The BIG Board With Ian Schwandt (Pro Remodeler Podcast)
The inaugural episode of The Pro Remodeler Podcast features Ian Schwandt, Production Manager at TDS Custom Construction in Madison, Wisconsin. Ian explains how his team uses “The Big Board,” a custom spreadsheet that tracks projects, forecasts financials, and guides staffing decisions.
The transcript below outlines how the system works and what remodelers can learn from it.
TRANSCRIPT:
“It's using things from the past to look into the future…"
—Ian Schwandt, Production Manager, TDS Custom Construction
DM: Welcome to The Pro Remodeler Podcast, a show for remodeling pros. But you knew that already. I’m Dan Morrison, with Pro Remodeler, and today we are going to peek into the tech stack of Ian Schwandt, the Production Manager for TDS Custom Construction in Madison, Wisconsin. Ian is going to talk about what he calls The Big Board.
The Big Board is a spreadsheet. But not just any old spreadsheet. It’s a high-performance control panel built on a decade of remodeling data—tracking every project in real time.
The first column is a list of current, upcoming, and potential jobs.
Ian: I have them sectioned off by phase. I go top down because that’s completion of the build part of the project. These are the two jobs that hit substantial completion for us in 2025. Then our active production batch—these are the ones we’re working on. Contract pre-con is things we just sold the build agreement on, and my project coordinator hasn’t started purchasing or writing purchase orders yet.
Organizing design and pre-construction phases
IS: Design development is the projects the design team has that will be the next ones to go to contract. During this phase, we’re doing trade partner walkthroughs and final estimating. Schematic design is their first phase where they produce three or four concepts to determine the job.
Design backlog is projects with a signed design agreement, but we don’t know much other than that. I take most of the data from the areas above and predict where those backlog projects will show up in production and what their financial profile will be. If the basket of jobs works within the forecast, that informs how we set pricing once it moves through the process.
“It’s like a construction conveyor belt. Projects move upward as they evolve. And The Big Board helps Ian predict when they’ll land—and what they’ll cost when they do.”
Tracking revenue per week on remodeling projects
But it’s not just a calendar. It’s a modeling tool. Ian looks at each batch of jobs like a financial organism—will it survive? If so, will it live up to expectations?
IS: Then I track the financial pieces: the volume per week and my estimated volume per week. That’s based on the construction project, and those cells track to another tab that does background calculations to give me the dashboard forecast.
Volume per week is the total expected revenue of the project divided by the hammer-swinging duration—from project start to substantial completion. That gives us an idea of revenue volume per week. It allows us to compare projects to others of similar size. If an estimate should be, say, $23,000–24,000 a week but comes back at $17,000, that’s my first red flag: you probably messed something up and need to take another look.
Measuring labor efficiency in remodeling companies
The Big Board doesn’t lie, but it does use bad words sometimes. If the numbers are off, it shows you where and why.
IS: I also track different cost of goods: estimated material, subs, and “other”—things like equipment rentals that aren’t labor. I track subcontractor cost of goods, material, and other independently, along with labor. Then I use all that to calculate my estimated direct labor efficiency ratio—how many dollars of gross profit $1 of labor should produce on a given project. That’s another estimate check.
DM: The Direct Labor Efficiency Ratio. DLER—did you just make that up?
IS: No, I stole it from Greg Crabtree. Read both his books. Great stuff for companies our size.
Forecasting project schedules with The Big Board
DM: Labor is one of the biggest costs, so understanding the efficiency of various projects can help even things out if jobs start bouncing out of the basket. You can’t necessarily replace a $100k hole with four $25k projects. The efficiencies are different on big jobs and small jobs. To fill the hole, the leadership team looks at the pipeline and plays with the metrics to refill the basket. He’s got a tab for that, too.
IS: That’s what we do on this tab. As the production manager, operations guy, the owner doing sales, and the director of design, we monkey with the dates in these columns. The namesake of the Big Board is this large schedule view, which has all the phases on it. I like to look at it in terms of construction phase.
This shows all projects on a calendar, so I can sit down with my project manager, project coordinator, and lead carpenters and talk through it. Right now we’re good, but when we get to summer or early fall, can we really do six projects at once if they’re these specific jobs? Recently we saw two small jobs right across the street from each other. I know John can run both at once.
We also have two porch projects, two houses down from each other, virtually identical. I can put the same guy on both and get economy of scale. Having the data makes that possible.
Calculating profit per day and gross profit targets
DM: So that’s how the Big Board helps Ian look at reality and see different paths to the same destination. Breaking a project into more than just numbers, into ranges and ratios, offers tactical leverage in a shifting landscape.
Profit per day, profit per week… This is a gross profit per day calculator I use for budgeting. I can plug in revenue, add a 24% margin, and figure out crew size and targets for balancing cost of goods.
It gives me GP dollars per day, another metric I run against estimates, but also a way to assemble the right package of jobs to generate the gross profit per day we need.
Using dashboards to track revenue and gross profit
DM: The Big Board offers a dashboard view into the future: where they are, where they’ll be, and how they’re going to get there. It also provides a peek into potential potholes, based on past performance.
IS: This is the big one. The dashboard sums up expected revenue, with rolling six- and twelve-month views. It shows project mix summaries.
The hours pipeline helps me think about hiring. We recruit from Madison College’s carpentry and remodeling program. Every May they graduate 40–60 new carpenters with a year of school experience. Right now I’m working through whether I can hire any of them.
Long-term forecasting for remodeling businesses
IS: I have 2025 revenue projections. Gray line is the budget. Red line is what the pipeline is projected to generate. I also added a reconciliation line from our P&L to track actual revenue against both the pipeline and budget.
Same thing with GP. I also track earned gross profit from the work-in-progress doc I fill out each month. It’s an arcane number in residential construction, but commercial PMs track it closely.
I also have a labor hours chart. And I’ve started the same process for 2026 projects to give the leadership team a long-term view.
The Big Board looks back, it looks forward, and it looks all around—for alternate realities, perceptions, and bullshit detection.
Why remodelers need accurate financial systems
IS: I’m the guy who sits on the porch Sunday morning with a coffee, messing around with a spreadsheet. Through my career I’ve worked for 15 or 16 companies, including running my own. Some of those companies failed spectacularly. I managed to sell my way out before mine collapsed, but many others weren’t as lucky. To me, this is a big investment in making sure that doesn’t happen again.
The Big Board is part crystal ball, part insurance policy. It gives time to respond to potholes.
Integrating JobTread with custom project tracking
IS: What accelerated the sheet in 2024 was switching to JobTread. We had been on Buildertrend and Co-Construct before, but we weren’t executing them well.
DM: JobTread has data built into the backend, so Ian can update the Big Board without bugging the bookkeepers. That keeps information flowing faster and frees up everyone to respond.
IS: The sheet is fed a lot by information in JobTread. When a project is active, the data is inside JobTread. I can pull up a project and see projected margin, how much we’ve collected, what cash flow looks like, the original budget, bills, labor costs—everything—right on the dashboard.
Steps to create a Big Board for your remodeling company
Setting up a Big Board of your own is partly mechanical, partly personal. Ian’s has a lot of design phases because they’re a design-build company. That’s a good place to start a smaller Big Board of your own.
Decide if you’ll track the design process or just construction. Start dates, end dates—quantify consistently. Track cost of goods; that’s where estimates break down. Track milestone dates, add new ones if they matter, and drop them if they don’t.
This isn’t just a geeky numbers exercise. Ian has seen companies go out of business when the economy hiccupped.
Preparing for the future of remodeling businesses
IS: We have 14 employees and their families counting on us to make sound decisions. That requires investing brainpower in the future. I believe the remodeling industry has been lulled by a decade and a half of good times. Many of my peers won’t survive what’s over the hill—and they don’t even know what’s coming.
That was really clear to me at JLC Live—the number of people sleepwalking through running their business.
DM: If you’re going to get good at running your business, a good place to start is helping run someone else’s. My interest in this allowed me to move from project developer/estimator into this role.
I want to thank Ian Schwandt for walking us through the Big Board: proof that systems don’t have to be fancy to be powerful. As long as they are thorough, thoughtful—and ruthless about the truth. Just like Pro Remodeler.
