For those of you who attend the Pile Driving Contractor’s Association’s April 3-5 conference in Saint Louis, I will be speaking on Construction Risks for the Pile Driving Contractor.This article is about the business side of the pile driving company — making it in today’s “faster, better, cheaper, safer” project paradigms. Those paradigms challenge the Contractor to rethink his business. But some old school lessons are right there for the taking, and yes, as Shakespeare wrote in Merchant of Venice, it is about “First, let’s kill all the lawyers”. Or at least put an end to the legalistic, risk adverse way of the last 70 years — no longer a competitive approach to national or construction industry success.

When a pile driving contractor bids a large project, often it literally “bets the company.” The contract, financial, and safety risks are potentially high. Against these steep risks, the contract forms, work procedures, insurance, and business relationships only provide so much comfort if something goes really wrong. Whether a differing site condition that triples the shifts, a specification that does not work, a tough owner or prime contractor, project delays, a crane accident or utility obstruction, somehow the finger pointing often seems to aim at the pile driving contractor, the one who is just doing his job, because at the bottom of the project “food chain.”