Solutions, being a resolution-engineer is hard. 

The buyers had a structural engineer inspect and then asked for another $60k reduction to stabilize the foundation.

Youtube is the second largest search engine, and has videos on basically every subject known to man.

I am an engineer so I am very used to Excel.

Therefore, we can be manipulated or our judgement can be affected by anything that happened during the day.It's called social engineering and it has multiple variants.

You can determine what a decent salary would be for someone in your market and then reverse-engineer to see if what you're paying as a salary, plus the projected performance commission, will get you there.

I am not your structural engineer so take what I say (and others most likely) with a grain of salt and best to get a contractor to come take a look at it.

Lawyers, engineer, architect, expeditor, surveyors, etc pile on the fees quickly. 

****I am not a financial advisor or guru, I was just a dumb civil engineer who learned that you cannot push on a rope and dirt and water  = mud.

Make sure your plans are engineered from someone reputable (don't trust the builder's guy unless you can verify their trustworthiness).