#126 Old vs Young in Construction
Hello, and welcome to a, another episode of the construction corner podcast. I'm Dylan, I'm your host. Before I introduce my blue collar bad-ass guys share the show. If you're getting any value out of today, any good conversation, topics that spark around the office around the coffee, pot, water cooler these days, you know, go ahead and give us a share if you, I mean, for us, You know, we don't, we don't run ads.
[00:00:28] We're not monetizing this. It's all to bring awareness to this great industry that we love called construction it's to help bring people in, keep people here, you know, make you better in how you do things on a daily basis. We do this live every week. So if you're listening on, any of the podcast platforms, we're basically everywhere.
[00:00:51] You can also catch us live. We'll throw up a post on when we're going live. You can. Common live, all that kind of good stuff, but guys share the show, you know, spread the word. We want to bring more and more people in construction. So if you want to share this with a colleague, somebody that wants to get in the industry doesn't know what construction's all about.
[00:01:08] Again, we just try to spread the word on how great of an industry this is. So without further ado, Matt, how's it going? My friend I'm doing well today, Dylan. And that was, a great intro. It's a topic we've been kicking around a little bit, but, but really guys, I mean, we're. W we're out here kind of shooting the shit once a week.
[00:01:27] I know there's people listening, but we, we gotta, we want to make sure we're talking about things that are worthwhile to anyone who is listening. And this is how you can kind of give back how you can play a part in the show and, and help kind of almost direct where we're going in the future with it.
[00:01:44] So like Dylan said, give us, give us a share, give us a like, and, and, we'll keep doing this. Yeah, and it's everywhere. Right? So on a it's on Facebook, if you want to watch their YouTube, it's under live broadcasts. This is hosted on my LinkedIn. Again, we're on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, you name it.
[00:02:08] We're we're there pretty, pretty easy to find. So what are we going to talk today about? I think today we kind of delve into, A topic that we, we brought up way back when I first started back in January. And I think it's kind of the, the, the turning point of what everything else we've been talking about up until now is, and, and some of the issues we're seeing, but it's the differences between what I'll call quote unquote old versus new construction.
[00:02:42] And when I say old versus new construction, I don't mean like ground up versus renovation. It's, it's old, like the old way of doing things and new. The new way of doing things. And, there's a little happy medium ground that I think you and I both kind of play in and can see both sides pretty well. Yeah.
[00:03:01] And that's one of the big things guys is understanding both sides of that equation. You know, Matt and I probably play a little bit in the middle of both of this, you know, I'm, I'm younger, but, and lean more towards the technology side of things, but again, fully understand and appreciate. Why contracts are set up the way they are, why a lot of things are done the way they've been done for a very long period of time.
[00:03:27] It works. It's proven and people put policies in the place so they don't get burned again. Right. Somebody got burned somewhere along the way. And this is that. 1% that one guy clause that gets put into projects or a workflow that gets adopted because of that one guy. So it's the exception and not the rule on why we do a lot of things.
[00:03:57] Yeah. And I think, I think we're here to bust the bust, the notion that the way we've always done it, or we're doing it just cause this is how we've always done it. That's not necessarily the way it's correct. That's not the best way to do things. And yeah. We all as an industry are growing and changing, whether we like it or not.
[00:04:14] w we're lobby a lot better off if we can see both sides of it and, and take the good from the old, with the good, from the new and, and make this into the new industry of the future. At the end of the day, we want a conversation around this topic. It's not cut and dry. Every firm's going to have their own opinion on how they want to move forward, which is what makes construction great.
[00:04:37] Is that, you know, there, there's not only one way to do something. There's plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal. Put up the same building. The end of the day, there is probably a best way, but at the end of the day, we can still, you know, get to the same point. You know, a lot of people do things very efficiently waste a ton of time and other firms do it a lot better.
[00:05:01] again, there's. I'm not going to say a right and a wrong way, but I'm going to say that there's, there's definitely more effective and efficient ways to get to the same end result. Definitely. There's, there's lots of paths that lead to your, your end goal. but why don't we start off and kind of touch on that one topic that we bring up?
[00:05:24] it seems without fail every episode and, and the culture of construction, Why don't we start there and see, see where this goes. Okay. Yeah. The, for me, the, the big culture within construction is loss aversion, right? And it really comes down to risk mitigation, I think is like the core thing that a lot of us struggle with that are in the industry, right.
[00:05:50] That are trying to put buildings together that are trying to bring things out of the ground in. With a lot of money, a lot of manpower, a lot of resources, you know, there, there is not as much risk in a project today as there once was right. In terms of casualties and safety factors, but there's still a big and as it should be a big focus on, on risk aversion, risk mitigation, and that comes in all ways, shapes and forms from financial to safety to timelines, to.
[00:06:25] w waste, right? You're trying to risk mitigate tons and tons of factors that go into construction. So I think that's kind of a big place to start is understanding that mindset and why it's been that way, obviously on the construction side, which I'll let you talk to Matt is safety, right? That's the number one thing, you know, you look back to like the Hoover dam and the, I think hundreds of people that were killed, you know, in that.
[00:06:53] Construction project to the empire state building to basically any big construction to now like a much bigger facility in like the Sophie stadi right. A multiple million square foot facility. One guy died and it was after it opened and he fell off. he wasn't tied in and he fell off some scaffolding right at the, like in the center of the facility, which you're not the last thing you're going to hit the field.
[00:07:20] So. You know, from, from the Hoover dam. So we're talking 90 years ago, right? When it was built in 1928 32, from that, from the thirties to today. So 90 years we have made drastic improvements in the safety of construction, but that's, I think the biggest one that typically comes to mind. Well, and it's.
[00:07:46] It's by far the most important one, right? Because you can't put a value on, on life and, and livelihood. And, you know, as a, as a country attraction owner, having three on a job site today is just about the worst thing you can imagine and, and knock on wood, you know, luckily it doesn't happen often. but.
[00:08:13] You know, there there've been a lot of changes made over the last hundred years or the last 10 years. Right. And, and rules and regulations. And some of them I'll agree with a lot of them. I don't, I think we tend to, you know, try to bubble, wrap ourselves through organizations like OSHA a little bit too much sometimes, but there's also a lot of good that that is being done and, and that's keeping people safe and.
[00:08:38] And even down to silly things like certifications for operating sky or a scissor lifts rather, you know, 10 years ago, that may have been a thing, but I would almost guarantee that most guys up on a scissor lift never had any sort of safety certification. If they had a harness at all, it was most likely just dangling by their knees.
[00:09:01] Whereas now at least on the job sites I'm on, on my own sites and, and neighboring sites that I poke into. You see a better sense of, of safety, a better sense of guys, you know, making that conscious effort to, to do something as simple as click into your rail. It, obviously it can literally mean the difference between life and death.
[00:09:23] It takes, I don't know, three seconds to do it. It, it, it's a little bit uncomfortable. It's a little bit less efficient, but the benefits far outweigh that.
[00:09:36] My, my first professional job was in electrical safety. So all I did was arc flash. So I'd go into facilities like these. These were my summers in college were going into from green elevators to steel plants to, like metal tube facilities, where they extruded stuff, plastics facilities, like you name a manufacturing plant.
[00:09:59] I've. Then in and around it and for electrical safety for, I mean, I've even been in chemical plants. Now. Those places are a lot scarier than, manufacturing facilities with each of these. Cause like, so in chemical plants, the reason that they're a little scarier is, you shutting down certain pieces of equipment actually cause more harm than good.
[00:10:27] You know, like turning power off. So turning power off is a bad thing in those cases because it, it prevents them from their safety measures. So like in, in Louisville, for example, Well, it's, I'm going to call it a chemical facility, but they made rubber. So it was a facility for BF Goodrich to make basically all the rubber that goes into tires.
[00:10:46] And it's like a clear yellow is what it actually looks like. But in those they had big chemical spheres. I mean, the stuff that gives into rubber is like insane, but they, they made 75 pound bales of rubber. Was there like an product that then went to be, made into tires. But in these facilities, there's a lot of stuff that could not be shut off at all, or effectively, like a couple of megaton bomb would go off and destroy, like the whole West end of Louisville.
[00:11:17] So like in those facilities, there's a lot of stuff that was like very scary because of the chemicals that they dealt with. But in most places to like on the far other side of that you had like a grain elevator. They're like, yeah, we, we just shut everything off. We like, we can not run, you know, an auger for 10 minutes or an hour.
[00:11:37] It's not gonna hurt anything. And we're fine, right? They are just like, well, we'll shut it off. We don't, we understand, you know, grain and feed and we're farmers, but we don't like, we don't mess with electricity. And so those are like the two extremes of things that I dealt with, but it was all around safety in that.
[00:11:56] And it wasn't until like 2002 that this became a kind of a known thing with arc flash. So when an arc flash is, is if you're in a fault in the majority of faults, like. 92% of all faults are face to face. So that means somebody took a screwdriver and went across two phases. And then the worst case is a bolted three phase fall, which means you took a piece of rod iron and pushed it right against all three phases on a conductor.
[00:12:22] And it hit simultaneously. And I mean, that's a big explosion, but we calculate all the energy levels at a piece of equipment to see how big that blast was going to be and things as simple as. Like you were saying, clicking onto a scissor lift now electricians. And a lot of facilities went as far as they just dress all their people in fr gear.
[00:12:46] So what would happen in a electrical accident is you'd have an explosion and because you're wearing cotton or polyester in a worst case, right? So the tracksuit, like you're an eighties, you, you then shrink wrap all that stuff would, would shrink. And you now, like you can't get that stuff off now you're in a burn ward and they're scraping polyester out of your skin for months and nobody ever wants that.
[00:13:14] So that's on one end and now most facilities for in the industrial setting, they put all their people in fr gear it's cheap, or relatively inexpensive to do that. basically any of the garment. People will come in know properly laundry room. Cause you can't have any chemicals. Right? You don't want to put tide on, on your fr gear to now catch on fire, but simple things like that for safety, where you're you got a long sleeve fr shirt fr pants.
[00:13:44] And then if you need to, if you're working on big gear, you can put on like the bumps squad suit basically to go work on like main switch gear and all this other stuff. And those simple little things. It's where for the most part guys were getting. You know, secondary burns at worst. It, you know, it's a bad, bad sunburn, third and fourth degree, or where it's like below the skin layer.
[00:14:05] Now you need to start going to a burn ward. And it, I mean, a lot of these it's, it happens in the blink of an eye it's super fast and you're never going to be like catching a fireball or an electrical thing. So a lot of these safety measures that have been put in place in the last 10, 15 years are pretty simple, just like clicking in up.
[00:14:27] You know, to a scissor lift, right? It takes no time, but now it's an automatic reflex. Just like going to work. Now you put on your safety glasses, your fr gear and everything just works. And I think that gets left out because now it's an automatic thing. That change period was pretty difficult. Or like, guys are like, why do I have to wear this?
[00:14:48] What is, why do I have to clip in? I'm not reaching over the rail and now it's, you know, they. Because nothing bad has happened. There's also that sense of safety or security and low of, you know, nothing bad ever happens. So that's the other side of the equation too. And we kind of touched on that, last week on our episode that that published today in, in the, the force of habit and, and the change of habit and how difficult that is.
[00:15:19] but I think you're right, you know, it's. It's a, it's a function of that habit of, of being forced to do these new safety measures for say the last 10 years, what does blanket call it? You know, now it's, it's become habit for a lot of people. And there are a lot of guys who get lulled into a false, safe sense of safety, you know, with that, that blanket that, okay, we don't really need this nothing's ever happened, but you still, you know, and construction, but in a lot of, a lot of trades in general, there's, there's always that blink of the eye.
[00:15:52] Shit, that can just happen. And, and that's when you, you very quickly remember why safety measures are in place for, a real short time in my, my history a couple of years, I was a firefighter on a local fire department and we had a structure fire one night and I wasn't actually there. So I'm telling this third hand, but, but one of our guys, was dawning as you know, all of his, his turnout gear with a full SCBA, you know, that the metal air pack.
[00:16:21] Well, someone had pulled the meter out of the DTE housing already, the main electric feed. And he either didn't know it or didn't see it or whatever. He, he went to squeeze by it and he kind of turned as he did. So, and his pack has air pack actually hit the meter and it welded his pack to the meter and they were, the guys were telling me that it was just this giant blue aura around him.
[00:16:49] Now, luckily, you know, thank God. One of our lieutenants was close enough and saw it. And he literally ran at him. He bull rushed him and tackled him off of the, the meter can. the dude spent a couple of days in the hospital being monitored and, and he was perfectly fine, but it just kind of goes back to that point, that the simplest things, you know, just, just walking down the side of a house, if you're not paying attention all the time, They could be disastrous.
[00:17:18] And that's kind of the point of construction safety, I think in general is that it's, it's that one out of a million chance. Right? And if, if you can prevent that by wearing your bomb suit, you know, or wearing the fr gear or clicking in on your, your scissor lift, it's pretty, pretty low cost, investments in your future.
[00:17:44] Yeah, and this is what it comes down to. Right? So the initial costs for any of these programs, like to change out your guys from a regular long sleeve shirt. And again, you're going through like Aramark or whoever to get your gear. And, you know, the initial like change is. You know, it's a little bit of an investment, whatever five, 10 grand could be more depending on how many people you have, but it is, you know, the facility has to put those costs in, but on the other side of it, you know, if a event were to happen, right, and you didn't have that gear now, like just your insurance premiums are going to be way more than that one a minute.
[00:18:29] Yeah. I mean like, well, and whatever you're going to have to pay in OSHA fines and everything else to deal with whatever the event is because you didn't have this. So by putting it in place by, you know, and now your people don't have to change, it becomes, an easy thing. Right? So by putting like your electricians, especially in FRV are now, it's a very simple thing to move forward with because.
[00:18:54] You're risk mitigated everything in the F like most things in the future. And you're, you're lower in your premiums. You're not going to have to deal with OSHA fines and just a complete risk mitigation. And that's, there's so many things, right. That we're dealing with. Negative consequences. We don't.
[00:19:14] Always, and this is it's bad that we have to like negatively reinforce these things through OSHA fines, through the fear of, of those things and not the, Hey you're going to go home at the end of the day. Right? Like that all these negative consequences are what forced people to do things versus like, don't you want your people to be, you know, happy, healthy, secure, safe at the end of the day.
[00:19:37] but far too often, you know, it's OSHA fines or, or things like that that ultimately make us. Do the right thing. And it's, it's unfortunate, but that's just human nature, right? Because the reality is economically, it, it, you take a hit to Institute these programs, whether it's small, big, or somewhere in between.
[00:19:59] And, but I can tell you through firsthand experience to have somebody fall off a building and become a quadriplegic on one of your projects, because they weren't. Being safe. They did, they weren't harnessed. They weren't tied off. That's a horrible thing to, to witness. It's a horrible thing to, to get past.
[00:20:19] it makes you real in the blink of an eye think, okay. We could have spent however many dollars to Institute this safety program to outfit all of everybody with harnesses and, and tie-down points. And maybe that wouldn't happen that cost now that economic cost becomes really, really minuscule in, in the mind of.
[00:20:41] I would think most people it certainly did with me. Yeah. I mean, that's a horrible tragedy and I mean, this is why a lot of things get instituted is on the back of something terrible. And ultimately what we're trying to do is, you know, training across the board should always have an ROI. Right. You might not see an ROI from training immediately, but by training and creating habits from your people, right?
[00:21:16] Whether that's clipping in wearing fr gear, putting on safety glasses, wearing hearing protection, right. And now how many places do you go to where. A hard hat, safety glasses, you know, hearing protection in some cases are like, it's not even questioned. People are just, it's a normal thing. No, one's, you know, worried about it questioning, and it's just, it's what you do.
[00:21:37] And if you're not wearing a hardhat, now you look like, you know, it's, it's a simple thing that is going to help actually protect you. It's proven statistically, like this is gonna make you better. And that's, that's the thing that we need to look at, you know, going forward is, you know, they're, they're really simple things that are proven, you know, safety glasses, hard hats here in protection for again, longterm health.
[00:22:03] Yes. It's a little bit of investment. And then the same with training, right. That, Hey, not only do you have RNs, but like actually clipping, we do trainings. We make that a habit. Same thing with like wearing a. Both the dreaded gloves, whether keepers, all that stuff for electrical work, live electrical work, and, you know, making sure that it's dead before we actually work on it is doing those things, you know, by making that a habit by training, by practicing on actual dead and like equipment.
[00:22:33] Now, when you go into the field, things are a little easier. It's a little second nature. You don't have to think about it. And over the long run training will always pay for itself. Again, it might not be like that afternoon, then it's going to pay for itself because you have to ingrain these as habits, but by perpetual training, you know, lockout-tagout training, OSHA, 30 training, getting your renewals for all that stuff.
[00:22:55] You know, it's, it's things that. You might not encounter it every day on a job site, but by going back and getting retrained every year for a lot of these things, you're going to be better prepared when it does come up in the field. Yeah. And obviously safety, I think, is the biggest risk mitigation and the biggest, or the easiest topic to, to pin from the days of the old to the days of now.
[00:23:21] But I think there's other forms of risk that are less. Less dire consequences to human life, but, but humongously powerful consequences in terms of running a business, you know, financial risk is huge and you kind of touched on the ROI, the return on your investment, which, which leads to a nice segue to a, another section I wanted to get to.
[00:23:45] And one that, that Dylan, I know you're very passionate about. So, I'm going to kind of tee it off for you, but so any as a business owner, it it's. It's not hard, but it's always a moderately difficult decision to spend money on something like software, for example. my personal example recently, I've been working with a group, a great group of guys.
[00:24:10] They've got an estimating, product that I'm very interested in. I think eventually I will end up purchasing it. Obviously that estimating software is not free. There's a lot of time and effort that went into creating it. And so it comes with a, annual price tag. And, you know, I had the conversation with my business partner at our, our weekly meeting, last week.
[00:24:33] Just kind of throw it out there as, you know, first pass. And, you know, after the, his jaw picked up off the table, now we had a good conversation about it and, and it was basically left with, well, you're the one that uses it. So if you think you need it, That kind of thing, but, you know, return on investment on something like that is hard to prove in the, in the beginning.
[00:24:55] So I'm going to let you kind of take over, but as a, as a technology guy, as a, a heavy, heavy software guy, how do you get over that hurdle? Because there is an old school thought that in my case, we can do this with highlighters and yellow pads and a box of big pens. Or we could go all the way to their side and do this with, I'm not looking at BIM, but I mean, there's a step before that where we can use it and it's all automated and there's historical record tracking that, that I don't have to do myself.
[00:25:27] And there's all these great features. How do you cross that hurdle? It is a great, great question. When it comes to software, I've kind of seen it all right in. People not willing to willing to do they, what steps do they take to make an cross? Really that decision chasm. So price is always what there's the first objection.
[00:25:55] They don't, there's a belief that software shouldn't be that expensive and we've gotten. Lulled into a free everything's free. We don't have to pay for anything type of world through Google, where you do pay for it. You just pay for it in your privacy. Right. So it's, it's really do you want, you know, convenience and give up everything on the backend.
[00:26:18] and that's what Facebook, Google, everything is run on. So in the, in the free world, you're giving that up somewhere else. The second thing is so. With price, you would more than happily pay. Let's just take a, so in like an estimator, right, 75 to potentially a hundred grand, depending on where you are to hire in an estimator, right?
[00:26:45] You happily pay 75 grand to bring in an estimator into your organization versus a, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month or a year. license, right? So like for my case, for surfboards. So like our, our top end product design documents in minute, you stack a couple of other things to do low-voltage and sheets.
[00:27:09] I can literally create a deliverable for you in 20 minutes from start to finish for 13,000 a year. And it's like 13, five, but you would rather go and hire. BIM technician at the lowest level for 30 grand plus the headaches plus all your time that's given into it, which you don't factor at all, plus benefits plus everything else that goes then the equipment machines licensing, whatever.
[00:27:37] And so it's not even a financial decision at that point. You're just balking at the price of what it is, but you don't actually think it's an emotional decision. It's not an actual dollars and cents decision because when you actually. Pound down halls, all the numbers, right. For whether it's an estimating platform, most, any piece of software, once you're trained on it, once you ingrain kind of the thing, again, there's going to be an ROI or a time period in there for most, any software to pay it back.
[00:28:11] Right. Whether that's Revvit. From AutoCAD to rev it, you know, going into BIM, whether that's using estimating software from crayons to a software, whether that's, you know, going from using rabbit to, you know, our solutions at California studios, it's it really becomes any of those things that I've listed off is far more beneficial.
[00:28:36] When do you start to actually know your numbers? You know, when you start to actually know what an hour's worth, what rework is worth, how much rework do you do? And the problem with a lot of from owners is they don't track. They don't have, they have no idea what that number is. No idea, right. They know what their top-line fee is.
[00:28:54] So in the design world, I'm just going to use 5% depending on what you are, where you are, what you do could be more, but 5% for is a design fee. So that goes to the entire construction team. Or the design team, Sam gets 5% for based on design value. So if you have a $10 million building, right, you're going to get 500 grand for the full design team to design that building.
[00:29:20] So that's architect, engineers, everybody, and then it gets broken out from there. What people don't know like, so you start going through all of that, right? Could they rattle off? What, what do you get paid per square foot to design a given building at that. Fi, no, nobody knows that number, right? It's a buck 25, a foot for electrical design.
[00:29:44] Like, I mean, that's, nobody knows that number. So nobody like most engineering firm owners. I mean, even in construction, like I've never run any across anybody. They'll give you what it costs to build. Right. It's 250 bucks a foot commercially to build this building. It's 300 and hospitals, you know, it's. One 50 to do a house it's, you know, a hundred to do it.
[00:30:05] Multi-family whatever, like they know those square foot numbers and what it costs to build, but like, what do you get paid to do the thing on the other side, nobody knows it. So this as far as like, so when it becomes an emotional decision right off the bat, it's an emotional decision because when you run the numbers, software will always beat out whoever you're not hired to do it, it'll do it more effectively, more efficiently.
[00:30:31] Every time, right. Again, so long as the software is built correctly. So there's a piece in there where you have to trust what you're doing, but at the same time, you prove that out. You use it, which is the other thing back there. Actually I have to run it, but then time becomes not a factor and people don't know where their time's going.
[00:30:52] They don't value their time enough. And they don't value their sanity enough to invest in something that's going to save much time, be more efficient. Like you go down all the benefits, you know, again, whether it's going from AutoCAD to rev it, right. There's a lot of things that just get taken care of, same thing in like an estimating solution.
[00:31:11] Again, like. You gotta make sure that it works once that's proven it. Why not? Right. And then the other thing, when you look at software, is it so there's price is usually the first objection, but there's the deeper ones are. And the things that aren't looked at are how many more projects could you now do right in your world?
[00:31:35] Estimating is the holdup to do more projects. You don't have enough estimators can't look at enough. Can't price enough, right? You know, and estimating will make or break or a construction firm, anybody in the, from a sub to a GC, if you can't price anything and price it accurately granted you don't, you don't know for 18 months, but you're, you're done real fast in that case, you mean?
[00:32:01] Yeah. So. But look at how many more jobs you do, right? Nobody looks at the other benefits side of it. How many more jobs can you price? Because now estimating takes you a 10th of the time to do it, or it automates it, right? Time is just a no factor. You do it on your couch watching Netflix at night. Like I that's, a lot of this is time because it doesn't become a factor, but that's really hard for people to wrap their heads around in that.
[00:32:27] Like, cause they've thought about it this way for so long. That like my case design documents should take months to do where I can do them in a half an hour. Plus some cleanup, call it three days, call it a week. If you want, I still save you 10 weeks on the project, but that comprehension isn't there.
[00:32:49] Right? Because that is so forward and so distant from where they are today, that getting there is. It's there's a big cognitive dissonance between the two, right? It's so an objection to their worldview. And this is, one of the things to kind of look at. I know I've probably gone on a big tangent, but this is, this is like one of the biggest things in software is that like time becomes a non-factor, but in.
[00:33:18] Even in construction, construction's a little easier to get it in because everybody understands dollar values and in time values of, of their people. But even like you were saying for on your side, right from the old guard, it's why should we have to pay for this? You know, w if it's not a person, why does it cost this much?
[00:33:38] And that's a needs to be a shift, but it's really, I mean, it's pennies on the dollar for anything you're going to do. You nailed it. And there's a lot to unpack there. I think the first one is cost. Right. And, and you touched on this right in the very beginning was most people, most firms don't really know the cost per hour of themselves.
[00:34:03] I'll be honest with you. I don't know. I could figure it out, but I couldn't tell you. Off the, you know, off the jump here, what it costs me an hour to build an estimate. I just don't know. And so for me, or for my business partner, more frankly, to look at this, this software platform that can take my time and let's say it.
[00:34:27] Cuts it in half. That's probably probably bigger than it really is, but let's just say it does. That's that's a huge, huge chunk of my time, which is now we have to put that value on it and in, and they're going to do this or this software is going to do it for pretty slim cost. When it, when you look at it, So I think the first thing is definitely that that's, that's a great way to sell it.
[00:34:50] I frankly think that I'll use that to sell it to my business partner. Once I figured out what my number is, the next thing is you got to use it. And that's a, that's a big problem that I've seen personally in, in the construction firm. I used to work at, we invested very, very heavily in. Some really neat software.
[00:35:14] And it was all for the pre-con side. It was very expensive. We put myself in it at 1.2 of my guys through training, we went on on trips to meet the developers, to learn more, to immerse ourselves. We did all the right stuff right out of the Gates, but then real life took over and. Fast forward a year or two years.
[00:35:41] And that software was more or less sitting in a shoe box in the proverbial basement. We had paid all this money. We were still paying money, right? We had, we had signed a multi-year license agreement and it literally never got touched, no one ever used it. And there's lots of reasons, you know, it's real easy to point and say, well, we are, we're just too busy or too busy to do this.
[00:36:04] There's too steep of a learning curve. People are reluctant to change. in reality, there, there were ways that we should have done things much differently, but I think that's a pretty common thing, especially with, with programs that are designed to take, say, a task you do now, or that you've been doing for 15 years or 20 years, one way, and kind of spinning around and, and.
[00:36:32] Change the way you do it, but, but also reduce the output. It takes to come to the same, deliverable the same conclusion, but people get really nervous about that because it's, it's speaking to an intrinsic level in the human that we don't like to work hard. Right. We've touched on this last week too.
[00:36:50] Our, our brains are wired such that we want to find habitual patterns that we don't have to think. I think a lot and I'm not suggesting you don't have to think to do an estimate. I would fire anyone on the spot. If they told me they didn't have to think about it, but there are there portions of it that just kind of become routine, right.
[00:37:10] There's you know, doing a takeoff, you could quite literally teach a monkey to do a takeoff. You know, whether you're doing it with highlighters on a desk or with plan Swift or one of the hundred other options on a computer. It's pretty simplistic, right? It's tracing lines. It's clicking buttons, but if you could take that process and shrink it down, so now it takes you a third of the amount of time.
[00:37:36] And while you're doing it, you have this new program that's grabbing the takeoff data from your highlighter, and it's spitting it into an estimate template with your unit rates and your data already loaded. And it's bouncing it back and forth and checking it against historical data. And it's throwing up red flags when things don't make sense.
[00:37:54] It's. It's cutting time down immensely, and it's increasing accuracy. You know, you, you, you have to be able to trust it. And, and I think that's kind of the culmination of it is people don't just don't trust change. And especially when that changes in the form of a, of a robot, right. Or, or a software, a computer, whatever it is that there's a general reluctance, especially in our industry.
[00:38:20] Our industry is not one for jumping on the cusp of. all things new in the technology world, right? We, we lag way behind. So I kind of rambled a bit on that, but I think there's, there's a lot to it. there there's a general realization that has to occur that the software, just like the robot or the spot dog walking around, it's not designed to replace a human, to get rid of a job it's designed to make.
[00:38:53] That human more efficient and more effective, among a million other different reasons. Okay. When we talk about commitment. So one of the most fascinating things that I've witnessed in my journey through software is it's just as hard to give away free software, give away free trials to get people, to actually use it as it is for people to pay for it.
[00:39:23] So it's, it becomes really, when you start to look at that, it's not a price issue at all freeze, very little difference to pay it's it's a commitment problem. Right? And you have a lack of commitment from leadership, just like you mentioned that you're from right. They, they committed to a lot of resources, but they themselves were not invested in the project.
[00:39:49] They didn't go, they didn't do the training. And this is the other thing, like for any training that anybody ever does, the more successful it will be is if leadership shows up to that meeting, like, have you ever been to a OSHA training and your boss is there, you're going to pay attention. Right. That's just the way it is.
[00:40:10] And in a lot of this stuff, leadership for whatever reason. And I still have yet to wrap my head around it. Cause I don't, I don't get it. I don't think this way. I just, I truly don't understand it, but once, and you can look at almost any firm for the most part, by and large, once people hit a VP level, they check out on how anything ever gets done.
[00:40:39] Right. They, they're not, they're not in the day to day. They don't care. They forgot completely how anything ever got done. And. Again, there's exceptions to this across the board, but by and large, once people hit that level for whatever reason, they're, they're done, they're done in production. They're done in the day to day.
[00:41:02] They're done caring how anything gets done other than you do it. Right. And that's a hard piece to, to change. And if. But if they did right. The firms that have, and I've seen a lot of architecture and design firms that their, their principals, their lead people, you know, invest in technology. There's plenty of architectural examples of this.
[00:41:29] like Frank Gehry who invested heavily, heavily, heavily in technology som back in the day. I mean, it made them. Huge. Right. Like everybody knows who Frank areas. And that's because he invested in technology and like cared about how things got done. You know, Gensler's the same way. So if you're, if you're you want your firm to grow, if you want your firm to be better leadership, I mean, this is all from leaders.
[00:41:54] Have to care, have to invest in how the sausage gets made. Right? You, you have to be involved in that process. And like, I, I give the example of sausage, cause it's the thing, right? Like nobody cares how it's done. It's just give me a, you know, I want some patties, right? Like outside of that, nobody cares. And if you care as a firm leader, and this is who I'm talking to for firm leaders, right.
[00:42:20] For the people that have the checkbook that are signing, the checks that are making this happen, you have to be continually invested in using that. And the longer that you are, the more you're going to see your firm grow and prosper, because once you get disconnected from the production, from that process, you're not going to find these little, little increments, right?
[00:42:40] These five, 10% things that compound over time to be extremely productive. And that's, I think the biggest thing when it comes to it is they might commit dollars. Cause that's easy, right? It's easy to stroke a check. It is hard or. It's outside of their norm to continually be involved in that process once the check is signed.
[00:43:07] Yeah. And I, I, I agree with you for the most part. I think, I think a big portion of that, especially once you get to the, you know, the higher levels is, is your, your mindset shifts, right? And you, you, you have to kind of shift away from the nitty gritty and more towards the big picture. but I think there's a way to keep the pulse of both to still focus on your leadership role on the, on the big picture, but still have enough of a pulse in the nitty gritty that you know, what's going on.
[00:43:38] You know, what your, your men and women are, are physically doing every day for you. And I think it, it it's a difference in mindset too. if you're an individual who's come up from the bottom. And, and kind of grown through the ranks, whether at one company or, or bouncing around, you know, if you've actually physically done all of these tasks, I think you, you keep, a closer reality of, to what everyone's doing every day.
[00:44:05] Then if you, you know, if you bounced around and you were, I dunno, a VP at an oil company, and then now you took a job as a VP at a construction company, and you might know how to sell, right? You could be the world's greatest salesman, but you don't know what the hell, everyone behind you. Out on the, in the bullpen are actually doing and you got to keep that pulse.
[00:44:26] that's one of the benefits of staying small, frankly, is that, you know, in my case I don't have the option. I, I know how to run every, every aspect of our company from top to bottom, because I just don't have the option. If, if somebody calls in sick or if we lose an employee or two, or God knows, whatever else happens.
[00:44:50] I need to know that at least myself, I can do everything. If I have to, for a limited time, there's this, isn't a discussion on burnout and, and, you know, trying to be Superman, but, but it's, it's all about keeping the keeping tabs on and keeping that reality in your head of, you know, what, what goes on every day?
[00:45:08] What are, what keystrokes are being made to produce this thing that I now go and sell. And then these guys go and build, you know, you have to know, you have to know how the sausage gets made. That's that's a great analogy. Yeah, it's a much more nuanced, piece, you know, you gotta be, you gotta be in it.
[00:45:26] You gotta be aware versus completely checked out. And that's, that's really the point here. I think that we can agree on is far too often. It's a complete checkout, right? You hit that level and all you're looking at is forward. Big picture, which I'm all for that, that, that is my forte is big picture where we're going.
[00:45:49] But to be disconnected from day to day, from what people do from how things get done, you know, that's problematic. Yeah. And you can't, you can't be that disconnected and, and run an effective company. It doesn't matter if you're building buildings or you're building widgets or you're making sausage, you can't just lose track of what your people are doing for you.
[00:46:16] Yeah. And the, the thing to, to, to remember in this for again, at leadership at the higher levels is a lot of these decisions. It's one decision that changes a lot of things, right. To, Hey, we're going to use Revvit and BIM, Hey, we're going to go through all of our process to make sure like all of our content is correct to move forward.
[00:46:41] Right. Hey, we're going to go through this estimating thing. We're going to. Do it once. Yes. This is going to be a big investment to do it. Take a couple of days or whatever to fully go through everything. But once that's done, once this pillar is set and in place, Everything else kind of works right. Then it's tweaks and improvements along the way then it's so it's big intensive for when the thing gets implemented.
[00:47:07] And then it's like monthly check-ins right. This is not taking all your time. You can still spend most of your time in strategy and sales and business development and all the big picture stuff. But it's, you need to, when you're implementing that thing to spend the time to learn it to. Immerse yourself and make sure that foundation, that initial pillar is strong without that.
[00:47:32] I mean the whole, thing's just going to come up. It's just like building in general, right? You start with the foundation and if you don't have that, you got nothing. And then the rest becomes, I won't say easy, but it's less time consuming. It's little check-ins, it's a monthly meeting to, you know, keep tabs on everything.
[00:47:55] Yep. Absolutely. So somehow we're, we're coming up on time already. I feel like we just started chatting today. but you got any, any last thoughts or last, last avenues you want to go down while we're still here?
[00:48:12] One of the things I think too, that's pretty structural in these conversations. You know, we talked about risk and. As a young person, getting into the industry or young in any really endeavor, typically you're more inclined to take risks. You're more inclined to, because you don't know what you don't know.
[00:48:34] There's a lot of things that you're gonna do that are maybe perceived to be not risky, but when. You've been slapped in the face a couple of times, or, you know, whatever, right. There's negative consequences to whatever the thing is that you did, whether that's emotional, like actually physical, financial, whatever, then you're going to ingrain those.
[00:48:58] And a lot of the things that we have in construction and from the old timers, the guys that have been in this industry a long time, right. I'm talking 30, 40, 50 years. Is, they have a lot of ingrained things that they've been hit by, right. Life has, has struck them. The industry has struck them. And there's a lot of things that, that they won't do now.
[00:49:22] So in a lot of the things that we, we need to move forward with, it's, it's reframing a lot of these kind of positive things that, that come up. So when you talk about technology, right, because they've been hit so hard, Loss is going to be front of mind. But if you continue to frame things and this is what we can do with it, this is how much time it's going to save us.
[00:49:44] These are the benefits. This is how much money it's going to return us. Right? If you can say like it's a hundred percent ROI, right? So for my top package, 13, five, you're going to return a hundred percent of that 13 five, like you're guaranteed to not lose money in a year. I mean for, for anything like that.
[00:50:05] So you're guaranteed to not lose money, but you're also, if you, again, use it, apply it, move forward. You do more projects, save more time, like all the other things that come with it. But it's, it's understanding that as a young person, you're more likely to, to take risks, to invest in new things, to go and try that new whatever.
[00:50:28] And as somebody that's. Had some negative consequences or those might be, over a period of time, you're less likely to invest in new things because it's the tried and true. And you're, you don't want to change. It's kind of the theory of, of blissful ignorance versus not being able to unlearn things.
[00:50:50] Right. And it's, it's a topic that you and I touched on way back when, when you had me on the show as a guest and that, that beautiful. Combination where you can put a younger guy, you know, the guy that, that, that has no blinders on yet. Right. And it doesn't have to be foolish, but, but the guy that doesn't have limitations in his mind, put him with the guy who's been doing this for a long time, that he knows how to get the job done, but he's got, he's got that blinder on those blinders that he knows, okay.
[00:51:23] If I go this way, I'm going to get smacked. You know, when I touch this thing, it burned me and, you know, on a simplistic level, You put those two minds together and you can create some really amazingly powerful things because you get the best of both worlds. You get the, you know, the blissful ignorance and the, you know, the sky's the limit mentality of the younger guy and you get the rational side, like, all right, hold on a second while yes, we could do this, this and this.
[00:51:48] We don't want to do this because. The results can be catastrophic. Let's find this, this middle ground and, and hold hands there. And, and that's how we really create as an industry. Perfect, man. I mean, it's that exact combination. It's an openness on both sides. It's an understanding of where people come from and then having that conversation.
[00:52:10] If you don't have that conversation, you don't know. But, you know, again, I think it goes to being open to change leadership and taking responsibility for your actions is core values, right? Like, you know, taking responsibility, doing the right thing, being a lifetime student, you know, willing to learn. That really goes a long way through everything that we're talking about.
[00:52:35] Okay.
[00:52:41] Like us sheriffs around, help us out guys. And with that guys, that's going to be this episode of the construction corner podcast. And one last note, if you have any topics, you'd like us to cover anything of interest, feel free to message Matt Nye. You can find us. All of our links are below in the show notes.
[00:53:01] And until next time,