Knowing the Rules

Growing up, baseball was my game even though football was what I was known for. Coming out of high school my old Babe Ruth manager, Butch Dent, asked to help him coach his sons little league baseball team. About half way through the season the Butch had quit to take a new teaching position in South Carolina leaving me to finish the season.


Our season was a disaster up to that point. You see Butch drafted his sons friends and other kids from his neighborhood and didn't draft for talent. I started working on basics and fundamentals. I sat down and reread the little league rule book. By the end of the year I knew the rules better than coaches with years of experience.

The three items we all need to work on are the same in construction as in baseball:
1.)work on the basics, get your mental game down
2.)work on the fundamentals, get your consistency down so you can do it in your sleep
3.)know the rules better than the men who wrote them, know what they say, not necessarily what they are meant to say

We ended up winning three out of five games to finish the season.

In 1976, an election year, Gerald Ford introduced a program called the Economic Development Fund. This fund was to assure minority participation in all projects that had federal money from this fund in it. It was set up to get the party in charge re-elected. It didn't do much for Gerald Ford, but it did stimulate the economy and it gave a yard stick for hiring minority companies.

In 1976, I was an estimator for Arnold Beck & Son in Cincinnati. Arnold Beck was a medium size general contractor with it's main competitors being Frank Messer and Sons, Dugan & Meyers, and Universal. After reading the regulations for the Economic Development Fund, I was convinced that we could make money by knowing the rules and by being ready when the municipalities where funded.

When the first one came out I wasn't completely ready. The project was to remove the deck off the porches at Cincinnati General Hospital and replace them with precast planks from Price Brothers. I had painters and masons lined up, now I needed a demolition sub.

The project bid between Christmas and New Years. Bob Beck asked me one day why we were even fooling with bidding this project and when I told him that none of the contractors that held drawings could do it he changed his attitude and asked about the mark up. When I told him due the difficulty I was thinking cost times two or one hundred percent markup. He laughed and said we would never get it.

Guess what? We were the low and only bidder. By knowing the rules and how the game is played we got the job, we got the job at my mark up. The only problem we had was finding a minority sub contractor. This was resolved by a phone call to William Cargile, a minority general contractor. He made a recommendation and we welcomed it.

The sub is a blog is a story into it's self. You will enjoy the story.