The results
ENGAGEMENT WRAPPEDWhat it did.
Directional results over the two quarters that followed, reported by the owner rather than pulled from a system.
Down from about a third, and the slips that remain are days rather than weeks.
A multi-unit order where a revised measurement never reached the shop, costing about $22,000 to put right.
From the builder who nearly walked after that job, placed in the following year.
The context
A small shop doing work nobody else will take.
A 12,000 square foot shop in the Greater Toronto Area building custom aluminum and wood-clad windows and doors, the heritage sizes and odd openings that standard product cannot cover.
Around 70% is residential replacement for high-end renovations, the rest is small-batch supply to boutique builders on four to twelve unit projects. They install most of the residential work themselves and hand builder work to the builder’s own crews. Fourteen people, roughly $3.2M a year, and an owner who knew every job by heart.
What was breaking
Three things, over and over.
1 job in 3
Dates that moved
About one job in three shipped or installed late. The average slip was eleven days, and a few complex heritage jobs slid six weeks or more.
9% of revenue
Work done twice
Rework and warranty callbacks ran near 9% of revenue. Most of it traced back to field measurements that were wrong, and nobody caught them before the glass was cut.
No single source
Two versions of the truth
Estimators quoted off the first site visit. Final measures lived in notebooks and email, so shop packets sometimes carried dimensions that had already been revised.
None of this was carelessness. Rush jobs jumped the queue without anything else being rescheduled, glass got ordered late, and a remeasure could be perfectly correct and still never reach the person cutting to it.
Why they called
A $140,000 job that arrived the wrong size.
Six units showed up on site undersized. A revised measurement from a second site visit had never made it out of the estimator’s notes and into the shop order.
The install crew was already booked and standing on site. The builder was furious. The owner absorbed about $22,000 in rush glass charges, overtime to re-fabricate, and a discount to keep the relationship alive.
I’m the only one who knows where anything actually stands, and I found out about this the same day the crew did. I can’t keep running the business like this.
That call was not about buying software. It was about making this stop, and about the owner no longer being the only system in the building.
The approach
Ten weeks, working the flow.
Map
Walk the whole path from first site visit to warranty walk-through and find where information falls out.
Gate
Put one hard checkpoint in front of the most expensive mistake, cutting glass to the wrong number.
Show
Make the status of every job visible on the floor so nobody has to ask the owner.
Assign
Name who owns each decision so the checks stop landing on whoever happens to notice.
What I built
Six pieces, none of them fancy.
The insight
The fix was a signature, not software.
The most expensive problem in the shop was solved by one sheet of paper that two people had to sign before glass got cut. Everything else, the board, the roles, the update cadence, existed to keep that one checkpoint honest. Small shops rarely need a new system. They need the handoffs to stop leaking.
The outcome
ENGAGEMENT WRAPPEDDates that mean something.
Directional results over the two quarters that followed.
- Callbacks and rework down from roughly 9% of revenue to about 4%.
- Late jobs down from about a third to under 15%, and the slips that remain are days rather than weeks.
- The owner checks the board twice a week instead of chasing status on the floor every day.
- The builder who nearly walked after the $140,000 job placed two more orders in the following year.
The real win was not the percentages. It was the owner getting to run the business instead of living inside its breakdowns.
Let’s talk
Paying for the same mistake twice?
I help small shops and owner-led teams find the handoff that keeps leaking, and put something simple in its place.