The Most Money I've lost on any one Job

whoa whoa whoa what what are you saying to me this is the biggest job that I never lost the absolute lost money huh [Music] all right guys so this is the Menard superstore and this is probably the first biggest job that we ever tackled and the contractor we worked for wasn't ready for us to come in with this little experience as we had so this entire thing I'm gonna blame right on myself I took on doing all of the excavation site prep and earth work for this job with a just a single excavator a skid steer and a dump truck that was way older than I am right now and one of the jobs we had to do and the way we well the way we did the job really torqued off the project supervisors out here we were actually bringing old farming techniques that I had learned growing up and road construction techniques that I had learned by jumping on the sill of dump truck doors and talking to inspectors while they were actually building in prepping roads and I thought well if it works there it'll work here but it wasn't the preconceived it didn't match the preconceived notions that the project supervisor on the site was expecting to see and rightfully so a good example would be the footings of this building all had to be compacted to a minimum of 97% standard Proctor density to hit that compaction level what I would do is I would use the same techniques that I seen them use on roads where we would use compression compaction and we would fill the footing up we would pack the lower levels but as we got to the top instead of using a regular standard compactor I would fill up my old 1976 white road boss dump truck filled to the brim I mean the truck would legally how about 50 50 3,000 pounds we had to have closer to 60 to 70 thousand pounds on it just mounded the dirt up and then I would go around every footing because at this building has columns throughout entire thing to hold the roof structure up not just the perimeter right and so I would fill that truck up and I would drive it around all of the footings the project supervisor came out that'll never work what do you think you're doing and I'm like I bet it'll work just give it a chance and he's like that's not how you put in a building this is not going to work it's going to feel nice as well it's got to be tested anyway we've got to have verification that we're hitting that 97% so just test it just check it out and do it well unfortunately what happened was I didn't hit 97% I hit a hundred and seven percent I went way over on my compaction and I say unfortunately because what I did by going way over was I entirely proved this project supervisor wrong and that doesn't give me an advantage that actually gives me a disadvantage because even though I proved him wrong I've also successfully pissed him off he's no longer in my corner on this jobsite and so this old farm country boy that has next to no equipment is actually accomplishing the job but not in the ways he's used to working with the bigger companies that have dozers and excavators and compactors at etc etc and so I would start to see him do little things like he would start to sabotage me in little micro ways and I would notice it but I would just keep working I mean I was just built to work plain and simple but a big red flag popped up one day when he came in and we were prepping the inside of the entire building now this is a Menard superstore so this is a massive amount of space that we've got to prep and he looked at me and said I expect this entire interior pad to be concrete ready by tomorrow morning we had rod earth at this point we weren't even close to having a pad that could support concrete and like Oh No so he left he didn't stick around I don't know what he was doing or where he went but I got on the horn to the aggregate pit and I ordered $45,000 worth of aggregate to be shipped in that day we are talking about n dump after end up in a continual stream now to keep up with them at this point I had an excavator and I had a skid loader I had a New Holland skid loader New Holland 180 and that's it and a dump truck so I rented two dozers I rented two Komatsu d40 one-piece and I had him outfitted with mass and mass means I could set my rip my grade lasers up on each mast and could grade and so it was my crew was me my dad and Tim and we worked all day long and we didn't even get close to it and so as the day was coming and I knew the trucks were gonna start to stop I decided to have them strategically placed oil throughout the entire building path so that as we would go from one aggregate pile we could then push the soil to the next aggregate pile we would never have to touch the sub base with our tracks and worry about contaminating it but it also meant we weren't even close to being done at that point so I said to Tim and my dad can we just work through the whole night and they both agreed Tim was running Packer he wasn't an equipment operator then he was running a compactor at runnin my dad hopped in the other Komatsu d41 Pete and I ran the first Komatsu d41 Pete and we never missed a beat we went from all day through the evening through the night to the next morning and the next morning's when I figured out what this supervisor did when he left he actually went back to the office and he called all of the reps from Menards he had them come out with him he had every person inside of the office that was his superior come out to the job site with him because his plan was to come out and show that we weren't capable of handling this project and have me fired I think he was pretty much setting me up for sabotage which if you want to get rid of somebody that's a good way to do it but when he showed up he was even more mad than the time before when I when I did the compression package and improved wrong because now the entire pad is done we're done we're wrapped up we're looking at each other sitting on our dozers going what do you want done next boss and he's like how did you do all this I said we just worked all night long and he he had the whole entourage and the entourage looked at him and goes what's wrong with this project what's wrong with this contractor and so we then again we didn't make a friend we actually made an enemy and these aren't good things these are just real things and what I learned from that is just because you have a project supervisor doesn't mean the project supervisor is automatically going to like you and it doesn't mean they're going to have your best interests in mind I learned that you've got to treat each person individually and understand that some of them are gonna favor you a little bit more than others maybe I'm wrong with it I don't know but that's my story with the Menard superstore holy crap what just one story it's like yeah it's a good story if I go to the next one [Music] alright guys so this is the project that I lost the absolute most money on and it's somewhere between 90 and $100,000 but it could have been a heck of a lot worse because not only did I not get paid for this retaining wall the contractor that I installed it for tried to sue me after the wall was complete and this is going to be the absolute craziest story I can't even believe I I'm telling you this story and it all stems from one little control point up in the middle of the field there is a spot when this whole stadium would be built that had to stay in place and what happened was that control point got destroyed intentionally by the contractor that was building the stadium because it was in his way and what happened was without that control point the surveyors came out here and staked the wall but they didn't stake the wall the right way they actually staked the top of the wall as the bottom basically what that meant was when I built this retaining wall everything was off not by feet but by inches and when you have a running track that you have to have exactly dead-on you can't be off even by inches but without the control point being in place I had no way of verifying it but the contractor capitalized on my mistake see we built this entire thing trusting that the surveyor that the contractor hired did their job the right way without having the ability to double-check the surveyors work the wall is built the wall is off by inches and who does what on a construction site like this this is what everybody does everybody points at everybody else the only problem was I had collected a dime and now I'm keep being threatened with a lawsuit and told that I've got to rebuild this entire retaining wall or they're taking me to court now I don't have a hundred thousand dollars of extra money just sitting around that I can go out and fund rebuilding tearing this whole thing down and starting over from scratch and so I decided to fight it I decided to stand up for myself by this point I've been doing projects like this and I said I'm gonna go for it and I figured I didn't have a snowball's chance and but I picked up the phone on an off chance and I actually called the project supervisor that ran this whole site development he worked for the company that employed me that was suing me and I said by any chance would you verify that the control point was removed and he said something that absolutely stunned me he said I will now this guy's putting his job on the line and I'm like what's that he's like I will I will verify that the control point was removed enough the heavens opened I'm literally going this dude this complete stranger is going to save my hide because not only at this point am I not getting paid I'm getting sued to rebuild this wall and it would have crushed my company I didn't have the wherewithal or the funds to be able to do it and so with him on my side we were able to defray the entire attorneys cost everything went from going from a court B to being settled out of court but I still at that point I still lost because here's where it gets sad here's where it gets where I should have taken more initiative my attorney is telling me this is a slam dunk we're going for it I'm thinking all right I've got $90,000 I've lost at this point I know that the cut the contractor is going to countersue me and I know that a judge that doesn't know construction is going to look at this and he's not going to understand all of the parameters so he's going to make a judgment somewhere probably in the middle and so there's still a chance that not only do I not get paid but I could end up repaying because the teardown and the rebuild cost more than the initial build and so I said I just want away from it because now I'm weighing the value of my own time is my time going to court going to be worth whatever I could potentially recoup or can I make more money by being more productive on a different job site and so instead of fighting it all the way to the bitter end I kind of caved I let the contractor not pay me the ninety seven thousand dollars he owed me but he didn't also get to sue me anymore and as all because of their project supervisor doing something that I never thought would happen and going to the side of one of the subcontractors it was awesome [Music] you [Music]