Matt and I arrived in Detroit about 7:30 tonight, an hour late after getting delayed in Minneapolis because of SNOW. It's Spring for God's sake. We were able to sit and watch a good piece of the Masters, but our flight left Minnesota at 4:25 and the playoff started closer to 7 PM. It was going on when we landed in Detroit, but we had to get our bags and meet the limo driver, so missed all of the fun. The buffet dinner (salad, lasagna, chicken breasts and fruit) was supposed to end at 8:00, but they extended it to 8:30 because so many of the guys were watching the Masters. We made it in under the wire and the dinner was somewhat underwhelming. I had a quick drink with the Birmingham, AL Branch Manager, Matt, a broker from Tampa and two guys from our Canadian arm, who flew into Windsor from Toronto and missed dinner. True to their British form (both are ex patriots from England), they were drinking their dinner. I left Matt, the Branch Manager and the two Canadians at the bar and repaired back to my room to prepare for tomorrow and to work on the Blog. Yes, I am a little anal, what's your problem?

 

You can see pictures from Burns and Wilcox's in service day with Habitat for Humanity on Saturday. We had ten people show up and donate their Saturday to helping others. Our work site was the remains of a home in South Sacramento that had been burned down in a fire last year. The Habitat crews had knocked the structure down and they had us breaking up concrete and loading all of the debris into bins for haul away to the dump. When we arrived, there was a huge pile of rubble and by the time we left at 2:45 PM, we had completely cleaned up all of the wood and debris and had about 75% of the sidewalk and driveways broken up and stored into the dumpsters to be hauled away Monday. There was a large piece of heavy equipment that had an operator picking the piles of debris up and depositing them into three large bins that were on site.  I took the gang out to pizza at Round Table for lunch for helping out.

 

We had to remove a tongue-in-groove kitchen floor and remove all of the nails and stack them up for use on another project. The home was built in the sixties and the place had been combed over pretty good before we got there. We did manage to find a television remote and quite a few black widow spiders hiding in the sub floor of the structure. The site looked scrubbed pretty clean by the time we finished. It was hard work and I ran out of gas about 2:00. The site foreman wasn't much better than me as we hung out talking and he took refuge in a wheelbarrow (see the top picture). I told him I was going to post the picture on the Habitat for Humanity website. He wasn't amused. David was there and worked concrete virtually the whole day working with sledgehammers and pry bears to break up the cement, loaded it into wheelbarrows and then hand delivered it to the containers. I'm sure he was sore and tired last night. David, Ajay and Jeff (my assistant Shawna's husband) were all really hard workers and ended up working together. They didn't know each other at the beginning of the day, but workers tend to gravitate together and they ended up working concrete almost exclusively. Jeff works for Home depot in the Contractor's Service department where Daniel hopes to get moved eventually. Right now, he is working the garden department at the Home Depot in Woodland Hills.

 

David got a job in his field and not a moment too soon. He turns 26 in May and will be off of our insurance. His old firm, Halston Engineering (he interned there in high school), had offered him a position as a purchasing agent and he turned that down as he wants to work as an architect. One of the designers was burned out and decided to move to the purchasing agent position and they called David back and he starts tomorrow as a design engineer and will also be assisting in the estimating process when they get to bid on new jobs. It's not his dream job, but he is very happy to have full time work and full time benefits.

 

Darla, coincidentally, is off to Kansas City tomorrow and her Leadership conference with Silpada. My visit this week is for the Kaufman Financial Group's Executive Leadership training. We will spend the first four days immersed in leadership training and working with Steve Zaffron, the CEO of the Vanta Group. He will be working with us on principles from his book, "The Three Laws of Performance, rewriting the future of your organization and your life." Interestingly, a lot of the principals and ideas of his study is on changing the culture of your workplace from one of apathy and complacency to one of forward thinking, positive change. To be honest, my office would be a test case for this training as it was an office DOA when I took over, with a lot of infighting and negativity. There were 13 employees when I took over and I have three left from that group and 20 new faces that work for me. Many of my employees have never faced poor results or negative performance in their time with me. They have only experienced a vibrant office with winning teammates and record profits. The idea of this seminar is to create the kind of positive vibe that is part of my office already. I guess I should just go sight seeing in Detroit, as I've seen little of this town outside of the Ritz Carlton here in Dearborn. I'm just kidding. It will be a positive week of forward thinking and goals and objectives for the future of Burns and Wilcox. I look forward to spending a week with the future leaders of this company and helping them plan for our future.

 

The agenda is pretty aggressive with the day starting at 8:00AM and the dinners each night offsite at 7:00PM. We will get back to the hotel after 9 PM most nights and later on a few of them.

 

Well, this is inarguably short, but it is almost 11:00 PM. I need to check in with my bride and then get some sleep as the coming days will be long and, at times, trying. BTW, look closely at the last picture above and you can see I snapped it just as Ajay was about to lose his load of bricks and cement. Timing is everything, eh. Have a great week. Ciao!