Construction Hot Takes
Hosted by Adam Cooper, CEO of Ascent Consulting, alongside Senior Consultants Gregory Gorman and Jeff Robertson, Construction Hot Takes show dives into the gritty, unfiltered realities of building a profitable construction company.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 11, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest episodes
Whose Fault Is a $25M Overrun, Estimating or Engineering? (opens the original)
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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 a
Will AI Replace Your Superintendent? (opens the original)
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Will AI replace the superintendent who won't use it? Not completely, but it could help your most experienced employees perform better and share their knowledge. A superintendent who knows how to build keeps the job. The one who also uses these tools gets better information can make the same calls sooner. If you run the field and have been told AI is coming for the trailer, or you are deciding whether to put these tools in front of your supers at all, the hosts do not agree with each other here a
Job Costing Fundamentals: Are You Actually Making Money on Each Job? (opens the original)
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You can feel the money moving. You can't tell if any single job is making it. In this episode, Greg Gorman breaks down job cost management and why hidden jobs that quietly bleed can still occur in a profitable company. Plus the three fundamentals that make job costing work and why you can still save a job at 40 to 50 percent complete (but rarely at 75). Chapters: 00:00 - Why job cost management is a top priority 02:13 - How does company profit hide a bleeding job? 03:45 - What actually counts as
Your Data is All There. Why Can't You See It in One Place? (opens the original)
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In this episode, Adam Cooper and Jeff Robertson break down how contractors go from siloed systems to one source of truth for their data, why Procore is built for projects (not company management), and the three ways to actually connect your stack. Including: Off-the-shelf connectors, custom middleware, and a data lake, plus where AI is heading over the next 12 to 24 months. Chapters: 00:00 - The 300-job treasure hunt 03:35 - Why don't your systems talk to each other? 05:54 - What is a data lake,
Do We Even Need General Contractors? Reacting to Your Construction Hot Takes (opens the original)
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Holding your hot takes to the fire in this episode, Adam Cooper, Jeff Robertson, and Greg Gorman take on what our audience actually posted: Do we even need general contractors? Does safety paperwork do anything? Does one platform really fix the chaos? Plus the E-Myth, GCs with skin in the game, one big job versus ten small ones, and whether LEED earns its cost. Chapters: 00:00 - We went ‘viral’ on TikTok 01:18 - Should you pay yourself first? 03:57 - Do we even need general contractors? 12:39 -
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