Why the sextant.
A sextant is a precision instrument for finding True North when the sky is imperfect. Capital projects are imperfect skies. WayPoint Controls is a practice for people who still care about the bearing.
Principal
Joe Roberts
Principal, WayPoint Controls, LLC · Project controls practitioner
Estimating, cost, schedule and risk across EPC, utility and industrial capital work — projects from a few million to several hundred million dollars, on the owner’s side and the builder’s. Based in Dothan, Alabama; works across the Southeast and remotely.
From Joe
I have spent my career in the machinery room of capital projects. This practice is what I learned there, offered directly.
The machinery room is the place where cost, schedule, risk and procurement are supposed to tell one story, and usually tell four. I know the Sunday night before the progress meeting: the schedule export in one window, the cost system in another, procurement in a spreadsheet named use_this_one, and everyone wanting the same number by 8 a.m. Monday.
I have reconciled the same commitment three ways and gotten three answers, and spent half a day proving none of them were wrong — only incomplete. I have watched a budgetary quote get treated as firm because the column had no place for its nature. I have watched a delivery date look green until someone asked about required-on-site.
The real cost is not the hours. It is the quiet loss of craft — when the best person in the room is the one who remembers which file is true. So the practice is built the other way round: capture the basis of every number at entry, keep cost, schedule, risk and procurement on one record, and let the report be computed from it. I built the instrument that does that, and every engagement runs on it.
What I offer is straightforward. An estimate you can defend before you commit to it. A budget that still means what it meant when it was set. A schedule that predicts. A forecast that reconciles to the last one without a weekend of archaeology. And a written record of how each of them was arrived at.
If you own a project and do not want to build a controls team to run it — or you have a number in front of you and want someone independent to look at it before you sign — let’s talk.
What we believe
- A number without a basis is a rumor with a dollar sign.
Firm, budgetary, quoted, judgment — capture it at entry or spend your life reconstructing it.
- The instrument notices; the human decides.
Tools should surface what is late, expired or still budgetary. The call stays with the person who answers for the project.
- Project controls is a craft.
It deserves practitioners who live in cost, schedule, risk and procurement — not a dashboard that hides the work.
Where the work is
- Industrial and process facilities — greenfield and brownfield
- Mining and mineral processing
- Utility and substation work
- Owner’s side, EPC side, and the specialty contractor bidding to both
Independent by design: WayPoint does not bid the engineering, supply the equipment or build the work.
Navigate by True North.
Project controls for capital projects — practiced with respect for the craft.
Plot a course with us
Thirty minutes, in your project’s language. No deck.
Or email admin@waypoint-controls.com