ConstructConnect Blog

Last week, President Biden unveiled the American Jobs Plan, an ambitious $2 trillion infrastructure plan. In addition to investing in rebuilding the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges, there would be strong focus on resiliency and sustainability. The plan would also focus on improving drinking water infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and high-speed broadband infrastructure.

It’s been a little over a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In the days and weeks that followed, we started to get a feel of how it would impact our lives as states began issuing stay-at-home orders, mandating people shelter in place except for essential work and activities.

Ask any construction business owner, regardless of the size of their firm, what their top priority is and we’re guessing you’ll get the same response every time: worker safety. The real question owners should constantly be asking themselves is whether or not their safety program is robust enough to meet their commitment to protecting their workers.

In construction, the successful completion of a job is accomplished through effective project management. Delivering a quality project to your client on time and within budget, while also turning a profit for you and your subcontractors is no easy feat. It requires careful planning, detailed monitoring of the progress, and communication and collaboration among all the major stakeholders and team members.

Effective risk management is key to every successful construction project. It can be the difference between making a nice profit and breaking even or worse, suffering a loss. So when should you begin your risk assessment? Are you doing it during contract negotiations or are you waiting until after you’ve received a notice to proceed? The truth is, risk management should begin during the bid preparation.

The implementation of lean construction has been gaining traction over the last several years as more and more firms realize the benefits of applying lean thinking to construction. The concept is simple enough, maximize value for the client while at the same time minimizing waste. Proper execution of the lean construction philosophy, on the other hand, can be difficult to implement. For starters, lean construction involves a completely different approach to project delivery from traditional construction methods.

Winning more construction bids isn’t a direct result of simply bidding more projects. Bidding on every project that comes your ways isn’t a smart or sustainable bidding strategy.

Winter is here again and we all know that construction work doesn’t get put on ice when the mercury starts dropping. Working in the cold can be dangerous if you don’t take the necessary precautions to keep your body warm and dry on the construction site.

Dealing with a defaulting subcontractor can be a real nightmare for general contractors. A nonperforming subcontractor or one that isn’t meeting its contractual obligations can wreak havoc on a project.

As a building product manufacturer, are you currently producing sustainable building products and materials? Over the past couple of decades, green and sustainable construction has slowly gone mainstream. AEC firms like Turner Construction Company, McCarthy, Clark Construction Group, and Holder Construction are just a handful of contractors committed to being more sustainable.