Turning Operational Chaos into a Confident Roadmap: Heilman Construction
The starting point
Heilman Construction, a successful family-owned outdoor living contractor building decks, pergolas, and custom structures throughout the greater Eastside, was hitting growth bottlenecks. Owners Andy and Amanda Heilman had ambitious goals, but nearly every function — sales, estimating, materials ordering, crew management — still depended on them directly. They hired me to map how the business actually operated across four core workflows: lead handling, estimating and bidding, the build process, and crew onboarding. That map surfaced the real bottlenecks, like an estimating process that relies entirely on Andy, a single point of failure on crew training and quality, and a fragile materials ordering process that had a history of delaying jobs.
The outcome
From that analysis, I ended up with eight prioritized, quantified recommendations covering all the pain points that came up during our deep dive, sequenced so Andy and Amanda could see exactly what to tackle first and why. The clarity paid off immediately: Heilman moved on several recommendations that lived outside the engagement, for example lead qualification improvements through their marketing and CRM vendor, and we look forward to working together to tackle documenting and automating the parts of the workflow that bottleneck with Andy and Amanda.
As Amanda put it, I “focused on practical solutions that aligned with our vision and gave us confidence moving forward.” For a business trying to grow without losing the quality and reputation that built it, that’s the difference between a stack of good ideas and a business that actually moves.
Results
Future Roadmap
8 areas of future work
I delivered a roadmap with 8 clear steps to take to address the pain points we identified, some of which involved other of their vendors.
Clarity
Clear recommendations
Immediate next steps
Heilman moved on several recommendations right away.
The rest are our roadmap for future work so Heilman knows what else they can do.