The Renovation Pitch

I've been selling building supplies for six years, and in that time I've learned that most bids are won by somebody who's willing to be hungrier than everybody else in the room, so when the Grand Lake Hotel renovation went up for materials, I priced my bid so low that my own sales manager called me an idiot and then told me to go for it anyway. It's a 1920s lakeside resort up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, three stories of brick and carved oak trim that's been rotting quietly since before I was born, and the job is big enough that landing it would change what kind of sales guy I am, or at least that's what I told myself on the four hour drive north with a sample case rattling around behind my seat.

The architect turned out to be a woman named Jamila Dunbar, thirty-four, who runs a small firm that does nothing but historic restorations, and she read my bid in about ninety seconds while I sat there in her site office trying to appear like someone who had nothing to hide. She had sawdust on her sleeve and a pencil behind her ear, and she didn't offer me coffee, which I took as a bad sign.

"Your bid is too low," she said, sliding the papers back across the desk. "Nobody can supply quarter-sawn oak trim and period hardware at these numbers and stay in business. So either you're lying to me, or you're planning to substitute everything halfway through and I end up with plastic wood in a hundred year old building."

"Neither," I said. "I'm hungry. There's a difference between hungry and lying."

"Sure there is," she said, and she didn't sound angry about it, she sounded tired, like she'd had this conversation before with other fast talkers and it hadn't gone well. She got up, pulled a thick spec book off the shelf behind her, the kind that runs four hundred pages of lumber grades and finish schedules, and set it on the desk with a thud. Then she picked up a sledgehammer from beside the door, a short handled one with tape wrapped around the grip, and set that down next to the book. "Show me you know this job, not just your spreadsheet. You want this contract, you work the site for a week. My crew, my rules. Poppy will be your supervisor, and she does not like salesmen, so consider that part of the test."

I looked at the sledgehammer, then at her, and I'll admit I laughed, because it seemed ridiculous. "You're serious."

"Completely. Duane Hobbs runs your general contractor side, and I already asked him. He says you're worth teaching, whatever that means."

Duane and I had worked together on a hospital job downstate two years back, and he's fifty-six, been married forever, one of those guys who takes a contractor's lunch break at exactly noon and gets offended if you call him during it. If he'd vouched for me, that was real, and it also meant I couldn't quit without him hearing about it at every job site in the state.

"Fine," I said. "A week."

"Good," Jamila said, and for the first time she smiled, just slightly, like I'd surprised her by not arguing. "Start tomorrow at six. Wear boots you don't like."

The hotel lobby is a big room with a fireplace big enough to stand in, a coffered ceiling, and about three thousand square feet of wallpaper that somebody in 1974 put up over the original silk panels, which is a crime against history that Jamila takes personally. Day one I was handed a scorer, a spray bottle, and a scraper, and told to strip the lobby, all of it, by the end of the week, and Poppy Kang, her senior designer, set a folding chair by the window and watched me work with a dry smirk on her face that I could feel through the back of my skull.

She's thirty, keeps the whole project's schedule and budget in a binder she carries like a weapon, and about an hour into my scraping she came over and peeled a corner of paper off the wall in one clean pull that took down a four foot strip, wallpaper and backing and old paste, all in one sheet.

"Steam it first," she said. "You're fighting the wall instead of working with it. Salesmen always fight the wall."

"You could've told me that an hour ago."

"I was curious how long you'd keep at it the wrong way," she said. "You lasted fifty minutes. That's longer than the last guy."

So I steamed, and I scraped, and by noon my shoulders were on fire and there was old paste in my hair, and I had cleared maybe forty square feet, which even I could tell was not impressive. The wallpaper came off in strips as big as dinner plates and the backing came off in smaller strips, and underneath was the original plaster, mostly good, one bad patch near the window that I made a note of, because knowing what's behind the pretty surface is apparently the whole point of the exercise.

We broke for lunch in the empty dining room, where Jamila's crew had set up a long table under the boarded chandeliers, and there was soup from a thermos and bread and a stack of my bid papers in the middle of the table like a centerpiece. Jamila sat across from me and didn't touch the soup, just turned a page of the spec book with one finger while everybody ate.

"Tell me about your pricing," she said. "Walk me through it, since you're here and I've got you trapped for four more days."

So I told her the truth, which is that pricing a bid like mine is a chess move, that I gave away my margin on the front end because I'm betting on the back end, the change orders, the additional phases, the next job her firm does, and that a sales guy who's willing to take the loss on year one is buying himself a seat at every table she sits at for the next five years.

"That's a bet," she said. "And I've been burned by that exact bet before, so you'll forgive me if I don't find it romantic."

"What happened?"

She did eat some soup then, and looked out the boarded up window at the lake while she decided how much to tell me, which is a thing people do and I've learned not to interrupt.

"Two years ago I restored a courthouse in Traverse City," she said. "My supplier won the bid cheap, same logic as yours, hungry not lying, and then three weeks in they couldn't source the actual specified millwork, so they substituted without telling anyone, and I didn't catch it until the review board did, and by then it was installed. We ripped out six figures of work. The job ran two months late and I lost the client, who was a county, and counties talk to each other. That's what your chess move looks like from my side of the table."

"That's a different supplier," I said. "I'm not them."

"No," she agreed. "You're here with paste in your hair, which they never were. So that's a point in your favor, a small one."

Poppy, who had been eating her bread and pretending not to listen, said, "He made a note about the bad plaster patch by the north window. Without being told. First guy who did that."

"Did you," Jamila said, and looked at me over the spec book with something that wasn't quite warmth but was at least a door cracked open.

"The patch matters if you're selling finish plaster," I said. "Which I am."

"Fine. Tomorrow you're on demo in the east wing with Duane's crew," she said, closing the book. "And Troy, if you're going to bet your margin on me, understand that I check every reference twice. Ask anybody in this state what happens when I find a substitution I didn't approve."

"I believe you," I said, and I did, because the way she said it wasn't a threat so much as a weather report, just a fact about how the world works when Jamila Dunbar is in it.

After lunch I went back to the lobby, and the afternoon went better because Poppy actually taught me instead of just watching, and by four I had a whole wall clean and the original silk panel exposed behind the 1974 paper, intact, colors still there under a century of dust, and I called her over to look at it because for some reason I wanted her to see it.

She looked, and then looked at me. "Okay. One point for the salesman."

"Only one?"

"I said what I said," she said, and went back to her chair, but the smirk had changed shape a little, and I stood there in the lobby of a hundred year old hotel with sore arms and paste in my hair feeling like maybe the week was going to go my way after all.

The morning of day two I was in the east wing pulling out rotted lathe with Duane's crew, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds, and by ten I had dust in my teeth and a blister forming under my work glove, and I was starting to understand why Jamila had smiled a little when she handed me the boot requirement. Around eleven Duane called a break and we stood in the doorway looking out at the lake, and he said, "You know she's got a window framing argument scheduled for today, right? The second floor sashes. She wants to rebuild the frames instead of replacing them, and the supplier quote she has on file is for replacements, and guess whose quote that is."

"Mine," I said, because of course it was, my bid had replacements priced in because replacements are cheaper and easier and every salesman in the country specs them, and I felt the trap close around my afternoon before it even started.

Duane laughed this low laugh he has, like a big dog deciding not to bark.

"So what do I do, fold?"

"Hell no. Argue. Argue hard, and be right, and if she's right, say so out loud where everybody can hear it. That's all she wants from you this week, kid, is to find out whether you can lose an argument with grace and win one without being a jerk about it." He knocked his knuckles on the doorframe. "She's testing you, not punishing you. She wants to be proved wrong."

"About what?"

"About salesmen. About you. She got burned so bad on that courthouse she's been running this place like a submarine, everything sealed up, nobody new let inside, and Poppy's the only one who gets to talk to the vendors. Then you show up with paste in your hair and a notebook full of plaster notes, and I don't know, she's at least curious, which for Jamila is practically a love letter." He checked his watch and pushed off the doorframe. "Two o'clock, second floor, bring your numbers and your patience."

I spent lunch actually reading my own bid instead of defending it, which is a humbling thing to do, and I found the framing line item and did the math on my phone while Poppy watched me across the table and ate a sandwich like a woman timing a race. "You're going to concede the frames," she said. "You're going to do the smart thing and roll it into a change order and everybody wins."

"Or I'm going to find out if rebuilding frames is actually the right call, and if it is, I'm going to eat the difference and upgrade my millwork quote to match, out of my own margin, and tell her to her face."

Poppy put down the sandwich and studied me for a second. "Why would you do that."

"Because the courthouse story scared the hell out of me, that's why. Because if the cheapest thing is the wrong thing then I'd rather not be the guy who sold it."

"Well," she said, and picked the sandwich back up. "Huh."

At two we stood in the second floor hallway where the old windows live, twelve over ones with weights and chains, half of them painted shut and two of them actually broken, and Jamila had her drawings spread out on a pair of sawhorses and her sleeves rolled up already, and she did not say hello, she just said, "Your bid prices full replacement sash and frame, stock profiles, and I want the originals rebuilt, so let's hear why I'm wrong."

"You're not wrong about the originals," I said. "You're wrong about what they cost. Rebuilding twelve frames with period correct stock, that's custom millwork, that's a six week lead time, and my bid didn't budget for it because nobody asked."

"So your answer is that your bid is cheap because it's incomplete."

"My answer is that my bid is cheap because I priced the normal job, and the normal job is wrong for this building, and I should have caught that in the site visit instead of at two o'clock on day two, and I'll fix the quote today and absorb the margin hit, and if you want I'll stand here while you yell about it."

She didn't yell. She walked the hallway with me and put her finger on the joints of the frames and explained how the originals were old growth and the replacements would be finger jointed garbage that would fail in twenty years, and she was right, and somewhere in the middle of her explaining it to me I stopped arguing and started taking notes, and she noticed, and something in her posture changed, her shoulders coming down maybe half an inch.

"You'll really eat the margin," she said. It wasn't quite a question.

"I'll really eat the margin. Call it tuition."

"For what?"

"For the lesson that the site visit is the whole job, and I did it lazy."

Duane, who had been leaning on the wall the entire time pretending to be furniture, pushed off and said, "I'll get you the revised numbers by five, Jamila," and walked away whistling, and Poppy wrote something in the binder, and I got the distinct feeling I had passed something without being told what it was.

That night the hotel rooms they were putting us up in were finished enough to sleep in but the common parts of the building were still a construction site, and around eleven I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to get my jacket from the dining room, and there was light coming out of the drafting room at the end of the hall. The door was open, and Jamila was alone in there at the big table, sleeves rolled up, hair down for the first time since I'd met her, marking up blueprints with that pencil she keeps behind her ear when she isn't using it. She looked up when my boots hit the floorboards.

"Insomnia?"