WELL BUILT

Prinkey provides a comprehensive plan for building a successful construction company.

In this nonfiction work, the author astutely catalogs the many challenges that beleaguer the construction industry—the dominance of low-price bids, the financial rollercoaster of “feast-or-famine conditions,” and razor-thin margins are only some of the difficulties firms typically face. The average construction company only nets a yearly profit of 1.5%. However, the top 2% of contractors can achieve many times that and generate millions of dollars in net profits. Prinkey is the founder and head of Well Built Construction Consulting and has advised nearly 200 construction companies over the past 15 years (approximately 50 of those were in the top 2% category); here, he shares what all those companies have in common, clearly and accessibly distilling the data into a system. The author is impressively thorough—he covers everything from the financial end of the business to operations, including hiring, choosing the right projects, sales, and safety control. The chapter on estimating costs and setting prices is particularly painstaking, and it alone makes this a worthwhile guide. (“Estimating must be a replicable, trainable science in your construction business.”) Here and there he indulges in some of the touchy-feely rhetoric so common in contemporary business guidebooks—the discussion of “core values” seems like a dutiful rehashing of the genre’s tropes. However, for the most part, this is an exceedingly practical book. (“Absolutely nothing you do as a construction company matters as much as your ability to produce a project that meets the scheduling, budgetary, and quality expectations of your own business.”) The intended audience is general and specialty contractors; both those just starting out and more experienced construction professionals will benefit greatly from this rigorous and encyclopedic instruction manual.

A masterful introduction to succeeding in a difficult industry, appropriate for veterans and newbies.