For a long time, I was the bottleneck.
Every set of drawings waited on my desk for review. Projects stalled. Clients waited. Not because the team wasn’t capable but because I felt like I had to personally touch everything before it went out the door.
When you’re starting a millwork business and training people from scratch, you don’t get the luxury of clean systems right away. You survive on experience. You hire people who know what “good” looks like. You rely on judgment instead of process.
Standardization was always the goal, but early on, expertise had to come first.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that standardization isn’t a milestone you reach. It’s a continuous process of removing yourself from the workflow, discovering the next bottleneck, and then doing it again.
Start With What’s Actually Hurting
The first place I focused was drawing review, because that’s where work was dying.
I didn’t start with anything fancy. I made simple checklists based on what I already looked for when reviewing drawings. No theory. Just reality.
Then we layered it:
- Drafters reviewed their own work first
- Team leads performed a secondary review
- Only the most complex jobs came to me or another senior reviewer
Over time, people developed enough experience to review independently. Today, I rarely review drawings at all.
Then estimating became the bottleneck. Same pattern. I was doing every estimate, so I trained people to do takeoffs. I reviewed their work. Eventually, someone else reviewed in my place.
The pattern holds:
- Identify the bottleneck
- Capture what’s in your head
- Build a tiered system
- Train yourself out of the loop
Your Checklists Can’t Stay Static
Those first checklists weren’t perfect. They couldn’t be.
As real projects exposed gaps, we added to them. About every six months, we review actual hours against estimates and update our data.
Why six months? A year is too slow to catch problems early. Anything shorter doesn’t provide enough signal. Six months gives us meaningful feedback without becoming a full-time audit job.
What surprised me wasn’t just the efficiency gains, it was what the data revealed that daily work hid.
Complexity Isn’t Just About the Project
Patterns started emerging. Certain clients consistently ran over or under budget. Some software environments introduced predictable complexity.
Complexity wasn’t just about scope, it was about who the client was and how they worked.
That insight changed how we approached estimating. Some clients weren’t “difficult”, we were just underpricing the level of coordination and detail they required. That wasn’t a people problem. It was a scope definition problem.
Once we saw that clearly, we could decide whether to improve our process, adjust pricing, or be more selective about the work we pursued.
Define Standards Before Work Starts
To prevent scope creep, we created a simple “Level of Development” framework for each client.
- Basic: plans and elevations
- Standard: plans, elevations, sections
- Complex: plans, elevations, sections, and details
At first, these were just text descriptions. That didn’t work. Everyone interpreted them differently.
So we moved to visual examples, sample drawings that showed exactly what each level meant. Now, when a drafter sees the LOD, they know precisely what’s expected.
When a client asks for more detail mid-project, the conversation becomes simple:
“This level of detail wasn’t included in what we quoted. We’re happy to help, but next time we’ll account for the extra work.”
It protects the relationship and the boundary.
Don’t Overcorrect
Here’s the part people don’t talk about enough: you can over-standardize.
Right now, we have multiple layers of review, drafter, team lead, supervisor, QC. That adds safety, but it also adds time. And at a certain point, the process itself becomes the bottleneck.
We’re actively working to reduce steps now.
The goal of standardization isn’t rigidity. It’s clarity and repeatability, without turning your team into robots or slowing execution to a crawl.
Every time you remove one bottleneck, another appears. That’s normal. That’s growth.
Standardization Is Never Done
If you’re waiting for the perfect moment to standardize, you’ll never start.
Begin with experience. Hire people who know what “good” looks like. Then systematically capture that knowledge into checklists, tiered reviews, and visual standards.
Review and update those standards regularly using real project data. Set expectations with clients before work begins. And stay alert for the moment when your systems start working against you.
The businesses that scale aren’t the ones with perfect processes from day one. They’re the ones willing to continuously examine what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change next.
That’s the real work of standardization.
Jacob Edmond
CEO