Sitting down at a big table in the back of Maria's Mexican Restaurant a few blocks from the office, Jeff and his new direct reports moved aside their plates and silverware to make room for paperwork. Given that it was a weeknight and that the food at Maria's wasn't particularly good, they had much of the establishment to themselves.

“Okay, let's try to avoid getting into too many details right now,” Jeff explained. “Let's just identify the biggest levers that we're going to need to pull to make this work.”

Bobby and Clare didn't respond right away, so he clarified.

“I'm talking about big categories. Like financing. Labor. Materials.”

Now their heads were nodding, and almost in unison they said “labor.”

His mouth full, Jeff motioned for them to explain, and Bobby went first.

“We need to add at least,” he paused to do some quick math in his head, “sixty people in the next two months.” He looked at Clare for confirmation.

She sighed, agreeing.

“What kind of people are we talking about?” Jeff wanted to know. “Nail pounders? Project managers? Foremen?”

“Yes,” Bobby responded with no sense of humor. “Everything.”

Clare added, “But there are four critical hires we have to make first. A project manager for the hospital, two foremen, and a senior engineer.”

“Three foremen,” Bobby corrected her.

“Okay, maybe three foremen. And then we're going to need a half dozen supervisors and about fifty contractors, of all kinds.” She shook her head as if she hadn't quite realized the gravity of the situation until going over the list. “This is crazy.”

Jeff wrote the numbers in a notepad.

They spent the next thirty minutes talking about the specific jobs they'd need to fill and how they would deploy them.

Jeff decided it was time to move on. “Okay, what else, besides hiring?”

For almost two hours, the three executives went through the details of the two big projects, everything from permits and schedules to design and materials.

Jeff thought he had learned a lot in his first sixty days on the job, but he would later admit that he absorbed more during those three hours at Maria's than in the previous two months. It was like a crash course in construction management, inspired by the new sense of urgency. And fear.

At nine o'clock, he decided to call it a night. “Let's not burn ourselves out on the first leg of this race.”

They agreed to meet the next afternoon after Bobby came back from the Oak Ridge building site, a problematic shopping center project that VB was trying to finish.