The half-gone clutch on the hill What my dad taught me at a stop sign at 15 — and the one thing the trade can't teach you. The Steel Erector's Playbook Issue #5 The half-gone clutch on the hill I was 15. No license. Saturday. My dad had brought me to work with him, and on the way home we pulled up to a stop sign in his beat-up work truck — the one with the clutch already half gone. He stopped the truck, looked at me, and said, “Okay. You're going to drive this home.” I'd never driven stick in...
4 months ago • 3 min read
The kind of job we don't bid anymore The Steel Erector's Playbook Issue No. 04 A bid invite hit my inbox last week. Multi-story mid-rise. Downtown Chicago. Decent tonnage. Mid-tier developer. I passed in ten minutes. Three years ago I would have spent two days on that takeoff and gone in aggressive to win it. Now I preview the plans, run it against our criteria, and pass in ten minutes. Here's what changed. We sat down and studied our completed projects. The winners. The losers. The ones that...
4 months ago • 2 min read
The Steel Erector's Playbook — Issue #3 THE STEEL ERECTOR'S PLAYBOOK Issue #3 We showed up with four truckloads of steel and nowhere to put it School project. 650 tons of structural steel total — including 100-foot-plus long-span joists for the gymnasium. Nice sized project. Our first mobilization was the north half — outer classrooms and hallway steel. Four truckloads. Five-man crew. Crane and operator on site. Everything scheduled, everything planned. Then we pulled in. The bricklayer had...
5 months ago • 6 min read
The Steel Erector's Playbook — Issue #2 Issue No. 02 The Steel Erector's Playbook Field-tested systems for steel erection owners The Confession I was guessing my labor rate for 15 years. I'll tell you something most owners won't. For most of my career, our hourly billing rate was an educated guess. We'd look at what we charged the previous year. Bump it up a few bucks. Check what we thought the market was doing. Talk to a couple of other guys. Settle on a number that felt right. That was the...
6 months ago • 3 min read
I signed a $936,000 subcontract on a commercial project two years ago. The GC had sent over the contract after we’d already mobilized material to the site. We had a second project with them in the pipeline. The relationship felt solid. So I did what most of us do — I flipped to the scope, checked the price, and signed. Page 27 had a pay-if-paid clause I didn’t catch. Page 14 had a 48-hour change order notification window I never read. And the scope language was vague enough that the GC later...
6 months ago • 3 min read