Last month the National Conference of State Legislatures announced that the national unemployment rate had dropped to 3.7%, the lowest since 1969. Contractors reading that probably didn’t need to be reminded of how difficult it is to find people who want to work. Around the country growing backlogs in every type of residential remodeling offer evidence not only of consumer demand but the inability of contracting companies to satisfy it in timely fashion.
Why Don’t You Hire More People?
Adrian’s Quality Fencing & Decks, in Beaverton, Ore., is scheduling three to four months out, according to owner Adrian Petrisor. He sells many of the 100 or so deck projects built in a year by his business, which is 55% decks, 45% fencing.
Petrisor also says it’s embarrassing to have to tell new customers about the wait. Ideally, he believes, it should be no more than a month. “They say: ‘Why don’t you hire more people?’”
At California Custom Decks in St. Louis, Mo., vice president Mike Brueggenjohann, not surprisingly, has the same problem. His company fields six crews of two to three carpenters with varying levels of skill and experience and can barely keep up with demand. It’s “not so much a problem as a challenge,” Brueggenjohann says, “because we’re very busy with work.”
From Feast to Famine
For deck building veterans like Petrisor and Brueggenjohann who survived the Great Recession, it must seem like a good problem—or challenge—to have. A deck, unlike a new roof or even new windows, is a discretionary purchase, not an immediate need.
Ten years ago, many deck building companies slashed payrolls to survive. Petrisor, for instance, had 30 to 40 employees when the recession hit. He thinned his payroll but helped discharged carpenters get licensed as contractors so they could continue building for his business on an as-needed basis.
Today he still installs mostly with subcontractors, but “subs get busy and sometimes you want certain things done in certain ways, and they’re not your employees,” he says. His solution is to recruit one or, best-case scenario, two in-house crews.
What deck contractors with such aspirations are encountering is pent-up demand combined with current trends regarding career choices among young people, making for a perfect storm of labor problems. A report based on third quarter 2017 findings, released by the National Association of Home Builders in May found 91% of remodelers reporting shortages of labor. The report listed 15 trades by degree of demand. Three trades—finish carpenters, rough carpenters, and framing crews—topped the list.
The NAHB matched up this recent poll of contractors with an earlier survey it had commissioned in November 2016. That study, of 2,100 young adults in the U.S., found that only 3% desired to work in construction.
Seeking Significant Helpers
Decking contractors with backlog need not just installers, but someone who can take a set of deck plans and a load of materials and produce a saleable product that meets code. With such people in short supply, more companies are considering on-the-job training of inexperienced recruits.
Brueggenjohann says it takes a minimum of six months to move someone from the point where “they don’t know much about anything” to being “comfortable doing the tasks and contributing to the project as a significant helper.”
Last January, the deck products manufacturer Deckorators organized a series of seven workshops to solicit feedback from its deck contractor customers. “We set up an open forum to give them a chance to talk to us,” says the company’s senior business manager, Kat Williams. “We heard the same feedback from multiple regions of the country.”
What Deckorators found out was that its contractor customers “were booked three, six, or nine months out” because of the labor shortage, she says. They needed production workers, they told the supplier, and were willing to train them.
Apprentice Program
Thus prompted, Deckorators asked the 10 contractors attending a Pro Summit it had organized what they wanted in an apprentice program and what it would look like for them. Contractors were happy to supply specs.
What the supplier found was that those specs “varied all across the board,” Williams says. Some wanted apprentices who spoke Spanish. Some were looking for at least elementary carpentry skills. Some were happy to train anyone who was talented and willing.
Pay scales varied by region, from a starting hourly wage of $15 to as much as $25 per hour on the West Coast. Some are more selective in their preferred candidate. Brueggenjohann, for instance, says above all he seeks in an apprentice “not just anybody who can swing a hammer” but rather a long-term hire.
“We’re trying to find good people and then teach them the skills,” he says—people “with energy and ambition who are ready to learn.” He will match such an individual with one of his company’s crews to learn as they go, “depending on what their potential happens to be.”
Training Week
Part of the idea of the Deckorators Deck Builder apprentice program is to free up contractors from the time and headaches involved in constant recruiting. Another is to telescope the training process so that, instead of taking six or more months learning deck building skills, apprentices can hit the ground running when they arrive and be useful that much sooner.
Candidates will undergo “an extensive interview process,” Williams says, first with the contractor, then with Deckorators’ HR team. If it looks like a fit, the recruit will travel at the contractor’s expense to Deckorators production facility in Prairie du Chien, Wis. There, the company has repurposed a 20,000-square-foot building it just purchased as an education and training facility.
In their onsite training week, apprentices see how the product is made and learn how to build a deck from instructors who are former contractors hired as educators. But before they even get to the plant, they’ll be required to do a certain amount of homework. The idea is that when they get to the contractor’s jobsite, they’ll know they’re supposed to be doing.
Guinea Pigs
Deckorators is taking applications online now through the end of November from “Certified Pros” who want to join the program. All apprentices will be selected by March 15, 2019, and in April and May, those selected will go to Prairie du Chien for training.
In the beginning of June, they’ll be reporting to work at the different contracting companies involved with the program, and remain there through August. Williams says the hope is for contractors to offer a full-time, higher paying position with the crew, noting that the first year is a trial run for Deckorators to “find out what problems they [the contractors] have and find solutions for those problems.”
Deckorators contractor customers find the idea highly appealing. “They find them, they screen them,” says Petrisor. “The people travel to their factory and show them the way decks are supposed to be built. That saves me a lot of time, and they have way more resources than I do. It’s huge.”