Whose Fault Is a $25M Overrun, Estimating or Engineering?

How do you lose $25 million on one job? By building exactly to the construction spec while a second engineering spec, signed off by your own leadership, sat unread until the systems were turned on. If you run design-build work, sit between an engineering department and an estimating department, or have ever assumed someone upstream read the owner's performance criteria, this is the failure that nobody catches on a walkthrough.

In this episode, Adam Cooper walks through the job with Greg Gorman and Jeff Robertson, answers the comments it drew, including whether submittals should have caught it and whether the estimator deserves the blame, and gets into what it actually cost the people involved.

Here is the TikTok video source for the comments:

‘$25M Spec Miss’: https://www.tiktok.com/@construction.hottakes/video/7657698121111129358

Build a business that runs without you: https://ascentconsults.com/build-it-better-ebook/

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open and Episode Introduction

00:24 – The Specification Mistake That Cost $25 Million

02:02 – How Did the Error Escape the Submittal Process?

04:33 – Why Didn’t the Owner Catch It Earlier?

05:47 – Was It Really the Estimator’s Fault?

5 Reasons Construction Projects Fail: https://blog.ascentconsults.com/5-reasons-construction-projects-fail