Thoughts of interest (at least to me)

The wonders of reinvention and reimagining continue, made possible due to the strong and consistent nature of our team.  1 person does not a team make (other than me) and that is more clear now than ever and the voids and duties of our departed one are quietly, quickly and competently filled by others.

Interesting, I’ve yet really to fill that position, and it turns out the delay, the time, has added a lot of perspective of what the person should be, and should not be.  I’ve had a few people lined up to hire, but they didn’t work out, which turns out that’s fine, since we are motoring right along, and are being forced to create skill set redundancy in the organization since if we don’t do it no one else will.  The duties and soft skills are endless, and are not top-level, but certainly important if not critical - printing from the blueprint plotter and fixing ink and paper issues, network issues and resolution, managing and tracking our endless stream of deliveries, ordering tens of thousands of dollars of product across dozens of vendors each week, personnel issues, operations issues, etc…

Last week was a great example of just how varied my weeks can be, and how the wins and losses come in daily.  I had this apparent thief of a landscaper down in the Valley Forge PA area where I own 4 new single family homes that I rent out.  I’m 3 hours away so he’s supposed to be my eyes and ears down there for the property landscapes and he just did a terrible job - inattentive, lying, lack of supervision - each week I was getting calls from my renters about this problem and that.  And there was a drought, so most of ‘his services’ weren’t actually needed, but he billed me anyway, provided no responses to my questions, and more or less just added a lot of stress 3 hours from home which is the last thing I needed.  So I withheld payment until I got answers, and instead of communicating like a normal human being, he gets a lawyer friend of his dad to take me to district court 3 hours from my home, where I should have had a lawyer but represented myself, and because he just lied through his teeth, and I lacked a proper preparation, pretty sure I’m going to lose that one, which is super frustrating since he did a lousy job.  

He actually had been doing a lousy job for years but I was just too busy to replace him.  

On the other side of the ledger, we had a well go dry on a new home we are building which is never a good thing.  Frustratingly, we had drilled this months ago, so the end of the job juggling act we normally encounter where we drill the well late in the process wasn’t encountered but we did expect to turn on the faucets and get water, which we did not.  Now if you know anything about well-drilling, it’s a big industrial process - big machines, hammering hundreds of feet into the earth, in hopes of striking clean water at a reasonable depth.  You get charged by the foot, so each foot adds $25, so each 100’ adds $2500, and a well can easily go 500’.  If you don’t hit enough water within that, you stop drilling, curse, kick dirt around, wonder why the gods are conspiring against you, because from there the process gets stressful.  What you do then is Frack- and not the scary oil/sand/chemical mixture they use to hunt for natural gas - but shoving thousands of gallons of water down a 6” well at really high pressure, hoping to crack up some veins in the earth that will let the water run free.   Usually works, but then you have a deep well, you typically have filthy water at first, and it’s a process, and not an inexpensive one, and you usually have to install a bigger well pump since the well is deeper.  So kiss off $10k minimum when you go down this path - but the alternative, that the initial well doesn’t produce water after you’ve spent $15k is a situation you do not wish for at all, and has only happened twice in the my career.  Both times it sucked for me and my client who had the misfortune of traveling that path with me.

My point of telling the above narrative description is this - I called the well driller, who is 2hrs away, at 3 pm Friday to relay the news.  They weren’t just sitting around waiting for my call, but they mobilized a frack crew for first thing Monday.  They fracked, and then came back Tuesday morning to check to see if the frack produced more water, which is did.  So Friday emergency call, Monday they respond by sending a crew, pulling the pump that was set 500’ down, engaging in the complex frack process of water and pressure, returning the next day, checking yield, reinstalling the pump and began running the dirty water clean, which will take thousands of gallons.

So I had landscaping company jerking me around and treating like a jerk, and I had Titan Well drilling literally performing miracles for me.  It balances out, actually more than balances out since the good work far outweighs the bad work, the reasonable contractors far outweigh the shitty ones, it’s just a matter of keeping it in perspective, or at least giving the wins as much energy as the losses.

I’m not alone in sticking with contractors you know aren’t good enough, but you just can’t fire like you see on TV.  Hiring is hard, and lots of time the enemy you know is much safer and a whole lot less time consuming than hiring someone new.  But the the lesson remains the same - if you are going to nurse a relationship you know has a limited future, don’t be surprised when it blows up and comes to an end, forcing you to do in a hurry (replace them) what you could have been doing methodically.

This bring me to a thought I had and wrote about last week - that I’m not the only company who allows a highly capable individual to steer the corporate ship on a course not necessary aligned with the best long term interests of the company.  It literally takes me a minute to see 3 or 4 highly successful organizations that are bottle-necked and hamstrung by one individual that is deeply entrenched and hard to picture the organization without - the old success rut I’ve been ruminating on.  What I’ve been seeing and discovering is that its typically the client who pays to the price for this lack of improvement within the service organization, typically in delay and frustration that while the main mission has been accomplished, a lot of the ancillary tasks have not been.