At the expense of offending Project Managers as well as the Monkey: A woman was looking at the animals on display in a pet store. A few minutes later, a man walked in and said to the shopkeeper 'I'll take a Construction Monkey, please.’ The shopkeeper nodded and took a monkey out of a cage. He put a collar and leash on the animal and handed it the man, saying, 'That will be $5,000.' The man paid ......

If you have been involved in bidding work you have probably at one point in time been apart of the Best and Final Offer (BAFO) routine. In private work it is typically called "scoping out" the sub numbers. It is a process where you are expected to give your best and final proposal for the work after you have turned in your actual bid number. It may be preceded with a list of questions or changes in ......

Business management for years has taken the advice of statisticians: that if you don’t or can’t measure something, then you can't manage it. In construction, this simple truth is the key to being successful. Management of bidding, projects, labor, or profits is not just a group of tasks that you must perform, it is taking in facts, analyzing those facts, coming to conclusions, taking action, and then ......

For those of us in the construction industry, we know the Estimators that are more cynical than the average Joe. They appear to be more prevalent than the fun loving young estimator. The duties of an Estimator change that fun loving young kid into the cynic through years of performing one of the most difficult jobs in construction. So what makes it such a difficult job? The most difficult part of ......

So what does weight loss and construction productivity have in common? If you track the inputs you are much more likely to get better results. In 2008, a study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that shows that keeping a “food diary” may double your weight loss. What they actually found was that the more participants recorded what they ate, the more weight they lost in the ......

Construction companies stand on three (3) pillars that define good business; Get Work, Do Work, and Monitor Work. If all three of them are done correctly and efficiently than the business will thrive. Getting work has a lot to do with generating an estimate on a custom product that has never been produced before, so what ensures that you have a good estimate? In the manufacturing world, it becomes ......

For subcontractors, the best way to control and increase profit is by managing labor productivity. Too often, project managers, foreman, and executives focus on material buyouts, squeezing subcontractors, and cutting back on overhead to make gains on profits, but these actions pale in comparison to what can be accomplished by having highly productive labor. There is no doubt money to be made by being ......

By now most of us have seen the change order and contract boat image that has been circulating around the internet over the past several years. The big boat is rightly called the change order and the small dingy is called "Original Contract". This brings forward a very interesting question about how people think. When you view the image it enters into your mind that this must be Contractor's set-up ......

When managers in construction start beating the drum of more production, the message that is typically received from the crews is “you need to be working harder”. While this may be true in some instances, most of the time this is not what is being said. In construction, especially for subcontractors that are performing the labor, money is made or lost in the amount of work being put in per hour charged ......

So what does it take to be a good estimator? Being great with numbers? Having a desire to color on drawings all day? There are a few key traits I have found in my career that really separate the great estimators from the rest of them. Let's recall how I defined an estimator's job as: finding the lowest cost solution to the project as would be acceptable to the client while identifying the potential ......

Measurements are critical to good construction. Not just in constructing walls, placing tiles, and balancing mechanical systems, but also in tracking contractor's performance on the project. A minute cannot go by where workers are not measuring boards, conduits, walls, concrete volumes, and hundreds of other things on a construction site, but are contractors measuring things for their own betterment? ......

If you are bidding work out there, you are going to be a price taker and not a price setter. In fact throughout the construction industry whether it is bidding, negotiated, time and material, or any other means of procurement you are a price taker and not a price setter. What do I mean by price taker? Someone where their price is dictated by others whereas price setters dictate the price of their ......

The past two years have been the worst global economic times in more than a generation and it is anyone's guess if we are coming out of it or if there are more challenges ahead. Change for anyone is difficult and for the vast majority of us it does not happen until we are up against the odds. So why is it that when I look at Construction, it does not appear that in the last couple of years we have ......

Best and Final Offers (BAFO) are probably the fastest growing trend in construction, especially given the economy today. In a previous blog, I talked about the ethics of the BAFO process. There are legitimate reasons to utilize the process, but you have to have integrity from everyone involved or you may just be another bid shopper. When dealing with vendors you need to ask yourself several questions ......

Measurements are critical to good construction. Not just in constructing walls, placing tiles, and balancing mechanical systems, but also in tracking contractor's performance on the project. A minute cannot go by where workers are not measuring boards, conduits, walls, concrete volumes, and hundreds of other things on a construction site, but are contractors measuring things for their own betterment? ......