We recently gave a restaurant trade magazine some tips on budgeting for a restaurant construction timeline. While the construction best practices we shared might be common knowledge with our experienced Chicago restaurant construction clients, I realize novice restaurant owners or entrepreneurs opening fast-casual franchise restaurants may not know how to create a successful restaurant construction [...]
Should You Hire A Commercial General Contractor Who Works For a Competing Brand?
For as long as I’ve been in the commercial construction business, which is 30 years, there have been two conflicting trains of thought about clients hiring a general contractor who also works for a competitor. If you did retail construction for Hollywood Videos then you couldn’t build Blockbusters. If you worked for Auto Zone, you [...]
Commercial Construction Highs and Lows of 2011
As 2011 comes to a close, it’s time for us to look back on the commercial construction building trends, news and projects of this past year and share our thoughts on the highs and lows in the industry.
HIGH – Everyone was submitting drawings in 2011. We saw drawings for new Chicago restaurant projects, retail construction work, office renovations, school construction and learning center additions – you name it, we saw it. In fact, our commercial construction budget work was back to 2008 levels. It was optimistic and certainly gave us a lot of commercial construction news to talk about around the water cooler.



