GMP and contract review
Qualifications, exclusions, allowances, contingency terms and the alignment between the price, the drawings and the specification.
The position you are in
The reading that matters lands in the week nobody has
You are accountable to a client for a price you did not build up. The guaranteed maximum price arrived with a signature date attached, it runs to several hundred pages across eight exhibits, and every person on your team is already carrying two other projects.
So the reading that would answer your client question gets done in the time that is left, which is an evening, and it covers the qualifications page and nothing else.
Why it happens
Why the capacity gap is structural
An owner representative business is priced on people, and people are allocated to projects that are running.
This is structural rather than a failure of anybody’s diligence. An owner’s representative business is priced on people, and people are allocated to projects that are running, not to the two weeks before a contract is executed.
The document review that carries the most value per hour of anything on the project therefore lands in the one period where nobody has capacity, and it lands on whoever is least busy rather than on whoever reads contracts best.
The alternative most firms consider is hiring, which means carrying a salaried analyst through the months when no contract is being signed and the review work that justified the hire is not there.
The work itself
What we examine
Any of the four modules, produced to your format and your document standard.
Risk and change registers
The exposures ranked by money, each carrying a trigger and a page reference your team can point to in front of the client.
Schedule assessment
Whether the completion date is supportable, where the float sits, and which owner decisions are already on the critical path.
Change order analysis
Cause, entitlement and pricing basis on an open change log, sorted into what to concede and what to contest, with reasons.
Allowances and contingency
What each allowance is likely to land at, and what the contingency rules let the contractor do without telling you.
Scope gap review
Package scopes read against each other and the drawings, with the party who should carry each gap named against it.
What you receive
Owners representative review support, item by item
In your template
Your format, your typography, your document numbering, unbranded. It goes out over your name and reads as your work because for the purposes of your client it is.
Notes and sources
Every line in the register carries the document and page it came from, so the person from your team in the room can defend it under questioning without calling us.
A call before it goes out
Forty five minutes to walk the register through, so your project manager knows which three items carry the value and which twenty are background.
What changes for you is specific. Your client receives the register on the date you promised it, in your format, with a ranked list of what to raise before signature. Your team spends the hour before the meeting reading a summary rather than the four days before it reading exhibits.
And the capacity question stops being a hiring decision. A firm that carries no analyst can still answer a client who asks what is wrong with this price, on the week the client asks.
How we work with you
You engage us, not your client
- You engage us, not your client. Our contract is with your firm and our invoice goes to your firm.
- We do not contact your client. Not during the work, not afterwards.
- We do not attend meetings unless you invite us.
- Our name does not appear on the deliverable unless you want it there.
- Everything is confidential to your firm, including the fact that we were involved.
Where it stops
What this is not
What an engagement is worth depends as much on what it refuses to do as on what it covers, so the limits are on the page rather than in the engagement letter alone.
We do not take your role
We do not hold your appointment or stand between you and your client. You keep the relationship and the mandate, start to finish.
We do not price work
We do not price work, produce quantities or produce a competing number. We read what has been priced and say what it does not cover.
We do not approach your clients
Not during the engagement and not afterwards. It is written into the engagement letter as a term rather than offered as an assurance.
How it runs
Turnaround, and what we need from you
Fixed fee against a named document set, never hourly. We work back from your date rather than quoting a duration.
Per work order
A named scope against a named document set, quoted and agreed in writing before any of the work starts.
Or a monthly retainer
A set number of analytical hours each month with priority turnaround, for firms that need the capacity already in place.
Turnaround
Set against your client’s date rather than ours. We work back from the date you have already promised them.
| Fee | Fixed, quoted against a named document set listed in the engagement. Not hourly. |
|---|---|
| Payment | Fifty percent on engagement, fifty percent before the final deliverable is released. |
| The clock | Delivery starts when the complete document set arrives, not when the engagement is signed. |
| Included | One kickoff call and one readout call. |
Before you commission it
Questions we are asked
If the answer to any of these decides whether this is right for you, ask before you commission it rather than after.
Will our client know you were involved?
Only if you tell them. The deliverable carries your branding or none at all, we do not contact them, and we do not appear in correspondence. Several firms use us on every pre signature review and their clients have never heard our name, which is the arrangement working as intended.
Can you work to our document template?
Yes, and it is the normal arrangement. Send us a previous report and we match the structure, the numbering and the tone. Where your template has sections we would not otherwise produce, we produce them, because a deliverable your client does not recognize creates a question you have to answer.
What if our client asks a question we cannot answer?
Ask us and we answer you, usually the same day. The working notes are written for exactly that moment, with the document and page behind every line. Where a question needs us in the room, we will join a call at your invitation, introduced however you prefer.
Do you work for contractors as well?
No, and not ever. We act on the owner side of the contract only. That is not a policy we could quietly change, because it is the reason an owner’s representative can hand our reading to a client without a conflict question arising.
We do the reading. You keep the relationship.
Send us the documents
2 days
Request a review
We reply within two business days with what this would cover on your project and whether it is worth the fee. If it is not, we say so.
Related reading
Three pieces from the same desk
Short notes on the mechanisms behind this work, written from the owner side of the contract.