5 Signs You Need To Hire A Project Manager

Greg: [00:00:00]
Welcome back to the podcast. So the episode today, we’re talking about a subject, which I get asked so many times, should I hire a project manager? Is my business ready for it? So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, juggling every job, buried in the phone calls, client questions, all of that stuff, this episode is probably exactly what you need.

We’re gonna be looking at five clear signs that your construction business may desperately need a project manager. You know this, that you can’t scale your business if everything is running through you. So grab a coffee, have a listen to this episode, because by the end of it, you are gonna know exactly if you are ready for that next critical step.

And it is a critical step because once you get your first project manager, it really can transform your business and your personal life too. So let’s get into it. So the five signs, let’s talk about sign number one. You are constantly being interrupted. So lemme just ask you something about that.

 

 

[00:01:00]

Does your day ever actually feel like your day or is your answer to that?

No, it never feels like my day. I start with a plan. I’m gonna go and do this. I’m gonna focus on managing this site and make sure it runs smoothly. And then maybe I’ll finish catching up on that quote. But what actually happens when you start your day? Sometimes you barely get onto site, the phone’s ringing, it’s the supplier, you’ve got a problem.

With your order before you hang up, the phone is ringing again in the background, a team member’s asking where those materials are for a job, and then you’ve got a client texting you about a minor issue that you haven’t even got to yet. All of that is going on before you’ve even hit the job site, and maybe your office manager needs you to approve an invoice.

It just feels like chaos. It’s not really your day’s being run by other people. And what does this mean for you? It means you can’t focus, you can’t get ahead. And you’re constantly reacting to problems instead of actually proactively moving the business forward.

 

 

[00:02:00]

We really wanna resolve this because it’s really about protecting your own mental capacity.

When you’re being pulled in a hundred different directions every single day, you really start to lose a bit of clarity and you start to forget things. You start making rush decisions. And what ends up happening is if we’re honest, we can do it for a certain period, but then we really start dropping the ball.

And we start dropping the ball on things that really matter, like getting your quotes out properly or following up on leads or thinking and growing the business strategically. So it’s not that you are lazy or disorganized, it’s not necessarily that’s the case, it’s just that the structure around you is broken and you’ve become the bottleneck.

Everything runs through you, every decision, every approval, every call. You are the glue that’s holding the business together. And I know how that feels ’cause I’ve been there. I’ve been exactly there. And it can be tough and you feel guilty about it because you’re not growing the business. You’re snapping at your team your family’s waiting for you and you’re home late again.

 

 

[00:03:00]

And af you know, you’re just thinking to yourself, why can’t I just get ahead? Why does it always feel like this? The reality is. Is that you probably feel like that because you are trying to do the job of three people or more. You are still running your business the way you were running it at maybe when you were at 300 K or 500 k, but now you are maybe at 800 or a mill or maybe even more, and the cracks might be starting to show.

So what is the solution? It could well be that you need a project manager, and this is not a luxury, it’s not like a luxury hire one day. Sometimes it’s. Actually a real necessary step if you wanna break through the million pound barrier and you wanna reclaim your focus and grow your business, and a good PM can really help you out of that.

When you’ve got a good pm, taking some of the pressure off you, it means. That instead of 15 people ringing you with problems, it’s the project manager they ring.

 

 

[00:04:00]

And just that one change, that single change there can give you your time back. It gives you your head space back, and it gives you the power to actually lead your business again rather than just trying to survive and cope.

So sign number one that you may need a project manager is that you just feel that you are just constantly interrupted all day long and everything’s. Going through you. That’s sign number one. Yeah, maybe it’s time to really think about hiring someone else that can take some of that away from you and just create some space for you to breathe, think, and drive the business forward.

So maybe that’s already triggered. Someone communion, you think, yep, I need to get someone on. But there may be more signs. What’s the second sign you need a project manager? Are your projects frequently delayed? Or are they running over budget regularly? So look, we know in construction delays happen, don’t they?

A supplier lets you down. The weather turns bad, especially in the UK.

 

 

[00:05:00]

I’m living in Australia now, but I know that yeah, UK weather can be absolutely awful and really knock you out for weeks at a time. Or maybe your subcontractor lets you down and goes awol. But what you’ve just gotta ask yourself is every job running late?

Is it a one-off? Or is every job running late? Is every project blowing the budget? Now, if that’s the case, it’s not just bad luck and you can’t just blame it on the weather. There’s a broken system there in your business, and more often than not, that’s because you haven’t got anyone that’s just dedicated to controlling the project timeline, controlling the workflow, controlling the numbers, and.

Let’s just be honest about it. If you are the person that is trying to do all of that, you are trying to manage the project. You’re quoting, you are ordering, you’re dealing with clients, you’re supervising the trades, sorting out the variation orders. Things are gonna slip through the cracks. Materials don’t get ordered on time.

Your variations don’t get documented properly. Your subbies turn up and there’s nothing ready for them.

 

 

[00:06:00]

And that job that should have taken eight weeks now drags over into maybe 10, 11, 12 weeks, which means your payment get delays. Your payments get delayed, your margins get squeezed, and your reputation gets ruined a little bit if we’re honest.

So just, let’s just flip that around, what could it look like? Imagine that every single job had someone else looking after it. Someone whose sole focus was making sure that those materials were there on time, that the trades were organized and scheduled logically and efficiently, that every variation was getting captured, costed, and approved and tracked.

And that the job was staying on budget and finished when you promised. Imagine that happened on every single job. That’s the role of a project manager. They don’t just handle the chaos. They should be preventing it. And they’re not just chasing the timeline. They own the timeline. They’re in control of it.

So that means it’s not you that’s calling those suppliers at 7:00 AM or updating clients.

 

 

[00:07:00]

When you finally get home from work you’re no longer juggling a dozen moving parts in your head because you’ve got someone else. Else that’s doing that for you. So that means your jobs run smoother, your clients are happier and you make more money.

So that could be sign number two that you need a pm. If you’re finding that your jobs are regularly delayed or over budget, you just need someone else that’s in control of that project for you instead of it being you. Sign number three is that the business just can’t function without you. So if you disappeared for two weeks, starting.

Tomorrow, let’s imagine you go to the Maldives and you turn your phone off. No site visits, no calls, no emails. Just ask yourself, honestly, would the job still run smoothly? Would clients still get updates? Would your team know what to do? Or would everything come grinding to a halt? If you’re honest about that, and if your answer is look, if I’m not there, nothing’s getting done.

 

 

[00:08:00]

There’s just a massive red flag because if your business isn’t operating. Without you, then you don’t really own a business that you are owning a job and you know, you’re not just owning the job, you’re owning every job. You’re owning the job of the head of operations, you’re owning the job of the estimator, the site supervisor, the client liaison, the HR department, and maybe you are even a trades person on the tools every now and again.

So that’s just an awful job. It’s a job that will burn anyone out and it can be really tough. So you’ve got to learn to let go. We’ve spoke about this many times on the podcast. The only way you are really gonna scale your construction business is you’ve gotta build a structure that doesn’t rely on you.

And the first part of that structure will be having a project manager that comes in, someone else who will take that responsibility. As we said, for coordinating the trades and updating clients, all that sort of thing. They can keep the business moving even when you step away.

 

 

[00:09:00]

So it’s not about you losing control, it’s about you actually building more capacity in your business to.

On more. So think about that. Is that something there, is that a sign that the business just will not move ahead without you? That could be a real red flag that, yeah, you need a project manager that’s gonna be able to take things on your behalf. Sign number four, you start missing critical details.

Now this one usually starts quite small. You know, you forget to chase a material order. And it gets delayed. Everyone’s waiting around for it. As we said, a variation might not get documented and then, you know, all of a sudden you remember it at the end of the job. And now the client’s really annoyed ’cause you’ve sprung a load of extras on them right at the end.

Maybe you approved a quote but didn’t realize that actually it was over budget and you shouldn’t have paid that much for that quote. Or maybe something goes wrong on site and the client’s really annoyed because they told you what to do and you didn’t follow instruction.

 

 

[00:10:00]

Now they’re not catastrophic mistakes or.

These things individually, are they, but they, all of them cost you. They cost you time, they cost you money, and they cost you trust from the client. They delay the jobs, they frustrate clients. The team gets annoyed. Just leads to awkward conversations. And if that keeps happening, if that’s starting to become a regular occurrence, that things are going wrong regularly and you are missing critical details, then it’s gonna chip away at your margins and it’s gonna chip away at your reputation.

And it’s not ’cause you’re careless, obviously you do care and you’re doing your best, but it’s ’cause your head’s in 20 places at once, you know you are across five projects. You are also running the quotes you’re taking the calls, texting the team, all of that, all at the same time. And that mental load guarantees that things will fall through the cracks because you are the bottleneck.

So as we’ve said, a project manager deals with all of that for you. You know, they’re holding the process together so you don’t have to. So just. Think about that.

 

 

[00:11:00]

If you’re doing too many jobs and the details starting to slip, then that is really sign number four that you need to bring that project manager in.

The fifth sign that you may need a project manager is that you find that your growth has been capped. So think about that for a second. Think about the scenario where maybe you are getting plenty of leads in. You’re pricing jobs nonstop. You know there’s work there, the market’s there. You should be scaling, but you’re not.

You are stuck. Look at the same revenue month after month, maybe even year after year, 800 K, 900 K million. You just can’t seem to be going beyond that and you’re not moving very fast. Maybe you’ve even gone backwards a little bit. Why? Why is that happening? It’s probably because you’re at full capacity.

You can’t take on more jobs without something breaking, and the person that’s gonna break is you, your sanity levels. So it’s not necessarily a sales. Problem. It’s not necessarily a marketing problem, it’s a delivery problem, a delivery bottleneck.

 

 

[00:12:00]

You just simply do not have the structure to handle more work because you are overseeing everything.

You’re doing it all yourself, so you’ve become the ceiling, and that’s when you know there’s another sign that you need a project manager, because they’re gonna give you the room to scale. They’ll remove that cap that’s currently holding your business back so that you can run more projects at once. You can say yes to the bigger projects with confidence that you.

Can take it on and actually deliver it. And it means you can spend more time on the strategy, the pricing, or hiring the subcontractors that you need. So that’s another sign, the last sign that you need a project manager. So maybe you are listening to all those five signs there and you think, yep, one or two of those is really resonating.

Maybe all five of those are resonating. So now let’s imagine you’re listening to this thinking. Yeah, I know Greg. You’re right. I need a project manager. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m gonna go out and hire one. Just a little bit of a bonus thing we wanna discuss is how can you clearly identify and hire the right project manager?

 

 

[00:13:00]

Hey, can I just ask a quick favor? We are constantly trying to bring on the best guests on this podcast so we can deliver as much value as possible, but the only way we can do that is if we get more subscribers, more likes, more comments, and more reviews. So subscribe to this channel and click notifications so you know, every time we’ve got a new video coming up, give us a review if you’re getting any value from it, and give us a thumbs up.

We’d really appreciate that.

This is where a lot of people get stuck because sometimes they’ve been burnt badly. They go out there, they hire the first person that looks good on paper or they go and hire someone from site. That’s great on the tools. But they can’t run a calendar properly or speak confidently with a client and they get burned.

And sometimes if you get the wrong person on board, it actually causes more chaos and more headache. And because people have been burned in the past, they won’t then take that step of hiring a project manager.

 

 

[00:14:00]

’cause they think, ah, just, I don’t wanna put myself through it again. It’s too painful. So here’s a few tips on how to hire the right pm.

Tip number one is don’t. Just hire a trades person and call them a pm. So you might be really tempted to go out there and promote your best chippy or the best brickie that you’ve got to the role because they’ve been with you for years and they’re really loyal to you. And look, loyalty does matter.

And it’s also important to identify. People on site. If there are potential people on your team, I always say, you know, look at your team first. But project management is a different skill set to someone being on the tools. Yes, they need construction knowledge, but they also need to be good at time management.

They need to be good at organization, they need to be really good at communication, and they also need to have a level of tech. Competence, you know, you want ’em to be able to prepare Gantt charts and use, you know, job management software, spreadsheets, things like that.

 

 

[00:15:00]

So you need someone that can coordinate people, not just someone who knows how to do the work.

You know, you may, that may be a trade. Person that you may have someone in your team that is a tradie that can do all of that, but don’t just promote a tradie just because they’re a good tradie. They’ve got to be able to match the other skill sets. So that’s tip number one. The second thing you wanna do is if you are hiring from outside, make sure that they have proven project coordination experience or proven project manager experience.

And are, have they got project management experience in the type of role that you are looking to fill? Now I’ve made this. Estate before I hired a project manager who had worked for Multiplex, so huge construction company, billion dollar construction business. He’d worked for them as a project manager, but he just could not translate those skills to the domestic market.

 

 

[00:16:00]

He couldn’t run multiple small projects for clients. He was used to dealing with, you know, big you know, tier one contractors. Tier two contractors. You need to think about that, you know? Have they got the skillset and the project management skills for the type of job that they’re gonna be looking after?

Have a look at their cvs, have a look at their profiles. Look at the type of projects they’ve managed. Is it right for you? What sort of budget ranges have they handled in the past? Is it the same budget ranges that you are looking for? You know, how many teams or contractors have they coordinated and can they bring any contractors on for you?

It’s always a bonus if they’ve got connections and they can bring teams on. And there’s a little. Bit of a sign there. If they do have really good teams that they can bring on board, it’s probably a sign that they’re a good project manager. Because if the teams will want to come and work for them, the SUBBY teams, then they’re probably a good pm.

You know, if they haven’t got any SUBBY teams, maybe they’ve burnt those connections or they’ve handled subcontractors poorly in the past, and maybe the last thing you wanna look at is systems and software that they’re used to working with.

 

 

[00:17:00]

You know, have they worked with simPRO or Procore or Buildertrend?

Asana. You know, what are they good at using? And that can be a little bit of an idea on how techy they are too. So what you’re really looking for with this is that they’re nice and organized. They’re nice and proactive, and they’re nice and structured. Alright? So they’re the first two tips. Make sure that they, you’re not just hiring a trades person and calling them a PM and call in number PM and make sure they’ve got proven project manager experience for the type of work that you do.

Tip number three is, let’s imagine you found those two, you’ve ticked the boxes and. In the first two. How do you interview this person? You want to really think about copying and pasting these questions. If you listen to this and transcribing it, just write these questions down or copy and paste them down.

Ask these questions in an interview, tell me how you’d handle a subcontractor falling behind schedule. What’s your process for catching that early and then bringing the project back on track?

 

 

[00:18:00]

Great question there for the, project manager to show you how they would deal with a project falling behind.

’cause it’s gonna happen all the time and they need to be aware of that. Maybe you could ask them what is their method for keeping clients informed? How often do you communicate with clients and how do you manage your client’s expectations? That could be a good question to see their communication skills.

What about their problem solving? Skills, maybe you could ask them. Imagine a project is starting to go over budget. How would you approach that? What steps would you take to fix it without escalating the issue unnecessarily? Maybe you could ask them how they would structure a job from start to finish.

Like what, how do they set up their sites? What systems or templates do they use in order to run a project? That could be a great question too. So asking types of questions like this really helps you see if is someone strategic. Strategic in the way they think and the way they act, or are they reactive?

And are they just turning up to do a job or are they actually running and proactively running a project?

 

 

[00:19:00]

Questions like that will just help you dive into the mindset of that project manager. The fourth tip on hiring is you want them to be really clear on their day-to-day responsibilities. This is really important and it should be outlined from the beginning.

What does success look like in this role? Really crucial. You wanna write down the exact responsibilities you want them to own, because if you are vague about it, then what they’ll do is they’ll potentially start shifting responsibilities onto other people. I thought that was the office manager’s job to deal with that, or, I thought that was your job, Greg, to deal with that.

You’ve gotta be really clear on what they own as a project manager, what’s in their remit. And what’s not in their remit. So some examples for that may be you want them to own the timeline. So you say to them, you create and manage the Gantt chart or the job schedule, because if you create it for them and then the job starts overrunning, they could start saying that’s ’cause you, it wasn’t coordinated properly from the beginning.

 

 

[00:20:00]

You’ve given us a schedule that’s unrealistic. So let them write the schedule and then you can review it and maybe tie it up if needed. You wanna let them own. Ordering the materials in advance and tracking deliveries. Potentially let them liaise with subcontractors to confirm dates and scopes of work.

Let them compare quotes and check it against the projected budgets. Let them do site walkthroughs and quality control tech checks. Let them handle the day-to-day client communication, all that sort of thing. Maybe variation orders. They own the variation orders and they’ve gotta track those, get approvals for them and make sure.

They’re they’re followed through. So all of that stuff, you know, they can own and make sure they’re obviously tracking it all. And make sure you’ve you’ve set the responsibilities for them and you are clearly tracking them on that responsibility. So one thing I would do is do a real detailed job description for them, and then I would take that job description and then you would use that job description as an appraisal metric.

 

 

[00:21:00]

So when you come to the appraisals after a month or three months, I really like doing 36. The 90 day appraisals. You can just go through that checklist and say, in, by day 30, we want you to be doing this, and this. By day 60, you should be doing this, and this. And by day 90 you should be fully running every single part of your job description and then measure them against that and see how they, they got on.

So that’s really important. Step number five. Is always have a trial period and let them know they are on trial. Now, the length of that trial is really up to you, but it wants to be anywhere between maybe four and 12 weeks. And depending on the sort of length of projects that you do, but really they’ve gotta be running a couple of projects on their own, maybe light supervision at first, let them prove themselves, you know, how are they getting on with communication?

How reliable are they? Are they staying on top of tasks without being challeng? That’s really crucial.

 

 

[00:22:00]

And are they staying in control? Do you feel like you are in control? Sorry, by having them on board. Think about that. Are they in control of their jobs, which makes you feel more in control?

So have a look at those. Those five steps maybe that will help you with with bringing the right project manager on board. So just to recap what they were, don’t just hire a trades person and call them pm. Make sure they’ve got proven project management experience for the types of jobs that you do. When you’re interviewing, use scenario based interview questions to test their strategic thinking.

Be really clear on their day-to-day responsibilities. Make sure that’s written down and they understand what they own. And number five, start with a trial period to test them out and see how they get on. So there’s your tips. Five signs on how to know whether you need a project manager and five things you can do to make sure you find and attract a good project manager to come onto your business.

 

 

[00:23:00]

Hiring a right pm, it doesn’t just make your business more efficient, it gives you time back, it gives you freedom back and you focus and energy and you’ve really gotta hire intentionally. Around this role. Don’t just reactively go out and hire someone just ’cause you want a big project. You wanna hire intentionally and give yourself a little bit of a lead in time about who you want and and select the right person to come on.

Because when you bring on the right pm, it’s just a game changer. It truly is an absolute game changer for your business and for your personal life because that’ll take so much pressure off of you and really unlock the growth that you may need for your business. So just to recap, if you’re constantly.

Interrupted on site. If your jobs are overrunning, if you’re managing every fire, if you’re missing critical details and if you feel stuck at your current revenue level, it’s time. It’s time to stop carrying the entire business on your shoulders. It’s time to hire a project manager. This is the next strategic move that you want to make.

 

 

[00:24:00]

Just remember the quote from Michael Gerber sort of mentioned it earlier, but lemme just say it in full. If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have. A job and it’s the most stressful job in the world. Couldn’t be true or words could they. So I hope you found that helpful this episode today.

Maybe now you understand if you need to hire your first project manager or not. If you found that useful, some of the tips there, please subscribe. Please leave me a review and if you’re enjoying these episodes or there’s. Different subjects you want me to discuss or different guests that you want me to get on, feel free to let me know.

Send me an email or leave something in the comments and we’ll try and read all of those and make sure we can get some information out there that really does matter to you. And feel free to share this too with any other construction business owner that needs to hear it. I’ll see you in the next episode.