Where Elevate Is Headed Next…

I’m excited to share a couple of things from my mind, just so you know where we’re headed, whether you want to participate, want to know, or it just creates better connection for us. I want to manifest some of the cool things we’re about to do. I don’t know if all of these things will happen for certain, but I want you to know where we’re headed.

Short answer: Elevate and Lean Takt are headed toward showing, not just telling. Kevin Rice is a full partner. We plan to be the builder for High Street in Phoenix, train and scale our team so I can travel less, finish the senior superintendent and takt books, build out software, and partner with the rest of the industry instead of competing.

Who Owns Elevate and Lean Takt Now?

I want to announce that Kevin Rice is a full partner at Elevate and Lean Takt. Katie, Kevin, and I own Elevate and Lean Takt, each with about a third. Elevate also owns Lean Business, Lean Survey, Lean Superintendent, and Lean Wellness, which we may build out under those brand names if we get the opportunity.

We have a remarkable website refresh coming out, and we’ve been standardizing and stabilizing all of our systems. We’re up to probably 28 people. Most work in Guadalajara, Mexico, and we have team members in Colombia, Germany, Croatia, and Pakistan. We get to work with some of the smartest, most capable people in the world.

Why Start a Construction Company?

This will not affect any of the clients we consult with. The developer we work with in Canada, High Street, is such a good partner that they’re looking into developing land and properties in Phoenix, and Elevate will be their builder.

It’s that show me piece. We’re a company dedicated to training, consulting, and sharing on social media, but now we can put our money where our mouth is from a business and construction company standpoint and say, look, we do this every day. We know what we’re doing. Maybe we can get larger trailers and do a little bit of a university. If someone wants their superintendent to implement takt or the integrated production control system, they can come to our project sites, stay however long they want, participate with the systems, and take that back to their own company. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time creating that company with Kevin over the next eight to 12 months.

We’re going to take a Paul Akers approach: here, we’ll show you. Our social media and examples will be much more scalable, because a lot of contractors, even lean ones, are so afraid to share. It’s very difficult to go videotape what they’re doing.

Why Am I Traveling Less?

One of the things I need to do for my health, and will do, is travel less. We are engaging our process improvement engineers to travel more and do more training. On project walks, I’ll FaceTime or Zoom in to get that builder experience, and our folks will do a lot of the audits, pictures, and takt planning integration. We’ll continue to do training and consulting.

How Is Takt Doing for Clients?

Lean Takt is doing well. Our clients love the takt planning system. A lot of them are getting up to 20% schedule gains and more flow. Even when it’s not perfect, they love it, and it brings transparency to the systems. I talked to someone yesterday who used it for their design efforts, and it’s bringing transparency to that process too.

A listener on a phased hospital kitchen renovation can’t get takt out of their head. They’re in buyout, the perfect time to implement the tools, and their superintendent is open to suggestions. They asked for a roadmap. The answer is yes: the roadmap is on Miro, the class is the Takt Production System course, and we do training all the time, in person, virtually, or with simulation. Start with What Exactly Is the Takt Production System?.

What Books and Tools Are Coming?

I’m working with a group of fantastic contributors to finish book two of Elevating Construction Senior Superintendents, which will outline the integrated production control system. We got trademark approval for the Takt Production System. We will write two more books, one about takt planning and one about takt steering and control, very visually focused, mostly pictures, with a beautiful design. We’re gathering information from industry experts to acknowledge all the research we can and align the terminology, so even terms like cycle time and takt time are used the way industry professionals prefer. The target is to finish before LCI so we can give the books to practitioners.

We hired a videographer to bring the Lean Takt YouTube channel up to the quality of the Jason Schroeder channel. We’re working with more software developers to partner on or develop an application that takes care of people in the field. We still work with Takting, and we love them. We want to scale the Takt Production System far and wide for the benefit of everyone in the industry.

I hope this year we finish Superintendents Book Two, both takt books, and one for elevating construction field engineers, so next year we can focus on PM and PE positions.

What Does Scaling Look Like?

We continue to hire. At some point we’ll need U.S.-based project managers and superintendents, and people like Kevin Rice who are good integrators who can scale. If you’re interested or have advice or suggestions, please let us know.

In the next six months, we want boot camps that people sign up for and are scheduled on a remarkable basis. The boot camps are dialed in, Katie always updates the manuals, the processes are streamlined, and the Foreman Boot Camp is developed. We want the website to lead people right to what we do, and our team so well trained, using EOS and Scrum, that we could scale to something like 60 full-time schedulers. That sounds crazy, but we want the capacity to bless the industry. We’ll see how well we sustain this pivot without getting in trouble from a cash-flow standpoint.

Why Partner Instead of Compete?

We want to be open and supportive and partner with people versus competing. I don’t even want to hear about the competition anymore. I want our industry coming together, listening to each other, and partnering. We support The Lean Builder every step of the way and they do the same for us. Jen and Jess wrote Lean and Love, and we love and support them. Adam Hootz, Hal Macomber, and Felipe Engineer too. These partnerships will take the whole industry into a bright and beautiful future. We have to stop fighting and bickering and be open to listening, and that goes for me, too. We don’t always have to agree, but we need to be united moving forward.