In 2011 Empire Parking Lot Services re-striped 90% of all the parking lots including, handicap markings, parking space stencils, and much more out at the the Westfield Mall located in Santa Ana, California. If you're not familiar with the Westfield Mall, it's located in the heart of Orange County. A Westfield Mall property manager had called us in regards to their parking lot striping needs.
They let us know up front that there were a lot of bidders on this project. It was a pretty good size project as far as line striping jobs go, so armed with that information our estimator set out to give them the best price possible, while not sacrificing any quality on the actual striping work. After performing a thorough take off and compiling the numbers we submitted our price the next day and hoped for the best. A few days later our estimator got the phone call. We were informed that out of five bidders, we were still in the running with two other companies. They asked us if we would be willing to match the lowest bid, and said that they felt the most comfortable with us, however the price needed to be the same as the lowest bidder.
Typically we won't just match a low bid to get a job. But, our estimator said that the jobsite was clean on a well maintained property, and the relationship was solid with his customer. Also, we can't have a striping project in our own back yard going to someone else now can we?
As mentioned above, this was a parking lot striping project. What the mall needed was a company that could come in at night and re-stripe what ended up being about 90% of the entire malls parking lots. The scope of project focused mainly on the ring road around the parking lot, as well as several of the main parking lots and garages. Once the contract was awarded to us, we submitted a move diagram indicating where we would be on what nights, and what we had planned to get done on those moves. The mall management agreed with the plan, and the project was executed flawlessly. All in all the entire project took about 4 nights to complete and it turned out great.
When Empire Parking Lot Services takes on a parking lot striping project such as this one, we bring a lot of pride in making sure the work looks good. Some of the extra steps that our company takes to provide a better service, is to pre-black out old stencil that will not match up with our MUTCD compliant stencils.
Life would be some much easier if every parking lot striping painter used one stencil font!
Another thing that we do different than many other line striping contractors is snapping lines. Even though this is are-stripe we still snap base lines so that when we re-paint the lines they look straight. Often times this will even help hide mistakes other companies have made in the past. Lastly with Empire Parking lot Services, we only use quality paint products. Many companies will use the cheapest price paint available that week. Empire Parking Lot Services uses only quality products that match the surface type and as well as environment.
Although this project was completed over 5 years ago we are happy to report that the Santa Ana Mainplace is still a happy customer. We have completed over 12 projects with them since then including line striping, asphalt repair, concrete surface prep, and many more.
