About Me

Name: David DeSchoolmeester

DOB: Stone Age – According to my kids.

Status: Taken!

Born: Yes, but my kids still have their doubts.

Sex: Yes please!

Misc: A face for radio!

So, here is where I tell you about me. I hope I do not bore you too badly!

Read the details below or skip to the Summary

US NAVY EXPERIENCE

I am a Disabled American Veteran who served in the United States Navy (USN) for just over 12 years before I was Honorably Discharged under medical conditions.

I am very proud of my military service and was devastated when my career was cut short.

In the USN I was a Nuclear Machinist Mate. Operating a Nuclear Propulsion
Plant was exciting and very rewarding. In my 12+ years I was assigned to two Nuclear Aircraft Carriers (USS Nimitz CVN-68 and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower CVN-69) and one Nuclear Cruiser (USS Mississippi CGN-40).

(click on ship to enlarge image)

Shipboard life has many challenges and taught me valuable lessons about
people, hard-work, duty, honor, accountability, ethics, teamwork, leadership,
the art of negotiation, reliability, friendship, organization, and how to
convince your co-workers to bathe more frequently!

In-between shipboard service, I also served a few years on shore duty. My
first shore based assignment was to take over a Lagging Shop (lagging is another word for insulation). When I arrived this shop had the worst work record on base. Within the first six months that I took over, the shop had won the “Shop of the Quarter” award two quarters in a row.

My Division Officer asked me how I did it.

And so I told him……………

When I took over, the morale in the shop was very low and they acted like
they new they would never be more than what people currently thought of them.
My first week I spent putting on coveralls, going out to the ships and working
right along side them. I usually got more dirty than they did, but only because I was not as good as they were.

I told my shop lead to treat me like any other new person and put me to work.

They told me they have never seen a First Class Petty Officer go out to the
ships and actually work side-by-side with them.

I got the entire shop together after the third day and had a long talk with
them. Later they told me the most important thing I said was that I would never ask them to do something I would not be willing to do myself and then I backed it up with action.

That week I earned their respect and it also gave me an opportunity to see
exactly what kind of talent I had working for me.

Several months later a very big insulation job came to the base and our
Department Head was going to send it out to a civilian company (at great
expense) because he did not think my shop could do it. After more than an hour of discussion I convinced them otherwise and at the same time put my butt on the
line.

I took my top two people out to the aircraft carrier (it will remain
un-named) to scope the job. In non-nuclear ships, there is a boiler whose smoke stack travels through many un-manned spaces on its way to exhaust outside.
Above one of the largest of these spaces was a Computer Room (poor planning, I know, but that’s what we had to work with). The heat from the unmanned space where the stack went through kept causing their computer mainframes to shutdown.

Our job was to insulate the ceiling area in the space under the Computer
Room. This stack space was 30 feet tall and the ceiling area we would have to insulate was approximately 45 feet by 60 feet. My team has never encountered anything with such big obstacles, for instance:

1. This job would require scaffolding to reach the ceiling (overhead) and they have never used scaffolding before.

2. This space had numerous pipes and conduit running close to the overhead they had to work on.

3. This job would require the use of a “cherry picker” to get the materials to the work location.

4. This job would require the use of a Pin Spot Welder that none of them have any training on.

5. The ships schedule meant we had to start right away and put other jobs on hold.

My people did not think they could do the job. I realized they were looking
at the entire job and were overwhelmed to the point they did not believe they
had what it would take to complete it.

So, I broke the job down into smaller “bite-sized” pieces and asked, “What
part don’t you think we can do?” They felt comfortable with being able to
complete each part, it was just looking at the whole thing made them not believe in themselves.

I knew they could do it and I made sure to always keep an excited, confident
and assuredly positive attitude in front of them.

Besides, my butt was in a sling if we didn’t pull this off!

We completed the task and removed the last bit of our materials 7 hours
before the ship went to sea. The Commanding Officer of the base received a message from the ship 1-week later thanking us for the work we did and that the computer room temperature was maintaining within required parameters.

A couple of weeks later the ship returned and a formal Letter of Commendation arrived for me. I turned it down and sent it back to the ship with a letter that said this job was a tea effort and not the work of one man. I sent the names of all of my shop personnel and told the Captain that either all of my men get recognized or none of us do.

One week later every man in my shop (and myself) received a formal Letter of Commendation from the Captain of the ship.

At another shore duty station I assisted in the scheduling of all maintenance
items for East Coast aircraft carriers during their major overhaul / shipyard
periods. Each overhaul package would contain thousands of maintenance items.

This is where I learned the process of scheduling for immensely large
projects. Many tasks required that other tasks were performed prior to their
completion. Therefore, it was very important to ensure proper sequencing.

I did not work there very long, but I was able to realign the sequence of
some tasks which saved the Navy over $75,000 on just one job. Attention to detail is crucial to success here.

COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR POWER

I started as an Auxiliary Operator, but the same disability that put me out
of the Navy, put me out of that job as well. Fortunately, I had proven myself
to be a good employee and they gave me the time to find another job within the company. Unfortunately, that job came with a 40% pay cut!

Again, attention to detail is very important here as well as constant ongoing
training. Similar to the US Navy, we had Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for every task in the operation of the power plant. The location I worked at had two separate reactors and reactor plants on the same site. Therefore, to prevent and minimize mistakes each plant was painted a different color and all of the equipment was identified either “1 plant – green” or “2 plant – tan”.

This really drove home the importance of Systems Thinking to minimize error and maximize efficiency.

I became a member of the plant’s Process Improvement Team. We employed the “LEAN” method of process improvement specifically using Kaizen Events to study and make changes on individual processes.

The last two events I was involved in prior to leaving the Nuclear Industry,
I was a team member where we achieved a 17.9% increase in efficiency and the other I was a Kaizen Event Team Leader achieving a 22% increase in efficiency!

For three years I was also on the company’s Speakers Bureau. I have given lectures / seminars to college & university audiences and fraternal
organizations such as AARP and Rotary Club. The lectures were all based on teaching people about nuclear power; nuclear safety; how power plants & nuclear plants work; etc.

Every 18 months commercial nuclear power plants shutdown to perform numerous corrective / preventive maintenance items; install system modifications; and refuel 1/3 of the reactor core. Things that cannot be performed with the plant in operation. Somewhere between 900 to 1200 tasks are performed during this short shutdown period, working 24/7 to get it all accomplished.

It was my job to run the Scaffold and Insulation program at the plant. An
average of 80% of these 900 to 1200 items required either scaffolding to get to these locations, needed insulation removed to perform the task or both.

So I was involved with all of these items and had to ensure that when they
came up on the schedule, the scaffold was already erected and the insulation was already removed. I coordinated the single most important group during the entire shutdown.

An idea that I had for enhancing the scaffold program on site was to purchase a new kind of scaffolding. We had several “near-miss” personnel accidents related to scaffolding and I wanted to reduce the chance for a real accident. So, I reviewed several different types of scaffold equipment to find a style that was superior in every way including the price. However, what stood out to me, but was not so apparent to management was that; as expensive as it was, it actually paid for itself in other ways within 3 Refueling Maintenance Shutdowns.

I gathered data and using charts & graphs showed how this scaffolding was
safer, easier and faster to erect & dismantle, and was much more versatile than the other styles. I easily convinced plant management to spend $700,000 on all new equipment, knowing it was the absolute right thing to do.

The new equipment did everything I said it would do and more!

Always remember, when presenting to management use as many pictures as possible and make sure you show a financial savings. If you start with the idea that management personnel cannot read, but understand pictures and are only interested in financial savings, you should have no problem getting their approval.

US GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE

I left the Nuclear Power Industry to re-enter government service. I accepted
a position running Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, Radiation Safety and Radiation Oncology at a government hospital. Before taking the job I learned they had been without an Administrator for almost 3 years and had a terrible reputation in the hospital.

Knowing that rumors travel faster than you do and employees are always
apprehensive about new management personnel, I decided to do three things which immediately removed a great deal of concern from the minds of my employees about their new Administrator:

1. I sent out a small questionnaire to every employee

2. I started a quarterly newsletter

3. I began by working in the clinics side-by-side the Technologists

The questionnaire went out to everyone in all 4 services with only 5
questions on it. The directions were simple: DO NOT put your name on this, unless you want me to know who you are; answer these questions and put your paper in this locked box which only I will have the key and read.

The five questions were:

1. What do you think works well here?

2. What do you think does not work well here?

3. What would you like to see me change?

4. What are you afraid I might change?

5. Tell me anything else you think I should know about the clinic, service, or hospital.

I received over 82% of them back and none of them had juvenile responses on them. This served to expedite my knowledge of how my employees felt, what concerns they had and to minimize their concern that I might “go off half cocked” and change things without studying them and getting input first.

It also gave me a list of things I needed to work on first to guarantee their
trust up front. After which, it would be easier to make harder changes they
might not like, but had to be done.

I found that the four service lines were located in different areas and
floors of the hospital. So, by starting a newsletter that described each
service and what they did helped to get everyone to think and act more like a team. Also, it was the perfect way for me to provide everyone with my
background information and a vision of where we were going with changes I was to make.

Before I even arrived, everyone knew I had no Medical background. So, in
order to gain their respect and confidence, I began by working side-by-side my Technologists in each clinic.

This assisted me in learning about all of my employees, teach me exactly what types of issues they face on a daily basis, but also let them know I was going to learn for myself about their issues and not just take someone’s word for it.

Doing these three things within my first 100 days of starting in a new
industry gave me a strong foot hold with my employees, peers and with upper management. This paved the way for me to get things done with minimal push back from my employees.

Pulling from previous experiences I saw some issues that needed studying. There were some big issues in a few of the clinics that required in-depth review and analysis. I began by performing a “Time Study” of Interventional Radiology.

I strictly observed and did not intervene for several days. I gave no
advice, even when I wanted to step in and help them be more efficient. This let me know just how my employees were doing and to see what issues were beyond their control which required my intervention.

After I gathered all of this data, I correlated it and began to analyze what
it was telling me. I knew that even though patient safety is a big motivator,
we did not have any of those issues, so I had to come up with another motivator for upper management to act on my recommendations.

I converted all of the separate problematic time wasters I unveiled and
determined how much each one was costing the hospital. I found that on an annual basis the hospital was losing $344,880 a year in wasted salaries of the Radiological personnel involved.

That got their attention.

I itemized each issue within their own groups and presented it with charts &
graphs. For every problem, I had two potential recommendations (the one I
really wanted saved the most money of course). Because my data was succinct, detailed and I had recommendations; the upper management committee I presented to did not have more meetings to discuss things. They took the top 3 money wasters and approved my recommendations on the spot!

SUMMARY

I’m sure you will agree I have had a very diverse working career. Even if
you only read a little from each section, you have an idea of how wide-spread my background is. And I did not list everything!

Here is a bullet list to more easily summarize some of my highlights

(some are mentioned above and some that are not):

Worked as a Tool & Die Maker

Worked for US Postal Service – Automated Mail Processor

US Navy Nuclear Power Propulsion Plant Operator/Supervisor

Turned worst maintenance shop on base to number one in 3 months

Saved US Navy $75,000 in Maintenance expenses for aircraft carrier overhaul

Commercial Nuclear Power Plant Auxiliary Operator

Process Improvement Team Member/Team Leader

Speaker/Lecturer on Nuclear Industry

Nuclear Plant Liaison to Governor – Nuclear Power Plant Emergency Position

Administrator of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, Radiation Safety &
Radiation Oncology Services in US Government Hospital

Through detailed analysis, found $344,880 in lost salaries & convinced US
Government Hospital to act on my recommendations

Manage $78 M budget and performing analysis on US Government Programs

Licenses, Certifications, Degrees:

Life and Health Insurance

Series 6 & 63 Investment License

Business Administration Degree

Marketing Degree

Certified Level One Project Manager

Certified Mortgage Note Appraiser

I know you will agree that I have something of value to offer most any
business owner!

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