The spring install season guide

Install season is six to eight weeks in which a dock company earns half its year, and the question every operator carries through it is the same: how do I run this end to end without dropping anything? Not “how do I work hard” — everybody works hard in May. How do I make sure no property gets forgotten, no half-finished stop falls through a crack, no finished job goes unbilled, and no customer call catches me not knowing the answer?

This is the whole season in one piece: what has to be true before the first launch, how a working day actually runs, what to do when the weather rearranges it, how the money keeps up with the work, and how to read where you stand in the middle of it. Each section links to the deeper piece or help article on that topic. It’s written around how LakeOps runs a season, but the shape of it — a confirmed list, a pool of work, boats pointed at water, pieces marked done as they’re done, billing the same day — is just how the trade works when nothing’s falling through cracks.

Before the first launch

A season that starts calm was won in February and March. Four things, all doable before there’s open water:

• The customer list is confirmed. Every standing customer walked, the sold cabins unticked, the season generated — one afternoon on the rollover screen and the spring exists as pins on a map, every property and every piece, waiting.
• The gear is proven. Hydraulics, winch cables, bearings, PFDs — the pre-season checklist, done while parts are still a phone call instead of a lost week.
• The crew can run the day. New crew members have the app on their phone, installed and opened once at the shop with signal, and they know the one habit that matters: pull the day pack before the boat leaves.
• The customers know the plan. One email in March — the window, the bay-by-bay order, what “done” will look like — and April’s phone goes mostly quiet.

When the ice actually goes is the one thing you can’t schedule, and the season above doesn’t need you to: the work is ready whenever the water is, and nothing in it gates on a date.

The daily rhythm: point boats at water

Each morning is one decision per boat, made against that morning’s wind: which crew, with which gear aboard, on which lake, working which stretches of shoreline. That’s a deployment. The crew’s chart then shows everything still open on that water — a pool, not a route — and they take what’s in front of them, ordered by where the boat actually is.

Nothing is assigned in advance, which sounds like less control and is more. A list made Tuesday for Thursday is wrong by Thursday; a pool is never wrong, because it’s just the truth about what’s still open. If a stop needs the crane and the crane isn’t aboard, the app says so plainly instead of letting the crew motor over to find out.

Sequencing across the weeks follows the water: work the bays that are open, batch stops so the boat clears a bay instead of visiting it, group crane work into crane days, and pull the handful of real customer deadlines forward inside that order. The sequencing logic is its own piece.

On the water: the piece, the clock, the camera

The crew’s whole recording job is three habits, all sized for a wet glove:

• Tap each piece as it’s done. The dock goes in, tap the dock; the lift goes in, tap the lift. Not a batch at day’s end, not from memory in the truck — one tap, at the dock, as it happens.
• Run the clock at every stop. Start it on arrival, stop it pushing off. Those minutes defend this year’s hourly bills and set next winter’s price list.
• Photograph what you did. The dock from the water, the lift with the boat’s spot ready. The photos ride along on the bill and end arguments before they start.

Something the crew genuinely couldn’t do — water too low, wrong barge, customer says leave the canopy — gets skipped with a written reason, and a skipped piece isn’t billed. And none of this waits for bars: the day loads onto the phone at the landing, everything tapped after that keeps, and it all lands in the office on its own when the boat comes back into range. Photos are the one thing that waits for signal.

When the wind rearranges the day

It will, weekly at least. A west wind at ten o’clock makes the planned shoreline unworkable, and the whole response is repointing the boat at the lee shore — one action, from the office or from the water, and the crew’s chart now shows what’s waiting over there. There’s nothing to unwind, because no jobs were ever tied to the shoreline you left.

Same logic for a stop that can’t finish: leaving a property part-done isn’t a failure to manage, it’s a normal state to record. The pieces that got done stay done, the pin turns amber, and the rest waits for whichever boat gets back there — Thursday’s crane crew, maybe, who’ll see exactly one pending piece at that property instead of a mystery.

The money keeps pace with the work

The most expensive habit in this trade is billing in July for work finished in May. The day a job’s last piece is done, whoever’s running the boat closes the job — a separate, human decision from tapping the last piece — and closing it prices the work and sends the customer an email: every piece listed, the crew’s photos, the total, a link to pay. The customer reads it the same evening, while the new dock is the best thing about their week — that email is worth getting right.

Checks and cards at your own terminal get recorded against the job by hand, and either way every job carries its own balance, so “who still owes us” stays a report you read, not a reconstruction you perform in July. If customers pay online through LakeOps Payments, there’s a 1% service fee, always shown as its own line — and you’re welcome to bill your customers yourself instead, off the completed-work report, with no fee at all.

Mid-season additions don’t break stride

New customers arrive all season — the April sign-up, the neighbor who watched your crew work and walked down the shoreline to ask. Add the property and the plan, generate the season again, and only the new job appears. A repair or a one-off relocate is a job with no season behind it, and it rides the same pool, picked up when a boat’s already in that bay. The season doesn’t have a shape that additions disturb; it’s a pool, and the pool just gets one deeper.

Reading where you stand

Mid-season, the question is “are we on track,” and the honest unit is pieces, not jobs. The map answers it at a glance: green shorelines are finished, slate ones untouched, amber ones part-done — amber is the one worth looking at, because it’s the handoff made visible. Count what’s left, watch the weekly rate it’s coming down, and you know whether you’ll make Memorial Day while there’s still time to do something about it. There’s a longer piece on the mid-season read.

The last two weeks: finish the amber

Seasons don’t end with a bang; they trail off into stragglers — the canopy that waited on a part, the lift the crane never got back to, the customer who asked you to hold off. The end-of-season discipline is working the amber pins to green and the skipped pieces to decisions: send the crane back, or tell the customer it’s a June job. What you don’t want is finding out in July that “done” was ninety-four percent true.

Then collect the tail. Completed work with a balance is a short list sorted oldest first, and June — while the water’s warm and the goodwill is fresh — is when it gets worked.

The season at a glance

When	The work	What “on track” looks like
February–March	List confirmed, season generated, gear proven, crew hired and set up	The spring is on the map and nothing’s waiting on you
Ice-out week	First launches; work the bays that opened first	Boats out within a day or two of workable water
Weeks 1–3	The push: clear bays, batch crane days, pull real deadlines forward	Pieces-per-week rate that clears the list before Memorial Day
Weeks 4–6	The middle: new sign-ups fold in, repairs ride along, wind days repoint	Amber pins turning green within days, not weeks
The tail	Finish the amber, resolve the skips, collect the balances	A short list, getting shorter, with names and reasons on it

The season in one paragraph

Confirm the list and load the season in February. Prove the gear and prep the crew in March. From ice-out, one decision per boat per morning; on the water, tap the piece, run the clock, take the photos; bill the day each job finishes. Repoint when the wind turns, let part-done properties be part-done honestly, add new work without ceremony, and read progress in pieces on the map. None of it is complicated. What makes a season calm isn’t any one habit — it’s that nothing anywhere depends on somebody remembering.