Tech and Teamwork
Join seasoned construction veterans Vice President, Josh Carson and superintendent, Mike Kuzenski from Moss and Associates as they share their strategies for overcoming tech fatigue and choosing tools that truly empower your team. We'll discuss their field-tested tech wins, how they secure executive buy-in for innovation, and why strong relationships remain the foundation of successful projects, even in our tech-driven world.
(upbeat music)
- Well, welcome back to the Build Different Podcast.
I have been looking forward to this conversation
for a very long time.
One, because I think when we first started doing this,
they're like, "Who do you think we should bring
"into these conversations?"
I'm like, "Well, I'm gonna go find all my friends."
So I'm just gonna go find people
that I wanna go share with the world.
So today we are local in Dallas, Fort Worth,
up in McKinney, Texas.
Right outside of TPC.
What is it called? TPC.
- Craig Ranch. - Craig Ranch.
- If you're a big golf fan,
right outside of that golf course up at Moss.
This is really fun.
I'm excited for you guys to get to meet Mr. Josh Carson,
Mr. Mike Kaczynski, and Adam,
welcome in for your first episode, my man.
- Yes sir, happy to be here.
- It's gonna be fun.
We're gonna have a good time.
This whole season we're talking about
just what it looks like to implement technology
and innovation from a field perspective.
And so no better person than Mike to bring you in here.
And Josh, you've had your way around a few times.
- I'm a washed up project manager.
That's all. - I don't know about that.
But this is gonna be a really good time.
Mike, I'm actually gonna start with you
a little bit about your background,
kind of what you do here at Moss.
And then we're gonna give them some heavy hitters.
Talk about what it means,
what tech means to you,
and we'll just dive right into it.
How's that sound?
- Yeah, perfect.
So I'm not a native Texan.
I've made three, but I'm not a native Texan.
Married my wife who is from Dallas area.
Prior to that, I got out of high school, joined the Marines.
I was a recon Marine.
Got out of the Marines, went to college,
went into the medical field,
didn't really know what I wanted to do.
When I finished college, started a construction business
and fell into that path.
We moved to Texas in 97.
And I started building, 97 started building houses.
And then I got into commercial construction
and worked for Beck for a long time.
As a superintendent,
got promoted general superintendent in 2013.
And then I left Beck in 2017,
and had a little hiatus where I did some crazy stuff.
And then I came to Moss,
and I've been with Moss for over five years.
- That's the shortest intro I've ever heard.
- Oh really?
- That was great.
- He's leaving a lot out.
- Oh yeah, I mean all the prisoners, obviously.
(laughing)
- There's some good stories nestled in there.
That's great Mike.
No pressure Josh, I think my stopwatch said like minute 10.
So, now it's good.
And you're from Michigan.
- From Michigan, yeah.
Yeah, grew up in Michigan.
Just couldn't, you know, I loved it.
I loved it as a kid.
It's a great place to grow up,
but I got so tired of the snow and driving in the snow.
Just, I wanted no part of it once I was able to leave.
So, families still lives there.
- Did college take you out of Michigan?
- No.
- I went to California, then I traveled all over the world.
But then when I got out of the Marines,
I went back to Michigan and went to school.
- And then the snow came.
- And the snow came and I remembered why I didn't like Michigan
and I left.
- Where'd you go in school?
In Michigan?
- Ferris State University.
- Okay.
- So, it's just T2, nuclear medicine.
- Okay.
- Ties into construction very well.
- Yeah, same, basically the same thing.
- Perfect for a super intense industry.
- Sister industry.
Just in case you have any medical emergencies,
Mike is there for safety's number one on my job.
- I'm not that guy for medical emergencies, but.
- Mike's definitely underselling himself.
He's a, I would say a young at heart,
huge innovator, great friend of course,
but he's awesome to have on our team
and it's fun to do work with him as you can tell
at a risk of a day.
- I mean, when I put out the invite to Mike,
I said, "Hey, we do this little podcast thing.
"What do you think?"
I don't know that I've had anyone more excited
than you to probably be on here.
- Dude, I mean, it wasn't even just the podcast.
We haven't seen each other in front of everybody.
- I know.
- Out of all of the project engineers
that I've ever worked with,
I hold everybody to great stuff.
- Whoa now.
- Oh, seriously.
- Seriously.
- You and I, you and I had our battles up front.
- The show is about you, Mike.
- I know.
- We had our battles up front, but we learned to give and take
and you and I ended up being a great team.
- Yeah.
- And so I do, I judge all my PEs
based on how Grant would do it.
- That bar's pretty well.
- WWG.
(laughing)
- What's crazy, man, we could be on here for a long time.
I feel like the conversations that we have
before we hit record are almost more fun
than the ones that we do hit record,
but that's okay, we'll get some good stuff in here too.
So Mike and I did have a chance to work together.
Gosh, out of college, which he wanna talk about.
Rowdy cowboy moving to Texas here.
And anyway, there's some good stories we'll share.
- He's grown up, but you're exactly the same.
(laughing)
- Just out of here.
- He's grown up a little bit.
Love it, Josh, give us a little rundown.
- I'll try to follow that, but Josh Carson,
vice president here at Moss.
I'm a native Uncle-Homan, so similar to Mike.
I did not grow up in Texas, but what's the saying?
I got here as fast as I could.
My whole career has been in Dallas,
but have three beautiful wife, Lindsay,
three awesome kiddos, Addison Luke and Kennedy,
live up in Prosper, Texas.
And my role here mostly focused on business development
and operations, it's kind of my core.
Kind of ventured my way through a couple great companies.
So we started at Beck with these guys.
Got to work on a similar project
and watch this relationship happen from afar.
I was actually working on a different one
in the same trailer, which was even funnier to watch,
but I just spent my first bid at Beck
and then about five years at JE Dunn.
Great company as well, very different in a lot of good ways.
And then made my way over here almost six years ago
and have been helping build our group since.
It's crazy.
When I was thinking about it, driving up here today,
I'm like, how long have I known you guys?
I mean, I've known you Josh for, I mean, 2008.
So that'd be, if I do a quick math here,
that's like 20, some plus years.
One of us as an engineer, remember that.
I think you were the one, I'll never forget this.
You were the one that picked me up from the airport
when I first moved here.
And I was like, dude, what am I doing here?
I did not grow up in Texas.
But yeah, I'll never forget that.
And then I remember the first time I met you
walking into the jobside trailer of like,
oh man, this isn't an internship anymore.
(laughing)
It was the real war building made the big leagues.
- I jumped into the fire.
- I don't know if you might knew that.
We interned it back together.
- I did not know.
- It was a little older.
When I went back and he was a little younger.
- Yeah, that was crazy.
Man, too many good stories.
One, this kind of seems like a softball question to ask you.
But so this whole, why we do this podcast,
who listens, all that kind of stuff.
The hope is, is that we want to introduce more people
to either tips, tools, stories, stuff,
all around kind of technology and innovation.
And when I was thinking about, all right,
who do we want to have on for the season?
Obviously you guys have really motivated
and encouraged me in a lot of ways,
in different ways for how do you do things different.
I think a big thing that we try to push,
we start on this show is like,
hey, innovation isn't just technology.
You can't just dump a technology on a project
and be like, oh, they're innovative.
Questioning out there.
Obviously it's a lot of people, it's a lot of process,
it's a lot of iterations and doing things different.
But the first question I want to ask you guys is,
like, what is your relationship with innovation
and technology?
Like, when you think about your careers,
all the things that you guys have seen and gone through
and kind of had as a part of what got you to hear,
like, how would you describe your relationship
with innovation and/or technology,
whichever way you'd want to take that?
So for me, I see my relationship with technology
a lot different than Josh's.
My relationship with technology is I know
that I'm not the guy that's going to bring
all of the technology and knowledge to the table.
But I think it's very important for the team
to accept technology.
And I'm probably a more forward thinker
than most superintendents.
I grasp it and I feel like, let's try it.
Like, I'm adventurous, I'll try these things.
We joked a little bit earlier, like,
back in the early days, Grant was the one
trying to talk me into not using paper plans anymore.
And I thought that was like the devil speak.
But, you know, it worked out and now I, you know,
I've lived my life that way.
But technology for me is something that's necessary.
I'm excited about it.
But I know that I'm not the guy that's bringing it
to the table, so I encourage the team to use it.
- How do you think that's like changed
the way that you will get it?
Like, do you feel like you've kind of taken a step
of saying like, hey, I may not be the one that goes
and like, find something to think about?
Or do you kind of like accept that, hey, like,
I'm not gonna be the one that finds it,
but I'm certainly not gonna be the one that stifles it
and like, snuffs it out.
- For sure, for sure.
So coming from a superintendent side, you know,
you used to have to be the toughest guy on the job
to be the general superintendent.
You were a hard-nosed.
You didn't accept any technology, you know, back in the day.
I came up under a guy.
My mentor was a guy who was very much like that,
didn't accept any technology.
And so I had to kind of learn through,
honestly through you, that it wasn't such a bad thing.
So, and I've hopefully led my teams down that path now.
- I would say in general, Mike said,
let's try anything guy.
His favorite saying is improvise, adapt, and overcome.
And I think that applies to technology.
I think it applies to problems in the field
as a superintendent.
I think it applies to problems in the office.
You know, I think Mike's always been a huge supporter.
You know, we live in the early adopter.
Let's try anything and I don't get discouraged
if it breaks.
That's great, but you can't have a room full
of people like me, otherwise you get nothing done
and you never figure out what works or doesn't.
You have to have a wingman that's willing to stand up
in front of a group as a leader and say,
hey guys, let's go try it.
Let's figure it out.
Yesterday we were in a kickoff meeting
and it was pretty awesome.
We were talking about, you know,
you talk about the evolution of technology
and we said, do we want to do this in bluebeam?
We're going to put it all in pro-core.
And Mike was the first one in the room
is let's just put it all in pro-core,
which is funny to go back 10 years to your comment.
You were pushing everybody into bluebeam 10 years ago
to get them out of paper.
So it's pretty fascinating journey.
Yeah.
Go for it.
What was that mentality that stopped a lot
of the older generation from being interested or adapting
or wanting to have any new tools
or kind of new ways on their job?
You know, like your mentor is my type.
I think this goes back to, you know,
kind of a generational thing.
Like, you know, our fathers were very set in their ways
in certain things.
And I think a lot of the super-tense
that came up before me were very much like that.
And they, you know, I think what also happened is
technology got so much better from 2008 and on.
Before that, the technology things that were introduced,
not all of them panned out.
So they were naysayers to the stuff
that was being presented to them.
So I think once the first few hit
and it didn't really help out a whole bunch,
you know, maybe they just said, hey, this isn't the right.
Well, let's just keep doing the same way we're doing it.
You know, maybe follow up to maybe pre-grant, right?
PG in your life.
Did you have any, did you have any technology,
kind of failures, anything that was tried to implement
that just didn't live up to the hype?
I mean, so for me, it was always scheduling.
So the scheduling tools that we had were,
they were not very user-friendly.
Like you work on the schedule for an hour and a half.
And if you didn't save that version every 30 minutes,
you risked your computer locking up
and losing everything you did.
So I can't tell you how many times I lost the schedule
because I didn't save it every hour or whatever.
So for me, those are the things
that really would just drive me nuts.
- Yeah, I think that's the first thing I remember
when I walked in your office.
You had this like folder of like a million copies
of the same thing.
And I'm like, the reason your computer is so slow
is you got like 7,000 copies of--
- I distinctly remember my screen was like
a thousand different icons of schedules that we had saved.
Grant fixed me up.
- I don't think you're the only superintendent
who has a screen that looks like that.
- Well, I don't anymore, Grant.
- You taught me what I did.
- Yeah, my doesn't have schedules anymore.
Those wings.
- Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting to hear you say that though too.
Like I don't think oftentimes I'm gonna categorize this here.
Like my generation coming in 2008 or whatever it was.
Like we don't really know and understand
some of the baggages for sure, not the right word.
I would just say like predecessors of what your
experience with technology was.
I mean, I'm coming out of college.
I'm like, dude, the world's my oyster man.
Let's go absolutely crush this thing
and hello brick wall first job.
- It's such a great thing.
Because if you did have that,
you might have been more hesitant to try to present
those things to the guy that this is my smile, right?
So I mean, sometimes superintendents are intimidating,
but you didn't have any of that reservation.
You came out and you were like,
okay guys, this can help you.
- Yeah.
I think the best part too is watching.
And I was guilty of this.
Grant was absolutely guilty of this.
Many particularly young people coming into it.
You have all these, you're like the eager beaver.
You have all these ideas and great solutions.
And you're trying to push them super fast.
And I remember many of days,
it's called borderline grant ready to jump off a bridge.
You were sitting in this cubicle crying
because his ideas were getting--
- Whoa, crying, crying.
- There were tears.
There was an akin edit to that.
(laughing)
But you learned a valuable lesson
on getting people on the team to buy into an idea
as opposed to the solution.
And I think that's that evolution of SMU in particular,
that I think that you kind of went through,
that we all kind of went through.
It was like, get everybody on board first
before you go push it out.
- I don't know, there certainly wasn't a moment,
but there was certainly a retrospect of like,
this recognition that like,
hey, technology is 10%, like the process,
or sorry, 10% the actual tool.
I remember us, I would get so excited,
I mean, you probably remember like,
so excited about, oh my gosh,
I learned something, I watched this video this weekend,
this is amazing.
- Oh yeah, we got to do this too.
- We got to do it every Monday,
and be like, hey, we got a new thing.
- And how much, not necessarily as much you,
but maybe like Chris or project manager
like side of like being like, dude,
we're not gonna go to the next thing
until we actually figure out if this is the thing
that you brought up like two weeks ago.
(laughing)
But like--
- What's the, maybe for you guys too,
what's the risk in that, right?
I mean, it's a sort of rhetorical question,
but you know, hopping from solution to solution,
innovation to innovation throughout the life of a project,
what does that do to a team,
what's that do to the project of a life?
- I mean, I saw you get exhausted,
it was like, dude, come on man,
like we didn't even figure out,
that was my perspective of it, but--
- Well, you know, again,
we're talking about one specific project,
but that was a time of like,
the innovation awakening for me.
Like, I had a lot of different things coming at me
that we'd never talked about or learned about or done before.
So I think probably I had some fatigue with some of that,
but you know, I had Captain Energy here next to me,
you know, feeding me what I really needed to be fed.
There were some things that didn't pan out,
but because of those things,
we found the next iteration of it and you know, they were.
- You gotta try to know whether it's gonna work or not.
At the balance of it all too, at the end of the day,
on that job, we're trying to deliver 1200 beds
and $120 million worth of work.
Like, all this other stuff is great,
but we're in the middle of the,
we're trying to build an airplane in the air, you know,
and it's like, and little incremental steps are cool.
You can make pivots, but flipping the whole script
and taking, I don't know, when you did math,
$60,000 worth of drawings or whatever we were printing
every week, every month on iterations,
and now you're trying to push everybody into bluebeam,
and some folks haven't ever even opened bluebeam.
We were pushing the limits on how many licenses could we even buy?
So there was a financial side to that,
but there was also just a, like, we gotta work.
Like, we gotta build buildings, not play on computers.
- How many times did you tell me that, Mike?
Like, what do you actually do when over there?
- Seven million times.
- At one point, I remember--
- You are checking some middles, right?
- I remember, we were like, so on that product,
we had a unique situation where our office
was an old Bank of America building, or Chase Bank.
- Yeah, yeah. - And it was cool.
And my office was, like, straight down the hall from Grant.
- It was the corner office, but--
- I remember one time I had a laser pointer,
and I put a mirror up so I could just shine my laser pointer
to cut, 'cause we didn't have the intercom,
so I would just call Grant.
What are you working on, Grant?
Put thinking of things, and let's just perfect the thing
we've got.
- Why do you think that job, I mean, we were talking about it
before we started recording, but, like,
if you were to take the recipe of that job and say,
like, hey, this isn't a, like, copy paste
if you do these five things, you're gonna have success,
but, like, what would you say were the, like,
core ingredients that made that job,
from a technology standpoint, or just,
I didn't even say technology, from an innovative standpoint,
'cause that, I think, there were a lot of things
that changed at that company as a result of that job,
especially towards the end, when people were like,
hey, what are you guys doing?
What's the things that are, like, coming on
that you could, like, tell us, but, I mean,
you got to see it, too.
Like, what would you guys say were they're like,
all right, if you toss these five things in,
four, there's whatever, like, that will make for
a more innovative approach than maybe your last job.
- Well, firstly, you have to have a team
of the right people, and so we had folks that were,
you know, further on in their career,
and we had a lot of new folks.
We had probably, on that project,
we probably had more younger, inexperienced folks
than most projects that size would have.
That helped.
At the time, we didn't know that it helped, but it helped.
So we had more people willing to accept
and bring technology to the table,
and then also we had some folks that were really excited
about being part of that change.
Like, even the guy we talked about, you know,
my mentor, who was a, you know, hard-ass,
and he really wasn't open to a whole lot.
Once he saw the cool things that were happening,
he allowed me to feel that it was okay to do that.
You know, at that point, we had,
my boss would always tell me,
"Hey, I don't want you to be him.
"I want you to be you.
"I like you as you."
But I thought I had to be him to be the general superintendent.
Once I realized that, and I saw that
all these people were open to all these other technologies,
I think that's a huge, that's a huge plus.
Also, we had some pretty big hiccups on that project.
We solved some of those hiccups with the technology
that, you know, some of you younger guys brought in,
you know, like we had the Dao Board problems,
and we were having, you know,
we put this foam board skin on these buildings,
and then we would find leaks on the wall,
and we could never figure out where they were coming from.
Turns out they were coming from like 40 feet laterally.
The way we found that out was,
we used a thermal gun, you know,
just little things like that.
You know, so we were always looking for a way
to help innovate and solve problems.
So problem solving, right age and mentality of the group,
I think those are probably two of the biggest things.
- Yeah, what do you think Josh?
- I would, let me spend it to the Moss version of that,
'cause I think there are a ton of parallels
that Mike just said.
We have a project that we're on phase two of,
Irby, you've been out there.
Irby one, and Irby two's doing great,
but Irby one was our first big tower in Dallas.
It was our plant the flag,
and to Mike's point, everybody gets some energy
around that, right?
Like, oh, we are here.
We're all Dallas people starting an office,
and we're building, we're playing in big boy land.
Whereas Mike Maselik's called it Barsey.
We're a Barsey player, right?
Well, to Mike's point, that team was,
we have a very seasoned general superintendent
that kind of is open, similar to probably
what Mike was describing, but,
and then a whole bunch of young,
I mean, it's a very young staff.
I would say very applicable to the SMU situation,
when you were just describing it,
it's like that's Irby to a T for us.
And that team tried more, failed it more,
pivoted, did it again, did it different,
and we saw little incremental benefits
from different technologies like Procore.
We're the first project in Moss to use Procore,
and ultimately now we use it enterprise wide
because of what that team just stuck with
and just kind of get through it.
And I think that's one thing, maybe one of the other things
that you were alluding to is,
you have to have some tenacity, you have to have some grit,
and you have to have some buy-in to just,
just try it and stick with it,
and didn't let's call it a fail or not.
- Push the game.
- And I think that that team, I think Irby,
I think the teams that you see doing very different
have that just like, almost failure is not an option mentality
until it is an option, but.
- Right.
Well, I wanna go back to something you'd said
about your mentor and kind of the mentality
that maybe the project manager you're referencing
that encourage you to be you and not be,
you know, don't emulate perfectly to your mentor.
I think that's a very important concept in today's industry
with as many young people that are coming in,
as many of the old guard that are retiring.
I've seen personally a lot of young people come in
and try and be their mentor.
And it, there's a lot of good that comes in there.
I mean, we still need good builders, right?
That's something that I'm a little, you know,
interested to see how that unfolds the next handful of years.
But there's also, you know, that those bad habits of,
this is the way we do it,
this is the way we've always done it,
this is the way we're gonna continue to do it.
Maybe just touch on that a little bit more,
maybe just advice to some of the younger superintendents
that are coming up, the folks in the field
who need to figure out how to navigate the industry.
- Yeah, so my mom told me two things in life
that I always hold tight.
One, you'll never make as much as your worth,
you'll only make as much as you can negotiate.
So I put that one aside.
And then my mom told me,
there's always good parts of everybody.
So everybody that I work with,
whether I do not get along with them at all
or I think they're mostly wrong,
there's a good trait that I can pull out of that person
and use in my life.
And I try to emulate a lot of the things.
Like I learned so much from this young man,
like I've learned a ton from this guy,
you need to be able to pull things from people
and use them, but not be like them.
Like everybody has their own pluses and minuses,
but don't change who you are, be who you are,
but use the positives from everybody else that you see
in your own way.
- Yeah, that's awesome.
I think one thing, this one you didn't call me a young man.
(laughing)
- Well, I think that person did not say that.
- To the like, 'cause I think where our relationship
turned a corner a little bit was, like, 'cause I agree,
I think there was definitely, this was me just maturing maybe,
there was definitely a recognition that I remember
you having with me being like,
"Oh, hey, maybe he's not just blowing on steam."
Like maybe he does have some ideas
that we could actually use here.
And I remember the thought I had was like,
"Hey, Mike's gonna help me be more successful at this
than it just being some kind of like smoke and mirrors thing
that we do here, we don't do somewhere else."
But like talk a little bit about how
it's almost the intangible side of that mentor relationship.
Like in the sense that, hey, how do you almost extract
those good things while also being transparent
and honest with them, like, "Hey, here's your blind spots,
too, by the way."
Like, "Hey, I see these," 'cause I remember very specifically,
you're not sitting in that office and you'd be like,
"Hey, here's where you're being blind here."
And if I'm being honest, like that was like the first person
that I would would be like, "Hey, this is a blind spot
for you, I hear what you're saying, I know what you're doing."
But you gotta remember this, like you gotta think about,
'cause my blind spot was like, just thinking,
"Hey, why is this project manager not like,
why is he not getting it?"
And you would be like, "Hey, you're not thinking about it."
Like, so talk about almost how that side
of being honest, open, transparent, and like vulnerable
with maybe your mental or mental disease
also plays a big part of it too.
- So I feel like I'm on the very open end
of being vulnerable.
When it comes to being a superintendent,
that's typically not something you have as a trait,
I am very, I feel like I leave myself open for,
criticism, I leave myself open for,
fierce conversations with people.
That was one of the things that you and I had to break through.
Like, I distinctly remember to this day,
one of the most important conversations we ever had
was a very heated conversation about you counting the rebar.
I don't know if you remember that.
- I remember it.
- I remember a lot of conversations.
- That was a very fierce conversation.
So we would get shipments of rebar
and then we'd have bar tags on them and Grant.
At that point, Grant didn't think
that it was his job to do that.
And so we had it out.
- This is an exposing episode.
- Typical new engineer though.
- So it's really not even about that.
That taught me that I was able to get through
to a young man who sees things totally different than me.
And I think that also taught you that you and I
were able to argue and still work through it.
Because at that point, I think you were so young
in the business that you, I think you thought
that that would be like a.
- It was under me.
- Yeah.
- Very much so.
- Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, I think it was a great lesson for both of us.
We broke through something there.
And I think to speak to what happened is
you have to just be able to break through
any kind of force fields each other have up.
Like, if you're part of a team,
then you've got to be able to have fierce conversations.
And I think that for me is a big part of
how you lead a team and how you be a good teammate.
I learned most of my leadership stuff.
I learned in sports.
Being a teammate, baseball, football, hockey, whatever it is,
you have your role, you have to do it.
But you also have to try to be the best
at bringing everybody together when it's time.
And I think a big part of being on a team
is being able to have fierce conversations.
- I'm glad the team comment came up.
'Cause I mean, again, for those that didn't get
the present pleasure of the pre-recorded version
of the conversation of the catch-up,
which I'm sure if anybody listening has been
on a project team, has worked for a construction company
for a long time, you've had those conversations.
I've had those with my old Turner teams.
What is it about a job site team?
The core, the nucleus of the construction project
that is running the job, reviewing some middles,
counting the rebar, there's a task and a role
for everyone there.
What makes that team function highly?
Have you found a secret sauce over the course of your career?
- I feel like I do.
So I was a recon marine.
So I operated in a six-man team.
You had to know exactly what this guy was thinking,
exactly what this guy was thinking
and exactly what the capabilities of each teammate are.
Even if your role is X,
if I know that you can't fully do X without some help from Grant,
then you have to be able to understand that and play that.
For me, I think the most important thing
for being a fluid and productive team
is to be able to know each other well
and understand each other's limits
and be able to communicate somehow effectively.
Fierce conversations or love or whatever it is,
you have to bond somehow to get to the finish line.
- That's great.
- I think something, Josh, I'm gonna almost kick to you
'cause I remember seeing this when you and I
interned together and just, I don't know
'cause I kind of got to know you too.
We had those moments at that job
that we were just kind of forged by fun.
Like we'd be there on a Saturday,
we're cooking burgers and the grill catches on fun.
(laughing)
Like, but I think something that you've done well
and almost like what by example is like,
"Hey, yes, we're here to build a job.
"We're here to obviously get a job done
"at the end of the day and leave this for the client."
But like, "Hey, we're not having fun along the way."
Like, we're definitely missing it.
Like, how have you seen that kind of help
with team building too?
Because if you're always just coming to the job
six a.m., leaving the seven, like,
you're gonna get burnt out, you know?
And I don't know, I think we naturally had it
because of that job.
It's had so many random characteristics.
But like, how have you seen the dynamics
of being outside of the job side trailer,
outside of the job office or office like this,
help build the teams in a way that you're like,
"Okay, now when you hit the ground running at six a.m.,
"you guys are in a clearly different mental state
"and relational state with each other."
- Yeah.
Well, a couple of things I'm thinking of.
So one, this is a people business.
We just happen to build buildings.
That's our byproduct.
But we're in the business of relationships, right?
And if whether that's on your job site team
with your client or whatever,
it's all a function of how deep are those relationships,
how about genuine are those relationships.
So I would tell you every successful team I've been a part of
had a lot of fun together.
But because really, whenever you get outside the office,
you have fun, you like to grill on fire, whatever you do,
there's laughter, it creates vulnerability,
it creates a moment of like,
"Hey, we're all the same people at the end of the day
"and we're all on the same team."
Our sign all says, "Moss" or whatever, "company."
And I think that's what bridges those generational
differences of young and old or innovative or not
or whatever, like we're just dudes and ladies doing construction.
So I think that core of just remember the value
of those relationships, that's one of our values here.
And I think there's probably two that really resonate,
but one of them is honoring relationships.
And at the end of the day, that's really, really important.
Second is contagious energy.
Work hard, be nice, have fun.
Pretty straightforward advice if you want a high performing
team, if you do those things together.
So for me and my come up, the coolest thing is
hopefully being a little bit inspiring or enabling
when you're in a position of authority,
making sure that those around you and below you
perverbably understand that you support that, you want that.
There's money for that, there's time for that,
there's a focus on that.
I think it's a really, really important role that I play.
And then it's really rewarding for me to sit back
and see the teams go out and do that.
The guys at Hawke Day, the team, the project
that Mike just finished, I think they emulated it really well.
And all of them really contribute here,
but you get these stories of these text messages
where they went and they bought this giant-sized teddy bear
and they gave it to the team, the soccer team or the cross
team that was playing for their first event.
And I had nothing to do with that.
They knew Voli is a couple hundred bucks, whatever.
We'd get careless.
But they did that.
I get a text from the client, your team's amazing.
And they're like, they are amazing.
They had nothing to do with Josh.
That was Mike and JP doing what they-- and Tommy doing what
they do best.
And that's really, really rewarding.
That's inspiring to me because that's a good reminder to,
like, hey, that job was very successful.
Let's go do that again.
Those are the jobs that are fun.
Those are the jobs that--
Yeah, you're going to be in the fire on certain days.
You're going to have those fierce conversations.
There's going to be stressful moments.
There's going to be long hours.
But the thing in the day, we're enjoying what we're doing here.
And it's all worth it.
Right?
It's all worth it.
I mean, it's the old anecdote.
Work hard, play hard.
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
But I think what's fascinating, even hearing you say that,
though, is if you would have told me that 10 years ago,
50 or however many years has been, I don't know.
Like, nah, man, this sucks.
We are in the thick of it.
But it's hard, though, because you're in it
and you don't appreciate-- because what you said,
it's like, hey, those are the fun jobs.
Every job can be fun.
Yes.
But I don't-- at least, I don't hear this often.
But I don't get the sense that every job believes that.
When you're in the middle of it, it's
hard to sometimes see the fun.
When you're in the thick of it, right?
I've been on projects with--
you guys have a cool shuffleboard table out here
in the middle of the--
we've had a ping pong table, a foosball table.
There's some element we talked about yesterday.
Yeah, yeah.
We went to a job site yesterday.
I noticed.
First thing I noticed, you walk in the job site,
there's the air hockey table.
There's the little ring swing game deal.
It's big down here.
Yeah.
And-- but yeah, when you're in the middle of it,
it's like those little things that get you out of the norm
and blow off some steam.
We had little mini drones on one of my projects.
We were flying around in this big open office space,
and that kind of stuff.
I think we get to the project.
We kick on some music.
Yeah.
Right?
That's good.
And then there's all kinds of different things you do to inte.
But something we started back then, I still do.
At lunchtime, we'll sit at the table
and eat, and I'll put on like fail videos.
Nice.
Yeah.
Like, I still watch some of the videos that we want.
That's awesome.
Like, you know, nothing breaks the eyes better
than some humor.
It's my first time.
Yeah, yeah.
Putting yourself in check like, hey, this isn't really so bad.
I would say too, and interested in your thought
on my very first project was the hardest project
that I was part of, not just because of my lack of experience,
but because it was a very difficult job.
We had a challenging owner.
We had a schedule.
It wasn't the right schedule subcontractors that weren't
doing as great as we'd hoped.
But I've told many people since that project
that I would go back and do that project exactly the same way.
I wouldn't change a damn thing because I learned how
to not build buildings as effectively as we could
on that project.
I'm curious if you have any of those types of jobs
that you learned the most on because they didn't go as you
planned.
100%.
I mean, all of my projects, I learned what not to do
and what to do.
That particular project, I learned
what not to do from several different aspects.
We had some challenges in the field
where we might have not made the best decision.
I think we had a field leadership issue
that we had to kind of navigate through.
But I think overall, we all know that there's
every project you're on, you're going to learn some things.
You're going to learn what is good and what's bad.
How you use that information?
Yeah.
We've talked a lot about teams and people and stuff,
and not all about tech.
And just kind of bring one little bit back.
And I think that a trap that a lot of software tech companies
fall into is that we see our products, the ROI, if you will,
is that you get to go home earlier as a superintendent today.
We're saving you hours on your job site.
Can you speak to the reality of that?
And have you found any over the course
of your career innovations, technologies
that truly let you go home earlier than you would have otherwise?
Or is that sort of a pipe dream?
And yeah, maybe just a long answer.
I don't think I've ever gone home earlier because of technology,
because I'll just find something else to fill my time with.
But it allows me to fill my time with other important things,
for sure.
One of the big things that came to me
was making those checklists and having QR codes.
So we'd set up a QR code on every room.
And you could walk up, take a picture of the QR code,
and pop up a list.
That was a game changer for me.
I had no idea that was ever going to be possible.
And it really helped the flow of us finishing that job.
And probably without that, we would have been in a pretty
tough situation to finish on time.
So you have found a lot of efficiency games
with drones being able to inspect areas of the building
that you normally wouldn't be able to inspect.
I've almost heard it said, because I've heard,
and there's a lot of buzzy stuff out there,
like, oh, save hours on your job.
Last season, we talked with a few folks
on some executive teams of like,
hey, we invest in technology purely out of quality of life.
Like that's our driver, like from hearing from our teams
of why they want to use this.
And we, on the software side, maybe hear that.
I'm like, ah, dang it.
How do you quantify that?
But it is kind of unquantifiable.
And it's not surprising to hear like,
hey, I don't go home earlier.
But think about like, when you're at home,
you can be more home.
That to me is like quality of life.
And of course, that's hard to put like a metric on.
How do you--
What are you?
The challenge is, as we've innovated technology,
these little devices go with us.
So it's kind of a catch-22.
You're right.
It may help you, but I just laughed,
because I felt like go back to the COVID life that's still hung
over teams and Zoom and all those platforms.
And now we have more collaborative technology
allowing us to share information all the time.
Even something as simple as text messages
are so advanced with all the little add-ins and plugs
that you can send stuff.
I mean, I think there's a blessing and a curse there.
It's hard to--
We take our little phone with us everywhere we go, right?
And it's just one of those that--
I think the blessing there, though,
and then you may not believe me when I say this.
Like, I have to put limits on my phone.
Like, my phone turns off.
Or like, I will go put my phone in another room.
And it-- because I've thought about that too.
Like, oh, man, we've just like gone way too far down
the rabbit hole.
We're too far past it.
But it almost now pushes the burden back on us to manage it
rather than it managing us.
Like, that is tricky in itself, where it's like, yes, you
are right.
We can be in more Zoom meetings.
We can be in meetings from anywhere.
But, OK, now the discipline's on you
to be that one that sets those barriers up,
rather than it owning you all the time
and you not having the tools to effectively be able to manage
that.
And it provides flexibility, back to kind of the efficiency.
Flexibility is equally as important.
I wouldn't say we work less or more or whatever.
I think we are just as hard workers now as we always have
them.
But it allows us to work different.
And I think that that's probably
where the blessing in the technology
is because it allows Mike to go to a cheer competition
in a different state.
But if he needs to FaceTime and see an issue,
he can help solve that problem in real time
in between whenever.
And so there's a lot of positives that come out of it.
To your point, it puts the burden back on us.
Don't be big boys and girls.
Like, you've got to manage that thing.
And frankly, the ones that starts with teenagers and kids,
when they get their first phone, I'm going through it right now.
Mike just has lived it.
That teaching them how to manage the device is fascinating to me.
It's a problem I didn't grow up with.
We didn't have-- blue or not green.
We didn't have cell phones.
I didn't either.
We're all in that.
We're in the last generation.
I didn't have my name.
Grant definitely had a pager with the clear case.
And the client still has a page.
Yeah, it's a page.
But so I think that's a problem when
you think of generational stuff.
Like, you know, 60-year-old General Superintendents,
they didn't have phones to contend with,
or pro-core, or iPads, or any of this stuff.
Backs machines, man.
Backs machines.
That's what they were doing.
Absolutely.
So I want to correct two things.
One, I'm not 60.
I didn't say you were.
And two, I'm not the cheerleader.
Yeah, OK.
I go to a cheer event, but it's for my daughter.
I know it's confusing, maybe.
But I'm not the cheerleader.
Thanks for the clarification.
Yeah.
Because they can see you.
Yeah.
The-- something-- on the efficiency question,
you brought up-- you don't go home earlier.
You find other things to occupy your time.
That's something that I've tried to describe to my coworkers
in the tech space now about the to-do list on a job site,
and how if you're caught up, there's something wrong.
Can you explain just your thoughts on that,
and how you feel about that on a job site?
So for me, this is a really easy example.
So technology-- OK, so you're building an elevated deck.
It used to be you take a set of plans up there.
You have the plumber, the electrician, the rod buster,
the form setter.
You have everybody up there, and everybody's
got tape measured, and they're pulling everything, right?
And then we got robots, and people
can shoot points and check those things.
The amount of stress that it took off in time,
that it took off of checking a deck--
I mean, 1/10 of the time that it used to take.
That's just one prime example of how technology has made people--
given the people the ability to take a big lump of stress
off of them, and instead of living that stress for a full day,
check in your deck, they can check it,
in two hours, and then move on to layout for the next deck.
So that's just one example of how technology has really
taken that level of stress and energy off of people's labs.
For sure.
What are those--
almost laying the plane here a little bit,
but when you said, hey, 1/10, what
are those other 1/10 technologies that have, hey,
I was doing 10 things before that are now 1?
Because they don't come around often.
And I think what was unique about that job that we were on
is maybe 2 or 3 of those 1/10 came in--
paper, aerial drone capture inspections,
mobile workflows with iPads and barcode.
I would maybe classify those as 1/10 technologies
that truly took 10 things down to 1.
Are there other ones that you see or that you're excited about
that you've come across your play?
So one of the biggest innovations--
and it's really kind of in that same realm--
that's taken so much off of my plate--
is all of the technology that's allowed us
to do safety orientations, log people's safety.
For instance, we're going to put barcodes on someone's
hard hat, so you can go up, scan the barcode on our hard hat,
save this guy's doing something good.
You see his history.
Like, hey, we've made note that this guy's
done three great things over the project.
This guy is a high achiever.
On the flip side, you could see somebody
doing a knucklehead move, then you go up,
and you give him a lesson, you tell him what's going on,
and you scan his barcode, and you see that every week he's
doing something foolish.
So for us, I think it's made our projects way safer,
being able to use technology like that.
Also, like the orientation process,
it's very important to make sure these guys understand
site-specific safety issues, not just general safety,
but site-specific.
So now you can come in, they can do their video online,
they can come in, we give them a little quiz on it.
It takes no time at all, where it used to take an hour of our day
every day.
Well, it changes the safety.
I love that you said that, and I 100% agree with my--
it changes it from quantitative, did you
do the safety orientation?
Do you have the sticker?
Did you fill out the paperwork to a qualitative side?
To my point, if you're doing all the paperwork,
that's the risk side of the business, right?
That's the part we got to do to check the box and say,
what we really ultimately care about
is the caring side of the business.
We want the workers to show a culture, work hard,
have a great time on our job site,
and go home to their families at night.
And that allows Mike, as a job side guy,
to be able to say, like, all that's great,
I'm glad you did all that.
Let's talk about the things out here on this job site
that can kill you, because we don't want that to happen.
And I think that the conversation changed.
And that's two or three hours per employee,
or per trade partner that shows up.
They don't have to do all that.
I mean, they still do it, but they do it at a different time.
Now you're talking about more important stuff,
which is a huge win.
Yeah.
So that, and then for me, the two big things
that we didn't mention were that, and then modeling.
Like, being able to-- remember all the underground piping
we ran?
We were able to take our iPad and see this stuff underground.
Like, that's huge.
And inside the buildings, being able to see what's
above the ceiling.
So if you're going to have to get into a ceiling,
you can take your iPad and know what's above.
That is a game changer for me.
That technology was probably one of the bigger things that's
happened in our industry in 50 years.
I would argue that's the most underutilized technology
that exists.
We can do those things.
But we're still living in the silos of that data.
We're trying to collaborate it.
We're trying to get to it where we can do all the things
today.
But how many job sites do you really see doing it effectively?
Even our best job sites, the most innovative job sites,
they can do it.
They got the technology.
They got the box.
It's all there.
They got to go use it.
And we're still seeing the lack of adoption in that.
So one of the questions that Grant had asked was,
what's technology that hasn't--
maybe I think it says, look back 10 years of technology that
maybe existed that hasn't come as far or something to that.
And I would argue modeling, that's
the most frustrating one to me because there's so much data
that the team, everybody on the team can use.
But we're still crossing those legal boundaries
where the architects don't want to necessarily share
because they don't want to misinterpret something.
I can appreciate that.
Our team, you've got generational differences.
Some of the people don't want to go take the iPad out there
and look above the thing.
Other ones solely rely on that.
And they say, well, that's what the model had.
Well, that's a piece of data.
It's part of the tool.
It's part of the solution, not the only data
in the solution.
So kind of interesting.
In a lot of projects that are MEP heavy,
may or may not have it in the budget
to do an actual MEP model.
So that's another constraint that we have sometimes.
But when it's used, it's game changer.
Yeah.
I think one of the one tents that come up--
I mean, I remember when the iPad came out
and, well, that makes me sound really old.
And also when the Blue Bee Map came out,
I was like, this is a 1/10th techno.
This is taking $10,000, whatever your 1/10th is,
to now $1,000 to go out.
It's updated, all that stuff.
I think that's what's really cool about almost tracking
some of these other tools and workflows of like,
I am probably putting some coin in a basket to say,
like, I think reality capture is becoming a 1/10th techno.
Like, for you to be able to see your job in any place
that you want to go see it from anywhere, at any point,
time travel, fly over it, x-ray views, the whole night.
Like, that, I think, is just a really unique thing
that jobs have never seen before.
And it's so simple.
And it's like, I mean, we were doing it 10 years ago
with drones of like, oh, I need to go check on that.
Well, how the heck do I get up there?
Am I going to go strap on my harness and climb that
and pitch and all that stuff?
I don't know.
Get up there, take a picture, come back down,
look at it on the big board, and we're good to go.
And it's like, it's just interesting how I think
reality capture is almost like also becoming that 1/10
technology that it's like, well, wait a second.
Like, I can see any part of my job at any point in time
if obviously those processes are being, you know,
maintained and held for the whole kind of life cycle.
So I don't know.
That's what I think is also another one of those 1/10s
is coming up and like, I mean, yeah, you're--
I would argue--
You alluded to it.
I would argue a 1/100 technology if you will,
let's get real bold.
I think the iPad was the biggest game changer as a tool.
We're not sponsored by Apple.
But I think single-handedly, that tool
changed the entire equation for construction
because it puts so much data and access and information
right at your fingertips anywhere.
Maybe you could argue an iPhone or a smartphone,
but I think the bigger screen, the simpler way,
the apps that have come along, to me, this is probably
arguably the biggest hardware innovation
that we've ever had.
We had a big conversation about mobile apps.
Well, I'm pulling up the stat, yeah.
Mobile apps and kind of the way that they've
influenced the way we build and the information that we have
in our hands are a little pilot episode of Just He and I.
Last week, we talked about the iPad and the plan grid
and those technologies and even the evolution of the pocket
and the balance of that.
Yeah.
It's like, that changed the industry.
I think about the incredible thing.
The term "auterbox."
Right?
Yeah, we're going to be sponsored by iPad.
How many times did we ever drop our iPads off of the fifth level
deck and it bounced off?
It was fine.
Worth it, maybe.
I was looking at some of these stats last night.
I came across this article that definitely clicked,
Beatty, 100 construction industry statistics
you should know.
I just pulled 20 or 35.
I was actually going to get your guys' opinion.
90% of firms report using smartphones on a daily basis.
Smartphones call it iPads.
I want to know who the other 10 are.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, what are you guys doing?
36% of construction professionals cited reasons
for technology failed.
It was because a poor fit within the current processes
and procedures.
Don't think that one's too far off, right?
I'm just pulling the ones that stood out to me, right?
56% of firms, construction firms,
don't have an R&D budget.
How many?
56%.
No, I could see that.
I mean, I could see a lot of companies relying
on the bigger companies to find the technology
and then they adapt it.
Here's the-- this one was the shocker.
52%-- and these are all from Autodesk, AGC, JB knowledge,
are all over the place.
52% of folks consider the needs of field staff
as a top consideration for investing in technology.
But only 28% actually receive it from their field staff
before investing in the technology.
Like, how much stuff is that?
That's a little wild.
Right?
That one doesn't mean shocking to me as I think it is.
Well, I should say, it's not shocking,
but it's also like, it's shocking.
Like, it's-- I don't know.
I think that-- I think the reason--
I'm a broken record as our listeners
are going to find out.
The reason we're focusing on the superintendents
and the people in the field this season
and a lot of what we're doing in our business now
is because of that stat.
I think we know and not taking anything away
from the people that the software companies,
the innovations that tech companies are talking to
within these organizations, they're very vital
and they're absolutely necessary to continue
to push the envelope and all of that.
But we only really talk to them historically.
The other ones that are allowed us
are the ones that want to talk to us the most.
They're the eager beaver grants in his first year or whatever.
But those are the folks that we typically historically talk to.
And so because of that stat, I think,
is why we're doing what we're doing now
and focusing on field teams and making sure that, hey,
not only do we have a vested interest
in making sure we're building a technology that you want
to adopt that makes your job more efficient
and you see those things every day.
But we want to get it out to more companies.
We want to see more of those companies.
That 56 stat is-- we want to help break that
and make that an 80, 90% stat.
Yeah.
Did any of those surprise you?
I mean, I don't know.
These stats are stats, right?
You can swing them anywhere you want.
I think they do it in some way snapshot
and communicate what maybe you're assuming or interpreting.
But--
Here's the problem that I see with technology right now
on a job site level.
The barrier to entry to create technology
is lower than it's ever been.
You can outsource it.
You can do it yourself.
I mean, my kids are learning coding in middle school
and elementary school.
So that you're seeing saturation in the market
of just thousands of millions of apps or programs
or solutions and not all of them are created equal.
And so the challenge is how do you
trust and find a solution that is good for the team,
that the team can go execute, that is not just another thing
to try.
And the problem is now the jobs are going--
I think construction moves faster today than it ever has.
Probably us getting older.
It's an old person saying.
But I think whenever you give the team a tool
and you want to go use it, they're moving.
They'll buy in.
You can get a leader to buy in and push it through the team.
But if it breaks because it really hasn't been that--
vet it out, you just lose all that momentum and time.
Now you get all this data and stuff,
and the place you can go access it.
So I think to me, that's one of the biggest frustrations I see.
I get-- I probably have 10 emails in the last 24 hours
from somebody offering some solution, 3D estimating,
plug-in solutions, taking our logistics plans
and making them 3D, which we do in-house.
But just all these people just nailing us with advertisements
and being like, man, just because you're there
doesn't mean you're good.
So figuring out what does the team really need?
And let's go focus on those specific things quickly.
We haven't said it yet in this episode,
but that's a feed the field.
Feed the field.
Kind of wants a feed the field button.
Bricks and sticks.
Bricks and sticks, for it.
Feed the field.
I mean, our leader of our company, our CEO, Scott Moss,
says we're an operations focus company.
We exist to build buildings and have great projects.
And so what we're doing is counterintuitive to that.
We don't want to have silos.
And I think historically, we do a pretty good job.
We're probably not perfect, but we do a pretty good job
at focusing on the boots on the ground building the buildings.
Not that superintendents need a bigger ego,
but I think--
I don't have an ego.
You don't have an ego at all.
But I think that it's kind of refreshing in the way of--
actually, at the end of the day, I
get to tell my kids I got to be part of a project.
But I didn't really build it.
Let's be honest.
You're going to drive by for the rest of your life.
I have a whole bunch of kids.
You were part of that project.
So to comment and add to that, also timing.
So timing of the technology.
It's like something big could happen tomorrow.
When I'm in the middle of a project,
when that technology would have really helped me a month ago.
But now I'd have to stop my process, pivot, relearn it.
That timing plays a big part of that.
Sometimes you just have to suck it up in order
for something big to happen.
I mean, going back to our very first question
about ingredients, I don't think we talked about timing.
I mean, that's a huge, huge one that I think
that's why that job was able to see so many of those tools.
Because it was the right timing, not only in the tech
and hardware and software space, but it was also
the right timing on that job.
We didn't use drones to the end of that job.
Because that was the time that we thought we needed it
the most.
Looking at hindsight, it's like, dude,
we could have used that for the slabs, for progress,
for anything early, early, early on in the job.
But we just didn't know that that timing was important.
I mean, just for an example, we had to rent a man basket
for the crane to get up and inspect a bunch of stuff.
We could have easily done that with them.
But we were six months away from a drone.
So we didn't even know that that was an opportunity
at that point.
Yeah.
Maybe going back to the one tenths conversation
is from your guys' perspective, at least at the instruction
site, and drone deployed a handful of times,
we had this question to our users, our customers.
If you could wave a magic wand, you could invent whatever
it is you need now.
What portion of the building process,
what portion of the-- whether it be pre-construction estimating
you brought up, or even close out, punch list, whatever
it is, the whole lifespan.
Is there any element of the project lifecycle that hasn't
yet had that technology adoption?
Or is it still missing the innovation?
What is it that you guys would want next?
So I'm going to say something that's--
maybe it's hopefully coming soon.
But we have the ability to model things in 3D.
I think a lot of the folks at Commod to College
for the first five or six years, the older folks--
we see this plan, and we build it in our head.
So we have a model in our head of what's being built.
A lot of the younger folks can't do that.
So I think a huge opportunity is somehow
to be able to get these things in 3D so that people can actually
see how things are going together, especially
like external, like exterior kind of details.
Do you remember when I went to Michaels and bought pipe
cleaners to try to model the rebar on case?
100%.
I do.
I mean, you--
It was awesome.
I love that, though.
But I built a model of these real complicated core wall
rebar structures in SketchUp.
Because we had a structural engineer that spec'd a bar
that wasn't going to fit.
We were just going to save out all the concrete.
All the big stuff was going to stay at the top.
We're going to have cream at the bottom.
I was like, we can't pour concrete in there.
So there was this visualization exercise
that we went through in the industry.
It's interesting to hear you say it, though,
that the way it's going to be the most impactful and successful
is if it's going to be done in a teaching mentality.
Are you going to learn something not just--
you're not just going to see this and move on.
You are actively becoming a better builder,
becoming a better schedule, becoming safer on this job
because of a result of this technology.
So for me, it's the folks on the team
having the ability to visualize what's going on.
But also, if I could sit in a room with the architect
and the owner and my team, and we could have a 3D model
of what they built, a lot of times, this stuff doesn't work.
So that's where it sometimes is difficult for the field
to explain to the architect why this detail doesn't work
exactly.
That's an opportunity for us to have a situation where
you can see where the problem is.
Well, usually you just set it a second ago
and the younger generation is very visual.
They grew up in Minecraft.
They grew up in all their 3D games.
Yet they come out to a project site.
We give them a 2D schedule that's a bar chart on GAN, which
is the most-- if you really think about no innovation there.
It's probably in English.
And 60% or 70% of our workers speak Spanish first.
We give them a 2D plan, and we expect them to understand it.
You try to ask a question to a young architect who thinks
it's in 3D, but you're not giving it to him in 3D.
I think what you're saying is dead on,
if we're missing-- that's a huge hot button for me right now,
so much missed opportunity on the modeling side.
It's interesting that the root of what you're explaining,
though, is bettering your staff.
It's not a technology that would make a building process,
directly influence a building process,
and make that better or easier or whatever.
It's actually empowering the younger generation
to be better at understanding what it is we're even doing here,
so that they can go and make those better decisions,
and manage appropriately.
The building's a result, for sure.
It's going to produce a better detailed drawing,
a better model, a better plan, all that stuff.
But, fellas, we are creeping towards time here.
I want to be respectful of one.
We're in a conference room in here,
if you are just listening.
I just appreciate you guys making so much time to come in
and chat with us.
I enjoy these conversations, one, because they're so fun,
and you really have many fun memories and things like that.
But I also get excited.
I mean, you guys are in positions that you're helping
mentor and raise up the next generation of superintendents
and project exec, project managers, and your guys' role.
Yeah, it's just exciting.
It's cool that I feel fortunate to have
been a small part of your guys' path along the way,
and don't share all my fun stories, Mike, though.
Do we have another two minutes or something?
Mike, we got as many times as you want.
Let me grab something real quick.
OK.
This is good.
When he has to leave the room, he
know he's going to get something good.
But, yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, I think it's interesting to hear the feed.
I'm like, what is this?
Oh, man.
I think I actually know--
Mike's got a gift from--
Is this something that I gave you?
I don't know.
You got to open it.
Oh, man.
This has never happened.
This has never happened before.
I actually think I know what this is,
because I think I remember making it for you for your birthday.
Is that what it is?
I'm ruining the surprise, man.
The rest of us don't know what you're going to get.
Is this how you open gifts on Christmas morning?
Yeah, this is to me.
Come on, guys.
My little two-year-old--
he doesn't know how to open gifts yet.
Yeah.
All right, thank you.
The fact that you wrap this with-- oh, yeah.
I just--
[LAUGHTER]
Wow, this is going to be actually really funny.
Oh, my gosh.
All right, so how did you keep this law?
Grant, that's been hanging in my garage since 2012.
In three garages, you said.
Three garages, yeah.
Do you remember why I made this?
OK, for the folks that are listening,
this is four baby pictures of me on a toilet.
Probably kindergarten, dressed to the nines with my crayon,
Santa, and then a marvelous looking suit here.
I don't even remember why I gave this to you.
I was just a funny--
I think it was a white elephant.
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
And I had to have it.
So I traded something really valuable for this, I think.
For this.
I mean, dude, this is gold.
I think this is a circuit.
2012?
The grant on the toilet is obviously the best.
Dude, it's crazy how--
It's crazy how--
I mean, yeah, just how--
now I look at this and I see my son and I'm like, holy cow.
That's how--
Well, now you can take it--
You can take it and hang it in your house.
Honestly, since I've had this, I've been thinking of the day
that we would teach each other again and I could--
Wow.
Regis did.
I mean, this pretty much is the epitome of my closing thought
of this is a people business.
This is where relationships are built.
And what happens on a job site carries on through your entire career
and through your generations.
I know this is about technology, but at the end of the day--
No, it's awesome.
One, thank you, Mike.
That's so awesome.
How I--
of why I gave this to you.
I think I actually brought--
if it was the white elephant, I didn't even
know who's going to get it.
I mean, that's even more--
you want to talk about vulnerability here.
I mean, I'm sitting on the toilet, so--
Man, that's also--
It's also vulnerability.
You go one of the two.
Yeah, you go probably more of like, look at me.
I'm very proud.
This is a grant's ability to act without thinking
through consequences.
That's great.
10 years later--
You need that blind ambition sometimes.
You do.
I think I'm going to hang it in my son's room, though,
because we're trying to get him to potty train,
and he's a little inspo here.
Man, that's awesome.
Mike thinks that's too fun, man.
I was looking forward to this for a long time.
It's been fun to come back and relive some of these thoughts
and conversations to.
And yeah, Josh, you're right, man.
We just get a chance to build buildings, too, along the way.
So while I go wallow in my funny stories here,
I'm going to turn us off and we're going to--
We're going to do the next one.
Thanks for tuning in here with us.
I hope you guys have learned some fun stuff along the way.
Mike, Josh, I appreciate you guys.
I like to be with us.
I appreciate you.
All right.
Talk to you guys in the next one.
Make sure to subscribe to Build Different on Apple Podcasts,
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(upbeat music)