Five ways to tell your general contractor has the job under control

You can learn more about how a job is being run from twenty minutes on site than from a month of progress reports. The way the material is stacked, who walks over to greet you, whether the person who greets you can answer a question about next week's inspection. We tell owners to visit unannounced and watch for five things. None of them require construction knowledge. All of them are visible from the parking lot.

Someone with authority is on the site

The first sign is who is standing there. On a well-run job the person in charge is on site, not dropping in once a week from an office across town. When you ask about a change, a cost or a date, that person answers without saying they will check with someone. On our jobs that person is a principal of the company, the same one who priced the work, and the owner has that person's cell number from the first meeting. If your questions always get relayed to someone who is not there, the job is being managed at a distance, and distance is where delays hide.

The update names dates, not moods

The second sign is what a weekly update sounds like. A good one is specific: the drywall inspection passed Tuesday, tile starts Monday, the storefront glazing ships on the eleventh, the opening date is unchanged. A weak one is a feeling: things are moving, we are working through some items. Ask what is on the critical path this week and whether the opening date moved. A contractor with the job under control answers in one sentence with a date in it.

Change orders arrive before the work, with both numbers

The third sign is how a change is handled. A change order should reach you with a cost and a schedule effect before anyone picks up a tool, and it should say which of those two numbers is zero if either one is. Change work that shows up on an invoice after the fact, or a cost with no mention of the calendar, means the contractor is either not tracking the schedule or not telling you what the change is doing to the date. We write the schedule impact on every change, even when it is none, so the opening date is never a surprise.

The site is clean and the trades are stacked correctly

The fourth sign is what the site looks like on an ordinary weekday. Material staged near where it will be used, one trade finishing where the next one starts, no week of silence between them. A quiet site when the schedule says it should be busy is a sequencing problem or a subcontractor availability problem that has not made it into an update yet. Because framing, drywall, tile, paint, millwork and stone are our own crews, the handoff between those trades is a conversation on site rather than a gap in someone else's calendar, and the site stays full when the schedule says it should.

Bad news arrives early and comes with a plan

The fifth sign is the one that matters most. Every job hits something: a field condition behind a wall, a fixture on backorder, a permit comment nobody expected. The contractor who is running the job well calls you the day it is found, tells you what it does to the cost and the date, and offers a way to recover. The contractor who is not calls you when the problem has grown into an excuse. Silence followed by a delay is the pattern to worry about. An uncomfortable phone call in week three is the pattern to want.

Visit the site without an appointment, ask the person in charge what is on the critical path this week and when the opening date is, and watch how quickly and how specifically they answer. If two or three of these signs are missing, raise it directly and ask for a reissued schedule with dates on it. The pattern across a month tells you far more than any single week.

We run every job with the owner of the company on site, the update in plain words, and the opening date written at the top of the schedule. Send over your plans and we will show you what a well-run job looks like from the first site visit.