I’m going to slightly change the direction of this blog. When I started writing over four years ago (wow, sure seems longer than that), I wrote for an intended audience of Construction Supervisors. I thought there was a real need for Construction Supervisors to learn, communicate with each other and grow. I still do, but found that few Construction Supervisors ever found their way to my musings. And if they did, they didn’t return.

What I did get, though, was a growing audience of folks involved in different aspects of the construction industry. I get about 5,000 unique visitors a month to the blog, but since so few leave comments, I’m not sure who does what.

I do know, though, that lots of my readers run small construction companies. Since I work with small construction companies everyday (concreters, masons, drywallers, plumbers, etc) I have a sense of what they need to do to survive and improve. With today’s construction related economy, many firms struggle to survive.

The current standard, I think, has small firms with much less overhead cost than large competitors, but also lacking in effective management processes. For example, few small construction companies do effective job costing, knowing how the costs are working during the project. Most simply wait till the end of the project and hope they didn’t lose money.

Most small firms don’t effectively manage contracts, change orders, submittals or keeping the drawings current to the field staff. Each of these items carries a substantial risk when managed poorly and reward when done well.

We live in fascinating times. With the smart phone and tablet computers, small construction companies could become better managed than large firms without increasing overhead. The time to embrace these possible efficiencies is now. The time to grow market share and profits is now.

So I’m going to write more about how to those things. I’m going to work with several of the small construction companies that I often use on my projects and see if we can increase our management efficiency (which gives the best information to the person in the field that’s doing the actual work).