Testimonial by: Casey Hultquist, President

We are a new truss company just north of Anchorage, Alaska. The company may be new, but the team I have put together to make this company work includes years of experience. I hired Todd at the very beginning of the planning process to help create a plant with high growth potential and minimal startup costs. Also, to implement the latest best practices, which he knows so well.

Knowing I was creating a more competitive market. The biggest thing I wanted to get right was our labor costing and pricing of our work orders. Todd was able to provide labor calculations based on time and motion studies that we were able to plug right into our truss engineering software. All the labor estimations were dependent on our equipment types, material size and number of the crew performing their assigned task. Not only did Todd show us how to properly set up our labor, he also showed us a much better way to price our work orders. Now we are very confident in how we are bidding our projects and are able to truly understand our cost and profit to best our competition. I clearly understand how our competition has been and is currently pricing their orders, but now we have a proven better method that will give us that much better of an edge over our competition. The old way of a simple cost markup for establishing the margin is now certainly obsolete. Especially when fighting the battle of keeping the shop full as well as making the most on every job

Since we are a new operation, I wanted to implement the best practices and methods in all areas of the company. After Todd spent a week explaining these and training our group, I am very pleased with what we learned. He was very methodical and thorough with all the different aspect of operations. Manufacturing, design, sales and administration issues were all covered in the training, which gave us a clear roadmap to follow. The old mentality of “This is how it has always been done” among members of our group was challenged again and again by the common-sense lean manufacturing best practices that Todd has created over the years. Nothing was off limits for discussion, and everything seemed to be discussed with lean manufacturing in mind. Quite frankly, my crew and I were very pleasantly surprised by all the changes in practices and the way we think about doing our different tasks to garner better results.

I highly recommend that anyone who wishes to improve on their current practices (or like I did) start a new operation make use of Todd’s services.