The Best-of-the-Best of Maegan Spivey’s Contract Advice
Maegan Spivey is a Contracts Specialist with Document Crunch.
6 Tactics for Building Strong GC Relationships
Find other subs who are willing to transparently share with you the good GCs they have found. (This doesn’t really happen in the lump sum world.) Take a trip to the GC’s place of business so you can observe the mood, culture and organization of their space. This can tell you a lot about how […]
4 Steps to Define Your Ideal GC Profile
Gather everyone from admin to laborers and ask them what features they think make a GC great to work with. Establish the ethical and practical principles you would like a GC to stick to in a perfect world. Write out the components of that ideal GC, and measure potential GCs against it, like a rubric. […]
Protect Profits: How to Capture Unforeseen Costs in Your Estimates
For subcontractors, a strong profit margin hinges on your ability to accurately estimate costs. But no two projects are the same. Unexpected costs crop up all the time, and they threaten even the most painstakingly crafted bids. To help subs tackle this, Billd tapped Clay Young, Owner of Falcon Electric and former Chief Estimator at […]
15 Tips from Subcontractors to Catch Unforeseen Costs in Your Bids
General Tips to Avoid Unforeseen Costs: Involve multiple team members at every stage of the bid: Hold bid meetings to maximize team communication and gain different perspectives on which items could turn into unforeseen costs. One sub recommended pre-bid meetings, mid-bid meetings, and post-bid meetings between supers, PMs and field ops teams. They characterized this as […]
10-Step Closeout Checklist for Subcontractors
Review the project specs to see what type of closeout documents are needed by the spec sections you are responsible for. You may have to contact the GC to find out how they want to receive the closeout docs (paper copies or electronically). Contact the general contractor to find the date of substantial completion. You […]
Closeout Responsibility Matrix for Subcontractors
Save Time and Money at Closeout as a Subcontractor
How you end a project is how you’ll start the next one. What do we mean? The impression you leave on your GC will carry over into new projects you might bid for. This is why nailing your construction closeout process is vital to sustaining customer relationships and having a continuous flow of work. Every […]
The Guide to Winning Your Most Profitable Projects
Bidding is an art. You tirelessly revise your process, involve your stakeholders, study what works, and cut out what doesn’t. Or at least, that’s what you would be doing if you weren’t moving a million miles a minute to keep your business running, right? The fact of the matter is, most subs don’t have the time to […]