On opening morning in London, I was on my knees with the flu, scrubbing sneaker scuffs off a white terrazzo floor a few hours before the doors opened. That is the image.
Let me tell you about the 6 months in front of it, because the floor was the easy part.
The building was more than a century old. Beautiful old bones, and a nightmare to bring back. That is the thing about old buildings that people who only read spreadsheets never feel in their stomach. Every wall you open is a question you did not know you were asking. You plan around what you can see, and the building keeps handing you what you couldn’t.
We would open a wall expecting one thing and find another. A pipe where no drawing said a pipe would be. Wiring from an era nobody on the team was alive for. Structure that had been modified and re-modified by builders who never wrote any of it down. Every surprise cost time we did not have, and the opening date did not move for a single one of them. Openings never move. The date is the date. The building does not care that it just lied to you again.
So for months, the whole team lived inside that pressure. And something happens to a group of people under that kind of weight. The titles quietly fall off. By the time we got to opening week, nobody was checking whether a task belonged to them. There was no engineer and no laborer and no manager. There was the mission, and there was whatever the mission needed in the next hour.
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That is why the floor was not a big decision. I was the lead engineer on the job. On paper, scrubbing scuff marks was about 9 levels below my title. In reality it was the most obvious thing in the world. The floor needed to be clean, I had two hands, the doors were opening. So I got down and scrubbed. Living on Tylenol, head pounding, hands raw, and it genuinely did not occur to me that it was beneath me. The team had burned off every title we had months earlier. This was just the last hour of that.
Here is what I took from it, and it is not really about floors.
You learn who somebody is by what they will do when the job gets small and ugly and nobody is watching. Anyone can hold the title. Anyone can do the fun, visible, photogenic part. The people I trust are the ones who will get on the floor. Who will do the boring, thankless task because the mission needs it done, not because it flatters them.
I run everything that way now. When I look at a building before I lend on it or buy it, I do not stand in the lobby and admire the marble. I go find the mechanical room. I open the panels other people leave shut. I get on the ground and look at where the wall meets the dirt. The Regent Street floor and the boiler room are the same instinct. The important stuff is almost never where the nice photo is. It is down low, behind a panel, in the part of the job everyone else finds beneath them.
There is a photo of me on that floor somewhere. Not my proudest picture. It is the honest one, though, and it is the one I think of whenever a job turns ugly and someone just needs to do the work.
No task is beneath you when the mission is real. I learned that on my knees in London, sick, hours before we opened the doors. I have never once regretted getting down there. Every good thing I have built since ran on the same rule.
That is the standard behind everything I do now, the lending included. If you want to see how I read a building before a dollar goes out, that is what Eyes Open is for. Link in profile.
Eyes Open,
Jon