Quitting your job

Last year was difficult. To summarise my personal experience the minimum number of steps looks like this:

January 6^th threat of pandemic clearly visible in advance of everyone else spotting the danger: Prepared for the long-haul.

23^rd of March the whole of the UK gets locked down.

24^th of March my Furlough period starts. I have a guilty Spring, Summer and early Autumn at home, but I get a lot of stuff done.

14^th of August after two meetings, I’m made redundant, my last official week working at Doorlining will be in September, but I’ll be at home anyway. Unfortunately for my ex-boss, his best intentions have cost him a huge chunk of his business. No good deed goes unpunished.

September I have to sign on on-line and start searching for jobs, I have a bit of redundancy money to float me for three months, I’m stressing but not desperate. Amanda and I know how to contract constructively and live within our means when things are tight.

October 26^th I start work again.

The problem with the new job was that it was paying £8000 less than I used to earn, doing pretty much the same job, but with the added responsibility of having to price everything I processed as well as the technical processing. Frankly, it was a liberty from day one. However, `needs must, there is a pandemic going on, millions are out of work. Be thankful you found a new job before the redundancy money ran out’… you would think. 

And I did for three and a bit months.

Jump forward to the 3^rd of February, I’ve had enough of Majestic Windows in Cheddar. This is a company that operates on throughput. If it had time for management systems it would have to have more administration staff, someone to answer the phones to deal with non-essential enquiries and to direct calls, someone to manage, populate and update a production schedule, someone to manage goods in and out and their movement within the facility. The alternative to this massively simplified model is to not have any management systems in place, everyone answers the phone that never stops ringing and nobody ever gets any work done to their satisfaction or with the absolute confidence that what they have done is 100% on point; but instead rely on making sure that there is at least 50% markup because that will offset and costs caused by errors.

I kid you not.

As an aside, a briefing article published in Construction News in July 2019 highlights the average 21% cost of construction industry errors that are effectively built into every construction project: https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/agenda/opinion/cn-briefing/openness-honesty-avoiding-21bn-errors-16-07-2019/.

It’s quite hard to imagine that 21% of your construction cost, goes on fixing things that went wrong, from planning through to implementation. Let that sink in for a moment.

We could also spend a moment contemplating the `bodged around errors discovered UK wide in the wake of Grenfell, and following the deep inspection of properties that have highlighted even more errors that have been papered over. The cost of those errors and omissions includes 72 lives for sure, and billions in putting them right. Never-mind the probable 21% on costs during the original construction/refurbishment phases.

In manufacturing for the general construction industry, making things the wrong size or to the wrong regulatory standard is always a bigger problem than first appears. You may be able to `bodge’ around a problem, but it will always be a bodge. If your window is too small or too large or doesn’t meet fire regulations etc, you have a hole in a wall. A hole in a wall means you aren’t weather-proof; this lack of weatherproofing delays your internal trades and your eventual sign-off. I could exhaust a page on the fallout from this one seemingly simple issue, but let’s summarise with, delays and costs.

What has this to do with quitting your job? Simple to answer. I was not willing to be spoken down to for not achieving throughput, because I wanted to keep an electronic trail of everything that came through the office. Because if you don’t have that audit trail or ability to forensically examine errors you can’t apply fixes to systems to trap errors before they manifest in your manufactured goods. 

You invariably become liable for every mistake as a company, because without evidence `he said she said he said’s is the default position for all parties, but stuff still has to be remade. Someone still has to pay. But likely as not, it is going to be the manufacturer if the client sticks to their guns and says `I’m not paying you, I won’t work with you again, I’ll tell everyone you let me down' (that can be private clients via review sites, or commercial customers through the builder's grapevine).

For my part, I looked at how I was being shown how to work from day one and thought immediately that it was too open to error, and that for myself as a cross trainee, bringing relatable skills but without direct experience, I could very easily lose track of what I was doing or had done, and incur costs and create delays.

My solution was to create a calculating spreadsheet, it really was as simple as that. Columns with headings for components, rows with client references, a total on the right, a grand net total at the bottom and a grand total +Vat under that. Some notes at the top, and a legend showing discounts, uplifts and the Quote Number. This critical number is the container for everything that follows including all subsequent orders if you end up with phased work. By the time I resigned the spreadsheet had undergone fourteen major amendments and numerous smaller ones ( it was getting smart, and had helpful tips laced through it explaining how it worked).

The reason for creating the spreadsheet outside the software that presents the quote to the client is that it is just the numbers. The actual quote system only shows a total price and picture of the complete item (t does list the components, colours and options, but it doesn’t show individual prices).

The way small builders and developers and even large builders merchant chains work is frankly very poor and rushed. Badly drawn, poorly annotated bits of paper often photographed from odd angles in bad-light, and or they just turn up at the office with their only copy of their bit of paper, give it to you and as far as they are concerned their job is done. I create a quote they add on their percentage and then they forget about it until their potential client gives them the go-ahead... or not.

In their world pricing is easy, add a percentage to the X for my time and my costs. There is no awareness on their part, of the underlying complexity, because you have done their work for them and not explained it.

I also created explanatory emails to go with quotes rather than just firing out a quote to XYZ with no annotation whatsoever.

The issue here is that my quote could be for £100000’s of widows for an office block to flat conversion. It is in everyone’s interests to ensure that the quote for this is itemised, per window, per component, per regulatory requirement. After all, that is how you price.

If, however, you price by simply writing currency numbers next to items on a bit of paper a builder bumped on your desk, without labelling those items with meaningful terms such as; frame, handle, glass, hinge type, `miscellaneous options numerous'  how do you look back at what you have done in the event of changes to specifications or error?

There is an answer. 

You have to try and reverse engineer scribble. Often other peoples scribble. You also have to find and then trawl through reams of paper that have already been scribbled on to find space for new scribble. This is time-consuming. Time, as we know, is money, equals delay and cost.

However, if you have scanned the crappy bit of paper you were handed, and create a folder for it. Give the folder a quote number the same as the one generated by your design software, and then use a simple spreadsheet to take your headlines figures, in one column, and have some adjacent columns populated with simple equations to work out discounts, you spend considerably less time bashing away at a calculator. And if you get a revision request, you simply copy your original worksheet to a new tab, revise the new and, supersede the old. What you have is history, you reduce your risk of liability for errors, and you remind yourself as you move left to right to check you haven’t missed something.

Nothing described above is rocket science it's not even innovative in the wider world, it’s just BAU. But not at the firm I’ve just walked away from. It was an innovation. However, it wasn’t seen as an innovation, it wasn’t seen as error trapping, and in the opinion of my now ex-boss, it was only useful to me, and it was slower. But everything is slower when you are taking all the calls that come in including all the non-essential stuff. And you don’t have access to an updated production schedule that tells you where in the manufacturing process a project is. When your third-party goods are coming in, and when you expect to be able to deliver those projects… again, I kid you not.

The alternative to a production schedule is to base your delivery system on whoever is shouting the loudest. And the only way to find the information about where a project is?  Is, to leave your seat and ask at each work area around the shop-floor, whether they are working on Job Number X? You may get lucky and find it at the first, you may get unlucky and not find it until you’ve reached the ninth.

Yes, their system worked. It worked on the basis, that so much business came through that it offset the money that got lost in remaking quite simple square holes with glass in…. windows… and doors.

It didn’t work in terms of hours demanded by the system. Costs and delays.

My now ex-boss would make the loud martyr boast that he hadn’t left the office until 11.30pm, had worked Saturday and Sunday at home and had come back into the office on Monday at 6am to try and catch up. The expectation was that I would adopt this modus operandi once I was fully conversant. As it was, over the three months I endured, I’d fallen into the trap of being in a bit early, working through lunch and rolling on for a bit most days.

I was very keen not to fall into the six to seven days a week working trap, especially because the salary didn’t deserve it and the work didn’t require it if everybody worked the same way. And more-so if clients were set a set of standards by which they presented their requirements to us. And would be encouraged to respond to email, rather than trying to dictate their requirements on an ad-hoc basis… when they suddenly remembered something vital that they had left off their bit of scribbly paper from a week ago.

For my part, I would willingly provide them with a simple schedule template to use and provide some simple guidance on its use. There is so much value-add in that process, you have provided a free tool you can support to create a relationship that is both financially agreeable, eliminates risks and educates.

However, it wasn’t to be. There was talk of creating schedules, there was talk of new people in the office to field calls, and to manage hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of goods in and out, but there was also resistance to change, resistance to adopting new technology and methods.

And here is one of the ironies. You’ve bought a new CNC machine nearly five months ago, it got cost over £60000. It’s currently sitting unused because the person who can program it is the person resisting getting new staff, is working seven days a week firefighting, rather than leading, doesn’t share information doesn’t trust his staff or partners and has no time to program his £60000 machine that should be making production more efficient and accurate.

After three months of doing and showing, offering and demonstrating I came to a realisation. My now ex-boss sees the value in the hours worked way above the value of the work done in the hours.

The sad thing about this, having experienced some of Doorlinings clients behaviours (and Lee at Doorlining set client information expectations to avoid these types of time/cost traps), is that general construction has a very long road to modernisation ahead even with the monumental `arse kicking’ it’s going to get at the end of the Grenfell Process.