who else estimates for a small business sub who's owner has become insufferable?
time to vent. I estimate for a solid surface fabricator.
I've worked at this company for 12 years. 7 of which as estimator. My boss was the general operations manager when I was hired. Then he became VP. Then he bought the company from the previous owner(overall this was good. the previous owner was a complete moron). Up until he became owner he was easy to work for and was a very reasonable boss. He became owner and switch got flipped in his brain I guess and now he's got a new way to piss me off with petty time wasting bullshit every. single. day.
We are primarily doing commercial work bidding to spec to Millworkers and GC's. Our bread and butter projects are in the $50k-300k size. Sometimes residential work comes around or some smaller GC has a job where they don't have a specific spec, but they have a look they're trying achieve. like "I want something grey & white" or "I need something black"
Sometimes these jobs are barely worth doing. Like $5k total in work. Dinky things you knock out in 1-2 days, get paid immediately, and move on. I can spit out a proposal for it in 30 seconds and move on to an actual meaningful bid. But for some reason he gets so boned up over these tiny bullshit jobs all because there's no spec and wants me to spend countless hours going back and forth with someone trying to sell them on materials we have on hand even if they don't meet the initial request just because it might mean we won't have to spend $800 or whatever. It's so fucking infuriating. Like some residential person comes to me and says "I don't have a color selection but I know I want white or gray" and my boss is like "pitch them this" and I have to go "they want white or gray and this is brown, it's not even close to what they want." his response is always just some variation of "so what"
Then he goes on some rant about how I need to "put my sales hat on" in these scenarios. How about my sales hat is listening to the customer and giving them what they ask for rather than trying to steer them towards whatever saves us pennies. I try to treat customers the way I want to be treated as a customer and that's not having my request disregarded in favor of something else entirely
I've gotten to the point where I tell him I pitched whatever he said but they chose something else when in reality I didn't, I just priced what the god damn customer came to me asking for and got the job secure in less than half the effort.