got to take care of that. What are we? How are we going to, you know, who can help with that? Or how can we get that done? So, as you dial it in, you'll know which meetings I know, we went through a process where we probably had two or three too many meetings going on too many of the longer meetings with the with, you know, different team members and realize, hey, in fact, I was working with a coach at the time, too. And, and he said, Oh, wait a minute, you're having that many meetings like oh, yeah, it's like, you're overdue. So you want to have the right number of meetings, obviously, where you're, you know, everybody's informed and knows what's going on. But you're not feeling like you're spending your whole life in meetings.
Kathy Droste
And there's a huge amount of satisfaction for the entire company, when they see the well oiled machine working at really a top level of performance…
Tom Droste
Through alignment.
Kathy Droste
Alignment, team alignment, like music to our ears.
Tom Droste
It is like a beautiful symphony.
Kathy Droste
Yes. And alignment also reduces stress. Right and how much of that do we all need in our lives? Absolutely.
Chris Shank
Tom, always great to have you on, thanks for being on the podcast.
Tom Droste
Totally a pleasure, Chris. Great, great topic and always enjoy talking with you guys.