Mastering Dynamic Strategic Planning And Disciplined Project Management With Antonia Botero | Ep. 211

COGE 211 | Project Management

The construction industry is undergoing a market shift, and it’s now become necessary for businesses to adapt to these changes. Antonia Botero shares a lesson on how you can pivot through dynamic strategic planning and disciplined project management to sustain and maintain your business in the downs and in the ups. Antonia is an Architect, professional project manager, and owner of boutique project management and business consulting firm MADDPROJECT. In this episode, she chats with host Eric Anderton about different strategies construction company owners need to use to optimize their teams and take their businesses through economic shifts in the marketplace. Antonia speaks about tapping into your team’s expertise and the relationships that you have external to your organization to identify the right projects with the right clients in the right locations. Listen to their conversation and get valuable practical wisdom for your construction business.

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Mastering Dynamic Strategic Planning And Disciplined Project Management With Antonia Botero

My guest is Antonia Botero. She is a second-time guest on the show. She is the owner of a boutique project management and development strategy consulting firm, MADDPROJECT. We have a conversation about two things, strategy and project management. Strategy from the perspective of your market shifts and economic condition shifts. How are you going to respond to that as a construction company? How are you going to tap into the genius of the people that you have in your organization, as well as the relationships that you have external to your organization to identify the right projects with the right clients in the right locations? That includes shifting your strategic perspective as perhaps one particular niche dries up and other niches open.

Speaking of niches and strategy, I want to get a quick plug for my book, Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-on, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies. You can get the book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle format, paperback and the Audible version. It is a killer book. You should pick it up. It is a book that every construction leader must read.

After we talk about the idea of strategy, we dive into the importance of project management. From a project management perspective, we emphasize what A-player project managers do. They have a sense of urgency, understand their documents, have a real grasp of how to coordinate every project and have a commitment to the process. Strategy project management is what this conversation is all about. You are going to enjoy it. Antonia is an expert. Check out her website MADDPROJECT.com. Check her out on Twitter. Her Twitter game is very strong. You are going to enjoy this conversation. Thank you for reading.

Antonia, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me back, Eric.

I’m glad to have you back. I love following you on Twitter, your insights and straightforward way of communicating them. I’m like, “I got to get you back on the show.” I want to talk about strategy here. What makes a good solid strategy in the construction industry? What are some of those elements?

One of the things that we have talked about a little bit is all of these first principles that apply to any shop. Just because you are in construction, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, the principles don’t apply to you. One of the first things that we talk about is thinking through what business you want to run. What construction shop do you want to run? Do you want to run a high-value shop or a high-volume shop?

Even though construction bends towards the high value because it is an expensive, labor-intensive activity, it doesn’t mean that you can’t bend it a little bit towards the high volume if you have a specific trade that you are a part of rather than a general contractor or a construction manager. Going back and having that sit down, write down, which business am I in? Am I in a high value or high volume? How am I going to make the revenue? Is it going to come from a lot of small transactions or a few big transactions? That is a good way to start.

Let’s talk about that a little bit because we all know the volume is sexy. Getting your name and banner on a project as someone drives down the freeway is cool but with volume comes pain. The more volume I have by the nature of the business, in many cases, the more pain I’m going to get, particularly if that volume is generated by multiple projects. What are some of the key insights or the key markers that I need to be thinking about when I’m making this decision between volume and value?

At that point, it is a matter of understanding whether you are going to run this by yourself or there’s some expertise that you need from someone else to help with dealing with the volume or specific trade things and technical things that maybe you don’t know how to do. You will have to determine whether you are doing it by yourself or you are going to partner. You also need to determine whether or not you are going to have to hire a specialized team or if you are going to carry the majority of the bigger strategic business management by yourself.

COGE 211 | Project Management
Project Management: It’s really a matter of understanding whether you’re gonna run this by yourself or whether there’s some expertise that you need from someone else to help in dealing with the volume or the specific trade things, and other technical things that maybe you don’t know how to do.

 

Answering that high-volume or high-value question is going to have a knock-on impact on whether or not you do it by yourself or you are going to need a team. Are they going to need to be specialized? Do they need special knowledge and training? That is what follows looking at a high-value, high-volume conversation.

If I choose the high-value route, in doing so, that requires some niching to a certain extent. Is it possible then to scale a high-value organization?

You can but you are going to need a big team. That high volume will better be high. You have established your constraints. You have said, “I need to make these projects. It can’t be medium-sized. I can’t be doing the $50 million things. I’m going to have to do the $500 million things because I’m going to need a specialized team to do it. To have a specialized team, I’m going to need to pay them well.” That is the trade-off and that is why it is important to establish what game you are playing early on.

There is a lot of temptation in construction and the temptation comes in a couple of different ways, particularly where we are sitting at the moment. One temptation is when the economy is going well and I have all these opportunities coming my way. The other challenge is when the economy is going badly and a particular niche that I have dries up. I’m casting around anywhere for any project that I can do to keep my guys busy. When the economy starts to dip and perhaps the niche that I’m in begins to dry up, how should I begin to strategically look at pivoting to sustain and maintain my business in the downs as well as in the ups?

It is almost the same exercise in the reverse. Instead of saying, “What shop do I want to be in? What resources do I bring in to achieve that?” It is almost like, “These are the resources that I have that I want to maintain. What other type of work can we attack?” It is not easy for people to pivot from high-value to high-volume quickly but it is worth a thought. The people who do this well, almost on a tiny scale, are the landscape shops that pivot to tree lighting in winter climates. What expertise do you have on hand? You have a bunch of people who are familiar with the plants and climb trees many times because they do tree trimming. They are also able to stream lights.

That thought is, “What are the resources that we have and how can we use them in other ways?” It might take some thought. You might need to sit down, take a pause and restructure your workforce a little bit. You may have to let go of some people and hire people with different skills. If you are low-volume, high-value and you decide to pivot to high volume, you are going to need to get more administrative stuff. If you are going to have more contracts or accounting, you are probably going to need a little bit more help with dealing with all the extra paperwork that you weren’t having to do before.

It will require thought and restructuring but it can be done and in my experience, it is what has kept some of the shops that I’m familiar with that have been around for decades. That is a lot of what they have done. They figured out, “These are the resources we have. How can we move them around to continue even though our business strategy has shifted a little bit?

Pivoting will require a lot of thought and it will require restructuring but it can be done. Click To Tweet

The first thing that popped into my mind there is the idea of pivoting is often challenging for us because we have this bias to looking at what has worked, doubling down on that and insisting that it is going to work because it has worked. Sometimes, we can be too slow to pivot because we are still stuck in that mindset that this is going to work. What do you think in your experience that the best companies do to keep that innovative mindset, that willingness to pivot in the business so that when the economy does shift, they don’t get caught with a bunch of overhead and a tiny backlog?

It is also a little bit related to the know-thy-self conversation. How are you going to run this place and make strategic decisions if you are the person who has a tough time accepting change? Maybe you want to have some advisor or mentor who can help you talk through those things when you don’t have a partner that is going to be that person.

It is a matter of knowing the limit of your confidence and that includes the emotional confidence to recognize when you are about to get caught in a bad situation and maybe ask someone else for help in how to restructure or think through this differently. That is a hard one and that is also the reason why we see many companies go under when there is a shift in the market. It is a difficult thing to do and being aware of it is also hard.

I have a client at the moment. Their niche is complex and demanding work in the type of work that they do and in the type of work that they do, there is all this cheap, easy stuff that gets flooded with a bunch of competition but they purposely don’t go after that even though they can technically do it. The challenge for them is that in the geography that they are in at the moment, that type of work is drying up a little bit. They are committed to their complex and demanding project type but the location that they are in is drying up. They are having to think about new locations to go to and that is presenting a whole set of other challenges in the business.

That is another option. How do you solve that problem? You either go somewhere else. My work is national. Not that I’m thinking of doing an eBook. If it came to the high-value work dried up for me, there are all these other things that I would probably begin looking at. Different kinds of consulting, maybe it is more one on one stuff, which I don’t do a ton of on purpose because my time is spent with the big clients. That is a pretty interesting challenge and looking at other geographies is one way to solve it. Unless you are a national company, you are going to have to shift into that whole opposite, whether it is higher volume or higher value, depending on where the market is coming from.

Let’s go into the executive boardroom of a construction company. We are doing this in late November of 2022. Some people have been trying to talk us into a recession. We are not quite there yet but we are teetering. Every good construction company should be in their boardroom with their senior team having these discussions. What are the key questions that I, as the leader of my construction company, need to be asking my executives as I’m considering the strategic landscape and adapting to that?

The first thing I would say is, “What are the things that you do well? What are the things that your people do extraordinarily well? What is it that you do better than anybody else?” You want to start there. You can look at it in 1 of 2 ways. The first is the work that you have done in the past but also the talent that you have sitting at that table. You may have people there that are applying lessons from a different niche to doing the work that you do well but they may have all this entirely different expertise that you can call on because the market is changing. That is a big one. Not only your exceptional work but your exceptional people.

Let me ask you there. This is interesting. Let’s say I’m the owner of a construction company and I got these guys or gals in my company. They have an expertise that perhaps I don’t have that I might be able to leverage and yet, I’m not willing to give up control. As a result of that, I may be reluctant to pursue the expertise that they have because I still want control.

You go back to that know-thy-self and soul search at that point and say, “What is better? Are you holding on to your control or your company?” At some point, you are going to have to make that decision. Looking around the room and saying, “I got these exceptional people whom I hired for a reason. They know to do certain things better than I do. There are probably some things in there that we can all follow in a different direction and probably keep this alive or I could not.” That is a question for that executive to sit down, think through and say, “The options are clear.” They can become clear. That is why many of these companies go under during shifting markets.

As I’m thinking through this, I’m thinking of someone whom many of my clients say went through the Great Recession. Some of them even went through a recession in the early 2000s, the dot-com thing. I’m thinking about how the past informs what we are doing in the present. Part of my job as a leader is to draw analogies from the past as I’m looking at the present and yet not to be stuck in the past in terms of how I respond to the present because the present is not the past. Here is a question. How do I balance the usefulness of the analogy of what we did in “’08?” This is not ‘08 anymore. This is 2022. How do I make that balance there?

You highlighted that already. It is that open-mindedness required. The lesson I wouldn’t say is, “We did it by doing these specific business things.” We did it by keeping our eyes open and solving for what we had at hand because the situation at hand was not the same. For most people, it’s a slightly different shift. Rely on the open-mindedness required that you needed to have at that moment, that phone call that you made to that unlikely person. The fact that you listened to one of your executives that you wouldn’t have otherwise put in charge of a whole new department in your company is the lesson. The lesson is not, “We went into window washing.” No. It is like, “No, I listened to this guy who has washed more windows than anybody else.”

There is a couple of different dynamics that we need to take into account. One is tapping into the expertise that I already have in my company. Likely, the people I have in my company aren’t the same people who went through the last recession with me. They are going to have relationships, expertise and insights that I lack. Let’s say I’m in my 40s and 50s. I’m going to have guys and gals who are in their 20s and 30s. They are going to have insights that I need to be willing to tap into that can be helpful.

When things are going well and projects are coming in the door, I’m a genius at attracting work when in fact, I may not be. It may be that because the tide is rising, I’m getting the work. I need to start to adopt a selling mindset that, perhaps in good times, I didn’t need to adopt. What do you think is the key shift that people need to make from a selling perspective to be able to go through a recession effectively?

That is a tough one to shift into because a lot of the selling that you are able to do in a recession or a shifting market is based on the selling that you did when the market was good. What did you do? It goes back to the two things that you got. What is the work that you are exceptional at? How did you showcase that and how did you market that when things were going well? That is going to create that loyalty that in many instances, for a lot of the people using it as an example, there were the relationships that saved them during ‘08. It was the stuff that you did before. That is not to say that you haven’t built super strong relationships or you can’t begin to look at a ship and have that mindset.

COGE 211 | Project Management
Project Management: A lot of the selling that you’re able to do in a recession or in a shifting market is based on the selling that you did when the market was really good.

 

The first thing is to look at exceptional talent because some of the people there may have relationships in selling with other people that are going to help you. Have those conversations with open-mindedness about how else are you going to sell. Perhaps you begin to do advertising online. Begin to go into a different market. You are going to have to get in there somehow and either you send someone for business development but be open-minded to those things and ask the people around the table whether they have experience and expertise.

How are you going to expand that marketing if you don’t already have the base for it, which you should have been building? You are building all the time. If you own a shop, every day, whether the economy is good or bad, you are working on your baseline for your marketing, your brand, for who you are and you are selling all the time. To me, that was like, “The best time to start was several years ago. The second best time to start is now.”

The other thing is the willingness to value relationships. Sometimes people are like, “That contract is too small for me. I’m not going to talk to that person because they are not the decision maker.” You might be wrong. Giving those interactions the benefit of the doubt a little more as you make a pivot into marketing is important. I always tell people, “You should have that mindset all time.”

When you are starting your business, you are out there hustling for projects and building those relationships. The business starts to kick off a little bit and your attention shifts from the external win work to the internal build work which also deals with the drama of running a business. My attention can shift. In my mind, with the CEO and the top-level people in an organization, one of their primary roles is the business development perspective. They have to be focused on that at all times.

I like to go back and think about every great construction company. They are building for the right clients with the right projects in the right locations. I’m thinking about this idea of relationships. I will tell you a little story and see how this analogizes. It was from my business. When I started my business, I started calling on people whom I knew from a previous business that I was in. It is the people I already had a relationship with.

I remember this vividly and this was cold calling. I would walk into a business and I remember this one guy. He said to me, “Eric, we were talking about you.” He was holding up this book. The book was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. I had never read the book before but he knew and trusted me from our previous relationship. He said, “Eric, can you do a workshop for us on this book?” I just started my company. I had four kids and I had to feed the family. What did I say? I said, “Yes.” I read the book and did the workshop. I built my whole business based on learning from that book and other aspects.

This is my point. A project came along that I hadn’t done before, the actual workshop but because I had the relationship and it was close enough to what I had done, I was able to say yes. In my mind, as the recession kicks in, the owners of the construction company need to make a list of their top relationships, the deep relationships that they have and even the ones where perhaps they haven’t done work for them in a while. They need to get their butts out there face-to-face with these people and say, “What are you guys working on now?” It may not be exactly the niche that you are in but it may be adjacent to it. The risk profile is sufficiently low for you to be able to take that on or at least look at that project. What are your thoughts on that?

If you haven’t been keeping those relationships through this time, it is time to begin reaching out and saying, “What are you guys working on?” When you start the business, you are out there finding, hustling for more work and trying to bring in more business. At some point, your focus shifts and it is like everything in the business.

When you start by yourself, you are doing everything. As you master and build it to a certain point, you hand it off somehow, whether it is your accounting or human resources. In that case, business development, you hand it off because of two reasons. Number one, you have mastered and built it to the point where you want. Second, it is important enough for someone else to continue to carry that torch.

Business development is super important. Hopefully, you are not having to make that list of relationships for the first time and you have someone in your organization who has been keeping a lot of those relationships and has been spending the time in finding out like, “I had lunch with Zoe. They mentioned that they are getting into a different type of project because the market is shifting. It turns out that Larry, whom we hired several years ago, is an expert at that thing. It is not what we normally do but I mentioned it to them. All of a sudden, we have work in Larry’s niche. There you go.”

That happened because you had a business development person who kept the relationship alive and casually ended up having lunch with the person who had the need at the right time. Building that now and being more robust about how your leadership runs and how the key aspects of your business are carried forward is great but hopefully, you have been doing this for a long time and keeping good books. Business development is equally important as all of those things. Having a person who is keeping those relationships is crucial if it’s not yourself.

Business development is equally important as all of those things. Having a person who's keeping those relationships is crucial if it's not yourself. Click To Tweet

I want to speak to the audience here and say, “You can’t rely on your business development people.” They are the ones who are out there. It is great that they are out there because they are putting your name out there but people are buying their projects from the people who are ultimately responsible for them and the people who are running the work. We know that most business development people aren’t doing that. You, as the CEO, the president and the senior leader in your organization, need to make sure that you are dedicating time every week to business development in some form or another.

Another aspect I want to hit on a little bit here is when things are going well, I’m going to have a combination of A, B and C players in my organization. One of the things I like about recessions in construction is that I can look at my team and say, “Fred has been a consistent C player. I needed a warm body. I had a project on the schedule. I needed him on the job site for running the work. I know it wasn’t as profitable as it could be. Perhaps it is time to move Fred on.”

What I would like to think about here is this idea of project management because I know you are a project management expert and I come across a variety of different project managers in my work where some are C players, some are A players and some are B players. In your experience, what makes an A-level project manager?

Urgency and doing things right away. Everything is right away and that one is difficult to teach. That one you can do little about if the person doesn’t have that in them. The one that you can do a lot about and that A-players have is training. They have good training on the base. Those span across the technical aspects of the work, whether it is trade work specifically, creating and keeping a schedule, managing people and project accounting. All those basics are things that you can train people to do. You can have people with the right attitude but if they don’t understand how construction accounting works, they are not going to keep great project accounting. Those two things together mark the A-players.

I want to start with this idea of urgency first. Tell us what you mean by urgency.

In construction, we know that 2 days could be 2 months in any other business. If something comes up, bring it up right away to the right people like the owner, the owner’s rep or the trade. Raising your hand quickly is a big one. Keeping up with your documentation is a big one too. If there is a schedule that needs to be updated, it needs to happen immediately. It can happen when you get around to it.

Project management, for me, a lot of it is an organized individual where you have certain days of the week or certain times of day but sometimes for people, it is after the trades leave the site at 3:00 PM if you are looking for regular construction hours. Trades leave the site at 3:00 PM. From 3:00 to 5:00, you update your schedules and issue your emails if you are not walking around all day. Those are the kinds of things where organizing yourself well, where you have these habits that support that urgency, updating things constantly. Communication is very important. Constant up-to-date communication is what it is about. You can’t have that without training and urgency.

COGE 211 | Project Management
Project Management: Communication is very important. Constant up-to-date communication is really what it’s about. You can’t have that without training and urgency.

 

Let’s talk about change orders here because change orders can be a challenge for some project managers in a couple of different ways. I got two types of project managers in mind. I got one project manager who is afraid of conflict and therefore, he doesn’t want to bring up a change order or address the issue when the scope is going outside of what we have agreed to. I have the other project manager in mind who is too rigid and doesn’t understand the art of negotiation and leveraging when conditions change to enhance the relationship and the position of the company. Am I clear on what I have described there?

Yes.

In your experience, how do you help the person who is on the passive side and the person who is perhaps a little too aggressive? How do you handle that?

For both of them, a great way in the training should be the understanding, the knowledge of the contract and the practice of either early on in the project or as the project goes along, the practice of referencing the contracts internally as you are doing the work to say, “Are we within the contract? This is a change order.” Let’s say you are a passive person. You have the basis for what you are saying. It might give you a little more moxie to say, “I don’t think this is my contract.” That is part one. Knowing the contract can help both of them.

Can I ask you a question about that? Let’s say I’m training my project managers. I’m training them on understanding the contract. I’m assuming that there is a learning curve here. How do I walk a project manager? What areas do I need to focus on for them to know what to look for in the contract to get their arms around it and understand it?

The first thing is the fee. You need to know what your fee is and if it is a percentage of your overall. Let’s use a cost-plus job as an example. What are your other pluses? Is insurance a plus? Is contingency a plus? What are those percentages? Something I would never agree to is if you are charging me contingency over your insurance. That would not be okay or fee over your insurance. I want to pay for your insurance straight up. Normally, those terms would be in the contract.

Understanding what percentages apply to what portions of the contract are a big one. What qualifies into general conditions? What are the general conditions according to this contract or not? We have a dispute on a project where they are saying scaffold is not part of the general conditions when there is a word in the general conditions that says scaffold.

How are we having that conversation? Knowing the contract, what is in the general conditions, what constitutes a change order and what are the time limits around a change order? You only have a certain amount of time to say, “This is a change order.” You can’t come back six months later and say, “That thing we did is going to cost you $50,000.” You can’t do that. Knowing those things, knowing what the markup is on change orders, understanding how those things need to be presented in your pay applications so you are not double dipping. To be honest, the times that I have seen double dipping, it has always been unintentional or most of them I believe have been unintentional.

The other thing is, what are the things that are going to put you in default? That is an important thing. If you are not issuing schedules once a month in my projects, that is going to put you in default. Will I go and chase you for that? Probably not, unless you are doing a bunch of other things that are not for the contract. At that point, I might chase you for not issuing a contract on schedule on the tenth of the month, as you should have.

The part that I was going to say that would help your super rigid project manager. When you see a contract, there are two categories of things in a contract. There are your obligations and your party’s obligations. When you understand those two things and you begin to see how you may run a file of yours, whether it is in your power or not, hopefully, most of them are in your power because that is a key to negotiating a contract. You don’t negotiate too many things that are outside of your control.

When you see the things that are your responsibilities, you are aware of what those things are and you are going to go and be rigid to the other party about their responsibilities. You may realize that at some point, those things that are not in your control, that you don’t have the power to change, might bite you if you have been hard on the other party.

If you say, “Let’s have a deeper conversation about this change order. Maybe a little bit was our fault. By the book, it is a change order. We split it this way or figure out a different way of charging the work. Some of it can come from contingency if we agree to it.” Having that conversation can help you a lot when the shoes are on the other foot and the other party can come back and say, “I’m not going to be super rigid on you because you have been lenient on me.” All of that requires a good understanding knowledge of your contract. You can’t do it without it.

It is interesting what you are bringing up about the things that are outside of our control because that influences our project often. If I’m too quick to jump on someone, you better watch out because, at some point, something is going to affect you that you didn’t even plan for and control and you are going to have to go hand in hand back with that person if you treated them too intensely, even if you were “right.” I thought about the word maturity. It requires maturity and wisdom to be able to operate in that dynamic realm of the realities of a construction project.

That is something that teaching that part of your project management training is going to be like, “This contract has two sides. There are categories of things that we are responsible for and the categories that things that the owner is responsible for.” Understanding it very well can help you see the other person’s obligations in a much better light. You are going to have the entire picture in mind when you go to that changeover and have that difficult conversation because it is going to be an easier one if you have empathy. That is going to help a lot when you go negotiate.

Understanding your obligations very well can really help you see the other person's obligations in a much better light. Click To Tweet

Let’s go back a little bit. The best PMs have this sense of urgency and are mastering the basics. I watch Premier League soccer players warm up for a game and all they are doing is the same thing the 7 and 8-year-olds that I coach are doing. It is passing the ball back and forth to each other all the time. They do it with a level of skill that my eight-year-old doesn’t have. However, they are practicing the basics again and again. What are the basics that, in your mind, the best project managers master?

The schedule is a big one. There are different levels of schedule. You got the project milestones and super fancy Gantt Charts, which I can have a whole conversation about that. Project milestones are important to week look ahead and understand how to fit them into the context of the job and the overall milestones. Dealing with people and understanding how to ask for trades also requires a lot of understanding of your contracts with the trades. Understanding contracts overall is important.

The other basic is project accounting. All of it falls on project accounting. Your contract revisions and change orders are all related to project accounting. It requires understanding the contract. Your accounting also has a major impact on your schedule and relationships with the trades. I beat that drum whenever I could. It is probably the biggest one you could begin with and all of them laying on top of it.

When it comes to project accounting, you are sitting down with a PM. You are going to be saying, “This is what I want you to be focused on.” What are those key areas that they are going to be focused on right out of the gate when it comes to project accounting?

Contract values are the first one. Contract terms that reign contract revisions. What is a change order? What are the markups for change orders? Understanding how those things equal a current budget. How are those things? Where are we? What is our actual commitment? Understanding the relationship of the billings versus the work in place. Finally, keeping a good handle on what work has been funded by the owner and the subs. Those are the basics of project accounting.

Keeping good accounting and track of the clerical aspect of it. When an invoice comes in, it gets logged in and reviewed immediately. Sometimes, the project managers handle that. Sometimes they don’t. It depends on the size of the company. The project managers who are forced to log every invoice and check for the contract with the sub every time as part of their day-to-day or in the way of training are becoming better project managers because they understand that relationship.

Project managers do different things in different companies. They are responsible for different things. On a typical construction project, I might have a project manager and a project engineer who reports to the project manager and I have my superintendent and my foreman. What a lot of project managers struggle with is when they become project managers, they are supposed to be operating at a slightly higher level and yet they still behave like project engineers. What are the things that you don’t want your project managers doing? There is a variety of different answers to that but in your mind, what should project managers stay away from, if at all possible?

This is the caveat that I will build my answer on but if you are a project manager at one point or another, everything on that job is your job. If you have to clean the floors and pick up garbage, that is your job. Having said that, I don’t want you to spend the majority of your time with a broom walking around the site and picking up garbage.

The biggest thing there is letting go of the relationships directly with the subs and beginning to deal with the executives for the subs. The challenge that you are talking about is going from that day-to-day work to the supervisory role of that day-to-day work, where you are having meetings with your project engineer and super and getting like, “How is the two-week look ahead? Did we hit these days? Did the plumber show up?” Having that more supervisory relationship to the project versus, “If I don’t show up to the meeting with the plumber, the plumber is not going to be here. If that’s the case, you need to find a better super.”

It is like, “How do you make the switch?” Part of it is personality. Some people cannot be sitting in an office. They don’t like and enjoy it. It is not where their genius lies. They need to be walking around all day. There is a little bit of that in the know-thy-self and know-your-employees to the point where some people don’t have it or don’t want it. I have known a couple of people who were great supers. They got promoted to project managers and they hated it. They were like, “This isn’t what I like to do.”

Number one, you got to have the right person in the right seat. Assuming that you do, you begin to look at the system and have a meeting at the end of the day. Being a project manager, you have to be incredibly organized with your time. You have to have those systems where you say, “Every day at 3:00 PM, I meet with the super. Every day from 4:00 to 5:00, I update the schedule. Every day from 5:00 to 6:00, I issue the change orders for the work that came up for the day.” It is like setting up those systems going from a more relationship task-based thinking to more systems-based thinking in the oversight of the work.

That switch, for some people, is easy and they take to it quickly. Some people are not built for it and you have everything in the middle. People are spectrums. There is no yes or no. Some people might have a harder time with it and after maybe one project, they get the hang of it when they are good. It takes a lot of thought leadership and empathy for your people because you might think that a guy’s a great super and he would be a great project manager. The minute that you put him in an office, he wants to kill you.

How do I know that my project manager is incompetent and their project is failing because of them and not because of circumstances beyond their control?

The biggest role of the project manager is to be the coordinator. They are the person who says, “This is the contract of this trade. They are supposed to start on this date. Mr. Super, when do you need them?” “The contracts for the drywall guy are not supposed to start for another three weeks but we need him tomorrow or next Tuesday.” That is a project management problem. Your super didn’t do anything. The drywall guy didn’t do anything. That was a failure of project management. You see it whenever there is miscoordination in the schedule, especially where it is easiest to see because you will see that one quickly.

COGE 211 | Project Management
Project Management: The biggest role of the project manager is to be the coordinator.

 

Three words that I’m getting from our discussion here of project managers. The 1st one is urgency, the 2nd one is coordination and the 3rd one is the idea of systematized accounting. Those three things have to be working together for a PM to be performing at an A-level. It’s interesting because it assumes that they understand the work, have a grasp of their contract, have a grasp of the schedule and have strong people skills. There is a lot of work there.

That is also why having the right person is important. This is almost cliche because it is true. A lot of companies have these fantastic estimators. Most people will tell you, “We do not put the estimator in front of the client.” They cannot manage the work because the skills required are different. Sometimes you will have an excellent estimator who makes an excellent project manager but everyone is in a back room. Nobody sees them and they don’t know they are here. They are like elves. There is a lot of that. It is because those skills are different. Having the right individual is important because you do have a lot of technical parts to it. You also need a lot of emotional intelligence to be successful at it.

There are some companies and large companies that have people estimate the work and run the work. Their logic is, “I want someone who understands everything that is going on from the beginning to the end of the project.” It is interesting because the estimating mindset isn’t always the project management mindset.

It can’t be because estimating goes down to the task thinking. You have this much tile. It is this big. This is how much wastage is required by this manufacturer. That’s it. The lead time is six weeks. I need it by this date. Everything is task specific. Whereas in project management, you are layering different things, usually over project accounting. You are having a system approach to your day-to-day, to your thinking and to the project, which is hard to do from super to project managing super. It is like, “I got to get the laborers to clean this floor. I got to move that tool over there so they can work on that wall.”

That is a different way of thinking than the project manager who is having to think ahead, coordinate a bunch of different parties, remember all these tasks and update the schedule and accounting accordingly. There are some fantastic estimators I have worked with who are great project managers but normally the thinking that makes you a fantastic estimator is not the thinking that makes you a good project manager.

The thinking that makes you a fantastic estimator is not the sort of thinking that makes you a really good project manager. Click To Tweet

Here is the last big question I want to ask you. Let’s assume that I buy into what you are saying that my estimator’s mindset is different from my project manager’s mindset and the function of the project manager is different from this function of the superintendent. What we have done is described some classic silos in construction companies and every construction company battles with those silos. In your experience, what do the best companies do to help each party and each silo appreciate the other silo and work together well?

It can be resolved at the project management level and also at the project executive level. Hopefully, your project executive is someone who has managed projects. Shepherding the project from the beginning, where you are having conversations from day one with the design team, the owner and the estimator. You are carrying it through and seeing it through. The project manager can be the glue for a lot of these people.

This is something that I disagree with also with architects big time that they have a different architect through your schematic design and different architect to your construction documents at a different architect. Fundamentally, what you end up with is poorly trained architects at the end of the day. You also end up with not good projects that don’t have a ton of continuity. You are going to have the same problem.

If your project manager, who is supposed to understand all of these layers of coordination and be the person who is going to bring together all of these different parties to build a building and yet, they don’t get involved until you have already bought all your materials and picked all your trades, how are they supposed to keep those relationships together and communicate to the architect and the owner that these materials that you bought don’t make sense but they weren’t around when they were bought? You put them in a difficult situation where 1) They don’t learn because they are not around when the contracts get bought with the subs and 2) You put them in a bad spot to do their job.

It is hard to do your job if you are responsible for a bunch of contracts you had no part of. You weren’t even sitting at the table. You don’t even know who these people are. You are supposed to enter a super complex contractual relationship and you are supposed to manage it as you have been around the whole time.

Architects are also project managers in their way. It is the same principle of carrying the design or the construction forward. Not to say that there aren’t niche-specific things throughout that process that may require a specialized estimator or a super but why do you have a project manager if they are not around when the job gets bought? That is a big thing I look for when interviewing contractors for projects, especially big ones. The first person I want to meet is whom I am going to be talking to every day while this thing is being built.

We started with a discussion about strategy and how as a construction company leader, I need to be flexible in my thinking, tap into the genius of the people I have in my organization when I’m thinking about pivoting, be willing to pivot and be aggressive in terms of my business development. We moved into the discussion of the nuts and bolts of project management. Regardless of where I am in the economic cycle, I got projects that I got to win but also projects that are on the books that I got to build. As we are moving forward and as you are thinking about the next several months in your business, what are you focused on as a top priority to make sure that you are going to be successful?

Business development is one of them. That is a whole host of things, your branding, communication social media presence and all the things that go with that. That is a big one. The other part of it is strengthening the principles. You want to make sure that the way you are managing projects is top-notch, not just because you want to do a good job, which is exceptional service is important in this industry. It is a service industry at the end of the day but also because when the market changes, you get audited by the IRS or a project is under the lawsuit and it gets audited in the process of litigation so you want to make sure that those basics have been followed through and are super strong. Project accounting, I beat that drum to death.

COGE 211 | Project Management
Project Management: You want to make sure that the way you’re managing projects is top-notch, not just because you want to do a good job, but also because when the market changes, you want to make sure that those basics have followed through and are super strong.

 

Going back to the basics and ensuring that all of your processes and internal things are super strong, your contracts are good, your insurance is up to date and your accounting is thick and span. You want to make sure your bookkeeping is where it needs to be. It is all of these easy things that you should be doing every day.

Particularly when the tide begins to shift, you want to double down on the day-to-day easy things because they are the things that, at the end of the day, if there is litigation or an issue, you are going to be covered. You are not going to have to worry about them. Your business development and the exceptional work that you do, which also built on the basics and keeping those day-to-day things. You are crossing those T’s for sure.

Antonia, remind the readers. Some people may not have read your first episode. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and how we can get hold of you.

We are an owner’s rep. We represent owners in development projects. Most of our work is complex and weird, either strange ownership structures, large master plans or historic buildings. We have been extremely fortunate to have experience across many different project types. We also do always exciting but maybe less terrifying work like ground-up development. Typically, it is $50 million up. We do work nationally. We are based out of Park City, Utah. I also have some presence in New York City. We do work everywhere else. We are starting to look at projects outside of the US. That has been exciting.

Where are the projects?

We have stuff North and South of the border. We are international. I joke about it.

I have clients in the United Kingdom. I’m like, “I’m international. It is cool.”

That is international. I’m not international. In my mind, when you think of the North and South of the border, we are not going across the ocean yet.

How can people get ahold of you?

People can find me on Twitter and my website. There is a contact form. I get back to people myself. Those are the business parts of it that I’m still doing myself. Those are the best ways to get ahold of me.

Your Twitter game is very strong, Antonia. I appreciate it.

I appreciate that, Eric.

Thank you for your generosity. I enjoyed our conversation and I do wish you the best in 2023.

Likewise. Thank you so much.

 

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About Antonia Botero

COGE 211 | Project ManagementAntonia Botero is an Architect, multiple business-owner and professional project manager. Owner of boutique project management and business consulting firm MADDPROJECT, Antonia believes in the power of applying strategic project planning and data-driven decision-making to all capital improvement and new construction projects, regardless of scope.