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As published in the North Bay Business Journal, Feb. 21, 2005: Lasercraft, Santa Rosa Imagine that you're a homeowner, living on Coffey Lane, in an area of Santa Rosa that is part residential, part industrial. You've tucked in for the night, and at 2:30 a.m., are awakened by the ding-ding-ding of back-up bells on trucks - lots of trucks. As you look out your window, you see this amazing parade of trucks, and a huge 150-foot boom extending far overhead and down onto what has been, until tonight, an empty foundation layout just across the street from your house. You're not happy. Not happy at all about the noise and the lights and the people. So you make a complaint call to the police department, hoping to get a little relief from the disturbance, and at least a few hours of sleep. Now imagine that you're the project superintendent for this massive construction job. For weeks, you've had the rebar laid in the ground for a huge 70,000-square-foot pad that must be poured before your construction company, Jim Murphy & Associates, can make any progress on the Lasercraft building. You will be constructing a 90,000-square-foot addition (the 70,000-square-foot first floor, with a 20,000-square-foot mezzanine) that adjoins the existing 50,000-square-foot building that Lasercraft presently occupies. Then you'll be remodeling that building, while the Lasercraft business continues throughout the entire project. This is a big job - one that will end up taking nearly a full year to complete. And you have been waiting for the weather to clear, so you can get started. The owner is losing money and time, and the subcontractors you're working with have been waiting for your go-ahead. And it just keeps raining, and raining, and raining. It was January 1998, and Jesse Gladman, project superintendent for the Lasercraft project, had been watching the weather reports for weeks, waiting for the promise of a couple of days - just two days was all he needed - of clear weather, so he could get the huge slab poured and work on the building under way. On a Monday afternoon, he saw the break in the rain he was looking for and immediately alerted the equipment people and the concrete truck people and the subcontractors: "We're pouring tonight. We've only got a couple of days of clear weather, and we need every bit of that. See you at 2:30 a.m." At 3 a.m., as work on the concrete pad was getting under way, with up to fifteen concrete trucks at a time arriving, backing into position in line for the pump, idling, pumping, and then leaving the site along the road that runs between the job site and the residences, Jesse received a visit from a Santa Rosa policeman. When asked to stop the work until morning, Jesse explained that he had no choice. "Do what you have to do," he said to the policeman. "And I'll do what I have to do to get this job done." But Jim Murphy & Associates is a company of resourceful problem solvers. Jesse and his bosses recognized this noisy disturbance as a problem that must be solved, and found a way to do that. First, they scheduled the second day of pouring to begin at 7 a.m. Then, they delivered written apologies to the neighbors who were affected by the noise, with gift certificates for dinner at The Tides restaurant in Bodega Bay. A potential disaster turned into a public relations success. "The letters and dinner certificates were our way of saying we should have been mindful of the impact on neighbors of the work we just had to do," says Jay True, Vice President of JMA. Many of the residents of Coffey Lane reciprocated with their own letters and calls of thanks to the construction firm. After the two-day concrete pour, the rains started again. For weeks it rained. But the two days of clear weather had been just enough to get the Lasercraft building project going at last. Walls were tilted up into place, utility lines run, windows installed, a roof was added. Approximately five months later, the building was completed, and then work began on the existing facility. Employees in Lasercraft's administrative departments moved into temporary trailers while their offices were upgraded. It would be winter again before they moved back into the remodeled building. It could have taken much longer. If they hadn't taken advantage of that two-day break in the weather, Jim Murphy & Associates could have been working on the Lasercraft buildings well into 1999. "We had to make progress on the job. And we think that we may have been the only people in town pouring concrete those two days," says Jay. "We learned a good lesson, and we hope the residents have slept soundly since we left their neighborhood." |