Market Forces - Surviving vs. Thriving

Construction contracting is a highly competitive business in a rapidly changing market.

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Leadership Tools: Surviving or Thriving. Innovator or Fast Follower.

The “Invisible Hand” of the market is constantly demanding that construction projects are delivered:

  • Lower Cost
  • Faster
  • Higher Quality

Whether you are looking at your individual career, a contracting business or the whole value stream of delivering completed projects to a customer you must constantly be focused on being competitive.

Just to survive you must be adapting faster than the slowest of your competition.  Survival is not guaranteed and just surviving is not fun.  

To thrive you must be in the top 20% of your competition with a team that can rapidly adapt and scale innovations.  There are multiple ways to innovate:

When you are in a business with single-digit net profits every bit of discipline in operations matters.


Learn how we help contractors define the right strategies and improve their operations


Market Forces - Surviving vs. Thriving
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Market Forces - Surviving vs. Thriving
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Two Planning Dimensions
Some of the impacts you see on a project are not as clear as a design change, conflict, or obviously changed condition. Some impacts, such as poor project sequencing or congested work areas are hard to notice if you don’t have good tracking systems.
Lean Principle - Value Stream
A contractor’s value stream is every step required to take raw materials and information then deliver a completed project to the waiting hands of a customer. Deep understanding of this value stream is the foundation for major productivity improvements.
PICK SMART Improvements
Contractors will never have enough resources to solve all problems or take advantage of every opportunity they face. There are a couple tools that can be used to align the team around the best utilization of resources: