In October 2006, I traveled from Seattle to Indianapolis to visit my mom’s cousin. He owns one of the largest home building firms in that market, Arbor Homes. My contracting business was still in its infancy and I was searching for some inspiration about “how to become a real company.”

I spent three days shadowing him and some of his key people in project management, accounting, IT and quality control. It was eye-opening on many levels, and I still refer to notes and materials I brought back from that trip.

I never could have foreseen, though, how studying a home building business would some day inspire me (with my brother) to start up a software company.

When a home is built, and especially when several homes are built sequentially, everything must happen with precise timing and in the proper order. Different employees and subcontractors are brought into the process as it unfolds, and communication among these people with the customer must be carefully planned and executed.

Altogether, Arbor Homes has approximately 100 steps that it takes to build a house, all outlined on a Gantt chart. The foundation must precede the framing, which must precede the electrical, plumbing, drywall, paint and so on. Sales people, superintendents and foremen must all work together and understand what their roles and responsibilities are at each stage.

My small contracting company is nowhere near as complex as a home building company. Rather than having a nine-month process with 100 steps, our jobs usually only last a few days at the most. Even so, when I returned from that trip, I began to think about my business like a home builder.

Knowing that I wanted to some day build my company to have multiple project managers, estimators, accountants and office support staff — and not have everything revolve around me — I knew that I needed to design a process that articulated how we serve our customer from the initial phone call to collecting the final payment.

Sounds easy, right?

Building a house is complex, but so is performing a high volume of small jobs in rapid fire. Each year, we perform between 1,000 and 1,200 jobs. In our busiest months, sometimes we do almost 200. And on each one, sometimes up to five of our employees might touch the customer at some point. The current version of our process actually has 57 possible steps. If we want to get to 2,000 or 3,000 jobs in a year and have multiple locations — and continue to provide consistently stellar customer service — we’re going to need to have everyone dialed in on “how we do things.”

An analogy that comes to mind is that we are a sports team. We have a playbook and everybody needs to know the playbook for us to have success; otherwise, we’re just playing in the backyard.

NFL analysts often say that good quarterbacks understand their role throughout the playbook. But the elite quarterbacks also know what each of the other 10 guys are supposed to be doing, too. That way, they can anticipate things that are going to happen, and respond when the unexpected comes up.

The Seattle Seahawks (shameless plug, hey we’re from Seattle!) and their mobile quarterback Russell Wilson actually have installed schemes for what to do when their play breaks down. Rather than having chaos unfold and the quarterback just trying to improvise, they actually have a plan for what each person is supposed to do based on what has gone wrong and where each of the chess pieces is at that time.

We have built this same methodology into the construction software we’re creating for contractors. Tasks are divided among estimators, project managers and accounting personnel based upon where the job is in the customer service pipeline.

If your business is like ours, you probably need to: (1) respond to the bid request, (2) follow up and sell it after submitting the proposal, (3) obtain a written contract, (4) schedule dates, (5) perform the work, (6) do quality control, (7) send an invoice and (8) collect payment.

Our software allows for each person in your organization to always know what they are responsible for, respective to those tasks, and make sure that you are always providing superior customer service. And from a senior manager or owner’s perspective, you can monitor your employees’ activity to ensure that they are valuing your customers as much as you do.