Austin Gray: All right, we have Marlena Spiegeler on the podcast this week! Marlena, welcome to the show.

Marlena Spiegeler: Thank you for having me!

Austin Gray: Marlena is the Office Operations Manager at G&M Outdoor Services. If you have been listening to the podcast, you have likely heard a couple of the other episodes where I've had her brother Garrett on. Marlena, and I think Garrett would probably vouch for this as well, you are sort of the brains behind the whole back office.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, yep! I wear a lot of hats, as most business owners do, but I'm behind the scenes of everything at G&M from accounting, HR, marketing, and all the above—anything that needs to be done.

Austin Gray: Garrett told us a bit about the startup story in his first episode, but if I remember correctly, you and Garrett both started the business at the same time, right? Like, you were still working, and you had another full-time job, and you were basically helping Garrett with all the back office during your lunch breaks, if I remember?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yeah, so we started in 2017. I worked a corporate job—we'll call it. I worked doing payroll for a big construction company in the area, and I would do stuff on my lunch break, quote unquote, and in the evenings and stuff. But at the time, it was just Garrett and one other guy, so there wasn't too much that needed to be done all day, every day. So I worked there for about a year and a half or so when we started out, just to get things moving in those early days.

Austin Gray: What were some of the specific roles and responsibilities that you helped out with?

Marlena Spiegeler: So just managing everything that I do now behind the scenes, but it was obviously at a smaller scale when it was Garrett and another guy. We didn't have processes, we didn't have software, we didn't have anything like that. So we had our Google platform—Google Drive, Google Sheets, all of that—Google Calendar. So that was kind of the brains of the company to begin with. Right now, that's just one of the tools in the toolbox. But we had our schedule on Google Calendar and then emailing our clients and using Google Sheets for shared information and stuff like that. That was mine, and then with QuickBooks as well. I had never worked with QuickBooks before, so I self-taught myself QuickBooks from the beginning. I managed all of that. But when it's just one crew and Garrett's doing the sales and the actual work, there's not a whole lot of jobs. Everything's kind of just in his head at that point.

Austin Gray: When you start out, how did you think about getting all of that stuff out of his head and into the processes in place right now?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yeah, so that's what has to happen, especially with any salesperson— the whole job can't just be in the salesperson's head of, "Oh, we got to do this, this, this." It needs to all be in the system. In a perfect world situation, the crew, the foreman wouldn't even have to call the sales guy; everything would be in Jobber, which is the system we use. Everything would be in there that they needed for the job—the scope of work, the internal notes, photos, drawings, site maps—all that type of stuff.

In those early days, Garrett was answering the phone; he would do all of the sales meetings with the homeowners, and then he was the one out there actually doing the work as well. So at that time, you didn't have to transfer anything over. That was probably the first six months or so, and then that was the next full season. We had a foreman as well, so we were putting as much as we could in the Google Calendar. Garrett was just meeting with him on-site, so it was a lot of just not in a system type of thing, where now we have, you know, we're on ten different sites with deliveries and sales and stuff like that, where everything is in our system. Nothing happens unless it's in Jobber, in our schedule software.

Austin Gray: Okay, so in those beginning days, Garrett would answer the phone, Garrett would meet with the clients, he would go with his other guy and do the job.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes.

Austin Gray: So what specifically, like when would you be engaged in those early days?

Marlena Spiegeler: Scheduling with the customer, emailing the customer when we're going to be there, helping order some of the material depending on what it was, and then the final billing to the client. So when we didn't have, you know, a whole step-by-step software, I don't know—some of your listeners are probably familiar with Jobber—that sort of CRM, where it's from the quoting stage to the job stage to the invoice stage, getting all that information ahead of time so that when we bill, it's already, you know, the customer signed off on it and everything.

So a lot of it was just, okay, having to call Garrett and say, "What are we billing for this job?" That type of thing versus it being in software now, and there are notes saying, "Ready to bill," and then I send the invoice from there.

Austin Gray: Okay, and so that's what you would do over lunch and in the evenings? So primarily scheduling and billing focused in the early days?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, scheduling, billing, a little bit of employee onboarding, HR type of stuff, and then the expenses, yeah, and integrating QuickBooks into there.

Austin Gray: Okay, and you managed the books for how long until you brought in a third party?

Marlena Spiegeler: I still manage the books! I have a full-time office admin that works with me—she's my right arm—she does all of the data entry now of everything with QuickBooks, but I still oversee everything at a high level.

Austin Gray: Okay, and then you submit everything to a CPA for tax filing at your end?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, yeah.

Austin Gray: Okay, wow! So you're still managing the books?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, that's awesome. Yeah, because there are so many— even like in our business right now, like I still have to be involved, even though we've hired a third party. So my Mondays are dedicated specifically to answering any questions she has because she's so far removed from the business. I think she's in Pennsylvania, actually. She actually lives in Montana. The firm is out of Pennsylvania. I'm here in Colorado, right? It's like whenever you're hiring a third party, it takes so much time just to get that person up to speed with what actually goes on in your specific business.

Marlena Spiegeler: So that's like a superpower—the fact that you guys have internal bookkeeping.

Austin Gray: Yeah, so we job cost. I should say about every single job. We try to job cost every single job. There are a couple of variables here and there that we wouldn't job cost something. So every expense, every dollar that we're spending, we're tracking back to a job. So there's a lot of manual work that comes into that. So my office admin, she does all of that. So she's tracking every single expense—we're taking our $30,000 payroll and splitting that up to every single job per every guy's hours. So there's a lot that goes into getting that job costing, which is crucial, and it's important to us.

I want to get into that because that is something I'm actively going through right now, and I would love for you to, one, coach me up, but two, coach our listeners up as well. So we just made our first remote hire out of Latin America, and she's doing great so far. But like one of the main projects is job costing, just because we don't have anybody internally like you on our team to dedicate time to this. I feel like my time is pulled in a lot of different directions, and our current team members all have different responsibilities.

So I do want to get to that, but I want to say in the beginning of this because I think it's very interesting to think about how your role has transitioned and how you have, like, in those early days, it's Garrett's the one in the field. All of our listeners— not all, but a lot of our listeners are probably very similar to Garrett. They've started a business; they're out there on the excavator, and they've got one other guy helping them with rake— you know, doing final grading and touch-ups. It's like that's the story most people are living right now.

The people—some people specifically who have reached out to me are pulling their hair out because they're trying to come home and do all of the scheduling and all of the customer communication and the invoicing and the invoice follow-up. It's like those are full-time jobs, right? That's why you have a full-time job. Can you tell me specifically when did it start to transition from Garrett answering the phone to customer calls in off of the website or your Google My Business to someone else answering the phone?

Marlena Spiegeler: That would be about three years fast forward when we hired our first sales guy, Michael. So it kind of transitioned from Garrett being the one doing the work to then our brother Jameson, who was the foreman running the crew the next year, and then Garrett was just doing the sales and overseeing the crew. And then from then, the next year, Michael came on for sales because it was too much for just one Garrett to do. And then Jameson transitioned into the operations role. So then Jamon was in operations, Garrett and Michael in sales, and that's how it still is, but now at a greater scale.

So it was just very natural, but for me to support all of that with the growth has obviously changed and increased a lot and changed with what I do, where now I'm not—I used to touch every single receipt, every single invoice sent out, every single payroll punch, every single, you know, new employee that was onboarded. I was doing all of those steps, but that scale has just grown, and I've had help in the office because it would be just too much for just one person alone, plus all the high-level business owner things.

Austin Gray: Take me back to those early days. What were some of those conversations you had with Garrett in regards to— let's take receipts, for example. What are you telling him that you need him to do in order to get you every single receipt?

Marlena Spiegeler: And that's still what we tell her; you know, that's still what we're trying to hit home with our guys, and they're good about it. We have a digital process—they submit them all digitally now instead of me sorting through stacks of receipts at the end of the month. But he would just, you know, get me a pile of paper at the end of the week or at the end of every two weeks or whatever it was, with all the receipts and all that. Like, I remember going back to, like, our first couple years of snow removal. We didn't have our scheduling software; it was a Google sheet with the snow removal route with everything there, and Garrett would check it off and write notes.

Then in the early morning, I'm headed to my corporate job, and he's at home asleep. We'd pass off the paper, or he'd send me a picture of the paper, and then I would do the billing in QuickBooks based off of that sheet. You know, that we had put everybody's address in order and then made little boxes for him to put whether it was done or not done or how many inches it was or whatever, and then, you know, I'm manually going in and invoicing every customer based on that sheet.

Austin Gray: And in that beginning part, were you invoicing off of QuickBooks?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, we were. We were invoicing all of our jobs out of QuickBooks.

Austin Gray: And then at a certain point, you switched to Jobber?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes. It had to have been either our second or third season; I think it was our third. We just needed something to get— it would have been our third because that was when we brought on Michael, our sales guy—and needing that somewhere for him to send the bids, put all the job information in there, then get it onto the schedule for the crew, and then invoice it from there. So yeah, we've been with Jobber now at least three or four years.

Austin Gray: How would you recommend someone who is in that stage—let's use Garrett and your other guy as the example. If there's someone in that stage of the business, what do you tell them right now in regards to software?

Marlena Spiegeler: Implement Jobber as soon as possible.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I would say so. And you have to do the follow-through with it. Like, I've talked to some guys that have, you know, they want to start Jobber, and they want to do it, and then talked to them a couple of months later, and I'm like, "How's Jobber doing?" And they're like, "Oh, we stopped using it." You know? Like, you have to use it and commit to using it. You can't just use it when you want to use it. But it does take somebody to set everything up in Jobber and put all the pictures in there and all that.

And if you're just, you know, if you're the one bidding it, you're the one doing the work, do you probably need it? No. But if you want to be able to pass anything to any other employee, you need to have some sort of system like that.

Austin Gray: Could you give our listeners just an overview? I promise this isn't like a Jobber sales pitch, but maybe they will sponsor. Jobber, if you're listening to this, yeah, we’d love a sponsorship.

Anyways, for right now, can you give our listeners an overview of Jobber and the reason I'm asking is because we use it—I've found a ton of value in this as well. So this, once again, is not a Jobber sales pitch; I just want you to give an overview to the listeners of some of the benefits and how it can make your life easier.

Marlena Spiegeler: Sure! And I can send you my contact at Jobber. So we do have a partnership with Jobber, but I used Jobber for many years before we started getting paid by Jobber.

Austin Gray: Oh, okay, so G&M does get—did you use my link?

Marlena Spiegeler: There you go! That's on our Instagram. But I use Jobber; I will go—you know, if I wasn't being paid, I'd still be talking like this about it. So the basics of Jobber that we use are our guys clock in and out of Jobber; they clock in and out of their jobs specifically. So that goes back to me job costing out every single penny that we spend. I'm splitting up all of their payroll wages to their jobs, so they're clocking into the jobs in Jobber.

I guess I should start with the quoting side: our sales. So we have two full-time sales guys now; they run their schedule and all their meetings and everything out of Jobber. So someone goes to our website, puts in their information, and then they're created as a client. So instead of using a general contact form on your website—so if you have Jobber, be sure you're using this— they get set up as a customer. So then you're not doing data entry of your general website form into your Jobber system.

So they go to our website, fill out a request, and then Michael or Dan, depending on what job it is, will reach out to them, set up their meeting with them, and then they'll set up the quote from there. So all of the steps of the quoting process, the job process, and the final invoice process is all within Jobber. The sales guys are setting up, you know, all the line items and everything one time, and that's transferring over from jobs to invoices—so I'm not typing up an invoice based on the quote; it's all just copying through, which you’re familiar with using Jobber.

Our sales guys are doing that portion of it. They're doing the follow-ups with the customers, you know, answering any questions, making any adjustments, that's getting approved, and then that's when the job goes over to operations if they move forward with the job. I handle the scheduling and communication and everything with the clients, and then he's managing our crews, scheduling our trucks, ordering materials, scheduling the guys—all of that stuff. And then the job comes back to me after it's completed, and we do the billing and finish out our final job process. So all of that is within Jobber. Everyone has their different steps in Jobber; anyone can see, you know, if Michael puts everything in there, and now if Michael's on vacation, we have—there should be everything with that job that’s needed.

You know, there’s always going to be something that comes up or the homeowner wants something additional or whatever it is, but all the information should be in there on the quote process, the job process, and then the final process.

Austin Gray: And you have sales guys log all of that in the notes section inside the quote, is that correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, yep! So there are customer-facing notes you can put right on the quote, and then we have an internal notes section. We have a whole checklist of questions and stuff that the sales guys have to answer, basically, so you know that stuff that operations needs to know—if there's anything for the locates that we need to know, where's the access, what type of truck, can we have a side dump, can we—does it just need to be a dump truck? What— you know, all of that type of stuff.

Austin Gray: At what point does the quote—

Okay, so for our listeners, Jobber makes it really nice and seamless to give an overview of, like what you just said. They make it really easy to copy some custom code and embed that form on your website. So like what Marlena was saying is that once your customer fills out the form on your website, all that information about the customer's name, address, phone number, email address, automatically gets created in Jobber, which cuts down on back office time.

That's just like one seamless automation that is awesome for anybody who's handling back office stuff.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! You can just input it. It's right in your settings on Jobber, and you can customize it for as much or as little information you want your customer to give to you. They just added a feature where your customers can upload photos; I don't know if you've seen that—it’s super slick—because then they can send you photos ahead of time. And then our sales guys call them; they can hit one button, schedule an assessment, put it on their schedule. There's no—then, you know, how do you spell your last name? Spiegeler—people can't spell it or say it. There's none of that; they're already set up as a customer in your system.

Austin Gray: That's right, yeah. And even like—so one thing that I noticed whenever I was doing sales when our business is that I would always have to ask the customer for a Google pin or an Apple Maps pin because we live in a rural area, and these addresses don’t populate if you just type them in. So we added a custom field in there to where it's like in order to submit the form, the customer now has to take or drop a pin or copy that from Google Maps or Apple Maps so that when our sales guy gets the lead, he just knows exactly where to type that in.

So that he can go meet, and it's like little things like that that just make your—can make your life so much easier if you just leverage this software in a way that it can be used.

Marlena Spiegeler: So, kind of to parlay off what you’re saying there too, like once the information is added in there, Jobber has the quote feature, which it's so seamless to be able to just click "create a new quote" and then just add the customer from the details they've already submitted. And then, sort of what you're saying there is that your sales guys will add all the notes within that quote, correct?

Austin Gray: Yep. And then from there, talk us through, like, all right, I’m a customer. I accept your proposal; what happens then?

Marlena Spiegeler: So then it gets converted to a job, and then it can go on the schedule from there. All of those notes and pictures and everything that the sales guys have—that’s all coming with onto the job. So now my foreman and Jameson, the operations manager, now he can see all of that on the schedule. But there is going to be some setup with that. So there's, you know, setting up for each crew, who they have, setting up your delivery drivers on each job. So that's where it goes.

Yeah, it's easy to use Jobber and have a quote and have a job, but you got to have somebody to set that up.

Austin Gray: So now when your guys are showing up Monday morning, they have, okay, here's where I'm going—the Google Maps pin is right in there—which is instead of you having to text, you know, all your guys the address of where they need to go, there's no texting an address. It's all just right in the app. You have to, you know, you have that setup time with those jobs.

Marlena Spiegeler: And so all of your guys have the Jobber app on their phone?

Austin Gray: Yep, yep—it’s a requirement! And that's how they view their work schedule, correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes. Whether they're on a crew or they're a truck driver, the truck drivers have, you know, all of the jobs that they're doing deliveries for that day, and they can see all the materials on the jobs of what needs to be delivered. So it makes everyone's life a lot easier.

Austin Gray: So there’s a really cool feature that I want to talk about here. So what—let's say Michael books a boulder wall job, and who’s a foreman that would go lead a boulder wall job in your company?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, so Caleb is our foreman, our Boulder Foreman.

Austin Gray: Okay, so Michael would then, as that job is booked, assign that job to Caleb in Jobber, correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: That would be me assigning them.

Austin Gray: That's you? Okay. So once the quote is approved— and if there are any permits, the sales guys do the permits for those. But after that, then it's handed off to Jameson and me, so we're the ones setting the schedule, determining— you know, I guess to back up, Michael clicks in there, what foreman should do the job. He knows everybody's capabilities, and he puts in there—or he'll put, you know, Caleb or Tanner depending on if it’s a job that multiple people could do because we have—we do a lot of different services with our retaining walls to landscaping to excavation, site work, utilities. So the guy that's doing site work utilities isn't doing rock around the house, so we have each of our foremen have their specialties and those crews accordingly.

Our sales guys are putting in there what crew should be doing the job, and then I'm building up the schedule based on those jobs per crew.

Austin Gray: And so this feature is really nice because Caleb shows up on Monday morning, and in his app, whatever job he's been assigned shows up on his schedule. Whereas let's take a different foreman—you mentioned Tanner, so let's use his name. Tanner shows up on Monday morning, and if he’s been assigned to a different job by Marlena, then on his app, his schedule is showing all the details associated with the job that has been assigned to him, correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep!

Austin Gray: And so, ultimately, where I'm going with this is like you guys have seen what Marlena and Garrett have started together from the early days of just kind of being like, you know, one OWNR OP type with somebody in the field to help and then Marlena in the back office. Now they've grown to—you’ll go back and I won't spoil it for you guys but go back and listen to Garrett's episode because I think he shared some numbers with where you guys are currently at. How many crews do you have right now?

Marlena Spiegeler: We have five crews right now.

Austin Gray: So in order to manage five crews, you know, you can either pull your hair out and manage with pen and paper, or pull your hair out a little bit less and manage with Google Sheets or Google Calendar.

Marlena Spiegeler: I promise this isn't a sales call for Jobber, but I am a big supporter of it!

Austin Gray: Yeah, I mean, it's the heartbeat of our business. I mean, you can plug in any CRM, whatever—it doesn’t need to be Jobber. It can be LMN or whatever you want to say that it is. But to have some sort of centralized platform that all of your different departments, let’s say, can work out of, is just crucial.

Marlena Spiegeler: It is! And you did your research, and I did my research as well. I think we can both agree that Jobber is the best fit for the type of businesses we run, correct?

Austin Gray: Yep, yep! There are things I don’t like about Jobber—we can—there are things that, you know, any software is going to be exactly what you need it to be unless you build it, and then that’s a whole other thing. So there are things that would I change? Yes, but they’ve come a long way, and they’re definitely improving things. They’re committed to listening to the people who use their software and to make changes based on that.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! We’ve had nothing but good things from using it as well. I do want to jump into job costing now because this was a topic you just brought up, and it's something that we are actively working on. How do you specifically use Jobber, or do you use Jobber in your job costing?

Marlena Spiegeler: I don’t specifically use Jobber for my job costing; it's a very manual process still, unfortunately—to get our final number because you're taking so many different—that so do you want me just to start from the beginning and explain exactly how I do it?

Austin Gray: I would love to! I guess—and first, let’s give our listeners just an overview of what job costing is and why it’s important. So, you can bid a job—yep, this job's going to take me, you know, two days, three days, ten days, whatever the size job it is. But do you know your prob—it’s kind of an educated guess based on your sales and bidding process, which I don't do a ton of that portion of the business. But to know what you’re bidding and how accurate you are on your jobs—you have to job cost.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, yes! Okay, it’s going to be some trial and error. You’re getting into a new service: you can, you know—this is, I hope this takes me a day, and now it takes you two days. Well, you didn't make any money on the job if you bid it for a day and it took you two days—chances are you didn't make anything. But what are you going to do and learn from that if you’re not going to job cost it? You’re not going to know and understand, okay, next time this job comes up, I need to bid this for two days or two and a half days or whatever it is.

Austin Gray: Definitely! So it’s basically a way to track whether your estimating was correct or not.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep! And it—I guess I shouldn’t even say just the estimation—there are things that go wrong on our jobs of, you know, there are things that are out of our control, or your material truck doesn’t show up, and now it’s 3 o’clock, and you still don’t have whatever you need. So there’s stuff like that and variables in the operations too that can, you know, that can happen. You forget a tool that you need, and you’re working an hour and a half away, and you got to go buy one or you got to go drive back, send somebody back to the shop.

So there’s a lot of different variables that go into, you know, why a job would be in the green or in the red.

Austin Gray: Yes, and in this business, it's inevitable that those things happen consistently.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep! Yep! And just planning for those, but not over-planning, and now you're bidding yourself out of every single job.

Austin Gray: Yes! Yes, definitely. I think that that, like, taking what you learn from the job costing can help improve your estimating to where you can build in some sort of percentage buffer for, "Hey, somebody is going to forget!" Like there's a certain percentage chance that somebody's going to forget a tool, which is going to add X amount of time.

Now, we’re all committed to delivering five-star service; this stuff just happens, right?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! Yes! And so being able to provide all that data to your estimator to then refine your estimating is why this is important.

Now, let’s jump into the process. Why don’t you take us from the beginning?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes. So we do—and it’s important too when you’re doing your job costing of what you’re doing with it. I think you just touched on that. So we have a sales meeting every Thursday with our sales guys, with me and my brothers. So there are five of us, and we go through those job castings together. I have them all prepped and ready for that meeting on Thursday, and we go through it of, you know, then we can see, okay, yep, this was bid wrong or this was— it was an operational thing or whatever it is. So then we can have open conversations about those situations.

Austin Gray: Can you give us like the overview of how you guys conduct that meeting? Like what are you preparing and bringing to that meeting?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, so I have kind of a template agenda that we’re using every week, and then we add things as needed. Job costing is one of them, and then our sales guys have monthly goals that they have, whether it’s taking, you know—it changes, but monthly and quarterly goals of taking, you know, someone, a customer out to lunch or a general contractor or builder, dropping off X amount of things at other businesses—stuff like that. So they give updates on that, and they have different goals within that or them stopping out on a job site once a week and then giving their feedback on that.

Pull my agenda up here—click! Do we have time here still?

Austin Gray: Yeah, we have time.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yeah! Okay, so everybody does their high for their week. So we like to have a professional high or something that went well with something within their role.

Then we look at our sales funnel on what's coming in for approvals coming up, any permit updates. We go through our larger jobs in production, like our commercial jobs, if there's anything that operations and sales can collaborate on, and then the job costing report—so going through and reviewing those. And then our sales guys give their little updates on what they have for their goals.

Austin Gray: Very cool! So job costing is a portion of the sales meeting.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, and what specifically are you trying to extract from your salespeople so that you can accurately put your job costing reports together?

Marlena Spiegeler: I don’t need anything from them to finish out my reports!

Austin Gray: So what? So those are being built out in QuickBooks. So we use projects in QuickBooks that can track all of your expenses. You can put your income and your expenses to that with that. You’re not going to have your overhead; QuickBooks obviously doesn’t know your overhead amount. They don’t know how many days it took, so that’s where the manual portion of it comes in.

My office admin, Lydia, she—we have her a shared sheet. She puts in once all the bills are paid and the job is—all the expenses are paid and pushed through the bank so then I can accurately take those expenses of what the actual expenses were—not overhead expenses—in order to export that report, apply my overhead, and then have my income. So that’s where it gets a little bit manual because there’s no—we’re—QuickBooks doesn’t have a function to just apply—you know, I can’t say, “Oh, it was a day and a half and it applies a day and a half of overhead.” So that’s where I have to manually do it.

Austin Gray: And is that because each equipment has a different daily cost to it in regards to your overhead? Or how specifically are you applying your overhead on?

Marlena Spiegeler: Okay, let’s take a four-day job as an example. Our overhead number is based on the crew, so each crew has their own overhead value, and it's—they’re pretty similar. We just take the average. I mean, you’re not going to— with all your crews, you’re not going to say, “Okay, they never use that piece of equipment, but they use this one more.” We have it pretty just spread out between all the crews because they do share a lot of equipment with the skid steers and excavators and stuff like that.

So I’m taking that dollar value, and I’ll just say, “Let’s just say $2,000 is our overhead amount,” which I wish our overhead was $2,000 per crew! But I’m taking that expense and saying, “Okay, it’s a four-day job,” so now I’m putting an $8,000 overhead expense and adding that to my expenses, and that’s how I’m going to job cost my job.

So I’m going to take my overhead for how many days it was, so even though the job was bid for three days, and there should have been $6,000, it took four days, and I'm going to put that $8,000 expense value there, take all of my job supplies—what was my actual payroll? What was my actual fuel? All of that plus my overhead, and that’s going to be my cost for the job.

Austin Gray: And you’re using QuickBooks for this?

Marlena Spiegeler: I’m using QuickBooks to—my office admin, she’s entering all of our expenses to those jobs, so that’s how I’m getting my direct job expenses tracked that way.

Austin Gray: And let’s take a step back here. So in order to get your expenses in QuickBooks, someone either has to manually create a bookkeeping entry or a receipt has to be uploaded, correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! So all of our normal receipts—all of our accounts payable invoices—all of those are being split out to the jobs and who is responsible for that. So let’s say somebody runs a credit card in the field for supplies for a landscaping job, right? Let’s say you have landscape fabric; let’s use that for an example. Who uploads that receipt into QuickBooks?

Marlena Spiegeler: Whoever is using their card, they’re responsible for submitting their receipts. So whatever card it is, they’re submitting it, and we use a platform called Bill.com, and that integrates with QuickBooks. So our guys submit everything through there, and then that goes through an approval process with me and my brother so we can review—we’re reviewing all of the accounts payable and all the credit card receipts and everything electronically through there.

Austin Gray: So do they upload in the QuickBooks app, or do they upload in Bill.com?

Marlena Spiegeler: They’re uploading to Bill.com, but we have a little bit of a workaround where they’re just emailing it from their personal email into there so that we’re not paying a user for every single employee with the card.

So they can just send it in; it’s a G&M Outdoor bill—you can send me a receipt. That’s where all the receipts go, and then Lydia is processing those from there, and she’s coding them—all coding them to job supplies, tools, fuel, whatever it is—and then assigning it to the project that the guys are putting on the receipt.

Austin Gray: Okay, so do you have the guys manually write what project?

MMarlena Spiegeler: Yep! So they can either write it on the receipt before they take the picture or they can just put it in the subject line of the email. Either one gets through.

Austin Gray: Okay, so hear me out on this, listeners. We’re actively implementing this into our business right now, and I believe we have a team of five. This is one thing I’m consistently thinking about because in the field, if you’ve worked in the field before, you know, especially in these types of businesses, like you’re running a million miles an hour.

So stopping to even just take a picture and log your receipt is like pulling teeth. And I’m sure you could probably agree—like getting people to do that is pulling teeth.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, yep! And it's not always—you know, it doesn’t need to be the minute you’re swiping your card. You can have it done at the end of the day or end of the week, or whatever works best. And I can— I’ve worked in the field my whole life, and so I can attest that it’s like the last thing you want to do when you're in the field is stop.

And if, let’s think—you have a slow internet connection in a rural area—it’s just a headache, right?

Austin Gray: So the reality is it has to be done, and I’m not undermining the fact that it sucks as somebody in the field to have to do this, but what you’re hearing Marlena say here is the way that they have created this process is that everybody in the field has to take a picture of it and email it into Bill.com.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes!

Austin Gray: And write the project. Do they have to write anything else on there to help her with coding?

Marlena Spiegeler: No, she can determine whether it’s a job supply or whatever it is. If it’s for something for a vehicle or piece of equipment, and they need to put the unit number on there, we have everything with the three-digit number, so they have to put that on there because we cost everything out based on the—you know, I can run a report for each vehicle and equipment to see what our direct expenses were for those.

Austin Gray: So, for example, if you had to get a replacement hydraulic hose at CarQuest for the skid steer.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep, for P770.

Austin Gray: Then they would write that equipment code on that receipt, and then that would be tracked to that piece of equipment for repairs and payments. And then I'm curious, just from a bookkeeping perspective, if that's repairs and maintenance on a piece of equipment that you own, is that a job cost directly?

Let's say that that hydraulic hose breaks on that landscaping job. Is that hydraulic hose repair job costed specifically to that landscaping job, or is it—?

Marlena Spiegeler: No, it’s put to that piece of equipment—not to a specific job—and then to the overall repairs and maintenance budget.

And then that number would play into overhead—is that correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Correct, correct! So every year that you're tracking repairs and maintenance, like that overhead number needs to be continually updated based on—

Austin Gray: Correct! This equipment is, on average, going to take X amount of repairs and maintenance.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, do you have an average number in your head of like what a skid steer repair and maintenance would cost to keep maintained each year?

Marlena Spiegeler: No, we don’t really have it based on—they’re broken out kind of per unit. You know, roughly this many units, we’re at roughly, you know, $150,000 in repairs and maintenance for our fleet size. And then if that—you know, that fluctuates, then we’ll add kind of a percentage if we’re removing or adding another unit.

Austin Gray: All right, that one was a little off topic, but I’m curious personally how you guys do it. Okay, so let’s go back to job costing. Whenever the guys are emailing the receipts, the receipt gets coded to that specific job, and then you go in and pull all of those expenses that are tied to that job, right?

And then you bring all of those expenses to the Thursday meeting plus the overhead that’s added on top of that—is that correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Correct, yep! And then I’m doing a comparison of, okay, we spent—you know, the bid was for this much material, and the material cost us this much. So that’s what we’re looking at too to see, okay, the material on our bid was $3,000, but it cost us $3,500. Okay, what went wrong there?

Austin Gray: At what point do you extract—all right, let’s say Michael bids a job for four days. At what point are you extracting the information from—or how long the job actually took?

Marlena Spiegeler: Once the job is completed, then I'm taking—and our job costing is usually two to three weeks after the job is completed. So it’s not—we complete it Friday, I'm job costing it Tuesday—it's not like that. It’s a couple of weeks for some of our vendors that only invoice on the 15th and the 30th or whatever it is. So we’re waiting usually—we even try to wait three to four weeks just so that we don’t job cost it and then we get hit with another AP that we weren’t, you know, that we weren’t expecting!

Austin Gray: So let’s say Michael books a job for four days. I’m going to try to remember next—Tanner, so Caleb was a foreman on this one, right?

Okay, let’s say the job takes five days. Who is responsible for relaying that information and getting that information into the system so that you can—?

Marlena Spiegeler: So I’m just seeing it based on how many days they’re clocked in on the job, and I’m running the schedule as well. So if a job is supposed to take four and it takes five, then I’m having to push out the job that was supposed to start on the fifth day.

Austin Gray: So did that answer your question?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! So I’m just going back based on how many days the guys were clocked into the job, which is determining how many days. So if you had somebody just doing the job costing and just doing the scheduling, that’s where you could connect those dots where I’m doing the scheduling and that, so I know if on the third day, Tanner says, “Okay, we’re not going to be done with this job tomorrow; it’s going to take another day.” Now I’m rescheduling the job that he was supposed to be on on that fifth day because now that same job took five days instead of four.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes.

Austin Gray: Okay, yeah, so this is where the manual piece comes in big time.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes! Yes!

Austin Gray: And being in tune with actually what’s going on in the business, correct?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep! And so say I wasn’t doing the scheduling, and I was just doing the job costing, which I would like to do eventually, where she could generate the reports for me—you can go into Jobber and see, “Okay, yeah, Tanner was clocked in for ten hours for five days, so it’s going to be a five-day overhead value.”

Even though it was bid for four, but we’re verifying that information because on the flip side, it was bid for four days—it took ten or three days—well now your overhead expense is only $6,000—not $8,000—because they got it done a day early.

Austin Gray: All right, so this is like a really in-the-weeds question, and I'm going to try to explain it as best as I possibly can for the listeners. So in this scenario, if the job goes five days and it's already booked as a four-day job and it’s already set up, and you’ve already assigned that job to Caleb, the foreman, and so he’s only able to clock hours on that job for the four days—let's say he shows up the next Monday and he’s like, “Guys, we got another day, right?”

Does he have the permission in Jobber to edit the job and extend it out another day? Or whose responsibility is that?

Marlena Spiegeler: So that’s Jameson’s responsibility. So the scenario you explained is never going to happen that way just because my client that was supposed to be there Monday—my Friday job went into Monday—we’re letting Caleb know that by Friday morning or afternoon.

And then we’re letting the client know, “Monday that we’re not going to be there for our Friday job—it’s going into Monday,” and then, you know, pushes out the schedule for the next week.

So Jameson and I work with the foreman to see, “Okay, Y, this is going to take longer,” and then he's relaying that back to me.

So then I’m updating the homeowner and updating the job in Jobber, so now Monday when Caleb comes back, he has that job still on his schedule for Monday. He didn’t just lose it from Friday.

Austin Gray: So the chain of communication goes Caleb to Jameson, who is helping with operations, right?

And then he’s running the operations.

And then does he edit it in Jobber?

Marlena Spiegeler: So he’ll edit it, or he’ll talk to me because we run through each day. We run through everything for the next day to make sure that everything in Jobber is good so that the guys have everything that they should be clocking into.

So between the two of us, one of us adjusts it and then emails the client: “Okay, this is something that you’re bringing up that’s very important. What does this look like at the end of the day for you and Jameson?”

Austin Gray: Yes, like what are you guys reviewing in regards to the schedule and regarding Jobber?

Marlena Spiegeler: Just that everything is still—that nothing is going over in time or going to be, a four-day job is going to take them three days. So now we need to move up their next job, you know, and at the jobs after that. If there is a new delivery, you know, we sell a lot of material too to other contractors.

So just making sure that all of our deliveries are set up through the next day so that our truck drivers—they use Jobber just as the same as if it was a job. So we sell boulders to other contractors; we set those up as jobs in our system.

And then our drivers have all the information right in there where to go, how many loads, where to dump—all that.

And then we can bill right off of, based off of that.

So just making sure that everybody has everything for that—everything in Jobber is good for the next day because otherwise, it’s 5:30 a.m., and, you know, they don’t have a job that they need to be clocked into; then it’s just a cluster from there if they don’t have what they need.

Austin Gray: Yes! Definitely. Everybody’s scrambling.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep! So are you pretty much living in Jobber?

Austin Gray: Yes! It’s one of my 20 tabs open all day, every day.

Marlena Spiegeler: Okay, wow! This is super helpful, Marlena! Thank you so much for explaining all this. I know we’re approaching the top of the hour here, so in the next couple of minutes, what would you recommend someone who is starting out—like, okay, if you’re the person in the field, like in that scenario: if you’re Garrett, just starting the business, and if you’re running around doing sales, meeting with the customers, fulfilling the jobs, and you’re pulling your hair out trying to do all of the things that Marlena is handling. What are the top three things you would recommend that person?

Marlena Spiegeler: Hire someone else and give them the responsibilities for probably—if you’re using software like Jobber, whatever it is—to do all the scheduling and set up in there and then the expenses if you want to job cost.

Austin Gray: Top three. Did you give me top three things, or did I give two?

Marlena Spiegeler: That’s fine! Those are obviously the two most important: track expenses and do invoicing.

Austin Gray: Yes! And payroll—paying the bills, all that type of stuff based on—you know, if that’s what you like to do, where you have a CPA to do that.

You know, we didn’t need someone to do that; we had to need to do that, so it wasn’t—we don’t really use a third party for a lot of our office—for the majority of our office stuff. We’re just all doing all the processing ourselves.

Austin Gray: Got it! Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Marlena Spiegeler: I don’t think so! I can talk about Jobber all day long—we already told us you’re getting paid off this!

Austin Gray: Besides that!

Marlena Spiegeler: But no, I don’t think so. I mean, there’s a lot— we’ve been in business now over seven years, so we’ve had to figure out a lot of things as we go. I just say keep doing that! Like, if you’re determined to do it and make it, you just—you got to keep pushing forward.

And, you know, you don’t need to have every single thing perfectly in place before you can start; you kind of just got to go for it.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I love that! It's been really cool to watch you guys grow the business and also just talk to you and Garrett about how you guys have both thought about your specific roles in the business. It's really cool to see too that you guys just obviously trust each other because you’re family, but you’ve been able to like delegate each specific role to each person. And that has—I mean, from the outside watching, it looks like it’s fueled your growth.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yep! And our brother Jameson, our operations manager, he's a key point in that as well. Like, someone called us once the three legs of a stool, and that kind of stuck with me. Like, you can’t— you know, with the three of us—like in the sales, the operations, and the office— like, we’re doing the work of probably two to three employees.

So to have that within the OWNR OPS in those positions is really key.

Austin Gray: Yeah, it’s really cool! And you guys provide a lot of resources on your website, so could you tell us where—or tell our listeners, where they can find some of those resources? Like, for example, the snow contract—and you’ve even shared some of your internal resources with me. Do you guys have any of those for sale on your website?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes, we have some. I need to do an update in there as well—just a few changes—but if you go to the bottom footer of our main website, it links over to our Shopify, and some of those documents and stuff are there. As we get into the winter season, if we don’t have a lot of snow, you know, that’s when we have a little more time to work on stuff like that.

Austin Gray: And then what is the website?

Marlena Spiegeler: GMoutdoorservices.com, and you can find that from our Instagram page as well; those are linked there.

Austin Gray: And could you tell the listeners what documents other than the snow removal contract template that you have available?

Marlena Spiegeler: Yeah! There are some employee policies—like cell phone policies, attendance policies, stuff like that. Just that I’ve created and put onto there, I think. I have a couple bundles of different things, and the snow contracts that are popular right now with everybody working on that—so commercial and residential contracts.

And then Garrett has a lot of YouTube videos too about, you know, different bidding things and stuff like that with jobs. I know he’s slowed down on that a little bit with starting a family and with just a busy season here for us, but he’s hoping to get back into that here this winter.

Austin Gray: Well, thanks for all that you guys do and share for, you know, people who are listening to this podcast, people who watch the YouTube channel. I know it is helpful for other small business owners. So thanks for putting those resources out there!

Marlena Spiegeler: Yeah, thanks for doing this podcast! I'm now a fan and a listener!

Austin Gray: Oh, that’s awesome! Well, I’m glad you’re listening. And before we hit record, she was telling me she didn't even know Garrett was on it, and I guess you were listening to it and then heard his episode.

Marlena Spiegeler: Yes!

Austin Gray: That’s awesome! Well, thanks again for being on, Marlena! And listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Just like building a service-based business locally, five-star reviews are very important for podcasts as well. So if you’re enjoying this type of content, would you mind taking 30 seconds to leave us a quick five-star review if you’re listening on Apple or Spotify?

And if you’re listening to this on YouTube, we would sure appreciate a like and subscribe. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less! We’ll see you in the next episode.

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