How to Improve Labor Allocation During Preconstruction (Before Bid Day Buries You)

You won the job. Now you need 14 electricians, a superintendent who knows tilt-up, and a concrete crew that can mobilize in three weeks. You have four electricians, a super who’s already running two projects, and a concrete sub who isn’t returning your calls.

This is the moment most GCs realize they have a labor allocation problem. But here’s the thing: the problem didn’t start when you won the job. It started when you decided to pursue it.

What is preconstruction labor allocation?

Here’s the definition you can steal for your next precon meeting:

Optimizing labor allocation during preconstruction is the process of strategically assigning workforce resources to projects during the planning and estimating phase, before construction begins. Rather than treating staffing as a post-award scramble, preconstruction labor planning aligns pursuit decisions, estimating assumptions, and bid timelines with actual workforce capacity.

If that sounds like something your firm already does, great. You can stop reading. (You’re probably not stopping, because “already does” and “does well” are very different things; like “owning a gym membership” and “going to the gym.”) For everyone else: the gap between where labor decisions should happen and where they actually happen is costing you money, margin, and sanity.

The 92% Problem Isn’t a Hiring Problem; It’s a Sequencing Problem

According to the AGC/NCCER 2025 Workforce Survey, 92% of construction firms report difficulty finding qualified workers. The Associated Builders and Contractors projects the industry will need approximately 349,000 new workers in 2026 just to meet demand. And an estimated 41% of the current workforce is approaching retirement by 2031.

Those numbers are real. But here’s what gets lost in the headline panic: the labor shortage doesn’t hit every project equally. It hits the projects you didn’t plan for.

Think of it like a restaurant kitchen. A great head chef doesn’t check Friday night’s reservation book at 6 PM on Friday. She checks it Monday morning, adjusts the menu if the fish delivery is short, and schedules her line cooks accordingly. The restaurant that waits until the dinner rush to figure out staffing doesn’t have a “labor shortage”; it has a planning shortage. Same principle applies to optimizing labor allocation during preconstruction: the firms that plan early don’t magically have more workers; they just stop wasting the ones they have.

Your Bid Pipeline and Your Staffing Pipeline Are the Same Pipeline

Most GCs run two parallel tracks that rarely talk to each other. BD is chasing pursuits. Estimating is pricing bids. Ops is staffing active jobs. HR is posting listings. Each team has its own spreadsheet, its own timeline, its own version of reality.

The result: you bid $18M in healthcare work due to start in Q3, but your best healthcare superintendent is committed through Q4. You chase a fast-track retail project because the relationship is strong, but your framing crews are on a municipal job that just got extended. Nobody lied. Nobody made a bad decision in isolation. The decisions themselves were made in isolation.

The AGC reports that 45% of firms say labor shortages directly cause project delays, and 78% had at least one delayed project in the past year. Those aren’t all “we couldn’t find anyone” stories. Many are “we committed to a timeline without checking whether we had the people to meet it” stories. The firms treating BD, estimating, and workforce planning as separate functions aren’t just inefficient; they’re set up to overpromise and underdeliver.

Capacity Is a Constraint; Treat It Like One

Estimators understand constraints intuitively. You don’t bid without knowing material costs, sub availability, or site conditions. But labor capacity somehow stays in the “we’ll figure it out later” column.

Think of workforce capacity like your bonding limit. You wouldn’t bid three $20M jobs with a $40M bond capacity; your surety would laugh you out of the room. Labor works the same way: every pursuit draws against a finite number of qualified people. But nobody sends you a letter when you’ve exceeded your workforce capacity. You just find out mid-project, when your super is running three jobs and sleeping in his truck. If you’d never ignore your bonding limit in a bid decision, don’t ignore your staffing limit either.

When workforce visibility becomes an input to preconstruction, the math changes. You can answer questions that actually matter before bid day:

Do we have the crew depth for this project type? If you’re chasing three data center projects and you have one qualified superintendent, that’s not ambition; that’s a coin flip.
What’s our real availability window? Your estimating team builds schedules based on assumptions. Those assumptions should include who’s actually available, not who’s theoretically on the roster.
Where are the hiring gaps we need to fill in six months? The AGC found that 63% of firms plan to increase headcount in 2026, yet over 80% can’t find qualified candidates. Know in January that you need a mechanical super by July, and you have a fighting chance. Find out in June, and you’re paying a premium or delaying the job.
Which pursuits should we decline? This is the hardest question, and the most valuable one. Saying no to work you can’t staff well is how you protect margin on the work you can.

Optimizing labor allocation during preconstruction isn’t about adding complexity; it’s about making the complexity you already have visible.

The Old Way vs. the New Way

The old way: BD wins work. Estimating prices it. Ops gets a phone call: “We won that hospital job. Need a super and two PMs by March.” Ops opens a spreadsheet. (We see you. We respect the conditional formatting.) Calls go out. Favors get traded. Somehow it works, until it doesn’t.

The new way: Pursuit decisions include a workforce forecast. Estimating assumptions reflect actual crew availability. Bid/no-bid conversations factor in labor capacity alongside bonding capacity and backlog. When you win, ops already knows it’s coming; the staffing plan was built alongside the estimate, not after the award letter.

The firms that win profitable work consistently aren’t just better at building; they’re better at deciding what to build and staffing that decision before the shovel hits dirt.

Institutional Knowledge Is the Asset You’re Not Tracking

Your people aren’t interchangeable units. The superintendent with a 15-year relationship with your best mechanical sub is not the same resource as one you hired last month, even if their titles match. Your CRM tracks every contact at every owner’s rep firm; your workforce plan tracks a headcount number. That’s a telling gap.

The real question is: which specific people, with which specific relationships and expertise, are available for which specific projects? That’s institutional knowledge; the kind of thing that lives in someone’s head until they retire or leave for a competitor offering $2 more an hour.

With construction wages averaging $40.55 per hour and rising 4.3% year over year (AGC), misallocating experienced people isn’t an inconvenience; it’s a margin killer. Tracking headcount without tracking capability is like tracking backlog without tracking profit: technically a number, practically useless.

Start Upstream or Keep Scrambling Downstream

Firms are taking on work they can’t deliver, then paying the price in delays, rework, and damaged relationships. The root cause isn’t a lazy workforce. It’s a planning sequence that puts labor decisions at the end of the process instead of the beginning.

The fix isn’t complicated to understand. It’s just hard to execute when your workforce data lives in six spreadsheets, three people’s heads, and a whiteboard in the ops trailer. Every firm that starts optimizing labor allocation during preconstruction arrives at the same conclusion: the problem was never the supply of workers; it was the timing of the decisions about them.

If that’s the problem your team is staring down, schedule a demo. Not because we have a magic button, but because we’ve built the tools that put labor capacity and preconstruction decisions in the same room for the first time.