5 - and have accumulated an interest in the company that is too great to he absorbed either by the company or the other members of the company management. It is at this critical point that the company must either be liquidated (which is relatively easy to do in the case of a construction company) or stock must be sold to the public. If the latter course is followed, the question then is whether the successors in management can perform at least as well as the founders, who have now reached the point where they are, as business assets, nearing the end of their useful business lives. If a company can survive the critical point of the death or retirement of its founder and the quality of management has been perpetuated, there is no reason why it cannot continue to perform in the future as well or better than it has in the past. The third point that characterizes most construction companies is the fact that the business is truly and highly competitive and increasingly so now that there are many companies sufficiently well financed to take on by themselves extremely large projects. Most of the work is won at the bidding table, and this means that the successful bidder has won the award by cutting the price below anyone else's. This puts a special pressure on profit margins and accounts for the fact that there is no consistent relationship between construction profits and company backlogs or company revenues. A portfolio of uncompleted construction contracts may be an asset if the work that it represents contains a profit or it may be a substantial liability if the contracts involved are finally going to be performed at a loss. An individual construction company has no assurance of a business momentum that will sustain its volume of activity, for it is constantly working itself out of work as it performs on the contracts in hand. It must constantly replenish its work volume. Its success in accomplishing this can vary widely