#334 - DAVID WHITESIDE, Founder of Whiteside Management
SUMMARY
This week David Whiteside, founder and partner of Whiteside Management joins David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design to discuss his background as a general contractor; transitioning into an owner’s representative; the value of an owner’s representative and their role in a project; the working relationship between his team and other stakeholders; tips for clients; and more. Enjoy!
ABOUT DAVID
David founded Whiteside Management in 2008 and hasn’t looked back since. He’s grown the business and established Whiteside Management as the leader in the Owner’s Representation market. The founding principles of honesty, integrity, and collaboration help steer the company daily. David enjoys anything outdoors: backpacking, fly fishing, scuba diving, and flying single and twin-engine airplanes. He mostly stays busy with his many kids and grandchildren.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) What is an owner’s representative?
“What we try to do sometimes, or have to do sometimes, is we're trying to keep the owner from negatively affecting their own project… It could be because of unrealistic expectations, or often more often than not, it's a resetting of the expectations because things change. But really, in my experience, the best owner is one that is well informed and educated and frankly, is not particularly coddled by hiding information from them.”(03:27)
(08:14) Types of projects to hire an owner’s representative.
“If we're talking about projects over let's say over $10 million and up, my bet is that probably over 50% of those have owners reps these days. However, at least 50% don’t… Historically, architects were functioning in this role of owners reps. Architects from the 50, 60, and 70s, had an emphasis on construction management. And I don't think that's the case so much anymore. And frankly, I don't think it's the desire of the architects to be construction managers. They want to do architecture.” (08:38)
(40:02) Becoming an owner’s representative.
“The client is looking for us to be the succinct but truthful purveyor of the information on their project. As you know, if you're on a project that's going to last for 30 months and it's going to cost $30 million, you're thinking it's going to cost $30 million. Every month you get a change order or a bunch of change orders and you think, how could that be… Probably half the time it's because the owners change things so they have some culpability, but sometimes it's because they didn't understand that they might be asking for something that was going to cost some extra money.” (57:22)
(01:12:53) Advice for clients.
“A common concern I hear from architects though is that we're going to get between them and the owner. They want to have a fairly intimate relationship with the owner because they need to, and we stay in our lane at all times in that sense. If anything, we promote that…And same thing with the contractor. The contractor has to have a relationship of trust with the owner. Just because I trust him isn't enough, the owner has to trust him too. And so we really want those relationships to be strong.” (01:19:22)
(01:22:07) Mistakes clients make during the process.
“Sometimes the owners don’t tend to pay as much attention to the recommendation of their architects versus what they're seeing at their friend's house that they want to mix and match… The architect is far better at holding the vision as a whole. And sometimes the owners will do something that is really not going to make any difference and that’s going to cost them more money. So I try to prevent those from happening.” (01:23:40)
(01:33:24) Favourite part of being an owner’s representative.
(01:43:28) Most challenging part of being an owner’s representative.
