As Planned

Episode 7 of As Planned. Michael Bograd sits down with Charles Tenly of ATR (Arena Technical Resources) to break down what sourcing good employees actually looks like in project controls, where every firm is competing for the same 500 to 1,000 A-plus candidates.They get into why a resume full of the right buzzwords means nothing without hands-on project experience behind it, why P6 proficiency alone doesn't make a strong scheduler, and how AI-written resumes are creating a fraud problem that only a real conversation can screen out. Charles and Michael also talk about growing your own talent by pairing green hires with seasoned vets, why the best firms forecast their staffing needs before a project ends, and how a sharp candidate experience becomes its own qualifier. Field over remote, ten times out of ten.

Who owns the float on a construction schedule? It's not intuition or "how we did it last time." It's whatever the contract says, and depending on the spec you're under, that answer can flip entirely.In this episode, Stelic EVP Michael Bograd sits down with Stelic EVP Brook Bolger to break down total float: how Caltrans lets whoever generates float keep it, why most contracts (including the Army Corps of Engineers UFGS spec) treat float as a shared commodity instead, what subcontractors need to watch for in "keep pace with the schedule" clauses, and why consuming your own float still isn't free once trade partners carrying labor risk are in the mix.

Every small business trying to break into federal work runs into the same wall: you need past performance to win the work, and you need the work to get past performance. Most firms either give up or start throwing bids at everything and hope something sticks.In this episode of As Planned, Mike Bograd sits down with Stelic EV-President, Stew Meny, to talk through public versus private pursuits, and why the two require completely different playbooks. Stew has spent his career on the business development side of both, and he's direct about what it actually takes to get positioned for public work.We get into what separates a public procurement from a private one, why relationships let commercial clients sole source and public agencies can't, what the GSA schedule opens up, and why three past performances in the right market segment matter more than a long project list. Stew also makes the case against volume bidding: ten pursuits at a 33 percent win rate beats a hundred at five percent, and the second approach will bury your proposal team and your overhead.If you run BD for a small firm, own the go/no-go call, or you're two years into trying to crack federal work and wondering why the door hasn't opened yet, start here.

Most project dashboards get built with care, admired for a week, and then quietly ignored. The status meeting still runs on gut feel, and the dashboard becomes expensive wallpaper.In this episode of As Planned, Taylor Moore, VP at Stelic, sits down to unpack why that keeps happening on life sciences projects. Taylor works with Pharma and biotech clients where the reporting stakes are high and the schedules are unforgiving, and he's seen the full range from dashboards that drive real decisions to ones nobody opens twice.We get into what separates a report people actually use from one that just fills a slide, why more data usually makes the problem worse, and how to build reporting that a project team trusts enough to act on.If you own project controls, run reporting for a capital program, or you're just tired of dashboards that look good and change nothing, this one's for you.

What does it take to run a project controls company? Michael Bograd sits down with Alex Viana, Stelic's VP of Operations, to talk about the part of the firm clients never see: recruiting, invoicing, compliance, payroll. The machinery most firms call back of house, and why that's the wrong name for it.Alex ran operations at Apple, Amazon, and Meta before joining Stelic at six or seven people. The firm is now close to 30, supporting more than 50 projects, and this conversation is about what had to change in between: why freestyling stops working past a handful of employees, how white glove recruiting keeps a bench warm for clients who need people yesterday, what internal AI bots did to a two-week invoicing cycle, and why a human still signs everything that goes out.