Lessons learned as a construction foreman

Happy Chinese New Year's everyone!

For the past week, I've been soaking in the sun in the beach in Thailand, and amazingly, the phone has rung only a few times (I ignored it).  In China, during the New Year's holiday, business really does come to a standstill and for that I'm so grateful.

In the previous 3 weeks, though, we've been working 7 days a week -- because of one mega project.  The project is removing asbestos material from a pharmaceutical plant for a German pharma company.  The way we landed this deal was kind of cool.  The overall head honcho on the project for the general contractor was a former residential client of ours and when they discovered asbestos in the air ducts, he gave me a call.  Initially, my response was, "You sure you have the right guy?  I have no experience with asbestos" But, I offered to at least ask around and quickly found that there was no one in China who did asbestos removal professionally.  Asbestos is not even prohibited in the way it is in many other countries.  So, I did some homework, and brought in a colleague from HK who had some experience, and next thing I knew, we were doing the assessment.  Learning on the fly is always scary, but the best advice a manager gave me once was to learn or prototype off the back of a customer.  

So, only a couple weeks after the first phone call, I was pitching a project for the total removal of the asbestos material, replacement, cleanup, and testing.  My contact with the general contractor advised me that the client had deep pockets, so I ended up charging about 3x more than I originally estimated (looking back, it's a good thing I did).  The single project had a value of more than our entire first year's revenue.  Now it was time to make it happen.  I traded my computer for a hard hat, safety vest, and work boots and have been putting most everything else on hold to get this job done right over the past few weeks.

It's been only a month since we kicked off the project, but I've already learned a lot of lessons the hard way and took advantage of the holidays to jot some of them down.  I thought I'd share them with you all -- they probably won't make sense to you, but if you're curious, or ever have to do construction in China or manage subcontractors, give me a shout.

Lessons learned:

1.      Do not plan to get anything done around CNY holidays.  Chinese manual laborers are accustomed to working long hours – 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week.  But CNY is sacred and there is almost no money you can pay them to stay and work instead of going home to their province.  Even if the holiday officially starts on the 22^nd and ends on the 29^th ,  laborers start vanishing by the 16^th and don't return until the 2^nd.  Us management ended up having to finish off a phase of work ourselves, turning wrenches, removing gaskets, and lifting steel scaffolding because we didn't plan correctly

2.      Managing Chinese laborers is like managing a class of junior high schoolers on a field trip.  Assume that they will not listen to the uniform requirements and insist on removing their masks while doing asbestos work.  Assume that they will not be doing what you expect them to do.  Assume that they will smoke where they want and pee on the side of the building.  The key to managing them is having positive control – having one reliable person with each team, NOT a site manager managing multiple teams.

3.      What you don't check doesn't get done to standard.  We were embarrassed when the general contractor pointed out to us that one team was not removing asbestos material – they had simply shoved in the replacement material.  They also damaged the existing ductwork unnecessarily.  It looked like someone entirely untrained had been working there.  Insist that the specialist manager has checked the work before your subcontractor manager has checked it and then do spot checks yourself.  Show everyone exactly how you are inspecting but then do the checks at unexpected locations.   Hold everyone responsible and make one single example (both positive and negative).  We ended up firing the entire ductwork team.

4.      German clients suck.  They are exacting (do not recognize the difficulties of working to European standards in China), difficult to work with, and will ask for more when you bust ass to go the extra mile.  To get them to compromise, you have to build in padding, cite a lot of standards, and then also create pain on their side – otherwise, if you just complain that it will be a lot of work on your end, they won't care.  It's your problem.

5.      Site managers must be bilingual.  Our subcontractor prided themselves on European management.  What this meant though was that they sent a young Swedish guy to manage a team.  He couldn't speak a word of Chinese and confusion ensued.  A foreign manager is a good idea but he must have a translator and have authority.

6.      Chinese workers can either work tremendously fast or horribly slow.  One Sat, I got a call from our site manager that workers were barely moving.  A scaffolding tower that normally would take one hour to construct had taken five hours and we were way behind in the schedule.  It was a combination of having worked late the night before, fatigue, but mostly, that the workers had just been told that they were going to have to stay several days late for Chinese New Year's and their morale was low.  We bought them lunch, promised them a bonus, but that didn't do much.  But the next day, Lao Yang, the grizzled old Chinese team manager, came to me and proposed that the workers were going to skip dinner and just get all the gaskets removed and replaced in two rooms we had targeted.  They would get it done and when it was done, they would go home.  This was what we had wanted.  Instead of reaching for more, I agreed, and was dumbfounded to watch absolute silence as these guys started working like machines.  Not only that, the work quality was still up to par.  So, give these guys a realistic goal, insist on quality, and let them go when they achieve it to break the "work to the clock" mentality.

7.      Work weekends and after-hours.  Seems like this would suck, but we were most productive when the client and the general contractor weren't hovering overhead to pounce on every uniform violation or distract us with meetings and requests for updates.

8.      Good practice is morning briefing and end of day site hygiene and cleanup.  This keeps safety and the day's tasks fresh in everyone's minds, and also keeps the work site looking tidy.  Although it has little to do with work progress, if the site looks like doodoo, the client will assume it's reflective of your work.  Also, it's a good chance to inventory equipment and supplies and replenish overnight before it pops up and stops up work the next day.

9.      In the contract, be very specific about roles and responsibilities.  Limit your scope precisely.  We procured some material that turned out to have a significant defect.  Although all we did was to order the material that the general contractor had specified, we shouldered a good amount of the blame and ate a lot of costs.  Fortunately, in the contract, I had included a matrix that spelled out specifically that it was the GC's duty, not ours, to purchase this. 

10.   Document every change and agreement.  I thought it was excessive, but unfortunately, covering your ass is a big part of this game.  I thought it was strange that the GC always put down every complaint in an email to us, when I would just mention their shortfalls in person, but I've since learned that they are keeping ammunition in case they ever need to terminate us.

11.   Pad the contract time and cost big.  The more risk and uncertainty, the more you should pad.  My subcontractor's initial proposal was to be done in 21 days.  We'll be lucky to do it in 60 days, with delays and the holidays.  Also, I would propose a bonus for the sub to finish on time and a penalty if they are late.  Our subcontractor did not have much skin in the game to bear the costs of screwing up or finishing late and I found that I was driving a lot harder and picking up the pieces a lot more than if I had built in a carrot and stick into the arrangement.

12.   Plan for worksite basics before the project even starts: PPE, access badges and building keys, workspace, work order and overtime paperwork requirements, secure storage area, how to get paid, and any communications/status update rhythms.

13.   Demand a project advance – we incurred easily 100k in costs without seeing a dime from the client.  This is both risky (if things went south and the client terminated the engagement) and a cash-flow burden.  Testing fees, equipment, gear, labor costs, rental fees, all add up.  I built in a 25% advance to be paid within 7 days of the project start and they agreed, but procedurally, this was a nutroll, so push hard on this before signing to make sure they do carry through.  The GC should help support you on this, not be an obstacle.

14.   During an assessment phase, the GC is your buddy.  Once you get into execution/remediation, the GC becomes a slavedriver.  For this project, the GC was super supportive in bringing us into the project so we could help them provide a way forward for the client and look good.  Once we moved into execution, however, they were all about appearances and cracked the whip frequently without helping much to fix joint problems. 

15.   Beware the phrase, "We're all in this together."  It usually means – I might have screwed up, but you're going to be picking up the pieces for my fault.  We pulled long hours and extra costs for a week for the GC's fault, but they kept coming back to this phrase and everytime I wanted to discuss cost recovery, I kept getting pushed off.