Running a Successful On-Call Program

Episode Transcript

Mollie (Host)
Welcome back to {Brief}ly Speaking, the SEH podcast where we talk about all the topics that matter most in the AEC industry. I'm Mollie Sabo, your host. If you've ever found yourself scrambling to handle a flooding issue, emergency repair, or project hiccup with no one on-call, you know how stressful that can be. That's where engineering on-call programs come in. But here's the catch. Simply having an on-call program doesn't guarantee it will work. Today, we're talking about what communities and organizations need to know before setting up an on-call program or how to fix one that isn't necessarily delivering results. Joining me is Alan Hart, who has spent his career helping communities stay prepared and resilient when the unexpected happens. With experience at the Florida Department of Transportation, Alan helped develop roadway design standards and quality assurance plans that built consistency and reliability across the state. In the private sector, he's guided clients through funding, design, and implementation of infrastructure projects. including helping communities secure millions to improve their water, sewer, and stormwater systems. Simply put, Alan knows what it takes to keep programs running smoothly, even under pressure. And with that, Alan, welcome to {Brief}ly Speaking.

Alan (Guest)
Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've been working with on-calls. We do what are called continuing services contracts here in Florida. been working with those for quite a few years with our CCNA limits down here, which they're the competitive contract limits. It's really better to have on-calls or continuing services contracts because it allows you to actually contract directly with the engineering firm or the firm you're working with without having to go through the RFQ process for every project that you put out. So they're really helpful. They usually have a master contract or master services agreement. Essentially, whenever you start those contracts, that gets negotiated. And so everything you do after that is just writing a task order that's referring to that contract. And you don't have to go through contract negotiations again for a second, third, 4th, or fifth time every time you start a new project, which is very taxing on a lot of the smaller communities and municipalities.

Mollie (Host)
Perfect. No, that's a great intro and you're clearly the guy to talk about this. So I'm excited to dive in. So we're going to start at the very, very basics here, Alan. What exactly is an engineering on-call program and why would a community want one? If they've never heard of this, if they don't have one started, why would they want to start one?

Alan (Guest)
Well, I think the biggest thing is, like I said, with our limits here, you can only contract with a firm up to about $50,000 before the project has to go out to an RFQ. So with a continuing services contract, that goes up to $500,000. or $5 million in construction costs. So if it trips either one of those thresholds, then you do have to go out to an RFQ. But most of our projects here do not trip the threshold. So the first thing that happens is the community decides that they would like to have a continuing services contract. They can determine how many engineers they'd like to have on that contract. I always tell them, yeah, I'd love to be the only engineer on the contract. But it's better for you if you have a couple because you may come to us and we may not be able to do a certain service or we may just be in a position where we can't get it done as quickly as you need. So then you have some opportunities to use a couple more. The other things is with an RFQ in Florida, all consulting services are reviewed by RFQ process, which is a qualifications process. It's based on performance, so it's not tied to fees. So whenever we go for an RFQ as a consulting firm, they're looking at just our qualifications. So they'll put out an RFQ that asks what they want. They may only want one for roadway. They may want one for all civil engineering. They may want one for wastewater. But whatever it is, they put out the RFQ, it will outline all the services and all the things they require. It usually includes all the insurance minimums that they need for their municipality. So then you respond to that and then they will be able to sit down, score those RFQs on the firms that submitted and then make their selections. Again, if they decide to take three, they might get 12 firms, but they can go through those RFQs and pick the three that they feel like will be best in a position to serve their community. Again, if you've got 12 projects in a year, all of those are under $500,000, but they're above 50, If you didn't have the continuing services contract, you would have to put every one of those out to an RFQ just for each project. Continuing services contract allows them to choose the firm that they've already got on board with them and go ahead and just ask them to write a task order. That contract cuts out a lot of time, and adds a lot of savings. Now, this doesn't always work. Not every grant program allows that to happen. Sometimes a CDBG, for instance, has to be RFQed. SS4A, which is a Safe Streets for All grant, has to be RFQed. So even if you have the continuing services contract, there's not every, it doesn't lend itself to everything, but it does lend itself to probably about 85 to 90% of the projects that they're gonna do.

Mollie (Host)
So it really just simplifies the project allocation and it provides redundancy if you have multiple different firms as an on-call, which is so important in everything we do in engineering. Redundancy is a huge buzzword, so to speak.

Alan (Guest)
Correct. And again, having a couple multiple firms, we don't do a lot of geotech in Florida. If you have a continuing services contract, you need a geotech firm. You could go through us and we would subcontract the geotech, but we're going to have our own project management fees that we do add to that. So, and then it becomes a pass through. And If you elected to have a geotech firm on the continuing services contract, you wouldn't have to go through that. You could just go straight to the firm that does the geotech work and have them directly contract with the community. That's just a simplified process and it helps the communities get through things a lot quicker.

Mollie (Host)
So if I'm listening to this as a community leader and we're sitting here saying that it can help with multiple different projects, I'm like, okay, an on-call sounds like a good idea, but I don't know what projects I'm going to have coming down the pipeline. So how can they balance being responsive without overcommitting staff or paying for unnecessary standby time, so to speak?

Alan (Guest)
If I get you right, on the continuing services contract, we're simply there just to do work. So you're not paying anyone that's on that continuing services contract until they have a project. The other thing that I think it really does help, we've run into this one or two times, we do a lot of funding for clients. Without that mechanism in place, if we get funding for clients, sometimes they have to RFQ it if they want us to have the opportunity to do the work. When you're under a continuing services contract, it gives you a couple of things. One of the things is it really helps you focus on that client's needs because you know that if you're out there helping them find funding, there's a good chance you're gonna do the work for 'em. And you're getting to know the client and you're building a rapport with the client, you're building a relationship with the client, not only with the client, but with that municipality. And you work harder for 'em, I think. You wanna see things happen for those communities. For me, when a client has enough trust in me to offer me a chance to be on a continuing services contract, That says a lot. And so that means that they want to use my services. And so, I'm going to put in that extra effort to try to help them fix their issues. A lot of the communities we work with are smaller communities. They don't have a lot of money. And so we're out there every day putting in grant proposals, putting in budget requests, state budget requests, state appropriations request. Anything we can do to help our clients find money and to get the projects done that they need done to help them with resiliency and redundancy with their water systems, with their sewer systems, with their stormwater and their roadways, being tied to that client, to me, it really helps us focus more on that client's needs and take care of that community.

Related Content: 3 Ways to Elevate Your Funding Applications

Mollie (Host)
So really it's just being, you're just being proactive and prepared. There's not really I mean, maybe there is a downside to having this on-call program set up. You're not paying for the projects before they happen. You just are prepared for when those do come up. You kind of have a pool to pick from where it doesn't take as much time for those initial setup phases.

Alan (Guest)
Just give you a for instance, we have a continuing services contract with Sopchoppy. Sopchoppy has an issue come up. Maybe one of their tanks go down or something like that. And so now they're having to figure out, well, we don't want this to happen in the future. If this tank goes down, we need some redundancy so that everything else works. So then they say, well, let's give Al a call. They give me a call and they say, hey, this is what we're looking at. Well, we're already familiar with their systems because we're working for them. We've got their modeling. We're looking at that modeling. We're taking that modeling and then we're figuring out, well, let's pop this tank offline. And so they can call us immediately, get us going immediately. I can write them a task order in a day. If they tell me what they need, I can write them a quick task order. I can send it to them. We can get it going. A lot of times we get it going before the task order because there's trust already there. But then long-term planning, it helps too, because we know we're gonna be there for a while. We know we're gonna be doing work for them. So it just, it really helps them. And the biggest key, and I haven't really touched on it yet, is communication. My clients, I talk to my clients couple times a week, sometimes three to four times a week. They're calling me to ask me questions. We don't charge for everything. We're not like an attorney where you call me and I pop my little timer there and I'm charging you for 15 minute increments. That's not the way we work as engineers. As engineers, we work on a project basis. All you got to do is pick up the phone and give me a call. And it may be a 5 minute call and we figure out something. It may be something that I got to grab one of my engineers and get on the horn. And then it may turn into a project if it's something big or it may not. But we're just there to help these municipalities and the folks that manage these municipalities just get through their everyday issues.

Mollie (Host)
And I think that's so important. The communication piece is so necessary just to have that relationship in the first place. but then to be able to work through the problems as they arise and to build that trust. So today we're gonna kind of talk about two different sides of on-call programs. I wanna start out first with starting a brand new one. So for a community that has never had an on-call program, what are some of the more important decisions that they need to make early on?

Alan (Guest)
I think they really need to understand what their needs are. Again, I'll go back to one of my communities, Sopchoppy, there's only 350 people. They don't have a lot of stormwater needs. They don't have a lot of roadway needs, but their water system serves 5,000 customers. They don't have sanitary sewer because the county does the sanitary sewer for them, we'll call a county. So their needs really are focused around water. Some infrastructure, some site development, but mostly water needs. So really what they're looking for when they start to think about this is they really wanna structure that on-call or that continuing services contract heavily towards the water side. They wanna be able to have people that, when they develop that RFQ, that's what they need to ask for. And the RFQ means the request for qualifications. So they put that RFQ out and then the engineers have a certain timeframe to respond to it. They need to be asking the questions of the engineers that will help them determine who's going to be the best engineer to do that work for them? Asking about, have you done elevated tanks before? Have you done modeling, water modeling before, hydraulic modeling? Have you developed master plans? Have you permitted water systems? They need to be asking the pertinent questions. They also need to say, hey, show us some of your projects that you completed. Give us some references of the people that you've completed these projects for. All these things come into play. Need to make sure that the insurance requirements are met. There's all kinds of things that you can ask in an RFQ. And typically you'll work with your attorney. You'll work with the county's attorney or the city's attorney who has a little bit more firmer grasp on the statutes, the Florida statutes or whatever statutes apply to your area. The other thing I would say is I think you should always have a limit to the timeframe for your RFQ. What I mean there is we're going to have this is going to be a three-year continuing services contract with the option of adding two more one-year terms. At the end of that three years, if there's been a couple of engineers that hadn't performed, put it out again, get rid of them, bring back the engineers that have and add a couple more that give them a chance. Having an unlimited time frame on your continuing services contract makes it very difficult to get rid of an engineer. That doesn't mean you have to use them, but it does mean that they're on there for a while. So having timeframes for your contract is not a bad idea.

Mollie (Host)
So really it's just knowing what your problems are for your community, knowing what you're looking for in this essentially long-term relationship. And then I love your advice of a time limit there because If it isn't working out, then you need to have the option of reassessing or re-upping the people that it is working with. Do you have a recommendation, just from hearing your answer there, of how many firms are typically a good amount to have? I know you said more than one, but is there too many to have on the list?

Alan (Guest)
I think it's according to the size of your program. So if you were looking at the city of Tallahassee, for instance, City of Tallahassee probably has enough work that they could keep six or eight busy. And it gives them the opportunity that if one or two doesn't perform or don't perform well, then they've still got four or five left, but they've got a big enough work program that they can support that. If you're a very small community that maybe you're going to have 500,000 to $1,000,000 of work a year at the most, maybe you only want two or three. And you also got to look at the size of the firms that you're asking to do the work. Smaller firms that are located in the area are always good because you can get boots on the ground and you have local knowledge. Bigger firms can maybe step in and do bigger projects for you quicker or maybe have their staff well enough that they don't get backed up. For our firm with 900 people, not every one of those does water, but I've got 15 people I can call on to help me with water projects. We have a lot of capacity to do a lot of work in a year. So I think it's a good mix of small firm, large firm, and then knowing what your capacity is, what your program is. Most everybody has a capital improvements plan for every year and they know what they're going to spend.

Related Content: 10 Ways to Prioritize Your CIP during Economic Uncertainty

Mollie (Host)
So you kind of touched on this in one of your earlier answers. But how important is it for communities to understand their local and state laws or regulations before setting up an on-call? And what kind of rules often will catch people off guard?

Alan (Guest)
I think the biggest thing I've seen is communities giving out contracts without going through the RFQ process that are over the limit. Like I said, it's about a $50,000 limit for engineering. I would check with your attorney to make sure that they understand the limits. You can be audited. If you've been giving out contracts without RFQing them over the limit, it can create a problem. If you've got the continuing services contract, you know the limit that you can contract and you stay within those limits. I think it's better for most communities personally to have some sort of continuing services contract. it makes sure that you're doing things lawfully. And once again, you don't want to have to RFQ every little project you got that's over $50,000. Because every time you RFQ it, you're going to have to send it out, you're going to have to review proposals, you're going to have to select, and then you're going to have to go through the contract negotiations again, where the continuing services contract, you've already done that once and you don't have to go through it again.

Mollie (Host)
We talked about making sure there's those time limits in case the relationship isn't a great fit between the community and the engineering firm. In that instance, if a program isn't working, if they're seeing missed deadlines, slow responses, unclear communication, like we just talked about, what is usually the root cause of that?

Alan (Guest)
I think that, you know, a lot of times as a business development guy, I'm not the project manager. I help bring in the work. I help figure out how we're gonna get the work done. I help figure out the task order. Then it goes to one of my project managers and then they start doing the work. But I'm still there. So I'm in meetings when I'm needed. I'm following up with the PM. I'm checking with my client. I think the biggest thing, again, comes down to communication. If you are talking to your client and something starts to go wrong, you should know it quick. If you're not communicating with your client, you're not going to know before the problem is almost too big to solve. It just takes constant communication, checking and making sure that things that needs are getting met. And it's on us to be proactive, not reactive. If we see something that's slowing it down, we need to let them know. Again, communication. We may have something that's come up that, and I can give you a good example, I'm trying to get my digital signature and it's taken a while. And so we're trying to submit something that I can't sign right now. I've got everything done, but I'm having to wait. Well, the client would rather hear that you've got everything done and you're waiting on somebody else than, well, I just haven't been able to do it. But again, it's being proactive. It's letting them know. Sometimes it's a personality issue. I haven't really run into that very often, but it can be. Maybe your project manager and your client don't jive, they don't see eye to eye. That situation, it may be something you might have to look at another PM coming in and helping. You know, one of the things I always do, especially with business development, I take people with me always because you never know when you may not mesh with a person, but somebody on your team will. So I think that's the other side of it is making sure you match up PMs to clients that you know will work well together. So it's all a personal thing. I mean, this is business, but it all comes down to personal.

Mollie (Host)
So you touched on this briefly in one of your previous answers, but how can on-call programs go beyond just that emergency response to actually prevent bigger issues or help control costs over time?

Alan (Guest)
Well, Again, going back, we're doing two models right now. We're doing a model for Sopchoppy. The model is done for Sopchoppy. When I say that, we have the model. We're working on a model for Lee for their water system. So being able to be involved in that and seeing everything that goes into that system and how that system works, we may see something coming down the pipe that needs to be taken care of. because we're involved in that. And we can say, hey, look, you got a four-inch line here and you're growing, your community's growing and that four-inch line ain't gonna cut it. If we leave that in there, you're gonna have some issues. Let's start thinking about upgrading that line before we need it. Let's figure out how to get it funded. That may be one of them. We're doing a VA assessment. Let's move to stormwater, stormwater VA assessment. We're gonna be doing, we're doing one of those for Lee right now. So we're looking at flooding issues and we're trying to determine where are the flooding issues, how do we alleviate those? Then we're gonna do a mass stormwater master plan. So by being involved in these things and understanding what's really going on in the community, what's happening from an engineering standpoint, from whether it's stormwater, whether it's water, whether it's roads, we can be more proactive and we can start determining this is your priority. You've got flooding here and if you keep having the flooding issues, it's going to wash away - your roadway is going to start to erode. Let's fix that now. Because if we fix that flooding issue and it costs us $150, $200,000, we might save $750,000 if we have an issue with the road. So we're being, hopefully being proactive and thinking about What could happen in the future if we don't fix it? It's a kind of old adage, you can pay me now, you can pay me later. Pay me later costs a whole lot more than paying me now. And it's not necessarily paying me, it's paying to make your infrastructure resilient. So the payment's not me, the payments may be to putting in a new ditch system or putting in a piping system and taking the storm water away from that area. And that's what we should be doing. We should not only be helping them with their previous problems, we should be anticipating their future problems and heading them off before they happen.

Related Content: 2 Asset Management Tactics Leaders Can Improve Through Technology and a Data-Driven Approach

Mollie (Host)
I think that's great advice. It's really just about you have the full picture so you and the industry knowledge so you can kind of catch those maybe mistakes. I don't know if that's another word, but or this shows oversights. You can catch those oversights before they get put into the ground or before they happen and avoid a conflict in the future. So I can definitely see how that has more long-term viability. Now, Alan, you've given quite a few examples here throughout our conversation, but I have one more question. Do you have any success stories that show how a well-structured on-call program really has made a difference in a community?

Alan (Guest)
Yeah, I think so. Town of Lee's got about 300 people. Their water system serves that community. They have a industrial park that the cities own the property for a long time. County city owns the property. It's sat there and when you drive by, they're all 510. You drive by there and it says Madison County Development Commission, we'll give you land if you bring your business here, right? So I've seen that a bunch of times and been there for, that sign's probably been up five years and nothing's happened out there. I remember talking to those folks a long time ago. Well, we came in and we said, look, you don't really have the infrastructure here, right? What if we get the infrastructure here? And at the same time, they had their first business talking to 'em about coming in. So we got 'em a grant to do the design of the infrastructure for water and sewer. And then we got them a construction grant for about $1,000,000 to actually construct the water sewer. We're probably going to need more, but we got it started. Now they've got a fire station that's coming in. They've got a business that's coming in. They're going to put an arena there and that the water sewer is going to be there for them. The roadway has been updated where they've got a turn lane. We didn't do that, but it happened because of this. So that community is, with the relationship that we've been able to foster with them, they were our first on-call. They were our first continuing services contract. When I first got here almost three years ago, I talked to the city, the town manager, and they got us on board, and we've been helping them ever since. We got an access 4A grant that we're going to look at the roads. We've got a vulnerability assessment that one of my project managers is doing right now. We've got a stormwater master plan that we're going to do for them. and we're doing the water and sewer modeling for them and doing upgrades to the water and sewer for future growth. And that small community is going to start growing. I've been in the panhandle now for almost 30 years. I've lived here in Tallahassee. I tell people this all the time. When my job becomes something similar to being a used car salesman, walk out the door. I don't ever want to be that. If I can't come in and help a community from start to finish on their projects and help them do something that makes their community better. I don't want to do it. I mean, it's just not, that's not the way I build. I want to be able to help a community do some of the things that they've been wanting to do but haven't had the means to do. And I want to see it all the way to the end. I want to see it go in the ground. I want to see the capacity grow for their systems. I want to see their roadways get safer. I want to see their stormwater issues go away. And along the way, I get to develop some relationships with some really great people.

Mollie (Host)
Well, and Alan, that passion is why we're so happy and so lucky to have you on our team. And if anyone listening here is inspired then to either revamp their on-call or start an on-call, what is the best way for them to contact you to kind of pick your brain?

Alan (Guest)
You can give me a call. My number is 850-508-1368. Feel free to holler at me anytime. Text me first, because if I don't know your number, I may not answer it. But if I see one coming in from the Panhandle 850, I'll usually answer it. Or you can e-mail me. My e-mail is ahart@sehinc.com. You can e-mail me. You can call me. I'll answer. I ask most of my clients. If you call, I'll answer anytime.

Mollie (Host)
I think that's a great way to wrap it up here. So thank you, Alan, so, much for sharing your insight. For communities listening who feel like they're constantly reacting to emergencies or waiting for help, this conversation shows that on-call engineering isn't just a backup plan, but it's a smarter way to manage risk, protect budgets, and really keep projects on track. So thank you for tuning in to {Brief}ly Speaking. Be sure to follow the podcast for more focused conversations on what matters most in the AEC industry.