Story by Chris Beaudin / December 18, 2025
Why the best strategic deviations start with the strongest processes
The construction industry has long recognized that good projects can die in pre-construction. Inadequate planning, scope gaps, unrealistic schedules, and misaligned expectations turn promising opportunities into margin-eroding nightmares. But there’s an earlier, more insidious problem that costs contractors millions: investing pre-construction resources in projects that were never truly viable in the first place.
This is the gap that separates process-driven contractors from strategically agile ones—and it’s where BEHKO’s “Build Ready” methodology creates competitive advantage.
A recent Construction Dive article argued that strategy should trump process when pursuing construction bids. The premise is sound: rigid adherence to go/no-go criteria can cause contractors to miss transformational opportunities. Sometimes you need to pursue a project that’s slightly too small, in a secondary market, or with less-than-ideal competitive dynamics because it opens the door to a relationship that will define your next decade.
But this framing suggests a binary choice: follow the process or make the strategic play. In reality, the most successful contractors don’t choose between these options. They use comprehensive processes to make better strategic decisions.
The question isn’t whether to deviate from your process. It’s whether your process gives you the intelligence to deviate wisely.
Most go/no-go processes operate at the pre-construction stage. A project lands on your desk, your team scores it against established criteria, and leadership decides whether to invest pre-construction resources in pursuing it.
This approach has a fundamental flaw: by the time you’re making the go/no-go decision, you’ve already committed time and resources to preliminary analysis. If you decide not to pursue, you’ve wasted capacity. If you decide to pursue a strategic opportunity outside your criteria, you’re doing so with incomplete information.
BEHKO’s Build-Ready process operates earlier in the pipeline. Before significant pre-construction investment, we conduct comprehensive due diligence across seven critical dimensions:
The result is a comprehensive intelligence package that transforms strategic decision-making.
With comprehensive Build-Ready intelligence, strategic deviations become calculated opportunities rather than hopeful gambles. Consider three common scenarios:
Your go/no-go criteria say projects under $50M don’t justify pre-construction investment. A $35M project appears with a Fortune 500 client you’ve been courting for three years. Traditional process says no-go. Strategic intuition says this is your entry point.
Without Build Ready: You override the process based on strategic value, but you’re flying blind on project-specific risks. You discover late in pre-construction that the scope is poorly defined and the site has environmental challenges. Your “entry point” becomes a money-losing relationship-strainer.
With Build Ready: Early analysis reveals the scope gaps and environmental risks. You still pursue strategically, but you structure your pre-construction approach to address these specific issues. You build contingency buffers into your estimate. You negotiate scope clarification milestones into the contract. Your strategic bet succeeds because you saw the risks coming.
Your target market is the Southeast, but a major healthcare project appears in the Southwest. It’s outside your geographic criteria but represents exactly the sector expertise you want to showcase.
Without Build Ready: You don’t know the local labor market, the regulatory environment, or the regional subcontractor landscape. You price it using Southeast assumptions and either lose the bid or win it with inadequate margin.
With Build Ready: Comprehensive analysis reveals that Southwest labor costs are 12% higher but local subcontractors are more sophisticated and reliable. You identify regulatory differences that actually work in your favor. Your bid reflects reality, and you enter the new market profitably.
A project scores highly on every metric except competition—there are six qualified bidders including your top competitor. Standard process says pass. But the project is for your second-largest client on a property adjacent to their current facility.
Without Build Ready: You pursue because of the relationship but can’t differentiate your approach. You win on price alone, sacrificing margin to maintain the relationship.
With Build Ready: Deep analysis reveals that four of the six competitors lack experience with this specific building type. You identify value-engineering opportunities others will miss. You structure a bid that wins on value, not price, protecting margin while deepening the relationship.
The most successful construction executives share a common trait: they trust their intuition about strategic opportunities. But intuition isn’t magical—it’s pattern recognition informed by experience and data.
Build Ready doesn’t replace executive intuition; it enhances it. When a leader looks at a comprehensive Build Ready analysis and says, “Despite these yellow flags, we should pursue this,” that’s not contradiction—that’s informed strategic judgment.
The difference is profound. Leaders making strategic decisions without comprehensive data experience anxiety and second-guessing. Leaders with Build Ready intelligence experience confidence and clarity. They know exactly which risks they’re accepting and which strategic benefits justify those risks.
Here’s an underappreciated benefit of the Build Ready approach: speed.
When every project requires full preconstruction analysis before you can make a go/no-go decision, your pipeline moves slowly. Projects sit in limbo while teams gather information. By the time you decide not to pursue, you’ve burned weeks of calendar time and thousands of dollars in resource costs.
Build Ready accelerates decision velocity. Fast no’s free up resources for better opportunities. Fast yes’s let you allocate your best preconstruction talent where it matters most. And strategic maybe’s—projects that warrant deeper investigation despite initial concerns—get flagged early for executive attention.
The contractors we work with report 30-40% increases in pre-construction capacity utilization simply by making faster, better-informed decisions about which projects deserve deep analysis.
Implementing Build Ready requires upfront investment. You need to develop evaluation frameworks, train teams to conduct comprehensive early analysis, and create decision protocols that balance systematic evaluation with strategic flexibility.
But this investment pays dividends every time you make a bid decision. Consider the economics:
Without Build Ready, you’re spending full pre-construction costs on 30-50 projects hoping to win 12-18. With Build Ready, you’re spending evaluation costs on 30-50 projects and full preconstruction costs only on the 15-20 that warrant it.
The math is compelling. But the strategic value extends far beyond cost savings.
At its core, Build Ready gives you the confidence to ask and answer the questions that define strategic excellence:
Chad Prinkey was right when he wrote that strategy should outweigh process. But the dichotomy is false. The contractors who make the boldest, most successful strategic moves are the ones with the strongest underlying processes.
Build Ready doesn’t constrain strategic thinking—it liberates it. When you know exactly what you’re getting into, when you understand precisely which risks you’re accepting and which strategic benefits justify those risks, you can make bolder moves with greater confidence.
The goal isn’t to eliminate strategic deviations from your process. The goal is to make those deviations so well-informed that they stop feeling like deviations and start feeling like the strategic advantages they are.
Your process should be a launchpad, not a cage. Your criteria should be a baseline, not a ceiling. And your Build Ready evaluation should be the intelligence that lets you pursue transformational opportunities with clear eyes and protected margins.
That’s the foundation of strategic excellence in construction. That’s what we’ve built Build Ready to deliver.
BEHKO’s Build Ready methodology provides comprehensive pre-preconstruction due diligence that enables contractors to make faster, smarter bid decisions. By evaluating projects across seven critical dimensions before significant preconstruction investment, Build Ready helps contractors protect margins, allocate resources effectively, and pursue strategic opportunities with confidence.
To learn how Build-Ready can transform your bid decision-making process, contact BEHKO at info@behkogroup.com.
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