This morning I spent time with a local group of home remodelers, a thoughtful room of owners and managers who care about doing the work well. Before the session, I asked each of them to name their biggest challenge. Every single one said the same thing: people.
The details varied, but the pattern didn’t. Employees on their phones, waiting around to be told what to do. Crews that don’t match the owner’s passion for getting it done right. Jobs estimated at a certain number of hours that run over, sometimes by double. Good people trained at real expense who leave after two years. Team members who aren’t entirely honest about what they can and can’t do. And work that isn’t done right the first time, which means sending a second crew back to fix it, with all the damage that does to customer satisfaction, scheduling, and profit.
And this isn’t a home remodeling problem, or a skilled-trades problem, or a general labor problem. I hear the same litany from retail owners, home care agencies, manufacturers, professional offices, and everything in between. Right now, nearly every owner and manager I talk to is singing some version of this song.
Then came the line I’ve heard in some form from nearly every owner I’ve ever worked with: “I’ve told them thirty times what I expect.”
I believe them. I’m sure they have. Here’s the uncomfortable part, offered with real respect: if you’ve said it thirty times and it still isn’t happening, the problem probably isn’t that your people haven’t heard you. It’s that telling was never a system. A reminder over the phone, a comment in passing, a correction on the job site: that’s communication, but it isn’t accountability. Nobody walked away knowing, in writing, exactly what they own and how they’ll be measured on it.
And the cost is easy to underestimate. When expectations live in the owner’s head, every employee fills in the blanks with their own version. Some wait for direction because nobody told them what the job actually is. Some overrun hours because no one defined what “on budget” looks like for their seat. Some oversell their skills because nobody ever checked. The owner gets frustrated, the team gets defensive, and the same conversation happens again next month.
The good news is that none of this requires a different set of people. It requires a structure around the people you have, and a better filter for the people you hire next.
Every business is different, and your situation will have wrinkles mine doesn’t. But after more than thirty years of working with owners, this is where I’d start:
1. Put accountabilities on paper, seat by seat.** Every role should have a short list of what that person is responsible for, in plain language. For a crew lead, that might include finishing within the estimated hours, passing a quality check before leaving the site, and keeping the schedule. When people know what they own, “waiting to be told” loses its cover.
2. Hire against Core Values and real capability.** Use a simple scorecard on every candidate and every current employee: do they live your Core Values, do they truly understand the job, do they genuinely want it, and do they have the capacity to do it well? Ask candidates to show you the work, not just describe it. It’s far easier to catch an overstated skill before the hire than after the rework.
3. Document how the work gets done right the first time.** You don’t need a thick manual. A short checklist of the three to five steps that matter most (a pre-job walkthrough, a mid-job check, a final inspection before the crew leaves) prevents more callbacks than another round of verbal reminders.
4. Replace hallway reminders with a real rhythm.** Hold a structured weekly meeting where accountabilities, job numbers, and hours against estimates are reviewed in the open, on the same day, in the same format. Formal doesn’t mean stiff. It means everyone knows when expectations get reviewed and that someone is paying attention. And when a number slips, don’t just note it and move on. Work it through Identify, Discuss, Solve. A job that ran double its estimated hours isn’t a complaint to vent about; it’s an issue to put on the table. Identify it, dig into the root cause (was the estimate wrong, the scope unclear, the crew unprepared?), and leave with a specific fix, an owner, and a date. That’s how the same overrun stops showing up job after job.
5. Share the why, not just the what.** People who feel they’re only trading hours for pay will do what’s required and not much more. People who understand what the business is trying to build, and the standard it holds itself to, start caring about the outcome. Your Vision and Core Values are what turn a transactional job into something worth owning.
None of this happens overnight, and the owners in that room already work hard enough. But I left that session convinced of something: the frustration they’re feeling isn’t a sign they have the wrong people or the wrong standards. It’s a sign they’ve been carrying a system in their heads that their team can’t see.
If any of this sounds familiar in your own business, I’d be glad to talk it through.