Last month, my (younger!) brother Mark wrote a piece for the VPCS blog reflecting on his first 40 years in the construction industry. It’s hard to believe that we’ve both been in this business for as long as we have. I suppose one of the reasons the time has flown is that we’ve spent it doing what we love.
Over the years, I’ve worked on many projects that I hold near and dear to my heart. What could be more satisfying than helping deliver schools, hospitals and community centers? But there’s one project that stands out for me personally as one of the most meaningful: the George Mark Children’s House.
I’ve been thinking a lot about George Mark since I saw an article in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine that mentioned it and other children’s hospice and respite centers like it. The article’s descriptions of the various amenities built into these properties that smooth the way for sick kids and their families took me back to when we were helping get George Mark off the ground in the early 2000s.
I’ll never forget the call that started it all. A long-time colleague and friend Mark and I knew through the Bay Area hospital construction community reached out to say he had an opportunity he thought we’d be perfect for, adding a detail we rarely hear in this business. He explained that while most construction projects have no money and a lot of help, this one was just the opposite because the money was there but nobody was on board to steer the ship. He told me he thought Van Pelt Construction Services would be ideal.
That project was the George Mark Children’s House. And our friend was right. It was the perfect job for us.
There’s plenty you can learn about George Mark by going to its website, or watching its amazing founder, Kathy Hull, deliver her powerful TED Talk on the subject. So I won’t go into too much detail on the specs of the place here, other than to describe it as the first freestanding children’s respite and end-of-life care facility in the United States. Kathy had been a pediatric psychologist at Oakland Children’s Hospital who saw a need for this type of property and took it on as her personal mission to open the first of its kind in the country.
We were brought on as the project managers representing the owner. Kathy had already secured the services of a designer and a builder, but neither had any experience in healthcare. Specifically, they had never worked with the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), which is California’s regulatory body that, among other things, grants the necessary permits for all healthcare structures. Since George Mark would technically be classified as a skilled nursing facility, it needed to get very specific approvals from OSHPD before a single shovel could hit the dirt.
So VPCS came on the scene. First, we saw the project through all the necessary pre-construction steps. Then we helped oversee it as it came to life. I remember a few of the more difficult aspects of trying to get the state to understand what we were trying to accomplish. Yes, this was a medical facility but it needed to look and feel more like a residential structure, complete with fireplaces, playrooms, classrooms, bedrooms, a waterfall and even a small chapel. Whenever OSHPD or the fire marshall said no to something we proposed, we just had to work with them until we all figured out how to get to a mutually satisfactory approval.
As Kathy Hull loves to say about George Mark’s mission, “The point is to abolish limitations; to have your default answer be ‘Yes’ and your default question be ‘Why not?’”
These days, my own kids work right here at VPCS, running their own impressive projects (quite skillfully, I must add). But back when it was my job to manage the George Mark project, my son and daughter were still young. I couldn’t help thinking about the families who would be coming through George Mark’s doors; how unimaginable it would be to have a terminally ill child. I was determined, just like everyone on that job, to do everything I could to deliver a beautiful, peaceful, nurturing place for every family who would show up at George Mark.
I take a lot of pride in every project I work on. But there’s something about this one that has affected me professionally and personally a little more than others, even after all these years. It’s such an honor to have been given the chance to help it take shape.
I started my career in construction on June 16, 1979 at 7:00 a.m. (The photo above was taken that very week.) Since then, I’ve collected paychecks from two companies: Lathrop Construction Associates and Van Pelt Construction Services, the latter of which I co-founded in 1996.
On that fateful first day of work nearly 40 years ago, I was assigned as a general laborer to a Lathrop project in Oakland, California. We were building an addition to Roosevelt Junior High School. My very first duty in my career was to pour grout into structural column base plates. Sounded easy enough. The labor foreman suggested that I carry two buckets at a time. “You’d hate to have one arm longer than the other at the end of the week,” he said to me. I didn’t really understand what he meant until I attempted to pick up the first bucket, which I filled with WAY too much grout. It weighed about 90 pounds. I had to carry this bucket through a mine field of scrap rebar, open trenches, slippery mud, broken boards, back-up alarms, and general construction chaos – all the while hearing, “Hurry it up, Van Pelt! That grout better not start setting up!” Tripping, huffing, puffing, grunting, and hurting, I somehow managed to make it (but just barely) to the baseplate that was waiting for my load of grout. I proudly emptied the contents of the half-filled five-gallon bucket into the form around the plate, but couldn’t believe that it barely dented the total amount needed. I hurried back to mix another bucketful, using a half-inch drill motor with a piece of #4 rebar shaped into a mixing wand. Six more loads into the same baseplate until it was finally full! I was completely exhausted, but extremely proud of my accomplishment. Then the labor foreman yelled, “Come on Van Pelt! Two hundred and twenty-five more to go! Hurry your ass up!” I remember thinking, “Is this what I signed up for?”
June 16, 1979 was the longest day of my life.
Coming up on my 40-year professional anniversary, I’ve been reminiscing more than usual. I think about what I have been so fortunate to have witnessed over this four-decade span of time. The TV remote, desktop computers, ATMs, email, the Internet, and the ubiquitous smart phone. Who could have possibly known that most everything my brother and I were watching on Star Trek on Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m. would eventually be available to us? (Except for the “Beam me up, Scotty” technology, which is probably the one I would utilize the most.)
Obviously, construction sites have seen the same staggering progress. We don’t have any paper drawings or specifications any longer. EVERYTHING is on our phones, iPads and the Cloud. Literally, no paper files. At the end of a $100 million project, we hand the team a thumb drive. Before, it was 75-100 banker boxes along with 500 rolls of drawings. Now, just one tiny little thumb drive. Amazing.
I asked one of our young project managers the other day if he knew what CC stands for in his email application. His response was just a puzzled look. When I told him CC stood for carbon copy, he continued to give me that same baffled look. I tried to explain: “You know, carbon paper? The sheet behind the original document? The copy? You mail it to … oh, never mind. Let’s go to lunch.”
My point is this: a guy like me, who started in the Polaroid camera era and now functions in the hashtag world, well, I see things through a completely different lens. Am I a dinosaur? Hell yes, I am and I’m proud of it! Somehow I’ve managed to ride this techno wave and remain functional. My co-founder, Mike, has done the same. I believe that our ability to manage VPCS effectively is completely reliant upon and a result of our insistence to stay on top of this almost light-speed progression not just of technology but of the construction business as a whole. We’ve found some pretty effective ways to navigate through the changing times.
Still, I have to confess that every once in a while, I wish I could mix up some grout and stumble around a job site. Then I’d step back and take a Polaroid snapshot to capture a memento of a hard day’s work.
There are always two very important relationships that we honor and nurture when VPCS works on school projects. The first is the one between us and our client, the school district. And the second is the one between the district and the taxpayers, who are basically our client’s client.
All of us from VPCS who are associated with the San Rafael City Schools district-wide improvement initiative understand that we need to do our best not just for the district, but also for the homeowners throughout this community who approved the two bond measures that are funding the work.
A quick overview of the project: VPCS serves as program manager for the $269 million district-wide effort, made possible when Bond Measures A and B passed in 2016 to fund school improvements and new construction throughout San Rafael. The VPCS team oversees things from the district offices, collaborating closely with district staff as well as construction managers, program architects, contractors and consultants.
As VPCS’s on-site office manager in San Rafael, part of my job is to coordinate with the district communications staff to keep those community members informed, engaged and enthusiastic about what we’re doing. And, given the scope of the program, there is a lot to keep the community up to date on.
In general, our community outreach falls into two categories: communicating about things that will affect people in the short term, and letting them know the bigger-picture status of the long-term project.
Short-term concerns tend to focus on things that will temporarily affect the neighbors who live around the individual school sites where we’re working. We want to give them plenty of notice before we begin a new construction phase, for example, so they can be prepared for a bit more noise, a few more trucks or a couple of blocked parking spots. To report on the bigger-picture story, we inform the public about the status and scheduling on the full program. These sorts of alerts are shared via mailers and newsletters that go out to all local residents.
It’s also very important that we communicate to the people affiliated with the affected schools themselves – the students, parents, teachers and staff. Sometimes, we need to let them know about sections of a campus that will be inaccessible for a certain amount of time. Or we need to notify teachers when they’ll need to move out of certain classrooms. When we have important updates to share with this audience, we usually draft notices for the principals to distribute through their own email and newsletter channels.
Whatever the message and whoever the target audience, we keep things upbeat. Sure, construction projects can create some temporary headaches but it’s all part of the journey toward a very positive outcome. (That is certainly the case in San Rafael, where Measures A and B are paving the way for fantastically improved schools.) No matter what’s happening, we do what we can to smooth the way for everyone concerned. Once, when we had to relocate kids at one elementary school into temporary classrooms that were farther from the lunchroom, we brought in ponchos and umbrellas that they could use outside on rainy days. At another site, we worked with school staff and teachers to customize advanced communications, timelines and packing/unpacking instructions for temporary classroom and library relocations so they knew what to expect at all phases of the process. Helping manage people’s expectations is key to ensuring moves like these are successful.
In the construction world, there’s always a lot going on – and those are just the things we anticipate! When we factor in all the little unforeseen things that crop up every day on every job site, there’s a lot to keep folks informed about so that they can stay enthusiastic about the work being done. But that’s our priority, because those are the people we’re working for. And we never forget it.
If you’re a VPCS client, you may have chatted by phone or exchanged emails with Corinne Figueira. She’s one of the reasons our home office hums along so efficiently. She manages multiple responsibilities and attends to countless details, always making her juggling act look easy. We chatted with Corinne to learn a bit more about some of her duties and her favorite tricks of the trade.
Q: What’s the best way to describe your job?
A: My official title is administrative assistant. That means I’m here to support [Operations Manager] Christine Diamond in whatever needs to be done to keep things running smoothly. So I do a little bit of everything around here – from answering phone calls, to managing staff requests that come in, to keeping track of equipment. I also manage most of the accounts receivable functions, which is when I get the chance to interact directly with our clients.
Q: What’s different between the way you interact with clients and the way the on-site VPCS project teams interact with them?
A: Even though my client relationships are based on a different side of the business – the financial side as opposed to the project side – I think they complement each other really well. Anybody who works for VPCS knows the personality of the firm and the commitment to honesty and integrity, and we all take it very seriously in our own jobs. So I’ve established my own connections with my counterparts at our clients’ offices that are always pleasant and friendly. That mode comes prettily easily to me, and is also an extension of the way everybody at Van Pelt always operates.
Q: What are your rules of thumb for how to interact with clients?
A: I always start every conversation by asking how they’re doing, how’s their day going, that kind of thing. I also make sure, before we get into any discussion of finances, that they have everything they need from us. Because if there’s something we can do for them, that becomes the priority. This is one of the many things Christine has taught me since I’ve been in this job.
Q: In what ways do your client interactions contribute to the bigger-picture value that the firm offers?
A: I think if we’re pleasant to deal with when we’re reaching out to clients about payments – which is a potentially sticky subject – it sets a tone that affects all the other aspects of the relationship. If I make it clear that I’ll always be approachable, I become someone they can reach out to if they need anything, whether that thing has to do with finances or something else completely. That way, I help reinforce the idea that VPCS is always easy to work with.
Q: What tips would you give other people who do what you do?
A: I take care of a lot of little things that might go unnoticed, but when you put them together, they add up to a lot and have a big impact on how the company operates. Making the effort to get to know clients along the way makes all the difference. Not only is it a pleasant way to build connections with people you work with, but it also makes the job easier and more fun. I’m helping make VPCS a firm that clients enjoy dealing with and know they can trust.
Van Pelt Construction Services is a family-run business that has always thought of clients and colleagues as members of our extended clan. During this time of year especially, we offer our warmest wishes to every branch of the VPCS family. May your hearth be warm throughout the holiday season and your new year be full of promise.
