The Hidden System Failure Costing You 20% of Every Super's Productivity
The Challenge
Your superintendent called you at 4 pm on Tuesday about another issue that's going to push the schedule. It wasn't a crisis, just another problem that needed solving, another decision that should have been made weeks ago, another conversation that's eating up hours of their day. You handled it, they got back to work, and nobody thought much about it. But here's what you didn't see: that call was the third one that day, and your super spent the morning in meetings explaining scope questions that should have been answered before they ever stepped on site. By the time they actually managed people and pushed work forward, it was almost lunch. I write about superintendents often, but this scenario plays out with project managers, foremen, and even your estimators. The pattern is always the same: highly capable people spending massive chunks of their day managing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. I spent years managing hundreds of millions in work on the streets of New York City, and if you know anything about building in NYC, you know that even the simplest tasks require an incredible amount of communication. But there's a difference between the necessary complexity of construction and the unnecessary chaos of poor information flow. When your field teams are spending twenty to thirty percent of their time solving problems that originated from gaps in your handoff process, you're not just losing productivity. You're paying talented people to work around a system failure instead of doing what you actually hired them to do, then they leave!!
The Impact
Every time you lose a seasoned team member, you lose institutional knowledge of how things actually get built, what truly costs time and money, and which subcontractors deliver when it matters. Meanwhile, your estimating team keeps bidding jobs the same way because field lessons never make it back upstream. The cycle repeats, margins erode, and you start thinking maybe you just need another layer of management. Sooooo you hire more managers, add more meetings, and somehow the problem gets worse because you're adding complexity to a system that's already broken at its foundation. Your best people start wondering if they're the problem, culture takes a hit, and you're carrying the emotional weight of watching good people burn out while the gaps costing you profits and people keep getting wider.
The Shift
If you've been following my work, you know I talk A LOT about synergy from estimating through project closeout. That's not consultant talk; it's because I've held all those positions and I know the pain that comes when they're not collaborating. The companies that retain their best people have figured out something simple, but it requires genuine commitment: they've built structured collaboration that connects estimating to field execution.
Here's the thing most owners miss: everyone on your team genuinely believes they're doing their part. Your estimator thinks they’re being competitive. Your PM thinks they're managing the job efficiently. Your super thinks they're solving problems. And they're all right from their own perspective. The challenge isn't that someone is dropping the ball; it's that nobody can see where the ball is actually being dropped because everyone is looking at a different part of the field execution vision. When I sit down with leadership teams, the breakthrough moment isn't when I tell them what's wrong. It's when I ask the questions that make the estimator realize the PM never understood the scope assumptions, and the PM realizes the super never knew about the client conversations that shaped the budget, and the super realizes their daily challenges never made it back to influence how the next job gets bid. That's when accountability shifts from finger-pointing to actual ownership, because suddenly everyone sees how the gaps between their roles are creating the problems nobody wanted.
The solution isn't complicated, but it does require precision in both what gets communicated and when those conversations happen. There's a specific handoff structure that needs to exist between contract signature and field mobilization, where the right people discuss the right information at the right time. And there's a feedback mechanism that needs to flow from field execution back to estimating, so your bids start reflecting what actually happens on your projects instead of what you hope will happen. Any solid operating system will show you the insane positive impact of structured meetings, both at the company operational level and project-specific level, but the meetings themselves are worthless if you don't know what questions to ask and who needs to be in the room. When you get this right, I can promise you superintendents stop inheriting surprises within the first sixty days, and your estimating accuracy improves within three bids because real field data is finally influencing your numbers. The companies that do this properly see measurable margin improvement within six months, not because they changed their people, but because their people finally have the information and structure to succeed.
I don't know about you, but I love profit. And based on what I've seen, capturing an extra 3-5% of project profit by making small shifts without adding a single person to overhead is money many contractors are leaving on the table by implementing the above!
Ask yourself right now: Does your estimator sit down with your superintendent before mobilization to walk through every assumption that shaped the bid (maybe even before bid submission with the PM as well)? When your super tracks a cost overrun in the field, does that information reach your estimating team before the next similar job is bid? Do you have a structured meeting process that ensures field intelligence actually influences your front-end decisions? If you're honest about the answers, you already know whether you're set up to retain your best people or quietly burn them out over the next twelve months.
The Closing
If you're recognizing your own company in these patterns, you're not stuck. The contractors who are winning right now have decided that how information moves through their organization matters as much as the quality of their work. Your people didn't sign up to be magicians who make broken systems work through sheer force of will. When you give them the information, the context, and the connection to the front end of your business, they'll do exactly what you hired them to do. This shift isn't just about retention or margins, though both will improve. It's about building a company where your best people can actually succeed and where the institutional knowledge you've spent years developing doesn't walk out the door every time someone gets tired of fighting a broken system.
Are you building your business with duct tape and adrenaline or building systems that maximize your potential?
Gerard Aliberti
Pro-Accel, Owner
How I can help: If you're seeing this pattern in your operations and wondering how to rebuild the handoff process between estimating and field execution, reach out to jerry@pro-accel.com to discuss how consulting or executive coaching can help you identify and close the gaps that are costing you great people and profitable projects.
Webinar Announcement!!
On November 13th at 11:00 a.m. EST, I’ll be joining forces with Patrick Shurney, Financial Coach and Owner of 3P Consulting, to host "From Builder to CEO", a paid masterclass that brings the financial and operational sides of contracting together.
This 90-minute session is built for contractors in the $5M–$100M range who want actionable steps, real deliverables, and immediate ROI. We’ll cover how to align your numbers and operations so you can step out of builder mode and into CEO mode.
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