As I have said before, the sheer pile-up of commissions in the first half of 2007 forced me to push work outside the office.
Payment terms back then were long, so I went for subcontracting: it let me defer part of what I owed until I had actually been paid myself. The subcontractors got 25% on delivery, another 25% once the work was signed off, and the remaining 50% the day the money reached my account.
Subcontracting has a flaw I never got comfortable with, though: you lose control of the work. My time barely stretched to admin, running the practice and site supervision (dirección de obra — in Spain the architect is legally on the hook for supervising the build, not only for designing it). There was not a spare hour to go through what came back to me properly and correct it.
So when the payments finally started arriving, around June 2007, I decided it was time to take someone on.
I will admit I did not grasp the weight of that decision until a good while later. The moment someone else depends financially on the office, the substance of the business changes. In the good years it multiplies your profit, because four hands do more than two. By the same logic, in the bad years two mouths eat more than one. That is where you take on a moral obligation: put money aside when things go well, so you can invest it when they do not.
The first person I took on, on a trial period, was an aparejadora — the Spanish technical architect who handles measurement, costs and site control, roughly a quantity surveyor. She was a thoroughly decent person and completely committed to the job, but she did not have the CAD skills the work needed.
Later on I offered a place in the office to the subcontractor whose work had been the best. We signed a proper employment contract, but it barely lasted until the September: they decided what they really wanted to do with their life was teach, and left to do the CAP, the teaching certificate you needed then to work in a Spanish secondary school — roughly the PGCE of its day.
In September 2007 a client recommended a neighbour of his, a very capable lad who was finishing his aparejador degree in Granada. The idea did not convince me: the one I had taken on trial had left me thinking they came out of university short on draughtsmanship. Still, I had nothing to lose, since it was a university work-placement agreement. Antonio joined the office that summer and, I have to say, although he was not fluent in AutoCAD, as I had suspected, his effort made up for what he lacked. I remember him injuring his wrist shortly after starting. He could not work, but he came into the office anyway and sat next to me to watch how I used the CAD software, so as to learn something during the enforced downtime. That attitude tells you everything, I think. He still works the same way today.
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