Lessons Learned From Cabling Project Gone Wrong...

tom here from orange systems and i am joined by vp of lawrence systems brett chittim we're going to talk about the worst wiring job ever and we're going to do some lessons learned we're not just going to rant although that was certainly what happened when the project was going on and in my uh i've been in business since 2003 which makes that up rough it was like 18 years now hands down worst job ever is always going back to this now we made my indoctrination into lawrence today oh yeah yeah brett got to be involved in this project uh because this is when brett was working as a contractor before he had a full-time position here and this was like what did i get myself into type situation right brett at four in the morning i was thinking that oh yeah we had a couple late nights at four in the morning to try to keep the project on schedule now a couple things you want to talk about on this particular project one the question comes up how do you get projects and that is done by brett well it's a it's a relationship thing most of the projects we get are built on the relationships we have with other id companies yep this is where you make the assumption that because someone's website says they do the same things you do you probably shouldn't talk to them they're your competitor but in reality is you'll find that if you actually reach out talk to the rit companies they can actually be a good source of leads maybe you have a proficiency they don't have and vice versa where you can lean on each other skills and this is one of those where a i.t company that is within my geographical region that i've uh went to lunch with the ceo owner of that company quite a few times we've somehow become friends uh we chat every now and then good good acquaintances we'll you know i don't hang out with him that much but either way the um job came up and they said we don't do wiring and cabling but you guys do so we gave them a finders fee for uh getting us this project which was common case you're wondering how that works from uh technical background but that relationship we had with them brought us this job but i i don't know if i want to thank him for this mess but don't worry we have visuals we're going to cut to a few times to talk about this to help jogger memories of disaster now what are some fun in it though too yeah that would be some fun in it and one of the things we want to do here is we're pre-facing this because i also want to make sure we say our goal is to not just rant about this but also educate and talk about like what warning signs we've seen in the early parts of this project ways we mitigated a risk and ways that we you know made sure that this particular project stayed on track despite um crazy people being involved and what did we learn um that we're not gonna do business with that particular company again not the it company we continue to this day to do business with them we didn't care much for some of the behaviors of the general contractor but then we also as we dug deeper into project learn the gc was being dealt with in a crazy way by the people that actually hired them so right we'll walk you through some of those steps right there um but one of the let's get a couple of things in case you're not familiar with this type of work your general contractor how would you describe a gc brett your general contractor is the person that really um he's heading up the whole job he's the one hiring the wiring guys he's the one hiring the plumbers the electricians the the people that are actually going to do the work he's kind of coordinating the whole thing and one of the things we learned later was they weren't the original gc for the project so you have the client that actually wants the work done they want this building built and then you have the gc they hired now they apparently fired the other gc and the other gc had also uh had some missteps that we didn't we weren't aware of we get in with the second gc then the next thing is um we came in the gc that we dealt with had also fired the electricians and brought in another electrical crew so we seen some things there when we did the walkthrough that were other warning signs like why are you guys tearing out brand new electrical boxes well they were all put in wrong who put them in wrong the other uh people and then for whatever reasons that we were never clear on there was another wiring vendor who came in and they bid it but then somehow and we don't know really why we know they couldn't do it or wouldn't do it we don't we never got it that's why we were there so someone else is not someone else did it but they also seen our price and said that's more than the other people i'm like this is what it's going to cost for what you want right this is i mean this this project was in the 200 000 range roughly in terms of uh wiring it was just a lot of infrastructure to build it was a lot of rooms it was roughly 300 or so drops that had to be put in but it's also the structure we're talking like tv mounts and everything there's a lot of it wasn't just cabling it's it's kind of the whole gamut of things right now first step is contract they people say tom do you have a template and it's actually the opposite the general contractor has their contract they give you and uh what'd you think of when you first reviewed it were some of the dates a little mystical well they it was funny because of having the the old general contractor that was fired their dates were set on those previous contractor agreements and they were they'd written those into our contract and we were going to have to meet those dates it was going to be impossible so the first thing we had to do was restructure the dates we would be able to complete certain tasks and one of the ways you get paid on jobs like this is there's the mobilization fee is what they will call it mobilization fee means the deposit uh and the deposit doesn't necessarily mean half now a general rule will ask for like a fifty percent down or on uh when we're doing a cabling type project or some variation but in this particular case um they wanted it done right away so we asked for a really high mobilization fee right now this is often in construction broken up based on accomplishments like as you build out you may have several payments that go across the job because especially with new construction the job may take multiple months because you have floors being put in walls being put up so you may build a rough structure and then as the next structure gets built come in and do it and then you put some stuff in the walls then the drywall people come in and you do it so you may get paid incrementally but one of the things is with these unrealistic which we did change in the contract we asked for a very large deposit on this we actually got i think 70 percent of the money up front or 60 on front i think is what we wanted just to start it and by the way where the job started in the quote and where it ended it didn't start as a 200 000 project it was a little less than that and they just kept adding on it was all the changes to the uh scope creep as a lot of people would call it so the scope of the work kept changing it was it was interesting um i think i think part of also what we learned in this was the communication factor too so we had that contract and that started the whole communication process of setting the right expectations i think people need to understand you need to first set the right expectation yeah and then you've got to communicate throughout the whole entire project and i there were issues we would have when we would go to meetings where not all the people and not all the players were there to actually have the right communication i mean there was one point where someone pretty much said hey yeah you can use those wires they were our wires for something else and they used them yes so that was part of it now one of the ways you mitigate this and don't worry we're getting to the photos for those of you right things are time index you just want to see the gore um the one of the ways you mitigate that is when you have meetings and this is the the reality is the default way humans work frequently is hey while you're here can you just do this or can you just do that people will do and respond very well to verbal commands the problem is the question may come up who told you to do that i'm not paying you for that so one of the things you have to do and we were especially doing they would have changes where they would tell us to literally put something on a different wall than was on the different drawings the drawings were very mismatched so we had to actually start taking the drawings and sketching on them where we were told then we would always to do the cya um we would cover our butts by emailing them and say i know you asked me to do this i want to confirm this is the way it's going to be done now this is actually happening here in the office in real time um the general contractor says i don't got time for emails he was kind of being angry and saying get this over there no problem just is the people on site would let us know in the office and then us in the office would then reiterate these emails hey just confirming you've told us now to uh put 12 more drops on this particular wall that didn't exist before by the way so we would draw where the wall is and we're just confirming you want to do that sometimes they'd reply sometimes they wouldn't but either way we always sent those type of messages because this later came up on the back end for the billing of all the different overages that were charged for we had them all in writing that were done don't want you to argue with well your guys just chose to do them on their own without actually listening to the gc these are important little factors that come in there now what we did learn this is where a lot of the problems come in and we'll throw on some visuals here they actually had moved an entire wall and that was where some of these problems come in we took pictures like this wall didn't exist but you notice if you uh i think we can zoom in this one's kind of blurry all these little drops in that wall there's another picture of it um that was all added this was not like this was not original and these were some of the problems that had come in we learned that there was just a lot of craziness going on with the uh contractor they they were we were here in detroit the company that actually wanted this building this was a new location for them here in the detroit area but but the what would happen is they would fly in and point and change where things would go just on the fly people who were doing the um hvac system cut a bunch of our wires that we're waiting to be installed so we come into that um there were so many changes happening so often it was it was kind of a level of insanity that was really hard to deal with we also realized this was part of the insanity of we put this ladder rack up and the this wall wasn't there right the ladder rack was supposed to go through to the next room but then the wall was put up instead so yes i remember that i was i was there that night yeah we we we were doing working later in the day and so you're not tripping over some of the other contractors and it was just insane to go that wall was not here nor is it on any of the drawings we have who decided a wall and we'd find out that the the guy who uh the people the company and their team would fly in point and tell people to build a wall and leave and then we're like there's a wall so this was so crazy watching this happen um so this is some of the things that that led to was this much wasted cable we wasted so many spools of cable because they would cut stuff and it was a bunch of half-cut cable and a lot of these runs were really long so it was just like ah it was such a mess uh trying to sort all of this out because we're like you know they moved an entire room i think it's this this is one of them this room was uh you can see how there's like a space behind it the wires all originally ran to the wall they decided to move the room there's about a 15 foot or 20 foot gap because they wanted a closet behind it for another one of the rooms they tore rit room after we ran the wires and pulled it back this is kind of what it looks like towards the end but it was just one of those things like we ended up with extra cable because we ran it 15 more feet so many all these runs that are now put into cable falls here but they just decided the room was going to be elsewhere that's actually why some of these come back from over further as opposed to there but that's just that's an actually an exterior wall on the other side yeah that was i remember i was crazy yeah it was so many things that happened in there and that's why we had like this this is another when we were pulling back all the extra and then we had to cut all these um it was some of the most wasted cable this caused a absolute ton of overages on there uh it was it was a lot of that now one of the things that we also had that had us there late was they kept upping the schedule because they wanted an open date to get open um i don't know if i should have said yes there's that whole entrepreneurship yes but brett said we should say yes so we we actually agreed but for a price to get it done so we brought a team in to finish we brought a team in so we had the original uh contractors and uh quick clarification the way we work here at lawrence systems is you say tom on your website you only have a handful of people there's no way you handle projects this big yes there is we coordinate with a lot of different vendors and a lot of different contractors we have a pretty good list brett is uh taking over that burden from me of uh managing all the contractors in in some ways we act like a gc because we have other parties that get involved when we need projects we use contractors and we you know maintain great relationships with them by the way this is one of the burdens you have to bear who who has to get paid first me or the contractors us well you'd think so yeah we gotta get paid we try to do that but the way you maintain good relationship with your contractors is they get paid even when you don't so but that's not the way it's always done that's the way you have chosen to do it yeah but it does keep a better relationship with these vendors um they know when they work for me they're gonna get paid even when they see disaster strikes so when we told them hey we need these extras they're like we're gonna need money and my reputation is i'll pay them i'm the one that had not gotten paid all the way into into late 2020 before they finalized the final overages to actually approve and pay them but all my vendors we actually use them for projects even after this and because they continue to get paid they're like and some of them felt bad like they're like wow you still haven't got paid on that uh that disaster job nope not yet that sucks there but they also don't want to say it glad you paid me yeah exactly because we still need to keep these relationships going this is one of those little things that when we we actually financially maybe we'll talk about this we sell fund all of our own projects to be able to do this it does require keeping a few dollars on hand but it does allow you to uh maintain good relationship with vendors because we've got so many wiring projects we've done after this that with the same vendors with the same teams but we did decide to stay till four a.m a bunch of nights with the crew that we were paying a lot of money each everybody got paid a matter of fact we had anyone that knew how cable ends went on right you loosely knew how cable ends come out i learned how k balloons go on that's where i learned how to punch down then we had more lifts we had so many now uh the lifts there's a few of them there we did only put people on lifts that knew how to operate them and actually one of the cool things there's that one photo of the penny let me find the penny photo i think we still have that in here that was kind of a fun thing was if you want to know how good these people are at operating the lifts a little bit farther there we go yeah well this is the distance and we had to get these wires uh up and over this right here if you want to know how precise they are and they're driving it up and down that's how close not once every time those wheels stop from that wall without leaving a scuff or a mark on it yeah it's kind of it's an art watching these uh contractors who really know how to operate the lift so we put the your high-end people as far as boots on the ground we had to test and label all these it turns out that uh that's easy i stuck hard hat on anyone any friends i had that go hey want to make a few bucks grab a hard hat um because this was a complete compliance with osha everyone had to have heart hats full time during the construction project um and uh visibility vests on there that's why you see us wearing them but um yeah it was like run around stick to stick that's it right does this one label printing labels and things like that we had so many people involved but yeah let's just uh let's just walk through some of the photos and you comment brett on where where you want to have a laugh here but this was some of the extra wire that was wasted this is i remember walking into that and and looking at that going i'm going to have to take that and do something with it and that wire does isn't it weighs a lot it does that's cat 6a plenum by the way that was part of the um requirements here everything was cat6a plenum everything was black everything cast these eight plenum one color wire um there's some of the rooms the spools we had just stacking up everywhere that was thousands of thousands of dollars of wasted wire oh yeah there was so much of it wasted on there and that's why we were taking pictures of just random things that were done um up there the electricians they were some of them were beside themselves too because they had put stuff in take stuff out um they moved where things were right this one when they wanted this uh set up and there's actually uh cabling that we pulled through on here and i'm not even sure why we put network jacks sometimes on the outside like that it was we questioned it we're like are you sure it goes here they're like yes so some cabling now some of this is electrical but then on it's just really confusing because this that's electrical but right here which in the end there's garbage cans this is where we ran it on this outside this is what i'm talking about these ones are electrical but this little middle part is actually uh data that we're not sure why it was put there and we laughed because they they built a garbage can i don't have a picture they built a garbage can in front of it like molted uh the slide out garbage can systems uh we mounted all these tvs i think we did did we do these ones too there was another contractor did some tvs it was confusing um i actually i don't remember on this one i think i think this was somebody else so uh yeah this one was a bowling alley this is where it gets interesting because um the bowling alley these are the bowling alley stuff in there this is like a family fun center right um but the bowling alley when they put this in we had to deal with getting wire over there but they were we were supposed to put the wire but no one told us where the wires go so we kept asking and then one day we came in and they put the bowling alley floor in and you can't drive a lift on it so it became rather tricky to get the wires over there tricky situation boom lifts came into play yeah we had to hang with boom lifts to get over this so bigger bigger equipment had to be brought in to um get some of that stuff done oh it was yeah and they had uh there's more pictures that this split unit's kind of funny because you're like hey that's a really big split unit for a very small server room yeah the split unit was supposed to be for the full server room uh insert mystery wall that came up one day and the hvac people are like we were told to put it here and spec it for a room x that's this size but then they cut the room in half and they cut it in half so the split unit was on this side and they're like i don't know i guess that's where it goes now yeah it was a calamity of errors it was such a calamity of things going on in people then uh oh the reason i took a picture of this they moved the ceiling on us after some of the stuff was in so what you're seeing here is kind of funny the when you put in the fire suppression um it has to be at roughly the height of your drop ceiling so you know how the drop ceiling has a little fire suppression things that pop through they move the ceiling height and then all the stuff had to be taken back out drained and cut because they'd already done some of the testing on it as i understood at least that's why i was told i mean i'm not i'm not an expert on that all i know is there was a lot of angry people that had to come back and cut everything they had they'd already left like their part of the job was done we ran the fire suppression now they're back cutting and moving the fire suppression up a little bit each one they had to re-cut and re-thread all those pipes i remember seeing some of those guys coming out of the building not very happy yeah no one likes redoing work and that was a big part of what it's it's one of those things like yes i was paid for it but it's like i ran that wire you guys cut it told me to run it somewhere else there's like this defeatedness that this job kind of gave you the sinking feeling um even it's not about money at that point it's not about getting paid on it's like really i just ran that and now you cut it you decided a wall arbitrarily needed to be moved x amount of feet over and yeah they also have a very large space yeah big space they had the go-kart track which was interesting because no one thought about how to get the go-kart track hooked up we asked that question and someone says oh i guess it probably does need wiring so we sometimes would ask the vendors who were there like the people installing the go-kart track and say hey what needs to be done here and then it would uh turn into yeah no one ever thought about that but then you had to then put it in writing that we heard from the go-kart people and tell the general contractor who would then have to authorize the change for us to get paid this is one of those things you have to be constantly like brett said communicate communicate communicate in order to get this um we know what needed to be done we're being nice we could have just played dumb and threw our hands up in the air and going no i don't know um not my problem but right being a little bit you've never done that no never ever done that we maintained despite all of this a really good relationship with uh everybody involved here to get this done and we even uh one off a contractor we never used before he was actually there installing something else i think he was the audio guy uh but he said he knew how to punch cables so i'm like what are you doing later hey guy what are you doing he's like a bunch of wires for you i'm like you like money i'll pay you this what do you want to do and then he started just going through and punching lots and lots of wires and helped us with the testing and things like that oh this happened too uh you have the drywall people and then you have the people building cabinets this is actually the cabinet cutouts that went over like where you have the cabinets butted up um it created all like this is what that's like an inside look at what some of these were so much of a mess right oh yeah well and that's why i mean you're if you're wondering why there's so many photos and there's a lot more photos it was about documentation yes and that's why tom mentioned earlier email he he responded in any change there was an email written of that change so that we could document it it's that's that was the most important part of what not that what we learned but what we did to be able to finally get paid on this and this is what protected us overall there was never any um lawyers or anything involved that got involved at the end even though it took them a long time to pay we were persistent we referred to our documentation we referred to emails we kept logs of what was changed i had everybody contributing photos we set up a shared google photos album in case you're looking for an easy way to do it and we still use it because it's just so easy to do then everyone just shares within those photos and if you see something take a picture of it if you see something questionable you talk to the other vendors matter of fact feel free sometimes we made a series of quick videos where hey we don't know who did this but this wasn't like this when we left yesterday but just to let you guys know and that's because of the wall moving things like that so it really comes down to the same principles of documentation that covers you following up going especially whenever there's so much flying by uh verbally that you come back and reply with hey this is what i think you asked me to do i went ahead and did it just wanted to let you know and then at the same time you're updating your billing system so to speak on your opinion making those notes of all right what we quoted and what happened are two different things and once that exceeded a matter of fact we had a series of uh to help cover some of the overages we actually asked them for a couple more times to pay us like right this is just a lot of overages but in the end we did it um they it was uh boy that's a walk down memory lane of that day it was so many times we stayed non-stop because we had worked here kind of at the office ring today and we would spend the rest of the afternoon and the final push we were there a couple times for 4 am we were like non-stop i also bought a lot of i bought food and pizza for not just my team i would come in there and i was because it wasn't just us by the way we had the other people we had artists putting wall art up we had people installing like the bowling alley we had a there was that place didn't stop it was almost like this constant shift after shift of people so i was sometimes the guy that came in with a bunch of pizzas and things like that because be friendly with everybody sometimes you need their boom left because your battery died and if you're cool with them you're like yeah that guy brought me pizza he can use my lift today so we did some swapping of things like that it was we kept the environment as friendly as possible forthcoming um because in all we're all trying to reach a goal we're all trying to get this project done whether you're electrician a plumber and the the plumber people hey i remember they had problems because getting the soda machines hooked up um they used our tubes that were buried to pull wire so we had to coordinate with them because some of the wires not by choice but there's no way around it there are the the soda tubes also have some cat6 wire in it yeah do you remember that they're coming up out of the same hole for the cash furniture we're like this was ours and then some people like no it's ours and we're like well there's only there's one for electrical we can't use that one and there's one for us so um that's how that tube got shared yeah well hopefully you were either entertained or uh we're just looking for you know what we did to mitigate this or whatever happened on it but it was a definitely a fun project in some ways looking back i'm smiling i was certainly not smiling at 4 am not not not in the least um but it's these things happen this is a really odd one and we do so many wearing projects this is the only one in since 2003 that i've been in business even when i worked in corporate i've never seen such a crazy amount of changes it was crazy but you know and this shouldn't shy anybody away from doing projects like this either because things are going to have an exception yeah you you just you need to learn how to document you need to learn how to make sure you're you set the correct and and the right expectations with the general contractor yes the expectation is everything right um that customer experience um the way the way things are handled the time in the time frame they should be handled don't shy away from projects like this embrace them yeah everything's a lesson learned and um you know in in the big picture we did make money when we break it all down and we divvied up the piles and we paid all the contractors even though i got paid later even if i calculate some interest on that and things like that in the in the end we made money on it so ultimately that part was you know that's the goal to be profitable on things so we that that goal was met um i i don't know if it really was enough for some of the mental issues i had dealing with it like just the oh my gosh are we going to complete this project but yeah whatever we did so here we are here we are smiling about it years later making it going on so hopefully you found this insightful let me know in the comments down below we can always have a more in-depth discussion on the forum on this uh but yeah that's that's it this is going to be my simple reply when hey tom what's the worst wiring project ever it's this one this is this one all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a shared project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 35,101

Rating: 4.9582753 out of 5

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, network cabling, network cabling installation, network cabling management, network cabling specialist, structured cabling, structured cabling training, structured cabling basics, structured cabling business

Id: XlvOyfL4km0

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021