By the time October rolls around, most of the year is already spoken for. The jobs that are going are already in motion, and everybody has more or less made peace with how the year is going to finish. Instead of asking where something stands, builders start asking what next year looks like.
The deciding factor on who gets those jobs comes down to whether your contractors told you the truth about what they could handle.
Every shell contractor in Florida is going to say they can handle next year's work, whether or not they actually can. Ask any of us if we can take on your volume and the answer will be some version of absolutely, we'd love to. Very few of the people saying it are actually running the math while they say it. They want the work, and they’ll say whatever it takes to get it.
We know how that plays out, because we've watched it happen from the outside plenty of times. When a contractor commits to more work than they have people for, nothing bad happens right away. January looks great. The trouble shows up around April, when the crew that was supposed to be at your site is still finishing somebody else's, and now two builders are waiting on the same fourteen guys.
That's why we'd rather tell a partner in October that we can take twelve of the sixteen projects.
The reason we can give that kind of answer at all is that our teams remain consistent. A team that has worked together for years knows what it can actually get done in a week, so when a builder asks us about volume, we're not guessing. That's also why the jobs go smoother once they start. Nobody on a CSCI team needs somebody standing over them to do it right.
What we ask of our partners is pretty simple, which is to bring us into the conversation while the calendar is still a draft. When we're in it early, we can tell you where next spring is going to get tight, and sometimes a small adjustment in October is what keeps a much bigger problem from happening in April. We can also give you a real price instead of a placeholder that changes depending on the month.
Next year is getting decided right now. The builders who come out of the fall with a schedule they trust are usually the ones who asked the uncomfortable questions in October. We try to answer them honestly even when it costs us work, because we'd rather turn something down than promise it twice.
