Why Adding More People Is Making Your Projects Slower
The Challenge
I'll never forget running my first project as both lead and solo project superintendent on a $12.5 million, three-location job with one superintendent (me), a handful of laborers, and a project manager who was essentially a ghost, working perhaps a few hours a week on my project from the main office. I always worked for self-perform GCs, so I managed my own crews and subcontractors. I had one foreman running crews while I tried to coordinate everything else, manage subs as they came and went, and somehow keep three sites moving forward while dealing with the local politicians, clients, utility company bureaucracy slowing us down, and O-yeah – the project I was in charge of.
Phase one was a disaster. We were constantly behind, communication was breaking down, and every day felt like we were playing catch-up. The instinct when you're drowning like that? Throw more people at it. More bodies mean more work gets done, right?
Except that's not how it actually works. I see this same pattern play out with contractors all the time around the country. Schedule's slipping, so you add another crew. Quality issues pop up, so you bring in more supervision. Coordination falls apart, so you hire another PM. And somehow, instead of things getting better, they get worse. More people mean more communication paths, more coordination needs, and more potential for things to fall through the cracks. What started as a solution becomes its own problem, and now you're managing the complexity you created instead of actually building the project. The math seems simple: double the people, cut the time in half, BUT construction doesn't work on paper. It works through coordination, sequencing, and clarity about who's doing what and when. When you add bodies without fixing the underlying workflow, you're just diluting accountability and multiplying the chaos.
The Impact
Here's what really happens when you keep adding people to solve schedule problems: your labor costs spike while productivity per person drops. You've got multiple crews tripping over each other, waiting on decisions, or worse, making different assumptions about the same scope. Your foremen spend more time coordinating with each other than actually managing work. Rework increases because communication breaks down across too many people. Your superintendents become traffic cops instead of leaders, and the project that was supposed to speed up with more hands actually slows down under the weight of coordination complexity.
The financial hit is obvious; you're paying more people to do less effective work, but the operational damage runs deeper. When everyone's responsible, nobody's truly accountable. Problems don't get solved; they get passed around until they become emergencies. Your best people get frustrated because they can't move at the speed they're capable of when they're constantly waiting on six other people to get aligned. And here's the part that really hurts: you start believing that maybe your team just isn't good enough, when the reality is your team is drowning in a coordination problem YOU created trying to solve a productivity problem.
The money you're hemorrhaging on inefficient labor is real, but the cultural damage of watching capable people fail because the system is broken? That's what eventually costs you your best talent. They don't leave because the work is hard. They leave because working harder doesn't make anything better when the structure is fighting them at every turn.
The Shift
After phase one of that three-location nightmare, I had a decision to make. The conventional move would have been to beg for more people…. another foreman, maybe an actual PM who showed up more than a few hours a week. Instead, I made what looked like a risky call: I took my one and only foreman, the guy who was in the trenches doing the productive work we got paid for, and I made him a non-working foreman. I promoted him to assistant superintendent and told him his new job was to think ahead, coordinate, and set the crews up for success with my supervision. And when we needed boots on the ground, he would jump back in with the crews.
That decision turned the entire project around. Not because we added capacity, we actually reduced our working supervision on the tools, but because we added structure. I was still making every decision and running the show, but now I had an extra set of eyes helping me see across all three locations and handling all the redundant grunt work that comes with running a successful project. He could anticipate problems before they became emergencies, make sure the right people were in the right place with the right information, and keep the machine running while I focused on the decisions that actually moved us forward. The crews weren't waiting around anymore because someone was actually thinking multiple days ahead instead of just reacting to whatever fire popped up that morning. We didn't add bodies. We added a strategy!!
Here's what most contractors miss: the problem usually isn't capacity, it's coordination and sequencing. And if you're running a larger company with multiple layers of management, bureaucracy, and approval processes, this problem is even worse. Every additional person you add creates another communication path, another approval needed, and another place for information to get stuck. The red tape that was supposed to create accountability ends up creating bottlenecks where decisions die and field teams wait. I've seen companies with entire project management teams where nobody can tell you who actually owns what, and adding another body just means one more person sitting in meetings instead of solving problems.
The companies that are actually productive have figured out that leverage comes from structure, not headcount. They've built systems that eliminate the waiting, the surprises, and the coordination chaos that kills productivity. When you get this right, the same crew that was struggling to hit schedule suddenly starts beating it, not because they're working harder, but because they're not spending half their day waiting or redoing work that should have been right the first time.
The Closing
Look, I get it. When you're running the business, fighting fires every day, and trying to keep projects moving, it's nearly impossible to step back and see these patterns. You're too close to it, and when you're emotionally tied to decisions you've been making for years, it's hard to question whether adding people is actually the right move.
That's usually the breakthrough moment I see with owners and executives dealing with this issue. It's not some big, complicated revelation. It's just finally stepping outside the chaos to see where your people are actually spending their time. If they're waiting, wandering, or working around problems that shouldn't exist, adding more people just gets expensive fast. But when you build a structure that lets them work at the speed they're capable of? That's when the same number of people start delivering completely different results.
Your people didn't sign up to be part of a coordination circus. They signed up to build. This isn't about squeezing more out of people. It's about removing the obstacles that prevent them from doing what they're already capable of.
Are you solving productivity problems or just multiplying coordination problems?
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.
Enjoying this newsletter? Pass it along to your colleagues and friends, and have them sign up here: https://www.pro-accel.com/#Newsletter
If you like Jerry's insights, follow him on LinkedIn here: linkedin.com/in/jerry-aliberti
