How do you finish strong on a long project?

Question

Something I've been noticing lately — and I'd love to know if anyone else deals with this — is how hard it is to finish strong on longer projects.

The beginning? Easy. Everyone's fired up, the client is excited, the crew is locked in. But somewhere around the 80% mark, that energy starts to bleed out. People are mentally on to the next job, and those last little details — the ones that actually define the finished product — start slipping through the cracks.

We've been doing more projects in the three-week to several-month range, and this has become something I've had to get intentional about. We've started building out procedures in ClickUp to keep the final phase from falling apart — checklists, task ownership, that kind of thing. It's not perfect, we're still figuring it out honestly, but it's better than just hoping everyone stays focused when the finish line is in sight.

The harder part for us is that a lot of our crew are our own employees, not subs. Subs come and go. Your own guys are with you every day, and keeping them accountable at the tail end of a long project — when everyone's a little worn out — is a different challenge altogether.

So I'm genuinely asking: what are you doing to solve this? Do you have a formal process? Does someone own the punch list? How do you keep your people's heads in the game when the job is almost done but not quite?

Would love to hear what's working out there.

mtlcontractors · Answer

Sounds like we are in the same boat! The biggest thing that we have found is making sure everyone is accountable throughout the beginning of the finishing stage. We make sure not to leave anything to chance. If we spot something that might need to be reworked, we do it before the client has a chance to see it and call us out.

In the past we used to let things pile up and say we'll deal with that at the end or it's such a small thing. We'll see if it even comes up and if it does we'll fix it on punch list. But then sometimes you end up with an absolute pile of work.

When we do projects with designers, we also like to leave what we call a sacrifice. We leave a small error in a very obvious space that they can point to and we can agree with them that it is not up to **bleep** and fix it easily. The first time we did it it felt kind of dirty but we realized that it made the rest of the punch list go very smooth. It was something I picked up. After doing a few structural inspections. We realized that if everything is perfect they will make you do something silly. But if you leave one 2x4 out they will just tell you to put the 2x4 where it belongs. So we started creating a sacrifice on each job lol

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How do you finish strong on a long project?

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