Avant Garde's CEO on the discipline of construction management, what to do when one sub bid lands 40% below the field, and the two deals that changed his company's trajectory.
Rob Clinch grew up in Bathurst, played varsity hockey at McGill at seventeen, and walked out with a civil engineering degree. He landed in Boston during the Big Dig years — high-end residential, retail, schools across the Northeast from 1998 to 2004 — then came back east to start a family and, eventually, a company. Avant Garde Construction Management is headquartered in Moncton with roughly seventeen people. It works commercial and multi-residential jobs for developers, tenants, and retailers across the Maritimes. On paper, it is a mid-size regional construction management firm. In practice, it is what happens when someone spends six years in one of the most complex construction environments in North America and decides to apply those lessons somewhere slower, and smaller, and worth building in.
The episode is about delivery models — specifically, the difference between a construction manager and a project manager, and why that distinction matters when sub prices expire in thirty-six hours.
Construction management only works when everyone is in the room early
The clearest way to understand what Clinch does: he gets hired before the drawings exist. A construction manager comes on at inception, builds budgets from conceptual sketches, coordinates with the design team and the lender, and tracks cost as the design develops. By the time shovels hit ground, there should be no surprises.
A project manager, in the way Clinch uses the term, manages a completed design. You get the package, price it, execute it. The risk sits differently. And the fee sits differently.
The CM model requires something the lump-sum model does not: transparency. "when you collaborate and you're transparent that's when construction management is at its best," Clinch says. Owner, architect, CM, and lender all in — from the first site plan. When that table is incomplete, the model breaks down. Clinch is specific about this: design takes as long as construction. Owners who treat design as a fast administrative step and then expect an accurate CM budget are the ones who end up arguing about scope later.
What to do when one bid lands far below the field
The honest risk conversation happens at tender. A low bid that lands 20 to 30 percent below the other four is not a win — it is a decision. Clinch qualifies it: is the sub missing something? Did they misread the spec? Or do they actually know something about their own costs that the others don't?
If he cannot find the answer in the scope sheets, he takes the question to the client. "do you want to take the risk because I'm not doing it alone." That is the CM structure working correctly: the client co-owns the decision. A GC running a lump-sum contract absorbs that gamble silently. A construction manager puts it on the table. Clinch has found that clients who are made to articulate the risk themselves make better decisions than clients who are simply handed a number.
The other half of the bid risk is time. The window for a valid sub price has collapsed. "my price is good for 36 hours" is not hyperbole — it is a real constraint that the industry has absorbed, unevenly. Material volatility and demand pressure mean a number carried in a tender for two weeks can already be fiction by closing day. For a firm targeting 75% construction management work, this is less of a problem — prices get refreshed in real time as the project develops. For the 25% competitive tender side of the ledger, it means tender-day coordination is nearly a sport: Clinch describes the adrenaline of competitive closings as one of the few remaining thrills in an otherwise process-heavy business.
The two deals he put on the record
The episode carries two genuine disclosures.
The first is a partnership with Quest Capital, a private equity fund focused on multi-residential real estate development in the Maritimes. Quest became an equity partner in AGCM, sharing office space and pipeline. The flagship project is a two-building, 600-unit retirement-living complex at Lake Loon on Montague Road in Cole Harbour — the Loon Lake Retirement Living development, designed by Lydon Lynch Architects, with groundbreaking targeted for spring 2024. The project is AGCM's Nova Scotia entry: building a Halifax sub-trade network from scratch, competing for subs alongside Halifax-headquartered firms already established in that market.
For a company of seventeen people, a project that size changes everything. Clinch talks about what the partnership communicates internally: "there's a Runway of work for the the next level it's so important for the employees to know that." Pipeline security is not just a business development metric — it is what lets experienced people stay, and what attracts the next generation.
The second disclosure is an acquisition. Clinch agreed to buy Rice Contracting, a Moncton-based commercial GC founded by John Rice. Rice Contracting had been operating for over thirty years and was the largest authorized Butler pre-engineered steel building dealer in Atlantic Canada. John Rice wanted "to find a succession plan for his business so we started talking." The result is a deal that adds design-build capability to AGCM's portfolio — Rice operates as its own company — and gives AGCM industrial and food-service depth it did not have before. (The acquisition was confirmed finalized February 22, 2024, after the episode recorded in August 2023.)
Between the Quest partnership and the Rice acquisition, Clinch made two structural moves in one episode. Neither was a pivot. Both were extensions of a logic he had been running for years.
The tech stack is a culture tell
AGCM has been on Procore for five years. Clinch is direct about how they got good at it: the pandemic created downtime, and instead of waiting it out, they used it. "we invested a lot of time into training and that's paid off now." Sage handles accounting separately. For estimating, the firm uses On-Screen Takeoff and Bluebeam, and where the architect is working in Revit — as Lydon Lynch Architects does on the Loon Lake project — AGCM extracts data directly from the model. "window counts are really quick your cladding materials are quick" when the Revit file is feeding the takeoff rather than a PDF. For site documentation, the team uses OpenSpace for reality capture, and Clinch is clear about who runs it: "we're using open space for for reality capture on site" and the twenty-somethings on his team know it better than the founders do.
This is not a firm chasing tools. It is a firm that found tools that fit the workflow and trained into them deliberately. The distinction matters because the construction industry is full of Procore licenses that nobody uses.
Labour shortage: the schedule answer no one wants to give
Clinch is blunt about where the trades are. "you just can't muscle your way through it anymore." The instinct — push nights, push weekends, stack crews — does not work when the crews are not available to stack. Subcontractors are at capacity, and the ones worth working with are honest about it. That honesty, Clinch says, is actually useful: "the subcontractors are doing better to manage expectations" by capping their commitments up front instead of overcommitting and delivering late.
The planning implication is direct. If a tenant's lease expires in twelve months, the design and procurement process has to begin now. Not next quarter. "if you're not starting now like it's not going to get done in time." This is the conversation AGCM is having with clients who still think construction timelines work the way they did in 2018. They do not.
On the workforce side, AGCM is hiring NBCC construction management graduates and internationally trained engineers who have re-credentialed in New Brunswick. "engineers in their country have taken the two-year program at nbcc" and come out work-ready. This is not a charity initiative — it is a pipeline answer to a real gap, and it is working.
The flywheel started with one client willing to take a chance
Early in AGCM's history, Crombie REIT gave the firm work at Highfield Square in Moncton. No bonding, certified cheques in year one. Crombie was "one of the first people that took a chance." That relationship led to Sobeys work, then JDI, then the repeat-client base that now includes fifteen-year relationships with Crombie and Plaza Corp.
The business development principle Clinch runs is simple: pick ten clients you want to work with, spend 80 percent of your BD effort on them. The architects and developers who gave early AGCM teams "not giving us jobs but opportunities to bid" were all the startup needed. The rest was showing up and not embarrassing the people who vouched for them.
Long-tenured site supers are part of how that reputation compounds. People like Alan, Chris, and Joe — AGCM superintendents with years on the firm — "help establish the culture when new people come in." They are the institutional memory and the recruiting pitch: when a super tells a prospective hire how they are treated, that is more credible than anything in an ad.
The companies in this episode
Avant Garde Construction and Management Inc. is AGCM — the construction management, project management, and general contracting firm at the center of this episode. Moncton-based, Maritime-wide. Commercial and multi-residential. If you are a developer or tenant in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia looking for a CM partner who will put your lender in the room before the design is done, this is where to start. LinkedIn · Instagram
Rice Contracting Ltd. — Greater Moncton's 30-year design-build and general contracting firm, now part of AGCM's portfolio. Atlantic Canada's largest authorized Butler pre-engineered building dealer. Industrial, food-service, institutional. If the project involves a steel structure or a food-service build in Greater Moncton, Rice is the call. LinkedIn
Crombie Real Estate Investment Trust — the TSX-listed Canadian REIT (CRR.UN) that owns, operates, and develops grocery- and drug-store-anchored properties across Canada; Sobeys/Empire-affiliated. Mentioned in this episode as the anchor client that gave AGCM its first real work. LinkedIn
Guest: Rob Clinch, CEO, Avant Garde Construction and Management Inc. Featured on Episode 63 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Acquisition of Rice Contracting confirmed: Quest Properties, March 2024.