Subs….and not hoagies

We take a lot of pride in the subcontractors who work with us, and also a lot of pride in the fact that there aren't many of them. It does take a small village however, and we recognize that and hold in very high esteem any subcontractors who work with us. We've also had a few we'll never work with again and wouldn't recommend to anyone else either. Subcontractors are crucial to the expediency and efficiency of a job being well-run. A subcontractor has a few important tasks to perform - for us, for any other builders, or for a homeowner who has called them in on their own. Those tasks are: showing up on time (and on a large site showing up as they are scheduled), working efficiently, passing their inspections, and getting out and finishing on time. A large jobsite is a working wheel. There are a thousand tiny, unseen, unimagined, never-touched-by-the-homeowner parts and schedules that all work together in making the wheel of a jobsite spin smoothly and efficiently (after all, isn't riding a bike an exercise in efficiency, after all?.) If just one of these subcontractors becomes a spoke in the wheel....well, the wheel can easily fly off the forks and the rider(s) flipped off the handle. Nothing - and I mean absolutely NOTHING - is worse for a jobsite than a subcontractor who fails to show up on the scheduled date, or who fails inspections and slows down the construction process, which in turn affects every other single person working on that job, and more importantly and MOST importantly, affects the family for who we are all working.

There's a great website that I was turned-on to by my buddy Ryan called BuildLLC out of Seattle, which is the city where Ryan has been working for the past year or so. Today their blog entry is all about subcontractors. The cool part is that after reading it I realized we do every single on of these items, and not because some blog of fancy-schmancy design-builders said to (because we'd never seen it before) but just because they're the right steps to take anyway to ensure the best final product and that all systems work together, cohesively, which is our ultimate goal.

We've got a big meeting today regarding a really cool winter project, and it's good timing that this was the first thing I read this morning as we're having both of these guys meet us at the potential jobsite before we even begin bidding, which I'm pretty sure the other folks we're going up against have not. Hopefully it's a sign of good things to come. Until then...