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Television Commercials: Telephone (1970) Three TV commercials; one set in St. Louis, Missouri, another on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, and a quick review of telephone history. Internet Archive

A Few Of The Places We've Been And Some Of The Things We've Done

JCS can bring you the ability to make things happen... to meet deadlines... to build and supervise a team... to get results. With the experience needed to complete projects on time, on budget and with the desired results; the know how to effectively create a plan, implement it, monitor its progress and deliver what was promised; the savvy to guide a project from bid to a bottom-line result? With nearly forty years in the construction game, traveling anywhere, from South Carolina to New Mexico - from Michigan to Alabama, we've plowed fiber, copper or coax in 30 states and bid in 37.

The heavy and highway contracting firm tends to be less subject to bankruptcy than the residential contractor or the commercial building contractor. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that heavy and highway work (sometimes categorized as public works construction) tends to be more stable as to volume as a function of time. In addition, because of the high equipment investment needed to operate, the heavy and highway contractor tends to be a large firm with a relatively sound financial structure.

Within the classifications of residential, commercial, and heavv and highway contractors is a class of contractors referred to as speciality contractors or subcontractors. These types of firms continue to be founded by craftsmen and highly skilled individuals. Typically, the subcontractor is small as to the number of employees and its volume of work. Subcontractors normally have relatively low overhead but are highly dependent on labor and labor productivity. Competition tends to be high and profit margins vary depending on the type of speciality work performed.

Unlike the general contractor, the subcontractor is normally only responsible for his own work. As such, the management skills needed to coordinate the skills of several labor crafts or flows of several types of materials are not vital to the subcontractor's profit on a project or its financial stability. What is needed is an ability to perform a highly skilled type of work and to be able to obtain high productivity while carrying out the work.

The size of the firm and the annual volume of work it undertakes are constrained by the resources available to the firm and its bonding capacity. Perhaps the best measure as to the size of a firm is its bonding capacity. Since the firm is required to submit a bond to the owner before undertaking a project, its bonding capacity limits the size of projects it can undertake and thus plays a role in the annual volume of work the firm performs.

More often than not, the construction firm starts as a small firm. One classification system used classifies a small firm as a firm doing less than one million dollars of work volume annually. The break point between a middle or average sized firm and a large firm can be thought of as an annual work volume of twenty million dollars. Whereas some of the approximately 800,000 existing construction firms started as small firms and have increased their bonding capacity enough to be classified as medium or large firms, many other firms have continued to operate as small firms. Not every firm can or should substantially increase its size or annual volume of work. Many a firm has gone bankrupt trying to carry out its objective of joining the "top 400" firms.

The larger firm does have certain advantages in regard to the construction industry. Foremost among these advantages is the fact that on a percentage basis, the overhead per dollar value of work performed is less than that for the smaller firm. This is evidenced by comparison of income statements for the small and large firms. This ability to operate with a lower percentage overhead results in the larger firm being more competitive and being able to obtain a somewhat higher profit margin. Since the larger contractor can always take on projects that are less than its bonding capacity, it often is in a position to pick and choose from available projects rather than to have to seek to be low bidder on each and every project. The size of the firm relative to its capital structure may also result in the large firm being somewhat less sensitive to economic slowdowns than is the smaller firm.

The small firm is not without its advantages. Normally, it does not have the management problems that are characteristic of a firm that is large and increasing in size. In addition, the rewards of operating successfully are received by the owner and not shared with stockholders or investors as is typical in the case of the large firm. Naturally, the reverse is also true in regard to losses the firm might absorb. However the small firm, because of its relativelv low dollar operating overhead, may be in a position to "shut down the shop" during a slowdown. Many a residential home building contractor has seen it fit to being a carpenter for another firm during an economic slowdown only to return to the home building business when the economy recovered.

In general, the size of the firm is not dictated alone by its technical skills. Its growth has to be accompanied by growth in management skills and changes in its financial makeup. While not always the case, a bonding company will consider all three factors of technical skills, management ability, and financial soundness in increasing or decreasing a firm's bonding capacity.

Yet another decision to be made in regard to the type of work the firm is to perform, concerns itself with the degree of responsibility the firm is to enter into with the project owner. In the past its decision was limited to a decision to be a general contractor or a subcontractor. However, the construction industry has witnessed some dramatic contractor-owner relationship changes in the past decade. As such, the question as to the contractor relationship to the owner must recognize the following types of relationships.

1. General Contractor
2. Subcontractor
3. "Spec Builder"
4. Developer
5. Design-Build Contractor
6. Construction Manager

The general contractor and subcontractor relationships to the owner are the traditional builder-owner relationship in the construction industry. Typically, the general contractor has a contract with the owner for constructing the entire project in question.

Construction, the Third Way: Managing Cooperation and Competition in Construction This book describes current best practice in managing construction. It is based on case studies of leading practice responding to demands from customers that construction match the value and quality that international competition is forcing on their own businesses. The case studies show that major customers now partner with construction firms to find more efficient ways of working.

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