A building firm that started with one mason and a borrowed mixer.

How the firm started

Muhammad Aslam Butt began laying brick in Ichhra in 1983, working for other thekedars on houses around Poonch Road and Muslim Town. In 1998 an owner in the same neighbourhood asked him to take a five-marla double storey on a labour-rate contract — the owner buying material, Aslam sahib providing the crew and the responsibility. He took nine men and finished it in seven months. That job is still standing, and its owner's nephew gave us a plaza contract nineteen years later.

For the first five years the work was labour-rate only. In 2003 we took our first material-and-labour contract, a ten-marla house in Township, and bought a mixer and a needle vibrator instead of hiring them by the day. The office at Abid Market opened in 2006 and has not moved since — deliberately. Owners with a complaint should not have to look for a contractor's new address.

In 2011 a commercial client needed invoices from a registered company, and the firm was incorporated with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan as Milli Builders Private Limited. Constructor registration with the Pakistan Engineering Council followed. When Engr. Usman Aslam came back from UET Lahore with a civil engineering degree in 2013, three things became standard on every job that had previously been occasional: a stamped structural drawing, a written bill of quantities, and concrete cubes going to a laboratory.

How we run a site

We keep our own crew. In season that is about sixty men — masons, steel fixers, shuttering carpenters, labour — with four site supervisors and a projects manager over them. We do not win a contract and then hand it to a sub-contractor we have never worked with, which is the single most common reason a Lahore house ends up with hollow plaster and a leaking roof after two monsoons.

Every active site gets a supervisor who is on it, not passing through. Steel is checked and photographed against the bar bending schedule before shuttering closes, because after the pour nobody can prove anything. Owners receive a written progress note each week with photographs, the stage reached, material received, and what is planned for the coming week.

Safety

Helmets from ground floor upward and full-body harness above first-floor slab level, edge protection on open slabs, tied scaffolding rather than stacked brick supports, and a first-aid box plus the Rescue 1122 number posted at the site office. No one under eighteen works on our sites, at any trade. Where a contract runs long enough to require it, labour is registered with the Punjab Employees Social Security Institution.

Structural integrity

Grade 60 deformed bar to the schedule, cover blocks on every face, and a concrete mix designed for the member rather than a mistri's guess at the ratio. Column and slab pours are sampled and cube-tested at seven and twenty-eight days at an independent laboratory, and the reports go to the owner with the stage bill. If a cube fails, we core-test and, if the core confirms it, we break it out and re-do it at our own cost. That has happened twice in twenty-seven years, and both times the owner found out from us first.

Timelines

The programme goes into the contract as dates, not as "insha'Allah six months". We build the Lahore calendar into it honestly: monsoon weeks in July and August cost slab and plaster days, December fog slows curing, and smog-season restrictions on dust-generating work do interrupt excavation and cutting. A programme that ignores those is a programme designed to be broken.

Transparent quoting

One rate, one BOQ, one payment schedule tied to stages you can see from the street. The brands of cement, steel, sanitary ware, wiring and tiles are named in the contract, with an allowance figure where the owner has not chosen yet. If steel or cement moves more than the escalation clause allows, we show you the purchase invoice, not a revised figure with no explanation behind it.

Who you will actually deal with

• Muhammad Aslam Butt Chairman & founder

  Raj mistri by trade, forty-three years on site. Prices nothing and signs nothing these days, but still turns up to check the first course of brickwork and the setting-out on every new job.

• Engr. Usman Aslam Managing Director

  B.Sc. Civil Engineering, UET Lahore, 2012; registered with the Pakistan Engineering Council. Prepares the estimate, issues the BOQ, checks structural drawings before they reach site, and is the person who signs your contract.

• Rana Tanveer Ahmed Projects Manager

  Twenty-two years on Lahore sites, sixteen of them with us. Runs the labour, the material deliveries and the weekly programme across all live jobs. If you telephone about your site, you generally end up speaking to him.

• Hafiz Bilal Nadeem Quantity Surveyor & estimation

  Takes off quantities from the drawing, prepares the BOQ, measures completed work at each billing stage, and reconciles material ordered against material delivered and consumed.

• Site supervisors Four, full time

  One supervisor covers a maximum of two live sites. Each keeps a daily site register — labour present, material received, pours carried out, weather — and it is open to the owner at any time.