Remodeling: The typical progression of a building contractor is this: You work as a carpenter, start doing work on your own, hire a helper, hire an experienced carpenter, start doing more complicated work, and, before you know it, you’re doing a half million in volume and realize you don’t actually know if you’re making any money or not. At that point, you start looking for resources that can help you move from busy to profitable.
5 comments:
We just learned in the Production Management Workshop that a huge percentage of creating a decent schedule is about skilled estimating. It’s interesting to think about the idea of going from busy to profitable. The fact that there is now a book made by the dude who made a good book the first time around is awesome. Sorry for my sad sentences. I think the fact that the first thing the book about estimating and bidding says is that estimating can make or break a company speaks volumes. I definitely think that estimating and bidding are crucial to the success of a construction company. It’s important to think about how this type of book could be beneficial for a project manager to read or people who work in commercial scene shops. It sounds as though this book is extremely comprehensive and focuses on the nitty gritty and it even helps you create a personal estimating system.
This book seems like it would not only be useful when translated to the particulars of our industry, but also as a bridge that could help those of us who are contemplating the leap to another industry. Although we may have a reasonable (perhaps even good) understanding of project management and estimating, the construction industry is packed with things that we generally (except for permanent install) do not every encounter. It appears to be a primer that teaches how to better manage the things that a typical construction manager should already know about while also diving into sneaky issues and costs that often go unaccounted for. This book could be a very worthwhile investment, and it could also provide insight into whether or not one might enjoy the construction industry. It is $43 at Amazon, which tells me that it is likely to be a textbook sized book, but the cost may be too much for a casual peruser. To the library!
This seems like a pretty comprehensive book to budgeting in the construction realm. I can see the benefit for anyone in the industry but I’m sure with the specificity mentioned it would be particularly helpful for someone who wanted to make the switch into that world from an adjacent industry. It does however sound a bit too specific to the industry itself to be worth the over a hundred page read for being in technical theatre. But it also sounds like if you made the switch getting that book as a guide would be even more helpful at the implementation of starting the business you were running. It might help you avoid some of the usual stops that the typical carpenter, to independent jobs, to hiring additional help to half million dollar projects route might lead you to be more susceptible to. If anything I think the length and level of detail in the book just goes to demonstrate how the devil is in the details with budgeting and estimating and it can make or break project budgets.
Budgeting and estimating is probably one of my weakest skills as a technical director, so when I saw this book I immediately bookmarked it to purchase at a later date. I like how the article begins, because that is often how I've felt about how the theatre industry breeds managers: carpenters become master carps, who become ATDs, who then become TDs. At that point, we always thing about how we would have built the thing, how long it would have taken us, and throwing materials at a spreadsheet to get a rough idea. And while there certainly isn't anything too wrong with this approach (in fact coming from a shop floor will lend a much better sense of time estimates), there is something to be said about the methods and practices of real estimating. While this book is written about the general construction business, I feel like that would prove even more beneficial to our subset of the construction world. After all, most of what we do is taken from other industries!
It is always intriguing to meet a book that has converted invisible concepts into the readable texts. Even though I am not knowledgeable and haven’t gotten any academic instruction regarding construction, reading the review almost made me feel like David Gerstel has made formulas out of the subjects that are unable to be made into formulas - of course in a very great detail, as we can tell from the number of pages (around 400). When I was having a conversation with the technical director at my old school, I could not really grasp how much the budget and estimation was crucial; especially because I thought we already had many resources at the school that didn’t require any further investments. However, reading this book’s review and commentaries made me realize how there were so many factors that had to be taken into consideration to make the performance actually take place and happen.
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