Time to Benchmark

Almost any conversation about quantifying productivity, profit, or performance in home building begins with time. That’s because time sets the standard by which many other home
building variables can be tracked and tabulated to understand opportunities for operational improvement. Time is a benchmark by which organizational effectiveness can be assessed, understood, and optimized. But the benchmarking process is easier said than done, and it’s one more thing for a builder to add to an already extensive to-do list. Except that benchmarking isn’t just another box to check; benchmarking is the key to consistently beating the competition and sustaining operational excellence and profitability.

“The idea of benchmarking is really simple: How do you begin to learn from others about how they do things better than you do?” says George Casey, a housing industry icon and group chair for Vistage, arguably the largest executive benchmarking and coaching organizations in the world. “And from that you begin to realize there’s another way [to do something], start learning from that, and get yourself better.”

It also requires humility. “The people who really benefit from benchmarking tend to be humble, rather than letting their egos get in the way,” Casey says. “You think you’ve got a secret sauce and you don’t want anybody to get it? Let me tell you: There are no secret sauces.” Still on the fence about benchmarking? Then ease into it by focusing on data. You have it, of course, from every corner of your operations. You may even use it already to “benchmark” your business against past performance.

But looking inward only reveals a fraction of the potential. As Casey and other high-performing builders say (and do), the real value of benchmarking is looking outward, to reliable, accurate, and objective third-party industry (and even non-industry) sources and data to serve as a sounding board against which you can compare your numbers and experience.