You are about to sit through four interviews where every firm shows you photographs of buildings that look roughly like the one you want. The photographs will all be good. That is the problem with them.
A portfolio tells you what a firm has finished. It does not tell you what is going to happen to your project. These six questions get closer, and the way people react to them tells you as much as the answers do.
1. Who is actually going to be in the room after we sign?
The people who present in an interview are frequently not the people who run the work. Ask who your weekly contact will be, how many other projects that person is carrying, and who makes a decision when that person is unavailable. Ask for it by name.
A firm that names the team without hesitating has thought about your project. A firm that answers with the word resources has not.
2. What is this estimate based on, and when were you last wrong?
Any number offered before there is a defined scope is an average dressed up as an estimate. Ask what it was built from. Ask what it excludes. Then ask the better question: on your last three projects, what was the estimate at this stage, and what did the bids come in at?
Everyone has missed. What you are listening for is whether they know their own history and will say it out loud. Someone who has never been wrong has not been counting.
3. If the bids come in high, whose problem is that?
This is the question with the most money attached to it, and it is the one owners skip most often. Under a traditional arrangement, drawings are produced, the project goes out to bid, the bids come back over budget, and the owner pays for a redesign and then bids again. The design fee has already been earned either way.
Ask directly who absorbs that. Ask whether they will commit to a cost cap, at what design stage, and what conditions let it move. The answers differ sharply by delivery method, which is the whole subject of design-build compared with design-bid-build and construction manager at risk.
4. What have you not told me about my site?
Any team worth hiring has looked at your parcel before the interview. Zoning, the utilities in the street, the floodplain, what was on the site before, access and traffic, whether your parking count works.
You are not testing for a complete answer. You are testing whether they showed up curious about your project or curious about winning the job. The team that raises an inconvenient fact in the interview is the team that will raise one in month seven, when it is worth far more to you.
5. What is on my desk, and when?
Owner decisions are on the schedule whether or not anyone tells you. Approvals, board actions, a selection between two options, a signature that unlocks ordering. When those slip, the schedule slips, and on most contracts the resulting delay is chargeable to you.
Ask for your decision dates in writing. A team that can hand you that list has run projects and knows where the real risk sits. We laid out what that looks like in the first ninety days of a building project.
6. What does the fee not include?
The exclusions are the honest part of any proposal. Survey, geotechnical work, environmental testing, commissioning, permit fees, special inspections, furniture, technology, moving, temporary space during construction. Every one of these is a real cost to somebody, and if it is not in the fee it is in your budget.
Get the list. Compare proposals on the same list. Two fees that look different by a wide margin are often the same fee with different boundaries drawn around it.
The answer that should worry you
Watch for the team that answers all six with total confidence and no caveats. Every real project has unknowns in it: something in the ground, something in the market, a decision nobody has made yet. A team that names those and tells you how they plan to manage them is describing the job accurately.
A team that tells you none of it will happen is either inexperienced or managing you. You have run a capital project before. You already know which one it turns out to be.