PCG Connect
from Performance Contracting Group, Inc.
Inside Out: Marine Services with Michael Curtin
Episode Notes
/Transcript
🔗 Learn more about PCG Quality on PerformanceContracting.com
Welcome to Inside Out, our newest series where we take a deep dive look at performance contracting services and product lines. We'll be talking to the movers and shakers of performance contracting, the folks who make the big deals and then bring those big deals to life. So with that, let's get to it.
Mel Renfrow:Well, I have a very exciting guest here with us in the studio today. So we've started to dive into the different, type of product lines. And so, we have Michael Curtin here to talk about our marine division. No? What is it?
Mel Renfrow:We don't call it marine division.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. It used to be the marine division, I think, when when I first started in 2003, but, it's gone through a metamorphosis. I think we're just San Diego 108 these days, but I still call ourselves San Diego Marine.
Mel Renfrow:I still am calling branches by old names and all of that stuff too. So, welcome, Michael. You're the general manager out there, so kudos to you. So I wanna before we dive in, let's talk about your background, first of all. So your education is a little bit unique compared to other people in the company, but you grew out on the up on the East Coast.
Mel Renfrow:Right?
Michael Curtin:That's correct. I'm a hillbilly from Pennsylvania, Northwest Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. Grew up in a pretty rural farming community there, graduated with a high school about a 101 kids, pretty small, not a lot of diversity, definitely no oceans there.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. So how did you wind up?
Michael Curtin:There's not a lot of shipbuilding. But I I've always liked math and science, and I don't know how I heard about Maine Maritime Academy, but I I was interested in, like, oceanography, ocean studies. So I went out there and checked the school out. I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau, go swim with the fishes, count the fishes. I went up to Maine Maritime Academy, to visit in.
Michael Curtin:It was a beautiful location. I end up going school there, and I did a full year as an ocean studies major. And, after that, I tried to find a summer program to do or an internship, and you had to have a a master's degree just to get an internship. Oh, wow. Competitive field, and I didn't see, like, a a long, a a good job opportunity coming out of that.
Michael Curtin:So I switched into an engineering program, and I chose 1 of their harder programs, the marine systems engineering, 5 year program. And I pretty much played catch up for the rest of my time there doing that program, and I ended up doing my summer internship the summer after I completed all my courses. So I would have been class of 2003, but when the school says I'm 2, 004 because I did my summer program 1 year later.
Mel Renfrow:So how did you how did you find out about, PCI? How did all of that come into play?
Michael Curtin:Well, that final summer internship, was actually shoreside. So, previously, we'd we'd be sailing on ships during the summer times. The last 1 is shoreside. And Pat Fulton, from PCI recruited me to come to San Diego. So he had just retired in 2002, I believe, and had come up to recruit me to come being a summer intern in 2003 and came to San Diego for that summer in May and left, and they made me an offer.
Michael Curtin:I accepted, and started, I think, in November right after is it the I think it was right before Thanksgiving in 2003, and never thought I'd be in San Diego 20 years later, but here I am.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. So you switched coasts. It seems like that was, like, some major serendipity because I don't think Pat was out recruiting all the time. No. He was looking for a very specific job, and and he found you.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. I don't know. He brought me to San Diego and, like, picked me up at the airport and took me to lunch and told me that was my last free lunch. So I repeat that line sometimes when we have our interns and stuff come out too.
Mel Renfrow:You've been earning it ever since?
Michael Curtin:Yep. I well, I hope so.
Mel Renfrow:So, I think you have. So you have a you got you started in 2003. So for people that don't know about, I think everybody or most everyone's probably heard the of the marine branch, but tell us exactly what it is and how it makes, it a little bit different than our other product lines that we do.
Michael Curtin:Well, it's, there's a lot of uniqueities, I guess, there. 1, we go to the same job site every single day. We have mostly a single customer that, in most years, is greater than 90% of our revenue. Some years, it dips down a little bit more, and we have more work in repair than we do into construction, but mostly 1 customer that we're serving. So we have to reinvent ourselves all the time.
Michael Curtin:We really live in a manufacturing world, building repetitive ships, so we deal a lot with learning curves and continuous improvement kind of initiatives. The other unique part of it is we are a border town with Mexico. So Tijuana's 15 miles away from us. A third of our workforce crosses the border every day to work in the shipyard with us. So, obviously, we have a lot of different languages being spoken, Spanish and English, but we also have a pretty strong refugee community there too.
Michael Curtin:So, we have a lot of people from African countries, and so trying to figure out how to communicate safety protocols and what the work needs done. So there's probably a longer list of unique things there, but covers it.
Mel Renfrow:So marine, you're basically you're insulating ships. Correct. They're in the docks. So you go you go to the same like, when you said you have the same you go to work the same place every day. So you're insulating the ships in the there's 2 lines, basically, kinda touched on it, repair and then
Michael Curtin:New construction.
Mel Renfrow:New construction. So can you talk a little bit a little bit more about what it actually means to insulate the ships and and then the difference between the 2 lines there?
Michael Curtin:Sure. So new construction, that is truly our our bread and butter. That's that's what keeps us our going, and we we are a partner with NASSCO there. We're single source. They call us a strategic ally.
Michael Curtin:So when they go after these programs, we're part of the initial bid phase. They give us an outline of what the ship looks like on a piece of paper, and somehow, we magically come up with a budget of what that's gonna cost to insulate, and we help them value engineer it along the way. So we we're part of the design and build part of, the ship structure, and and we try to help them to go through trade offs, value engineering in terms of using insulation, like board versus spray on applications or joiner panels, where fire boundaries are, acoustic treatments, thermal insulation treatments. And then we do all the piping systems too. So we've also as a branch, we haven't built any steamships since I've been there.
Michael Curtin:But as a branch, we've worked on steam propulsion chips, gas turbines, and diesels. So diesel electrics are the predominant source for most of the ships we build now, power source. But we also just built the first LNG fuel, propulsion system, container ship, a couple years ago for toads in the world. So that was a pretty unique experience.
Mel Renfrow:What does LNG stand for?
Michael Curtin:Liquified natural gas.
Mel Renfrow:Okay. Going back, so you said NASSCO. So you've mentioned earlier, primarily, it's with 1 customer, and that's the customer. So for people that don't know.
Michael Curtin:General Dynamics NASSCO.
Mel Renfrow:What does it stand for?
Michael Curtin:A net National Steel and Chip Holding Company. And that's what it used to stand for. Now it's just NASSCO. I think it's standalone.
Mel Renfrow:Oh, it's stand alone? Yeah. It doesn't stand yeah. It's like the, share of like, it doesn't need a last name.
Michael Curtin:It's just NASCO. The acronym acronym is just morphed into a single word its own meaning now.
Mel Renfrow:Okay. So and then NASSCO, it is it it's all federal work. Is that correct?
Michael Curtin:All federal. Like, that container ship I was mentioning, the LNG 1, that was a commercial project. So it's mostly on new construction is all federal. We do commercial projects for TOTE Maritime, for Matson. Some of the commercial shipbuilding companies, some of the oil carriers, from time to time, they kinda fill in their order books when those opportunities come, but they they ebb and flow.
Mel Renfrow:So I know 0, admittedly, about ships, but so what different kinds of, ships are you insulating? So you just mentioned how you had the oil breakers. What else?
Michael Curtin:So for the navy, everything we build are auxiliary ships, so we don't build any combatants. So most of them are all military sealift command type ships, which means they're civilian mariners. That's, again, my background at Maine Maritime Academy, and there's 6 other state, academies and then a federal academy. So those are the merchant marine that operate these ships for the government. And then sometimes they'll have a contingent of military people on there to do the operations and such, but they're supply ships.
Michael Curtin:So the current ships are working on the TAO program or the fleet oilers refuel the ships at sea. So they follow the fleet around, usually dispatched with a carrier group or whatever groups are out there, and they fuel those ships out at sea so they can keep going. They don't have to go into port to fuel. We've built the ammunition supply ships, those were the TKEs, from about 2006 to 2012. There was 14 of those ships.
Michael Curtin:Same kind of thing for the installation on those.
Mel Renfrow:Well and I know it's something, that sets you apart from other branches. A lot of time, you're bidding that work. You mentioned, like, you're working directly with NASSCO and value engineering and all that, but you will get contracts for years in advance. So your backlog, it just works a little bit different because you're not having to bid last minute and complete the work within, you know, a couple of months.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Yeah. We currently have work on the books till 2026, and we just bid, the next 7 ships in the program or p o 10 through 16, so the next 7 ships in the program. And that takes us out to 2034. It's, like, 10 years down the road and trying to imagine what's gonna happen over that period of time for cost increases and labor increases and what kind of new rules and regulations from the government we're gonna have to deal with.
Michael Curtin:So my crystal ball doesn't see tomorrow. I don't know what what 10 years looks like, but we we put a number to it, and we'll see how it plays out.
Mel Renfrow:Have they always bid at that That's the
Michael Curtin:far out. Farthest out I've ever, I've ever submitted an RFP for. So that's that was a unique 1. Yeah. And we'll see how I think that one's kind of a we'll see how that 1 plays out.
Michael Curtin:Then the Navy put out the RFP. I think NASSCO prompted them to do that, but I think that we'll touch that proposal 2 or 3 more times. And I doubt that they're gonna award it. In that way, do a letter contract of bulk buy. It'll probably the final product will probably be something different in a shorter timeline.
Michael Curtin:It's I think there's too much risk to look out tenures like that.
Mel Renfrow:Oh, sure. But even knowing, you think about even knowing that a building was gonna be built that far in advance doesn't really doesn't really happen.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Exactly. This is it. I have like I said, manufacturing. We're building 20 of these ships, and it's that's the other challenging part about working on government programs is the funding.
Michael Curtin:So they have these long term reports to the Navy, puts their proposal out every year, what they want for their budget and what they wanna fund the next year, and then it goes through the whole political process and has to go through congress and the senate and then goes to the president and kinda goes up and down the chain until they all come to some something in the middle. So the Navy never gets what they what they asked for. They will always end up with an unfunded priority list of stuff that they need. The current ship program we're building, they absolutely need the the fleet oilers. The the current ones, they the ships that they're operating, a lot of them were single haul ships, which are illegal in most cases for the rest of the world other than than for the US Navy, just because they they all have to have a double hull.
Michael Curtin:So in case they hit something, so the oil doesn't leak out. Yeah. But they've been operating these ships for 30 plus years, and they're they're old and they need replaced. And so it's a priority. So those ships are will get funded, but they're stretched they could build them a lot faster if they had the funding to do so.
Michael Curtin:But, simultaneously, the navy is trying to fund building aircraft carriers and then submarines too.
Mel Renfrow:All of our work, you know, kind of ebbs and ebbs and flows. And in election years, you'll see things you know, people kind of hold off sometimes on funding, but yours is impacted maybe a little bit more than others. Yes. So you talked about the, new the new construction, and then the other side of the business is repairs. So what does that deal with?
Michael Curtin:US Navy ship repair is pretty dynamic. We get there's some longer term called CNO availabilities, the chief of naval operations, and those are big, usually 18 month availabilities that we compete for. But there's also these, CMALVs or, like, short maintenance periods that we bid on, and those are really turnkey, quick hitting work. So we work for NASCO is 1 of our primary customers, but there's 3 main master ship repair entities in San Diego. There's NASCO, BAA Systems, and Continental Maritime.
Michael Curtin:So between those 3 entities, they get all the bigger work, and then there's a probably 20 different boat shipyards, that do some of the smaller maintenance work that we work for. So there's probably we probably have 20 plus customers, in San Diego, but we have our top 5 or 10 that we prefer working for, and we do just, yeah, keeping getting the ships in and out of there, do their maintenance, do any upgrades, modernizations that they have that come in.
Mel Renfrow:So does it work where you have some of them are just you're bidding every single time, or is it more like a maintenance contract that we have, like, with some of the buildings that we have maintenance contracts?
Michael Curtin:We're build bidding every single time, and we'll bid that same project to 6 different customers, usually all with the same price, unless we have a a preferred customer we wanna really target to help them get the job. But, yeah, we bid it multiple times. For every availability, we bid it. A lot of times, it's you're bidding a paragraph of words to try to figure out what the scope of work is, so it takes some imagination. I'm definitely more the engineer, and I I need numbers, but we have our, repair estimators that somehow convert those words into into some kind of scope of work.
Michael Curtin:So Yeah.
Mel Renfrow:That's pretty amazing. So you have, obviously, in San Diego, you're doing marine work there, but we have, they also do marine work in Washington as well. So how how does how similar is that?
Michael Curtin:That's pretty similar. You know, there there's a really good book, called Freedom's Forge. It kinda talks about all the history of shipbuilding on the West Coast, and I was actually I was as I was looking getting ready for this, I was reading Pat Fulton's. He, before he, he was a consultant for us for a while. He passed away, a few years back here, but he 1 of his final project was we kinda joked around, called it his magnum opus.
Michael Curtin:It was, like, a 400 page history of our branch. But I was reading it, and there's a lot of similarities with this book, Freedom's Forge. I I didn't recognize, until I reviewed it again. It talks about shipbuilding in the West Coast and the the Henry Kysers and the and the Nudsons and, and the Bechtels, but, I mean, going from the ramp building in the Hoover Dam and then the ramp up to build the Liberty ships, all the shipyards in the West Coast or a lot of them are spun from the World War 2 ramp up. Mhmm.
Michael Curtin:And we've lost a lot of those shipyards over the years. Just the whole industry has kind of died in the United States. There's only a few handful of big shipyards in the United States left. There's I mean, as a country, we probably only deliver 12 ships a year or something like that. Oh, yeah.
Michael Curtin:So not a lot. There's shipyards in Korea that will build 60 ship ships a year, and there's dozens of shipyards of that size over there. So we're pretty small in the shipbuilding market in the world as to where we came from. But on the West Coast, from the Henry Kaiser and Bonnoldo Liberty ships and the the other companies that did that, but there was Todd Shipyard up in Seattle and then Cascade General in Portland. So we have Seattle, Portland.
Michael Curtin:I know that we're doing some marine work in the Bay Area. Rob Croix is, at Mare Island Dry Dock there, and then down in San Diego. And and we've chased work. I've I've been to a lot of different shipyards across the country. I've been on both coasts of Canada.
Michael Curtin:We've tried working in Vancouver. I was up in Halifax, and we had a little branch up there. Been to Bath Iron Works in Maine, Newport News in Virginia and Philadelphia. We're actually currently chasing an opportunity in, Fincantieri Marinette in Marinette, Wisconsin.
Mel Renfrow:Mhmm.
Michael Curtin:So we'll see how that plays out. But most of our marine operations are on the West Coast.
Mel Renfrow:So this is so interesting. Do you I mean, you know this if there was a 400 page opus that Pat was working on. So how did we even get into the marine business? I'm I'm sure it goes obviously back to the OC days. But
Michael Curtin:Yeah. It it goes back to the OC days. And I think when they Pat's magnum opus goes into this in-depth, through those 400 pages, but it really started with, I don't know, the invention of fiberglass, and they when they produced 1 of their early plants was in Santa Clara, California. And in 19 fifties, when they established the contracting division, kinda when, Pat Fulton signed on out there, they brought him in as a marine expert. He was a chief engineer, sailing on commercial ships, and then he was working in Idaho Falls doing when they were doing their nuclear protocols and stuff out there.
Michael Curtin:And they brought him in as their marine expert, and the contract division is NASSCO was kinda starting up. But that plant and the and the contracted division kinda teamed up on the Liberty ships. A lot of those fiberglass boards were on those ships. It was kinda probably the introduction marine market, and then it just kinda rolled from there as, we had our different branches down here. I think they were doing a cold storage business Mhmm.
Michael Curtin:Somewhere in San Diego. And when this first ship came out in 1959, NASSCO, they changed ownership. I think that was when Henry Kaiser and Knudson had acquired. NASCO is in that time frame. They started looking to build bigger ships, and the first contract that they won, they they were a tuna boatyard before that.
Michael Curtin:They built tuna boats? Yeah. They had tuna boats. There was a big tuna fleet in San Diego. But their big first ocean going vessel was this US Geotic and Oceanographic Agency vessel, which is now NOAA, contract they got in 1959.
Michael Curtin:And that's that was their first big contract as NASCO. And when NASCO when PCI started working with them in 1959, we got the first contract with them. So here we are 64 years later, and we've been on every new construction program or ship that they've built since then. I was trying to tally up the my spreadsheet was out of date. I was trying to
Mel Renfrow:tally so disappointed. I know.
Michael Curtin:I used to be on top of these things. But I think we're at about a 177 ships that we've built concurrently with NASSCO. We've been on every single 1.
Mel Renfrow:0, man. Talk about customer alignment. Right?
Michael Curtin:Exactly. That it's just continuously reinventing ourselves as new management groups come in and and proving ourselves every day.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. So what what's the biggest difference? Obviously, we, we have a lot of branches that are in insulation. What makes it different when it's on a ship?
Michael Curtin:Well, there are just some different rules and regulations. It's not the same product necessarily. So everything we install has to have a US Coast Guard certificate of of approval, which falls under the rules of IMO Solace, the International Maritime Organization. So it has to be non combustible or interior finish. So everything has to be tested accordingly.
Michael Curtin:Usually, they have different finishes. We have a lot of cloth faced products on our hull board. So the hull board goes on all the the structure of the strip, so usually all the bulkheads, which are the walls, and the overheads, also known as the ceilings. We have our own vocabulary for the shipyard and on ships. But, so that provides all the thermal acoustical or fire treatments and those board products, and they're impaled on pins that we weld, to the steel structure.
Michael Curtin:And then we put a cap on it and and tape all the seams. Then we have all the piping insulation, and I'm similar, but the I guess, the difference there is that we use a fiberglass we lag everything. So using a fiberglass cloth dipped in adhesive and and lag it, and that is just kind of a an old skill that I think a lot of, commercially isn't done anymore.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. So what, what unions do you work with?
Michael Curtin:I work with the carpenters, the marine carpenters, insulators. We have a few Teamsters in our warehouse, and we just recently started doing some painting coatings. So, we're working with the painters union.
Mel Renfrow:If I remember right, because I was able to go out and tour the shipyards. It's so so so cool out there. But don't you actually on the new builds, do you build it upside down?
Michael Curtin:That's correct. Yeah. So they're, like, big LEGO blocks. So we start with the steel structure, and they are yeah. They're they're upside down, so you're standing on the ceiling of the space working downhand on all the piping or electrical, or when we're doing our structural installation.
Michael Curtin:It's it's downhand like that. So we wouldn't do the overheads most of the time because people would be walking on top of the product. So we'd usually try to leave that until it's upright, but we might do there's, structural stiffening on those boundaries that we might do, but any piping so there's in shipbuilding, there's this rule. It's called the 135 or 138 rule, but any work that you do in a shop or in a controlled environment takes 1 hour. En bloc, which we're talking about here, would take 3 hours to do it, or onboard the ship takes 5.
Michael Curtin:So Yeah. Earlier you do your work, the less work it's gonna do. And that's part of our our learning curve, and that's what we're going through right now on these first couple TAEOs, and it happened on the TAK program just the same. We end up doing a lot of that work onboard the ship, and it's a lot less efficient because you have to get the work up there, plus you have so much more stuff in your way and to get there versus when it's in that en bloc situation like that, upside down, working in, like, ideal work positions. We can really get a lot done.
Michael Curtin:So our goal is to be 80% complete with that ship before those those LEGO blocks are put together and erected on board the ship.
Mel Renfrow:It's it's fascinating. Yeah. So it's like you're holding the plans upside down.
Michael Curtin:Well, some people don't need to do that. I actually do need to do that. Sometimes I have all the plans over my heads to figure out where I'm standing. I never really got that skill.
Mel Renfrow:At first, I thought you were making fun of me, but, yeah, I'm glad to hear. Yeah. I would have to turn it upside down too. So I I guess we talked about some of the regulatory requirements for the project. So I think just now, other branches are getting a taste of some of the new government compliance and some of those regulations that
Michael Curtin:you so much fun.
Mel Renfrow:You've been living with for years years. So I guess any advice there for people, or what do you see as, like, major difference there or challenge?
Michael Curtin:Well, what do I see as a major difference is we got a lot of resources and help now from the corporate side. It was, that did not exist, and we were we were asking for help or whatever in 10, 15 years ago. I mean, we were doing our best, but there was a lot of stuff that we didn't understand. I mean, I remember when the executive compensation, requirement came out and, like, we we sent that up to food chain, and nobody was gonna wanted to report their salaries to publicly out there. It was an interpretation of the rules, but that's all these are is you have to look at the rules and interpret them and instead of us being on our own trying to figure out what resources to do with, both, again, the cybersecurity stuff, and then we have Rico and the government compliance stuff.
Michael Curtin:So there's on the accounting side financially. I mean, there's just tons of tons of rules and FAR regulations and DFARS, federal acquisition regulations, and the cybersecurity stuff is kind of a book being written right now too.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. Well and to be fair, a lot of those didn't exist even probably when you started
Michael Curtin:Oh, no. Yeah.
Mel Renfrow:You know, which,
Michael Curtin:Yeah. There was no security to go into the shipyard. I remember 1 my dad came to visit, and I just decided to take him down to the shipyard and walk him around the ship, but it was you could pretty much take anybody in and out of there. Now it's all badged and gated and, armed guard standing outside. So
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. Background check before you even go on.
Michael Curtin:Yep. Yep.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. 1 question I have. So I know on, like, the drywall side, we work with SWACA, the Association of Walls and Ceilings. So what about do you have anything similar like that?
Michael Curtin:For installation, there's the WICA, Western Insulation Contractors Association. But, mostly, our our little niche in the shipbuilding is we either work with the Shipbuilders Council of America and then the National Ship Repair, or the Ship Repair Association. So and just 2 weeks ago, I was actually in Washington DC with for the National Ship Repair Industry Conference, which is always kind of a interesting thing. You get to hear from all the top navy officials, admirals, all of our our, we had several senators and representatives from the House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee, speak to us and what their current initiatives are. And then we do a hill crawl, which I've last year was kind of my, my favorite hill crawl year.
Michael Curtin:I've I've led the team the last 2 years. Last year, we had a lot of really good interaction with a lot of the top military aids from the representatives you see. We we haven't got to see the representatives the last couple years. We have in previous years, but the aids are the ones that have all the knowledge anyway. The the representatives are just they're nodding their head and on whatever the
Mel Renfrow:age group they're calling.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Whatever they say. But, this year's was a little bit light. We had a I think we had a couple of the interns that met with us, so they were just nodding their heads. Oh, that's so interesting.
Michael Curtin:But
Mel Renfrow:So what do you wanna do? Like, what is the hill, crawl? Like, what are your objectives there?
Michael Curtin:Usually with the ship repaired, association, we did it strictly with our San Diego, group, and we targeted all the California representatives, there and San Diego representatives and just got our message across. So workforce development, recruiting and retaining the workforce, stable budgets. Like, we're talking about the federal budget and stuff that they get a budget in advance that the Navy can plan for as they're going through their budget battles like they're just starting right now with the government every year. It sometimes, it eats away that whole Q1 of the navy's operating maintenance budget, and they can't get any work done because the budget's not passed to government.
Mel Renfrow:So Yeah.
Michael Curtin:So we'd like to see they've kind of found a workaround with that now with, using the omnibus or or the different spending bills to some of their maintenance or, their new secure money to do maintenance work, but that's not the right way to do it. They should do, like, a 2 year budget and kinda have a rolling budget to get approved.
Mel Renfrow:I think
Michael Curtin:the 1 thing I do wanna wanna leave in there was the, we actually got a proclamation from congress from the ship repair thing that our workforce is a strategic asset for national defense.
Mel Renfrow:Really?
Michael Curtin:Yeah. So not just PCI, but our entire ship repair industry.
Mel Renfrow:Tell me more about it. Like, how did that come come into play?
Michael Curtin:And when last year's hill crawl when I led that charge. We actually got that initiative from our different representatives, and they they made it a proclamation to congress.
Mel Renfrow:Very cool. Yeah. So you have a plaque
Michael Curtin:we do have a plaque, with that proclamation of congress hanging on it, yeah, in our office.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. Very nice. Good crawling on the hill. Yeah. Thinking of 1 PCG and, you know, it is pretty specialized.
Mel Renfrow:Do you have any joint venture opportunities?
Michael Curtin:Yeah. There's a few. So that opportunity in, Marinette Marine. So we are kinda touched base with Mike Toft a little bit, and I don't know exactly we're very early in that stage, but that's a long way from San Diego, and we need help managing those projects. So that's those are the new frigate program that, they're building up there.
Michael Curtin:So they're smaller ships, 400 foot ish, but there's it's a pretty good contract, but we would need help there.
Mel Renfrow:So it's all up on the Great Lakes, I would assume?
Michael Curtin:Yeah. It's about an hour north of Green Bay. Okay. So it's it's up there a little ways. I think it's probably, I don't know, 3 hours plus from Madison.
Michael Curtin:So that's an opportunity we could look at. And then the other 1, is probably the Joiner system. So I I talk a lot with, Sean Reichenbach up in the northwest, and he's got his estimator there, Aaron Wymore, who does all the joiner systems.
Mel Renfrow:What's that?
Michael Curtin:So those are that kind of aligns with what our interior group. It's kind of the interior finish of the ships. So usually, they're finished, like, panels that get installed on track system and all the ceilings and floors. Obviously, a lot of, synergies with our interior group, but it's there's some different nuances too in terms of how they're fastened. There's a lot of welding.
Michael Curtin:They're all specialized, like, approved products too for the marine environment, so a little bit more costly. But it that's a it's a big opportunity. I know, like, it's magnitudes greater in in cost on the ship than our installation contract is. So I don't know. If we could build that group up from, what he's doing up in Portland and bring it down to San Diego, that'd be a great joint venture.
Mel Renfrow:I like it. How big how big exactly is your branch, by the way? I meant to ask this earlier. So about how many people are in the office and then how many people, craft?
Michael Curtin:We currently have about 19 people in the office, salaried individuals, and then we're running about a 162, I think, field employees as of last week. The number changes every week, but that's last week's number.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. So how many people worked in the office when you started in 2003?
Michael Curtin:Oh, man. I'd have to do, the math on that,
Mel Renfrow:but it's
Michael Curtin:Ballpark. Less than 10. Yeah. Yeah. Even even since, 2017.
Michael Curtin:So, Ernie and I'm the 4th general manager of San Diego Marine since its inception. So there was Russ Seeley, Pat Fulton, Ernie Martinez, and then Ernie retired in 2017, and I I took the seat. I wish Ernie would have stayed on, and and I would have stayed in my previous role. It was it was a lot more fun managing projects than managing people, sometimes, but it's also rewarding managing people. We get a lot of successes from them.
Michael Curtin:But in that previous office, yeah, with the Ernie and the 8 or so people, it's changed a lot.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. And Ernie sat in that seat for quite a while, didn't he?
Michael Curtin:He became, I think well, there was some I don't remember when. I'd have to look. I have it written down, but I I think he might have become GM in, like, 1999. He had some overlap with Pat as Pat was a VP. And then, yeah, from, yeah, 2000 or 1999 probably until 2017.
Michael Curtin:Yeah.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. That's a long run.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Pretty long run and pretty successful run too.
Mel Renfrow:Are you gonna are you gonna surpass that?
Michael Curtin:Jeez. I don't know. Here I am from 17 on, so I'm working on 6 years, I guess. What what year is that? Ways to go.
Michael Curtin:But this is my 20th year at PCI. I'm pretty, that's amazing how fast 20 years go by.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. Congratulations. It's in August. Right?
Michael Curtin:In August. Yeah.
Mel Renfrow:In August. 1 thing I wanted to ask about your branch because we just talked about how many people are in there. You do a lot of, really cool community work. Can you tell us a little bit about some of those things?
Michael Curtin:I can. They've definitely died off a little bit since COVID. I I was actually thinking about that because we're getting close to Earth Day here, and that was always 1 of the big ones that we actually organize that event every year. So we do it with the San Diego Waterfront as pretty much all companies, and we would go target areas for cleanup with trash removal or removing invasive species on the waterways, mostly cleaning up the waterways around us, just kinda giving back. We've done it at community centers too, doing cleanups and weed removal and and whatnot.
Michael Curtin:We usually get a pretty strong contingent of PCI people to do that, and I've all the accolades really go to David Fulton. He kinda plans that whole event and gets everybody out there. We usually get t shirts, and, usually, there's lunch and stuff, but just spend, I don't know, half of a day on a Saturday and go do a big cleanup. And as we're dialing in on Earth Day, it's probably time to do that again.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. I'm I'm sure you're surprised at some of the stuff that you can you can pull out of the water there or the beachfront. Yeah.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. It's pretty gross sometimes.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. I watch, do you watch Alone?
Michael Curtin:I don't watch Alone, though.
Mel Renfrow:So for somebody who likes to be outside and do it's, I think it's on I don't know which streaming service it's on. I can't keep track. But, basically, these people are all by themselves. Truly, they don't have a camera person or anything, but the first 2 seasons, they were on Vancouver Island. And, yeah, it's amazing what they could salvage out of the water, you know, and then they turn it you know, they can turn it MacGyver it into something completely different, but, yeah, it's crazy, the stuff they'd pull out of the water.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. It's a lot of garbage in the in those waterways and stuff, So we we try our do our best and clean it up. It's a good event. We've been doing a couple other pretty cool events just with our employee, our workforce, really focused on the engagement piece, but we're doing this luncheon every month here. This is so we we've just done 2 of them, but our office staff actually delivers lunch down to the shipyard, and we break up into teams.
Michael Curtin:So try to do, like, 10 person teams, and then we do a continuous improvement event where we kinda identify a problem. Like, the last 1 was on our PTP process or pretest plan process and kind of go through the process and figure out what the problems are, where why people aren't finding all the risks or hazards out there. And we found a lot of good outcomes from that, but kind of a good involvement. And, mostly, it's more to get people engaged that we care and that we're trying to improve it. And some of the outcomes from that 1 was, it sounds like there's some differences between our Spanish version and our English version that didn't really translate equally.
Michael Curtin:And then we have acronyms on there, like lock out, tag out, and people didn't know what LOTA was, which I I think that's something that that's something we have to reflect on ourselves, that we expect that that people knew what that meant, but that's not always the case. We have to make sure we explain ourselves. And the other thing we've been doing here lately, this will be the second 1, we actually have 1 next week, is the phone at the parking lot shindig. I think IIII coined the phrase, but we're just after work on AA1 day a month, just kinda barbecuing some burgers and and hot dogs or whatever. I think this week, we're doing some tacos, but then having some cornhole boards and just hanging out for an hour or 2 after work with everybody, invite no pressure if people wanna show up and do it.
Michael Curtin:So it's trying to really kinda build that team because we have these long term contracts. We're gonna have that steady workforce for a long time. So just kinda that retention piece, trying to reward them, and just make it a good family environment for people to work in.
Mel Renfrow:I like that. We might steal it. Parking lot, Shindig.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. I coined I'm gonna copyright that, so you have to pay me a a royalty.
Mel Renfrow:Done. Done. So what do you see as, like, the thinking about the future? You you talked about the joint venture work, but are there any new trends that you're you're seeing in the marine industry?
Michael Curtin:New trends. I mean, there's technology and, I don't know, the way they're welding ships. I mean, we've been using something similar to the BIM modeling like, our interior group uses for since I started. There's been 3 d modeling with ships, but we're finding new ways to use that that model, and it they've come up with better versions of it where we can do some pretty good data extraction. So I think that's 1 improvement that, Peter Betti and his team on the new construction side have done, Michael Tomlinson, Charlie, and Victor Tavazone, is that we have a pretty complete takeoff before we actually even see those blocks out there.
Michael Curtin:So we'd always start with kind of a rough estimate, and then we'd go and do physical takeoffs, all the piping footages, exhaust off the engines, all the structural and stuff. And we're still doing that, but the the takeoff that they're getting from the model is pretty spot on now. So that's been a drastic improvement, and we've been able to segment that little model into little components that our field supervisors can pull up on their iPads. And when they're walking the block, they can actually, like, flip it around on their iPad and identify where the piping and stuff is. So those are that's an advancement.
Michael Curtin:It it's morphed, I guess. It's not new. It's just it's morphed and become a little bit more user friendly.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. That's really interesting. Do you have to have a marine background to work?
Michael Curtin:Oh, absolutely not. I think, Charlie well, we have we have a pretty mixed office. In our office, there's 3 of us that have, marine backgrounds. We have a couple of summer interns come in this summer from Maritime Academy as well. But we have a lot of our PEs.
Michael Curtin:1 of our PMs are from the field. We have another PE, Alyssa Alfero, who came on, and she was 1 of our admins. It really I'd say kickass. I don't know if it's a lot on the podcast.
Mel Renfrow:You can
Michael Curtin:yep. Okay. Yep. She was a kickass admin, and she's doing a kickass job out there as a PE too. She's a real go get it go getter, very motivated, individual.
Michael Curtin:But, again, different coming from a different background. And then we have Charlie Hunt who has a construction or a civil engineering background, came in too. So it all different makes unfolded. The marine background does have some values and with a it's kind of an automatic door opener with some of our customers. Mhmm.
Michael Curtin:We have that same background, But it there's just a general understanding of the ship propulsion systems and how a ship works, the terminology. So some of that stuff takes years to learn and understand. There's a there's some nuances to to ships and shipbuilding.
Mel Renfrow:So you talked earlier about a third of the employees from Mexico, and they're coming across the border. What are some of like, for people listening, besides I mean, obviously, there's the language, there's a challenge, but other challenges that come with that or, you know, on the other side, you know, rewards that come with it.
Michael Curtin:Well, that that's driven mostly by cost of living. San Diego is a pretty expensive place to live. It's right up there in the top of the ranks country. Housing prices are super expensive. Everything is.
Michael Curtin:They can live across the border in Tijuana, and have have a better lifestyle down there based on the wages on the waterfront. It also somewhat suppresses the wages on the waterfront, which is which is not a good thing. It makes us tough for us to compete, and and it it kinda holds everybody down there. I I think the wages should hopefully start coming up a little bit. But some of the the tricky parts of crossing the border every day is our our some of our people wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning to get to work by 5 o'clock because they don't know what that borderline is gonna look like every day.
Michael Curtin:During COVID, there was we're going through all the threats and them closing the border. And, so it was there's always the challenge there, and then that sometimes we get people that just they are not gonna make it to work because they didn't get up in time, and they call in sick. So absenteeism is always a struggle too.
Mel Renfrow:Even little things I can remember, we started, looking at different, you know, softwares or something, being able to communicate with all the, field employees across the company. And, talking to Kimberly there, she was like, make sure that it, you know, you can do international phone numbers for texting, not just, you know, US domestic numbers. So even little things like that to think about. Yeah. Absolutely.
Mel Renfrow:Anything else that you can think of that works a little different where you I know you have a huge warehouse.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. We do. We run the largest inventory in the company It's right around $2, 000, 000 right now. So we're at our turns are probably we're probably turning about 6 times a year. That's our target anyway.
Michael Curtin:It's a little bit short of that. Previously, we had to turn in a lot faster than that. It's just kinda the flow of the work. But, yeah, managing that inventory and making sure it's accurate, our warehouse team does an amazing job. It's usually, like, a fraction of 1% variance every year when we do our audit.
Michael Curtin:And that takes they they do monthly counts, and it takes a lot to to keep it tight. And and we have a very organized warehouse too, so those guys have done a great job. That's what our teamsters do. They deliver the materials to the shipyard. There's no storage inside the shipyard, so it's usually just in time delivery, whatever the guys are gonna need.
Michael Curtin:Usually, they're ordering the day before, it gets delivered, and it's staged, and then the next day, they're consuming it. So a pretty good cycle of materials. We also because these are all certified products, we we only really have 1 supplier right now, which is kind of a major risk point for us with Distribution International. There's SPY does some fabrication too out of Seattle, but they don't have all their products, certified that we need. So that supply chain is really kind of a they've, combined over the last couple of years, and we've left with 1.
Michael Curtin:So we're gonna start doing a little bit of the marine fabrication ourselves just to mitigate that risk.
Mel Renfrow:I was gonna say entrepreneurial spirit here. Yeah. It sounds like Yep. A good opportunity for us.
Michael Curtin:Nope. Absolutely. And DI has been a good partner. It just having all your eggs in 1 basket. I've I've been around enough, like, where 1 of their buildings caught on fire, and there's a couple instances where they lost their coast guard search and couldn't produce material for a period of time.
Michael Curtin:What do we do in that scenario if we don't have a plan b? And I I hope Spy comes to the table, and I don't think it's gonna work if they're doing it from Seattle. I'm trying to get them to do start up operations in Phoenix, and I think we can support that from there. But either way, I think that we're gonna try to build a little little core group that we can do some of it ourselves just in case.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. It's good to have a backup plan. Yep. Anything else you want people to know before I move I'm gonna move on to something else, but I guess we'll let me do this as a segue. So are there any we always kind of talk about myth busters or misconceptions.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. Anything that you've heard out word on the street that is not true about marine or anything you just want people to know about?
Michael Curtin:Well, there's been speculation that Ernie always had a money tree in his office. And, I've I've been in there for several years now, and I have not found that money tree because I might have picked some of the leaves off of it. So You ruined it?
Mel Renfrow:You did you ruin the money? You didn't ruin the
Michael Curtin:money tree. I forgot the water or something. I'm not sure. But, yeah, we we do not have a money tree. It actually comes from a lot of hard work, and so we we're not just sitting there and cashing checks.
Michael Curtin:It's our office opens before 5 o'clock every morning. We have a lot of people in the office pretty early, staying late. It closes at 5 PM every day. We work a lot of whenever it's needed, working on proposals. We're working weekends, late nights.
Michael Curtin:So it ebbs and flows, but it's from a lot of hard work, and it's really a focus on our real single customer. So reinventing ourselves there over and over again. And and there's rocky roads, and we've made mistakes along the way. But I think we've we've stood our ground, and I think we've when we've needed to, we've given and and taken responsibility for things when whenever it's ever happened. We've also bailed them out on a couple, I think they've always been grateful to us.
Michael Curtin:There was the major dock flooding, a few years ago. I think that was in 2018 or so. And ESB 5 was in the building dock, and the flood gate failed. And it was kind of it was pretty eerie. Like, it was very lucky that nobody died in that incident, but but that ship, although there was holes and accesses to all the machinery rooms, and the water filled up that ship, like, 30 feet high inside of the ship.
Michael Curtin:A lot of the equipment was underwater, and we had to go and rip out all that insulation. And we actually they, Kevin Mooney was the vice president of supply chain management at that time. And when we were done, he said a thank you to to our leadership group about how we magically made all that insulation removal come off of that ship. And that was working in 7 days, 2 shifts, and we just made it happen.
Mel Renfrow:Wow. That's very cool. Yeah. Well and for people that haven't, haven't been here 20 years or more and haven't been around for a while, 1 thing that's really cool is it helps us as a as an organization be diversified. So back when, you know, the market crashed, like, we were a little behind.
Mel Renfrow:So it was about 2009. Marine really, really came in clutch at that time, and you guys stayed steady with the steady work as, you know, the other commercial things were kind of falling down. So
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Absolutely. I was I think it, the government funded programs really peak when, again, when we're commercially probably in a recession is when the government's really funding that stuff. And and and, obviously, that was all preplanned work. It just happened to be ramping up at the right time, but that those were some big years.
Michael Curtin:Yeah.
Mel Renfrow:So I'm gonna I'm gonna switch off of marine specific. I'm just gonna ask you as somebody, you know, that started here as an intern. You've been here 20 years and now GM 2, I think. What, you know, what advice do you have, for people that are just starting out in the company, things that have helped you through your development and, made you successful?
Michael Curtin:I think just show up to work, work hard, ask a lot of questions, find a mentor. I think I've had a few really solid mentors over the years. I would I would count Pat Fulton as 1 of my foundational ones, Ernie Martinez. I count Dave Gas from my ERP days. I learned a lot from Dave in that ERP experience that shared with you, Moe.
Michael Curtin:Mhmm. But, yeah, find a mentor that, I don't know, can help kinda steer you along the way, and, I think that's definitely clutch. Yeah. Don't pretend like you know everything because there's there's a lot of things out there that come up new every day and things there's different scenarios that happen that that you couldn't have planned for. So I'll just keep an open mind, ask a lot of questions, and know your job better than anybody else.
Mel Renfrow:Very good. So you could you ready just for some fun questions here?
Michael Curtin:Sure.
Mel Renfrow:Okay. What was your very first concert?
Michael Curtin:Steve Miller Band.
Mel Renfrow:Oh, that's a good 1.
Michael Curtin:Yeah. Where was it? In near, Hookstown, Star Like Amphitheater. I don't know what the name of the amphitheater now is. It's changed so many times.
Mel Renfrow:Like Tostitos Bowl or
Michael Curtin:Yeah. And you're in Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh.
Mel Renfrow:Who took you? Who who did you go with?
Michael Curtin:I went with Friends.
Mel Renfrow:K. Yeah. How old were you?
Michael Curtin:Probably 17 or 18. K.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. What was the last concert you went to?
Michael Curtin:I don't know the answer to that. I know I've been to I haven't been to a concert in a lot of years, but I've gone to I've seen Coldplay a couple times with my wife. I was that's her favorite band or was her favorite band. I don't think I've been to a concert probably in 10 years. I don't know.
Mel Renfrow:You you need to get up on that.
Michael Curtin:I guess so. I
Mel Renfrow:Hey. There's other things. What do you do what do you do for fun?
Michael Curtin:I spend a lot of time outside. I'm always. I moved to a new property here, last summer. Pretty big spread. It's like 8 and a half acres, and that's unheard of in San Diego.
Michael Curtin:So I got a lot of, pretty good orchard on a well.
Mel Renfrow:Do you have any, like, alpacas or lawn mowers?
Michael Curtin:Not yet. It might start with chickens or something like that. But mostly, I was trying not to kill all the fruit trees, last summer, and so far, they survived. I've added some new ones here this spring, but it was I've learned a lot about irrigation systems. I'm almost an expert in irrigation systems now, or not.
Michael Curtin:That's But Lucy overselling my soul. Gets your wife gets
Mel Renfrow:into that stuff, doesn't she?
Michael Curtin:Well, she got into canning. Like, we had this weird, fruit there, the calomancies. They're like some kind of Filipino citrus fruit. They're horrible. They're, like, so bitter.
Michael Curtin:And, like, there's this whole tree full of these little fruits, and, like, what do we do with these things? So she ended up making, like, syrup and and jam or something. And that that was pretty good when she had a bunch of sugar to it, but the only person
Mel Renfrow:to eat
Michael Curtin:them was my daughter. She would eat someone who loves them, but they're so sour and bitter.
Mel Renfrow:Very interesting. Yeah. So if you didn't work in construction, or I will put, like, your original Jack Cousteau sea explorer. What would you wanna do?
Michael Curtin:I'll be outdoors. I mean, I love hunting and fishing and hiking and stuff. Like, I would love doing anything outdoors like that. Probably not work. Just go adventure.
Michael Curtin:I'd go be I don't know. I like reading a lot of, like, history books on individuals. I'm reading 1 right now on on Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Like, I like exploring and seeing new places. In terms of work, work funds those opportunities, I guess, to go do the fun stuff.
Mel Renfrow:Yeah. That way, it still stays fun,
Michael Curtin:and it does. Work is still fun. I I think that's I don't know. Another thing with PCI is, I think that there's been no shortage of being challenged and rewarded along the way. I know I think those are 2 things that make your job enjoyable.
Mel Renfrow:I agree. You can always you can always have fun even when it's super stressful Yep. And all of that, a way to make it make it fun.
Michael Curtin:Yep.
Mel Renfrow:Okay. Well, with that, I wanna thank you for joining us here in the cabin, and, maybe it'll be the first of first of many times you can come and join us on the show.
Michael Curtin:That sounds great. I'll do it, maybe every 5 years.
Mel Renfrow:There we okay. You're gonna
Michael Curtin:have a different you're
Mel Renfrow:gonna have a different host next time then because I'm
Michael Curtin:out. Alright.
Mel Renfrow:Okay. See you later.