Chaos At Work

When I agreed to partner up with Dino Gilli and Joe Sandino back in 2013 to restart Custom Development of California, I had no illusions about how difficult the job would be. Yes, the economy was doing better. Obama had helped pull the country out of a deep recession and everything was beginning to look up. But running a company is a challenging endeavor that requires an incredible of amount of cooperation with everyone running in the same direction. That has proven to be an ongoing challenge.

Joe, who didn't last even a year, left the company abruptly, taking all his furniture with him and demanded a settlement of $10,000 or he was going to make our lives difficult. And so began a revolving door of unstable, incompetent people coming to work for the company and leaving behind a mess in their wake. I will describe the ones that have damaged the company the most and the one person who I hold most responsible.

Vasile Rilea

Vasile came on board the same time as Joe since they were working together at Joe's previous company, Weatherite which crashed and burned. Vasile and his assistant Nikolay were skilled in bathrooms and windows. My first impression of Vasile was that he was a pretty skilled worker and in his job as production manager for the most part things went smoothly at first. But very early on, I began to see some things beginning to happen under Basil's (as he liked to be called) watch. He began to hire outside people to do work on some of the larger jobs and this almost always created problems. The one project that stands out the most is a siding job in Oakland where Basil went ahead and hired a subcontractor without checking the subcontractor out and the subcontractor turned around and hired someone who had no clue how to install siding. The end result was the entire job had to be done over again at a tremendous loss to CDC. In addition, Basil apparently didn't feel that writing change orders was necessary which created problems in adding a justified cost to jobs. He sometimes ordered product incorrectly and not to customer specs, adding unnecessary cost to the job.

After bringing Kevin on board to head up production of the bath division, Basil was put in charge of kitchens, an area that he wasn't as familiar with but still well within his skill set. Towards the middle of 2017, he found himself way in over his head in projects that had gone south, with no quality control. By October, there were multiple projects that had turned into disasters. But rather than ask for help, Basil just threw his arms up and announced he was going to be resigning as a production manager to work for another company but he was still interested in doing window installs during the week. The mess he left behind has pulled the company down to nearly the point of closing its doors and I am literally fighting to keep the company afloat..