SALESFORCE!!!

Hola Amigos!

With no real Revit shit to bitch about (other than receiving garbage background files of buildings designed and modeled by morons), I'm left having to bitch about other stuff - like our idiotic/incompetent 'salesforce'.

Now, these are the guys responsible for making this whole thing a reality - although a lot of our actual clients come to us through other channels - only to be delegated to various salesmen to do takeoffs, estimates, submit bids, and hopefully get signed contracts before we go to work doing detailed designs.

These salesmen's ability to do this correctly, and see a project through to completion does have an impact on our ability to retain clients, as well as get new ones through word of mouth.  Fortunately some of the systems we design and install are requirements of any kind of building, and the rest are highly desired (and will have to be done by someone - so why not us?)

On top of that, some of the systems have to be monitored, and receive regular testing and occasional maintenance - so we kind of have some people by the balls (or lady balls).  Obviously there are other firms doing the kind of work we do, but we've got a pretty solid client base that includes several federal and state government agencies, city/county school systems, etc. (across several states), as well as other large companies - along with all manner of medium and small clients.

These tasks require maintaining a fairly large salesforce, as well as making sure we take into account the type of client, and any special requirements they may have with a salesman (or salesmen) who are going to be capable of handling the scope of the project, and (if necessary) hold the client's hand throughout the process.

Some clients (especially those at the federal level) have people who literally do one project at a time, over disturbingly long amounts of time - so the level of detail they start to go into in order to justify their paychecks goes FAR beyond anything in reality (and dragging us down with them).  Even once a building is built, and as-built documents are submitted, they often continue to fiddle with inconsequential items and pull us back into the mix again and again.

For this reason, we generally front-load these projects with plenty of extra time for revisiting the same (often not even very large) project over and over and OVER AND OVER.  Many of the projects are renovations of part of larger buildings, and over the years before I started working here, people apparently had serious difficulty keeping track of what went where, and so they would occasionally start new projects to do a renovation of a piece of a building where we did the original building - and the renovations should have started with those drawings in order to maintain one master set.

Add to this, the process of submittal, mark-up, re-submittal, etc. has always been sketchy (at best), sometimes involving direct contact between the client and me (or whoever is designed their project), a mix of the client, electrical contractor (who we are sometimes a sub-contractor for - depending on the nature of the project), and the salesman - who may or  may not be capable of juggling several projects at a time (along with their personal issues).

The best way we've figured out to handle it is for the salesman to be the one point of contact, that way we make sure that everything we are doing actually falls under the scope of a project that we have a contract for, and if we start to experience 'scope creep'  - like in the case of a small addition to a building that we were supposed to do that turned into a renovation of the entire existing building (not uncommon), then we make sure to submit change orders, or put together new contracts to address additional work.

It also keeps e-mail clusterfuckery down, where you have to dig through several different people's e-mails (even if you try to organize them by project) - sometimes discussing (and including file attachments) for more than one project.  This was the case for a series of projects that came through recently - and as I was looking at them, my brain started to turn completely to mush.

The saleman had tried to consolidate all of them down into a single e-mail/list - but as I started going through them, I couldn't help but shake the feeling that many of them sounded VERY familiar.  One of the biggest issues with this (federal government) client is that they refer to all of their projects through a series of acronyms - which would be bad enough, except that on top of that, many people  involved with the projects come up with their own names/nicknames.

Some are the words that the acronyms are made from, some will refer to the building numbers that the acronym projects are located inside of, and some are... just totally fucking made up (or, my favorite - people refer to them by the sheet numbers that address the portion of the building that we are addressing.  This last one isn't as illogical as it sounds, since each area has a set of sheet numbers allocated to it, but as I mentioned earlier, some people weren't clued into this standard, so they took off on their own, creating a series (or multiple series) of drawings with numbers that don't match up with the rest of the sets (it literally hurts my brain just trying to type this).

I found out why they seemed familiar when I opened the first set of comments, and discovered that I had actually done them - over a month and a half ago.  I point this out to the salesman, and he goes back and finds the e-mail where I had sent him drawings, and he neglected to forward them on (keep in mind, this guy wants everything sent to him for review before it goes to the client).  Now, this is great, because I'm already done - but to prevent him (and thus 'us') from looking like idiots, he has me re-date the drawings and send them again (so now we look like slow idiots).

I jump into the second project - and (sure enough) I find drawings that I had done SIX MONTHS PRIOR.  Unfortunately, this time, I couldn't find where I had sent him an e-mail, but after a quick dig through the pile of crap on his desk, I find a set I had printed (at his request) and left for him to review before wasting my time e-mailing anything (and having it disappear into his e-mail inbox).

In this case it kind of worked out, because while I was done with the drawings, the EC had sent over updated floor plans (that only sucked a little bit) for me to insert, so that's two down.  They've sent over the third one this morning, and it won't surprise me in the least if it was done as well - the only question is whether or not I have proof that I gave it to the salesman.  Fortunately while this guy is a bit of a space cadet (due to going too many directions at once - along with some health issues he's dealing with), he's actually a pretty stand up guy, and will admit when he makes mistakes.

He's a super genius compared to Dipshit McDumbfuck that had me wasting my time submitting shit to the wrong AHJ, or the guy that I literally had to start putting received/read receipts on everything I send him because he apparently doesn't understand how e-mail works (he would ask me to do something really quick in the morning, so I would stop what I was doing, knock it out, send it to him, then receive a phone call that afternoon asking if I had gotten to it yet).

Those two have the distinct advantage of not working in the same office as me (the second one being in another state), or I probably would've tossed both of them out of a window by now.  We've got a few more in this office that range from total space cadet, to reasonably concerned with making sure their projects get done properly.  And even all of these don't compare to the (fortunately) small number of guys who try to pull the good old 'throw me under the bus because they fucked up' routine.

I mentioned it in a previous post, but I did a massive renovation and addition to a school, sent it over - with the explicit instruction to have one of their guys go do a walk down of the existing portion to verify that it made sense (I had been compiling information from decades of drawings showing systems that had been 'grandfathered' in by AHJ's who may have literally be the grandfathers of the people doing the design work.

One day I have the owner of the company come into my office and tell me that this salesman is telling him that I did a bunch of stuff incorrectly, and had added tons of extra equipment - instead of doing a one-for-one replacement of the existing system (which nobody had informed me was the plan).  I told the owner (who is actually a really good guy) that I had sent over a set for them to review and mark up literally weeks prior.

We got on speaker with him - and he claims 'yeah, I had my guy go out and mark up drawings', so I said 'well - then send them to me'.  He agreed, and two days later I called him back to ask why he hadn't sent them - and it came out that he had lied while on the phone with me and the owner to cover his own ass, and worse - had been lying to a co-owner that is in his office as well.

I resorted to my tried and true method of blind carbon copying (bcc) both the owner and co-owner on all future correspondence with this guy - and hilariously both of them would respond to me by telling me to 'get him'.  It's always funny when someone goes to a higher up to try to throw me under the bus, not realizing that I'm on good terms with the higher ups (anyone reading my blog for any length of time should know I'm not a kiss-ass, but it always pays to  have friends in high places).

Unbenownst to the the guy trying to scare me by going to the higher-ups - the owner is a fanatic for old Ford/Shelby race cars, and I've been building classic Mustangs for years as a hobby, and the co-owner is a metalhead - and any time he's in town and drops by our office, he will come back to my office and we talk metal bands.

Everyone else is scared of these guys - and they think I am too, and it cracks me up every time someone threatens me with going to them.  Dude, seriously - we're just going to have a good laugh at your stupid attempt at covering your ass, so why not just do your goddamned job, because I damn well do mine.


Vaya Con Dios,

Skuzzy AF

Next Time: Apocalypse Wow