The Grit Blueprint

Designing Efficient Yards And Door Shops For Speed, Safety, And Growth: Scott Morrison, Do it Best

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What if doubling your speed didn’t require a new machine, just fewer steps? We sat down on site at the Do it Best Fall Market with Scott Morrison to unpack how simple, evidence‑based changes turn door shops, warehouses, and lumberyards into faster, safer, and more profitable operations.

Scott walks us through his on‑site approach: capture the current state with brutal honesty, map the “dance steps” between machines, and target non‑value‑added motion that steals hours. From a door shop operator walking 20 to 30 steps for inserts to forklifts hunting for staging space, distance is the hidden tax. When you cut travel time in half, it's as if you've doubled your speed. Scott shares a zone picking case where a member saved 90 minutes per day, eliminated overtime, and rolled first‑out loads by 6:30 to 7:00 a.m., a competitive edge contractors feel on the jobsite.

We also dig into smart layout under real constraints. Ordinances and retention basins shrank a client's “plenty big” plan to 45,000 square feet. By specifying door widths, aisle design, and clear beam locations, Scott fit current needs and protected 50% growth without new construction. On the LBM side, centralizing staging cut travel by about half. The throughline is disciplined iteration with a cross‑functional team: one quarterback for communication, voices from operations, sales, and the floor, and a willingness to reject the first draft. Technology, like a warehouse management system, adds leverage only after the flow is fixed. It's painful for two weeks, indispensable two weeks later.

If you want earlier trucks, fewer headaches, and a culture that hunts waste daily, start by mapping what is true right now. Then remove distance, balance work with real sales data, and design your aisles for where you’ll be in five years.

Topics we covered:
• Mapping current state to expose waste
• Cutting non‑value‑added motion between machines
• Zone picking design and balancing by sales history
• Saving 90 minutes per day and reducing overtime
• Preloading trucks for first‑out morning deliveries
• Building cross‑functional teams with a single quarterback
• Iterating future states and breaking old paradigms
• Planning layouts for 50% growth without new buildings
• Centralizing staging to halve travel
• When to pair layout changes with WMS

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Stefanie Couch:

You get in there, you see the problems, you diagnose, and then you start to map it out.

Scott Morrison:

I can help them to break it down into smaller steps, analyze it, and then say, okay, here's the best way to go forward. Where are the machines today? And what are the footprints? Uh, what are the steps, the dance steps that go from machine to machine? And that's when you start to really dig into the to the issue.

Stefanie Couch:

When you think about having a machine operator on a door shop assembly line, and that person is having to walk 20, 30 steps to go get inserts for that door, if you could make that where they turn around and grab it without taking a step, how many hours in a week could that save? I mean, it's a lot of time.

Scott Morrison:

Absolutely. If you just move it half the distance, it's the effectiveness of you're going twice as fast. Working with one of the do it best members by implementing the system, they're saving 90 minutes per day. The impact on that is less overtime. The trucks are coming back, and they're loaded for the next day. And so now the next day at 6 30 in the morning, 7 o'clock, they're ready to go. That's a good winning twice.

Stefanie Couch:

Welcome to the Grit Blueprint Podcast, the playbook for building unmistakable brands that grow, lead, and last in the built world. I'm Stephanie Couch, the founder of Grit Blueprint. And I'm a lifelong building industry insider. I was raised here, built my career here, and now my team and I help others win here. The truth is, you can be the best option in your space and still lose to someone else who simply shows up better and more consistently. Each week on the Grit Blueprint, I'm going to show you how to stand out, earn trust, and turn your brand into a competitive advantage that lasts. If you're ready to be seen, known, chosen, and become unmistakable, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Welcome to the Grit Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Couch, and I'm here today on site at the Do It Best Market with my friend Scott Morrison. Welcome to the show.

Scott Morrison:

Thank you.

Stefanie Couch:

And you are here in a really cool role that actually you came into in the spring. So this is your second market.

Scott Morrison:

Right.

Stefanie Couch:

Tell me a little bit about what you do at Do It Best. And you've got 40 years of operational excellence background. So tell me about that.

Scott Morrison:

I'm an engineer, uh, industrial engineer, and uh have worked uh in manufacturing quality operations, and really the last 20 plus years has been mostly consulting, and I'm doing for do it best exactly what I did as an independent consultant. Uh going to lumber yards, uh door shops, trust plants, wall panel plants, and I help them get far more efficient.

Stefanie Couch:

That's awesome. I've walked a lot of door shops, and I've walked a lot of lumberyards, and I know you have too. Yep. They're not always the pristine organized beauty that they could be. Sometimes they are panic inducing uh from a safety perspective and all of that. And I know there's a lot that can be done. So tell me a little bit about how you're actually working with members and what are some of the most common problems that you see when you do talk to members or walk a lumberyard.

Scott Morrison:

This type of work is almost always more effective when it's on site. Yeah. Um so a member, a do-it-best member will call me, I'll go in, um, we will map out what I call the current state. And uh they will tell me warts and all what all the problems are. And it's really important to be honest because if you don't start with a problem statement that's accurate, you're gonna solve the wrong problem or not solve the problem at all.

Stefanie Couch:

Does it help to uh to act like you're better than you are? Because then, like you said, it's not it's really just a waste of everyone's time.

Scott Morrison:

It is. I I always go in as I'm not I don't have the answer. Yeah. And uh a lot a lot of times people at first at first think, hey, you're just gonna come in here and just tell me what to do. And it nothing could be further from the truth. I always have to get all the input from them on what the problems are. They're the people that are there 40, 40 plus hours a week. I'm not. And um, when they tell me what's going on, then that's where my skills come in because now I'm listening and I'm going, okay, I think I know what you're talking about. Let's talk more about it. And eventually things like a process map comes out, a layout comes out. Um, it might be as you're talking about door shops, there might be something that's just as simple as just where are the machines today?

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Scott Morrison:

And what are the footprints? Uh, what are the steps, the dance steps that go from machine to machine? And that's when you start to really dig into the to the issue.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, when you think about having a machine operator at on a door shop assembly line, and that person is having to walk 20, 30 steps to go get inserts for that door, or they're having to go get the right threshold or whatever they're doing, if you could make that where they turn around and grab it without taking a step, how many hours in a week could that save? I mean, it's a lot of time.

Scott Morrison:

Absolutely. I I always and in the yard too, uh, they'll be, well, can't we just make something go faster? I'm like, if you just move it half the distance, it's the effectiveness of you're going twice as fast.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Scott Morrison:

So it's real simple. And it's almost always the non-value added time. It's the steps and the motions that are in between the activities. That's what you're really attacking.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, we have a rule in our business. We actually took this from a Navy SEAL that we like, uh, Jocko Willink, who's a leadership trainer, but he talks about how simple solutions, you know, make it as simple as possible. And Elon talks a lot about how do we take things out, how do we delete things. I think that sometimes the solution is that it's just simple to move things, like you said, and they they think it's overcomplicated. Do you find that people often have kind of a solution mapped out that they just need your help implementing?

Scott Morrison:

They do. A lot of people will know kind of what they want to do, but they don't quite know what the process steps are. And that's where I come in. I can help them to break it down into smaller steps and then analyze it and then say, okay, here's the best way to go forward.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah. And you showed me a few days ago a whiteboard of you on site with a member. Uh, it's a beautiful whiteboard with all different color post-it notes and all these notes. And it's so uh, I'm sure you use a ruler to make your lines, right? I mean, I did actually on that one. It was too beautiful to not have been rulerized. But um, that is kind of how you work with people. So you you get in there, you see the problems, you diagnose, you talk through, their team member has to have buy-in, right? Their team's got to be a big part of it. And then you start to map it out. So tell me a little bit about maybe one of the stories. I know you worked with a customer doing some trust stuff the other day. We talked about some warehouse layout. So tell me one of the stories of you know, somebody that you've worked with recently that's seen great gains because of the work you've done.

Scott Morrison:

I've done uh just recently a zone picking uh project. And zone picking, for those who may not be aware, is um instead of giving a ticket to the picker or a stager and say, go drive around the entire facility and find all this stuff, what you do instead is you break the yard or the warehouse down into smaller bite sizes, and now they're working very, very efficiently and effectively in a smaller area. They bring their stuff to a common area and then it gets picked up. And uh recently, uh working with one of the Do It Best members, they found that by implementing the system, they're saving 90 minutes per day. Wow. They were finishing up at five o'clock and now they're finishing at 3 30.

Stefanie Couch:

Wow.

Scott Morrison:

And the impact on that is less overtime. The trucks are coming back uh and they're loaded for the next day. And so now the next day at 6 30 in the morning, 7 o'clock, they're ready to go. That's a winning twice.

Stefanie Couch:

Because contractors want that load on the job site as soon as they can in the morning. They don't want it at, you know, 10 o'clock. They want it at 6 30 or 7 if they can get it. They want to get it done before.

Scott Morrison:

Right. First out, first outs are critical. Uh, and so many people, the the the kind of they're they've got all their crews ready to go. And if you weren't there the night before preloading the truck, then you are indeed showing up late, and now everyone's getting frustrated.

Stefanie Couch:

This episode of the Grit Blueprint Podcast was sponsored by Do It Best Group. Do It Best Group is the largest co-op in the world, and they help independent hardware and lumber yards all over North America win. Do It Best offers services, products, and people that can help you win long term. They are the champion of independence. So when you work with people like that, how do you have their team in the room? Like, how does that work? I mean, how do you get to that conclusion?

Scott Morrison:

Even the picture that you were that you were describing a few minutes ago, there were actually six people in that room. I just had them all stand back and get out of the way so I could take the picture. But um, I always start with uh there's a site leader. I call that person the quarterback. Uh it's a person who is going to be my point of focus. So I'm not emailing and trying to get a hold of five, six, seven people. Uh there's an operations representative, there's usually someone from sales in some way, shape, or form, even if it's an office, uh, an office manager, um, and then people from the yard or from the or from the shop. And you've got to cut through all the layers of management. You can't just have all one level or all or all another level. You got to have a good cross-functional team for it to really be effective. And the other thing, too, is it's an iterative process. I know a lot of people think, oh, we're just gonna come in, just be a one and done. It's not that way. The first, the first future state layout or whatever it might be, the first one, a lot of times they just hate it. Yeah. Because you're like, oh, I didn't think of it that way. And I don't like this, I don't like that. I get it. That's why you have me here. I'm I'm here to break your paradigm. But then once you get to the second one, the third one, and the fourth, and the fourth one, sometimes more, but now they really take ownership because now they're like, wow, I helped to I helped to create that future state.

Stefanie Couch:

Right. Well, and also uh we implemented a warehouse management system which is technology driven, but that's a pretty big deal. When we had to, you know, put the warehouse management, relay out everything. But once we decided that it wasn't going to be the end of the actual world for about two weeks, we were like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to us. But about two weeks after that, it was like, how do we live without this? And I see that a lot with projects like this, is that it it really does seem like a holy cow, I can't believe we did it the old way for so long. And we wish you had come in beforehand.

Scott Morrison:

Yeah, the zone picking is is truly a perfect example of that. I mean, they knew they wanted to do zone picking, they just didn't know what were the steps. How could how could they analyze the data, which is the sales history? How could they analyze that data and come up with something that was fair and equitable for those five turn up to be five zones? Yeah. But that's where I came in was to balance it out. But yeah, they uh once they saw it, then it was a pretty good sprint to the finish line.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, I love that. Well, tell me about another project that you've done. I I know there's always it seems like no matter how big your yard is, no matter how big of a warehouse you have, space constraints. Right. I don't know how these warehouses fill up so quickly, but it is crazy how fast you can fill up a warehouse. You recently did a project with a warehouse layout where they were wanting to reallocate some space and make more out of what they had. Tell me about that.

Scott Morrison:

Exactly. It's a uh a consolidation. They're they're looking at how do we bring mill work into a site uh without impacting their current LBM operations. And the other constraints were there's uh city ordinances for setbacks and things. Um obviously environmental concerns, they have to have a you know a retention base and all that. They thought they had this gigantic area, but then when the architects built in all that, it turned out to be 45,000 square feet. Now, depending on your your point of view, it's like that could be gigantic or it'd be really small, but surprisingly, they didn't know if they were going to fit everything they wanted to.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Scott Morrison:

So my assignment was take a look at the footprint. I couldn't, I couldn't challenge the size of the building, but what I could do was I could specify door widths and I could specify where the aisles go and nothing in the way of things like beams and all of that. And again, data analysis. Uh they sent me the list of everything that they had, what they wanted to put in there, and also futures, future concerns. They want to grow the business, which is great for everybody. Yeah. So they said, what can you do with this? So worked on it, took several passes, but um came up with a uh with a system where they could put everything they wanted in that building and leave room for about 50% growth. Wow. Now the side benefit of that was it also didn't impact their LBM operation. So working on that and finding out they were losing space because of this warehouse. So I also worked on that side of it, and we found about 50% less travel by centralizing where the uh where the staging area is.

Stefanie Couch:

So everybody was happy, nobody was mad at you when you left.

Scott Morrison:

Well, the space that they lost to be allocated to the warehouse and the parking lot for the for the employees, they lost that space. So I had to work on the space that was left.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, you're kind of like a little bit of a magician.

Scott Morrison:

It's a lot of fun. A lot of fun.

Stefanie Couch:

I love it. Well, I am excited for members to be able to have a resource like you. You obviously have a ton of experience, and there is a lot of problems that come up in this. You know, I'll give an example. When we were laying out the door shops when I started those Greenfield door shops with my team, uh, we had an expert come in and lay out two different racking layouts. And I think we got 400 more spaces by doing it one way versus the other. But then in the end, the flow, we actually felt like we had made a big mistake by going, we had to make a hard choice. It was like, do you need the racks or do you want the flow? Yeah. And it's hard to see that. And we uh we wanted to move the racks after about two years because it was just too it crossed the warehouse in a weird way. It's tough.

Scott Morrison:

I mean, yeah, you're bringing up a great point, and that's that's very important in the work that I do. I'm I'm always asking the the folks I'm working with, don't just tell me what you want to have, you know, next year. You got to tell me where you want to be in two, five years. Yeah. And that's where that warehouse example uh is is perfect for that. If they didn't tell me that, I would have come up with just filling up the space with the stuff.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Scott Morrison:

But now I know that you can't completely fill it because they want to grow.

Stefanie Couch:

Sure, 100%. I love that. Well, I am excited for members to be able to work with you. So tell me a little bit about if someone's wanting to do an operational excellence project with you, how do they work with you?

Scott Morrison:

It's real simple. There's a QR code that'll be part of this uh podcast and also at the market. Just scan it and that will bring you to a worksheet. Yep. Just very simple questions to answer, you know, who you are, your member number, and uh how we get a hold of you. And then we will contact you and we'll set up a meeting. It's a complimentary 60-minute meeting uh on Teams or Zoom or whatever it might be. And uh, we talk through what your issues are, no cost. Yeah. So it's all absorbed by Do It Best, which is fantastic. And um, and then from that point, I'll write a report and from there they decide what they want to do. If they want to re-engage, then we'll talk about a project. But that's awesome. But that bottom line, uh, that 60 minutes, we've already done it over a dozen times here in the past the past uh two months, and it's been extremely effective.

Stefanie Couch:

That's great. Well, if you are interested in making your operation excellent in all the ways that we just talked about, whether it's a door shop or a lumber yard, don't miss out on this opportunity. And I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Scott Morrison:

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, you too.

Stefanie Couch:

Thank you for listening to the Grit Blueprint podcast. If this episode helped you think a little differently about how to show up, share it with someone in your building world who needs it. If you're ready to turn visibility into growth, then head to gritblueprint.com to learn more and book a call to talk to us about your growth strategy. Until next time, stay unmistakable.

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