Bill Mills

speaker

271 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 3 Dec

Bill Mills’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Builders, Budgets, and Beers · Construction Accounting Success with Bill Mills · 3 Dec 2025 podcast

And so they're going on feel.

um which a lot of times is one of the best indicators but it's good to have data to back that up and say this is off the rails we need to change abort um we need to do change orders um we need to re-scope and uh stop before this thing gets worse for sure just stop like recognize the bleeding stop the bleeding yeah and and your comment like war stories about

All it takes is one bad job and that can sink the ship.

And I've seen it happen.

I've seen it happen right before my eyes.

And when it's a surprise, when it's too late to know that this thing is off the rails and we can't turn it around.

So you want to stay ahead of that.

That might not be a bad outcome if I understand you correctly, where

um it's a good surprise yeah yeah um hey these have been accounted for one cost has been accounted for twice and so that's just that's an accounting error that leads you to the wrong conclusion um but that's not um that's not reality reality is margins are are in um reality higher um but one thing maybe to answer your question is so war story uh with a local

um this is a pretty big outfit it's electrical contractor electrical contractor um they do some hvac work and they have um pretty big civil jobs and so one indicator is profit fade so these are jobs that span over a year and they're using percentage of completion contracting and so year after year as jobs complete there's a huge profit fade on the back half of the job

And all the jobs that are, you know, 30, 40, less than 50% complete, everything's great.

Their estimates are for solid profits.

And so the estimates are wrong, the management's wrong.

But if you are regularly having profit fade, jobs don't finish like we had planned for.

you're not estimating correctly you're not managing correctly you probably don't have timely information to manage correctly and so that's a real indicator that there's there's a problem in your system to give you the reliable data to make informed decisions about estimates and then when those estimates vary from what you thought they'd be you can confidently and swiftly address

That's it.

Or things change and there's some out of scope stuff, but the estimates aren't timely addressed for that.

So we don't have timely change orders or we don't call a timeout and address on the front end before it's too late.

scope changes whether it's a builder variance or a client variance you should just be building and issuing a change order why doesn't that happen um well if it's too late um you i mean you lose the leverage if you're not timely um to negotiate to reason to um be able to demonstrate what happened whose fault it was

And so if you don't have the information, you don't know, and you can't have those conversations with the client.

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