Brad Wyant (00:00)
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm Brad Wyant.
Dee Davis (00:04)
And I'm Dee Davis. And this morning we are going to talk about quality control and why it is so important on construction projects. But first I just want to make sure that we distinguish between quality control and quality assurance. Sometimes these words are used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. quality control is performed internally to your organization.
If you're a subcontractor, you're a general contractor, it's internal to your organization. While quality assurance is performed by a neutral third party. we see this a lot in the pharmaceutical market in microelectronics where we have a third party quality assurance contractor that has no stake.
in anything in the project. Quality control is your own internal resources doing quality checks on your own work.
Brad Wyant (00:57)
A good way of remembering this, think, is that when somebody is assuring that a product is quality, they are going in and checking things to make sure. Whereas the quality control, somebody is in charge of making sure that it's quality, and they're controlling it themselves. They're doing the work and doing it in a quality fashion. That's a good way of distinguishing those two terms, in my mind, at least.
Dee Davis (01:20)
That's a great point. Thanks for that. the way we lay out and manage quality on a project is through a quality control plan. So what is a quality control plan? It's a document that details what we're going to do. it tells a customer, a client at the end of the day, here's what we're going to do to make sure that our piece of the work is done in a quality fashion.
Each subcontractor would have one of these for their own work and the GC would have an overall one for their piece of the supervision of the trades. Brad, what's been your experience with quality control and construction or any other industry that you might have worked in?
Brad Wyant (01:58)
Well, it's always been QA slash QC in the terminology of the general contractors I've worked for, which is funny because the distinguishment you're making here is an important distinguishment to make. And there's been a quality manager at some of the better companies I've worked for, and that's a very valuable thing. But even that person's job is not always to help implement quality control metrics. It's oftentimes just to
implement standards that the company wants everyone to use. And I think distinguishing a standards and practices role from a quality control role in the construction industry would be a valuable thing. Saddling one person with both of those responsibilities, both of those very important but different in my opinion responsibilities can be tough. More often than not, quality control ends up being, we're here on the job site. We know what's going on. Let's just sit and talk about quality and what problems we're facing.
try to solve it in a more ad hoc way, not as much of a processed, this is the way that the company does it all. In all regions, it's been hit and miss is what I'll say to cut it short.
Dee Davis (03:00)
Yeah, and I think your experience is probably what most of the people who are listening are saying. unfortunately, it's more miss than hit in my experience. I worked for a company once that I didn't even know had a quality control plan. I'd worked there for years and years. I'd never seen it until a client asked to see it one time on one specific project. A client said, hey, can I get a copy of your quality control plan? And I went.
I don't even know if we have one, let me ask. So I call the office, I started asking around and I find out that we have a person in the office who apparently was our quality manager. They never left the office ever. So I'm not really sure how you're a quality manager if you never go to the field, but I got in touch with him and I said,
the customer's asking me for a quality control plan. do we have one? And he goes, yeah. okay, can you send it to me because I need to turn it in. I'm reading this document for the first time after being employed there for years and years and executing a multitude of projects. And I'm thinking we don't do half of the stuff that's being called for in this quality plan in reality out in the field. And of course the quality manager wouldn't know that because they never leave their office.
⁓ I've never been trained on it. I've never seen it, never read it. Unfortunately, that is the experience that I think more people have than not. We don't know whether or not we even have one. If we do, we don't know what it says. I see a lot of lip service not backed up by a whole lot of thing. think a lot of contractors use it as something they put in bid packages.
And the people that are executing the work have no idea that such a document even exists.
Brad Wyant (04:40)
think we can all relate to that.
Dee Davis (04:42)
kind of like some of those promises that are made at bid time or during interviews that those of us that actually have to do the work we're like hey wait a minute
Brad Wyant (04:49)
We signed up for what?
Dee Davis (04:50)
In reality, here's the thing. You don't understand that not having a good quality control program is losing you money. So this is what I've learned in my years since that this first thing happened to me and I went, there's such a thing. Let me read this. these are all the things that we should be doing. Some of it needed to be updated, but a lot of it was like, wow. Yeah, we really should be doing that.
Not having a good quality control program is going to lose you a ton of money. It's just that simple. what does a good quality control program do for you? It reduces your punch list. It reduces rework. It helps you get it right the first time. And after all, we are only paid to do things one time, right? In your bid, you're not assuming that you're doing it two or three times. You're assuming you're doing it once. It'll save you overall money and time.
It improves your reputation to have a real solid quality control program that you're actually using. It gives you an edge over your competition. Cause as we just noted, most people out there are doing a really poor job of this. And it helps you become known for producing high quality projects. I definitely know who the contractors are as an owner's rep that have small punch lists on every job.
I know who those are and I want them on my next project.
Brad Wyant (06:04)
It's such a tough argument to make. It's like, well, I know they're more expensive, but look at our track record with these people. These people are the ones who get it done right the first time. Can we afford to have it done multiple times and for them to find ways to? No. It's that kind of thing. Look at their quality control plan. That's why we're to pick them on a best value as opposed to a low bid job. Or you could say on a low bid job, this quality control plan does not meet this quality control plan. So we would have to
pump this bid up with more money it's a great area if you're a client, if you're somebody on the buy side. Even if you're a general contractor hiring subcontractors and you're looking at the big trades, their quality control plans, you can make this argument to say, no, no, no, but look at what we're getting here. Look at the variance in the quality control programs between these bids. That's a difference that we need to account for.
Dee Davis (06:53)
Yeah, and there's two major electrical contractors that I can think of They just install what you ask for. They put their head down. They do the work. They don't say a whole lot. And their punch list items, they might have 10, everybody else has 50.
I don't have to babysit, it's fantastic. Those are the kind of contractors that you want on your job. And if you are a subcontractor, that's the kind of subcontractor you want to be. You want to be the kind of subcontractor that when your name comes up, the owner, the owner's rep, the GC is like, yeah, love them. You don't want to be the one that's like,
They had a huge punch list, took forever to get everything done. They had poor quality throughout the project that just created all these issues. You don't want your name to come up in that way on a project.
Brad Wyant (07:42)
Absolutely not. I don't want to disparage the estimate department of any company. think that estimating properly and estimating aggressively is important. But estimating and bidding low, Bidding the work correctly and doing the work well, having a great QC program, implementing it successfully, when did you repeat work? Simple as that.
Dee Davis (08:00)
Yeah. And it's really tough if you're living in a low bid environment. I worked in the public sector for many years of my career and that, is a tough place to live. However, you can learn to live in that world and do it competitively. produce good quality work at a competitive price. If you know how to do it, it just takes some practice.
And it's a little scary. I think a lot of contractors get scared off of that kind of work because they think, if I go in and I do that, I'm not going to make any money unless they cheap out on everything. And that's not true. I've done it. I did it over and over again, bidding the work competitively and executing it with quality matters. And that's really
the difference between somebody who's going to lose money in that environment or struggle to make money and somebody who's going to do well. They have good quality control. That's the difference. Because they're doing the work one time.
So the intent of a good quality control program is to provide the customer an assurance, there's that word again, of consistent quality installations backed by detailed procedures and consistent training. that was the huge miss, right? I wasn't trained on our quality control program until that very moment, some years later. It's kind of like show and tell. Here's what I'm gonna do.
and then you have to actually go do it. just like we said, a submittal is a promise. This is your quality control program. Up front is a promise of what you're going to do. And you have to be true to your word. Then you have to follow through and actually do it. You can't just write up the program and say you're gonna do it. If you don't follow through, you're not gonna get the benefits.
The quality control programs are written and maintained by qualified people from the industry. You cannot have this written by somebody who hasn't stepped foot on a job site ever in years, an administrative person, somebody who's never done the work, doesn't understand the work. It can't just be written by somebody who doesn't know the work
It has to be done in a way that makes sense for the folks out in the field.
Brad Wyant (10:09)
And that's the tough thing, I think. I empathize with the executives of construction firms who are looking at their staff, looking at their people and saying, well, do I really want to saddle the people who are making us profitable with one more thing to do? Hey, I know that you're already working 60, 70 hours a week and you're commuting an hour and a half each way, but you also need to work on this quality control problem. A bunch of people are going to tell that.
executive to pound sand or worse. And then it's like, okay, well, there are these admin people I have in the office that seem to have time. Why don't I just give them this to do? There's some right-headedness in that kind of thinking. You don't want to overburden your people in the field, but if you leave quality control, updating and revising and implementation to people who don't know what it is and how to do it, it's not going to get done.
You have to either staff your jobs with enough people to implement a quality control program properly or admit you're not going to do it and just Move on with life. Don't don't waste an admins time Operating a quality control program when they're operating it is not going to serve your business's needs
Dee Davis (11:12)
Yeah, and you absolutely cannot just take this and say it's a collateral duty for somebody who's already really busy. This is a job in your company. There should be a quality control department. Maybe you have one person in a region or something like that that manages your quality control program and then they should be deputizing people.
On jobs, especially major projects, it's their whole job to do quality control. On a big project, this is a full-time job. so we have to staff it appropriately. These documents do need to be reviewed and updated periodically because processes and procedures change. Technology might be changing how we're doing some of these things. New.
things that come out in the industry that impact your trade. I remember when layout of inserts on a deck changed from a guy with a pencil and a tape measure to using laser transits to do it. That was this whole big thing. And of course it's very normal now, but at the time it was a big deal and it was a huge adaptation.
for the industry when it happened. Technology can come in and blow up whatever we've been doing for the last umpteen years. so it is important to keep, your quality control program facing what you're actually doing in the field and what makes sense.
Brad Wyant (12:36)
had an instance where the quality control manager at the company I was working for came out to the job site to come preach the gospel, much the way the safety guy comes out once a month and says, hey, how are you doing on safety? And he explained how to use Procore to do submittals faster and to record everything about materials that we were receiving in a way that was going to
verify that we had gotten the right thing. It was involved in our quality control plan. I was like, ⁓ well this rules. You should come back more often. your quality control person has to be somebody who's at that cutting edge of technology and understands the time burden that your people are under and offers value in that kind of a way. Not just somebody who's like, hey, you also have to fill this form out in triplicate. That kind of quality control person is not going to be listened to in your office trailers, unfortunately.
Dee Davis (13:26)
I see a lot of. Not nice things said about safety people out in the field, and it's often because those safety people have never worked in the trade. Same thing with a quality person. If you've never done the work, it's going to be really hard to get people to listen to you because they just.
think you're an office person like you said, they come out once a month to preach the gospel and then they go back to their office and really have no idea what's going on. And so they're just kind of ignored. these folks need to be people that like you said, are on the cutting edge of what's happening. They spend a lot of their time out in the trenches still doing the work in some way.
even if they're not swinging a hammer or turning a wrench anymore, they're out sitting on jobs, keeping up with what's really going on out there. They also need to be providing training to your internal staff on the quality control programs. Because if your staff don't know they exist, they will not be implemented. I was not trained ever in that company on our quality control program.
I finally sat down and read it and I remember bringing it up in a PM meeting going, hey, do anybody else know we had a quality control program? Cause I sure didn't. But nothing really ever happened. Fortunately, we had pretty good practices and it wasn't a big problem, at least on my jobs, but I could see how that would be a real problem on a lot of projects.
Brad Wyant (14:49)
or how that would alleviate problems on some projects. If you have your C team players who are just not figuring it out, shove the QC program into their standard operating procedures, and all of sudden, they're going to play like B team players. And then they're going to be B team players.
Dee Davis (15:04)
Yeah, let's get those C players to be players and those B players to A players for sure. Exactly your quality control person, whoever it is that's assigned to do this on your on your project needs to not be sitting in their office trailer all day. Or even worse back at the main office all day. They need to be out on the job site walking around looking at stuff. That's where their job is. It's not documentation, it's.
implementation out in the field. They need to be talking to the crew and they need to be making corrections along the way. If they see something consistently a problem, then let's talk about it. how come this is happening? What can we do to make it not happen anymore? The reality is it rarely happens this way. Outside of the pharmaceutical environment, I've seen most quality plans written by people who don't do the work.
And it's never shown to the people that do do the work. It's submitted to the client and the project team has little or no training on the quality plan, much like what happened to me. Even on pharma projects, we too often see that people are not following their own quality control program as strictly as we should the first time through, which results in more cost, more schedule time, more punch list items, it results in chaos.
And I'll be the first to tell you that I've always described construction as organized chaos. And it is, it feels like you're kind of riding a bucking bronco the whole time and you're just trying to hold on. And that is the chaos of what we feel, especially on these really fast paced jobs. And it is a marathon folks, do not make a mistake that it is a marathon.
not a hundred yard dash on a lot of these projects. And so it's hard. There's so many things that we need to pay attention to. Very often the owner doesn't have anybody on their side of the fence that understands the work in enough detail to really go through that quality plan and understand what's being said there, which is a shame. it really should be a document that's utilized throughout the project.
and referred back to. When we start to see that we're having quality concerns out in the field, the first thing we should be doing is pulling out that quality control plan and looking at what does it say that we're supposed to be doing? Are we doing that? And if we're not doing that, how do we fix it? And if we're doing that and somehow that's not working, maybe we need to revise it. Maybe that's not the right answer.
Brad Wyant (17:25)
And I think that revising the quality control plan, implementing it, training people on it is part of a virtuous cycle that ends up saving you time you didn't know you were going to be able to save. Whereas saying, ⁓ quality control, it'll be fine. And then having things go wrong is the kind of destructive cycle that is hard to break out of. let's say you're on that job and you're having that quality problem and somebody comes along and says, hey, what you really ought to be doing is following the quality control plan.
Yeah, but I don't have time for the quality control program because everything's going wrong. but would you have time for the quality control program if things were already going right because you were following the quality control program? It's kind of a self-solving problem, if you will. It's hard to recover, as we all know, from something going wrong. And the quality control program is there to prevent you from getting behind eight ball like that, prevent you from losing your footing in that saddle of that bucking bronco.
Dee Davis (18:18)
I can't tell you how many times when we start having quality issues on a job, I go and I pull, in the pharmaceutical market, it's an SOP, right? A standard operating procedure. What does it say we're supposed to be doing? And I find that we're not following it. And I'm like, guys, if we just follow this, it's going to be okay. We need to just take a breath, step back for a second and start again.
doing what we said we were going to do to begin with, which is following the quality control plan. Like you said, you feel like we don't have time, it's too hard. Well, if we already know what it is, if we've been trained, we already know what the quality control plan is. The quality control manager for that project or your overall manager, however that's being managed for you,
It's their job to come in and constantly remind you this is what we're supposed to be doing. That's a great, topic as you're starting to enter into a new phase of construction, a new activity. Don't forget, this is what our quality control plan says we're supposed to be doing here. Let's make sure we're doing that right the first time. There is nothing worse than having to go back and touch the same thing over and over and over again. People get mad. They don't want to do it.
They just want to be done and move on to the next thing. That's just our nature in this industry. But we get ahead of ourselves. We get in such a hurry that we forget sometimes to do it right, or we get it 90 % of the way and say, I'll come back and get that later. That's the famous one. know, are you done? But are you done, done, effin done, which is 100 % right? That's my DDFD. Are you DDFD?
Brad Wyant (19:43)
you
Dee Davis (19:53)
Because if you're not DDFD, you are not done. You can't have one more label to go do. You can't have one more grade to go fix. no DDFD is the goal. We want to get there the first time as much as possible. It's trust, but verify, right? Right. So assuming we can get over the hump of having a well-written quality control plan and getting everybody trained to do what we say we're going to do, we have to trust, but verify.
and go back and make sure that we're doing what we said.
The qualifications of the person to do quality checks, we've already talked about this. They need to be adequately trained on the quality plan. They need to have adequate field experience for the scope. We cannot put the project engineer that graduated last week on quality control. I don't know how many times I've seen this happen.
I've had the project engineer who graduated school last week put as the MEP manager, equally inappropriate.
Brad Wyant (20:46)
the
Dee Davis (20:47)
You need to have experience that's the whole into the fire conversation that we've had. have a whole episode on being thrown into the fire. And yes, you learn rapidly, but you are not doing a good job in the beginning of that because you don't know what you don't know. And so contractors, please, please, please do not take your most junior person and bless them to be your quality control person on the job.
They have no idea what they're looking at.
Brad Wyant (21:15)
They could be looking at something like, yeah, it looks great to me. I have no idea. Total recipe for disaster. that young person should be instructed to read the quality control program and should be taught what is and is not quality. But the person has to innately know it before they can be responsible for it. That's not fair to anybody. It's not fair to the people. Especially, OK, let's say that you've got that young, hungry
Dee Davis (21:18)
Not a clue.
Brad Wyant (21:39)
fresh out of school project engineer who seems brilliant. And they are just like, give me everything I can do anything. I am Superman, I'm superwoman. And you put them out there in the field and they just start asking your foreman a million questions, about every feature of everything. does this really meet the quality control plan? Because blah, blah, blah, That person is going to get hated out of the job. They're gonna be like, oh my God, I can't stand that person because they just keep asking me questions. I need somebody who knows this business.
to talk to about quality control, not the kid who doesn't know anything yet. It's just a recipe for disaster, totally.
Dee Davis (22:11)
Yeah, the good plan would be to take a good experience quality control manager and put that kid with them so that they can learn. They will have accelerated learning. They will be able to dive in with both feet and on the next job. Will be in a better place within a much shorter period of time, they'll be well prepared because they're expressing that curiosity. They're asking the questions
Getting all that information in a fast period of time. I was that young project engineer that followed the foreman around like a lovesick puppy dog asking a million questions. most of the foreman honestly were pretty good and they really like to explain things to me and show me things and it's an accelerated path to learning totally. I highly recommend it. In fact, when I train people, that's exactly what I tell him to do. Find the foreman.
follow them around like a lovesick puppy dog, ask all the questions they'll tolerate, take notes and just keep asking good questions. Don't keep asking the same questions over and over because yes, then they will throw you out.
in the case of manufacturing we have written SOPs which kind of serve the same purpose. They're a piece of the overall quality plan. In other work, we really want a written company quality plan. And sometimes I've seen job specific quality plans.
Not always. If you have a really good overall company quality plan, you should be able to get away with not doing a job specific one every time. Some clients are going to ask for it, in which case there should be some minor adjustments to it, but it really shouldn't be too laborious.
the elements we want to see in a good quality control plan, we want to see clear objectives. What is the point of our quality plan? So what are the clear objectives that we're trying to achieve here with the quality plan? We want to see detailed processes and procedures in that quality plan. It doesn't have to be as detailed as an SOP. An SOP is literally a step-by-step almost like a checklist. Do this, then do this, then do this, then do this.
It's not that detailed. It's a little more broad brushstroke than an SOP. But we do want to include forms that we use, our quality control forms. if we have checklists, walk downs, things like that want to be in this quality control plan. We want to notate what industry established standards were following.
So in pharmaceutical, we might say we're going to follow BPE, this and that. We might be following an OSHA regulation. We might be following an IBC. There might be all kinds of different ASHRAE standards, different things that we're following, depending on what trade discipline you are, but what those industry standards are that we intend to follow. We want to list roles and responsibilities. And I am the first one to tell you
I detest RACI charts. this is not a RACI chart.
R-A-C-I.
Brad Wyant (24:57)
Responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.
Dee Davis (25:00)
typical RACI chart will show you who's got the primary responsibility, who needs to be keep informed. And it's 1800 pages long and it's ⁓ X's and ⁓ no, that is not what I'm talking about. much like we do in an SOP listing. Here's what I'm going to do. And in order to support what I'm going to do,
Here's what I need from you, Ms. General Contractor. Here's what I need from you supporting contractors. It's listing out what you need from others to support what you're doing. for example, if part of our quality control plan talked about receiving owner furnished equipment.
then we would be saying here, Mr. Owner, this is what I need from you in order to effectively receive your equipment. And here, General Contractor, this is what I need from you to transfer the ownership into your hands for you to store it until we're ready to install it or something like that. So you're making other people aware this is what I need from you to do my job correctly....
Testing and inspection information. information about what kinds of tests or inspections are going to be done inside your quality control program. if you're a piping contractor, part of your quality control program is going to be pressure testing.
You're going to talk about that. What is the documents you're going to use? What's your test program? How is it verified? what is acceptable? What is not acceptable? Your pass fail criteria. Risk identification and management. This again is where you are shining the light outward a little bit, not just looking at your own risk, because of course you know those very well.
But the risks are much like we talked about in an episode that we just aired recently. The risks associated with trade handoffs.
Other people around you are making risks for you in the implementation of your work.
Brad Wyant (26:55)
Going back to the comment about pressure testing and about quality, there was a job I was on where the quality control program, which was a contract document, said that we were going to test to a certain PSI. And the industry standard, the code minimum was lower. And the subcontractor came back and said, hey, this is ridiculous. I can't be expected to comply to this. Ridiculous or not, it's in the quality control program. And he signed up for that. Well, if I had known that that was going to be the pressure, I would have
instructing my guys to do the pipe differently. Really? Well, tell us more about that. It's these kinds of moments that you can have either at the beginning when you can do something about it or at the end when you can't, or when you're doing it twice and you're doing it on your own dime. It's easy to assume people have read your quality control program, but when you're onboarding a subcontractor, when you're transitioning from one to another, sitting with them and going through your quality control program,
especially the stuff that's trade specific, invaluable.
Dee Davis (27:47)
Well, and make them sign off on it. Yeah. Right. yes, as a GC, you're going to incorporate that into their contract documents so you can flog them on the nose with the newspaper if they don't comply. But more importantly, you need them to actually read it and understand it. And you need the right people reading it and understanding it, not the people in the office. The people doing the work need to be reading it and understanding it.
That's a very interesting thing because I guess as a pipe person, my first gut instinct on that is either you're testing to a level that is unnecessary or I'm questioning their joining method. If they're that concerned, I would have done it differently. Really? If it's some crazy pressure, possibly,
Okay, processes for corrective actions and feedback. you're never going to hit it 100%. There's going to be corrective actions, let's say I'm the quality control person for company XYZ and I'm walking around out in the field and I'm noting stuff. What is that process?
Brad Wyant (28:34)
Mm-hmm.
Dee Davis (28:52)
How am I giving that feedback back to the trades? How am I asking them to correct that? Is it going to be re-looked at afterwards? How do they communicate back to me that the correction has been made? What kind of timeframe are we putting on this? There's all kinds of stuff that needs to happen when we see a quality problem. What if the customers walking around out in the field and notices it? What do they do?
How is that information communicated back to the team and processed through? your plan should address that kind of thing. Any documentation requirements, this will be very by project, but your overall plan should address in general what your standard is. And any project that is over and above that you may have to do a.
project specific one, but your overall company policy, what does it say about your documentation requirements? And training requirements. How often are people trained on the quality control plan? Once ever? Once a year? If it's revised, how often does that happen?
Brad Wyant (29:51)
much of a risk are you willing to take that your people don't need to train that often? If you say every five years, are you trusting that all of your people are going to remember it for five years, that nothing's going to happen in your business that's going to be worth telling them about in terms of improvement to your processes or that there's going to be some way that saves them time? it's the kind of thing where, if you're talking about quality every second of every day, everyone's going to hate you. No one's going to listen.
There's a right amount and it's whatever people feel like it.
Dee Davis (30:18)
Yeah, my recommendation would be an annual training. Backed up by. Maybe a monthly nugget. About quality, just a quick little, two minute. Example, just like we do like with safety. here's what happened On a project. Here's how we resolved it. Watch out for this thing. Just a very quick little.
reminder so that quality is always staying on the top of our minds. again, this is where we're going to lose money, folks. As a contractor, you are going to lose money if you don't have a good quality control plan that you are following and you're enacting on a regular basis. So how much money do you want to lose every month?
I don't know about you, but I want that number to be as close to zero as possible. Exactly. And then continuous improvements. You have to continuously improve any program if you just write up a program and you stick it on a shelf and you never look at it again. Not helpful. It needs to be continuously improved, reviewed, and updated by the appropriate people.
It's going to lower your overall risk profile on your projects and provide you a better face for your clients and in your bid packages. Some contractors submit their quality control plan in their bid packages Some do, some don't. Granted, they're very long. And at bid time, am I sitting there and reading a 250 page quality control plan for every contractor? Probably not, but I'm going to open it and I'm going to look at it.
and I'm going to skim it and I'm going to see, you have a revision control on there? Has it been updated recently? I'm going to might pull out a few little pieces I'll look at your org chart, Do you have a quality org chart? Who is responsible for this document what is their background? Do you have an actual quality department in your company?
⁓ And then I might look at a few key pieces of it just to see if it looks like the quality level is high. And I'll be looking for training.
Showing your client that you've taken the time to do this and consistently train your people to get a really good result out in the field puts you one up on your competition. Why would you not want to do that? Most of your competition, they don't have a plan or they've got a really poorly written and executed plan. So if you take the time to do this right, you're going to give yourself a leg up out there in the field.
Brad Wyant (32:37)
And I use a car metaphor every time we do this podcast, but I'm gonna use a car metaphor again here the Made in America stamp that used to be carried along with a lot of American vehicles Was so powerful. I'm sure that the quality this is gonna be great because the quality control in an American factory is so strenuous the Amount of work that goes into putting that car together, right? I'm gonna have the experience. want to have with this car
Whereas when people started manufacturing cars in Mexico, the quality control wasn't there and everyone knew it for a little while. That's changed recently and cars that are made in Mexico now are of much higher quality.
If you're the company selling either the car made in America or the car made in Mexico, and you're working for a client that can afford the car made in America because they want the quality, tell people about it. Demonstrate that you are implementing processes that put you far above your competition, and it will reward you in your marketplace if your client can pay for it. If you know that your bottom barrel bargain basement environment doesn't permit that, you still need to do it because
you need to be able to afford to run the job on a shoestring. Any job that's bit to a shoestring is going to have problems if you have one mistake and it's all going to fall off the rails and then things are going to compound, you're going to get into that aggressively bad cycle. But if you stay on top of it, if you maintain a consistent quality, you will not have those bad problems. You'll have a virtuous cycle where your team's always looking forward to the next thing.
There's no circumstance under which you can afford not to implement quality work.
That's just a virtue of the fact that our business thinks can go so wrong. It's not an environment that tolerates failure, that tolerates one-off instances where something goes wrong. So keep that in mind, no matter what market you're in. Take that into account about how you market yourself. Maybe somebody might see on that bargain basement, bottom of the barrel bidding situation, well, these guys have a quality control program.
paying for them, you can play that game, but you still need to use a quality control program internally for yourselves.
Dee Davis (34:43)
There's really no downside to having a good quality control program. You want to continue to get work. You want to do the work that you do well so that you are invited back.
by that client over and over again. I think we've talked about that in when we had our episode with Aaron Luce a few weeks ago, it's a red flag if you have somebody who's not invited back. people pay attention to this stuff and people talk in the industry. And let me tell you, as somebody who's an owner's rep, owners talk about contractors all day.
And if you did not leave with a positive taste in that client's mouth at the end of the job.
That lasts. Good lasts, bad lasts, but bad lasts longer.
Brad Wyant (35:26)
God does it. Trust is hard won and easily lost. And even if you work for a company that is known for having bad quality, that's an ex so and so guy. They aren't gonna be as up to snuff as this ex other company guy. Even if they're working for different companies now and they spent most of their career at one company that was known for not implementing a good quality control program, that's gonna hurt you.
It's reputation, it's your name, it's everything.
showing your client that you have taken the time to implement a great quality control program, and constantly train your people on how to obtain a great result in the field puts you one up on your competition who has no plan or a poorly written and executed plan. People who have been in this business long enough know the difference between a good plan that integrates the latest software that makes the best advantage of everything that's in the field and one that was written 20 years ago.
Dee is one of those people.
Dee Davis (36:23)
I am. That just means I've been around a long time, right? No, seriously, I review a lot of quality control plans and I've been doing this a very long time. So if you're a general contractor, an MEP or process contractor that either doesn't have a good quality control plan, you're not sure if you have a good quality control plan, maybe you have none at all, give me a call. I would love to go through that with you, help you get that quality control plan that is going to give you that edge.
over your competition and make you the most money possible on every job.
Brad Wyant (36:54)
mitigate all the risks that there are to be mitigated. Even implementing, even trying to get your people trained on your quality control program, thinking about the strategies that you can use to share that quality control program with the people out in the field and the company that need to use it. That's something Dee has a lot of familiarity with.
Dee Davis (37:12)
I train on other people's programs all the time. I can either write and draft the entire program for you, or I can take your program that you've got, give you some feedback on it, maybe help you tweak it a little bit, and then go train all your people on it. Maybe if you don't have a quality control manager, I can help you find the right quality control manager for you with the right qualifications, help you write up that job profile if you're out there looking for a quality control manager.
These people exist out there and that is all they do. Just like people that just do safety and that's their specialty, there's people out there who just do quality control and they are really, really good at what they do. So let's get you in a good quality control plan today. Give me a call. Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you soon.
Brad Wyant (37:55)
Talk to you next time.
Dee Davis (37:56)
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at heyd at managementunderconstruction.com. That's H-E-Y-D-E-E to get me or Brad at managementunderconstruction.com.
