Full book, tight crews.
Now the schedule has to hold.
Fractional maintenance planning for contractors who are too busy to keep the schedule straight, but not big enough to carry a full-time planner.
Mackay based · 13 years in ports, mining services, and heavy manufacturing
All from prior roles on the payroll, not consulting engagements, and the last one is the point. A twenty-person shop has the same problem as a five-site port, with smaller numbers on it.
Being flat out is not the problem. Week four is.
Most contractors I talk to aren't short of work. They're short of a schedule that survives contact with a week where something moves, and something always moves.
- One job slips, and three others quietly collide. Nobody sees it until the morning it bites.
- The forward plan lives on a whiteboard, across four spreadsheets, or in the head of the one supervisor who can't take leave.
- Crews get double-booked across sites. You find out when two supervisors ring about the same fitter.
- Long-lead items get ordered when the job starts, not when the job was planned. The crew stands around waiting on steel.
A Schedule Reset. Two weeks, fixed price, three things you can hold.
I take whatever exists now (whiteboard, spreadsheets, someone's memory) and turn it into a plan you can actually run the month from. No retainer, no lock-in, no ongoing commitment attached.
What you get:
- One consolidated forward schedule: every job and every crew, in one place, in one view
- A labour-loading view: exactly where you're already over-committed, by week and by crew
- One page on what's about to bite: the collisions, the long-lead materials nobody has ordered, and the jobs that cannot start on the date currently promised
A$2,400 + GST if you give me a written reference and approve an anonymized case study afterwards. The reduction is there if you want it.
Delivered remotely. Call 0493 262 725 →
Costs you about three hours across the fortnight. I run two of these at a time. If both slots are taken I'll tell you the date I can start, not string you along.
Some outfits take the Reset and run it themselves from there, which is a fine outcome. Others would rather someone kept the weekly cycle turning: schedule issued, re-sequenced when jobs move, labour and materials checked ahead of the week. If that's the conversation, we can have it once you've seen the work. Not before.
Ten working days. Here's exactly what happens.
No discovery phase, no workshops, no one wandering around your yard with a clipboard. You'll hear from me four times and that's it.
Kick-off & what you've got
A call to walk through the jobs you've won, the crews you've got, and what's already promised to whom. Then whatever you can send me: spreadsheets, a photo of the whiteboard, a job list out of your accounting system.
Your time: about 45 minutes
Build the forward schedule
Every job and every crew into one view, sequenced against real durations and real commitments. Where dates are soft I'll mark them soft rather than invent certainty you don't have.
Your time: none
Load the labour, find the collisions
Crew by crew, week by week, against what you've actually got. This is where the over-commitment shows up, along with the long-lead items nobody's ordered and the starts that can't happen on the promised date.
Your time: one short call to sanity-check
Handover & you keep it
We walk the schedule and the loading view together, and I show whoever's going to maintain it how to keep it current. You keep the files. They're yours, and they work without me.
Your time: about an hour
Aaron Ridgway
13 years in industrial operations. Ports, mining services, heavy manufacturing.I plan maintenance and shutdown work, and I've spent most of my career inside the operations rather than advising them from outside. Sole planner across five bulk port sites, running the whole work-order lifecycle. Primavera P6 on a $1.1M project at Goonyella Riverside, coordinating up to 300 contractors on shutdown days across day and night crews.
Before that: workshop scheduling across trades crews of 20 to 40 in SAP, and six years as a Level 2 NDT technician inside more than ten major shutdown windows across Bowen Basin coal. I've been on the crew side of a bad plan often enough that it isn't an abstraction to me.
I've also run the other side of it: full operational responsibility for a $6M-a-year manufacturer with twenty staff. Small enough that the schedule was my problem personally, which is most of the reason I know it can be fixed without hiring anyone.
- Bachelor of Business (Management), Griffith University
- CAPM (PMI) certified
- Primavera P6, SAP PM, TechnologyOne CMMS
- Mackay based: Bowen Basin, Central Queensland, and the Paget yards
The things people actually ask.
Our data's a mess. Half of it's in someone's head.
That's the normal starting point, and it's not a blocker; it's usually the finding. If everything were already in a clean system you probably wouldn't need me. A photo of the whiteboard and a job list out of your accounting system are a perfectly workable starting point. What I need is the jobs you've won, roughly how long each takes, who's on the tools, and what's already been promised to clients. Where that only exists in a supervisor's head, we get it out of his head in the kick-off call. That's part of the work, not a prerequisite for it.
How much of my time does this actually take?
About three hours across the fortnight: a 45-minute kick-off, a short mid-point call to sanity-check what I've found, and an hour at the end to walk through it and hand it over. Someone in your office may spend another hour pulling files together. That's the lot. I don't run workshops and I don't need a desk in your building.
Why not just hire a planner?
If you've got a full-time planner's worth of work, hire one. Genuinely, that's the better answer and I'll say so. But a good maintenance planner in this region is $110k to $140k plus on-costs, they're hard to find, and most businesses your size aren't sure they've got a full-time job's worth of planning to give them. The Reset is a way of finding out cheaply. Sometimes what it shows is that you do need someone full-time, and now you know what to hire them to do.
Do you need to come to site?
No, and that is deliberate. The Reset is desk work on your own records, so there is nothing a site visit would add to it. Everything happens across three short calls, which can be taken at 6:00am, after 4:30pm, or at a weekend. I am in Mackay, so if you would rather shake hands over the handover at some point that is easy enough, but it is not part of the engagement and it is not what you are paying for.
What happens after the two weeks?
Nothing, unless you want it to. You keep the files, they're yours, and they're built so someone in your business can maintain them without me. A lot of outfits run it themselves from there and that's a perfectly good outcome. If you'd rather someone kept the weekly cycle turning (schedule out, re-sequenced when jobs move, labour and materials checked ahead of the week), that exists, it's month to month with two weeks' notice, and we'd talk about it after you've seen the work rather than before.
Are you a labour hire outfit?
No, and it's a fair question given how many people around here are. I'm not supplying you a body to work under your direction and I'm not going to try to place anyone with you. You're buying a defined deliverable (a schedule, a loading view, and a written list of what's about to bite) produced by me, to a fixed scope and a fixed price. If what you actually need is another set of hands, I'll point you at someone who does that properly.
We're probably fine, honestly.
You might well be, and if you are I'd rather establish that on a phone call than take your money finding out. The businesses this helps aren't badly run; they're usually run well by people who are now carrying more work than the current system was built for. The tell is whether a job moving in week two is a five-minute adjustment or a bad afternoon. If it's a five-minute adjustment, you don't need me.
If week four is starting to look ugly, it's worth a phone call.
No forms, no funnel, no sales sequence. Ring me or send an email, and we'll work out in fifteen minutes whether there's anything here worth doing.
Ridgway Resilience · ABN 74 293 033 960 · Mackay, Queensland
Delivered remotely · serving Mackay, the Bowen Basin, and Central Queensland