Adventures with lyrical - buying a business

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Cathan_foh

shitlord
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Eomer said:
He pisses a lot of people off, not just my bro and I, but other employees. Outside of work he"s a good guy, but he steps on a lot of people"s toes at work. Nothing is ever his fault when things go bad, but when things go well it"s all on him. That kind of thing.
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That 100% sounds like a project manager to me. Motherfuckers take all the credit for shit they didn"t do. Engineers do the design work and then you have some pm step up and get awards for having conversations with the locals.

Engineers here can talk to the locals, it"s just we don"t have the fucking time to do it and they need people to design shit and review shit.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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The economy must be great, because we"ve fired six new employees this year for general asshattery. One guy who was here a year decided he was going to come to work every day and pick fights with everyone, the other guys thought they could just show up whenever they wanted. I"m sorry you partied too hard the night before, but you can"t show up to work three hours late and not even call. Several of them didn"t make it past day one, because they lied about how much skill they had, and while they claimed to have several years" experience, some of them had only several minutes" experience. I"m amazed at how many people will say what it takes to get a job in this industry, and then get on the job and realize that they have no idea what they are doing. It takes years to train someone at high end jobs, and I can"t carry two-three guys who are standing around just watching while the core guys are doing all the work.

I"m absolutely amazed at the lack of work ethic nowadays. Even when I was a kid working for $5 an hour, I never no-show/no-called. These guys have had to go work up the street for 40% less, but hey, at least they can show up whenever they feel like it.

I"ve got a stable crew of six right now, but I"m a little worried that we won"t be able to keep up with the Summer rush if we need to hire more people. We are a service business, and I"m not going to just put the company uniform on any asstard and send them out to deal with customers and do jobs. We are growing, as in year-over-year sales are higher, but we"ll only be able to grow as fast as we can find good, hard working and honest people. Apparently, they are hard to come by in 2012.
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Lyrical said:
The economy must be great, because we"ve fired six new employees this year for general asshattery.
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Nah, it"s like that everywhere. All our new guys are complete dogshit too, despite paying 50k a year with 100% free health care and a pension for an absolutely zero skill required job.

I suspect it"s just because the people who are unemployed now are the ones who weren"t doing any work before to begin with. Everyone who was worth keeping still has a fucking job and doesn"t need to look for one.
 
Cad

Cad

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Candiarie said:
Would reference checks have caught the lack of experience Lyrical? How did you find most of your new hires?
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Reference checks for landscapers? Really?
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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Candiarie said:
Would reference checks have caught the lack of experience Lyrical? How did you find most of your new hires?
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To be honest, we do reference checks, but a few things stop that. If its one of our competitors, they won"t tell us anything or even want to talk to us. Also, with a number of companies in our industry going under, a guy will tell us he worked for a company, and they may no longer be in business. So there"s no phone number to reach the owner.

The best thing has been the tryout day. We"ll weed through 75% of the bad ones on that day. The other 25% that can pass the tryout day will make it a few weeks, and as soon as they start feeling safe, thats when they start coming into work three hours late, or no-show/no-calling, from the all-night partying.

The best thing thats worked for us is hiring people that our current employees have worked with in the past, or hiring guys from our strongest competitors. Some of our competitors do so much to piss their employees off (like pulling $200 in cash out of their weekly paycheck for no reason). So we let our competitors spend the years getting someone trained, and then we cherry pick the best.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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TheCutlery said:
Nah, it"s like that everywhere. All our new guys are complete dogshit too, despite paying 50k a year with 100% free health care and a pension for an absolutely zero skill required job.

I suspect it"s just because the people who are unemployed now are the ones who weren"t doing any work before to begin with. Everyone who was worth keeping still has a fucking job and doesn"t need to look for one.
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Pretty much. I"d hazard to say that given what my competitors are paying, we are 60-100% higher in pay scale, and we don"t pull money out of their checks and yell at them all day. My one guy who I fired after his 50th warning over yelling and flipping out at his co-workers made 50k last year, and I don"t think he"ll make 25k at a competitor. Where he would make $17 an hour, bonuses for doing well, and get 50 hours a week with me, he"s getting 11 an hour, no bonus, and barely 30 hours a week over there. No one outspends in me in ad dollars, and its the main reason why we are growing while the competitors are going under. Not only do I pay more than I can afford, but we work all year round, while our competitors shut down for the Winter and lay everyone off.

These guys go up the street, realize how good they had it and beg to come back. I tell them no way, they showed me the best they had. I"m liking my crew now, 4 guys are busting out 3k a work a day (which is really productive in my industry), and no one shows up late. We only had to hire ten guys to find two of them worth a damn.
 
I

Izuldan_foh

shitlord
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I"m not sure why you find this surprising Lyrical. As a fellow business owner, I would say that 90% of the people I hire either 1) suck or 2) can easily be replaced by someone else without skipping a beat. And I"m in an industry where my most important positions all require college degrees. In construction, I imagine, the number of GED asshats would be overwhelming.

This is in direct contrast with employees, who by and large think they are the shit and deserve raises....."Oh man, I"m awesome, I deserve a raise and make more money".....no you"re not, not if I can hire someone to do exactly what you do for what you make currently. If you want to make more money, show that you are worth it and can"t be easily replaced. I would say 90% of employees think they are doing a good job, when really, they can be replaced with no detriment to my business. What"s funny is a lot of these people like complaining about how shitty their boss/job is, when really they are the ones that suck or are mediocre. Oh well, such is the divide between employers and employees.

Again, the Peter Principle applies beautifully, and I encourage you to utilize it. Basically, the cream that rises to the top, the 5% or so, do whatever you can to keep them. My top employees all make 100-200% of average for their position. My top sales rep makes double what the #3 guy does for example, because he"s awesome and can"t easily be replaced. He makes 3x what my #8 rep does, because the #8 rep can be replaced.

If people are available for work, either 1) they got laid off because of hard times (legit reasons) or 2) they suck and can"t get promoted within their old company. The task as a business owner is to discern between the two. Again, people will rise to their highest level of incompetence. If they suck, then they will be stuck in the same shitty position for years on end.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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Izuldan said:
I"m not sure why you find this surprising Lyrical. As a fellow business owner, I would say that 90% of the people I hire either 1) suck or 2) can easily be replaced by someone else without skipping a beat. And I"m in an industry where my most important positions all require college degrees. In construction, I imagine, the number of GED asshats would be overwhelming.
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I am shocked at the total contrast in the quality of new hires. They were either B+ or F quality, no one would have rated a C or a D. They either knew what they were doing and worked hard, or they were useless enough that they didn"t deserve minimum wage making french fries at McDonalds. If a guy is at least average in desire and skills, I feel as though they can be coached up or trained. But they have to have something to work with. You can"t multiply from 0. In four years, I"ve never seen such a juxtaposition.

The two new guys are good and they work hard and show up on time, but they are still B+ because they aren"t used to using the equipment we have. So we are slowly training them on it.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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I"ve started tracking closer our jobs and calls every week. Last week, we closed 60% of the customers that called for a free estimate, for a total of $17,000 in approvals. Looking at the advertising mix, one of the yellow pages ads that I spent about $120 for the week for brought in 5k of work. The newspaper ad that I spent about 45 on brought in two jobs totalling 1,200. And surprisingly, two NPR ads costing me 37 apiece brought in 3,200.

I fell out of my chair today when a google adword ad that I paid no more than $2 brought in 5,600.

The moral of the story is that advertising does work, and like Peter Drucker said, getting the work is the most important aspect of the business, everything else is detail work. I spent 4,500 a month in the Winter, and didn"t get these results. People are outside more, and noticing they need work, and we"ve positioned ourselves in their minds. All advertising does is make people aware of you when they are in the market for your product, you can"t multiply if there is zero demand at that time.

I fully believe that managing demand for your product is key to be successful, especially when the economy sucks so bad. Business isn"t just going to fall into your lap, you have to manage and plan for it, and then measure the effects, while doing a cost-benefit analysis.
 
Eomer

Eomer

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This is an email exchange recently between me and a developer/contractor. Back story is they called us up a few months ago, looking for some budgeting on a couple buildings they had coming up. The guy apparently knew my uncle down in Calgary, as well (uncle said he remembered the guy, thought he was alright but hadn"t ever gotten any work from him). We said sure, no problem, it takes only an hour or two to do a suite/bathroom count and compare it to past similar jobs to cook up a budget that"s within 5-10%.

A month or two later the same guy calls and says they have the final drawings for the project, and he needs a price in a week. I tell him we"re in the middle of tendering 3 or 4 other projects, and it will be really difficult to turn it around so quick. I ask him if we can have until the end of the following week, he insists no later than the middle, or about 8-9 days. I specifically asked him if any promises had been made to anyone, and why they were calling us if our competition had done a decent job on the last project, that budget should have been a decent check price etc and he reassures me that if we our price is legitimately low, we"ll have the job. So we proceed to invite subtrades, request pricing on fixtures and equipment, and spend a week tendering the project.

The day after we close it, I call to ask how things turned out. Dude is evasive, saying he hasn"t looked at the mechanical numbers yet, but he"ll get back to us as soon as he has. Another couple days pass, I call again and ask how things are looking. Again, non-committal. The next week I find out through a subtrade that our competition, who did the last project for these guys, has only just then started to call subtrades and suppliers for pricing, two full weeks after we were forced in to tendering it "ASAP." I call him again, and pointedly ask him why that was the case, that it sure seemed like something fishy was going on. He say not to worry, he"d been trying to get a hold of someone at our competition for weeks and they wouldn"t return his calls, he was pissed at them too, we"ll still be given a fair shake.

Then one morning the little fucking coward sends me this email:

Weasel said:
Please accept my sincere apology, unbeknown to me at the time and before my arrival here at Acme Fuckheads, a deal had been struck with Shit Work Mechanical to provide firm pricing for all Fuckhead projects in Edmonton for 2012. Had I known this at the time, I wouldn't have asked you for a quote. This was only revealed to me in a meeting yesterday, when I complained about no pricing from Shit Work Mechanical. It would have been nice working with you, as I have worked with (Uncle) here in Calgary in the past.
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This was a slap in the face for many reasons, first of all because he didn"t even have the balls to call me directly. Second of all because his corporate title was "Chief Estimator", so I doubt he wasn"t aware of the arrangement, and if he was he"s a fucking moron. Third because we called our competition and they told us that they"d had a contract in place on the project for months, and as far as they could recall it had the Weasel"s name on it, so he was flat out lying. Fourth because it costs $5,000-15,000 for me to bid a job in terms of my time and my estimator"s time, drawing reproduction, and the like. To say nothing of the similar costs my subcontractors incur, or the lost opportunity in passing up other work we could have bid.

My reply:

Me said:
To say that I am disappointed would be a massive understatement. Irate, furious and disgusted would be closer. I specifically asked you several times in separate conversations whether you only needed a check price, if there were any existing arrangements or promises made, and if (my company) would have a legitimate chance at being awarded these projects price depending. You assured me that no promises had been made and that we would be given a fair shot. I asked why we were being asked to price the project, if Shitty Work Mechanical had just completed several other buildings, and you assured me that while they had done an okay job that Fuckheads was looking to potentially "shake" trades up. Further, you dangled the carrot of 3 other buildings coming up after these as an enticement.

Whether through omission or intention, we were lied to about all of the above.

On top of that, we were forced to price the project in extremely short order for no apparent reason, which caused us to take a pass at several other tenders where we would have been treated fairly and honestly. My estimator and myself were tendering numerous projects at the time, working evenings and weekends, and apparently completely wasted our time based upon the assurances we were given. It took me an hour to prepare the original budget that was within 10% of our tender, which we would have been happy to prepare had we been told the truth. It took over a week to conduct a complete take-off and tender, to say nothing of the time wasted amongst our subtrades and suppliers.

I am deeply offended and disgusted at the dishonest and unethical way we have been treated by Fuckheads. This is not the way we do business, nor should anyone else.
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If I ever meet him face to face, I"d at the very least get in his face, if not just punch him in the throat. Asshole.

We told our competition to jack up their price as the developer told us they were committed to them. I hope they get fucked.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

Mr. Poopybutthole
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$5-15k to do a bid? Sheesh. I thought my cost to bid was high.

I"ve been jerked around on big state jobs (in excess of $50k), but it sure is nice when the work is done and you get the check in the mail. We do emergency work, and did a job for State Farm last week, and after we did the work, they tried to pay us 35% of the bill, because they claimed that was all the computer said they could pay. I ended up reducing the bill by about 12%, but I was so pissed that I almost sent a letter to our competitors letting them know. We all know our costs, State Farm was trying to muscle us and tell us what it would pay. I told them if they took this stance, they"d lose way more when no one would do their emergency work and the damage would start multiplying.

Getting jerked around is part of it, I guess. The trick is to not get jerked around to the point that you are incurring big losses.
 
Eomer

Eomer

Trakanon Raider
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That particular project would have been about a two million dollar job. We might do 10-20 projects a year, and bid 30-50 as we stay away from publicly tendered work as much as possible, both to increase our hit rate and to get better margins. Like I said, that particular bid took my estimator about a week of work, our head foreman doesn"t have much to do so he spent a few days on it as well, and me a couple days if not more. Call it a couple weeks salary, plus overhead and whatever other misc. costs (a single set of drawings can cost $500-1000 to get reproduced, since owners/generals don"t feel it necessary to provide adequate tender documents these days). That"s easily 5-10k when it"s all said and done.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

Mr. Poopybutthole
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LOL, just had a guy quit today because he was pissed I wouldn"t let him use company equipment on the weekends to do side jobs for himself. He was really worked up too, like I screwed him. I"m not gonna lend you $100k+ in equipment so you can do jobs that you may have found while you were working on a job for me, and get zero financial benefit from it.

He has very little experience, and he"s going to find that the competition is going to pay him 70% of what I was paying him. And no, I"m not going to take him back when he gets his first check and realizes he"s screwed himself.
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

Mr. Poopybutthole
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I"m not sure if this thread is worthy of being a sticky, but whatever. We are having our best year in three years, and now I"m going to have to worry about the tax man. I"ll have to call my CPA to figure out how to reduce my tax burden. Because I had to make this a c-corp, the tax rate is 50% over 50k in corporate income!

I"m thinking a mix of 401k payments, prepaying bills, and investing in new assets would do it. I"ve already redone a billboard, I"m going to buy an ad campaign for the Winter now, and I can fix some equipment to get it into top notch shape. When you are in business, you have to find a way to reduce your tax burden.
 
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Rune_foh

shitlord
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This is a serious question, and I ask because I respect your opinion:

How is the Affordable Care Act going to impact you as a small business owner?

PS Do you deny that you are, in fact, Donna the Tree Lady?
 
Shonuff

Shonuff

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Rune said:
How is the Affordable Care Act going to impact you as a small business owner?
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I don"t believe it affects companies with under 50 employees. At the most, I"ll run one manager, one secretary, two crew leaders, two skilled labor, and two not-so skilled labor.
 
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