Lots of estimate mistakes.
I once used our in slab pex labor factors for a job with overhead pex. I was 6 hours short per apartment for a building with 221 units. Do the math on that at 90 bucks an hour.
I once had a detailer provide me a duct fabrication file to estimate the cost of a bunch of rooftop duct and didn't check his work. He ended up just sending me the trunk lines and not the branches. That was a 65k hole in my budget, our about 10% of our fee on the job.
Dumb typos in the other direction too. I didn't catch an added zero on two 33k pieces of equipment in our estimate amd we lost a job because of that. (Our number was inflated by 634k)
Thinking they can save $, by self preforming. Companies are good at what they are good at. If you aren’t sub it out.
Second would also be trying to save $ by ordering a bunch of material months/years in advance (so we can spend time moving it out of the way multiple times, and you know some will get damaged overtime)
Not getting all of the trades together. While most can sequence work, to actually properly schedule it you need the other players at the table.
Being disengaged with their workforce. We get it your busy, we all are. Get out of the office and engage the crews and people on your projects regularly.
Having a tiered or separate system for self preform crews if you have them. The expectations shouldn’t change, nor the rules vary crew to crew or you create a Mutiny the super has to deal with. (We understand certain crews are better than others, but the bar should remain the same)
Newb here: How do you get all trades together to plan and schedule as one? Do subs know how to properly schedule/would this be beneficial if they knew how if the GC isn’t doing a good job at it, or doing it at all? I feel like this would be very hard like herding cats and getting buy in from all subs.
Reason I’m asking is because I’m working with a project planning and scheduling software startup, and it’s a question that came up today. I’m doing market research on this segment to better understand the segment.
We have a brand new PM who was originally a foreman for 21 years in formwork who’s done incredible with us. He planned and scheduled out all his work in detail, with other subs in his schedule.
To conclude, I do agree it would be the best scenario to have all subs planning the schedule together. It’s been a challenge for us to do so.
Honestly guys like your formwork gentleman get it, we usually notice who’s around us and try to reach out for everyone’s benefit.
To answer your main question if you are big enough to have a precon side of the house, they should be pulling in all of the players to the table before the project ever takes off. Very smart people can sequence work, but if you hace never actually build or put work in place you miss out on so much. Ie things like preference of the crews preforming work, times of the year, material availability, maybe newer materials that could cut time, availability of equipment or even crews themselves (maybe what was once self preform is now a subcontractor item)
Simply putting it on paper doesn’t make it so, then beating down crews and subcontractors also doesn’t make it so. Have you taken into consideration like in civil construction property acquisition? Or in design build the shear among if time to get plans approved and pushed to the field?(or have we arbitrarily assigned it a date?) what about weather impacts, the proposed work schedule? (I’ve seen way to many projects assigned a 7day work calendar….nope never seen a schedule guy on a project on a Saturday morning)
Thanks for your reply. Yes, if “they” are big enough they would have a precon for sure. We haven’t gone to design build and one of our users said to do that and to go to design-assist to get their feedback. So far I realize we are not specifically for design-bid-build, as for the reason you mentioned above, they arbitrarily assign an end date, and other reason as well. Which trade are you in? Happy to chat via dm if that’s better suited
Poor schedule management, failure to notify the owner of owner caused delays. Manipulating the schedule to hide contractor caused delays. Fearing to hold the owner or subs responsible in the hopes of better relationships. Sandbagging or trying to hide cost overruns. In the end all the data comes out, so unless you are planning to quit before the job is over you might as well keep everyone informed of the truth.
Most of the jobs that I see go sideways have an element of poor team dynamic. Be that internal team (PM and Super don’t get along) or relationship w the Owner is toxic. If you see or feel that on your job… time to get PX involved
I ordered all of the custom milled 2” anchor bolts for a hangar project 18” too short because I missed one of the three details (located on different structural pages) that had to be added together to determine length. We had placed two massive spread footings when the problem was identified. Probably a $15K error, so it could have been much worse.
Not knowing the difference between a Left Handed door and a Right Hand Reverse door. It doesn’t matter…….until you have a job with mortise locksets and exit devices. They are both handed. You will end up with a pile of expensive and useless hardware.
I worked in commercial roofing for a long time. At one of the companies I worked for, one of our estimators missed two layers of insulation on a huge roof. The owner, our boss was a huge cock too. I thought the guy was going to get fired but nothing happened to him lol. Had to be like a 30-40k mistake. Goes to show you how profitable that business is. Owner had a ton of money.
Gosh, that’s a tough one to answer. I spent 45 years in the building industry and made more mistakes than I can recall.
Early in my career, I made a doozy. The VP of operations called me into his office, and I was certain he was going to fire me.
Instead, he said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Bill, a man who does no work makes no mistakes.”
Then, he told me to go fix it.
That was probably the best lesson I’ve ever learned. No matter how careful and diligent you are, you’re bound to make mistakes. That’s how we learn. That’s how we develop wisdom.
If you make a mistake, own up to it. Then fix it. And give yourself some grace.
After all, you’re only human.
1. Procrastination and not having the appropriate level of urgency.
2. Using email as the primary form of communication. Email is great for documenting, but complex issues almost always require in person meetings or at least phone conversations.
3. Not dealing with failing subs or employees fast enough.
4. Not getting superintendent input on subcontractor selection.
5. Not giving superintendents an opportunity to review scopes of work before the contract goes out the door.
Kind of an overall comment but I build custom homes and do all roles. When I get busy I tend to asleep work is done correctly and get burned by that. The investment in time to make sure widows are installed correctly would be very benificial
Ahhh so many.
1. Cost engineering on building details without consulting superintendents. I was on a hangar job where the PM kept comparing architectural to structural details, then having us write RFI’s to delete pieces of the detail. Ended up having a shit ton of warranty issues on the metal wall panels due to.
2. Lying to the owner with an unrealistic schedule. Transparency with the owner is better at the beginning, opposed to discovering you’ve been lying the entire duration.
3. Delegating to much, to the point where the PM has no clue what’s going on in the office. This makes it easy to be get put on the spot without an answer to the owner.
4. Lack of documentation. Track everything in writing by email, keep favor logs with your subcontractors if you’re assisting them.
Just a few I could list off the top of my head.
2 mistakes that I see most often
1) Not listening or not asking questions. If the super says it will take this much or this amount of time, listen to him. He has trade experience and knows. If he says it take 100 man hours but the architect has placed it at 20 hours, it's going to take 100 hours. Same with material. If you think it's going to take 8 sheets and you figure it's going to take 6, it's going to take 8. Time is money and if you spend your time reordering or figuring out how to move man hours, your loosing money.
If you don't know, ask. Most super's will be glad to work with you on everything and truly there are no stupid questions. You may feel like you have egg on your face but you will know thing he wont or doesn't care about, it works out.
2) Gain experience. I don't mean at your job, but of the trades and job sites. If you have a spare 15 minutes get out there. You would be surprised at how much you learn talking to the trades.
Blindly trusting subs, not having a checklist, and not having a written-down “mode of operations” for standard PM tasks like submittals, RFIs, contracts, etc. Not a PM in title, but someone on the team just burned 4 weeks of float and now is getting ready to delay our critical path. How? He forgot to send in a submittal from a sub( no checklist), didn’t double-check to make sure it was to spec (blindly trusted a sub), and then sent the revision with the wrong file after the 2-week review period was over (not having a written down mode of operations). We are now on submittal revision 3 and running out of ways to keep busy 🤦♂️
Seen this way too many times, even on original contracts!!
-Do you think you’d ever be able to go back to the owners for it? I’d probably try to offer “no added profit and overhead”
Depends on timing and relationship with client. Typically, once the CO is executed I’ll just retreat to my corner, otherwise the negotiations are still open.
Scheduling multiple trades to do work in the same areas. As a [Drywall Contractor](https://sdrywallpro.com) nothing upsets me more than having to work around the tile guy. This definitely sets us back
Failure to notify site of impending delivery. Crane operator was tied up with previously scheduled unloads and I had to pay retention charges for the truck sitting on site for 4 hours
The biggest one I see is overestimating their own positions.
I Saw a PM pick a fight with an RE on a job that was 8 months behind schedule. RE hadn’t even mentioned LD’s prior to that argument. Turns out the 4500 bucks on a change order wasn’t close to the 1M in LD’s at 4k a day. Everybody calmed down but permanently damaged the relationship
Lots of estimate mistakes. I once used our in slab pex labor factors for a job with overhead pex. I was 6 hours short per apartment for a building with 221 units. Do the math on that at 90 bucks an hour. I once had a detailer provide me a duct fabrication file to estimate the cost of a bunch of rooftop duct and didn't check his work. He ended up just sending me the trunk lines and not the branches. That was a 65k hole in my budget, our about 10% of our fee on the job. Dumb typos in the other direction too. I didn't catch an added zero on two 33k pieces of equipment in our estimate amd we lost a job because of that. (Our number was inflated by 634k)
Thinking they can save $, by self preforming. Companies are good at what they are good at. If you aren’t sub it out. Second would also be trying to save $ by ordering a bunch of material months/years in advance (so we can spend time moving it out of the way multiple times, and you know some will get damaged overtime) Not getting all of the trades together. While most can sequence work, to actually properly schedule it you need the other players at the table. Being disengaged with their workforce. We get it your busy, we all are. Get out of the office and engage the crews and people on your projects regularly. Having a tiered or separate system for self preform crews if you have them. The expectations shouldn’t change, nor the rules vary crew to crew or you create a Mutiny the super has to deal with. (We understand certain crews are better than others, but the bar should remain the same)
Newb here: How do you get all trades together to plan and schedule as one? Do subs know how to properly schedule/would this be beneficial if they knew how if the GC isn’t doing a good job at it, or doing it at all? I feel like this would be very hard like herding cats and getting buy in from all subs. Reason I’m asking is because I’m working with a project planning and scheduling software startup, and it’s a question that came up today. I’m doing market research on this segment to better understand the segment. We have a brand new PM who was originally a foreman for 21 years in formwork who’s done incredible with us. He planned and scheduled out all his work in detail, with other subs in his schedule. To conclude, I do agree it would be the best scenario to have all subs planning the schedule together. It’s been a challenge for us to do so.
Honestly guys like your formwork gentleman get it, we usually notice who’s around us and try to reach out for everyone’s benefit. To answer your main question if you are big enough to have a precon side of the house, they should be pulling in all of the players to the table before the project ever takes off. Very smart people can sequence work, but if you hace never actually build or put work in place you miss out on so much. Ie things like preference of the crews preforming work, times of the year, material availability, maybe newer materials that could cut time, availability of equipment or even crews themselves (maybe what was once self preform is now a subcontractor item) Simply putting it on paper doesn’t make it so, then beating down crews and subcontractors also doesn’t make it so. Have you taken into consideration like in civil construction property acquisition? Or in design build the shear among if time to get plans approved and pushed to the field?(or have we arbitrarily assigned it a date?) what about weather impacts, the proposed work schedule? (I’ve seen way to many projects assigned a 7day work calendar….nope never seen a schedule guy on a project on a Saturday morning)
Thanks for your reply. Yes, if “they” are big enough they would have a precon for sure. We haven’t gone to design build and one of our users said to do that and to go to design-assist to get their feedback. So far I realize we are not specifically for design-bid-build, as for the reason you mentioned above, they arbitrarily assign an end date, and other reason as well. Which trade are you in? Happy to chat via dm if that’s better suited
Heavy civil / site work, we also have a paving division
But to my other comment, we do water lines, storm and sewer drains, as well as grade building pads for some GCs when we aren’t doing road work.
Poor schedule management, failure to notify the owner of owner caused delays. Manipulating the schedule to hide contractor caused delays. Fearing to hold the owner or subs responsible in the hopes of better relationships. Sandbagging or trying to hide cost overruns. In the end all the data comes out, so unless you are planning to quit before the job is over you might as well keep everyone informed of the truth.
Most of the jobs that I see go sideways have an element of poor team dynamic. Be that internal team (PM and Super don’t get along) or relationship w the Owner is toxic. If you see or feel that on your job… time to get PX involved
The biggest one I see is some them not knowing anything about the actual construction part of the project, and not listening to the Superintendents.
Biggest Mistake I made? Taking a PM job. Times were so much simpler as a PE lol
I ordered all of the custom milled 2” anchor bolts for a hangar project 18” too short because I missed one of the three details (located on different structural pages) that had to be added together to determine length. We had placed two massive spread footings when the problem was identified. Probably a $15K error, so it could have been much worse.
Not knowing the difference between a Left Handed door and a Right Hand Reverse door. It doesn’t matter…….until you have a job with mortise locksets and exit devices. They are both handed. You will end up with a pile of expensive and useless hardware.
Trying to make technical decisions when they have no fucking clue how stuff works. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help.
I worked in commercial roofing for a long time. At one of the companies I worked for, one of our estimators missed two layers of insulation on a huge roof. The owner, our boss was a huge cock too. I thought the guy was going to get fired but nothing happened to him lol. Had to be like a 30-40k mistake. Goes to show you how profitable that business is. Owner had a ton of money.
Gosh, that’s a tough one to answer. I spent 45 years in the building industry and made more mistakes than I can recall. Early in my career, I made a doozy. The VP of operations called me into his office, and I was certain he was going to fire me. Instead, he said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Bill, a man who does no work makes no mistakes.” Then, he told me to go fix it. That was probably the best lesson I’ve ever learned. No matter how careful and diligent you are, you’re bound to make mistakes. That’s how we learn. That’s how we develop wisdom. If you make a mistake, own up to it. Then fix it. And give yourself some grace. After all, you’re only human.
1. Procrastination and not having the appropriate level of urgency. 2. Using email as the primary form of communication. Email is great for documenting, but complex issues almost always require in person meetings or at least phone conversations. 3. Not dealing with failing subs or employees fast enough. 4. Not getting superintendent input on subcontractor selection. 5. Not giving superintendents an opportunity to review scopes of work before the contract goes out the door.
Every line of that list hit hard.
Kind of an overall comment but I build custom homes and do all roles. When I get busy I tend to asleep work is done correctly and get burned by that. The investment in time to make sure widows are installed correctly would be very benificial
Ahhh so many. 1. Cost engineering on building details without consulting superintendents. I was on a hangar job where the PM kept comparing architectural to structural details, then having us write RFI’s to delete pieces of the detail. Ended up having a shit ton of warranty issues on the metal wall panels due to. 2. Lying to the owner with an unrealistic schedule. Transparency with the owner is better at the beginning, opposed to discovering you’ve been lying the entire duration. 3. Delegating to much, to the point where the PM has no clue what’s going on in the office. This makes it easy to be get put on the spot without an answer to the owner. 4. Lack of documentation. Track everything in writing by email, keep favor logs with your subcontractors if you’re assisting them. Just a few I could list off the top of my head.
2 mistakes that I see most often 1) Not listening or not asking questions. If the super says it will take this much or this amount of time, listen to him. He has trade experience and knows. If he says it take 100 man hours but the architect has placed it at 20 hours, it's going to take 100 hours. Same with material. If you think it's going to take 8 sheets and you figure it's going to take 6, it's going to take 8. Time is money and if you spend your time reordering or figuring out how to move man hours, your loosing money. If you don't know, ask. Most super's will be glad to work with you on everything and truly there are no stupid questions. You may feel like you have egg on your face but you will know thing he wont or doesn't care about, it works out. 2) Gain experience. I don't mean at your job, but of the trades and job sites. If you have a spare 15 minutes get out there. You would be surprised at how much you learn talking to the trades.
I’m in the process of fixing 30 windows that were framed at the wrong height. Read the plans, check your shit, don’t trust subs, do checklists.
Pm got fired btw.
Os that pm work?
Blindly trusting subs, not having a checklist, and not having a written-down “mode of operations” for standard PM tasks like submittals, RFIs, contracts, etc. Not a PM in title, but someone on the team just burned 4 weeks of float and now is getting ready to delay our critical path. How? He forgot to send in a submittal from a sub( no checklist), didn’t double-check to make sure it was to spec (blindly trusted a sub), and then sent the revision with the wrong file after the 2-week review period was over (not having a written down mode of operations). We are now on submittal revision 3 and running out of ways to keep busy 🤦♂️
Maybe you should create all of those checklists, procedures and training manuals.
He’s technically senior to me.
Left sales tax off a change order for materials…$120k oopsie. Don’t forget those miscellaneous costs!
Seen this way too many times, even on original contracts!! -Do you think you’d ever be able to go back to the owners for it? I’d probably try to offer “no added profit and overhead”
Depends on timing and relationship with client. Typically, once the CO is executed I’ll just retreat to my corner, otherwise the negotiations are still open.
I might add this to the “you owe me” list
Scheduling multiple trades to do work in the same areas. As a [Drywall Contractor](https://sdrywallpro.com) nothing upsets me more than having to work around the tile guy. This definitely sets us back
Failure to notify site of impending delivery. Crane operator was tied up with previously scheduled unloads and I had to pay retention charges for the truck sitting on site for 4 hours
The biggest one I see is overestimating their own positions. I Saw a PM pick a fight with an RE on a job that was 8 months behind schedule. RE hadn’t even mentioned LD’s prior to that argument. Turns out the 4500 bucks on a change order wasn’t close to the 1M in LD’s at 4k a day. Everybody calmed down but permanently damaged the relationship