Construction was essential on paper, and nobody was showing up
In the spring of 2020 Tellus had a custom house under contract in Santa Monica. A big one, mid-build, on a schedule written the way every construction schedule is written: foundation, framing, rough trades, drywall, finish, each phase assigned to a subcontractor crew that would arrive when called. I had been running Tellus since 2004 and this was not an unusual job for us. Then the state's stay-home order landed in March, and in the same week California listed construction as essential. The site could legally stay open. For about a day that felt like the answer.
It was not. Being allowed to work and being able to work are two different things, and the gap between them is where this house lived for most of the year. A subcontractor's crew is not a machine you switch on with a permit. It is a group of people, each one weighing a sick parent, a closed school, a spouse with a different view of the risk. One by one those people decided to stay home, and the subs who employed them stopped confirming dates. Nobody refused. They simply did not show up, and a standing schedule built in January had quietly become fiction.
The people in it were the homeowner, who had a contract with a completion date and was watching the same news as everyone else; the subcontractor owners, most of whom I had worked with for years and who could not tell me on a Monday who would be on site Wednesday; my own office and field staff, who were also deciding week to week what was safe; and me. What the job needed was not a legal opinion, and it was not a harder push on the subs, who had nothing to push with. It needed the remaining scope taken apart and sorted by a different question than the trade sequence asks. Not what comes next, but what each phase actually requires: a licensed crew with its equipment and its inspection, or a skilled pair of hands. And it needed the owner protected from all of it, because a homeowner who has been told the schedule is open never fully trusts it again.
Construction was essential on paper, which solved nothing, because nobody was showing up.
License or skill: the one question that sorted the work
The options on the table in April were the ones every general contractor in California was looking at. Wait for the crews, let the schedule slip, and let the owner absorb it. Pay retention premiums to hold a crew in place. Hire a sub's idled workers directly. Bring labor in from a softer market. Re-sequence toward long-lead materials and let the labor problem wait. Good operators used every one of those that spring, and none of them was wrong. But each one treats the shortage as one problem with one fix, and it was not one problem.
Structural framing and the rough mechanical, electrical and plumbing need a licensed trade crew. The license, the crew size, the tooling and the inspection all sit with the sub, and no permit and no amount of my own capability stands in for them. The shortage there was absolute, and the only honest levers were timing and a second relationship kept warm. Finish carpentry, trim, hardware, fixtures, and the coordination of inspections and the owner need skill and time. Skill I had. Time, with the rest of the pipeline slowed by the same shutdown, I suddenly had too. So the shortage on that side of the line was not a crisis. It was a staffing decision, and the staff was me.
That is the whole decision. Sort every open phase by whether the scarce input is a license or a skill. Where it is a license, protect the phase with schedule discipline and a backup sub, and do not pretend otherwise. Where it is a skill, do the work, at a slower pace than a crew, and book the hours so the accounting still shows what happened. Premium pay and direct hiring were set aside on the licensed side because both carried licensing and quality exposure Tellus was not positioned to take on mid-project. Re-sequencing to materials was set aside because it defers the labor problem and does not solve it. And the owner's schedule stayed closed, because the relationship was worth more intact than explained.
How I came at this one
The first question was, for each phase still open, whether the scarce input was a license or a skill, because a license has no substitute standing on site and a skill might. It fit because the shutdown had already answered the legal question and left the physical one, whether the people would come, wide open.