Wondering what tools everyone is using and how they connect their tech stack for one centralized source of truth. What flow do you find most effective and useful for your business?

To estimate a project’s whole-of-life cost from the owner’s perspective, work out what it will cost to build, operate and finance. • Break the project into packages. List the work you’ll buy: design, earthworks, concrete, structure, services and so on. Define what each package includes so you can check for gaps and double counting. • Prepare an early estimate. Use costs from similar projects, adjusted for size and scope. For example, multiply the building’s floor area by a suitable historical cost per square metre. Get indicative supplier prices where you lack good data. • Replace allowances with detailed prices. As the design develops, measure quantities and send drawings and scopes to contractors and suppliers for quotes. Compare their inclusions and exclusions, then allow for work or risks their prices leave with you. • Add the owner’s costs. Include land, approvals and project management. For costs such as project staff, multiply the monthly cost by the expected duration. Add allowances for identified risks and uncertainty. • Estimate ownership costs. If you’ll retain the asset, price its operation and maintenance using comparable assets or service-provider quotes. Allow for equipment replacements over its life and eventual removal where required. • Calculate funding needs. Put those costs and expected income on a timeline. Identify the cash shortfall and include the cost of financing it. • Review and set the budget. Test the assumptions, update the estimate as information improves, then organise the approved costs into packages the delivery team can track. Record what each figure is based on, what it includes and how certain it is. Watch the full explanation: https://youtu.be/3lhwUrXTgPI

Last week I did my first bid in ages. I had taken some time off to build the software, so it was good to be back at doing actual estimating. It was an electrical project but the scope was unbelievably confusing. It instantly reminds me what I hate most about estimating. Spending hours going through the drawings, trying to make sense of the scope of works and put it all together. It feels like when bidding, you spend 90% of your time trying to work out what the client actually wants you to price. If you were going to spend $5m+ on a contract, surely you should spend a few hours trying to clearly articulate what you want them to price? But clients never seem to do it properly.... What do you hate most about estimating?

Hey Everybody, New month! So new goals I know for me, I have had this big realization that AI is just genuinely not that difficult to use. I guess I am very deep in the bubble of people who play with it a ton. But increasingly, I am becoming more convinced that the real skills I want to focus on mastering are my construction management skills. So trying to do more content on construction projects and businesses. The skills that actually matter. The thing I find hard is that AI is such a massive buzzword that any video I do with AI in the title does well. I'm tryin to balance that with the topic that I think really has a huge amount of depth and complexity to it which is Construction. I did this video and was really happy with it. This is more the style of content I want to be doing What are your goals for September?

Hey Everybody! Welcome to Construction Contractors Hub. The best place to learn construction management for free. First thing! Introduce yourself and your goals by commenting below. Next, watch this video: https://www.loom.com/share/9bc96fac3d9b48c89c43eb57d5fd43d1 How Contractors Hub works 1. The classroom has a bunch of free courses templates and resources. Here are the most popular ones: Construction Project Management - Our foundational 8 hour course on the absolute basics of project management. Quantity take-offs - Tutorials and practice projects to master take-offs Templates - Over 50 excel and other templatse I use on my projects. AI in Construction - A full series of tutorials and resources to help you get started 2. Win by contributing Each month, the top contributor gets free access to Contractors Hub Premium and ContractorOS (our AI in construction roadmap). All you need to do is contribute and support others 3. Anything you need - let me know If you are looking for templates or other resources, just comment below, and I'll help you find them.