Construction Curiosities #82
Top 5 Tips For A PM Wanting To Get A Promotion 📈 | What's too cold for Concrete? 🥶
Hey! Happy Saturday! Matt here.
Welcome to the Construction Curiosities newsletter!
A special warm welcome to the 23 new subscribers this week!
This weekly Newsletter explores the Curiosities of the Construction Industry. It's meant to help Drag the Construction Industry into the 21st Century by making you think, smile, and become motivated to drive innovation in your realm of the industry.
The Newsletter will focus on 4 primary areas of Innovation:
Technology & Tools
Digital Marketing & Social Media
Training/ Education/ Mentorship
Being People First
We won’t hit on each of these topics every week but that’s what is in rotation!
Summary
This week we will look at:
Top 5 Tips For A PM Wanting To Get A Promotion
One Video: What’s too cold for concrete?
One Program: Content Creators Gym Trainer LAST CALL
Top Headlines from Last Week in ConTech
One Meme: Underground Unexpected Utility
Top 5 Tips For A PM Wanting To Get A Promotion
by Josh Luebker, Owner of Sulpher Prairie Management
It feels like my entire career was striving for the next title. Titles don’t matter, but the compensation does. Companies like to leverage how valuable a person is to a company to how much they’re willing to pay them. So here are 5 tips on how to get a promotion at work, increase your value to a company and in the end make more money!
1. Understand the Contract
It’s like beating a dead horse. Everyone on LinkedIn posts about how important contracts are so it’s easy to just get numb to the real message. The best advice I got was early in my career, “Know the contract better than anyone else on site.” Contracts are literally the product the client wants, how they want it done, when they expect it done and what rules to play by during the project duration.
By using the specs, scope of work, and the detailed drawings, you’ll understand the product expected and how the client wants it done, so you don’t have a scenario of this is what we always do and it’s not right. What “we always do” is the bare minimum. What the client wants, may be spares for future expansion.
By understanding the schedule and the rules to play by, you bill on time, have less phone calls for fires, and ultimately have a 5 star review making that client ask for you next time.
2. Understand Construction Company Finance
Construction Finance is the planning and direction of financial transactions for a company. This translates to PM’s to understand the culture of contract resolution, future business, and working with subcontractors/vendors.
By understanding the company’s position on things like change orders, negotiating conflicts instead of being rigid on your perspective, and building partnerships to have in the future as everyone scales their business, you’ll be invaluable. Point #4 goes into more detail on how.
3. Understand Construction Industry Accounting
Construction Industry Accounting is the opposite of finance, instead of the planning and direction of funds, it’s the history and record of how funds were allocated. This is important to have growth, to learn problems within an organization and to learn to see patterns before they become issues.
This is extremely critical for being promoted. You want to be able to read a project financials and understand problems within minutes to see where to focus attention.
4. Understand Relationships
Construction is surprisingly more about relationships than any other area. Relationships win you work by having opportunities others don’t to bid, winning jobs when you aren’t the low price, and getting better deals from vendors due to your company treating them well in payment terms.
Understand you may not work with someone today, but they may be the most influential person you work with tomorrow so treat everyone with respect. Think of if the shoe was on the other foot and you had a vendor making your job tough, when you get promoted, you will actively push to avoid that vendor with your entire team.
5. Understand Your Blindspots
The last thing to work on is self reflection and self realization. It’s important to know yourself to know what you are good at, what you tend to avoid, and what you need to work on. There are a ton of ways to approach yourself.
You can lean into your strengths or work on your weaknesses. I prefer a middle route. One where you lean on your strengths to get things done that need to happen immediately and when you have time and you notice you’re avoiding a task because it seems time consuming or intimidating, take uninterrupted time to focus on it, set meetings with other colleagues to understand multiple views to make your own style.
Being a project manager is all stylistic but following a sequence of events. If you can help your company be guaranteed work, see the vision of where they want to go, organize the accounting to get there, build working relationships and work your blindspots, you will be the next Senior Vice President of the company.
Thank you Josh for participating and letting me gif out your work. Y’all should go follow Josh on LinkedIn where he posts awesome content like the above.
Do you want to be featured in an Upcoming Newsletter via a Guest Article or a Regular(ish) Contributor in 2024?
Hit me up at matt@constructionyeti.com. And let’s talk about it!
One Video
I thought this video would be fitting for this week…
One Program
Last week I announced a program I had been working through for a while. The Construction Content Creator Gym Trainer Program.
I will be closing applications on Wednesday 1/17/24. This should have given you enough time to see if your habits will stick on their own or if you need some accountability help.
You can catch up on last week’s post here and learn about the 90-day/ 10x Guarantee: https://constructionyeti.substack.com/i/140289383/one-program
For more information and to apply head to the Google form: HERE
Top Headlines from Last Week in ConTech
11 startups raised $103m in funding (2 undisclosed).
The most interesting startup this week was BluSmart who are an Electric Vehicle (EV) ride hailing service. They raised $24m to build electric charging infrastructure. They view the lack of infrastructure as the largest bottleneck to adoption and supply on their platform. It follows a wider trend of transportation startups building infrastructure to drive growth in their core business.6 Key Policy & Regulatory Changes
The key change this week is in the US with the Biden Administrations plans to define what a ‘zero emission’ building is. Current definitions and sustainable building policy varies from state to state. This definition will provide a national framework.And we saw 4 Acquisitions, 10 News Articles and 18 new jobs posted.
If you like this sort of content and want more, check out Bhragan’s substack: Last Week in Contech: Construction Technology startup funding, news and policy changes each week. No fluff. No hype.
One Meme
After a while, where it’s supposed to be is the last place you’d expect it to be. 😬
See y’all next week! ✌
