Blog
Article of the Week
Our goal at PFCS is to do AWESOME work for our clients, but not have to beat the hell out of everyone to get it. All employees want to feel appreciated and that they are an important piece of the puzzle. Providing tools to complete our tasks is important, but providing respect and appreciation is vital and is the foundation of PFCS.
Building
Introduction
Wow. This is fun for me to read. It's a January 2004 letter that I wrote to a client, when he asked why we didn't use Xactimate. Xactimate was a good program then. And it's even better now. Some people on the staff here at Pete Fowler Construction are even certified to use Xactimate. But it's still not REAL estimating.
We have been using this letter in our estimating training courses ever since it was written. I am sure we have put this letter in our project files more than 100 times, when we have been hired as construction cost estimating experts and others have used Xactimate to perform their work.
The letter has prompted a lot of good (and a couple heated) conversations. I hope it keeps working!
Contents
The "Definition of Quality"
Managing Construction Quality
Construction Quality Management
Lean Construction
Punchlist Management Software
The Cost of Quality
"Really, Really Good Reading"
Buildings
PFCS has been contracted to compose a resource guide to aid owners and contractors in construction quality management. As the saying goes: If you can't measure it, then you can't manage it. Therefore, we need to define "quality" at the outset.
On February 4, 2012, the Oregon Chapter of the Community Association Institute presented a one day Workshop in Portland, Oregon. The "Essentials" program is a comprehensive course about the history, organization and financial structure of community associations, including problem solving techniques to help run your community better. Pete Fowler spoke on property maintenance
Business
Hiring changed dramatically at Pete Fowler Construction in 2020, and that has continued into 2021. What happened? Several things. Our company seeks a very high skill set that is often tough to find via traditional recruiting methods and frequently requires more of a push, headhunting effort than a pull, advertising method. That reality caused us to take a big step back to examine our practices.
In late 2020 Pete had the opportunity to sit down with Samuel Thimothy for his awesome series called Coffee with Closers to talk about how processes and quality improvement are the backbone of our business. Whether you write it out or not, everything in business is some kind of a process. You have a goal, and a way to achieve that goal, and a time you want it completed. With the landscape of business constantly changing, we have to update our goals and processes along the way.
A Technology Company?
Many people who know me are surprised to learn that I consider my business a "technology company."
My college major was a B.S. in Construction Management and I also have a minor in Management Information Systems (IT), I was a computer network administrator, and I have been setting up computer systems to enable remote work since the 1990s. Since then I invested in development of what has become a magical, proprietary information system where everything that anyone sends to us, and everything we do is saved forever in "the cloud," everything is connected to everything else, and it's backed up and accessible anywhere, any time, by anyone with the appropriate permissions. Because of all this work for the past 25 years, our business has not missed a beat this month (literally, our productivity is actually ahead of goal).
When I have done my best work as an expert witness, I have gone over and over and over and over my report and conclusions, refining, improving, and ultimately perfecting the work through an excruciating process that is at least 95% elbow-grease, and at most 5% “experience,” native gift, or divine inspiration.
“The One Minute Manager” is a parable about a young man who searches the world over to find a good manager to mentor him and finally finds "The One Minute Manager" who teaches him three secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praising, and One Minute Reprimands.
An organizational maturity model is a relatively new (1990s) tool to evaluate whether or not a human organization can reliably and predictably accomplish its' objectives. Models typically have 3 to 5 levels of maturity. As with humans, age is not closely tied to maturity level.
Last week, we opened doors in a new branch in Corona, California. Michael Villalba will be our lead consultant in this area as we better serve our clients within the Inland Empire.
In the summer of 2017 a friend of mine, who had moved to Eastern Europe, reached out and asked something like "I know that you know a lot of lawyers.
In the shrewd words of Mike Tyson... "Everybody has a plan... Until they get punched in the face." But let's be honest; not everyone has a plan.
