My view which the tradies on site agree with is that a stick is always best. i.e. treat em mean and keep em keen. My view is I treat this like any business transaction.
My wife says that we should offer a carrot and that honey catches the bear. Her view is keep the SS onside as you may alianate them with my view causing delays.
Id like the opionion of the PD community on this....Stick or Carrot?
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I think you can use both. Stick if they're stuffing you around, carrot if they're treating you right. If they're doing a good job thank them for it and just be firm about wanting to get any little issues fixed. If they're stuffing you around then make it clear you're not a pushover and you expect things to be done right.
We've only had the one meeting with our SS so far after the frame inspection from Darbecca, it came up pretty well and we talked about all the problems pretty openly and he told us how he was going to get them fixed or explained that it would be done at a later stage. There's no point in being a hardass and chipping him about every little thing that comes up, I don't expect the tradies to do a perfect job the first time around and so long as it gets sorted and doesn't hold up the build I'm not bothered. There's a whole bunch of stuff and inevitably some of it will get missed, that's one of the reasons why I hire an inspector to take a fresh look at it and let me and PD know what needs to be sorted.
If something big comes up in the future then I expect we'll have a discussion about it and if he doesn't play it straight then the stick comes out. If you've got a good SS though then I would expect that they'll be trying to do the right thing anyway and hopefully it can be carrots the whole way through.