Bid janitorial on a campus where the ops manager says he runs a power plant
A general contractor I've done work for passed my name to a facilities group looking for grounds, exterior porter and interior common area cleaning on a two building campus. Two buildings, big fenced yard, the kind of place you drive past and assume is a distribution center.
The bid process was unlike anything I've quoted. Background checks on every named person, no substitutions without seven days notice, escorted access for anything past the office suite, and a rule that my crew never opens a door they didn't come in through. Insurance requirements ran higher than I carry, which meant a call to my agent and a real number added to my overhead. There was a clause about photography that basically said phones stay in the truck. My cleaning scope stopped at a painted line on the floor. Past the line is their people only, and the line is in the drawings.
During the walk the ops manager kept getting pulled away by radio. On the way back to the lot I asked him what the hardest part of his job was, expecting something about vendors or the roof. He said he runs a power plant that happens to have computers in it. He said the building is the cheapest thing on the property, that he could re-roof it and repave the whole yard for less than one piece of the equipment in the yard, and that his entire year is about whether the utility work upstream lands on schedule.
Then he said the thing that made me write this down. He said if his uptime is good nobody in the world knows his name, and if it's bad it's on the news. I've cleaned medical offices and restaurants and nobody ever described the job that way.
I priced it, added the insurance delta, added an escort inefficiency factor because my guys will be standing around waiting, and came in higher than I normally would. Still waiting to hear.