Why Your Favorite Project Manager Might Be Losing You Money!

Stephen, have you ever seen a contractor brag on a PM because the clients love him, but nobody stopped to ask whether the jobs you ran actually made any money?

Yeah, absolutely.

I see it all the time.

And a lot of times when I go to projects with surety underwriters, we're meeting in the job trailer with the project manager.

And basically, we want to know is where you are now and where you're going.

When will you be finished? The profitability part of it is something that we never talk about in a job trailer.

So from my perspective, project managers are generally more loved by the owners of the construction company for cranking work out, cranking it up.

But at the same time, if you're a construction company, you have key customers that love your project manager or managers to an obsessive degree that they won't let you fire them.

Then the tail may be wagging the dog here.

Yeah, and I've seen this in various different forms.

The project manager estimator, they got good relationships, whether the customer or the project manager having a great relationship with a sub is a great thing, especially if they'll do stuff for them.

But sometimes being too nice, you got to watch what's happening there.

that too nice dynamic.

Maybe they're too nice to write up a change order or a back charge, something like that.

These guys, they live and die by their relationships and they want to protect that relationship.

So they sort of absorb some of the small stuff that general contractors happen to eat.

Well, they just say, we'll take care of it.

And all these little small favors basically become all this unpaid extra material, schedule disruption,

Yeah, and you've got this crane here.

Hey, drag this over here for me.

Move this over to here for me.

I know you've got a story about that one.

Yeah, it's good and it develops relationships.

Most of our listeners that run your own construction company know the owners that take advantage of you.

You're really excited to do business with that owner, okay? And you want to do everything you can to make them happy and get repeat work from them.