Designers, Architects and your Pre-Construction Process
When it comes to providing potential clients with a fixed cost or cost-plus estimate for their remodeling project, your goal is always to give them the most accurate price possible.
That means spending a tremendous amount of time reviewing architects' or designers' plans, costing out each aspect of the job, and getting input from your trade partners. So it's natural that this part of the process is one that you charge for as a pre-construction fee.
But because a potential client doesn't see this work happening, they often have a hard time understanding what your pre-construction fee is actually for. And if the owner has a designer or architect working as an intermediary between you and them, explaining how your pre-construction process works can end up like a game of broken telephone.
Why You Need to Charge for Pre-Construction
Anyone can throw out a ballpark number as an "estimate," but it's generally useless in the decision-making process for clients because it's based on pure assumption, not facts. But clients will cling to that number, which will only lead to frustration for you and them when the actual costs differ from the original "ballpark" number you gave them.
This is why you have a pre-construction phase. It helps you start the relationship with owners based on mutual trust and understanding and sets the tone for effective communication throughout the entire project.
Using a pre-construction process allows you to take the time to price your work based on three exacting principles:
The project scope
The approach to the work
The cost of running a professional business
It's not uncommon for a pre-construction process to take upwards of dozens of working hours. That's a significant investment of your time for a job that you might not secure, which is why you need to be charging clients for it. For more on why you need to charge clients for estimates, click here.
When the Client Starts with a Designer and Architect
Some residential construction companies offer both design and build services, but very often, custom home builders source a good portion of their work from design and architectural partners.
The roles of designers and architects are to take the client's vision and craft it into a schematic design. From there, the design takes shape, and layers of complex design elements are often added without any feedback from a builder until the client has fallen in love with their masterpiece. It's at that point in the design process when the logistics of actually executing the construction documents are discussed and assigned a dollar value.
And very often, they cannot afford to build it.
This starts the contractor-client relationship off on a bad foot because it falls to the construction team to break the news about how much the project will cost instead of being able to help guide the design development discussion alongside the price discussion.
Explaining Your Pre-Construction Process to Designers and Architects
In a typical design-build process, once a client and their design team have finalized an architectural design plan for their remodel or custom build, the project would go out to general contractors to bid on. When architects and designers facilitate construction administration (CA), they typically run this tendering process.
And it's where architects and designers feel the need to have to "sell" your pre-construction process to their clients. What designers and architects don't understand about your pre-construction process can only hurt a client-builder relationship as they attempt to explain it.
Designers, much like clients, have been conditioned to believe that builders should provide high-level ballpark estimates for free at an early stage in the project before any pre-construction begins, and that a pre-construction fee might only apply if that contractor is chosen to perform the work. In many cases, there's also an expectation that pre-construction fees will be credited back against the overall construction costs at the end of the job.
They also often wonder why you charge a pre-construction fee if a designer is providing fully dimensioned floor plans and scope of work during the architectural design phase because they don't understand that your pre-construction work isn't the same work they've done in creating those floor plans; you need to ensure they can actually be built.
The truth is that a good residential contractor will charge a pre-construction fee regardless of whether or not a designer has delivered floor plans and/or a scope of work because there are often a lot of details left off of design plans and architect-drafted scopes of work, and a lot of potential issues that a builder would catch. And after all, the builder is the one who will execute the strategic plan.
Communicating this shouldn't be the designer or architect's responsibility. Explaining your pre-construction process and how it fits into the overall value you bring to successful projects is your job, which is why your time is better spent advocating for being included at the beginning of the project and not after the design is developed.
So what is the solution?
Integrated Project Delivery
Integrated Project Delivery breaks down the traditional design-build method of remodeling or custom home building by removing the siloed approach, where each stakeholder works independently.
Instead, it allows everyone to collaborate and focus on one goal: the project outcome. This ensures that input from every stakeholder is shared at the start of the project, setting the tone for better communication throughout the build.
By creating a collaborative environment on the project between design partners, clients, and builders, the project goals become the main focus, and the entire team can define the scope of work, project costs, and risk by leveraging early input from you, the builder.
How to Use Integrated Project Delivery
People often fear what they don't understand, and when it comes to the processes you use in your remodeling or custom home-building business, designers and architectural partners are often in the same boat as clients.
Which is why you need to take the time to foster relationships with your design partners in the same way you nurture relationships with your clients to help them understand how your pre-construction process works.
Meet With Them On A Regular Basis
Reach out to designers and architects that you work with or want to work with long-term regularly to talk about how you work. Explain your process, and delve into the value you bring to projects when included with design and team members at the beginning rather than after the plans are finalized.
Bridge The Gap With Knowledge
As a professional builder, you can work with clients to identify their needs and wants and translate them into a scope of work that aligns their dreams with their budgets.
Architects and designers bring much-needed design talent to construction projects as they play a critical role in helping translate a client's vision. But more often than not, they aren't paying for or managing the budgets for the project, so correlating plans to actual build cost is often overlooked, which is why your expertise in project costing is needed early in the process.
Help Identify Options & Provide Feedback Privately
Very often, in the design phase of a project, you will see the significant cost drivers in the project long before anyone else. It's at this moment that providing your feedback is critical and valuable in the architectural design process to help identify cost savings for the client.
But it's very important to use tact and discretion when doing this, and I recommend that you do this privately with the architect/designer and allow them to present the adjustments at the table with the clients. By doing this, you are respecting their role in the process and allowing them to drive the design discussion with the client.
The Bottom Line on Working with Design Partners
Architects and designers are a vital part of every remodel or custom home-building project. However, their expertise is often more focused on design and planning.
And it's not fair to expect them to carry the knowledge of how to cost out a renovation or a new home build. That's where you come in.
By forging strong relationships with them and showing them the value you bring to the table at the beginning of each project, you can be their advocate for their design alongside providing realistic cost alignments during the pre-construction process.
The BUILD AND PROFIT SYSTEM teaches builders to sell their value to clients and design partners using an Integrated Project Delivery model that centralizes the project goals instead of each individual stakeholder's interests.
Click below to learn how the BUILD AND PROFIT SYSTEM can help you align everyone with the same objective: a plan created by architects that a builder can execute on a budget the client can afford.
