How many office workers – administrative support staff – does your company employ? Office workers, unseen to most of your market, are the essential workers that can make or break every operation. And they often don’t get the recognition they’re due.
“The office is beyond the heartbeat of the company,” says Linda Alfonsi, operations manager for Petra Paving, Hampstead, NH. “We’re front and dead center and we’re driving the ship.”
But it’s not the number of people that make an office successful because every office, regardless of its size, has to accomplish the same tasks. And when those tasks are accomplished smoothly, jobs get done well and on schedule. When those tasks are done poorly or when they aren’t done at all, the entire business suffers -- from the crews out on the job to the estimators and salespeople to the customers.
Tasks in the Office
Like many contractors, Brian Gann, founder, president and co-owner with Joe Abner, vice-president, of Gann Asphalt & Concrete, Riverside, MO, initially handled all the office and back-room work himself. “But we eventually hired people here and there as we saw the need,” he says.
Gann started Gann Asphalt & Concrete in 1994 with a 500-gal. sealcoating tanker and added services as needed by customers. Today the company’s 30 employees (which include two office support staff) generate 60% of work from paving and repair, 30% from in-house concrete work, and 10% from sealcoating and striping.
Today the office staff is led by his daughter, Robbin Markham, office manager, and supported by Stephanie Holey, administrative assistant. Markham has worked in the office since she was 18 and today answers phones, “other small things that take up a great deal of time,” but spends most of her time with the books handling accounts payable, receivables and marketing.
“It’s a big role in a smaller company like ourselves,” Gann says.
At Petra Paving, Linda Alfonsi like many operations managers is a jack of all trades. She handles payroll, accounts receivables, scheduling, and customer service. Until 2017 she also handled all the job costing (Petra Paving tracks everything daily), but it got to be too much.
“For years it was me and one other person in the office to answer the phones, but I was becoming overloaded,” Alfonsi says. “I was so busy ‘doing’ things that I didn’t have the time to run the operations like I was supposed to and like I wanted to.”
This, Alfonsi says based on conversations with other contractors, is a fairly typical situation. She was the hub through which the entire Petra operation ran.
Most if not all contractors find themselves, at one time or another (and often more than once), in situations similar to both Gann Asphalt & Concrete and Petra Paving. That’s because as contractors grow their there are “pinch points” when companies are not quite big enough to hire that additional administrative person but too big not to.
Contractors who start working out of their pickup truck and who head back to their home office every day to handle the office work can do that for a while. But eventually, assuming they are successful, their support needs are greater than they can handle alone. Gann says he understands – and remembers -- the frustration early on of trying to handle all the office-related jobs and he knew he couldn’t afford to drop the ball on anything.
“I wasn’t in business very long before I hired that one person to support me in the office,” he says. “I didn’t have the money but I needed that person and I decided I’d better hire sooner rather than later. Dropping that one call or not being there to take the call can have a huge impact on your growth.”
Technology has made it easier for the smaller operator to give the impression he’s a bigger business because the company number can be a cell phone, emails can be responded to in the field etc. but that can only carry you so far. At some point, for your sanity and for the growth of your company, you need an administrative staff – an office of support people – who have your back (and your front).
Petra Paving now has a three-person office staff. That’s because things came to a head late last year when Petra Paving started a second business (unrelated to paving) and Alfonsi was tasked with being essentially an operations manager for both.
“Up until a certain point it worked fine, but Petra got to a size where everything couldn’t flow through a single person,” she says. “Having everything in my hands was backfiring because I couldn’t keep up.”
That’s when Petra Paving brought in a part-time person to handle all the job costing and related work, which enabled Alfonsi to get back to the actual operations manager she wanted to be – and that Petra Paving needed.
“It’s a workload issue,” she says. “That’s usually when companies realize they need to add a person to the office.”
Gann says that larger companies have individuals assigned to do specific tasks, but smaller operations need people who are willing and able to take on more and different work than their job description details. Just a few of the tasks office personnel perform include:
- Answering the phone
- Developing proposals
- Providing essential paperwork such as proof of insurance
- Job costing and job costing analysis
- Payroll (sometimes tracking hours for a payroll service, other times actually cutting of checks.)
- Human Resources including insurance, benefits, time off, child care etc.
- Purchasing (office supplies and miscellaneous items)
- Crew management
- Scheduling
- Safety programs
- Accounting
What Skills to Look For
Gann says that when hiring for the office, first determine where you’re going to use that person the most. Then detail the skills for that task and hire the person that has those skills.
“You want to hire someone who can develop and grow in their job and who can grow with the company and that’s what you want,” Gann says. “But when you’re hiring initially you’re hiring to get a specific task done.”
Alfonsi says Petra Paving has had a difficult time finding the right person to fit the third office job they needed to fill. The last two hires, she says, were nightmares and she can relate to the horror stories many contractors can tell. But the admin they have now is completely different.
“She got it and ran with it,” Alfonsi says.
“The biggest attribute that support staff must have is to see the bigger picture,” Gann says. “As we were growing, Robbin, our office manager, would be the first person to take the call from a customer and the last person to do the receivables. So she would see everything through from beginning to end and that’s essential regardless of how many people are working in the office. The crew is focused on each job and the sales people are focused on their jobs and clients, but the staff sees the bigger picture from beginning to end.”
Gann and Alfonsi point out that as the company grows so, too, do the responsibilities of the administrative staff. “And they need to take on those responsibilities,” Gann says. “When you hire the right people hopefully they’re going to grow with the organization.”
Office and administrative staff obviously have to the specific skills for which they were hired, but other skills to look for when hiring office staff include:
- Multi-tasking. “This is the key to the success of an office staff in a small- to mid-size operation,” Gann says. “There are all sorts of things that come up within an organization and they’re not always assigned to someone. Because the office staff are the ones in the office they tend to end up having to handle them.” Gann says his company just printed t-shirts for the crew and bought gifts for some of our customers and Markham and Holey ended up handling that. “It’s not in a job description and it doesn’t happen often but things like that come up all the time and the office people need to be able to handle them.”
- Communication. “This is huge, especially in a small office,” Alfonsi says, adding that listening skills are a big part of communicating. “You can and should learn a lot from everyone around you, especially in a small office where everyone works closely together. You can advance much quicker and take on more responsibility more quickly by listening to what others are doing and how they are doing it and incorporating that into you daily efforts.”
- Phone etiquette. “Even if ‘it’s not their job’ to answer the phone, most office staff eventually become part of that first contact with the customer,” Alfonsi says. Gann adds characteristics of friendly, outgoing and someone who is “on the ball.”
- Organization. An essential skill for someone juggling multiple tasks and interacting with numerous teams.
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- Flexibility. A requirement especially for small companies where office staff might be called on to step in and assume another job temporarily.
- Follows directions. Essential as part of a small team and for learning.
- Good computer skills. Essential in today’s workplace.
- Adept at social media. See above.
- Honesty. Difficult to determine at the start but because of the nature of the work you need someone who is honest.
- Cares about the company. Also difficult to determine at the start but the office role requires a personal investment.
“You need to look for someone who can hit the ground running and who is not afraid to take over,” Alfonsi says. “I’m not interested in someone who can just fill in the blanks. I want someone self-motivated, who is interested in more than just filling the position. I want them to take the job because they want to do the job at 100% because the crew and the customer and the company need that – not because they want a paycheck.”
But she cautions that owners and manager have to be willing to give up some control to find the right person.
“You have to empower the person to make decisions on their own,” she says. “If the person comes to me every time a decision has to be made that’s a sticking point, and then we know we have a problem. I get so excited when someone comes to me after looking it all over and telling me what they think we should do.
“Sometimes the decision bites them in the butt, but that’s going to happen,” she says. “Then we just back up and see what happened and how it happened and then we redo it. We actually redo whatever it was because that’s the way to make the learning stick.”
Then Alfonsi and the staffer check the other paperwork to make sure that same problem doesn’t happen in other situations.
“All the pieces have to be there or the crew can’t run right. If they don’t have everything they need we’re in big trouble right out of the gate,” she says.
Systems Mean Success
Gann says that regardless of company size, every contractor needs to have a system in place, “from the initial phone call to the final billing and follow-up,” to make sure everything gets done the way the company wants it to get done. And office personnel need to work within the system.
“That’s especially important for mid- and small-size companies because so many tasks are handled by so few people. In larger companies there’s more specialization,” Gann says. “If you don’t have these systems in place and don’t have that office support it’s going to be very difficult – especially in this day and age when it’s a very competitive industry. You’ll have to work harder and stress out more and the company eventually will probably not succeed.”
Alfonsi says she’s talked with many contractors who don’t have a structured office organization and operation.
“The structure might intimidate some contractors who are more informal, but it works for us,” she says. “I don’t see how you can really get by without it, especially once you reach a certain size and if you’re trying to grow.”
