Diamond Certified Video Reports

Sigura Construction, Inc. in 5 Useful Answers

• Play from Beginning
• What type of precautions does your company take to ensure client safety?
• What’s the favorite thing you enjoy about the work that you do?
• What are some of the key things your company does to deliver high quality?
• Tell me a short story about an interesting job or customer.
• What should potential customers know about you and your team?
• What makes your company different from the other companies in your industry?

Sigura Construction, Inc. - Diamond Certified 5 Useful Answers - video transcript

Number one, we make sure that all our employees are vaccinated, and we definitely talk to clients these days. Some clients care for employees to be with masks, and some don't care about it. So, for the clients who care, we make sure that our employees are wearing masks at the time of working there. We try to isolate the working area as much as we can with plastic barriers and make sure that all the areas are detached from the client. So, if we have a client that is inside the house, we try to create a plastic barrier between our employees and the client, making sure that, this way, there is some safety zone or safety area. Even if our employees, you know, on the way to work, got corona from somebody else, then they will be fine. In addition to that, we're making sure to follow up on all protocols that the government is issuing, and, you know, in the more stricter days, we did everything protocol, and obviously, now we're following it as well. Improving people's lives—that's the honest truth. I like to create a new environment for people. My company is doing design-build, so I have a team of designers that I'm working with, and I love to see, you know, a house looking one way and then coming to life on the paper. And then, eventually, actually, when we build it, we make the house, you know, come to reality. When we see the smile on our clients' faces, that's really what makes us happy. To see that, yes, we got the reward, we got paid for the job, but our client's life was improved and they're living in their dream home. And, you know, depends if they have kids or not, sometimes facilitating for their kids, with all their needs, whether it's, you know, special amenities or no specialties of any kind that are needed. So, at the end of the day, we're really happy to see our clients enjoying their homes and happy about it. So, high quality does not mean just workmanship. It is workmanship, however, not just workmanship. Scheduling is something that ensures a high quality of a project—communication with the client. So, we put our clients together with us on, you know, text groups like WhatsApp. We're creating a chat room for the job where the client can convey all his messages, and then everybody on the team can get that message and actually understand what's going on. Because, a lot of times, in some other companies, I see and I hear from clients, you know, they say one thing to the owner or to the estimator, and at the end of the day, the guys don't know anything about it. But what we create, we create an environment that is, let's call it a global environment for that project, so everybody that is involved in the project is aware, in real-time, of what's happening. Definitely, owning material in advance, especially these days, when there is a lack of deliverables by vendors, we try to acquire everything ahead of time so there is minimum or no downtime at all at the job. In addition to that, our technicians— all of them—are very, very qualified, very polite, very quiet, very organized, and it is a pleasure every time to hear back from clients, "Oh, you guys are great." So, those things, all together, make us the perfect company for perfect projects. And, you know, we're making sure that the quality is not being delivered just in the construction itself, but also in the experience that our clients have while they are going through the process. As everybody knows, the construction process is long, tedious, and not always enjoyable, so we try to make it as joyful and fun for the clients as much as possible by not creating hurdles. So, you know, we work with many different customers, but the most enjoyable project—one of the most enjoyable projects—is one I'm doing right now. The client is very flexible and very helpful. He's coming from the high-tech industry, and even though the high-tech industry is very demanding, whenever we have any issues or anything like that, we do give the reasoning, we do explain, we do fix everything that needs to be fixed, even if it's not our issue. And he's very pleasant. There are all kinds of different people in this market that we work for—some are more pleasant, some are less. But, on and on, it's really fun to work with somebody who can be actually like a team and work with us as a team. Definitely, our company is and needs to be a team player. But when you work with a client, it's not just you doing the job and him needing to pay you. It has to be teamwork. And, you know, whether it's the design, whether it's issuing the design, whether it's, you know... because when you put it on paper, it's one thing. It's most of the time very easy to convert what's on the paper to what's on-site, but sometimes there are challenges that, once you open the world, you can find out all kinds of things. Like right now, we found out that the continuous beam is actually spliced to two beams, and now we have to come up with a solution. So, we went to the client, we spoke to him, we walked through them together, and shared with him what the issue is and how we're going to resolve it. We contacted the engineer, and the client is very pleasant to work with. So, it's not important only that your contractor will be pleasant. It's important to work also with pleasant people, which most of the time we're very, very, very, very lucky. I want to say 99 percent of the time, we get lucky to work with pleasant people. We try to let our potential customers know that, hey, it's not me and my team, it's us—the client itself. If he will come and work with us, he will be part of the team. He will be involved, he will see the process, he will have, obviously, a say in what he wants and what he needs, and we will work on it together as a team. It's very important to work together with the clients, versus, you know, coming and doing drawings, coming around, and showing them this, that, and the other, and then saying, "Here, this is what it is. You know, this is what you paid for." We're very flexible, we always offer trade-offs. This is very important because people should have all the flexibility in their lives to do, you know, changes and change what was on the design if they want to change it, or to give them better options to have more new resources. We have a lot of resources that we can actually give our clients and have them, you know, choose from and maybe even reduce the budget, even though the budget was already determined in advance. A lot of times, I come with ideas and I say, "You know what? Even though we quoted a plan, because we're bidding against other people, I actually have a suggestion. Here is, you know, an equivalent material that is very highly recommended as well and will do the same job, but it will cost, for example, half or three-quarters of what the other material will cost for the installation. It's much easier, then, we save your time on installation, and that's how we can save you money." So, we always try to be a team player, to help people have choices, and to be very, very, very flexible. So, that's what we try to convey to our new customers, so they understand that, you know, we are working with them, we are there as a team, and we are not there just to come and throw numbers at them. All throughout the process, we give solutions, we give better products, or an easier way, or a faster way to do things without compromising on quality. I think my company is different by having most of the people working on the project from within, like, inside the company. So, most of the job in our company is being done by our own employees, versus subcontractors. That makes us different because, A, we have control of quality, we have control of scheduling. You know, these days after the pandemic, a lot of subcontractors don't deliver what they promised they would deliver, which creates a lot of issues. Thank God, my company has no issues like that because I want to say about 95% of our products or all the production is being done in-house, and it's all by trained people. So, that makes us different than others by being able to control quality, being able to control deliverables, and being on time for our clients. We only rely on subs when we have to, and it doesn't happen too much.