What Are You Really Paying a General Contractor For
General contractor project management is what you're really paying for — and most homeowners don't realize it until a project starts to go sideways.
In this episode of Your Home Building Coach, Bill Reid goes deep on the first two pillars of what makes a great general contractor: expertise and project management. This is Episode 46 in the World of Construction series, building on Episode 45's introduction to contractor types and the Fred vs. Ace framework. If you haven't listened to Episode 45 yet, go back and do that first — it sets the foundation for everything covered here.
The central insight of this episode: experience and expertise are not the same thing. You can have 30 years in construction and still be making the same mistakes as year three. A truly qualified GC is like a senior project manager in any other industry — they don't need to know how to do everything, but they absolutely need to hold the right people accountable for doing it right. That's the distinction.
Bill walks through all 13 fundamentals of what general contractor project management actually looks like on a daily basis — from disseminating plans into an executable battle plan, to managing subcontractor deployment and material procurement, to implementing quality control throughout the project, to completing on time. If your GC isn't managing all of that, you are. And you didn't sign up for that.
Then the episode goes deep on the one element of project management that reveals more about a GC than almost anything else: the construction schedule. Bill explains critical path in plain language (it's simpler than it sounds), walks through the tile story — a real-world example of what happens when there's no schedule — and lays out exactly what a complete construction schedule must include. The central message: if there's no schedule, you aren't getting what you paid for.
In This Episode You'll Discover:
• Why experience and expertise are fundamentally different — and only one builds your project right
• How to ask interview questions that require demonstration, not just description
• All 13 fundamentals of general contractor project management in plain language
• Why communication is the most underrated GC skill — and two questions that reveal it instantly
• What critical path means in residential construction
• What a complete construction schedule must include: materials, subs, inspections, milestones, progress payments
• Why the schedule should exist before you sign a contract — not after
• How to request and evaluate sample schedules from any GC candidate
• Your responsibilities as the homeowner within the project schedule
• A preview of the third pillar — team building — coming soon
KEY TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 — Introduction: The Three Pillars of GC Quality
2:15 — Experience vs. Expertise
5:30 — The Senior Project Manager Analogy
8:00 — Testing Expertise in an Interview
10:45 — 13 Fundamentals of Project Management
14:00 — Communication: Most Underrated GC Skill
17:30 — The Construction Schedule
20:00 — Critical Path Explained
22:30 — The Tile Story
27:00 — What a Schedule Must Include
31:00 — Schedule Before You Sign
34:30 — Homeowner Responsibilities
37:00 — Team Building Preview
38:30 — Resources and Closing
RELATED EPISODES:
• Episode 45: General Contractors: Who They Are and What Sets Them Apart — establishes the contractor type framework and Fred vs. Ace archetypes that Episode 46 builds directly on
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ABOUT YOUR HOST: Bill Reid is Your Home Building Coach with 35+ years of experience in residential construction. He created The Awakened Homeowner methodology to enlighten, empower, and protect homeowners through their building and remodeling journeys.
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NEXT EPISODE: Episode 47 — Team Building: How Great General Contractors Choose and Manage Their People. We'll cover the employees, subcontractor relationships, and supplier networks that make or break a project.
Keywords: general contractor project management, what does a general contractor do, construction schedule, critical path, hiring a contractor, home construction timeline, construction project management, home renovation planning, the awakened homeowner, world of construction
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