Run one fifteen minute review per job, before material is ordered, done by the person who will answer for the job going wrong rather than the person who sold it. A review run after the truck is loaded is a report, not a gate.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
Most of what goes wrong on a job was decided before anybody arrived. The scope was vague, the order did not match the estimate, somebody assumed a color, and none of that surfaces until a crew is standing on a roof with the wrong thing on the truck. By then the cheap fix is gone.
There is exactly one moment when a mistake on a job is still cheap, and it is before anybody has spent money on it. A wrong color caught before the order is a phone call. The same wrong color caught on install morning is a crew standing around, a restock fee, a second trip and a customer who now knows something went wrong.
Everything downstream of the order is recovery. The gate exists to be the last point at which you are still choosing rather than reacting.
The person who will answer for the job going wrong. Not the person who sold it.
That is not about trust. A seller reviewing their own sale reads the estimate as a memory of a conversation, and the memory fills in what the paper leaves out. Somebody who was not there reads only what is written down, which is exactly what the crew will have.
Did we read what we already have. The signed estimate, the work order, the measurement report, the site photos, and the material order checked line for line against the estimate. Not "is there an estimate". Has somebody read it this week, with the order next to it.
Is the scope actually clear. Colors, finishes and models named. Every surface or area in scope listed. Trim, edge and transition details clear. Special instructions clear. And what the customer has been told to expect, written down, because that is the version the customer will hold you to.
The parts check. Not quantities. The small items nobody prices and everybody forgets.
What did the seller not write down. A direct question, asked of a document, not of a person. The things a seller knows and never typed are the things a crew finds out.
What is missing, who has been told, and the answer. Three fields, and the last one is a decision: this job is ready, or it is not and here is what has to happen first.
Anybody can print a list. What makes this work is that it is a gate rather than a form: material does not get ordered until the review has an answer on it. If the order can go out with the review half-filled, you do not have a gate, you have paperwork, and paperwork gets skipped on the busy weeks that are exactly when it matters.
The second half of the mechanism is the loop. What the end-of-job review catches this month becomes a line on this gate next month. That is what makes it get better on its own rather than through somebody deciding to improve.
Fifteen minutes a job, once. Against one second trip, one restock, one crew standing idle for a morning. The arithmetic is not close, and it is the kind of arithmetic that only looks obvious after you have run the gate for a month and watched what it catches.
The gate itself, the close-out review at the other end of the job, the record that turns what the second one catches into what the first one checks, and the board that runs them are The Production Standard. If what you want first is to know which jobs lost money, that is The Job Cost Standard. More answers on the questions page.