Category: General Contractors

The big money was in the general contracting business, which included building homes and apartment buildings. But we didn’t want to be in direct competition with our father and brothers, and the only way to avoid it was to subcontract out the work. So we became a middleman, introducing contractors who might otherwise not have met.

We knew something about carpentry and painting and plumbing and roofing, but we couldn’t build a house from start to finish. We didn’t know how to put up an entire house, which materials were best for different purposes, what prices to pay for them, or where to buy them. We didn’t know anything about financing either: getting loans, negotiating interest rates, or writing up legal documents.

My job was to find potential customers and bring them together with general contractors who could do the whole job. My brother’s job was to be on call if there were any problems that needed immediate attention.**

General contractors do not design houses. If you want a custom home, you hire an architect and a builder, not a general contractor. A general contractor specializes in remodeling existing homes, or building new ones that are copies of other homes.

The reason for this difference is simple: It’s easier to build than to design.

It’s not just that designing takes more skill; the problem is that it requires more knowledge of the future. Designing a house requires knowing how the house will be used, what kind of neighborhood it will be in, what materials will be available, and dozens of other things. You can’t learn all those things without building the kind of house you are planning on the building; they are part of what you are trying to figure out.