Nick Vanderheyden

General Manager

Black Dog Homes

Wayzata, Minn.

On an  accountability process: We’ve had massive growth, and added roughly one person every six weeks for the last two years. We found that we were losing productivity. Someone would forget we didn’t get structural engineering done, or they thought someone else was doing it. Maybe a permit wasn’t submitted. It was costing time. So we created an accountability chart. First we wrote out every step in our process from the moment a customer calls to the moment we complete their one-year walk through. We then put those tasks on the left hand side of a spreadsheet.  Across the top, we added every role in the company and who owns each step. It’s been a complete game changer. We use it now in our production and design meetings, and every single person on the team knows the specific cell on the accountability chart that every project is in currently. We now say, “This is the hand-off point, this person owned that and now it’s on to this person.”

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