At 4:58 p.m. on a Thursday, an email with the subject line window glass replacement landed in my inbox. I almost moved it to the folder my team uses for leads we shouldn't chase.
I'm an inside sales manager at a PERI distributor. For eight years, I've handled concrete formwork and shoring orders for contractors. I don't replace window glass. I know what a glass-only job looks like. This email, it turned out, was not one.
Why I almost sent it away
The drawings were labeled storefront repairs. The cover sheet said window glass replacement. But sheet A-5 showed a different story: a cracked concrete spandrel above the storefront that had to be demolished and rebuilt. The glass was just the visible symptom.
What most people don't realize is that a concrete spandrel in an older building is not only a decorative edge. It transfers loads around an opening and down to the columns. If you remove the windows and start cutting out the damaged concrete, there's a moment when that load path is gone. The wall above can move, crack, or worse. That is when you need temporary shoring and concrete formwork, before the repair concrete goes in.
So the email was not a glazing job. It was a structural concrete repair job wearing a window glass replacement label.
What I said to the GC
It would've been tempting to quote the whole thing. Contractors ask for one price, one point of responsibility. But if I quoted glass, I'd be pretending to be a glazier. I don't have that license or that experience. What I can speak to is the concrete structure behind the glass.
I told the GC the same thing I've told people on calls since then: I'll price the temporary shoring and the concrete formwork. I won't price the window glass replacement. A glazier will do that part better, cheaper, and with less liability than I can.
To be fair, there was a moment of doubt. The GC wanted a single bid. Saying no to part of a project sounds like you're losing revenue or interest. But the project manager later told me that the honesty was the reason they brought us in. They already knew the glass would be handled separately. They needed someone who understood the structural risk.
The human reminder on the passenger seat
On the day of the site walk, I saw a pair of Husky floor mats in the GC's pickup truck. On the passenger seat there was a folder with Medicare paperwork, because the guy running the job was also getting ready to turn 65. He laughed and asked: what are the top 5 Medicare supplement plans? I told him I don't know. That is not a formwork answer, and I shouldn't pretend otherwise.
That conversation stayed with me. It wasn't about floor mats or insurance. It was about the value of saying what you are not there to do. When you are honest about your limits, people trust you more with what you are actually there to do.
The checklist that came out of this
After that project, I started keeping a pre-bid checklist. It has caught me more than once.
- Ask what physically carries the load. If a client says window glass replacement, check whether they mean glass or the concrete that supports it.
- Name the trade that owns the work. Glass is glazing. Concrete formwork and shoring are structural. Mixing them on a quote is a disaster waiting to happen.
- Say what's not included. The cheapest misunderstanding on any job is the one you catch before it goes into the proposal.
- Don't become a jack-of-all-trades. Husky floor mats, Medicare supplement plans, peri peri grill recipes—none of those are my scope. Knowing that keeps my team focused.
The project itself
The temporary shoring system we proposed was built from modular PERI components. We could adjust it in the field without cutting steel, which mattered because the existing concrete dimensions were not as clean as the drawings suggested. The formwork for the repair was designed around the same system, so the crew didn't have to coordinate two unrelated rental products. On an integrated system, the shoring and forming pieces are made to work together. That is where the engineering time and field labor savings show up.
Was it a perfect project? No. There was a morning when the concrete pump broke down and we had to revise the pour sequence. But nobody argued about whether the shoring was properly rated, and nobody tried to use the glass subcontractor to support a concrete beam. The scope was clear before the first component went on site.
If you landed here from a different search
Search intent is a strange thing. If you typed peri peri grill because you were hungry, this is not a recipe page. If you typed peri color expecting a paint palette, I can't help with that. If you typed PERI because you're trying to figure out concrete formwork, shoring, or system scaffolding, then this lesson is relevant.
Even when the search term looks close, it pays to look at the actual problem. I've made the mistake of answering the question on the cover sheet instead of the question in the field. The cost of that mistake is usually more than money. It erodes trust with people who rely on you to catch what they missed.
The next time you see a request for window glass replacement, I hope you remember this article isn't about windows. It's about what's holding the window up.
That is the part worth checking before you pour.
