CDCI is a for-profit commercial enterprise small business. In 2017, the principal partners made a company decision to move forward with consideration to consciously employ the “Triple Bottom Line” (TBL) approach to operating our business:
For some companies, going to TBL might be challenging. For CDCI the move wasn’t much of a change and essentially was just a matter of applying the term “TBL” characterization to practices we had already built into our original founding principles and business philosophy:
Our Planet — CDCI is located in the Sierra Nevada mountains near where high-head hydroelectric was originally developed. Hydropower is the original sustainable “green” energy. And, as an approved vendor for the major hydropower utilities in the West, the core of the CDCI business are the dams and other hydro-generation facilities and structures of the mountain ranges where power is made.
Many small diving contractors deliver breathing air to the diver using compressors powered by combustion engines. In the tranquility and sensitivity of the remote canyons and pastoral river and lake settings where many dams are situated, a load running engine and a thumping compressor just seems glaringly out of place (not to mention obnoxiously annoying).
And, while we do bring a compressor on every job as a backup to avoid downtime, our standard operations practice is to whenever possible utilize diver breathing gas packaged in a series of cylinders. Cylinders have no moving parts, so the compressor backup is only along in case unexpected task or dive times consume more bottled gas than we had anticipated due to unforeseen reasons.
Recognizable as similar sized to welding bottles, we fill our own cylinders at our shop facilities using high-pressure compressors such as those for recreational scuba tanks. Our high-pressure compressors are electric-motor driven and that power is offset by the system of a series of solar panels on the shop roof.
There are other environmental considerations as well detailed in our CDCI Employee Handbook, but the short version is that we try to reduce our environmental footprint by utilizing common sense practices like non-toxic and biodegradable cleaners for the equipment, capture and reuse of rinse water conservation, and the more typical recycle policies familiar to most people of shipping and packing materials, food packaging, batteries etc, and decontaminate for Aquatic Nuisance Species using only natural potassium chloride and hot-water.
We are a diving company and routinely utilize life-support equipment. Plastics and other fossil-fuel based materials do feature in our equipment inventory. However, CDCI purpose-built a deep-diving control van that has been praised as the most technically advanced mobile control center in the Western United States for managing helium-oxygen diver breathing media required for dam work at water depths down to 300 feet. We are very proud of our use of modern available technology to build a ‘green’ dive control.
Totally portable and can be loaded onto a barge from its dedicated trailer, our control van uses only 12-volt power generated from solar panels to run interior lights, diver lights, diver video, digital-video-recorders, video monitors, diver communications, computers, underwater navigation, satellite communications and to charge hand-held worksite radios, from storage in a series of on-board batteries.
Our People – The very nature of deep diving operations creates a tight-knit team atmosphere. The deeper the work, the more attentive and inter-relationship the crew is to support and keep the diver working down deep safe and productive. Our CDCI inner circle of primary dive crew personnel have all worked together in various combinations for many years. Our families know each other, and as an owner I can look wives and girlfriends in the eye knowing we are as safe as we can be doing deep diving construction.
The original CDCI business concept that brought the CDCI founding partners together came out of a mutual distaste for the negative and embarrassing element of the ethics of our industry that all the Principals shared.
Successful dives can be done by solid and talented Divers. And successful dive projects can be bid and won and carried out with clever and better mousetraps. And by using the known quantity of solid and talented Divers.
At CDCI we have seen it all and are firm in the belief that the long game can be won by a diving company that doesn’t compromise ethics and honor but cultivates a level of integrity from management to the field personnel that becomes reputation. This recipe of principles has served the Principals of CDCI throughout our respective careers and we are confident that this conscious culture of ethics will prevail.
We go where the work is and that can be far-ranging. But we are based in Northern California and California is a Union State. When we work in non-Union States, the wage and benefits change somewhat but our employees are carried by Union health insurance, pensions and retirement funds overall.
From the beginning, the Principal partners of CDCI knew we wanted to cultivate employee buy-in and enthusiasm and to make our company a place where our key personnel were proud to work and the envy of our competition in how we treat our people.
CDCI uses a performance incentive protocol that is different than most. Not a “bonus” per-se, nor is it “profit sharing” in the traditional sense. Our incentive uses cost savings as the reward criteria scale:
Say a CDCI job was estimated and bid for a price. That price contains costs and an anticipated profit. We let everybody assigned to that job know what the project budget is right up front. We know what the expected costs are that have been built in. Materials, time, equipment and labor expense. At the end of the job when the project manager finalizes the closeout numbers, the actual costs are known.
These are compared to the original estimate that the bid was made from. For every dollar that has been saved and is less, the company shares that efficiency with the employees that did the job.
The practice is our policy and our people have the comfort of knowing that (except for time-and-materials contracts) the system is in place on every job. For a small one-week job it might not be worth much, but for a multiple week or several month heavy civil underwater construction project when the project financials close-out it can be worth checks cut to CDCI employees for several thousands of dollars to divers that “knocked it out of the park” with production, efficiency, and safety to save costs while still delivering a quality product to be proud of.
The CDCI Triple Bottom Line business philosophy is part of our Employee Handbook and we are both proud of our culture and look forward to making it better and better to become a showpiece example within our already very specialized industry.
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