Week 15/16 - To be Right or Happy
- Sal Randazzo
- Apr 22, 2018
- 4 min read
April 22nd! I can't believe it's the end of April already! This week I wanted to touch on something that I've been hurdling over since I separated from the military in 2015. Is it better to be right or to be happy? This post isn't designed to tell you what to do, but more of a learning experience from my mistakes.
The scenarios that play out throughout my life come back to one common theme - Age. I'm young (29) and have a lot of responsibilities with my job. I supervise 6 construction managers and am solely responsible for nearly $8M worth of projects that must be executed on budget and in a timely manner. In addition to the day-to-day operations of the office, I'm consistently looking toward the future to find more projects and scale our growth within the Government Contracting market in Charleston, SC. This means; finding new work, estimating competitively, preparing quality proposals, and forecasting our manpower to execute the future work.
It's a lot of work, but it comes with excellent compensation. I'm NOT talking about pay and benefits - My "supervisor" (more of a mentor) allows me to run freely with my program, checking in from time to time on the budget, schedule, and manpower. I can lead our operations as I see fit - something that I've been searching for since leaving the military. The success or failure rests on my shoulders and not too many people would give that kind of responsibility to a 29 year old.
That being said, being young comes with a sort-of chip on your shoulder. You have to prove to people that you know what you're doing. You feel the constant need to justify to everyone you run into that even though you're young you have all the experience in the world. The truth is, you don't - stop doing this! Between my 6 employees, there's nearly two centuries worth of experience through many different trades; site civil development, electrical, mechanical, carpentry & finish work and many of them were previous business owners! What is my lousy 9-years of experience going to add to this team? Any experience I have, they've seen ten-fold throughout their careers.
The key in this situation is how to communicate with the right people, leverage the right experiences to move the program forward. Sometimes, taking a step back and listening to the experience of others, will teach you leaps and bounds vs. proving to everyone that you've got the experience to do the job.
The past couple of weeks, I've been presented with multiple scenarios where the client feels that we've done something incorrectly on our projects. Now, in some instances our client deals with other contractors who try to sneak a quick-one by inspectors or aren't as honest as others so I can understand where the distrust is generated from. But, we have always been an open-book and have worked with the same client for the last decade. In these scenarios, we have been technically correct in our procedures according to the specifications and drawings. Where we have failed is communicating those means & methods with our client.
One specific scenario from the past couple of weeks; our client felt that our hydrostatic pressure test failed because we had a pressure loss of 1-psi over a 2-hour long test, spanning 935 LF of 20-inch C905 pipe. American Water Works Association (AWWA) sets the standards for pressure loss on these types of systems and there's a very detailed formula & chart to determine the "allowable leakage." When the pressure test "failed," the inspector told us to run it again. I clearly did not agree that the test failed, but instead of trying to understand where the inspector was coming from, we decided to quote the specifications and AWWA standards verbatim on-site which created an "us vs. them" scenario. This is never good in the construction industry - projects don't progress quickly when we're constantly arguing with the inspector. Instead what I could have done better was one of two things. (1) Address the allowable leakage before the pressure test started so we didn't waste time afterwards and we would all be on the same page or (2) When the client believes we have failed, try to understand how the inspector was coming to that conclusion.
In this instance, the client was referencing a standard in the specifications where it stated, "no allowable leakage." However, this was referenced in the Ductile Iron Pipe section. I knew this did not apply to the C905 (PVC) section of pipe we were testing, but I decided it was best to show our knowledge and that we were right, instead of understanding where the inspector was coming from. Once we started quoting specifications and standards, the inspector shut down and wasn't open to discussion. If I set my ego to the side, and tried to listen to his point of view, we would have come to the conclusion that he may have been incorrect and we wouldn't have wasted additional man-hours.
This is the Right vs. Happy scenario I wanted to address this post. You may be correct & dead-to-right, but you can easily piss everyone off along the way which will hinder your future progress. Every little scenario will require an argument to move on. It's not what you say, but how you say it - this is the key in Government-Contractor relationships.
I hope you enjoyed this post! I'm constantly seeking feedback - leave a comment below or send me a message letting me know what you think, how I can make this better, or if there's a topic you want me to cover!
Thanks for reading!
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About Sal Randazzo: Sal is a defense contractor, entrepreneur, and fitness enthusiast. His Blog is designed to share his life with his followers. His YouTube channel & Blog is a gallery of his work and personal life. Enjoy!
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