EPISODE 447:

Before you hire your next superintendent, project manager, or estimator, you need to know whether you have a capacity problem or a process problem. Todd Dawalt walks construction business owners through a five-step hiring framework to make smarter, more strategic staffing decisions.

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👉 If your PMs are stretched thin, your supers can't be everywhere, and every question still finds its way back to you, it's easy to assume you need to hire. But in a lot of construction businesses, the bottleneck isn't headcount. It's a pre-construction deficiency, a fuzzy accountability chart, or a performance issue everyone's been working around.

Todd walks through the five things you need to do before you bring anyone on: confirm who's actually accountable for what, audit your handoff process, run the math on real management hours, have the honest conversation about whether someone on your current team isn't owning their role, and forecast the full cost of the hire, not just the salary.

The goal isn't to avoid hiring. It's to hire at the right time, for the right reason, with the financial data to back it up. Because adding headcount to a broken system doesn't fix the system. It just gives the chaos more room to spread.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Short-Staffed or Just Disorganized?

01:40 When Hiring Makes Things Worse

04:08 The Five-Step Framework

07:50 Business Evaluation Call

10:42 Step 1: Clarify Accountability First

14:32 Step 2: Fix Pre-Construction Before You Hire

18:44 Step 3: Do the Math on Hours

21:22 Step 4: Is It a Capacity or Performance Problem?

24:50 Step 5: Know the True Cost of the Hire

31:14 Three Hiring Pitfalls to Avoid

37:54 Five-Minute Action Step

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The Construction Leading Edge Podcast helps construction business owners maximize their revenue, eliminate chaos, systematize their work, and win back their time.