Starting a Commercial Construction Project: What I Need From You, and How Involved You Have to Be
Updated: Sep 20
The two questions I am asked most often by owners are the same two questions, phrased politely. What do you actually need from me to start? And how much of my time is this going to eat?
The honest answers are less than you think, and less than you fear. Starting a commercial construction project does not require a completed design, a fixed budget or a finished business case. It requires a clear problem and one person who can make decisions.
What I need from you to start
Six things unlock a real conversation. If you have four of them, that is enough to begin.
1. The problem, in your own words
Not the solution. The problem. You are out of space. The lease expires in fourteen months. Production keeps stopping because the layout is wrong. The building will not pass its next inspection. The tenant wants a model suite by spring. That sentence shapes everything that follows.
2. The site, the building or the shortlist
An address, a floor plan, a lease, a listing, or two or three options you are choosing between. Old drawings are useful even when they are wrong. A photo of the electrical room tells me more than an hour of description.
3. A budget range and where the number came from
Not a final number. A range, and its origin: board approved, lender indicated, a figure from a broker, or a guess. I would far rather hear an honest guess than a confident number nobody stands behind, because the whole project gets planned around it.
4. The date that actually matters
Every project has one real date and several soft ones. Lease expiry, a production start, a tenant possession, an academic year, an event. Tell me which is which. Fixed dates change the delivery strategy, and pretending a soft date is fixed costs money for no benefit.
5. Who decides
One name. Who signs, who can approve a change up to a stated value, and what has to go to a board, a landlord, a lender or a head office. Slow approvals are the single most common cause of avoidable delay, and knowing the path in advance is how we design around it.
6. The constraints you already know about
An operating business that cannot shut down. Weekend-only work. Union requirements. A landlord who controls the base building. A heritage designation. Hazardous materials from a previous fit-out. Constraints are not bad news. Undiscovered constraints are.
What I do not need on day one
You do not need drawings, a consultant already engaged, a finalised business case, a firm budget, or answers about finishes, fixtures and layout. Owners routinely delay the first conversation for months to assemble those things, and it is almost always the wrong order. Early input shapes what those documents should say. Producing them first usually means producing them twice.
How involved do you actually have to be?
Week to week: about an hour
Through design and construction, a typical owner spends thirty to sixty minutes a week on the project. A short progress call, a handful of emails, and a decision or two. Projects that consume ten hours a week of an owner's time are not more thorough. They are usually projects with no clear decision-maker, where every question travels around the organisation before it comes back.
The moments that genuinely need you
Kick-off and requirements. Two hours, once. This is the highest-value time you will spend on the entire project.
Design milestones. Two or three reviews, an hour each, with a written decision at the end of each.
The freeze. One meeting where you sign off the structure, envelope and services capacity and accept that changing them later costs real money.
Tender or price review. One to two hours to work through the numbers and the exclusions.
Anything over your change threshold. Ideally within forty-eight hours.
Substantial performance and closeout. A walkthrough, a deficiency list and a warranty handover.
The one thing you cannot delegate
You can delegate coordination, reporting, technical review, site attendance and paperwork. You cannot delegate deciding what the project is for. Every time a project loses its way, the cause traces back to a requirement nobody owned, and requirements can only be owned by the person who will live with the building.
Starting a commercial construction project: the first ninety days
Weeks one and two: an initial conversation, a site visit, and a written summary of the problem, constraints, budget range and dates as I understand them. If that summary is wrong, we have lost an afternoon rather than a quarter.
Weeks three to six: investigation. Existing conditions, a services review, the approvals path, and an early order-of-magnitude cost picture with the assumptions stated.
Weeks seven to twelve: delivery strategy and team. Which delivery model fits, who should be on the shortlist, what the procurement should ask for, and a schedule with the real dates in it.
At the end of that, you own a decision-ready package. Whether you proceed with me, with someone else, or not at all, you are further ahead than you were, and the money you have spent is a fraction of one change order.
The honest summary
Starting a commercial construction project needs a problem, a place, a rough number, a real date, a decision-maker and your known constraints. It costs you about an hour a week after that, provided one person can decide. Everything else is my job.
Common questions about starting a construction project
What do I actually need before I start?
Six things, and four of them are usually enough to begin: a problem you can state in a sentence, a location or a shortlist, a rough size, a target date that matters to the business, a sense of what the money can be, and someone empowered to decide. If you have the first four, a conversation is worth having.
What do I not need yet?
Drawings. An engaged consultant team. A finalised business case. A firm budget. Finishes. Every one of those gets easier and cheaper once the problem, the site and the approvals path are understood, and more than one owner has paid twice for design produced before the space was settled.
How much of my own time will this take?
Thirty to sixty minutes a week for the routine reporting and decisions, plus set pieces: the site selection, the design sign-off, the tender review, the deficiency walk. The weekly number stays manageable when the set pieces are scheduled in advance rather than landing as surprises.
What can I delegate, and what can I not?
Coordination, reporting, technical review, site attendance and paperwork can all be delegated, and should be. Deciding cannot. Approvals that sit waiting for an owner are the single most common cause of schedule slip on an otherwise well-run project.
If you have four of those six, that is enough to have the first conversation. You can see how I work with owners and project partners on project solutions, or simply book a short call.
This article is general information about commercial construction practice in Canada, not legal advice. Have your own counsel review your contract.
Connect with Carolee on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/carolee-w-turner-2002417
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