Field Superintendent
Full time · Scottsdale, AZ and the surrounding east valley · On a job site every day
Every hour past forty is paid at time and a half. A normal week here runs 42 to 45 hours, which puts real annual earnings between roughly $90,000 and $110,000. Where you start in the range depends on how much you can already run without somebody checking behind you.
You are the company on that job site. Not a title on an org chart. You are the person the homeowner sees every morning, the person the trade partners answer to, and the person who decides whether a $300,000 remodel feels like a well run project or a slow motion problem.
You have run jobs where the schedule was fiction and the drawings showed up half finished. You were the only person on site who cared whether the reveal lined up, and nobody above you noticed either way.
You did not get worse at your job. You ran out of places that deserved it.
Two or three projects at a time, and none of them a mystery.
You will usually be running two or three at once. That is possible here because roughly 90 percent of the work on any job is performed by trade partners, so your day is coordination rather than production. It is also the difference between this and the shops that hand a superintendent six jobs and a phone that never stops ringing. Two or three you can actually stay on top of. Six you cannot, and everyone involved knows it.
On the hands on part, because most ads are vague about it and then surprise you on your first Monday. You are not swinging a hammer here. What you do with your hands is the connective tissue. Fixing a dust barrier before the drywall crew starts. Hauling out what a trade left behind. Meeting the countertop template guy with the sink and the faucet already in your truck.
Then occasionally a trade partner falls out on a Thursday and the client has one bathroom torn open, and you are the person who picks up tools instead of the phone. That happens less than it used to and more than we would like. You need to be capable of it and the kind of person who does it without being asked twice. You do not need to want to do it all day, because you will not be.
What you will actually do
- Own the schedule and the completion date the way the homeowner owns them
- Be the single daily point of contact for the client, in person, on site
- Review plans before work starts and catch the discrepancy before the material shows up
- Coordinate trade partners, inspections, and material orders
- Run daily logs, photos, selections and schedule updates in JobTread, not in your truck or your head
- Surface found conditions the day you find them, with a photo, so they get priced before they become delays
- Step in and self perform when a trade partner falls through, so the schedule does not slip while we replace them
- Walk the job at the end of every day and leave it the way you would want somebody to leave your house
- Drive toward zero punch list items at the final walkthrough. Not a short list. Zero.
What we need you to already have
- Five or more years running residential remodels, not new construction production work. Remodeling is a different animal and we are not going to teach you the difference on a client's dime.
- Enough carpentry in your background to know a trade partner's work is wrong before the client does. Framing through finish. You will use the judgment far more than the hands.
- Plan reading, and the judgment to catch what is wrong with a set before anything is ordered
- Communication a $1.5M homeowner will trust on day one. This is the part most candidates underestimate and it is the part that decides the hire.
- The capacity to hold two or three projects in your head at once without dropping a thread. This is what decides whether somebody lasts here.
- A clean driving record, and a home roughly 35 minutes or less from Scottsdale. Our work sits in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa and Ahwatukee, and you are on site early every day. A ninety minute commute wears people out and we would rather say that now than find out in month eight.
- Comfortable on an iPhone and willing to learn software you have not used. We will teach you JobTread.
Who tends to thrive in this seat
People who have been the best builder at a company that did not deserve them. People who have run their own small operation, done well at the building part, and gotten tired of wearing every other hat at once. People who have a specific opinion about how a job site should look at 4:30 on a Friday.
Forty hours guaranteed, and every hour past forty paid at time and a half.
We pay hourly for an unglamorous reason. We close out every project against what we estimated it would cost, and that only works if we know the actual hours. The reason is bookkeeping. The consequence is that we pay for every hour you work.
Hourly usually means the company hands you the risk of a slow week. We think that risk belongs to whoever scheduled the work, not to the person who showed up ready to do it. So forty hours is guaranteed in writing, in your offer, whether the work is there that week or not.
And past forty, you get paid for it. Almost every competing superintendent job in this market is salaried, which means the fiftieth hour is free to that company. Here it is not.
Forty hours guaranteed
In writing, in the offer. Paid for forty whether the work is there or not.
Overtime, actually paid
Time and a half past forty. A hard week costs us more and earns you more, which keeps us both honest about the schedule.
$50 for every five star review, to everybody
Every five star review pays $50 to every person in the company, not just whoever was on that job. We say the experience is the job, so everybody who touched it gets paid for it.
Company truck and fuel
Available to you if you live inside our service area. If you live outside it, we cover every mile from your first job site onward. Tool maintenance is ours either way.
A company phone number
A business line on your own phone, the way Devan and I do it. Clients reach the company, not your personal number.
Paid time off
Eight paid holidays, plus sick pay and vacation pay. We would rather you take it than bank it.
Run the number against the salaried job down the street
Say they offer $95,000 and the week is fifty hours, which is what a fifty hour week usually turns out to be once you are in it. That is $36.54 an hour.
A forty five hour week here comes to about $103,700. That is $44.33 an hour.
More money, and 260 fewer hours of your life. Six and a half weeks.
At the quiet end of the year, a forty two hour week here lands around $93,900, which is roughly even with that salary for about four hundred fewer hours. The floor is the guarantee. The ceiling is yours.
And the thing we do not offer yet
We do not have company health insurance. I am not going to bury that and let you discover it on your start date.
We are a small company, my wife and I pay for our own family coverage out of pocket like everybody else here does, and I have not yet built a price structure that carries a group plan. I am working on it. I am not going to promise you a date I cannot hold. The hourly rate, the guaranteed forty and the paid overtime are all set with that gap in mind.
If health coverage is the thing your family needs most right now, I understand completely, and you should weigh that carefully before you apply.
This is not the right seat for everybody, and we would rather you find that out here.
We could leave this out and get more applications. We would also spend the next two months in conversations that were never going to work, and so would you.
You should probably not apply for this one if any of these are true:
- You want to be left alone to do your thing. Every project here runs through a design department, a production department, and an owner who is going to walk your job. If autonomy for you means nobody looking at your work, this will feel claustrophobic.
- You think client communication is somebody else's job. It is not a department here. It is the job.
- Your instinct when something goes wrong is to fix it quietly and hope. We can work with almost any mistake. We cannot work with finding out about it from the homeowner.
- You want one job to disappear into. You will be carrying two or three. If going deep on a single project and tuning out everything else is what you loved about your last role, this will feel like an interruption machine.
- You want to swing a hammer all day. This is not that job, and we would rather you know before your first Monday.
- You need this to be a stepping stone. Most people here have been here a long time. We hire slowly because we are trying to hire once.
None of that is a character judgment. There are good companies where every one of those is fine, and people who are happier at them.
If you read all six of those and got more interested rather than less, keep going.
Exactly what happens after you apply for this position.
You have probably applied somewhere and never heard anything back. We are not going to do that to you. Here is the whole thing, start to finish, usually a couple of weeks.
You apply, and you hear back
An email with a short video from me. Not an autoresponder telling you we will be in touch. An actual explanation of what happens next, so you can decide whether you still want it.
A short call, twenty minutes or so
Phone, Zoom or FaceTime, whichever is easiest for you. Usually Devan, our general manager, sometimes me. Short on purpose, because there are three or four things that would end this either way and we would both rather find them out fast. What you are making now, what you need to make, when you could start, and what went wrong at the last place. That last one is a safe space. It will not hurt anybody's feelings.
Time at our showroom with an owner
We will walk you through real projects, including the ones that did not go to plan and what we did about them. Come with questions. The people who ask hard questions in this meeting are almost always the ones we end up hiring.
References, then an offer in writing
We call three people. Then the offer comes on paper with the hourly rate, the guaranteed forty, the benefits and the start date on it. Nothing gets negotiated after you say yes.
Then, if it would help you decide, come spend a paid half day with us
Devan will take you to a job site or two, you will look at a working schedule, and you can see how we actually run a project rather than how we describe it. Paid either way. Some people want this and some do not, and both answers are fine.
Most companies make you audition. We would rather put the offer on the table and then let you check our work.
And if we go a different direction at any point, you will hear that from a person and not from silence. You took the time to apply. The least we can do is close the loop.
Questions we get about this position
If yours is not here, call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan. You do not have to apply first to ask a question.
It is real and it is narrow on purpose. $40 to $45 an hour, forty hours a week guaranteed in writing, time and a half past forty. A normal week runs 42 to 45 hours, so actual annual earnings land between roughly $90,000 and $110,000. Where you start comes down to how much you can run without somebody checking behind you, and we will tell you on the first call roughly where we think you fall and why.
Then you get paid for forty anyway. That is what the guarantee means and it is in writing in your offer. Most hourly jobs in this trade quietly hand you the risk of a slow week. In practice it rarely comes up here, because you are carrying two or three projects at once and there is always a punch list, a start to prep, or a barrier to rebuild.
Because we close out every project against what we estimated it would cost, and that only works if we know the actual hours that went into it. Job costing is how we find out where our estimating was right and where it was wrong, and a salary makes those hours invisible. So the reason is bookkeeping, not strategy. The part that matters to you is the consequence: when we track every hour, we pay for every hour. Forty are guaranteed and everything past forty is time and a half, which is not true at most of the salaried superintendent jobs in this valley.
Less than most superintendent jobs and we would rather say so. Roughly 90 percent of the work on a project is performed by trade partners. What you do with your hands is the connective tissue: dust barriers, hauling out what a trade left, meeting the countertop template guy with the sink and faucet already in your truck. Occasionally a trade falls out and you pick up tools to keep a job moving. You need to be capable of it. You will not be doing it all day.
Two or three at a time. Most of our work runs $100,000 to $500,000 with an average around $200,000. Kitchens, bathrooms, whole home remodels, additions and guest houses across Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa and Ahwatukee.
Devan, our general manager. He came up running our projects, so he has done this job and he knows what a Tuesday afternoon actually looks like. I do not disappear. I walk jobs, I am in the numbers every week, and you can call me. But you will not be sitting around waiting on me to make a decision, which is the thing that goes wrong most often at companies our size. Lorrie runs design, and you will be working with her on every project before it ever starts.
Your day starts early, on a job site. One thing worth clearing up: we tell homeowners the work window is 7 to 5, and that is about when trade partners may arrive, not a shift you work. A tile setter finishing another job might not get there until two, and that does not mean you sit on that site until five waiting for him. What it means is that the homeowner can reach you inside that window and hears from you every day. Most weeks land between 42 and 45 hours. Forty are guaranteed and everything past forty is paid at time and a half. Weekends are not a normal part of this job. If we are working a Saturday, something has gone wrong, and that is on us to fix rather than on you to absorb.
If you live inside our service area, a company truck is available to you and the fuel is ours. If you live outside it, you get yourself to the first job site of the day and we cover every mile from there. Either way, bring your own hand tools and we pay to maintain them, and job site consumables are ours. You should not be funding our projects out of your own pocket and waiting to be paid back.
Broader questions about the company, the values and what it is like here are answered on the careers page.
If you are still reading, we should talk.
Everything about this position is on this page. What it pays, how many projects you carry, how much of it is hands on, what we do not offer yet, and every step of what happens after you hit submit. You should be able to decide without a single phone call.
You will not be the person who cares the most anymore. You will just be one of the people who does.
Not ready to fill out a form yet?
That is fine. Call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan, our general manager. He has run these projects himself and he can answer anything you want to know before you put your name on something.
You do not have to apply to ask a question. If you are working somewhere now and you would rather nobody knew you were looking, I understand that completely and it stays between us.
Apply below
Ten minutes. You will hear back within one business day with a short video from me explaining exactly what happens next. No resume required if you would rather just tell us what you have run.
Scott Hochuli, Founder. Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, Scottsdale. Est. 2001.