I have recently been looking at pricing a large industrial building with high insulation requirements for a client, and been greatly struggling with this. After several weeks of back and forward between the client, ourselves and the insulation supplier, I was ready to throw my hands in the air and asked the rep "why is this so difficult, as surely we were not the only people in existence to have ever wanted to insulate a large building? Is it something about us?"
His reply was very interesting. "Jon, that is virtually the same scope that is written up Australia wide, but what normally happens is that is is technically not possible, and halfway through the project, the contractor finds it can't be done and the scope gets changed. You are the only people we know of who try to work it out in advance"
Apart from muttering about why the rep didn't tell us (and others) this in advance, it caused me to reflect on what makes a successful remote area contractor. Most of our sites are a long way from anywhere, and so issues have both a time and a cost factor to make anything happen. We try to keep our projects as low cost as possible, and so we appear to have an inordinate amount of planning that happens BEFORE anything happens on site, and also before we even get to the stage of submitting a price estimate. I have joked before that I only ever go to site for political reasons so the client thinks their job is being managed. There is a large margin of truth in this as 90 percent of our head office work is complete before the first person arrives on site, and day 2 is generally an opportunity to sit back, take a deep breath and relax. Execution is our anti-climax. My observation of construction in Perth is that this is the time it gets really busy as the couriers and supervisors utes shift into gear picking up forgotten items. Can't do that 1000 miles away, so we will stick with thorough planning in advance.....