Mr. Clean

My life churned along as an estimator. I was fairly successful at it and I always made my 'plan'. Almost always. The 'plan' is what the branch manager decided you could produce in total dollars bid and secured, and then the gross revenue. My first year, the plan was $1.5 million secured and I made a $2 million number, so the next year my 'plan' was increased. I made that number and the 'plan' was increased once more. I saw the pattern.

I also learned that if you secured a large job, you were a hero! If you came in second with your bid, you were a loser…big time! You were only as good as your last successful bid. Stress ruled!

I did secure some landmark work; the Shriner's Hospital in Sacramento was one that I estimated and secured. Another was the Park Plaza Tower, a 24 story office tower in downtown Sacramento. And lots of others. I can drive around the Sacramento area today and point out dozens of jobs that I had a hand in. All very satisfying today, but all stress and bother at the time I was involved.

After I had been with PCI for some time, our branch office was invited to bid on the new NEC cleanroom project in Roseville. Cleanroom? I was given a short course education in just what a cleanroom was and how it was constructed. I also found out that cleanrooms were bid 'concept only'. The plans for this $25 million dollar cleanroom consisted of 3 pages. And a specification book. We had to come up a design we could build for the lowest amount of money but would still satisfy the customer and meet the spec's.

Bidding this project was going to be a team effort. It was far too large for one estimator as we had to plan on building walls, floors and ceilings. And not just ordinary, walls, floors and ceilings. Cleanroom grade!

To learn more about cleanrooms and how to bid on them, I went to Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, where our San Francisco branch office was building a small R&D cleanroom. We had to get into the Tyvek 'bunny suits' with 'booties' and face masks. All very high tech as we were going into a Class I cleanroom, the highest class, where particles of contaminants are measured and regulated by microns and even the number of water molecules is strictly regulated by the HEPA filters in the ceilings. De-ionized water is added back to the atmosphere in a cleanroom, just to make the environment human friendly. I found it all fascinating and I now had a second path available for my career.

So we began to prepare a winning number for the NEC plant. The new cleanroom there was going to be a 'Superfab', a Class I cleanroom that would be over 100,000 square feet in size. And since I was the only one of the estimators that used a computer, I was the designated spreadsheet guy. The Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet guy! It was not an enviable task as I had to constantly re-assure the team leader, a Luddite, that the numbers would calculate as planned and it wasn't magic as he assumed it was.

Many long weeks and lots of long evenings later, we came up with a number to bid with. Well, our concept number must have been right as we were invited to stick around for the second round of bidding. We were told the other prices we needed to beat and something about their concepts. Now we had to imagine a way to come in lowest and first! Which we did. We removed the number we had for cleaning and final wipe down of the fab and came up with a number that was substantially lower than everyone else. Of course we knew that someone had to do the cleaning and we planned on offering that service once we secured the project. And then we could charge more!

Sure enough, we got the job and now our real education began as the branch office, that had never seen a cleanroom before, began to build their very first one.

Link to cleanroom stuff…

The Age of Computers

Estimating, (or Quantity Surveying if you were in Great Britain) was soon my life and I loved it. I had an office and a computer and I could take a set of drawings in to my office and close the door. Then I could take the plans apart, not physically, but within my head. Like most estimators, I was able to visualize the completed project and just about everything in labor and material it would take to get to that finished state. I was in my own little world and until I was finished, the door would remain closed.

But, back to the computer…sure I was given one, an IBM clone. But I wasn't given any instructions. I was going to have to figure it out by myself. And after a few frustrating weeks, I decided that there was no way that I could learn at work; too many interruptions. I was going to have to learn at home, so we decided to buy a computer. We convinced ourselves that we could learn to use it together for personal purposes as well as for business.

I went shopping and ended up buying an Epson Equity II with a 40 MB hard drive and 12 MB of RAM. With Turbo! It was top of the line and it cost us $2,500 (20 years ago). Long story short; it did help us, though it was painful at times.

And back at work, I could now begin to navigate through the programs that had been installed on my pc. Programs like Symphony, which contained a program called Lotus 1-2-3. And Pro-Write, a simple word processor. I didn't care for the Symphony word processor. At home I would read about spreadsheets and then practice. Later, at work, I would try out my new knowledge.

As luck would have it, I was the only one of the four estimators that wanted to use a computer. In their offices, the computers were silent and the screens were dark. I would get no help from those Neanderthals. I would go to our secretarial staff and ask them the tough questions. And I learned a lot. Probably too much as I was soon the resident 'geek' and if anything went wrong with a computer, I was the first one called to solve the problem. I quickly learned that 'reboot' solved 75% of those problems while checking the power supply would solve another 20%. For the remaining problems, we would call our West Coast Comptroller in Anaheim, a corporate 'geek' and the one that was pushing the use of computers everywhere. Pretty soon he noticed that he was getting very few calls from the Sacramento office and he figured out that I was the reason for that. We became friends. I think he enjoyed talking about computers to someone who knew what he was talking about.

That friendship became a lasting one, and it changed my career in ways I couldn't even imagine at that time..