Faces on Fences
It’s early morning on a Friday. A couple of the Optimum guys are unfurling a nearly unending, thick vinyl banner, and they start to chuckle. Who’s going to be on this one? It’s become an office joke and a teamwide prank, to put each other’s faces on the long fence scrims that stretch around the Optimum job sites. You may have seen them in Falmouth near Portland Country Club, or up at the first exit to Freeport, right at the intersection.
Some companies won’t put faces on their fence scrims because they are scared of people leaving.
That’s exactly why we do it! There is a pervasive strain of people on our construction team who wouldn’t be caught dead self-promoting. Humility might be a good descriptor, but basically we all know that if we’re going to share the success, it’s never a one-man show. But everyone is doing great work, and we want to celebrate that! We want everyone to know that you’re valuable to us, we have no fear whatsoever about putting their faces on fences, these are our people and we’re proud of them!
Catching an Eye
This is exactly the kind of thing that caught Sebastien Leclerc’s attention. He’s our newest Project Estimator and Construction PM on the team, and the kind of guy we love to work with. His humor may be the driest of us all, but he contributes so much more in other ways!
“In a small company, you have time to think about the team. You can just jump right in.”
And Sebastien would know. Since the age of 15, he’s been working every side of the business from sheetrock subcontractor to foreman, superintendent, estimator and project manager at some of the major construction outfits in the Southern Maine area. He’s a firm believer in avoiding the subtle pitfalls of making project-by-project decisions that can potentially jeopardize the whole team and effort. We’re not a culture of “ladder climbers”, there’s no room for egos to grow bigger than the “team-first” attitude.
Growing up Well
Sebastien was looking for a place that would allow him to see the effects of his hard work and carefully monitored attitude. He sits just a few feet away from the “ownership”, a refreshingly close proximity. “Optimum hasn’t surprised me, I knew what I was coming into and I knew how I could help.”
So what’s Sebastien bringing to the table other than his bilingual abilities and exhaustingly long resume? “I know they don’t want to be a huge company, I love that, that’s what I’m looking for. But, we can still use strong corporate processes where needed.” It’s the nuts and bolts kind of things. Leclerc has seen it, he’s done it and he knows that when you implement the same good process a hundred times over, it means that you can still perform well even as the office fills up with new faces.
“This fits perfectly when you don’t have too many layers of people, each with their own set of plans.”
So, About that whole Building Relationships Culture?
“My wife said to me after I started working here, ‘You don’t look forward to Friday nearly as much as you have at other times in your life!’” Mondays aren’t a thing to dread, and Friday isn’t the solution to every workweek’s woes.
“On Monday we have our meeting, it’s a different kind of meeting.” It’s not an interrogation, it’s a chance to share around the group and report-in on how things are going. We band together and talk about how we are growing the company, with a very transparent set of goals and criteria. Every New Way of doing things has a reason, and this is when everybody critiques and buys-in.
“It’s just easy to be transparent here.”
We stopped Sebastien in the hall, he told us about coaching hockey, we made a joke about his completely bald tires on his car, “who has time to change their tires,” he said, “You do!” we replied.
Taking Care of One Another
Sebastien told this story:
“Most of construction can be pretty cutthroat. It’s easy to start focusing on helping yourself get ahead, not remembering the others around you. But just this morning, one of our supers was wrapping up a job,
you know, a mad scramble to the finish line. He was telling us about it when another super said, ‘I have some availability, I’ll stop by every day after my job to help you with yours.’ And this is 30 minutes out of his way, every day! I mean, if you’re too much in your lane, you miss this. Everyone knows, and everyone wants to help each other out.”
And it doesn’t stop with the team, as a long time subcontractor, Sebastien has a keenly defined style for working with subs. They are critically important, and the relationship needs to be strong and balanced. Leclerc’s top rule for construction, “Good general contractors are good to their subs.”
What “Good” Looks like for a Sub
Keep subs busy, but don’t waste their time. They want to work, not stand around. When the business cycle is up, you make sure you’re ready for them to arrive on a job, when a cycle is down, you go out of your way to find good jobs for them to keep busy.
Create flexibility when it’s absolutely needed. The sub can’t run the job, but you can do your best to accommodate them if they have an issue with timing or resources. Remain reasonable with expectations, but not inflexible.
Don’t abuse or take advantage of your subs. If you nickel and dime them, they don’t feel important or valued. Don’t cram schedules down their throats and don’t intentionally try to overwhelm people. This seems obvious right?
Pick jobs that meet the level of the sub. You don’t want someone operating outside their area of expertise or confidence. Size the sub to the job and you’ll get confident people producing great work.
Sebastien values his reputation in the subcontractor community as well as the broader community. “I wear my optimum shirt to baseball practice and the parents on the teams all know Optimum, I represent who we are to these people, and that’s meaningful.There are so few degrees of separation in Maine.”
And that’s the truth, so why not make that relationship the focus? Keep our eye on the fundamentals and we set people up to succeed. Robots won’t be building our offices and retail centers, our banks and our homes for a long time, so we’ll have to rely on one-another (which is what we enjoy about all this in the first and last place). Sebastien’s got great experience, and a really keen eye for how to bring his skill to the team, and we appreciate that, but what we really value is that he’s one of us. He gets how important people are to everything we want to accomplish, and like us, he’ll take the time to really know people, confident that it’s the catalyst to build anything, better.