If you've spent any time around a construction job site, you've probably seen some version of this scene: Two guys, looking at a piece of work, scratching their heads. They look at each other shrug and say…"looks good from my house". With a chuckle and a nod and they turn to the next task of the day.

It happens all the time. You've been working on something all morning and you realize you made a mistake, a cut was an 1/8th off, a fastener was not quite centered in a piece of material, a scratch in the paint, something. Mistakes there were, mistakes there will be, but…Is it good enough? Do we have to rip it down and redo it? Will the boss notice? Will the client? How much do we care?

The way you answer these questions day in and day out says a lot about your company. And the right answer can be difficult to settle on. How much time would the redo take, what would the materials cost, what time of day is it, what are the clients like? How will the site superintendent react? Is he going to yell? Is he going to fire you? Can we fudge a fix rather than a complete redo?

Really though, in the end, the better questions to ask are: What are your core values as a company, and how much does the whole team own those values? Do we give lip service to quality just to win bids and then barely scrape by when it comes to execution and move on to the next job? Do we really care about the quality for its own sake and do good work because good work actually matters?

Dura-beauty

At Optimum, our core values shape everything we do and Dura-Beauty is one of the most important ones. Simple, clean, uncompromising. Everything we make should stand the test of time and be beautifully made. It should be something we walk away from proud of having made and should feel the same years down the road when we come back and look at it.
It means crisp and precise joints that won't shift out of line as the seasons change. It means masonry work that is designed to handle freezes and thaws. Steelwork that won't end up rusting in the salt air and staining everything around it.

And the thing about core values is if they really do shape what you do, the proof is in the pudding. How we see it is that straight lines and square corners are there to reflect our company’s integrity for years to come. But getting there takes more than lip service. It has to be built into everything you do.
A company can have standards as high as the moon, but getting your team to reach them all consistently comes down to the way we react to mistakes when they do happen. Does the world fall apart around us, do we get angry? Do we shuffle the blame and throw the new guy under the bus? Or do we own them, share them around, learn from them, and try not to make them again? It is the shared and lived values of the company that answers these questions

And that is where another of our values comes to play: we call it "Plain Talk." Dealing with mistakes well requires a commitment to honesty but also a team where that honesty isn't going to get you hit in the face or fired. We love talking about our mistakes, and we love laughing about them too, after they're fixed of course. Some mistakes live on in jokes for years and never get lived down. But if it's done with a good-natured sense of humor, not cutting people down and if we don't take ourselves too seriously, in the end, we learn from them. The mistakes and the legacy of roasting that we build out of them is how we make sure they don't happen again, and we're all better builders because of them.

A little story

It takes a team to build a new office building or restaurant, but each person on the team has to own the standards themselves. Every member of the Optimum team has a story of how they learned the value of Dura-Beautiful work and owning their mistakes. Here's a story from one of our team members, how he learned it.

"When I was first getting my start in building, I hadn't really taken on Dura-Beauty as an unyielding standard in my work. I was learning how to do crown moldings and had done an outside corner, shrugged at the poorly aligned joint, and moved on. An older carpenter came by and saw it, looked at me, and asked, "You happy with that?" I replied, not very convincingly, I'll admit, 'No, but I really don't feel like redoing it, it's good enough,' He said, 'You're going to look at that piece of crap joint every day for the rest of your life and wish you had redone it.' I knew he was right, tore it down, and fought with that corner until it was perfect. And he was right, I looked at and enjoyed that corner for years. In the end it did 'look good from my house,' because it was in my house, it was my own kitchen.

From then on I tried to treat every cut and every fastener as if I would be looking at them for the rest of my life in my own kitchen. And you know, there were a few cases early on where I didn't make things as right as I could have and shrugged with a 'looks good from my house' chuckle to myself (it is a good line after all). Even though I don't have to look at them every day, I've got mental pictures of those mistakes that I left behind that have kept me honest on every project since then."

The next time you're on an Optimum worksite or see one of our banners on a project in Portland or thereabouts, poke your head in and ask the first guy you meet how he learned to do Dura-Beautiful work, there are a lot more stories like this around, you can be sure.