Why We Built SCPM
Forty years of building taught me that margin is lost to structure, not effort. The SCPM framework was the answer on paper. The software is the answer at scale. Here is the whole story.
By Ed Warmoth, Founder of Conquest Consultants
I spent forty years as a general contractor and never lost money on a job. People hear that and assume it was luck, or a knack, or a market. It was none of those. It was structure – a way of running the work that I built, corrected, and hardened one project at a time until the failures other contractors treated as bad luck simply stopped happening on my jobs. This is the story of turning that into something you can use, and why, on July 28, it became software.
The same failure, over and over
Early on I noticed that margin never disappeared in one dramatic event. It leaked – a little in the gap between the estimate and the field, a little in the change that never got papered, a little in the job whose real cost no one computed until it was too late to act. The leaks were not random. They were the same leaks, in the same places, on job after job. And if a problem is that consistent, it is not bad luck. It is structure – missing structure – and structure is something you can install.
From a practice to a framework
So I installed it. Over the years the specific fixes became a system, and the system became the Systematic Construction Project Management™ (SCPM) framework – a discipline for running a construction operation so the money you earn actually reaches the bottom line. Through Conquest Consultants I have spent years installing that framework inside other contractors' businesses, and it works. But consulting has a ceiling: I can only be in so many rooms.
A framework tells you what discipline looks like. Software makes the disciplined thing the easy thing – on every job, for every person, every day.
Why software
A framework lives or dies on whether people follow it under pressure, and construction is nothing but pressure. The only way to make the structure hold on every job – not just the ones I am watching – was to build it into the tools people already touch every day. So we did. SCPM Project puts the whole framework into one system, with construction-native accounting built in. SCPM Construction Accounting brings the financial half of it to firms that need that first. Forty years of hard-won structure, finally in a form that does not depend on me being in the room.
Both launch July 28, timed to SEBC, where I will be announcing them in person. If you have followed this writing for the margin and the structure behind it, this is that structure – built to run your business. I will have more to say on each in the coming days.
Structure defeats chaos.
If margin is leaking through the gaps in your operation, a direct conversation is where it starts.