Shackleton’s Ad

Hiring new people is one of my least favorite tasks. It is a lot of work pouring over emails and resumes trying to figure out who may be a good fit. Especially these days when so many people are looking for work. A simple ad on Craigslist describing how wonderful we are to work for elicits dozens of responses. And, after finally picking someone, they turn out not to be right for the job. Either the work is too hard, or the weather (we work outside) is too hot, or too cold. One guy told me that using the chisel and mallet hurt his elbows. Kind of a problem if you’re an aspiring carpenter.

So I wondered, how can I start filtering out applicants?

I remembered reading an amazing story about Sir Ernest Shackleton leading an expedition to the South Pole. Needing men, he placed a rather blunt and honest ad.

“MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS. SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON”

I like it. It lays out the truth. It doesn’t sugar coat it.

As an employer in a perfect world my help wanted ad would generate one response from the perfect employee. But being that the world’s not perfect, I have a greater chance of creating a perfect ad. One that scares off those who won’t be a good fit and entices the people that will. Here is my Shackletonesque ad:

Carpenter’s assistant wanted for hard work at $11 / hour. No experience
necessary. We are willing to train. We do most of our work outside so it’s cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Long term reliable work is questionable as the economy of late has been questionable. I will do the best I can to keep the best people working as long as possible.

Don’t bother contacting us if…
you are the kind of person that thinks “good enough” is good enough.
you are the kind of person that doesn’t take pride in your work.
you are the kind of person that points out problems but doesn’t have any
solutions.
you make excuses and don’t take responsibility for your actions.
you are not creative.
you are not reliable.
you don’t like hard work.
you don’t have a can-do attitude.
you are not willing to learn.

If none of the above apply, you have a great attitude, and you are
interested in building really amazing structures out of timber and steel,
contact us.

Visit our website at http://www.threeelements.com to see what we do.

These are the people I am looking for. We do provide health insurance, and paid vacation and holidays. The wage is increased after 90 days, assuming they are still here. I didn’t want to put that in the ad. I wanted people to apply that really wanted to do the work. They are excited about what we do.

Twenty-eight men responded to Shackleton’s ad and gave the expedition a go. Thing is, they never made it. Their ships were crushed by the ice. Still, Shackleton managed to survive and bring home every one of his crew alive. Every single one. How?
Before the voyage began the crew shared a common vision influenced by a simple, yet perfect, ad. Shackleton didn’t have to worry about anyone complaining about the conditions because that is what they signed up for. They knew what to expect going in. His ad attracted risk takers, a team of men who weren’t afraid of challenges, more so, they expected them. You have to get people working together that believe what you believe. The ad acts like a filter.

So what happened with my ad? I sent the ad to some of my friends before I placed it to get some feedback. Most said they liked it but I think they were lying to me. They seemed politely skeptical. I placed the ad on “Connecting Colorado” and after two weeks I received only three replies (be careful what you wish for). The first two were not a good fit. The third is a young guy that is really excited about what we do. We’ll see. He’ll start next week and I will keep you posted.

What are your thoughts? How do you go about hiring people?

I would appreciate any feed back you may have.

Our first studio photo shoot.

Years ago we built the timbers for a house in the Colorado mountains. It was for a charming couple that I grew very fond of. The wife asked me to build some furniture for them. I told her that I don’t build furniture I am a timber framer. She insisted. I did build her a small bench for her mud room and we used the same timbers that we used in the rest of her house.

As anyone in this business knows you have busy times and you have slow times. During some of the slow times we built some other furniture with similar details and materials. We had a lot of comments on it and our original home owner thought it would be a good idea to have the pieces professionally photographed. She recommended Brian Mark Photography . I thought it would be fun to take some pictures of Brian taking pictures.

It took a long half day to shoot and I was really impressed with Brian’s attention to detail. It took him several hours just to get the lighting the way he wanted it for the first piece. He explained to me that he used a mix of old and new technolgy. The camera itself was the same type you would see in the old time movies where the photographer would cover his head with a blanket and take the image. Mounted on the back of this classic camera is a high tech contraption that converts the image to digital format. It seemed to me that he did all of his lighting manually. I didn’t see him alter the image digitally at all except to remove some scratches that the family pets had put on it over the years.  I think the photos came out great, and if you ever need a product professionally shot in a studio I highly recommend Brian.

Here are his final products:

Stavebolt Connection

We are working on a new project with Rudd Construction. It is a large heavy timber storage / barn structure. What makes this interesting is we have a clear span of 50′ with some shed dormers on top. This creates a fairly large tension load on the bottom chord among other  things. We have a connection that we can use to resolve this. In fact I have blogged about before. Click here to see the article. The connection itself looks like this:

We are working with an engineer that we have never worked with before. His name is Dodson Harper and he is with Resource Engineering Group out of Crested Butte CO. After speaking with Dodson about the 43 kip tension load he recommended a stave bolt connection. It is something I had seen and heard about but had never used.  We did have to change the location of the bottom chord but this is a great way to resolve these loads in a very efficient way.  We have spec’d out this connection with Dodson’s help and I am excited to use it in this project.

Let me know if you have seen or used any interesting connections using any type of material.  It would be great to hear about them.

Snavely Forest Products

Back in March I called Mark Spargo of Snavely Forest Products Inc. asking if they could help us by providing 2×6 tongue and groove decking for the roof of the CTRC project. If you don’t know about our CTRC project click here.  We have never done any business with Snavely. (Not for any reason other than the fact that they don’t sell the materials we use on our projects). As many of the people in our industry, things have been really slow for them. I told him not to make a decision right away. I said think it over and get back to me. When he called me back he said that he looked in his yard and couldn’t find any decking that they could donate. I could tell by his tone that he was disappointed but I understood the circumstances. Times were really tight. The following week I was at the MSLMBDA show in Denver and I noticed Snavely had a booth. I asked if Mark was there ( I had only spoken with him on the phone so I had no idea what he looked like.) and someone pointed him out to me. I introduced myself and told him I fully understood his situation not being able to donate to our project at this time. Especially since I wasn’t even a customer. He was gracious and said thanks for understanding. That was on a Friday. The next Monday Mark called me and said I could pick up the decking next week. I had never purchased anything from Mark, but that didn’t matter. Times are really tough right now for everyone in construction, but that didn’t matter. He would probably not get any business from us (again, only because they don’t supply the type of materials we typically use), but that didn’t matter. It is easy to do the right thing when things are going well. When things are tight and you are struggling and you still help others, people you don’t even know. That says volumes about your character. I don’t know Mark from Adam, but from this one experience I hold him in high regard and would encourage people to do business with him. These are the types of people that make the world, even just a little piece in their corner, a better place.

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Atomic Forge

I am way behind on my blog posts giving credit to the folks who have helped me out with the pavillion. Brian Martella of Atomic Forge came out this spring and welded the post bases to the steel embedments. It never fails to amaze me how generous people are with their time when it comes to helping out on this project. Brian has been really busy, but he made the time to get this done.

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The Missing Algorithm.

Honestly, I don’t know if it is an algorithm I am looking for. It might be a formula, I am not sure. Anyone who is in business knows that some projects go great and some not so great. If you could predict which jobs will go which way what a great tool. I think in order to figure that out you need some variables and an algorithm (or formula) to run those through. First, what are the variables? That part seems pretty easy. I think that there are 3 factors that can be reviewed. Let me say these factors apply to us here at Three Elements Timberworks. The factors may be different for you and your company. Here are three factors that are important to us. First off (in no particular order) is the “Cool” factor. We love to build interesting projects that push the limits of innovative design. If the project ranks high on the cool factor that is a good indicator that this could be a good project for us. The second variable is the “People” factor. In a past post I talked about how important relationships are to us when it comes to business. We need to have a common goal. There needs to be mutual respect in order to work cooperatively on the project. If the people we work with share a similar philosophy that is another good indicator that this will be a good project for us. The third variable is the “Money” factor. We are all in business to make money. Our business can’t survive if we don’t make money. We can’t do a good job on the project if we aren’t making money. It is a simple fact.

So we have our three variables/inputs. Now what? I still haven’t figured that part out. I do know that the function (hmm, maybe it is a function?) is non-lineal, meaning that some of the variables have a greater influence than others.

 

For example: If the money factor is moderate (we cover our expenses and  maybe a little bit of profit), but it is high on the cool factor and high on the people factor that has been shown in our past to be a good project. We have had projects that were moderate on the cool factor, moderate on the money factor and high on the people factor, that also was a good project.  We looked at a project for a couple retiring from New York and building a small retirement home in Estes Park. They wanted 2 trusses in their great room. Nothing fancy, just 2 simple king post trusses. It was a small job to say the least. Here are how their variables added up. Very low on the cool factor. They were not wanting any fancy joinery, just straight cuts and bolted together. It  could have gotten cut on the job-site by some competent framers. Very low on the money factor, due to the simplicity and the small scope of work we would barely cover our expenses. We met with the owners for about an hour. They were so nice and so excited about these simple, easy, little trusses in their house. They were great, off the chart on the people factor. I want to build these trusses for them. An example of how the function is non-linear. The off the chart people factor overwhelms the low ranking on the cool and money factor.
I probably will never come up with a rock solid algorithm/formula/function. However, knowing the variables and rating them should help us make a reasonable decision about whether or not we should take the job.

Case Study on Three Elements Timberworks use of SolidWorks

Click on the image to go to the case study.

We Believe in Integrated Project Delivery

Click here for a more detailed description of integrated project delivery. This is a model of a timber structure that we were hired to build several years ago. There are so many things wrong with this design. We had no input in the original design. 164 bolts and several steel plate weldments that required a lot of slotting. The slots alone caused problems, wood is anisotropic. Problems occur when wood is slotted and the environment changes the humidity rises and falls.the temperature rises and falls. The long through slots allow the timbers to twist and check. The loads on most of the connections are shear and moments. We like to see compression and tension. If I told you to break a 2×4 would you try to bend and twist it or would you try and pull it apart.

Here is our solution. We went from 164 bolts to 24 bolts, we went from 32 slots to 5 slots, we ended up using 14% of the original amount of steel in the weldments.  If you believe in working with a fabricator while designing your project PLEASE contact us.

I believe business is about relationships.

It was several years ago when I was in Vertical Arts’ office and I saw a set of blueprints with a house that had a lot of timber. I asked the architect about the project and he gave me the name of the builder. It was Paul Ferguson of Fairview Construction. I contacted Paul and we met at a bookstore in Steamboat just off of Lincoln. I don’t think the bookstore is there anymore. We had a nice talk about the project as well as about life in general. He mentioned that he was going for a bicycle ride that afternoon and I complained about not “having” the time to workout. He said something that has stuck with me to this day. He said “you should always be able to find 1 hour a day for yourself.” I took note of that and that was when I  started to call him my life coach. . When we meet we don’t talk just about the project at hand but we talk about life.

I was hopeful about getting the work, not just for the work’s sake, but also because I looked forward to working with Paul. It turned out that our bid was higher than the other bidder and Paul wrestled with that. Honestly, I am not sure why but we did end up with the job. Paul and I would get together to discuss the project and we would inevitably end up talking about life in general. What impressed me the most about Paul was his balanced life. He works hard, he is thoughtful, he reads books that open up your mind about life’s idiosyncrasies (in fact he gave me one of these books as a gift once, reinforcing his status as my life coach), he exercises regularly and after several decades of marriage he still can’t say enough good things about his wife. At the time I had been dating a wonderful woman for almost a year and a half and during one of my conversations with Paul I mentioned that I was going to propose. He said to me “Make it Special”, nothing else, he didn’t give me specifics, he just said “Make it Special”. I took his advice. I won’t bore you with the details of how I proposed but it is a story that 3 years later my wife still loves to tell. It made her feel special. What in hindsight seems so obvious, at the time I would not have made a point of making the proposal special if not for Paul’s advice. (again re-inforcing his status as my life coach.)

As any large project moves along there are bumps along the way (at the time this was the largest project we had ever done in terms of total board foot of timber) but the fact that Paul and I had similar beliefs and a good relationship we were able to navigate them successfully. I have often said that I believe that business and friends don’t mix, but I would like to make a caveat to that by quoting John D. Rockefeller “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship”. I would certainly consider Paul more than my life coach, he is a friend.

A few weeks before our wedding we received a beautiful piece of pottery in the mail. It was from Paul and his wife Bridgett congratulating us on our upcoming nuptials. It sits in our home reminding me to pursue a balanced and remarkable life.

WoodSource Inc.

I know, not another post about the Colorado Therapeutic Riding Center pavilion. I just want to make sure that I take the time to give credit to all the great people that have chipped in. The timbers were donated by Martin Schwab and Chris Schureman at WoodSource Inc.

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