The construction world can be a competitive, low margin game. As a customer, you look for social cues of reputable companies, get recommendations from trusted peers, and start getting quotes for your project. At the end of the day, you’re just trying to get the highest quality work for the lowest price. This is the world we as contractors chose to compete in.
In a low-bid world, we’re trying to give customers a competitive price and still be profitable enough to pay our workers, acquire building supplies, administrative & office costs and hopefully still have a little leftover to put in the bank. To be successful, it takes a level of efficiency. One of the more critical areas of efficiency in construction is to have a tight-knit network of trusted suppliers and partners.
If you’ve been in the game long enough and are fortunate enough to have built a consistent book of business like McBride Construction, then you hold on tight to suppliers with quality building supplies for a good wholesale price. Most of the time, Home Depot just doesn’t cut it.
Behind the scenes of every home construction project, there is a delicate dance that happens. We know you don’t care how the clock gets made, but we sure do.
At the end of the project, you see a beautiful new deck, a grand staircase, a lovely new kitchen. We see a puzzle that means coordinating our best workers to the tasks they’re great at. Purchasing nuts & bolts, brackets, wood, primer, paint, brushes, and other building supplies from various suppliers in our network. Knowing exactly what tools from our arsenal are going to be needed at what time. Making sure the trucks are gassed up and our administrative team knows where we are, what we’re doing, and what resources we’re using. It’s what every construction company goes through, and it’s honestly what we love about it; the dance.
However, if our workers are on-site, on-time, and all of our tools are organized and ready, it means nothing if our building supplies aren’t there. Purchasing supplies is only half the battle. Making sure all the supplies are at the project site exactly when we need it is one of our bigger challenges.
On most projects, we can’t afford to have our team pick up supplies. If they’re picking up supplies, they’re not building. Yes, some of our great suppliers will deliver to the job site, but most of the time we need supplies picked up and delivered when we need it. It’s not a job we can just call Mom or cousin Mark for.
Often, you need special trucks with lifts and personnel that know what they’re doing handling heavy supply loads. Thankfully, we have specialty hot shot delivery partners that we trust to pick up supplies and deliver to your home project, so we can focus on what we do best.
Behind the scenes, the careful choreography of a construction project can be stressful, but not if you have the right team, suppliers, and partners. We love seeing a customer’s vision come to reality. A successful end-result and a happy customer is what makes the dance worth it.
