Quarter End
My least favorite times of the year are the end of quarters. Why? Because this is when my life gets hella busy since this is when all my closings end up happening. There should never be 15+ closings within two days of each other. There are way too many issues with materials, labor, and scheduling to make that work. Yet, every quarter-end, this is what happens. They should be spaced out over the entire quarter or some of them should be pushed into the next month, but nope. The company wants to report lots of closings for shareholders, we try to make every home close that we possibly can.
When we inevitably cannot make a closing, it falls on me to deal with it. Also whenever we have to reschedule a walkthrough or an inspection or give nearly any bad news. Today alone I have had to reschedule five walkthroughs or inspections for homes that are still going to close in June. This is exhausting because, despite how ridiculous some of them are, I genuinely care about my buyers. I spend more time than most setting the proper expectations so no one is blindsided. This way when I have to give bad news no one is surprised. Still, that’s not the way it should be and I hate that it has to be this way four times a year because management decides to do nonsensical shit.
I know that this is pretty much every home builder right now so there’s no real difference between them. Still, it is very clear that people who are not in the field dealing with the actual realities of construction and talking with the people buying the homes are the ones pulling the strings. Which sucks.
Basically, quarter end sucks and I am looking forward to July 1st more than I can possibly describe. Only nine days to go. Until then this is me whenever I get home:
How are you doing? Is your job affected by quarter-end?
Feature Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
Our month ends gets dicey but thankfully it’s much smaller scale than what you’re dealing with and less miserable. It’s mildly balanced out by the fact that I get to do my own personal month end calculations which I still enjoy.
It doesn’t make sense that you’re being driven to that level of nonsense when these could be spaced properly and you’d still end up reporting good numbers across the quarters longer term. Forcing you to do crunch time four times a year seems ridiculous. July 1, here we come!
Yep. It is absolutely ridiculous. I keep pushing my construction manager to get raises. Being commission, I am not eligible, but he better be getting paid to close 16 homes in four days. I have already warned a few of my homeowners that I may be out sick on the 1st just to recover from this nonsense.