Tristan Wilson, CEO of Edgevianta, shares eleven lessons from decades running $30M+ civil infrastructure projects. Focus on the 20% of items that drive 80% of risk, staff the project like a business, and maintain senior-management engagement from start to finish.
Chapters
What happens on these big jobs is stuff can go south really quick. Running a large infrastructure project is extremely complex, challenging, difficult, a little scary, but can also be really fun and exciting for everybody who's involved. It's never done until it's done. See the constructor's head. I'm Tristan. I'm the CEO and founder at Edgevianta. We make AI agents for civil estimating. I worked in the civil construction industry. Industry first as a field engineer and then as a project manager, estimator and area manager. I've spent most of my career bidding and building civil infrastructure projects. I've built some larger jobs where it's a lot different than jobs that are three to six months long. These are multi year projects. 30, 50, 100 plus million dollars. And it takes a different mindset and a different approach or a contractor to be successful on large infrastructure projects. Large projects really depend on the size of contractors. So if you're a $30 million a year civil contractor, a large project might be 10 or 15 million. If you're a $500 million a year civil contractor, a Large project might be 250 or more. So with big jobs it's very important to staff it like a business, not like a project. I've seen a lot of contractors who are low money, low bid contractors come in and staff a $50 million job. Light Bay would staff a 5 million dollar job. And then you get into a really complex project where you need the support team and you fall and you fail. And I've been in that situation. It's not a good place to be. So it all starts before really before the bid gets sub. So there's a lot of risk analysis that goes into analyzing the scope of work, analyzing the geography. Do we have people and can we bring a management team and craft labor to the job site in order to be able to deliver on the project before a large job goes in on bid day. Very important to have the people who are going to be involved in the construction involved in the estimating of the actual project itself. They're going to buy off on the budgets, they're going to buy off on the strategy, on the approach. And if they built this type of work before, they're going to be able to provide insights on how to staff it, how to approach it, how to sequence it. But it's a team effort and it's very collaborative. Pre planning starts before any crew or any subcontractor shows up on the job. We should have a job specific orientation that's led by the Project manager and the superintendent and the project team. For everybody who comes on the job site, this is really important to explain. What are the unique requirements of this job? How do I get oriented with this job where I'll lay down areas? What are the expectations of me as an employee, as, as a subcontractor, as a vendor? Very important that each subcontractor go through a subcontractor. Pre construction meeting. All of the representatives from the management team of the GC sit down and go through their scope of work, go through every item that they're going to be working on, Talk about the safety, talk about the quality, talk about what the expectations are, how do we get paid, who keeps track of what quantities, what are the reporting requirements? Go the work operation. Really have a deep understanding of what's it going to take in order for both of us to be successful. 80% of your risk is in probably about 20% of your items on a large infrastructure dot project. Stay out as far ahead as you can on these really major key items. Remember, 80, 20, find the risk in the job and de risk as much as possible. The way we de risk is by planning the operation together. The other thing is like celebrating success. When crews do great stuff on a job in whatever way you can, it's so important to celebrate those wins that could be having a cookout, giving away prizes, taking pictures, getting shirts made, getting hats made. All these little things really add up to build camaraderie. Keeping the big job going and keeping people engaged and excited and keeping their head in the game. For every big job, there should be a committee of people from senior management within the organization that come and help support the project team. This meeting should occur at least once every month where everybody comes physically to the job site. And we sit down with the management team of the job and we go through basically a board packet. It's a summary of what's happened in the last month. You got to go through everything and the people got to stay engaged, all right? Because what happens on these big jobs, this stuff can go south really quick. Project manager and the management team, they need support from the company. One small little issue on a big job can cascade and lead to the job losing money. Or there could be a major safety or major quality issue. Understanding your cost is key to success. The way that you keep track of costs is there. You keep track of costs daily. So keep track of labor, equipment, materials and trucking costs should be monitored on a daily basis. There should be a daily P L for every crew, for every, every Work operation. We should know exactly where we're at. Monitor that religiously. Don't do work for free. So if there's a scope change, get a signed change order before you start the actual work. Know your contract, be ready that for there to be issues, there's a great thing called what's called an issues resolution log. And you got to keep track of your change orders and you got to be prepared with really good documentation in the event of a claim. So that's keeping track of the letter writing, the notification requirements and the contract. Follow them to a T. You don't want claims, but be ready in the event that they come and be prepared for the absolute worst. Design build is a completely different animal than bid build bid bill. The owner or the engineer draws up the drawings, writes up the contract and gives you unit prices to go out there and perform the work. If an item overruns or there's a problem on the job, for the most part you're going to be covered as the contractor. When you start getting into design build work, the contractor will own the quantity risk on the job in most cases. So that means you have to cover everything. So if the, if certain items overrun, you know, it's on you, it comes out of your pocket. There's a ton of risk in design build. There's, you know, contingencies that must be built and you have to have the right team and the right people to go do that. I think where people get in trouble is when they bid design build or when they bid bid build work like design build and they are not the same thing. And you can really get into trouble by bidding them the same way. Working in sections. So basically what that means is we break a job, a large job down into small pieces and we work a section at a time and we fully complete that section before moving on to the next section. Keeping a short punch list. This helps with getting sections turned over to the owner, which can be done on some of these larger projects. Punch as you go, finish sections at a time and then be able to turn that over. Avoid a long punch list. It costs five times more to go do the work the second time, as it would have been to just do it right the first time. Subcontractors are critical on large projects and subs need to be managed. If subs aren't given the proper direction and aren't guided in the proper way, it can be chaos. So subs do need to be managed very closely and be very careful who you pick as your partners, as subcontractors. Stay tight in the field. All the pieces, every single detail matters. On a big job, you know, we have the choice as contractors whether or not we want to accept that or whether or not we want to set higher standard. And are you willing to hold everyone to the highest possible standard. That's what it takes to be world class. And you're never out of the woods on a big job until you literally have 100% sign off and the job has been accepted by the owner and all retainage has been collected. Bad meeting a bad poor can set the whole thing off in, into a tailspin. And a lot of this is actually, in my opinion, about maintaining relationships. You have to approach everything with a beginner's mindset. When we screwed up, we had to admit that we screwed up. But I saw that when I admitted that we screwed something up and I said we, we're going to take care of it, don't worry about it. We're going to do it at our cost. We're going to make it right. The owner was really appreciative. Owning. Keeping your side of the street clean is really important on these, on these large jobs, especially as people get tired. They've been working days, they've been working nights. You also have to be ready to change people out if you need to because sometimes people get burned out on these big jobs and they need to go do some other jobs. Be okay with rotation of, of team members. So use it as a training ground. It's never done until it's done. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate it. This is like the first, I don't know, educational series that we've done. So we'd love to hear your feedback, your comments. Look forward to, to hearing from you. See, the constructor said.
