In a previous life working construction, I crafted hundreds, if not thousands, of cabinets. The face of the cabinet was real hardwood while the body of the cabinet was some form of manufactured product such as veneered hardwood. You could be moments away from seeing your masterpiece come together, when suddenly your song comes on, you lose focus and in a blink of an eye you sanded through the veneer! All your effort on your almost completed masterpiece could quickly be ruined and found holding shop supplies in the corner versus the intended resting spot in a customer’s home.
Zoom ahead to 15 years of construction work in the wireless infrastructure industry (that has lots of wires involved), I have learned that every layer of construction has its own unique challenges. I may be biased but argue that we in this industry have a few more challenges to navigate.
On a very basic level, wireless contractors are just construction companies that provide labor and expertise throughout the many divisions of wireless infrastructure. Just like a home builder, we repair, remodel, build, and construct additions. We offer a variety of different services. It is also not unheard of to have customers whose demands don’t align with reality. How we get to providing this work and how this work gets completed is what really sets us apart.
We need certain amounts of team members on each crew to complete projects from not only a skill and challenge aspect, but also a safety and certification compliance stand-point. These crew members need to travel with all the needed equipment both for the job and personal gear to be successful in all weather conditions at locations up to 10 hours away, at heights at times pushing 500’, all the while prepared to be successful. If we need to make an unplanned return trip to a site, there is a very high chance that all the effort and hard work that went into creating the masterpiece will be nothing more than another unneeded storage cabinet in the corner. Some in the business world might refer to this storage cabinet as profit.
Our industry is still new. We are quickly approaching the first generation of career telecom workers retiring! The first generation went through a lot of reactionary trials leading to the current day’s quickly changing proactive industry. We will always have our reactive circumstances, however the way we do business is changing quickly into forcing successful contractors to operate and navigate as many proactive measures as possible.
The number of boxes that need to be checked for a crew to be able to successfully navigate a project is long. As we proactively plan, we can check all those boxes and be ready to go, however there are events that are out of our control, where all of our planning needs to be put on hold. There could be a weather event, a change in customer funding, a team member calling in sick, or even a bird’s nest! We do not have the time to shrug our shoulders and kick rocks in disappointment. There is a need for a continual mindset to keep moving forward with plan B, C, D.
We always need to have additional strategies and plans. We need to be proactive in planning not only what is next but also for what could be. This is a reality and directly relates to why One Way Wireless Construction chose one of our company values to be Agility. Nimble and responsive in a changing environment. We need to be light on our feet. As we obtain experience in proactive planning and thinking, we strengthen our decision making. You could say that this is just part of the dance of telecom.
Todd Paseka, with his 14 years of telecom experience, is the Director of Operations at One Way Wireless Construction.
