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Research Outline

Prepared for Carter B. | Delivered March 5, 2020

Insights on Design-Build Contractor Audience

Goals

To find out insights that help to better understand the design-build contractor audience, especially their pain points, motivations and triggers when making decisions. The research should also help to build the psychographic profile of such an audience with detailed information on aspects such as their values, attitudes, behavioral traits, etc. The research should elaborate on the audience from a high level, as well as specifically help to understand what's driving their decisions when it comes to heating/cooling/HVAC solutions and options

Early Findings

  • The primary benefit of having a design-build contractor is that the customer has to manage only one contract with a single point of responsibility.
  • Also, since the designer and contractor work together from the beginning, as a team, they are able to provide unified project recommendations that can fit the customer's schedule and budget.
  • The primary motivations that drive the selection of design-build contractors are less schedule growth, faster construction speed and faster delivery speed.
  • To see in numbers, design-build contracts equip their customers with 0.3%-1.9% lower unit costs, 13%-36% faster construction rates, 2.4%-3.8% less growth in costs and 61%-102% faster delivery speed.
  • For Johnny Gaffney of Pinnacle Veteran Services, who is a customer of design-build contracting services, design-Build is the most logical and cost-effective approach to handle his projects.
  • According to Steve Savoie, design process leader and senior architect, involvement in design-build contracts gives the customers a lasting sense of pride in their building.
  • The pain points that customers often face while working with a design-build contractor are as follows: restriction of resources driven by regulations/codes, lack of accountability as no party is explicitly responsible for safeguarding customer’s interests, lack of intermittent checks and balances during the process, etc.
  • As far as the nature of the customers of design-build contracting is concerned, manufacturing, highway/street and education will represent the greatest percentage of design-build construction spending during the period between 2018 and 2021.
  • Geographically, the Mountain (6.3%), Pacific (6.1%) and South Atlantic (6.2%) census divisions will yield the highest growth rates between 2018 and 2021.
  • Out of all the projects where design-build construction did not go well for the customers, 50% had customer-organization related factors affecting the project, 25% involved contractors who did not fully understand the project and 25% involved contractors who did not staff their projects adequately or consistently.

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