Managing 1,100 Homes Like an Investment Portfolio | Cash Flow, Job Costing & Field Reality

Rishi Srivastava (00:42)
Today our guest is Charles Britt. Charles, welcome.

Charles Britt (00:46)
Thanks for having me.

Rishi Srivastava (00:48)
First section here is on your background, leadership, and career path. You’ve spent nearly 18 years in the Air National Guard and now lead a mechanical reconstruction project at Keesler AFB. When you look at your career arc, what are the big turning points that shaped how you think about construction, money,

and responsibility on a job.

Charles Britt (01:19)
OK, so a few moments that showed me how like construction and money really the air guard learned a lot. Mostly that resources are finite. Accountability is everything and your name is attached to every decision that you make. Moving from structures to a contracting office really gave me the full picture. Only what it costs to build something what happens when you mismanage a contract. Now leading major reconstruction project. I see how the decisions on the ground roll up to real financial impact.

Those experiences together made me someone who pays attention to details, schedule, cash flows, because they all tie back to responsibility.

Rishi Srivastava (01:52)
All those things are tied together. You are currently overseeing the reconstruction and remodel of roughly 1,100 base housing units at Keesler. When you think about that portfolio as a mini real estate fund,

How do you keep track of performance house by house and make sure the job makes financial sense?

Charles Britt (02:16)
Yeah, that’s an interesting way to think about it for sure. You have to treat every home like a standalone investment. Each address is its own job. Each one has a budget, a timeline, a clear path to revenue or loss. We use an online system called Dash, which makes that possible. It’s one clean dashboard, if you will. I can look at a house by house basis and quickly see labor burns, materials, where we’re drifting.

Rishi Srivastava (02:28)
Mm-hmm.

Charles Britt (02:40)
When you think of it like investment portfolio, instead of just construction, you naturally make better decisions because the math is right in your face and the numbers don’t lie.

Rishi Srivastava (02:47)
Thank you. Restore care grew from under 100 employees when you started to a larger footprint today. And your Biloxi Mississippi operation alone has 30 employees and 10 subs with 100 plus people on site daily. How does that scale change the way you think about cash flow, risk, and communication on a project?

Charles Britt (03:11)
Yeah, so from my experience and background, you go from leading a few dozen people or even just three in a contracting office to now hundreds of people touching a project every day. You learn fast that cash flow becomes your oxygen. One delay, one bottleneck, and it rips across the entire operation. Communication has to be faster and cleaner because small misunderstandings can turn into huge, expensive slowdowns.

You have to scale your forces, building systems and processes that can outlast yourself even. Then it requires the discipline to follow and maintain and instill those systems and processes throughout the project. The four years I’ve been overseeing this project, we’ve increased our in-house employees from three to 30. We’ve had to scale it down to around 15 at times. We rely heavily on subcontractors to pick up some of the slack in those times. We have to scale back and we essentially try to regrow our teams.

Rishi Srivastava (04:00)
Mm-hmm.

Charles Britt (04:04)
back and forth kind of as the project ebbs and flows. Luckily, our sub-contractors have been pretty solid in their ability to scale as the project has ebbed and flowed in its demands.

Rishi Srivastava (04:14)
Yeah, having so many people on the site must be challenging.

You’ve seen both sides of the table, building and maintaining infrastructure, and then administrating contracts. How does that inside view of government contracting shape the way you negotiate price and manage contracts today?

Charles Britt (04:36)
I mean, it definitely helps a lot being on the government side of the table. You learn how they think, what slows them down, what they’re actually looking for in a contractor. This gives you great insight on how to price jobs realistically to negotiate smarter and manage expectations. Kind of takes the guesswork out because I’ve sat on the other side of the table. It keeps me fair but firm because I know what the compliance really requires and what’s just noise.

It’s unfortunate for most large scale construction projects though that the government is involved in any shape or form. They’re really just looking for LPTA, which is the lowest price technically acceptable. And we’ve lost our fair share of bids because of the contractor beats our price out by just a few dollars. We could have the fastest turnaround time, the best quality, but our price was just a little higher than the next guys. It’s unfortunate, but it’s one of the things that take pride in working for Restore Core for though is

We don’t ever strive to be the cheapest, but always take pride on being the best value.

Rishi Srivastava (05:34)
Some of the contractors, when they’re bidding, they bid really low price, but then put change orders to get the price at the right level.

Charles Britt (05:44)
Yeah, mean, you’ll see

contractors actually take losses to get their foot in the door on a project. And they’re OK with it somehow, some way. So they’ll bid it so low they know they’re going to lose money over this project.

Rishi Srivastava (05:49)
huh.

Can they not put the change order later when during the operation? So you say, oh yeah, there’s a change order. Let’s give me another $100,000 for this or a million.

Charles Britt (06:05)
Yeah,

that’s the difference between a good contractor and a great contractor. The great contractor when they’re doing the job visit or the site visit before they ever bid the project, they already see the change orders that are going to take place. Already have those accounted for.

Rishi Srivastava (06:19)
The next section here is in job costing, profitability, and financial levers. When you look at the Keesler project, what are the two to three biggest financial levers that really move the needle on margin? Labor, materials, change orders, rework, or something else?

Charles Britt (06:38)
Yeah, all those things are huge and probably are number one, twos and threes. Labor efficiency is number one. If your crews lose time, your margin disappears quickly. Materials are something you think that would be pretty set in stone, but supply swings come into effect. I’ve learned to expect significant increases from the tone of five to 15 % from year to year. The third lever is obviously rework.

If you’re tearing something out or doing a task twice, you’re killing your budget and your time management and you’re essentially paying for it two to three times. The rework can turn into a circular down spiral quickly where you’re burning time materials so much so I constantly preach to our crews when taking on a new task or challenge to take 10 to 15 minutes to think about what’s the best way to tackle this challenge. Not just what’s the best way, what’s the most efficient way we can accomplish this.

Like I said, those three things, labor materials and rework can make or break the job.

Rishi Srivastava (07:36)
Yeah.

You lean heavily on Excel, Dash, QuickBooks, and bill.com to run the work. What does a good day in the numbers look like for you? And what are the red flags in the data that tell you something is going wrong in the field?

Charles Britt (07:55)
Yeah, our number one first foremost is meeting the customer and the client’s demands and requests. Second to that is making all the numbers make sense, of course. A good day is when the labors match up to the schedule, the materials line up with what we had budgeted, and nothing unexpected spikes the cost curves. Some of the red flags, which are easy to spot, or hours going up with no real progress being made, material costs exceeding the budget.

or sudden jump in damages or unforeseen conditions. The data shows me where we need to adjust, who’s outperforming their peers and really highlights who the underperformers are. We make those adjustments as needed.

Rishi Srivastava (08:33)
How real time is your data? Is it like a week old, a day old?

Charles Britt (08:39)
So it’s about 24 hours kind of lagging when it comes to labor hours hitting the job and dash. So it’s not as immediate as we would like it to be, but that’s where the constant communication between myself and our field superintendent, we’re able to keep an eye on what’s actually happening out in the field and then what’s happening on the numbers in the books.

Rishi Srivastava (09:00)
Okay, so even if like your reports and dashboards are 24 hours behind, you have the sense of like even what happened an hour ago or a minute ago, pretty much.

Charles Britt (09:10)
Yeah, QuickBooks is kind of our immediate hour tracker, if you will. I’m able to punch in the QuickBooks and see who’s on the clock, where their physical location is, what house they’re working in. So that helps out a good bit. And then all that reports to Dash about 24 hours after real time.

Rishi Srivastava (09:26)
Each house is treated as its own job in Dash. How does that job level visibility into labor and material costs change the conversations you have with your COO, your superintendent, and your subcontractors?

Charles Britt (09:43)
Yeah, when we can see every job, every house is its own job. Conversations get on us real fast. With the COO, we’re talking trends, what’s improving, what’s dragging behind. With my superintendent, we’re talking production daily. Where crews are losing time, which crews are hitting the mark, which crews are falling short. With the subcontractors, it keeps everyone accountable because the numbers are right there and really eliminates the guesswork.

Rishi Srivastava (10:07)
You know, having this kind of visibility and at that granular level, so important.

Charles Britt (10:13)
Absolutely.

Rishi Srivastava (10:15)
You mentioned that 10 to 15 % of your day is work orders, purchase orders, and paying subs. Where do you see the most friction or waste in that workflow today? And what would a cleaner, more automated version look like?

Charles Britt (10:33)
The friction comes from double entries, scattered communication, and human errors. I feel like technology has advanced so much just in the last four years that definitely a clean system that could auto pull data from the invoices received from subcontractors or vendors, and then push that into bill.com, which is our accounting system, then match, confirm that information with what’s already listed and budgeted in Dash.

From there, it should be as simple for someone like myself, with a click of a mouse, to approve or disapprove that particular invoice and trigger payments, preventing us from shuffling PDFs back and forth and chasing emails. The less time we can spend chasing paperwork, the more time we can spend actually running the project or the job.

Rishi Srivastava (11:20)
So does Dash integrate well with QuickBooks? So the data in Dash automatically goes to QuickBooks and from QuickBooks it goes to Dash.

Charles Britt (11:29)
Yes and no. the information from QuickBooks, which is the labor and hours tracking, is automatically going to Dash and reporting there on the dashboard. When it comes to the invoices, though, they’re not talking as much as I would like them to talk from bill.com to Dash.

Rishi Srivastava (11:46)
So

which type of invoices are you talking about? The one that you pay to your vendors or the one that you send to your clients?

Charles Britt (11:54)
So these are invoices received from our subcontractors and our vendors.

Rishi Srivastava (11:59)
OK, so how do they make into QuickBooks right now or bill.com? What is the process?

Charles Britt (12:01)
So.

So an actual person sitting behind a computer is having to take those PDFs and emails from a vendor or subcontractor and drop them into bill.com, make sure that information is entered correctly. And then I have to go in and create a PO number and confirm that information in dash. So once that’s confirmed in dash, I put that information in bill.com, approve that bill in bill.com, and then there’s several approvers after me.

that are confirming that information is correct. So it’s not automated by any means necessary. It’s a full step of lock and key and checks and balances along the way.

Rishi Srivastava (12:37)
⁓ okay, okay. That makes sense.

The next section here is field operations, communication, and process. Your team relies heavily on text groups by address to coordinate work and keep a searchable record. From a finance and risk standpoint,

Charles Britt (12:46)
Sure. ⁓ Absolutely.

Rishi Srivastava (13:07)
What are the pros and cons of running the job out of text messages versus a more structured system?

Charles Britt (13:14)
Yeah, when you say you’re running a project of this scale, the text messages seem so archaic or barbaric or crazy. But the biggest pro is speed. The reason it works is everyone has the information at their fingertips immediately. Everyone’s able to respond instantly. And being a group text message, everyone who needs to see it or needs to see it later because they don’t necessarily have to see it right now, they have access to that information. We’re creating a searchable record by address.

When you have 100 addresses at construction across four different neighborhoods, the ability to type that address into a search bar and your text messages and see every time that address has been mentioned in all the information pertaining to that one particular address, that’s invaluable to have that on one screen at one time. The downside and the risk is the obvious. Text messages get buried. They go unnoticed. They go unacknowledged. The text can be misunderstood.

We misinterpret text messages a lot. There’s no motion to a text message. Those same texts can become lost when phones change or someone loses their phone. I can definitely see the value from an app or a structured cloud system, if you will, that would give us the same speed and searchability of text messages. But having that organization and backup of a cloud, having that continuity of a real platform, you know.

Rishi Srivastava (14:35)
Next question is the addresses. They may be tough to search. Somebody’s writing these spellings differently, maybe commas and all.

Charles Britt (14:45)
It definitely

happens all the time. Somebody misspells it or someone does a voice to text and there ends up being a colon in between the three numbers of the address that’ll throw off how you search it or how you find it.

Rishi Srivastava (14:57)
Yeah, yeah. You are a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and certified acquisition professional. When you walk a job or review a weekly report, what kinds of waste, bottlenecks, or process breakdowns jump out that others might miss?

Charles Britt (15:17)
Yeah, I’m you asked that. A huge continuous improvement in process improvement guy. So much so it kind of makes your eyes twitch a little bit when you see things that are going a little awry or somebody’s just doing something so inefficiently. I noticed a little delays that stack up really. Materials are staged too far away from the work. Trades stepping on each other. Crews waiting to make decisions or having unclear scopes where they can’t make the decisions themselves. You know, that small waste adds up fast on a project.

this size. Weekly reports, they tell a little bit of the story, but walking the job site, communicating with the trades really shows you where the bottlenecks are. You hear a lot of managers say people are the problem. Well, people are also the solution when you can get someone to change the way they think, the way they approach problem solving in itself. You change the way they work and see the improvements in their production.

Rishi Srivastava (16:08)
You operate a satellite division in Mississippi reporting to leadership in Pennsylvania. How do you ensure that what happens in the field across 1,100 homes is accurately reflected in reports, dashboards, and financial leadership depends on?

Charles Britt (16:27)
Yeah, that’s one of the main points of my position is to be that liaison between the field work and getting the end product or client requested. Then I’ve taken that and put it into a nice neat package and presenting all that timely and efficiently to our COO on a weekly basis to keep him updated and ensure we’re all strategically aligned. Not only as a project, but for our stakeholders, we need to be strategically aligned as a company as well.

I make sure the field reality is showing up in our reports with no surprises. Our dashboards and weekly briefs, constant communication, keep leadership and stakeholders synced with what’s happening on ground. There’s no secret. The secret is really consistency. If you keep reporting the same metrics the same way every week, your leadership can trust the trends that you’re showing.

Rishi Srivastava (17:11)
What happens if a report that you sent out is wrong?

Charles Britt (17:15)
I don’t know. I don’t know that I have sent out anything necessarily wrong before. It’s kind of the same format and the way that we present the weekly report. So you’re just going and updating that information and changing it. If there happens to be a mistake, usually we catch it in our weekly meetings and I can correct it on, you know, on our teams meeting on site and give them the right information.

Rishi Srivastava (17:35)
Your weekly reports include headcount, houses turned over, hidden conditions, weather delays, and discovered damage. How do these field findings feed into budgets, contingencies, and financial planning?

Charles Britt (17:49)
Yeah, those findings, they drive our forecasting, our budgeting. Headcount ties straightly into our labor or labor burn. In the conditions, they hit the contingency and chew up time that was scheduled elsewhere, which is usually more important than money is time. Weather delays, they modify the schedule and usually end up costing more money, materials, time. The fields where the truth lives, our budget just has to keep up with what’s going on in the field.

make sure we’re adjusting our forecast and projecting completion dates as necessary.

Rishi Srivastava (18:23)
Hmm. Another product manager I was talking to, weather is such a big deal for them too

Charles Britt (18:28)
Yeah, it’s South Mississippi, so it rains in the summer every day. And we usually end up finding roof leaks that we didn’t know existed. And sometimes those are the most inopportune times, maybe days away from turning that house over and having it completed And now we have a roof leak dripping through our freshly painted drywall. So it happens more than we’d like to admit.

Rishi Srivastava (18:34)
Mm-hmm.

⁓

All right. The next section here, Charles, is on technology, voice, and the future of construction. Coming from emergency management and contracting, you’ve worked in high-stakes environments. How has that shaped the way you manage risk, contingency planning, and decision-making on a large construction program?

Charles Britt (19:15)
Yeah, emergency management, we have a saying, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. So with that being said, I’m always thinking on both sides of that coin. I want to know what the worst case scenario is so I can be prepared for it, but also shooting and aiming for the best case scenario by using data analytics to project and know what our realistic expectations are, then clearly communicating those expectations to our team and subs. Emergency management training to make decisions with

imperfect information on hand and still keep it moving. Construction telling me how those decisions translate into dollars.

Yeah

Rishi Srivastava (19:52)
Thank you. We talked about voice to text being unreliable with strong accents and construction jargon. If you had a construction specific voice system that actually worked, where would you plug it in first? Daily logs, POs, issue tracking, or subcontractor communication?

Charles Britt (20:14)
I plug it into the subcontractor communication and issue tracking right away. I those two things go hand in hand. Those two areas need up a lot of time and daily logs usually don’t get written to the end of the day when the details are faded, know, getting a little hazy. If a voice to text could capture real field information in real time, then we could take that archive it into a daily report at the end of each day. I think the whole project could benefit tremendously.

If that could be cloud-based or some kind of system-based access from a mobile device and like a cellular network, could prove itself invaluable in the time saved and detailed documentation captured and stored daily.

Rishi Srivastava (20:57)
So the very first one where you could plug it in is in subcontractor communication. That’s the high priority, you think?

Charles Britt (21:04)
Yeah, kind of getting more concrete in the tracking of those text messages, if you will, because most of our communication is through text messages, we said previously. But you know, to plug that in and have a tracking or a cloud-based log of that on a daily basis would be huge.

Rishi Srivastava (21:22)
Yeah, makes sense. The last section here is on leadership advice and industry perspective. Charles, this is also the last question. For a young project manager who wants to speak the language of both operations and finance, what two to three habits or skills would you tell them to build now so they can manage a 1,000 home multi-year program with confidence?

Charles Britt (21:49)
Yeah, so three things. First, and this may be controversial with some project managers because I’ve heard the opposite of what I’m about to say, but for me, learn the inner workings of the project intimately. Learn how the project progresses from one phase to the next. Learn what inspections or checkpoints that you need to meet along the way. I believe learn the process of how the cake is made is important to managing the bakery. Maybe that’s a bad analogy, but intimately knowing the day-to-day operations of your project.

Walking the job is one of the best ways to accomplish this, I believe. The numbers only make sense when you see what’s happening on the ground. can make the links between the two. Secondly, learn how labor hours drive the schedule and the budget. People are the heartbeat of the job when the data, or actually let the data tell you the story, but get to know the people behind that data. Understand what makes your people tick, what motivates them. Then you can learn how to position them for success.

And in return, your people will naturally ensure your project is successful. At any point in time, we have over 100 houses undergoing one or multiple phases of construction. And I can’t be, nor can my superintendent be, in 100 different places at one time. Therefore, we have processes in place that flow naturally from one to the next. And we have the right people in the right seats that I trust to manage those processes. And those boots on the ground, they keep the boat rowing in the right direction at the proper pace.

And the last thing, just get comfortable with data and with statistics. Get comfortable with analyzing that data. Don’t shy away from spreadsheets or dashboards. If you can get those three skills down, you can manage projects of any size.

Rishi Srivastava (23:27)
That’s a great answer. Thank you so much for your time, Charles. I had a great conversation with you.

Charles Britt (23:32)
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me.