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Why does nobody talk about the paperwork handoff killing small GCs? | Construction Management - Free To Speak

Why does nobody talk about the paperwork handoff killing small GCs?

Tbh I used to think the old way of doing things was fine. Every small GC I knew in my area, around Akron, ran jobs off a clipboard and a cell phone. Then I watched a 6 man crew go from winning 2 jobs a month to losing bids they should have won, all in about 8 months. What changed was not the market. It was the handoff between the estimator and the field. The estimator would win a job, email a PDF, and the super would get it 4 days later with no notes on what the client actually cared about. We started doing a 30 minute sit down before every job, just the estimator, the super, and a one page scope sheet. Our rework dropped by a third in 90 days. I know the popular thing right now is to say all this stuff gets fixed with software, but that has not been my experience at all. Has anyone else seen the paperwork gap hurt a crew more than the actual labor did?

2 comments

2 Comments

nguyen.morgan10d ago

Did you ever sit in on one of those handoffs and see how much got lost in the gap? I used to roll my eyes at the idea that a 30 minute meeting mattered more than a new tool, mostly because I figured the field guys could just read the plan and figure it out. Then we tracked it for a quarter and found our crew was redoing about 15% of framing on a couple jobs, and almost all of it traced back to the super never hearing why the client wanted a certain layout. Now we do a quick walk and a one pager before every job and the callbacks have dropped a lot.

samflores10d ago

Man I used to be the same way, figured a good set of plans should tell the whole story. Then we started tracking our own rework and a bunch of it came back to stuff that never made it from the office to the guy running the job. That one pager thing sounds dumb simple but it clearly works.