The Trusted Concrete Contractor

How Concrete and Masonry Contractors Stop Chasing Jobs and Start Attracting Clients Through Reputation, Trust, and Referrals

By: Eli Elario

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Ross gave Travis the biggest job Hess Concrete had ever held. Travis nearly lost it by waiting five days to make a two-minute phone call.

Travis Hess is a skilled concrete contractor running a power plant expansion, the largest scope of his career. When the subgrade in the northeast corner comes up soft five days before a major pour, he tells himself he'll know more by Wednesday. Wednesday becomes Thursday. Thursday becomes a Friday morning standing in the mud while the mechanical contractor's crew sits idle and the GC who trusted him says what Travis already knows: his father never made him wonder what was happening on the job.

The concrete was never the problem. Travis pours clean work. What he never built was the other half of the job, the weekly update, the safety orientation, the pour report, the two-hour RFI, the Sunday evening email to the GC before the weather window closed. The calls you make before anyone has to ask.

The Trusted Concrete Contractor follows Travis as he learns, one Thursday afternoon at a time, what it actually means to run a job the way the people depending on your work need you to run it. Curtis Weaver, a masonry contractor working the same site, has already figured this out. He doesn't lecture. He just shows Travis what a one-page weekly update looks like and lets Travis do the math.

This is a story about the gap between doing good work and being the contractor a GC calls back fifteen years later. That gap has nothing to do with your pour quality. It has everything to do with what you do with the information before the pour.