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Position Description:

Our client is creating a new position of Director of Preconstruction. This position offers a long-term prospective pathway to become one of the senior-most construction executives in the company, with regular interaction with C-suite executives.

Our client owns two office-to-residential conversion projects in pre-development in Washington, DC totaling 1.8M square feet, the first of which is in the construction drawing phase and being actively bid to contractors. They are bidding both to general contractors and subcontractors directly and aim to have the work substantially bought out by the second quarter of 2024. The immediate responsibilities of the role are a successful buyout of the first project with a hands-on approach for each subcontractor, along with a direct engagement for potential direct subcontracts with trades following structure and envelope.  The Director of Preconstruction will be the point of contact and face of the company for Washington, DC general contractors and subcontractors.

The medium-term goal of the DC activities is to grow the skillset, network, and reputation to directly field, contract, and manage all subcontractors on future DC construction projects (if the pool of existing general contractors is deemed not sufficient to meet the end cost and quality goals). To this end, our client expects to be in touch with every aspect and minutia of a hired GC’s scope and buyout to successfully manage the GC and have the relationship and ability to perform the same if called to do so. The Director of Preconstruction will be the vanguard of this  expansion into  Washington, DC; an enterprising individual who has field and office experience, combining leadership traits with the intimate knowledge of the costs which constitute each subcontractor’s scope.

The candidate may be based in either Washington, DC or Philadelphia, with at least 1-2 days per week spent in each Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

Critical skill sets for this role include:

• High level of comfort reading Architectural, Structural, MEP plans
• Ability to create scope sheets, building on a library of what has already been created
• Estimation and takeoff ability
• Ability to create a project budget, building on templates that have been created from past projects
• Knowledge of relevant unit value metrics for all major trades, and the ability to discern unit values resourcefully from subcontractors and dissecting bids
• Ability to create a thorough schedule of values for all trades, building on company library, to ensure proper cost loading and sectoring of the subcontract for billing and managing risk

Critical performance traits for this role include:

• Comfortable taking responsibility for a project and proactively engaging people and resources to achieve the goal of a fully contracted buyout within the budget constraints
• Salesmanship and persuasiveness in engaging valuable subcontractors (i.e. beyond the roster that every GC typically bids to) and engaging them in company’s project to competitively bid
• Ability to interact with smaller subcontractors without administrative staff
• Comfortable presenting both good and bad information, identifying risks along with solutions or mitigation measures
• An entrepreneurial spirit to push past roadblocks and industry norms, not settling for what an institutional GC or Subcontractor finds is comfortable and creating new solutions

To learn more about this position, contact: Jon Nowikowski | (412) 339-5376 | jnowikowski@crownsearch.com