By 1978, a great deal of my life had changed. My marriage to Cece was over. I had two sons, Ben and Bryan. And before long, the job that had begun teaching me the estimating business disappeared as well. The owner of the fabrication company died. His son took over the business, but it wasn't long before the company failed. Once again, I needed a job.
Allied Fence Company
I found one with Allied Fence Company. I was still estimating, but now I was estimating and selling fencing jobs. It wasn't glamorous, but it kept me working and, more importantly, kept me using the skill I had begun developing at the fabrication company. I was learning that estimating was estimating. Whether you were building a pressure vessel, a storage tank, or a fence, the basic questions remained: What materials will it take? How much will they cost? How much labor will be required? What will the labor cost?
What other costs have to be considered? And what price must we charge to make the job worthwhile? I worked at Allied Fence for about a year. Then something happened that I could never have predicted when I first began learning to estimate steel tanks. I applied for a job with Dow Chemical Company. They hired me.
Back to Dow — But This Time Was Different
Dow was not new to me. I had worked there before returning to college, and after graduating from Lamar I had briefly worked there again as a salaried employee during a strike. But this was entirely different. In September 1981, I went to work at the Dow Center in Houston as a project estimator. I moved to Houston. And almost overnight, the scale of the things I was estimating changed enormously. I wasn't estimating fences anymore. I wasn't estimating individual pressure vessels or storage tanks.
I began learning to estimate the cost of entire chemical plants and power plants. And those plants could be located almost anywhere in the world. How Much Will It Cost to Build a Plant? The basic question was still the same one I had begun learning at the fabrication company: What is this going to cost? But now the answer could involve enormous projects. A chemical plant contains far more than steel and concrete. There is equipment. Piping. Electrical systems. Instrumentation. Buildings. Structural steel. Construction labor.
Engineering. Thousands upon thousands of individual items and work hours eventually have to become one number that management can use to make a decision. Should we build it? Can we afford it? Is the project economically justified? How much money should be authorized? Those decisions depend heavily upon the estimate. That meant an estimator carried a considerable responsibility. If the estimate was too high, a good project might be rejected. If it was too low, a company could approve a project believing it would cost far less than it eventually did.
I had entered an entirely different professional world. Estimating became my profession. The fundamentals I learned in fabrication, and continued using at Allied Fence, prepared me for Dow. I did not know in September 1981 that this work would shape approximately the next thirty years of my life. There were good years. There were difficult years. There were enormous changes inside Dow itself. There would be another marriage. Another divorce. And then there would be Trish. The most important things that happened during those years had very little to do with chemical plants.