What we self-perform

The schedule is lost between trades, not during them

On a commercial project of this size, very little time is lost while work is happening. It is lost in the gaps: the three days an excavator waits for the utility subcontractor, the fortnight an electrician cannot start because the slab is not poured, the week millwork sits in a shop because nobody released it.

Those gaps are not laziness and they are not anybody behaving badly. They are what happens when four firms with four other backlogs each protect themselves against the other three being late. Each builds float into its own commitment, entirely reasonably, and the float accumulates into the owner’s calendar.

Where a trade is ours, the gap on either side of it is ours to close. There is nobody to wait for, nobody to chase, and nobody to blame. On a project of this size that is usually worth more weeks than any other single decision an owner makes.

The four, and why these four

Site work and utilities. The division that sets the start date. Nothing happens until the pad is built and the underground is in and tested, and an excavation contractor with four other jobs sends their crew to whichever one is loudest. Ours goes where our schedule says.

Trucking. Our own trucks. On an earthwork-heavy site, import and export is mostly haul cost and haul timing, and material arriving the morning the crew does rather than when a haulier has a window is the difference between a productive day and a wasted one.

Millwork. The division most often blamed for a late certificate of occupancy. Casework and finish carpentry sit at the very end of the sequence, where there is no float left, and a shop with a queue in front of you at that point is a serious problem.

Electrical. Rough and finish, scheduled against our own programme rather than against somebody else’s backlog. Electrical touches almost every other trade, so an electrical crew that cannot come when needed delays several things at once.

What those four have in common is that they sit at the pinch points — the start, the haul, the finish, and the trade that everything else waits on. They are not the four largest. They are the four that decide whether a schedule holds.

What we subcontract, and why

Mechanical and controls, because an HVAC contractor who does only that is better at it, and because commissioning a system properly is a specialism. Fire protection, which is engineered and certified work. Roofing, where the manufacturer’s warranty depends on a certified applicator and where a general contractor self-performing would void it. Structural steel fabrication and erection, which is a plant and an equipment business. Specialty finishes, flooring and glazing, which are production trades with their own economics. And testing and special inspection, which should be independent of the contractor as a matter of principle rather than convenience.

Where we subcontract, we carry the coordination, the schedule and the responsibility to you. A subcontractor is never an explanation an owner should have to accept.

Four self-performed trades is not everything, and a firm claiming to self-perform everything on a commercial building is either misdescribing subcontractors as crews or doing specialist work badly.

How to check it rather than take it

Self-performance is the easiest thing in this industry to claim and one of the easiest to verify. Do this with every firm you are considering.

Ask for the equipment schedule — owned, not rented. Excavators, loaders, trucks and a millwork shop are capital. A firm that genuinely self-performs owns them, because renting them by the month is how you lose money. A firm that brokers everything has a pickup and a laptop.

Ask for a certified payroll from a comparable completed project and count the trades on it. A genuinely self-performed job carries operators, labourers, carpenters and electricians. A brokered one carries a superintendent and a project manager.

Ask for the subcontractor list and compare its value to the contract value. That single division is the whole claim, and it is a number rather than an adjective.

Ask to see the millwork shop. It either exists or it does not, and it takes ten minutes to find out.

What self-performance does not fix

It does not make a firm the right size for every project, and it is worth saying so on a page that is otherwise an argument for it.

A crew list is a fixed capacity. A project large enough that we would have to broker most of it defeats the reason to hire us, and we would rather say that at the pre-bid meeting than submit a number and find out at month six. The scale question is set out plainly on the work page.

It also does not substitute for the design side. A self-performed project built from an ambiguous drawing set is still a project built from an ambiguous drawing set. The two arguments on this site are independent, and the design one is the larger of the two.