Bob Salt : Contracts Manager
Lumsden & Carroll
My role as Contracts Manager/ List B Framework Manager, responsible for high profile clients and contracts, gives me a varied role in which I enjoy. My current role means I am on site around 50 per cent of the time, reviewing jobs and finding solutions to problems and ways in which to make the project work, I’ll then head back to the office and pass on the information to be tendered or allocated to one of the supervisors. Clients include Term contract for Northumbrian Water Ltd. where works involve dig down repairs, emergency works, C.S.O’s, flooding and new development work. As well as Term contract for Environment Agency, including emergency works, constructing fish passes and weirs and maintaining assets.
With my job comes a large amount of responsibility, we have 27 gangs working for the L&C Term Contract Team, and I have shared responsibility for all supervisors and issues relating to specific contracts. It’s vitally important to ensure we work well and relate to the client, it’s important to have good rapport, where we have a mutual respect for one another, and this tends to breed work and keep us going from strength to strength.
I’ve had a wide range of jobs since leaving school at 15, to work as a miner at Dawdon Pitt for 3 years. I left the pits at 18, to start work for George Wimpey in Heavy Civil Engineering, moving onto Monks in 1975. My role as Foreman at Monks led to meeting with Brian Manning (now Chief Executive of Esh Group), whom I’ve now worked with for a number of years. In 1984 I left Monks to work as a Contracts Manager for A.R. Maurice, specialising in trench, shoring and pipe laying in difficult ground conditions around the UK. However in 1987 I returned to Monks, to work on a varied a wide range of projects. One project in particular springs to mind as Durham Viaduct and station where we were contracted to re-waterproof the viaduct deck and platform extensions. The job had a penalty clause of £2000 every hour for the time in which it was closed after the deadline; however we re-opened the viaduct with 2 hours to go.
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I’ve worked for Lumsden & Carroll, part of Esh Group for the past 14 years. It’s a great place to work, to me the most important aspect of my job is the close working relationships I’ve built with my team both management and the workforce. I also like the practical aspects of the job, and love a problem job, where’s it’s a challenge to come up with a solution or an emergency where we have to react quickly and pull together to make sure it’s a success.
