I'll bet you didn't expect to have to learn a circus skill to run your home makeover project successfully. But which skill am I referring to ? And why on earth is it important, essential even ?
In circus terms, back in the days of live animal acts, the lion tamer was popular because lions are truly terrifying up close. But if you're guessing it must be lion taming - you'd be wrong. Not many lions roaming around building sites these days, except perhaps in remote parts of Africa.
Second only to the lions, the other circus act I loved was the clowns. And one skill in particular was always impressive.
The clowns juggled. In the act I remember most clearly, one of the clowns - complete with oversized shoes - kept being given unusual things to juggle by the other clowns. He started with just three balls but it wasn't long before he'd been thrown some china plates, a wooden chair, a particularly vicious looking knife and a burning torch - real flames, sparks, smoke and all. Hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Growing up in the bad old days, before health and safety was taken seriously, had its upside, I guess.
So - juggling. Successful leadership of Home Makeover projects requires home owners to become skilled jugglers.
There are four particular project-components that must be juggled at all times. Four competing forces that must remain in balance. In truth, they are very like the chair, knife and flaming brand the clown had to cope with.
These four forces are common to all projects, everywhere in the world. And it's essential that home owners understand what these four forces are, why they need to be balanced or spinning smoothly and why this requires advanced juggling skills. It's a fact, that if you fail to keep them effectively balanced, then they can spin out of control to become more like the four horsemen of the apocalypse - and your project will lose it's shape, focus and direction with associated catastrophic consequences.
Let me introduce you to these competing forces of great influence. They are :
Time
Quality
Health and Safety
Cost
It's fair to say they are not always equal in power and each homeowner must decide early on, ideally at the very beginning of their project , which will be the dominant power. And you have to keep reviewing this throughout the project because circumstances may subtly alter which force dominates.
Let's dig a bit deeper.
Starting with Time
This refers to how long your project will take from start to finish and not just the time on site but also the time from when you first start planning, designing and so on.
At some point in your process you will identify an end date for your project. Sometimes this is driven by external factors. For example you may be moving house and plan a renovation before you move in. This would drive two dates - you can only start the work when you take possession of the property and your move-in date might be driven by the duration of a rental you move to while the house is uninhabitable.
So your project planning will revolve around getting ready to start the day you become the new owner and ending before the day you need to move out of the rental.
A few facts about time on projects.
Just like in all aspects of our existence, time costs money.
If you have a very short time to do the work, the project may cost more if the contractors have to work faster to get the job done - this might be longer days or including weekend working and even working double or triple shifts.
But taking a long time - more time than really needed, can cost even more - if you have no critical end date and can stay on in your rental for as long as needed, then at the very least, you will be racking up rental costs. Contractors will explain that they make more money the less time they take to complete the works, when working normal hours. Think about it - if the plumber has quoted $ 3,000, labour only, to install a bathroom in 5 days then he's earning $ 600 per day for his crew. But, if the same work takes him 10 days, then he's only earning $ 300 per day.
The secret of aiming for a sensible time on site is to aggregate the advice of your skilled advisers who will have a pretty good idea of how long your project should take - as well as the gut instincts of the contractors you invite to bid for the work. When they first view the project, they'll quite quickly develop their own sense of how much the project is likely to be worth and how long it will take. Asking for their best guesses before you've even invited them to bid will give you the benefit of their informal but informed opinions.
An insider strategy I've used for years on most projects is to invite bids based on a specific timescale but ask the contractors to comment on the timescale and offer an alternative quote if it would either reduce the cost or, even at a higher cost, would save time that would be a benefit to you. This way you'll quickly discover if your target timescale is realistic, whether or not it can be reduced or would be better extended.
Next, let's consider the second force - Quality
Quality is a measure of standard. But, like time, it's very closely tied to cost. The most effective way to measure quality is by price, although this isn't always as reliable as you might think. Typically we set a quality standard by balancing what we can afford with what is sensible to spend.
When homeowners plan projects they want more than they can afford and when the bids come in, they pick themselves up off the floor, get over the shock, and have to go through a tough process to get the total amount back to a number they can live with. We call this process "value engineering". In a future Blog Post, I'll explain the best way to value engineer a project for the best outcome.
Sometimes, even though we can afford something, it's not a great idea to spend that much. In our House-of-Horrors project ... one of the horrors - self inflicted - was that we had very ambitious plans. We had bought a local quality property but had aspirations to increase the quality so it would be closer to a superior grade hotel - something our target guests would appreciate and so we could maximise the rates we wanted to charge for vacation rentals. Not to mention we wanted it to be a fabulous place for family holidays.
Our property only had one shared bathroom when we bought it. By the time we had finished, it had two additional en-suite bathrooms and the original bathroom had been upgraded with a free standing bath, a walk-in shower, two matching wash hand basins and electric under-floor heating. They were magnificent and many guests mentioned the bathrooms in their 5-star reviews; they loved them. But the cost was extortionate. And we knew, even as we were spending all this money, that we were over capitalising the property. This basically means when we added the costs of the alterations to the original purchase price, the total would be much more than the likely market value of the property. Which can become a massive problem - it's another topic we'll be discussing in a future Blog Post.
Almost every component of any home makeover can be bought at a range of prices - carpet, furniture, faucets - whatever it is, when you go shopping you'll see cheaper options and more expensive. Typically, the cheaper items are a lower quality and the quality improves as the cost goes up. But there is definitely a price point above which a purchase becomes a "nice-to-have" where it shifts from increased or improved functionality to more of a vanity buy.
In a future Blog Post, I'll be sharing a secret strategy for getting the best quality at a cost you can afford.
The third force we must address is Health and Safety
Historically, no one paid any attention to this aspect of project delivery. Just get the job done, it doesn't matter how. And as a result, construction had a very poor safety record. Workers died on construction sites. These days, we are getting better at addressing this important factor. This has affected both labour practices, working conditions and materials used - think about the ban on using asbestos containing materials.
As an absolute minimum, you must comply with your local legislation regarding Health & Safety. If you don't, you risk criminal prosecution if anyone is injured or worse. This may mean for example ensuring workers are using safety ladders, wearing protective footwear or have a comfortable, dry, warm space to eat their meals during work breaks. As the employer you carry ultimate responsibility. Laws in different countries are likely to vary so be certain you know what standards are required. Saving money or time by cutting health and safety corners is the worst possible option. Will you be able to live with yourself if a worker dies on your project, just because you wouldn't pay for some item of safety equipment or you appointed a contractor who you knew was using unskilled labour without appropriate Health and Safety training.
But obeying the law and sticking to the rules costs money and can slow things down.
Finally, let's address the elephant in the room - let's talk Cost
Cost is how much you're going to pay. And from the very start of the project, when you first decide you're going to embark on a project adventure, you must be cost focused. Even if you have money to burn and cost is of no concern, why spend a dime more than you need to ? For the rest of us who are counting every penny running a tight budget is imperative.
I won't say too much more in this Post because I'll be writing a lot about cost - how to track it, how to tame it, control it, and above all, how you can reduce it and save it - in future Blog Posts.
But I do want to sow a seed about cost that is worth you hearing at the beginning of your project journey. Let me ask you this - How much do you want to pay for your project ? If you haven't even started planning and designing yet, then you're going to be thinking "I've no idea" but you're wrong. And I can tell you the exact amount you should spend, kind of.
You should spend the right amount, the correct cost, for what you want and expect to get. And this amount is a balance of what you can afford with what you need to achieve - and if that is also what you want, then you're winning.
Most people think they should pay the lowest cost, the cheapest cost. And that would be sensible if you said "the lowest possible correct cost".
Here is an absolute truth that I've seen proved over and over. John Ruskin, a prominent English social thinker who lived in the 1800's at almost exactly the same time as Queen Victoria said this ...
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
Ruskin was bang on the money.
If you have ever bought anything from Amazon or your local equivalent online retailer, you have probably only seen the photos of the product you're buying before it arrives. So there are likely to have been times when a product arrived and you were taken aback because it was much smaller than you expected, or more flimsy - the build quality was poor, what looked like polished steel was actually just shiny plastic.
In 99% of projects I've worked on, my clients wanted to appoint the contractor with the cheapest bid. But over and over, by using a hugely effective strategy which I'll share with you in another Blog Post, we could demonstrate that this would be a false economy. In most cases the lowest cost was only lowest because it was wrong and it turned out that a higher bid was actually "the lowest possible correct cost".
But paying top dollar is no guarantee of increased quality or functionality. Take cars as an example - if you need a car with four seats that can get you from A to B, the price point for a reliable vehicle may start at say $ 10,000. But you could also spend $ 500,000 on a car - the same model even, just encrusted with diamonds. Which seems silly but lots of construction elements are like that - there are hugely expensive "designer label" items, where the cost includes a huge mark-up for the brand name or because the Kardashians have one in their home.
The reason why cost is the elephant in the room is that all of the other forces influence the project cost.
We've already mentioned how too little or too much time is costly.
We've discussed how quality influences cost.
Even Health and Safety affects cost.
As your project progresses you have to constantly juggle these forces to keep moving towards completion.
Imagine if you were building an extension and early in the process when digging the foundations, stormy, wet, or freezing weather stopped work for a couple of weeks. Now you have to decide whether to give more time - which will cost money - or to pay extra to the contractors to accelerate to make up the lost time. But that could mean that your total cost will be more than you can afford. So now you have to decide whether you can compromise on items not yet purchased - taking a scope or quality hit - and maybe not getting what you wanted or having to find more money for the extra cost.
Good news though, I have a really effective strategy for dealing with these kind of tough decisions, which I'll share in another Blog Post.
It's worth mentioning that cost can even influence the other forces.
More often than you might realise, a project is plodding along and suddenly a brilliant idea lands. Let's add something extra that will really improve the end result. Like adding a hot tub on the new deck. But this sudden addition means the contractor has to strengthen the deck to carry the extra load of the hot tub, and the electrician has to run a new power supply to the deck because the tub needs a higher rating, which means they will take longer to finish the job. So the project takes more time along with costs increasing.
There are so many examples of how these forces have to be kept spinning smoothly - the circumstances are unique to every project, so it is important to be ready for them and I recommend you look out for future Blog Posts when I'll be explaining what you need to do to become a master juggler.
Another insider secret ... there's an invisible fifth force that has to be juggled ... actually, it's more like the vicious looking knife I mentioned that clown juggling - and, because it's so important to understand, I'm going to dedicate a whole Blog Post to it in the next weeks.
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