Scaling Through the COVID Shutdown, Exterior Home Remodeling Firm

Context

This was an exterior home remodeling firm in Virginia, running roofing, siding and window work across multiple sites with a team of 72. I came in as Senior Manager of Business Operations and Strategy, which put firm-wide resource planning under me along with the production and sales standards and two new service lines the owner wanted stood up. The shutdown landed roughly ten months into that, and it arrived in the middle of building the new lines rather than after they were finished.

The Situation

Most home remodeling operations froze when COVID hit, and the reasons were the same everywhere you looked. Material availability went sideways because factories and suppliers were closed or running at reduced capacity, and the transportation problems stacked on top of that made lead times unpredictable enough that you could not build a schedule around them. Raw material pricing moved with the shortages, which put pressure on budgets that were already set. The new health and safety requirements meant smaller crews and staggered shifts, so the same job took longer with the same people on it. The office went remote, which is not a small thing in a business where the schedule lives in somebody's head and gets fixed by walking down the hall. Every one of those is a real constraint, and none of them is a reason the year had to be bad, because demand for home improvement work went up during that stretch rather than down. The operators who could actually deliver were the ones who got it.

What I Did

Rebuilt supply chain sourcing from the ground up. I widened the supplier base so a single shutdown at a single manufacturer could not stop a job, and I moved a meaningful share of the buying to local suppliers, which took lead time and transportation exposure out of the schedule at the same time. Bulk purchasing agreements with the key suppliers locked pricing in ahead of the inflation and gave us volume terms that offset a good deal of it. The point of all of it was to make the material arrive on the date the schedule said it would, because everything downstream of that date was already sold.

Realigned human capital and budgets against live project schedules. Firm-wide resource planning had been running off a plan written before any of this started, so I moved it to assigning people and money against what the schedule actually needed week to week. Crews got sized to the work in front of them instead of to a forecast, and the budget followed the same logic. That change is where the 26% revenue increase and the 12% cost reduction came from, and the two moved together rather than one at the expense of the other.

Wrote the production and sales standard operating procedures. We were hiring into a distributed operation with people working partly remote, which is the worst possible time to be training by shoulder-tap. Standardizing how production and sales actually run took new-hire onboarding time down 40% and got performance consistent across the sites instead of varying by whoever happened to be running each one.

Launched two new revenue lines from zero. I stood up the insurance restoration division and the solar division inside my first eighteen months, which put the build straight through the shutdown. Insurance restoration brought in $3.8M and solar brought in $1.4M, $5.2M combined, and both of them came from nothing.

Results

What It Proved

The demand was there the whole time, and what separated the operators who grew from the ones who froze was whether they could deliver against it. The constraint was never sales, it sat in the supply chain and in resource planning, and both of those are fixable by an operator who is willing to go rebuild them while everything else is on fire. Launching two service lines in the middle of that is the part I would point to, because a business that is genuinely stalled cannot do it, and it says the operating base underneath was solid enough to carry new weight.

The Transferable Part

When your inputs turn unpredictable, holding more inventory and pushing harder on the schedule are both the wrong answer, and they are the two answers most operations reach for first. Widen the number of places the material can come from, shorten the distance it travels, and then re-plan people and budget against what is actually in front of you week to week instead of against the plan you wrote in a calmer month. That combination is what let this firm grow 26% in a year the rest of the industry spent standing still.