The Nuframe Way: How one forming division is setting the pace from the ground up

There’s a saying in the forming business: “You do 20 good jobs and nobody hears about it. You do one crap job and everybody hears about it.”

That’s according to Albert Wiens, who joined the Nuframe platform with the February acquisition of AJ Construction, and has spent decades in the trade.

Wiens captures a key truth about forming, and why it’s so important. Concrete forming is the true beginning of a construction build. It’s the mould that shapes everything that follows. Get it right, and the project moves along seamlessly. Get it wrong, and the knock-on effects ripple forward through time. It goes without saying that the stakes are high. 

For Nuframe Group, this risk is reframed as a leadership opportunity. 

Two-Way Trust (And Accountability) 

Wiens’ longest-serving employee has been with him for 26 years. That kind of tenure doesn’t happen by accident, and he sees it as a direct result of leadership built on respect, and the conviction that people who feel valued show up and truly deliver.

“If you treat your employees well, you will have a good result at the end,” Wiens explains. And his perspective on this accountability is that it goes both ways; for team-members fulfilling their day-to-day duties, the idea is to “go and do what you say you’re going to do. No excuses.” 

This translates to trust between leadership and the team on the ground, and a team that consistently delivers on its promises — a value that resonates through Nuframe at large (and was central to the decision to acquire AJ in the first place). 

Process As Power

As integral as the people are to getting things done right, the process brings the structure required for success in a high-stakes trade. 

That’s where Matt Forward, Director at Nuframe Group, comes in. And in Nuframe’s forming division, the process starts with the schedule.

“The formwork is the start of these projects,” Forward says. “As well as you plan it — as well as you schedule, coordinate, and sequence — that’s as good as the project is going to go.”

What sets Nuframe apart isn’t that the team plans carefully — most good forming companies do. It’s the perspective from which they plan. Within Nuframe, there is experience on all sides of the table. With staff that have been site superintendents through to working directly with the developer, Nuframe has a lens that extends well beyond the forming scope. Schedules are built with an understanding of how a general contractor reads them, incorporating other trades’ timelines, and recognizing that awareness of the full picture actually expedites things and reduces cost.

“Other trades may say, ‘This is our scope, this is what we’re getting paid for, the rest is on the GC’,” Forward explains. “But because we at Nuframe are integrated across multiple scopes of work, we put meaningful thought and planning into the whole project.”

The Handoff

This depth of integration is also an asset during transition moments in a project, with forming and framing holding a special key: “Those two [trades] are the drivers when it comes to site speed,” Wiens says. “They’re driving the pace of the project.”

Nuframe’s integrated model is built around making these transitions smooth and seamless.

When forming and framing are handled by separate companies, there’s typically a gap between where the forming crew finishes and where the framing crew can begin. A week, two weeks, sometimes longer. And on a modern construction project, that gap carries a price tag: Nuframe President Russ Esau notes that carrying costs on a job site can run thousands of dollars per day.

“That’s where we can save companies real money, real time, and a lot of grief,” Esau says. 

With forming and framing both within the Nuframe platform, that window becomes something the company actively manages. Schedules are built as part of the quoting process, so by the time contracts are signed, the framing team already has the information they need to begin planning. 

This is where that aforementioned accountability comes back into play; the internal trust between the two divisions means the framing team isn’t just hoping the forming crew delivers. They know their teammates will follow through. Of course, this benefits the client, too. 

Wiens frames it simply: “If we were an independent forming company, we’d be accountable to the GC. Now we’re accountable to both them and ourselves. That’s a meaningful shift.”

The Nuframe Way

People + Process = Performance isn’t an ethos Nuframe aligns with loosely. It captures the symbiotic relationship between how the company treats its people, and how — in turn — those people execute on the processes built out for them. 

“Having these processes in place is what allows the people who work for us to know what to expect every day,” Forward says. “They can come to work knowing it’s not going to burn them out — that their time is respected, that their input is valued. When people feel respected and valued, they become a contributing part of that process. It’s cyclical.”

Three months into the integration with AJ Construction, Wiens says the teams have confirmed what they suspected going in: the ceiling on what they can accomplish together is a lot higher than what either could reach alone. “The sky’s the limit,” he says.

And for Esau, that sky-high ceiling is the whole point. “The biggest focus right now,” he says, “is making sure that from day one of a job, the team is set up to succeed.”