Landon McQuestion

Relentless Ally

Leading an Estimating Dream Team

Vice President of Preconstruction Landon McQuestion has approached his career as an estimator with a serial inability to sit still. As estimators constantly chase a moving matrix of prices and timetables, so too has Landon relentlessly pursued opportunities to push the boundaries of tech-enhanced preconstruction and build teams that share his and Balfour Beatty’s client-first values and lean leadership.

Today, Landon leads a team that, though based in California, is actively leaving an indelible mark on our preconstruction practices nationwide. Landon is also Balfour Beatty’s foremost expert on DESTINI Estimator and spearheaded its implementation over eight years ago.

While Landon and his team continue to test new and exciting AI-powered preconstruction tools, they still churn out more than 200 estimates per year, constantly driving down risk for our clients and trade partners.

From Trade Partnerships to Estimating Prowess

Landon attributes much of his estimating success to his roots in the trades, where he first worked as a metal stud framer and experienced the many ways that inaccurate estimating can result in cost escalations or delays that directly impact trade partners. After transitioning to the world of estimating, he brought this ground-level knowledge of the jobsite to bear.

It can be easy for estimators without that experience to overlook the granularity of a jobsite’s day-to-day activities and materials – how many tubes of caulk will be needed on a project? How many screws? How many cans of paint?

“At Balfour Beatty, we’ve created a culture where we expect that kind of precision as a higher degree of service to our clients,” Landon says. “Most of our estimators also come from the subcontracting world, so they understand the value of minute detail.”

While pursuing ever more accurate estimates is a clear benefit to our client, Landon’s and others’ trade backgrounds also ensure that our preconstruction teams have a clear window into our trade partners’ interests in achieving mutually beneficial goals.

“Large contractors can fall into a mindset that small preconstruction inaccuracies ‘come out in the wash,’ but we know better,” Landon adds. “Not only does that mentality betray our mission to deliver lean project solutions for our clients, but it lets down our trade partners for whom small changes can have outsized impacts.”

Embracing DESTINI

Collaboration – within, with clients and with design and trade partners – is at the core of Balfour Beatty’s behaviors as a company. When Landon first encountered the possibility of an even more collaborative and virtually accessible preconstruction environment via DESTINI Estimator, he seized the opportunity with the full support of company leadership.

At a base level, DESTINI provides a powerful tool for parametric estimating, able to extrapolate future estimates based on Balfour Beatty’s ever-expanding database of current and historical costs. In a time of persistent market volatility, owners increasingly rely on “napkin sketch” estimates during the earliest phases of project planning.

By implementing DESTINI Estimator, Balfour Beatty makes “napkin sketch” calculations as reliable as possible, and the following more concrete estimates are faster and more collaborative than ever.

“Many of our projects follow a collaborative alternative delivery contracting model like design-build or CM at-Risk, which already universally enhances collaboration between our team, the client and our design partner,” Landon says. “Using DESTINI combined with powerful 3D modeling tools, our preconstruction team and design partners can generate hypothetical sub-estimates in minutes, testing value engineering decisions and their cost implications in real time.”

What was once handled in a series of tedious back-and-forth emails (potentially losing the accuracy of cost data in the process) can now be accomplished instantly, accessible to all and accurate to the minute. Beyond just enhanced accuracy, the time savings significantly accelerates preconstruction and thus a client’s prospective speed to market.

Building on Success

Even after successfully implementing and improving upon DESTINI Estimator’s powerful advantages, Landon and his team have continued to explore new enhancements to the technology.

Under Landon’s leadership and out of commitment to Balfour Beatty’s mission, Senior Estimator Jorge Vargas has recently made DESTINI’s already collaborative environment even more user-friendly and accountable by creating a data-rich environment of trend management with software from Join. With the tool, clients, designers and our estimators can easily prioritize the most financially consequential value engineering options, comparing even minor design changes using DESTINI’s reliable cost predictions.

That data is largely managed by Estimator Hans Seggelke, and the entire process is overseen by Chief Estimator Neil Reilly, all while Director of Design Management Kristen Tuerk utilizes her architecture background to help clients identify the most lean and cost-effective design choices for any project.

While Landon is quick to divert attention away from himself and toward the dynamic preconstruction team he’s assembled, they’re all united by the same client-first values. Whether building schools, emergency operations centers or world-class aviation facilities, preconstruction professionals like Landon and the rest of our California team have the technical knowledge, collaborative mindset and willingness to try new and powerful tools necessary to create success.