Business Building: Finish Jobs On Time With No Punch List!

Words: George Hedley

A common denominator of successful construction companies is the owner’s ability to delegate and hold people accountable for results. To achieve this, they install a series of systems and meetings to leverage their time and effectiveness, allowing them to focus on more important priorities like attracting higher-margin customers. By committing to holding regular weekly supervisor meetings, the owner can delegate responsibility, stay in touch on a weekly basis versus hourly or daily, and keep track of production, schedule, quality, and safety results weekly. All this, while forcing foremen and superintendents to be accountable for achieving expected results and deadlines. In contrast, contractors who remain stuck continually make excuses for why they can’t find any time for meetings.

You can get your construction projects completed on time and under budget without punch-lists or callbacks by following these simple, proven systems.

Weekly Supervisor Meeting
Hold regular mandatory meetings in your office with all your field foremen and superintendents every week. These effective and powerful supervisor meetings are typically held on Thursday or Friday afternoons, or Monday mornings. The meeting is facilitated by the Construction Operations General Manager, or the Owner if there is no GM. The purpose of these meetings is to get supervisors to plan their activities and goals for the upcoming week, commit to achieving the weekly results, and be held accountable for making it happen. The targets are presented on a project scorecard and include field production, project schedule, crew hours, equipment usage, subcontractor activity, and all work to be accomplished. By committing and sharing results with others, they remain responsible for reaching their targets and improving productivity. Consequently, project and company managers can then focus on monitoring overall progress to keep projects on schedule and on budget in real-time, versus discovering results after projects are complete, when it’s too late to make adjustments.

Each foreman and superintendent presents, reviews, and describes to the entire group:

  1. Production: The actual progress, activity, and production on their projects versus their goals and commitments made at last week’s meeting. These commitments can include what was to be built or produced last week, crew size and equipment required to accomplish the production target, the actual amount or quantity produced, and actual crew and equipment hours used versus the budget spent on the accomplishments.

  2. Schedule: Present their 2 or 4 weeks “Look-Ahead” schedule and production commitments, including self-performed and subcontractor work activities.

  3. Safety: Present their safety issues, concerns, and action plans for the week.

  4. Quality: Present their quality action plan for the upcoming week.

  5. Needs: Present their tools, equipment, and crew needs for the upcoming week.
Weekly Quality & Safety Report
Implement a required weekly quality and safety job walk system on every project for the foreman or field superintendent to perform and complete. Requiring the field supervisor to do a thorough job walk to inspect for quality, punch-list, and safety issues ensures each job is inspected weekly. This forces supervisors to find and fix punch-lists or repair items as they occur rather than wait until the end of the job to fix these items. Create a short report form to be completed and turned in weekly with the items observed, action steps, and completion dates for each item that needs attention.

Sign-Off Before Leaving Project
Require your foreman to walk every project with the customer representative or project superintendent before you complete your work and leave the project. At the completion of each project phase or final, walk through the project to look for any unfinished items, repairs required, or other issues unacceptable to your customer. Then, document this event and forward a copy to your customer, outlining that the walk-through occurred and any items left to complete as of that date. This will also avoid callbacks where other subcontractors might have damaged your work after you left the project.

Supervisors Attend Final Walk-Thru
Have your foreman and job superintendent attend every final project punch-list walk-through with the project owner, customer, architect, or engineer. This will allow them to see what concerns and expectations customers have to sign off on a project. Then, have the specific project supervisor be responsible for completing this repair work and getting it approved by your customer.

Adjust Pay For Poor Workmanship
Ensure it is your policy that all field foremen and superintendents have their incentive compensation reduced for any punch-list work, poor-quality workmanship, callbacks for unfinished work, or additional repair work required after the crew finishes and leaves the project.

Want to hold your field supervisors and foremen accountable and responsible? Commit to using these proven systems to reach your goals.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Hedley CPBC is a certified professional construction business coach, consultant, and speaker, He shows contractors how to double their profits, grow, get organized, and turn their companies into BIZ-BUILDERS and Profit-Makers! He is the author of “Turn Your Construction Business Into A Profit-Making Machine!” available on Amazon.com. To talk, start a personalized coaching program, or get his free e-newsletter email GH@HardhatBizcoach.com. Visit his YouTube channel to watch his videos. To download online courses or get his contractor templates visit: https://constructionbusinesscoaching.com.


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