Find your trade, your role, or your comparison.

By trade

Every trade has its own way of going wrong. Find yours.

• Roofing contractors — Tear-off starts before the full scope is known, and every deck you open is a change order the customer has not agreed to yet.
• Electrical contractors — Rough-in and final are two separate inspections, and a failed one costs you a crew day you had already scheduled elsewhere.
• Plumbing contractors — Rough-in disappears behind drywall. If the record is not kept while it is open, every question later is an argument.
• HVAC contractors — Manual J, duct testing, refrigerant documentation — the work that passes inspection is the work that never shows up in a photo.
• Concrete contractors — Everything on a concrete job is decided early — mix, reinforcing, testing, access — and there is no going back once it is set.
• Framing contractors — Shear nailing, hold-downs and structural observation are all inspected once, on a schedule you do not set.
• Drywall contractors — You finish in days and then wait a month, because the package that gets you paid is not finished when the board is.
• Flooring contractors — Lead times and acclimation set the date, and a homeowner changing colour sets it again.
• Painting contractors — You inherit every other trade's damage and then get asked why the finish is not perfect.
• Remodeling contractors — Every decision runs through a homeowner who is standing in the dust, and every change is personal.
• General contractors — Eleven subcontractors means eleven sets of insurance certificates, waivers, submittals and notices, and one person holding all of it.

By role you are thinking of hiring

If you are about to hire one of these, read this first. There is an honest answer about which one you actually need.

• Construction office manager — An office manager is one person. What is actually slowing you down is a role that is four jobs wearing one job title.
• Construction project coordinator — Somebody has to be answerable when a submittal is late, a waiver is missing and a draw stalls. A coordinator can carry the list. They cannot carry the consequence.
• Construction administrator — Filing is easy to measure and easy to hire for, which is exactly why contractors end up with immaculate filing and money sitting in unpaid draws.
• Construction bookkeeper — Bookkeeping is backwards facing. It records the bill that already went out. It does not build the draw, chase the waiver, or notice that a retainage is 40 days old.
• Construction billing coordinator — Every week a draw sits unfinished is a week of your money working for somebody else.
• Estimator support — Every hour you spend taking off drawings is an hour you are not in front of a customer or on a job that is already running.
• Construction scheduler — The schedule matters less than the record of why it moved. That record is what protects you when a delay is argued about.
• Submittal and RFI coordination — Submittals and RFIs are where the schedule quietly dies — not dramatically, one open item at a time.

Compared honestly

Every one of these explains the case against us as well as the case for us. That is deliberate.

• Versus hiring an office manager — Hire the office, not the person.
• Versus construction software — Software will not do it for you.
• Versus a bookkeeper — A bookkeeper and a desk are not the same purchase.
• Versus a consultant — Advice versus someone doing it.
• Versus doing it yourself — You can do it. That is not the question.