Technically they are "His" towers, but he has had me essentially deal with everything from leases to construction for a while. I treat them the same way I would if I owned them and most of the time he never even talks with the customers, I handle everything. So in their eyes I am an owner, and my Father likes it that way. I own one tower personally, then I am a partner in one completed tower and another that is in planning stages. I manage the other six towers, we sold one last year and have a a couple others that are redundant at one of the other sites. All in all now I handle 9 towers and I am in the process of getting all of the leases and contracts in order. My Dad has neglected that aspect of it and we are finding lots of customers have not been following the leases, basically he is losing money because of non enforcement of the terms. It is probably going to take me until next summer before I have everything cataloged and organized, but it has been very embarrassing when a customer wants to come to one of the towers and I can't tell them where they can go without doing a lot of leg work. I should be able to look at one or two sheets and say, yes we have the 200' level available. I have to climb one of the towers next week to visually confirm a few things before the engineer can pass judgement on new loading.
I have been involved in the permitting process of the towers for years, a couple of our towers took about 10 years to get through al the permits and actually become reality. One of those was on an island where there are plenty of wealthy summer people that did not want a tower, but the year round community did, it was an interesting fight. Another one we had to get a seaside community to change the ordinance for towers to allow a 300' tower (current ordinance was for 100' tower). We had to go to many public hearings, one of them was at the school auditorium and there were a lot of people there.
Sometimes I wish I had become a lawyer, I enjoy the legal aspect of it and I have saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by doing all the legwork for our lawyer. I am always learning new things, sometimes I learn the hard way, but I do not forget and the next time I know what to expect.
Today the installation crew was trying to convince me that it was too hard to run the cable where I wanted it, I just looked at them and said "you see those other four cables? I ran those, so I know it can be done." That made them quiet down and in the end they said it was not as bad as they thought. There are very few tower managers that understand towers the way I do, this makes me a force to be reckoned with and my Dad respects that and trusts my judgement. I keep telling him that someone needs to understand all the aspects of the towers, because if something should happen to him, things would essentially turn to ****. My stepmother would look to me, but until recently I also had very little knowledge of all the happenings. There is so much info to keep track of, that my Dad has lost track of a lot. When we were doing a recent lease amendment, he could not even find the original lease or all of the previous 5 amendments. I had to get them from the lawyer that was handling things for the customer, luckily they provided copies to us. I now have a dedicated folder with all of the info on them, but this is only one of maybe 20 tenants on this one particular tower.
assasins beans. need to die.