How to find the right foreman

Question

Brief overview I own a remodeling and General Construction company and I am Reaching a point with my company that I am need of a foreman to run jobs i cannot be at. I have had two what I thought were good candidates.  But they have shown me otherwise with constant mistakes when left alone and a lack of attention to detail. Does anyone have any ideas, maybe i'm approaching this incorrectly. Any advise will be appreciated thank you

Jim Goebel · Answer

I'm also interested in this - we own rentals so I have functionally been the foreman on the projects/houses we have completed.  Suffice it to say, we have struggled endlessly it seems to try to find that 'right person' who can truly take over/lead a project successfully from start to finish.  This is primarily for residential real estate projects.  The lack of attention to detail is one thing that has cropped up time and again, but also the reliability factor, and principal-agent issues (ie: our person doesn't care as much as we do and doesn't document their work, etc).  I suppose this is a 'foundational' problem as for us, we will have a hard time scaling our business unless we figure this out.

Pedro Martins · Answer

@Bradley Lee, I do not have any experience in the contracting/construction world. But I do have a lot of experience in the corporate world managing people and growing them to more empowered jobs.

First of all, things take time. you can't just suddenly tell someone you're in charge and expect that everything will be done properly.  Have you tried giving them a very detailed daily scope of work and checking on the progress daily? I know that this would be a lot of work, but they would learn from your scope and from your check - then you only check them every few days and finally you start asking them to create a detailed scope based on your general instructions... and so on...