Time, Tide, and Loyal Clients

There is a saying, (well, it’s more than a “saying” but anyway…) that every Plebe learns at the U.S. Naval Academy, and it goes, “Time, Tide, and Formation wait for no one….”  It’s something that I learned when I was a Plebe, and it has stuck with me throughout my professional life.  Time and tide (or weather) wait for no one; that is self-evident.  Similarly, clients, if they are to be loyal clients, will not wait for slow contractors.  When forced to wait, loyal clients become angry clients.  Here is some general advice on how to approach the important question of time with a contractor.

Time is one of the toughest things for contractors to estimate, so most avoid committing to a time line unless pressed to do so.  There are a lot of reasons for that such as weather, local inspectors’ schedules, and a variety of other legitimate unknowns, but if you sign a contract that does not bind your contractor to some sort of project deadline, you’re asking for a bad surprise.  You may find when you press a contractor on the time issue that they balk, especially if you make them give you a specific deadline or time penalty clause.  I’m not suggesting you can ask a contractor to perfectly predict their project deadline, but time needs to be addressed in the contract, and you need to make sure you’re comfortable with the window of time you agree upon.  Some honest contractors won’t accept deadlines, so you need to be careful not to scare them away because most consumers don’t know to bring it up.  If you love everything else about your contractor, this could be something you soften on in the course of negotiations, but make sure you address it.  Just bringing it up verbally will, at the very least, identify you as a time-sensitive client, and should get you priority attention because you’ve identified the importance of time to your contractor from the start.  There is no panacea for overcoming the time delays inherent in construction, but identifying time as a critical component to your contractor early on should improve your chances significantly to getting the project done in a predictable window of time.

Tags: bid, builders, building, Construction, Contractors, contracts, estimate, homebuilding, negotiating, remodeling, residential, scope, time

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Construction, Contractors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.