Crisis construction: Expert tips for overcoming job site challenges

Charley Burtwistle (00:05):

What is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of “The Building Code.” Once again, solo, I’m your host, Charley Burtwistle. Very, very excited to get into it today. Once again, what I lack in co-hosts I make up for in guests. Today, we have Brady Bankston, owner of Popularis Construction out of Massachusetts. They are a renovation company. They’re actually a little bit of everything. I’ll let Brady tell you a bit more about it, but really, really interesting story. And today we’re going to be talking about how to handle unexpected challenges on the job. I think that is something that everyone has a couple horror stories about. Some people have some extreme PTSD dealing with different clients, dealing with different challenges that pop up over the course of a job. Brady is here to give us insight into how he tackles those and some kind of common principles that you can use to help tackle those unexpected challenges at your business as well, too. So, once again, you don’t need to hear it from me. Let’s hear it from Brady. Hey Brady, welcome to “The Building Code.” How’s it going today?

Brady Bankston (00:05):

Doing great, man. How you doing?

Charley Burtwistle (01:07):

Doing really well. Appreciate you making the time. I’m super excited to talk today. We always like to kind of start these off with just quick introductions. So, if you could tell us a little bit about you and when you founded Popularis, and where it’s at today.

Brady Bankston (01:22):

Sure. Yeah, so a little bit about myself. I got started in the industry when I was about four or five.

Charley Burtwistle (01:32):

An early start.

Brady Bankston (01:34):

Yeah, real early, real early. Before child labor laws. So, my father would come home with dirty paintbrushes, dirty rollers, and he’d pay me 50 cents a brush and a dollar a roller to clean them out for him.

Charley Burtwistle (01:47):

There you go.

Brady Bankston (01:48):

So, it worked out good for him, worked out good for me. And then I kind of just always had that entrepreneurial fire in my belly and I decided when I was about 22, a little bit of a rock in a hard place situation, I decided, “You know what? Now’s the time.” So, I jumped out, just a little bit of a career switch and I started as a laborer for a high-end residential remodeler. Worked for him for two or three years and he was retiring and I felt it was the right opportunity to take that next leap and started my own business. And I was essentially a mercenary carpenter for other GCs. So, I exposed myself pretty quickly, but also kind of slowly within the industry I learned as I went. I didn’t have a lot of formal training and back in 2018, so that was 2014, I formed Popularis. I guess that’s pretty much the nuts and bolts of it.

Charley Burtwistle (02:55):

Yeah, absolutely. So, you said that was 2014, and then, obviously, where are you guys at today and the road to get there, I’d be super interested to hear, too.

Brady Bankston (03:05):

Yeah, so like I said, I was pretty much just subbing myself out to other GCs as a carpenter for quite a few years, and I’d get decks and little sunrooms and stuff like that and I would self-perform everything, which was, it’s tough to grow when you’re doing everything. So, in I think 2018, a mutual client from my previous employer had approached me about building a 10,000 square foot net-zero building for him, which was substantially larger than any sunroom I’d ever built, using technologies that I had never worked with, including geothermal and SIP construction. So, I naturally said, “Of course I can do that.”

Charley Burtwistle (03:57):

Of course. Yeah.

Brady Bankston (03:57):

And we started the, “Course, I can, I can do anything.” So, long painful process in a great way, lots of learning opportunity. And we finished that project in 2020, the beginnings of 2020, and that allowed my company to go from just me to hiring carpenters and laborers and attempting to hire a management staff, which we can get into that a little bit later on of how that went. But yeah, grew from there. Got up to 15 guys all in the field trying to do all the management across, I think we had at one point 26 projects open with just me. So, you could imagine that wasn’t going extremely well and kind of started really to dig into the process and the management side of things from there.

Charley Burtwistle (04:58):

Yeah, I love that. So, obviously, today kind of the goal of this episode is talk about some of the renovations side of things and unexpected challenges. I’m sure having 26 jobs going at once, you encountered plenty of those. But I was also looking at your website a little before this. You don’t just do renovations, you guys do full custom homes, renovations, side projects, a little bit of everything. Is that correct?

Brady Bankston (05:20):

Yeah, so, we’ve evolved with that project, that put us into doing some commercial work. So, then we started doing some tenant fit outs, and today we have on the board some full gut renovations, some ground up nine unit with mixed use, ground up 16 unit. So, we’ve kind of started going in a very interesting direction with … we have a mill conversion that we’re working on right now in tandem with our target for our renovations would be large scale, full home renos. For the right person, we would still do high-end kitchens and baths. They’re pretty easy for us to manage at this point. We’ve done a hundred bathrooms. We know how to manage a bathroom. So, we’ll take for the right client, previous clients or the right designer that we’ve already worked with, we won’t take on projects like that. But our focus is really large-scale renovations and new construction homes and large scale commercial benefit homes.

Charley Burtwistle (06:30):

I love it. It sounds like you don’t like staying still very much, kind of always on the next thing.

Brady Bankston (06:36):

No, no, no.

Charley Burtwistle (06:37):

I love that.

Brady Bankston (06:38):

Yeah, that can be good and bad though. It’s not always good to not stay on the same thing for long enough.

Charley Burtwistle (06:43):

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. I’m excited to dive in and get going here. So, to kick things off, I’d mentioned the goal of the episode is talk about unexpected challenges. When you are doing kind of a whole home reno for somebody, obviously, that’s a very big project and even so, I think closer to the heart for your customers as a new home because it’s a home they’ve already lived in and a home that they care about a ton and they kind of want everything to be perfect, so they have pretty high expectations. So, what does that look like going into a project and how do you work with your clients to level set, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” But then also prepare for as they get going, wanting to change things and some of those potential surprises that pop up?

Brady Bankston (07:26):

Sure. Yeah. Well, there’s quite a few pieces there. So, the very first …

Charley Burtwistle (07:31):

Yeah, I’m sorry about that. There were about eight questions in that one question there.

Brady Bankston (07:35):

No, it’s all good. So, I would say, the very first thing that we do is we initiate a pre-construction process. So, in order for a client to hire us, they have to go through our pre-con, and we have different versions of that. We can rush certain things, but what I’ve learned going back to the 26 projects with one person trying to put out fires all day is that you have to plan for the unplanned. So, our first initial steps are figuring out what we don’t know, figuring out what we do know, and marrying those two things together to create a scope of work and a contract that relates all those things together so that we can execute effectively.

(08:25):

And it all comes down to clear communication with the client, clear communication with the designer, the design team. Whether it’s interior designer, architect, structural engineers, everyone, the entire MEP team, everybody has to be on the same page. That takes time. And a lot of times clients want to rush that piece of it, but in the end, they lose time because we could miss something and screw something up. So, our initial first step is just digging in deep as we can to the plans and to what’s actually existing, especially in a renovation. New construction, you’re all paper until construction and with renovation it’s hands-on in the field before paper to really understand what you have in order to know what you can design. So, we go through an intensive process of cutting holes to inspect what the framing actually is.

(09:23):

We can guess, but until we cut a hole, we don’t know. So, if it’s someone’s home, we try to be respectful of they’re still living there. So, we very clean cut a hole, inspection ports, we’ll lay all those out on paper beforehand, show up, cut all our holes, get all our pictures, understand what’s there, cover everything back up. And if it’s going to be a long time, we might even plaster them back in or we would just put them back, re-screw them, tape them. But now we have a vision port of what we actually are working with. And then we take that information, and we go to our subs, to the rest of the team and we just deliver and circulate information until we spit out a solid scope of work that we can execute off of.

Charley Burtwistle (10:08):

I love that. And so, then from that scope of work, are you going back to the client and presenting that? Is there any back and forth there? Or from that point, is it pretty much full steam ahead?

Brady Bankston (10:18):

Nope, absolutely. Yeah, so we do it in phases. So, we don’t engage the client throughout every step of the way. That’s why they’re hiring us, so that they’re not involved every step of the way, even if they want to be, they don’t need to be, and they shouldn’t be because we’re working in the sausage factory, we want to deliver them the end result. So, there’s checkpoints where we would deliver the scope of work and then we would get their feedback, and we make them read through and mark up the scope of work because that is ultimately a piece of our contract.

(10:58):

So, if we’re going to execute a contract, we want the client, all goes back to communication, we want them to be on board with signing off, “Yes, I read this, and this is indeed the scope of work that I’m agreeing to.” And so that gets refined, refined, refined with the entire team. So, the architectural team, interior designers, structural, all their components, they see the scope of work, that’s a living document. And then if we get into the project and there’s a change order, then that gets executed and added as an addendum into the scope of work, so that we’re constantly editing and evolving that contract as we go.

Charley Burtwistle (11:43):

Yeah, that makes sense. So, are there, once you kick things off there and start the actual con process, what are some of the typical unexpected but probably expected challenges that can arise once you start getting into the, quote, unquote, “sausage factor” as you put it?

Brady Bankston (12:02):

Sure, yeah. Well, you have budget, schedule and quality of work. Everything kind of boils down to those three buckets. We try to simplify things as much as possible, and I found that really quality of work is first and foremost the priority for us because at the end of the day, that’s the end result and without a focus on that, the other two will ultimately fail because if you don’t focus on the quality of the work at the end, you’re going to have to spend more time fixing problems, and you’re going to have budget issues. So, weather delays I would say are something that we expect to be an unknown. So, we try to build our schedules to reflect things that we know are going to be unknowns.

(12:57):

So, that’s a known unknown for us is weather. And then I would say another kind of obvious thing that we always deal with is site work. Site work is a huge unknown. You don’t know what’s under the earth. We can do geo testing. We can do core drilling. we can do certain things to understand what’s under the ground, but at the end of the day, once you dig a hole, what’s there’s there. So, it kind of all pairs back to communicating initially with the client. These are the unknowns that we don’t know, and when we get to those, we will address them. And, ultimately, we hope that the reason they hired us is not because we’re going to do it cheap, but because we’re going to be effective in the way we handle the problems that we will encounter.

Charley Burtwistle (13:43):

Right. Yeah, I think the fact that you keep alluding to the communication side of things is really the end all be all. But also, when you listed out the three things that matter during the construction process, keeping that quality of work first and foremost in the mind dictates everything else. So, when you have things that come up, ensuring to keep that referenced with the customer, I’m sure you’re typically communicating back with them of, “Hey, here are what your different options are, but here’s also what we would recommend to maintain the best quality of what we’re doing for them.” Is that correct?

Brady Bankston (14:14):

Right. Yeah. We’re tasked to carry the integrity of the design. So, we work so hard in pre con to develop a project, which is for a residential client that’s their living space, that’s where they spend so much of their time that we’re working for the client. We’re working for the architect. We’re working for the interior designer. We produce what everyone else designs. So, it’s incredibly important for us to maintain the integrity of the design and the quality of what we’re putting out there. Because at the end of the day, it’s my reputation, it’s my name, I’m the owner of the company, I’m the face of the company.

(15:02):

I want to be able to talk to anybody and say, “Oh yeah, you know my client.” And know that they would not have anything bad to say about us. And, ultimately, there’s times when we failed and I’ve had to go to clients and say, “You know what? I messed this up. I’m going to make it right. It’s my dime. It’s not going to cost you anything, but it is going to delay the project, but in order for us to deliver the correct project contractually but also spiritually I’ve committed to building, this is what I have to do to fix the problem. And it is what it is.”

Charley Burtwistle (15:40):

Yeah. We had someone on, I can’t remember the exact name a few weeks ago, who had a really interesting way of thinking about what you just mentioned there is like, I’m going to be taking pictures of the project and promoting on my website. So, if it costs me extra dollars or extra time to make something look right, I’m not thinking of it as sinking additional costs into an existing project. I’m thinking of it as marketing spend to get my next project, and I may lose a couple extra dollars here, but it’ll help me get the next project down the line that I thought, and that’s kind of what you’re hitting at right now, too. Is it’s my reputation, I’m not going to put a cheaper cost or a lower quality of work just to get done with one project because that’s ultimately going to harm me down the road.

Brady Bankston (16:26):

Right. Oh yeah, no, absolutely. It’s my reputation, which is … I mean, we don’t really advertise. So, if word of mouth is my form of my lead source and my dollars to run my business, then I have to make sure that the word of mouth is good.

Charley Burtwistle (16:44):

Yeah, you’re advertising with every project that you do.

Brady Bankston (16:48):

Yeah. And I mean, I would say early on I gave too much, I wouldn’t say too much, it’s a dangerous word. I gave a lot of money back to the projects more so than I … and I would say, “Yep, I’m investing into the company.” It’s a little different now, and we try to be clear with our clients. I’m at a point now where we have more and more ability to pick the projects we want, which ultimately drives us to that. So, I’d say that’s a great initial concept, and I still do that, and I will always do that because it’s just in me that I want to make it the best I can, but the larger we get, there’s a level of reality that we have to face because without dollars, the business doesn’t run. So, we have to be cognizant of what do things cost and how much do we want to put back into the project?

Charley Burtwistle (17:45):

What does that look like? I’m kind of interested. It makes sense in theory and talking about you and me in here, but in a real-world application, when you come across some of those decisions, how do you handle those? How do you understand the impact of keeping something under budget or potentially putting more costs into something to get it done right? Are you working with your team? Are you talking to the client themselves? How do you go about problem solving those things as they arise?

Brady Bankston (18:13):

Communication, fast, clear communication, and then being willing to be the one to make a decision. I’ve been on teams prior, and I’ve worked on my own projects where the person who was supposed to be the one to make the decision just couldn’t get it to the finish line and needed somebody else to tell them it was okay. And what I found is, ultimately, for right or wrong, I have to be the one to make the final say. And then in addition to that, I have to empower my team to be willing and able to make a decision quickly if need be. But as soon as we have an issue or as we like to call them a solution-al opportunity, we take that …

Charley Burtwistle (19:05):

Love that. I’m going to steal that one.

Brady Bankston (19:06):

We take that solution-al opportunity, and we come up with solutions, and we do it quickly. We get the right people in the room as fast as possible. We talk through it out loud, and then we analyze the options that we have and whoever needs to make the decision is pushed to make a decision. And then once we’ve made a decision, if we don’t need the client to make the decision, it’s just a, “Hey, we have this issue, we need to solve it.” Then we bring that with the solution to the client. We try not to, sometimes it’s unavoidable, sometimes the client knows, but, ultimately, if we’re going to bring a problem to a client, we want to also bring them a solution at the same time. It just reinforces why we’re here and our value, and really that’s what we’ve sold the client this entire time is this is our value.

(20:01):

Our value is the ability to solve problems. That’s what we do. We are going to encounter things that need to be fixed. That’s why you hired us. Your home is broken, your business is in disrepair, whatever that is. You want a new home that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter, it’s across the board. There are problems that need to be solved, we’re here to solve them. So, it’s clear communication, but also setting the expectation in the contract for how that … I mean, that’s like day one is walking them through the contract step by step. “Here’s the scope of work, here’s what’s included. Here’s the contract is how we execute each of those components from a mechanical standpoint. When this happens, if it’s over X amount of dollars, this is how gets addressed. If it’s under this amount of dollars, this is how it gets addressed.” And lay it out, so that whenever we come to them, this is how we discussed, here’s what we found, here’s how we’re going to solve it, here’s what it costs.

Charley Burtwistle (20:59):

So, actually you had mentioned talking about some of the known unknowns such as weather delays and things like that on the front end, but you’re actually talking about some of the unknown unknowns on the front end as well, too, and laying out the different options or buckets they could fall into and how each would be addressed.

Brady Bankston (21:16):

Yeah, sure, I mean, and both. It really goes both ways. So, ideally in every contract we have a contingency fund, and it depends on how we structure our contracts. We go a couple different ways in how we structure contracts. Ideally, we have a max budget that we’re working against. Our client is clear in what that is, and we build our contractual budget for the construction underneath that, so that when we find something that needs to be resolved or a client wants to add something, they have the freedom built into the contract to handle that situation. And it’s not as big of a shock. If we’re talking about site work, we know we have a big project right now, 8,000 square foot house, big footprint. We know there’s ledge. I can’t tell them how much it’s going to be because I don’t know how big the ledge is.

(22:20):

So, we can go two ways. We can wait until we get in, and it is what it is because either way, it is what it is. We’re not going to not build the house because there’s ledge there, not this house. Or we can do geo testing and actually see what’s underground to some degree and help us. But at the end of the day, we’re just going to find out that the ledge is there. We know it’s there. So, then when we get to it, contractually we’ve already laid out a map, and that’s what people need. People need a map. We need a map in order to manage it. If we’re just shooting from the hip all the time, then we can’t effectively communicate. So, then when we get into a situation where we need to solve a problem, we’ve already planned to solve unknown problems, we have a process in place to solve those problems and to effectively communicate those with the client and to effectively update our contract to reflect whatever the change is.

Charley Burtwistle (23:17):

Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense, and from my point of view, this entire interview I’ve been thinking about, this is what you need to do to make the client experience as good as it can possibly be, which is obviously true. But what you’re hitting on there is it also allows you to have the right framework to operate the business and build the project going live, dealing with that stuff. And taking the time on the front end, so when things come up, you already know how you in your business are going to handle them as well, too.

Brady Bankston (23:42):

Yes, exactly. You hit the nail on the head there. No pun intended – pun intended. But you’re right. No, it’s, ultimately, the client hired us to deliver a product, and I think a lot of times we get so hung up on making the client happy that ultimately we have to look at the back end. What’s going to make the client the happiest is a clear, quick executed project that’s as close to budget and as close to schedule as we can get. Hope none of my clients see this.

(24:17):

Sometimes you have to make the client a little bit unhappy during the process or … not you’ll have to make them that way, but sometimes they may be that way. They may want it a different way, but if you know that, nope, this is the correct path, we have to have given ourselves the freedom to make those decisions from day one, so that we can execute effectively when we’re in the trenches literally trying to make decisions. We don’t want to have to bring everything to the client every step of the way because we can’t deliver to them the way they need us and want us to deliver to them.

Charley Burtwistle (24:54):

That makes a ton of sense, and I can tell that you’ve really gotten this process ironed out just from repetition and continuing to push forward. I’d be interested for newer construction companies that are potentially listening to this right now, what kind of advice do you have for them that you’ve learned along the way that you wish you could go back and do things sooner?

Brady Bankston (25:16):

Balance.

Charley Burtwistle (25:18):

Balance.

Brady Bankston (25:18):

And capacity. Understanding what you’re capable of because, ultimately, you want to do more than you’re capable of, but not so much that you create chaos. So, understand what actually needs to be done, which means taking the scope of what you need to do and breaking it out into time, so you actually understand so you’re not overcommitting. If you overcommit, you will ultimately under deliver and there’s no way around that. Overcommitting leads to underdelivering. So, understanding what your capacity truly is, and then balancing your management style with what needs to be done and then hiring the right people as soon as possible. And hiring the right position, too. A lot of times we want to hire as a carpenter, I remember I need to hire a laborer. I created no time for myself by hiring a laborer.

(26:25):

All I did was create someone else that I have to manage. Now, at the time you think, “No, now I’m helping myself because I have a second set of hands.” Depends on what your goal is. So, understanding what your goals are, understanding your capacity, and then really balancing that, so that you can grow intentionally. Bringing in more work does not necessarily mean growing. And I learned that four or five years ago when I really took off, and I had so much work that I couldn’t do it all, and I was overcommitting and underdelivering to clients, and that’s just being real. It was a tough time, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. We still executed some really awesome projects, and I still held the company’s integrity intact. We didn’t deliver any subpar products, but they took too long, and we didn’t make the money that we should have made. So, balancing what your capacity is and hiring the right position and hiring the right person.

Charley Burtwistle (27:35):

I love that, and I think that’s a fantastic note to end us on as well. Brady, thank you so much for your time today. Really, really enjoyed talking to you, and I definitely learned a ton. I got some scribbled down notes on my notepad here, so if I ever start a construction business, I’ll know where to start as well, too. So, thank you very much, Brady. We just heard from Brady Bankston, very, very thankful for the time. I loved the message that he was preaching there and the mindset that he had going into these sorts of things. These are all opportunities, not challenges and opportunity for your business to showcase its problem-solving skills. Ensuring that they have the best client experience, but also ensuring that your business continues to move forward and have contingency plans based on what certain things could arise.

(28:19):

So, I love, love, love the way that he continued to stress communication on the front end with the client, during the process with your team, on the back end with the client as well, too. And just ensuring that’s kind of the constant guardrail throughout the entire construction process is clear communication and clear expectation settings. I think that those are valuable insights that aren’t just applicable to construction but are really applicable to any business everywhere. But I could tell that he means what he says and lives by it. So, I really appreciate him coming on today to tell us a bit more about that, and I think that’s definitely something that I’m going to go back to my desk and try to implement here at Buildertrend as well, too. So hopefully you guys enjoyed it as well. As always, if you guys could like, review and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts, I would really appreciate it. Otherwise, I will see you here next time on “The Building Code.” I’m Charley Burtwistle. Peace.