#151 CCP - Matt & Dillon Cruise the internet

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the construction corner podcast. I'm Dylan, I'm your host joined now as always by my blue collar. Bad-ass Matt, how is how's vacation? It is fantastic Dylan down here in Southwest Florida. Perfectly clear skies, sunny. It gets to about 90 degrees. And as we're recording right now, I'm watching dolphin jump out in the Gulf about, I dunno, it's 50 yards from my doorstep, so things are pretty sweet, man.

How about yourself? Not sweet. It's cold as shit here in the mountains. But Hey, that's. Which is that time of year. And I know dude, I'm a big fan of dolphin. So years ago when I was in Maui, we had like rarely where we stay on the west side of the island. Do dolphins like swim in that portion.

We were coming back from just to walk down the beach and we could see him jumping out in the water. So I booked it to the room to go get my like fins and goggles. Cause they were not close to shore. It was probably, 500 yards out. Maybe like you could see them, but it was a swim to get there.

And luckily like I got enough, got my GoPro there and and swam with there was maybe like three or four versus and another time I've swam with a full pod where it's $200 a while. No kid, that's gotta be amazing. I've never done that. And we see them constantly out here, but I have not jumped in the mix.

Yeah it's really cool. Like they make it look so effortless and swimming to wear. And I'm like working my ass off, trying to, keep up with fins on and you're just like, ah, get that. You're not, it's not going to happen. Were they cool with you being around, being that close already trying to get the hell out of that?

No, they were fine. Like you could, they got like close enough. You thought you could touch them. But it was like still 10 feet away, but they were, yeah, they were fine. Like all I took some video. I'll send it to you. Yeah, I do that, man. I'd love to take a look and show the boys, but they're amazing spectacular creatures at the very least.

If you get into the actual science of it and the echolocation and the size of their damn brain, that's, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. If anybody has a chance to go and do that, so like swim with dolphins. And I Florida in Hawaii, there's some spots that they're like typically in, so you can be pretty you can get lucky if you will and see them, but it's for sure something to be excited.

Yeah. Yeah, man. We love it. Just seeing them jumping around and, we got here I've lost I'm on island times. I don't know what day it is anymore, but we got here a few days ago and there was really nasty red tide, like bad enough that I made it about half hour outside and I couldn't breathe anymore.

And that kind of shit, but the ocean man, it never fails to disappoint. Within two days that shit cleared up, it all pushed away somewhere. It's not. The water's perfectly clear at cooled down a little bit. And it's amazing. So cool places. Yeah. I think that's one of the lessons like you learn doing a 75 hard, is that if, like the weather, just wait a couple hours, especially like in the Midwest and or wait a day.

But in 75 hard, like you just gotta go out there and do it. And some days are better than not. Yeah, absolutely. I had hoped to do this add Millette sitting out on the patio with the ocean in the background, in the waves, but I couldn't figure out how to set it up so that you could see anything that the sunshine was messing with my my on-board cameras.

So you get my American flag background and said, Yeah, man. So guys today we're thinking one with MAPI and on a vacation to do things a little more lighthearted, and especially with everything going on in the world to provide a little bit of. Entertainment more so than some heavy topics. So today it's going to be, Matt and Dylan, cruise the internet and look for topics going on in construction and just what's going on in the world.

So in in cruising the internet, one of the things that I found and for Matt, all. Oh, share my screen here since we're, doing this from California to Florida, but with. With that. So a consigliere tests, robots for automated building layout system. So this is a construction company can Sigley they're based in Massachusetts and they're doing a test project on a 240,000 square foot life sciences building with rugged robotics of Houston.

So there's another company called dusty robotics. That's out of the bay area. Who's been around for a few years. Who I've met actually in person amazingly a couple of years ago in San Francisco for the society of construction solutions event that gets held in San Francisco talking about different technologies and companies that are coming up, but it does your robotics, rugged robotics appear to do the same thing.

They use an inkjet to do. Layouts. And then with that, instead of like your typical chalk layouts, chalk lines, one it's a there, and they're going to be using the like geolocation basically within the building. So you can set up all your way points to, to do. And you're dimensioning off of it. I'm blanking on what that says.

Do you remember what that system's called the total station? Yeah. They'll use a toll stations to do distance and everything. So you have an actual Waypoint for it that it'll ping back to trying to find a better picture of these damn things, but they've the other thing that they could do is cause it's ink and, flooring is going to go over it.

They're just going to spray it on the concrete. Is one of the things that dusty robotics that talked about doing is you can now put like room names and ink on the floor. So now you can put more information down than just like the wall outlines, and because it's a robot, they can actually do both sides of the wall.

So you can see where the wall is actually going to. They can offset that to where it's a six inch wall, four inch wall. Like they can do the full wall outline on the floor, plus room names and all this other stuff. And just one person gets at these things loose versus having a full like chock team.

I'll jump on that one. Cause I that's amazing to me. I have not seen that. Roboticized if that's a word I haven't seen layout done with robots yet that's incredible. Typically the way we lay out a building is still pretty old school in archaic with a chalk box and a tape measure.

And then some Aquanet hairspray and, it's painstakingly slow, especially on a detailed or any sort of larger building where you've got walls. Spacing that has to be held throughout everything for all the systems and all the infrastructure from plumbing to the HPAC layout, everything is all interrelated to each other to have that done with robots accurately.

Let me preface it that the ship's gotta be accurate and correct. But and like you mentioned, don't to strike or to paint, print, whatever, both sides of the stud or both sides of the slip track. That's huge because I've also been. Tons of jobs where inevitably, humans lay it out.

It's all fine. And good. If you spray hairspray on it to keep the chalk from going away. But somebody will inevitably put the track on the wrong side of the line. Now your stud walls off six inches or three and a half inches whatever the width may be. And it just, it leads to rework and problems.

So to have. Both lines there. So it almost makes it foolproof for them that the carpenters in the field actually just slap the track right. Where it fits in between. That's pretty slick. Yeah. Any idea what the cost is? Look, I know for some of this, what does, how dusty did this and some of the other robotics companies have been doing it is we're there, they're basically a sub to like the wall contractor so that the, it's not in the GC.

So they're working directly with the wall contractor to put this stuff down so that you're not, Basically leasing a robot or anything like that or doing whatever. It's really coming in as a subcontractor to do layout for these people, which is actually a very good model, so that they're responsible for layout.

And again, it's going to get 95, 8%. There's going to probably be some weird shit in a corner, somewhere that in a weird wall that it's just not going to be able to do so by having their team there to do that, you still get layout. And whether the robot does it or not is a different deal. But it's a good way to cashflow the business with, robotics and testing it and doing it on actual jobs and all that stuff.

Oh, absolutely. And if I'm reading that these things can paint down 5,000 lineal feet a day. That's pretty impressive. Granted, that's gotta be on a single floor. I'm sure. And there's probably different variables that, that actually slow them down, but either way you cut it that's way faster.

Then two dudes in a chalk box. Yeah. And then if you search and that's per robot, so then you deploy multiple robots. You can start to really do this. And then if you get, let's say you get 10 and it's a, multi-store building granted. If the floors report, now you can start to, do a whole bunch in a day.

Oh, I'm just thinking this we're in the middle right now of constructing a climate controlled storage facility. And, that's got partition density like crazy because of what its use is. But if you could deploy a handful of these robots in there to lay that thing out, that'd be a huge time saver.

'cause. I got to imagine the guys that are coming to install our our actual corrugated walls and doors. It's going to take them a week to strike all those lines and to get it all laid out. And yeah they have some efficiencies I'm sure. Cause it's all repetitive. So they probably just hit the end or whatever, but to let loose a fleet of robots to do, it seems like a really cool idea for something like that, for that sort of.

Yeah. And especially if you've already done your job in Revvit or CAD, whatever, and you have all these layouts, you've got total. So part of this too, is you need total stations like onsite which is doing those points. Terribly overwhelming, but it's one of those things that you need to have, some base point set on the site so that the robot can and figure from there.

So that's part of this is, but again, if you're using total stations already now, it's a pretty simple thing to. To do that, with the robot to set that base point, here's where you are and, go for us and mark lines. No, that's really cool. We don't typically see total stations inside any of our buildings.

We just, for whatever reason, we haven't adopted that. Our guys haven't really adopted that sort of tech yet, but we certainly see them outside, w we have a station set up for. Our field layout, everything civil related. So I don't know why we couldn't just bring the damn thing inside the building once, once it's dried in and looking at these videos and pictures, you've got plan that's, it's taken BIM and put it into the actual visual 3d world, where you're seeing cutouts for duct chases and all that stuff.

That's really. Yeah. And that's been the big thing for in particular And using total stations in, where you have big slab pours and stuff is when you're doing anything through slab. So any floor boxes, any chases in multi-story buildings, that's really the biggest piece of using those total stations is.

Now, where all the rebar is. Cause you've done all those scans continuously for pores, right? And at different points within the project. And now you can measure off of that total station where a floor box is going to go where a duct chase is going to go, where a pipe chase is going to go.

All those different things where the rebar actually is. So you don't have to come in and x-ray it to make those cuts. So that's been some of the other pieces and uses, especially in multi-story, concrete, slab buildings to where, it would cost you 800 bucks to bring in an x-ray and shoot the slab.

But if you've done it through the whole process where you've got scans of those slab pours of where all the rebar is now, you can pretty easily. Figuring out, can I cut here without having to bring in an x-ray to do that you can do, and then you do the outlines, with supplying this from either dusty or rugged and all these so Dusty's a complete west coast things since they're based out of the bay area.

So they're only going to do Washington, Oregon, and California. And then this rugged robotics out of Houston. So now they're doing some stuff out in Massachusetts. And again with a printhead head, right? So it's just a pink jet printer basically for this in particular, but it's really cool to see, a couple of these companies coming up and proving that it can actually work and to do it really across the country.

Yeah. And it's we've always talked about, it's not robots taking over human jobs. It's robots, keeping those human jobs incredibly way more efficient than they are now. It just that idea alone upset and lose a robot or two or 20, whatever the job is versus. Human manpower to do that sort of layout, that repetitive tasks that is very easily calculated, and I don't understand all the technology, I don't care to either, but it's all just math based, right?

It's distance and volume metric parameters that allow those things to go where they need to go along with, intertwined in the cat or rabbit. It seems like a no-brainer. Again, I haven't seen the numbers to see if I could integrate that into one of my jobs without too much heartburn. It's got to keep the carpentry or whatever layout trade is way more efficient because they're just not spending that, that dull time doing such a repetitive task.

Yeah. So when it comes down to, when you talk about things like this, there's a few things to consider. So one is just the straight up cost of it, right? What does it cost to do? Two is how much time are you saving? So if you can, now, like you were saying a week to lay it out and you do it in a day, so you save four days on layout, which, you gain back and putting it down.

And then if you also save time and not reworking a wall, cause somebody didn't place it in correctly. So let's just say. You are two weeks to the good, what does that do for your client? What can you now charge? To be two weeks faster than the next guy? And then the next thing to consider, especially for like dry wall contractors is, and all the guys do in layout is what.

What is the benefit of those guys not having to bend down for a week, doing chalk lines, right? Like how much more longevity, how many less injuries are you going to have on a job site? Because you're not stressing your guys, right? Those are the other things to consider. Same with the painting robot to do drywall finish and stuff like that is, what's the, you have one operator.

For a robot that can do a bunch of stuff. Granted, you still got to tape and whatnot, but there's now to do, paint finish. Like you're gonna do a lot better on it, right? There's and I'll bring that up. Canvas. It's the robotics company. So for stuff like this, what are the benefits of, now in reduction to your workforce, right?

Like in, in. Work comp injuries, all that kind of stuff to wear. And now you have one guy using it that can basically do a lot more work than anything else. So through a lot of these robotics, it's not just what's the upfront cost, even if it's the same to do it as layout versus, using this robot, even if the cost is equal, you're you make so many other benefits that.

Plus like we've talked about skilled labor shortages, like the amount of building demand, right? The amount of costs, the amount of stuff that goes into buildings, where now you can have one, two operators and do a lot more stuff. And in a controlled, safe environment to where now, a guy isn't breaking his back to do dry wall finishes, or to do layout or anything like that. So this is some of the things that. When you talk about robotics, when you talk about automation, when you talk about all these different things, there's a lot to consider, not just the upfront cost of it, which I think a lot of the times, and we're all guilty of this in some way, but we, shoot ourselves in the foot.

Cause we look at first costs, not at, total value. Yeah. Cause that's been the way. Raised, we've all been trained to protect that bottom line at all costs. And that's how we all make money. That's how we succeed. But you're right. If you protect that bottom line to the point where you're not protecting your human capital, what good are you then?

Because we do have a labor shortage. We've talked about that quite a bit. We don't have an influx of people like we need in this industry. It just makes a lot of sense if there's a technology available to go finish walls and it works and it's easily deployable, and it's not gimmicky anymore.

And that's going to keep my finisher working for maybe another, I dunno, how do you quantify it? It's protecting his back. It's protecting his shoulder. And you still get a quality product. You still have those people who need to be involved, because like you mentioned, with the layout robots, there's always going to be anomalies in any job where a robot just can't quickly figure it out.

They're not a hundred percent autonomous yet. So you still have to have your finisher around because there's going to be weird corners or curves or, bulkheads or something where the robot just can't do it. You can greatly reduce the workload and the physical task on your finisher by having this thing working alongside.

Yeah. And it, to even tie some of the things that we talked about last week with cash flows now, for manpower, for resource allocations, for job costing, right? Like you can have something like this and put it on a job site, earlier, to help with cashflows because now you can do more in a shorter period of time, meaning you're going to get paid more for it and all that type of stuff.

It's no different than, the analogy of a hammer to a nail gun. Like it's the same thing. It, you improve efficiencies. You it's more consistent, less work, right? It's the same thing. It's just in a different, bigger form. Yeah. And as owners, as leaders, we just have to be planning for that sort of thing.

It's a hammer to a nail gun. It's a shovel to a bottle. Is there's ways to increase efficiency really easily out there available. And as long as you're planning for it from the very beginning, and you're building those costs into your estimates, you're building that time or taking off that time, rather out of your schedules, it really seems quite easy to figure out how to deploy that sort of any, anything, as long as you plan it, it's all about planning.

And as long as you're planning early, You can work quite, almost anything into a project, speaking of big projects. And I'm trying to find things that are nice and fun here versus some of the other things that are in the news, but in Turkey they are getting close to. The world's longest suspension bridge.

So they've got kind of everything in place. And with that, it's going to be 2023 meters edging out Japan's Akashi Kyoko bridge, which has a 1,992 meter span. Which is fine. So for really big engineering projects the, and it's the hundredth year of the Turkish Republic, really nothing to do with the bridge other than this is just really cool.

So they're putting in the suspension bridge, we're looking at some pictures to where they've got the piers in the water. When the suspension bridge in, they've got some peers in and starting to set roof deck or set deck for the traffic. It looks like they've got, 2, 3, 4 piers in there. Pretty cool.

Really cool. It is very cool. And it's crazy to me to think about the machinery the equipment needed, like just to set those piers alone. That's stuff that in my world we don't see obviously, but to set those beers and then to somehow drape those cable or whatever the hell it actually is called.

That's still cable. It's gotta be just a phenomenally huge barge crane that what they use for this sort of thing, 5,000 ton floating crane. And. Where this is. So this is over one of the straits in Turkey. And it's been a project like in the works for 30 years, apparently. But in this, they apparently have severe weather, so they got a plan to set the decks when the wind is not too severe and probably they probably.

A couple of foot ocean waves through this. So three, four foot way. I have no idea, but like here's a two cranes with 300 ton lifting capacity to place the final quarter panel forming last tower and just 30 minutes had like plan and execute this thing to happen pretty quickly. That's astonishing.

I just look back at this summer that we've had in Michigan and, trying to plan around the weather with our measly little projects to coordinate something like these folks are doing or have done. That's something that.

Yeah. And the, in reading this article stuff comes from like Singapore and other places around the world to get this bridge put up, it's a two and a half million build operate transfer contract. It took five years that they put in 2016. So like it's, 25 financial institutions from 10 countries.

Oh my gosh. We'll do the two and a half billion, and then the, to build and set all these piers, five-year construction period, 12 year operational phase, like it's just a high winds, high seismic activity, high stack container ships, to get through here. Cause this is into where's the map and this is into, I'm pretty sure that's the black sea in Turkey.

It's just massive on a scale that most people don't get to see ever. Yeah. It's one of those things and we've talked about it a little bit before is like the amount of time saved. Yeah. So the it's not the black, see, what is this? This is the sea of Marmara. So on the Northern edge of.

Perky south end symbol. So it's probably like in this area to get, ships up and through into this side as symbol and then through and into your the black sea, which aligned, the Southern side of Ukraine and the Romania. And then in the. Georgia. And some, I think this is that Catholic Stan.

So in some of these other countries in the shipping lanes, so they've got to, ships have to go through there for goods and all that kind of stuff. But that's, I think this is where the bridges, like where hula and Lapinski is where that was sitting. Yeah. In here. So it's a big deal, but it's cool to see like just huge engineering projects, and places around the world that really have needed one for a long time.

I was at a conference at one point where they were talking about the travel in Turkey using like Foursquare or people are checking in for it. And and in stumble in particular. There's a ferry spot. So you can see all the travels, but to go across in this symbol people would work on each side and they, there was a lot of ferry traffic then went around.

So it was cool to see some of these different things because of, either lack of bridges or was just way quicker to take a ferry than it was to drive.

As something else, man, just the sheer scale of it. I got, I have a hard time even comprehending a project like that. I've built some bigger things in my day, but nothing like. It's the world's longest. So very few people I've worked on, it's 2000 meter suspension bridge. It's a long, over a mile long, like mile and a half to, to get across this and just the sheer feats to stack all these cables, put it up, guys that are.

Hundreds of feet above the water line, right? The CS, the high winds, like everything that they would need to do to put this together. What's really crazy if you get into it. And we talked a couple of weeks ago, I think about, we were talking about bridges for some reason and the Mackinaw bridge and the sunshine Skyway bridge down here.

When you look at footage and records of when those were built and the lack of. General safety features like that we have today. And that's when it really gets crazy. When you're talking about, dudes hanging by rope, hundreds of feet above, the Mackinaw straits. It's really incredible what those men and women were able to accomplish that.

Yeah. That's why the picture, for the empire state building is so iconic and the steelworkers sitting up there, no ropes, no nothing with their lunch boxes. And, it's just so iconic because. One, it was the, I'm pretty sure at the time it was the largest structure to be erected.

Two was made a steel three. They did it in, I think like 10 months they put it up. So it was built extremely fast, especially compared to today's standards. So things like that. And someone's going to correct me, but it was like 10 to 14 months. It was like, they put it up very quickly to erect that building.

A lot of things with we've come a long way, from, I dunno how many people died and putting up the empire state building to now, what we're able to put up with, minimal if any casualties. Yeah. It slows things down, but it's amazing that just, I can't even put words to it.

In your head, the monstrosity, those people are building and the conditions are building it in. And I don't, I haven't looked or read the articles, but I'm assuming not a whole heap of people have perished building that thing. That's outstanding.

Oh, this is talking about the allied forces, but yeah, there's not a thing. A single thing of death mentioned in this article about the bridge or casualties, yeah. That's mentioned in the article. I guess the next thing to, again, being on a beat type of note is construction technology, funding, skyrockets to new levels.

In construction, $2.1 billion has been invested thus far here. This article was published October six of this year, 2021 saying that we are 100% increase from a year ago which is pretty great. It's close to a hundred percent and late stage funding jumped more than 150% during the same span.

So a lot of people are investing in technology and some of this is going to be with COVID with remote workforce, all that kind of stuff. But also just companies that are spinning up and wanting to I guess let's dive into this a little more because I think, and I've had this kind of insight for a while is there's a lot of people that see piss poor productivity from construction firms.

They see, shitty margins, all this stuff and they come into our industry. We think these firms are going to fair, especially when you look at the massive failure that Tara had in, just lighting a billion dollars on fire.

We had a Gareth McGlynn on a couple months ago and we were talking with him about, estimating technology in particular He made the statement that, you know, if you're not already working on this and you're not already integrating it, you're already behind that. The big guys have been, have seen this coming, I think long before COVID COVID probably help spark a general interest and, maybe ramp up some efforts.

But if you're not getting the tech in now, you're already behind the.

Looking at these numbers that you're flashing out, that's, $230 million, $2.1 billion. That's significant, and it should be a wake up call to everybody in the industry that, we got to keep growing. Got to keep innovating. You gotta stay on top of these trends.

Cause that's no small dollar amount, this isn't just a passing phase. Yeah. And a lot of this is, like in visualization and then. Seeing things. And there's some of that my kind of wariness with a lot of this is for most of these firms out there, while visualization of data is cool, it can help make decisions for sure.

In a lot of ways, it's always, the question always becomes, are they going to use it? You might be able to sell it, but how. How easily implementable is this and how crucial can it be to your workflow? Autodesk has a lot of good things and bad things going for it, but they have done a really good job and becoming a crucial part of the workflow and.

There's, you could say bad things about this, but they've helped in a lot of ways to really bring technology, to bring them, to bring all this, their cloud technology, to the forefront of everything. That's. Really allowing this to happen. And I don't think Autodesk really gets enough credit cause everyone kinds of builds on their stuff.

But that's one, one piece in a lot of this is, how much is it actually going to get used and where's execution fall into this conversation? And that's just, it. When I think of construction tech, I go immediately to the cool robots and the, the sexy side of it. When somebody who's in construction, tech thinks of it.

There's way more technology available out there that may not have the, the sexy front to it. It's not a walking robot, but it's things like let's just throw you out there. Cowabunga studios. It's the incredible design. Software and technology that, that people like yourself have come up with that frankly, Autodesk should get on board with and talk about acquiring you.

But that's a different show, but it's technology that gets used that truly can push efficiency. It's almost, it's behind us. The firms that are using your software, for example, don't necessarily have to advertise they're using it, but it's boosting their efficiency.

And it does get used on a day-to-day basis by their people who are tasked with MEP design in this case. When you see these kind of dollars, it's real easy. I think the thing to immediately go to, okay it's the robots it's doing, the Boston dynamics guys putting on fun, little videos of dancing machines, but in reality, that's a part of it.

Sure. But I think a much bigger part of it is the behind the scenes tech that the average person probably never really even knows what it is. And doesn't maybe have a real.

Yeah. And it's, with any construction firm, I think that, this goes for a lot of companies too, but within construction, within, designing construction firms, we're so focused on the day to day, the fires that are being raised, right? The problems in construction, the different things that we have to deal with to where we're not.

We're not looking up in the horizon, where we're just rowing the boat, really steering the ship. And that's something that I think needs to happen more often is for people to look up, see what's out there, not just the next client, not just the next project. And I get it, within construction, we're fighting for every project we're fighting for every.

There's really no kind of safety security within recurring revenue. If you can find some way to provide, information, newsletters, things like that to clients, and have them pay for it. It doesn't have to be crazy, but to be able to have the ability to really. Put yourself in a position where cash is coming in.

No matter whether you perform project or not, can add a lot of safety and security to your firm where you can go and. Put your head up to go and look at other things that aren't just that next project that you're not just finding a clon tooth and nail to get the next thing and take every project that comes in the door.

Whether they're good or bad, you're going to take it cause you need the revenue. And that's just not a good place to, to be in. Yet that's where a lot of people live. So I think there's two sides of it in that. Yeah, if you, and also just the hiring and firing and increase in people, as you get more projects, and this is a big thing that I've been talking about here lately is that as you look to scale your firm, your overhead is going to raise with it. And then your margins are, you're never going to increase. Sure. The dollar value is going to increase, but if you're your three and a half percent margins, a hundred million, you're only making three and a half, right? Because your margins are so small and that's, retained earnings in the company, not dividends to owners, if on three and a half net margins percent net margin, which is a lot of firms. Like you just need to do a lot of work, take on a lot of risks to make what is effectively very little money.

And you look at the big firms, like Jacob's e-com, they're less than 1% net margins. Jacobs will do 18 billion in revenue and they'll make a hundred million bucks and it, which you can go look up on their 10 K which is readily available. So a lot of these firms are really not making a lot of money for how much revenue that they do.

And very few people recognize that even people in the industry don't recognize that, it is it's always feast or famine in construction. But there's ways to offset that downside of it. You're always, you always have to be looking for the next project, because like you said, we, the typical construction for many ways, even the big ones don't.

Multi-multi year recurring deals. It's not selling a license or a renewal based product, so you have to be looking for the next project, but Jocko talks about, and I'm paraphrasing. You have to also be able to elevate and to detach and elevate, and see the forest from the trees and be able to get up and get that 30,000 foot view.

To really chart a good course for your organization through the future. And if that means investing in software, investing in, design software or estimating software, or if that means investing in layout robots, these are all aspects that are going to help keep pushing us and keep us all in the game.

As we move through the.

Yeah. And as you look at it, it's a lot of these things is, if you let's just say that robot costs the same as a person, let's just say that it costs you 30 grand a year, which apparently is about the same as a, window worker at McDonald's these days. So if that robot costs you 30 grand a year, 16 bucks an hour for, full time person and can put out, 2 3, 4 times the results, right?

Ultimately the work that a person can do, is that worth it? And those are the types of right. And then you can scale pretty easily, right? If you do more projects than you get one more robot, you can do four times as much. It's extremely profitable. You ended up being able to scale without having to hire people.

You don't have to worry about Joe or Susie being. You don't have to worry about their personal problems at home, right? You don't have to worry about a lot of those things. And I'm not saying to not hire people, you do need people and you need people that are reliable and show up and, Talk to the clients and give you more work.

But at the same time, we also know how unreliable most people are in just their day-to-day lives. They got a lot of stuff going on, whether it's at home, whether it's watching the news, whether it's whatever, they got a drug and alcohol problem there's a lot of things going on to where having.

Tools and processes and systems and software and robotics in place allows you to now ride through those ups and downs of your people without too much disruption to the end client. And that's ultimately what it's about. Can you ride through the waves and do that pretty well? And software, and a lot of other things can help you do that.

Yeah. And it's, I'd agree with you. It's not getting rid of human capital, but it's tempering some of that reliance it's, offsetting risk and allowing you to redeploy assets in a different way and utilize your human capital in a different way to produce more efficient, better, bigger results.

Yeah. And it's one of those things too, as firms scale, right? You need people, but as we mentioned, if you're on a project basis and you win a bunch of projects this year and you don't next year, now you've got to fire a bunch of people because you can't hold onto them. And that's the trouble that a lot of firms go through is they hire and fire and they're known for cycling through people.

'cause they can't plan. Their marketing is not consistent. They don't win projects. And a lot of this granted in construction has to do with the economy, what other people are doing and you can't control how many projects are out there or not. You can only execute on what's going on in the marketplace.

Which also is why, if you can bring financing and other things to the table, you're going to be a more valued partner to make those projects happen. So something to consider and really all this is, putting in other pieces so that you can keep your court staff, you can scale, you can grow, you can make more money, take more home with less risk and, allow your team to, to really thrive without working 90 hour weeks.

So that you can pop down to Southwest Florida once in a while and stare up at the other kind of waves. Yeah. And it's, when we talk, work, life balance, all that stuff, it's being able to where you don't have to manage the fires, to manage the day in and day out and that your business is going to be fine, whether you're there or not.

And frankly, most. Design firms can't operate that way. Most construction firms can operate that way. Most businesses can operate that way, where you can tell a great deal of difference between if the owner is in town or not.

Yeah. And speaking from personal experience, that's a very difficult thing to get past and to, That's a big topic of what we've talked about here. It's building culture. It's building based on values and setting in place a system that is efficient and solid enough that you can step away for a little bit because you have to be able to do that.

Cause if you can't,

you ha you already said it. You can go work at McDonald's now and make $21 an hour. I saw this morning. You could do that. And you could, you can collect a paycheck and punch out and be done with it. If you want to succeed in this entrepreneurial life that we talk about so often, regardless of what industry it is, you gotta be able to build that team, to gain efficiency and to know, to get yourself to a point where you can bounce out.

A few days and the wall don't come crumbling down. There are other people with hoses that can put out fires in your absence. Doesn't always work. No, but it's something to strive for. I think. Absolutely. And so for our last article today, as we cruise the internet is Intel breaks ground on two Arizona chip plants worth 20 billion.

What are your thoughts on Arizona bringing or Intel bringing back chip manufacturing to the us? So here's the other couple of highlights is 3000 Intel. Employees will be there in these 3000 construction jobs. I'm guessing this is going to be like a two-year project 15,000 indirect jobs in the community that I believe.

And it's a semiconductor fabricator factories as fabs. So those are the big highlights for this in Arizona. Here's my parting thought on that one. We should've done that shit a long time ago. We never should've left. Let all of that manufacturing, all that fabrication, leave our shores and now we're paying the price.

So it's about damn time. Somebody steps up and brings it back because we need the jobs. We obviously need the damn chips to do most everything we're doing these days. It only makes sense that it should be here under domestic production. Good on Intel for doing it, but why didn't you do it five years ago?

Because the Senate just gave them the money to build it. Oh, that probably helps quite a bit. I see the $52 billion you just highlighted. Yeah. So the Senate passed the innovation and competition act. Yeah, last June. So this event under Trump, which would provide 52 billion towards domestic semiconductor research and production.

I don't know. I guess it took a year to figure out what, how to do the bill. But this project is 670,000 square feet. And it's going to bring six. So it's on an existing campus up to six fabs in this campus. So they're probably at least doubling production. Three times larger than the old facility.

So they're tripling expansion. And it's had that campus since 1980, but they haven't done anything in 26 years. And a lot of it is it's, I won in Taiwan, semiconductor. Announces building a 12 billion, 3.8 million square foot manufacturing complex in Phoenix. So Taiwan semiconductor, which is also one of the largest in the world is bringing their stuff to the U S as well

go faster. We were able to pump out three vaccines in record time. Maybe we can get this building built and start turning up the chips that we need. Yeah, I'm sure the building will be put up in six months. It's everything inside that's going to take forever. That's good to see anyways. It's good for, it's good for the economy and it's good to see jobs like that being created. Yeah, it'll be 30 billion between Intel and Taiwan, semiconductor and fabs put in Arizona, which, there's no better place than a water-intensive facility to put up in the desert.

Yeah. Yeah. There's planning for you.

Parting thoughts for today. I enjoyed this. I think we should rotate this into our mix a quick fire. You pick some articles and throw them at me and then we'll do vice versa the next time. And we'll see how it works. We'll see what people what people think about it.

Guys, if you like it, let us know, share it, give us some thoughts and help us keep growing this. Yeah guys. So this is a little bit of a new format for us, or as we cruise the internet and see what's going on we'll depending on what mood we're in, we'll either make this nice and upbeat or choose the big, hairy topics that are out there.

And and give you our thoughts on them. So we'll rotate what we would go through, what what's relevant, how light or not to keep the episode. But I'll real issues, right? All real things that we're dealing with in the industry that we're having to compete against or deal with in various shapes and forms from really cool engineering projects and Marvel.

To, building new fab plants that we desperately need to robotics and helping us automate and update our workforce and really keep all the people that we've had in the workforce for 30, 40 years to allow them to continue being productive members of our teams and keep them really in the industry, their knowledge within the industry.

Versus them rotten on the bind somewhere or dealing with other painful problems. And that they can't reach overhead or whatever it might be from the years in the industry putting up drywall or doing layouts, all that sort of thing. Always cool to see what's out there.

Always cool to see the new and innovative things that people are coming up with. And as always guys share the show if you like it, if you want different topics, feel free to reach out to Matt and myself, we'll be entertaining different topics. I won't say that we'll do it, but we'll we'll at least give it consideration.

So go ahead. Share the show and until next time.