Across 26 years, I’ve sat at a lot of tables.
The CEO, CFO, and COO have a seat. So do the architect, the general contractor, and a roster of specialty advisors. Every one of them is valued, and every one is good at their piece. Yet on project after project I’ve watched the same costly gap open up, and no one in the room names it.
The gap is timing. And the best way I know to explain it is a timing belt.
In an engine, the timing belt links the crankshaft to the camshaft. The crankshaft drives the pistons up and down; the camshaft opens and closes the valves that let air in and out. The belt forces those parts into a strict, rhythmic dance, so the valves open at the exact instant the pistons expect them to.
When the belt wears or stretches, it slips and skips teeth. Synchronization is lost. You get misfires, poor fuel economy, rough idling, loss of power, and a ticking noise. If the belt snaps outright, the pistons slam into the valves equaling catastrophic failure.
A project runs the same way. However, when the optimal sequencing slips, most don’t feel ALL of it: It might be sensed in rough idling (poor communication), ticking (time passing), sputtering (delays from late or missing decisions), and loss of power (schedule slippage). You get the analogy.
The engine: your design and construction team
Here’s what most owners and corporate occupiers don’t realize: that slippage is quietly costing them money. Not in a line item the CFO can point to, but in premiums and inefficiencies. They aren’t getting the greatest value dollar for dollar.
Why doesn’t the team catch it? Because each part is built to run its own function, not to hold the whole. The architect and engineers are the camshaft: their job is to produce the design, and they’re watching their own P&L, hours estimated versus hours billed. They aren’t measuring the timing; they’re focused on getting the answers and direction they need to start and finish. The crankshaft the Contractor. Here’s the deal. There’s always an invisible line, and it only gets crossed when it’s too late and the belt is about to snap. That’s when everyone starts losing money at once, and only then is it known.
Holding the timing or sequencing, is a full-time role. It takes leadership, relentless follow-up, and the fortitude to pull what’s needed out of every participant, at the right moment. It is not a specification you hand someone. In my billion dollars of experience, every project was custom, with unique constraints. You have to possess precision and little intuition, know-how and execute it.
Why the cost stays hidden
The owner usually absorbs it without ever seeing it. It’s hard to isolate because each party only sees its own slice. It gets priced into fees. It shows up later as Additional Services from the A/E team, which carry their own premiums. From the GC, it comes as added overhead. It rarely appears spelled out in a change order.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: many owners, and even large national and global project management firms, don’t have this depth at the senior-PM level and above. Yet your paying for it here too! The “how to” is rare.
Where I learned it first
My timing-belt analogy isn’t borrowed. My father was a Chief Master Sergeant of Avionics in 181st Tactical Fighter wing, from fleets of F-4 Phantoms onto F-16 Fighting Falcons, nicknamed “The Racers”: fly-by-wire controls, laser-guided bombing systems, ECM pods that can scramble ten square miles of a city’s electronics. So, when he took apart my Honda Prelude engine and spread it across cardboard for me, I trusted he knew exactly what he was doing. As he reassembled it, I learned the inner workings. I had no idea how much that would matter later, on my first project out of college at $16M with HUNT-AECOM, to CBRE, and the largest at $200M+, all totaling millions of square feet.
I also went to university for construction technology, then earned the rest on the jobsite and worked my way up and into the boardroom, through roles as a general contractor, then at a construction management firm, then my own firm for 7 years. A billion dollars of work, 44 projects later.
I want to point out something, because after a quarter century most people still believe a PM is a PM, or that PM equals construction. It doesn’t.
A PM is not a PM
Picture the jump in precision, knowledge, and technology from a corner-shop mechanic, to a Formula One engineer, to an F-16 avionics specialist. Wildly different animals, all “working on engines.”
Project management is the same. Many PMs at the big real estate firms move into the role without ever learning the mechanics, tools, and technology of construction. Some came up as architects. Some came from hospitality programming and find themselves at the advisor helm. Plenty can manage at a high level, speak beautifully, and make you feel taken care of. I call it white-glove project management: smooth, choreographed, served like a seven-course meal. It’s the feeling you get leaving the Mercedes dealership. The real question is what you actually paid versus what it cost, and whether the difference was necessary. Most of us aren’t racing our daily driver in the F1 championship. However, an F1 cars and fighter jets runs $15M+.
Who’s making sure your building is ready for the starting grid or flight line?
Too often, the project belt is slipping and the teeth are worn. To me its obvious. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of slippage, that alone pays for a great Project Management firm and allows you to sleep at night.
Not enough bite and combustion from your belt— A $12M case study
When I landed at the world’s largest commercial real estate firm, I saw the problem firsthand. The client was a global medical-office and insurance company, and their SVP of Real Estate of Global was frustrated. The project management firm running their international projects, everything from site selection to architecture to art, was consistently over budget or behind schedule. And the overages were rarely fixable, because there was no time left in the schedule to fix them.
That’s usually where Value Engineering enters: design changes made after a project is over budget, to cut cost. If you’ve had a PM firm on your project and still hit budget and schedule problems, I don’t fault you. That’s exactly what they’re there to prevent.
The budget on this one was set before I arrived. What I built was the schedule, the design guidance, and above all the sequencing. I call it Designing into the Design: driving to checkpoints, leading the client through finish and feature decisions on time, and building optionality aka Alternates into the first design deliverable, so the owner always had levers on major cost components, from mechanical systems to finish levels.
Then the GC bids came in. Ten percent over budget. Most of the firm’s PMs had historically gone with the large, reputable regional and national GCs they always used, which makes a project easy to manage from the top because the big GC drives it. The three bids were close and well scrubbed, so this must be the market, right? No.
Here’s where finesse matters. All three were regional and national-scale GCs, carrying heavy general conditions and oversized subcontractors. What a project this size needs is right-sizing, from the GC down through the subs. An oversized sub means paying a premium for the same HVAC unit, the same electrical gear, the same paint. If you’re building a semiconductor fab, an international airport, or a stadium, you need that top-tier bench or the project fails. In between is where the experience of a Project & Development Services professional earns its keep.
On this $12M project, architecture through art, selecting the right-sized GC preserved what would have been a $500,000 overage. Same scope, $500K less, delivered on time, all above-board.
Three major moves made it work:
Selecting a right-sized GC, from real market knowledge and firsthand experience with that firm.
Building a schedule that sequenced the work and the owner decision checkpoints.
Designing roughly 30 alternates into the first Design deliverable, so when pricing came in high the owner could decide fast instead of going back to the drawing board (which costs more design fees and time, and time matters when you’re relocating or facing a lease holdover).
The takeaway. Scale, Scope, Depth, and breadth all matter.
It’s First Principles: break the thing into its simplest component parts. Sounds easy. The easy part comes from experience, bite, and combustion.
The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.
The Proof (Commercial Real Estate) is on LinkedIn, archeadvisers.co, and ARCHĒ’s Instagram.
Copyright, Ryan Scherzinger 2026+