Look after the subbie
I was chatting recently with Nick Abley, CEO of the national company Badge Constructions. As part of the conversation, he said: “I tell all my project managers and supervisors to ensure they look after our subbies. Because they’re often smaller businesses, the owner is generally up before dawn organising the day. After they get home, they have families to be with and then they’re invoicing, quoting and playing catch up into the evening.”
Nick’s approach caught me by surprise as it was the first time I had ever heard a business leader express it. And upon recounting the conversation to another construction business owner, he told me he had never thought of it that way as they often drive their subbies hard.
The conversation highlighted why empathy matters — the word itself literally means in feeling, or feeling into, someone else’s experience.
While it’s important to adapt our leadership styles to the situation and the people we lead, I think empathy is an essential underlying trait for leading people well. And when we treat people well, they are more likely to treat us well in return.
PS. It’s also worth noting that it’s extremely important to pay subbies on time. They are often smaller businesses that don’t have the luxury of huge cashflows.
Ray
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I don’t know Badge as we don’t do construction works and for a very specific reason. It is a race to the bottom and I’ve never seen a construction company behave the way Nick says they do.
On piece of evidence here is the make up of the board at Master Builders. It is heavily stacked with large construction businesses and therefore their votes outweigh the sunnies every time.
The reason ECA, now Master Electricians was formed 80 years ago was to help electricians to get paid by builders. This remains one of our key objectives today.
The two biggest issues in construction today are unfair contracts and being paid on time. DIT contracts now have payment terms of 10 days from invoice date yet most construction companies push subby payments to 30 days from end of month. Some 60-120. And they now require all subbys to pay $50 per month to subscribe to pay apps for invoicing as the builder will not accept invoices any other way.
Subby’s are to scared to fight this through fear of losing work.
Your Story from Nick here if true, provides hope. I would jump at the opportunity to discuss this further but to add actions to words, I wonder if Nick would out his money where his mouth is and provide evidence of his worlds in actions for his own business and further to this use his position to lead by example and support the implementation of security of payments legislation reform ensuring subbys are not out of pocket due to unfair contracts, payment terms and builders going broke.
Let me know if there is an opportunity to create some
Positive change here.
I have to agree with Troys Comments below, as someone who has been a subbie for more than 40 years the sentiment in your article is very rare if at all where Builders treat the subby with anything but contempt to obtain the greatest amount of work for the lowest possible price while passing on as much risk as possible to every subcontractor. Over years as Chair of the Australian Subcontractors Association i saw firsthand the way subbies were treated in every trade and witnessed many going under because of the treatment while the builders just moved on to screw another subcontractor in the same way. I hope things have changed but I very much doubt it.