Nineteen-eighty two, 1990, 2001 and 2009. Those are the recessions that I remember. As an estimator, I felt that I would never sell another job. As a project manager, I dreaded that we would actually sell a job, and running it would be my nightmare for the next 12 months. I believed I was destined to inherit a job with no margin, production rates that were too aggressive, and an owner’s rep whose mission in life was to ruin mine. But what actually happened was that during those times we did some of our best work, felt the highest sense of professional achievement, and probably impacted the bottom line more than any other time in the last 30 years. Why? Because we were hungry.
A recession can hit a contractor hard—and this past recession has been no exception. Looking back at numbers released by the U.S. Census Bureau at the end of 2009, the value of construction during that year was $939.1 billion, 12.4 percent below the $1,072.1 billion spent in 2008. While today’s numbers are beginning to trend upwards—the Bureau estimated a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $961 billion in August 2014, which is 5 percent above the August 2013 estimate of $915.3 billion—indicating the recession clearly had an impact.