Business Innovators Radio - Episode 22: Old School Wisdom vs New School Tech With Jason Perez

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

As we traverse the digital age in construction and adopt new technologies, we need to preserve some of the old school wisdom and valuable people skills developed by so many pioneers in the construction industry.https://yardz.com/In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-22-old-school-wisdom-vs-new-school-tech-with-jason-perez

Welcome to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Welcome to Construction Executives Live. I am your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements out in sunny, Northern California. We are the home of the Kings.

We got beat by the Warriors. We're a little bit hurt here in Northern California. We're really struggling to, watching the Lakers play the Warriors. We don't know who to root for, neither. So we're really struggling here right now, but thank you for tuning in. I know this is a busy time for a lot of you guys, so we appreciate you being here. I always recognize a lot of familiar names and faces.

So thank you for your loyalty. We have another great show for you today. A couple quick notes before we get in. into it. I've had a couple people ask about the recordings. So to get to our previous live shows, go to us construction zone.com, hit the tab that's called In the Zone, drop down to construction executives live, and you will see all the previous recordings there. This is a lot of great content. We're doing this about a year now, once a month, first Wednesday of every month, typically, and the content is great. And the guests we've had, and the speakers we've had have been

fantastic, get a lot of great feedback on it. So we wanted to make sure that we had a place to store this. You will also see that we're going to be adding a lot more content to the live shows so that we have a little bit more meat on that bone. We want to make sure that not only the industry can tap into these resources, but our speakers can use it to their benefit as well. So we're really excited about that feature. Sponsorship opportunities. I have a couple coming in here. Just email us at info at usconstructionzone.com if you want to sponsor the event. And let's get into what I'm going to call a two-part series in technology. So today's show is called Old School Wisdom versus New School Tech.

And really, as we traverse the digital age and construction and adopt new technologies, we need to preserve some of the old school wisdom and valuable people skills developed by so many pioneers in the construction industry. And next month's show, we're going to get into kind of how to lower stress, how to use technology to really tap into, how do we lower that stress and tension that we so often feel in the construction industry. So today's guest is Jason Perez. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Yards. As CEO, Perez manages the overall strategic direction of the company as it expands in scope and size. Before establishing yards, Perez founded the Veritas Group, a consulting and management firm that has great success in the mission critical world.

Before that, he was manager of Southeast Region Construction for Cisco Hennessy Group. He has sat on the boards of several nonprofits and entities and is presently ambassador for the Marine Raider Foundation. Please help me welcome Jason Perez. Thank you so much for being here, Jason. Hey, thank you, Jeremy. I truly appreciate it, excited about being part of construction executives live and U.S. Construction Zone. It's a great show. Thank you so much, man.

Let's just get started with a little bit of your background. How did you get started in the construction industry? Yeah, so it's in my blood, I guess. My father was an electrical contractor, right, electrician, my brother was electrician. I actually wanted something different in my life than that, so I didn't necessarily choose it. I think maybe God chose it for me. Since I was a young kid, I wanted to be a Marine. That's what I wanted to be.

So as I went to school, it took international relations, developmental economics, developed transitional economies. So I double major, triple emphasis, and graduated, you know, high honors and thought, all right, I'm going intelligence in the Marine Corps and got medically declined. So my dad was like, hey, guess what, boy, we're in construction. So you got to make some money. So that's kind of how I fell into it. And what turned initially to be something that I resisted and was thought a curse became a tremendous blessing in my life.

Yeah. So, I mean, I've heard you kind of talk about that a little bit. So you kind of grew up as a kid, you know, wanting to be in the Marines, right? And so, you know, talk about a mind shift. and adversity at a young age, right? So how did that really kind of impact you, right? I mean, obviously you had to kind of change your future outlook of your life. But, you know, how did that really benefit you, I guess?

What's the positive about it? Yeah, well, I think it was the first lesson in resilience, and it's the first lesson that things are going to go wrong, and you have two options. You can lay and cry and sulk about it, or you can pick yourself up and determine that life doesn't always go the way you want it to and and chart a new path. And so, um, although I went through the motions

and I did the best at what I could do, um, in the construction industry, it wasn't until I decided, hey, you know, not only am I going to do my best, but I'm going to go above and beyond. I'm going to make this my career and my path for my life, but I really started to find an affinity for it and a love for it. You know, as a child, we used to build things all the time, right? And we would wire houses. We would build patios, waterfalls, whatever it was at our house. We did all our landscaping ourselves.

And I think it taught us, you know, the pride of working with your own hands, right? And that construction is a beautiful place. It's where science and art come together, right? You got all the calculations and mathematics behind what you're doing, right? whether you're a mechanical or electrical engineer or whatever you've chosen your path in construction be on the design side or the construction side. But then you have this artistic piece of, when I tell people, some of the most beautiful things I've seen are conduit, right?

In Veritas group, we build data centers or we represented customers and building data centers and hospitals and things like that. And you see this just these rows. of conduit just bent and falling on trapezes or up walls. And it's beautiful. I mean, the way that these electricians can bend pipe, I was never good.

My older brother and my father were great at it. You know, I just wasn't necessarily as precise as then when it came to those types of applications. But, you know, you look at all that or you look at a data center with all this low voltage wiring, getting, you know, put back to all these servers and you're going, this is beautiful.

This is art, right? Totally. So, you know, I was very fortunate to kind of get placed into construction and start to see the beauty in it. And then I think that's where I just grew very quickly. I went from being a labor out in the field to assistant super super PM, running the southeast for an international engineering construction. firm and then starting my own consulting company back in 2009.

And then, you know, never looked back from there. And now, you know, part of yards here. Founded yards, it's been five, six years now that we've been working on it. And that's a whole different adventure, to be honest with you. It felt as bad as foreign from going from, you know, going to the Marines to being in construction. being in construction to being in tech, very different. Very, very different. Yeah, when did you kind of realize that when was that decision made?

Because like you kind of said earlier, like that tech wasn't necessarily your natural bend. So when did you decide to get into the tech side of the industry? So we've grown Veritas and we're doing a ton of work, places like Saudi, Guantanamo Bay, all over the country. But my second son was born in 2017. And that's when I started looking. We had an office in San Diego and off in Atlanta. And I was traveling back and forth.

My wife and I, actually my second son was born in California. So even though we're out here in Georgia, we relocated for a little while out in California. And we just looked at each other and we said, hey, this isn't necessarily the life we want for our family. We knew we were going to start our family late, which we did. and we knew where we wanted our life to be when that happened. And so we just kind of looked at each other as a couple and as a family and said, all right, we need a transition. And there was no plan.

There was none. It was, all right, we're going to sell off the contracts for Veritas and we're going to go back to figuring out what the next step is in life. And so we came back to Georgia. And it was one of my neighbors that actually came to me for some advice. You know, he knew that I sat on board.

boards and with nonprofits and for-profit startups. And so he asked me, hey, I'm thinking about starting a company, started describing this like equipment rental brokerage. And I thought, well, heck, there has to be tech out there. Let's just, why don't you leverage some tech and run this brokerage? And we couldn't find anything at all. And so that's when it kind of just sparked some interest. And kind of like, you know, going from wanting to be a Marine and ending up and

in construction. It was being in construction and I just got kind of pulled into this, this tech space. And construction is a very, very special place for tech. Very special place. Yeah. There is this vast void between the design side and high-level GC side and then kind of everybody else, you know?

And yeah, I tell people all the time, on the design side or the big gc side you can literally walk a building before you even break ground you can put on VR goggles walk the halls see all this cool stuff right and it's and it's so neat and you go wow like we can look at all this technology and construction it's so cool and everybody gets excited and then you go to the field or the people dealing with equipment and they've got spreadsheets, right? And Excel is it. And I like Excel, but, you know, you shouldn't be running a billion dollar company on Excel. Right. And what do you think took the industry so long to get to this boom? Because I mean, we're definitely in the middle of it right now, right? So it's like,

you know, is it just because of the old school kind of having a hard time adopting some of it? or was it just the rest of, of, you know, our society not bringing tech to us, you know? What do you think of the problem was? I think it's a combination of both. I think there's a tremendous amount of fear of change.

You know, I think there's a lot of security and what you create as your habits and you go, if this is my habit, I know the evil within my habit. I know that maybe 10% of it is wrong and I'm okay with that 10%. But if I go to this, attack what if it's worse and then how do I get back to normal because what we do know is that

people work a lot the people that work a lot in construction work way more than most people right and I say the people that work a lot because I do believe that there's like an 80, 20 rule in construction. I think that 20% of the people do 80% of the work and the other 80% of people do 20% of work and the people that do a lot of work will put in 16 hours a day and and they go, man, there's no way I'm taking on something else. I'm not going to learn tech. I'm not going to do that. But the other issue is that tech wasn't listening. You know, when you start building things that make a lot of sense for someone that's been involved with tech the whole life, it's not going to make sense to people that haven't. Right. It just isn't. So now you're,

you show me something. I'm trying to learn something and I can't learn it because you built something that doesn't make sense for me in the first place. And there's there's there's there's this major gap. Again, BIM, Revit, like all the engineering side, cool tech outside out there, right? Big GCs. They can have all these workflows that come together from estimating all the way through to commissioning. Right. Then you get to the guys in the field or the guys dealing with equipment and they go, we haven't been part of any of this revolution, this push, we haven't seen any of this. And they want people just to get dragged in to where they're at. And it's not possible.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, describing your business yards, you've described it as new school tech with old school values. And, you know, I guess my question here is like, where did some of that old school values? Like, where is that influence coming from? Is it people or just an innate desire in you? Where do that come from? I think it's from two places. One is you definitely learn this from people, you know?

And my mentors, when I started in the construction industry, Randy Cudworth and Tim Cannon, right? So Cannon Building Services, great, great, great GC out in Southern California, great healthcare work. They are dot the eye, cross the T. big in relationship. And, you know, their thing was, and I'll, I'll just take a sidebar real quick before I finish this statement is, you know, the best thing someone can say ever is that, you know, I sent an email. That's one of the best phrases they can ever say.

Hey, I sent an email because it's documented. One of the worst phrases, and it kills me is when I hear someone say, well yeah I sent an email I'm like well you know we still have something called a telephone yeah so true so right like pick up the phone and ask them if it's important you should be talking to them about it and so you know people still haven't even learned how to use email and if they still can't even figure out how to use email then it's going to be hard for them to learn how to use tech emails really made for confirming things, maybe reiterating conversations, but not for coordination, not for communication, right?

So back to this, these people, they said, hey, send an email, pick up the phone. It was both. Right. You're not doing one or the other. You got to do both. And they kind of drove that into me very early on. This is also the type of people that talk about the days where they had a, a bottle of Stollies in their bottom drawer, right?

Like after work, it was 4 o'clock, you know, you sit down, you have a drink, and you look at some drawings together. Right, right, right. Different. Different culture. Yeah, I mean, my roots start from, my grandpa started in the 50s, 1956 is when my first route in the industry. And yeah, wild stories about, you know,

a lot of business was done in strip clubs. And, you know, it was just like, obviously there was some negative things that went on but he's like the culture was always skin to skin obviously they didn't have they only had a phone they didn't have anything else at that point so you had a roll a decks you know or a planner of some sort and anytime you needed something you had to pick up the phone that was your only option you know and you had a bunch of quarters in your car so that you can hit up the pay phone but but you learned a different way to network you learned that was that old school grind that you you had to do you had to make the calls whether it was

awkward or hard or whatever you didn't have a network you didn't have a business period so just such a such a different mentality from his stories in the 50s my dad's in the 70s to to now i mean there's really nothing similar really i mean i guess the values as long as you have them you know you got to hold on to them right well and and you're you you said something skin to skin, it really was far more relationship driven. And some of that's culturally just more possible back then than what you have today. I think people switch, switch companies so much more now. Where back then, I remember we had like three subcontractors that we used for every single project, right? Or I should say bidded on every single trade.

And so we knew it was one of these three. And we were fair every single time. But we tried to keep these relationships really tight. And we knew that we had each other's best interest. If they missed something, you know, on the drawings and we saw it and say we already went to contract, we're going to work with them to go, hey, man, I'm sorry, you missed that. Like, we went through it. We must have missed it too or something happened. Because again, the process that we went through, talk about skin to skin. When you bid a project, everybody was in the same room at some point going, all right, let's go through the drawings. Where are the conflicts?

Where is this? What are the potential change orders? What do we need to RFI? What do we like the extensive process was done as a team ahead of time. Now it's like submit your change order or sorry, submit your RFIs for the RFP through this link and we'll submit them and we'll get them back and then we'll send them to you. Right. That's not coordination. Right.

You know? And again, tech, like the idea of tech is not just to come in and change everything. Tech should create efficiencies. I say this a lot when I'm speaking on a different podcast and even when I'm with customers, I say, hey, you know, our job in tech is to create efficiencies on what you do today, not change what you do today, but create efficiencies. So now, yes, we have a place where all the RFIs come in. We collect them all, right? And now we don't have to take 25 different emails, cut and paste 25 different emails. We have one place to submit them. But that still gives us the obligation and maybe even more so now than before to review all those. Right.

Right. We have one place. We have less time that we spent cutting and pasting. So guess what? We have more time to review it. We have more time to call our subcontractors. We have more time to meet with the owner. We have more time to build these relationships and talk through it.

And guess what? When you do that, sure enough, more things surface. More things are seen. But without that skin to skin that your grandfather's talking about, it just doesn't happen. It doesn't. Yeah. So it's almost like if you use it as a crutch, right? If you're relying on it too much, then you're going to fall in some pit holes.

So, like, you know, we got to use it to our advantage to be efficient. Like you said, hey, we just create all these efficiencies, but that doesn't make the rest of this obsolete. There's still a component of face-to-face talking. Now, I think the one good thing that I can think of with COVID is, like, people learn how to do Zoom, right? Yeah. And like, if you're not, if you're traveling, you need to get some FaceTime,

it was way more productive than the phone call because you're able to see somebody and learn a little bit about them. And it just changed the way I think we communicated a little bit when we had separation between us. Yeah, I think, you know, disagreements, conflicts typically come because they're driven by ego that are founded in little truths, you know? And the truth that comes from the old generation is, guys, that tech doesn't solve the problem. problem. It doesn't. Tech does not solve the problem, right? It's like my meetings, my my working with these guys, you know, face to face and coordination and relationships with these contractors and, you know, all these other things that they did, right? They're driven in that truth and they go,

tech doesn't solve that. And so now they just go, I'm going to push tech away. It didn't solve it. I don't need it. On the other side, the newer generation, their truth is, hey, Look at what tech did. It just took all those things that you would have had to cut and paste. You would have had hours and hours of meetings. You would have done all this stuff. Look at how cool tech is. Tech's the best.

Right. And we can get in BIM and it's going to show you all the conflicts in BIM. So I don't need to talk to a contractor everywhere. Anytime, right? Any, anywhere, ever. Right. Both little truths dug into the ego and people just, they won't come together and go, oh damn if we take a little bit of this guy's knowledge right and the old school and go yeah all right we can learn from this guy and then we can take you know this new tech and streamline the process to get to those conversations then hey now we have some a target to focus on right instead of going through a hundred maybe we're going through 20 targeted where we can have these conversations we can't ignore the conversations we can't ignore the tech

You just can't. Right. And thinking about this old school, first I want you to kind of give me your definition of it. But in thinking about some of these folks, you know, we lost my grandfather a few years back. So we kind of lost a lot of that. But of course, we were able to tackle his knowledge and gain everything we possibly could about the construction industry. But I don't think that's the case for so many, you know, so many that are up in age that have all this knowledge. knowledge that a lot of them just like they almost keep it to themselves.

They're like, hey, this is the way I do it. It works for me. But now we have all this tech that's kind of slammed in a lot of our faces. I know I struggle with what tech to adopt and what will work, what will not. But we got to still listen to them, whatever that looks like. If you have the Wiley veteran in your staff, you need to, you know, you need to talk to them and get all the information from them that you can because they're going to retire. they're going to be gone and and that information is going to be gone.

So we really do got to focus. And that's what technology has to do. They have to make sure they tap into that source, right? They do. They have to tap into that source. And it's not just about, hey, like, tell me what you know. It's tell me how you know what you know and how you got there in the first place. Yeah.

Right. There's a certain appreciation that has to come with that. to honor, you know, those people forward. And what we look at, even from a trade standpoint, let's talk about the lineage of trade and where it started. Yeah. In the old days, like your trade was your name in theory, right? And I know people talk about examples like, you know, Mr. Blacksmith or Mr. Carpenter or whatever it might be, right, that actually had it as their name.

But the reality is, you know, if you're the one that was. the blacksmith or the carpenter people knew you hey take it down to the carpenter right like they might not even say joe right because that was who you were and guess what your child or somebody else's child was going to apprentice under you and they were going to learn this skill and they were going to have excellence around this skill until one day they became their own master of that skill right yeah And it was their lifestyle. And it wasn't that that's how they defined their entire life. But what they knew is that they learned it at a level where they can carry a name and they would be well respected.

And you knew they can perform that task because they were the carpenter, right? Right. They were the blacksmith. And nowadays, they were the electrician. And I feel like today there's just not that value given to those trades in general. general. And so why does anybody want to even carry the name, you know, if if people aren't respecting that name in the first place? And then where does the pride come in executing that work? How do we drive those values back in there? You know, when we, you talked about old school

values, right, with new school tech. That's what we said at yards. Yeah. Our old school values are, guess what? We're going to answer the phone. You're going to have our cell phone and you're going to be able to call somebody on our team directly. You're not going to call an 800 number and push one a prima number two like nothing like that. It is you're going to call somebody. You're going to know their name. You're going to have a relationship. You're going to know how many kids they have. They're going to know you. And if you don't want to chat like that, that's okay too. You can chat or you can send emails if you want. But the point of old school values is we, we, We want to be front line.

We want to be skin to skin with our customers. And text just not like that anymore. The other old school value is, you know, for us when we design, we say, hey, everything has to have a picture. Everything has to have a list. So like we have can bands where people can drag and drop. The same data can be viewed in a list view as well. And what that does is it allows the old. school people to look at the same data and go, all right, there's my Excel spreadsheet.

I'm comfortable with my Excel spreadsheet, right? But it allows a new school people to be, oh, drag and drop and I'm going to work through this flow can band and all that type stuff. As a tech company, you have to look at those and ask the questions. You have to have, and this was a big one for me because I'm not super techie. My guys kept them designing stuff where the box would pop up, right? And then you would click away and the modal would disappear. And they're like, yeah, that's how you close it.

You just like click away from it. It will close by itself. I'm like, no, man, that's not the way construction works. I want a close button. I want a little X on it as well. Give me every way possible to close this box because I'm a construction guy and like it's on the drawings. That's what I'm going to do. You're not showing me what's on the drawings, man.

You're implying what's on the drawings. Give me a X, give me a close button. That's what I want. Yeah. Yeah, so true. I mean, I like what you said too about that the old school way of the trades. And I don't know when that was necessarily started to become, you know, a lesser-than career. I think that there was a time.

I don't know if that was the push to college. I think that was probably the 90s is when I know it was like, everyone must go to college. And I know I felt that pressure when I was younger. And I think when you do that and you have these careers that don't take a college career always, and they're like a trade, a different path, then it started to shift the mentality of, is this a good career or not? And I often look at, you know, Mike Roe has been a champion for the trades for so many years and decades. And like his dirty job show and the way he,

just talks about, hey, these guys really enjoy what they do. They're waiting around and shit. And they come home and they're happy. So I don't know what the deal is with everyone saying that it's not going to be enjoyable. They love it. There's pride. There's all these things that they and he just showed it. And it was just really cool to see finally somebody actually talking about this is a career that is viable. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. He's done tremendous things for the trades and he continues to to put those words out there. And I don't, here's the thing. I don't want to make it sound like, um, like the old school is the only one that has something great and the new school doesn't. Because again, the tech's important. The efficiency is important. And even

culturally, it's important to be honest with you. There's two things that I think about all the time in regards to culture and what the old school can learn and, and the new school can learn. Right. So, clearly the new school needs to learn a couple things. One is that skin to skin, that relationship, that willingness to get in the room around drawings, walk through the drawings, ask the questions, walk the job site, look around, right, with some drawings, like really get into the details and learn. You know, as superintendent in the old days, they knew. Maybe they weren't experts on how to do every job.

But they knew what it took to do concrete, electrical, mechanical. They knew what it took to do anything. And if they needed to, me as an assistant superintendent, if somebody didn't show up that day, I was assisting people all the time in their jobs, right? Because we needed to push the job forward. So I've done just about every trade that's out there. It was an old school way of looking. Now you look and you go, nobody knows how to build anything themselves anymore.

They know how to read contracts and they know how to push schedules and send emails. And you're like, well, that's not really building. Right. Like you need to know how that gets installed for you to understand how long it's really going to take and what it impacts and how to project the future and find predecessors, successors, and how it's going to impact the schedule and so forth. So the new school really needs to get out there. And the second thing is they need thicker skin. And I know I might have said some people saying this, but they do. They need thicker skin.

They need to get yelled at more. They need to be called names more. They need to like these are good things, right? Because construction is stressful, you know? Right. And the idea that you can have like, you know, they talk about it in boot cap now where they have stress cards and they can pull that out. And, you know, any Marine that went through boot camp during the Vietnam era will tell you like, there was no stress cards back then. Right. Right. So,

but I feel like people have stress cards now in construction and they can pull them out and be like, oh, this got too stressful. I need to like step back for a second. It's like, no. You know, you can deal with a lot more than you believe you can. Yeah. Now, on the other side, on the old school side, some things they can learn from the new school people. One, it's awesome that there's a tremendous amount of pride in your work. It's awesome that you're willing to show up when you're sick and bloody and hurt and you'll still show up every single day. You don't care because that's your job.

But listen, it's okay to take a couple days off. It's okay to hang out with your family. And maybe a very, very, very important one. Like, you don't have to work for A-Holes the rest of your life. life. Like, staying at the same company for 30 years is great in regards to your resilience, but guess what? Like, don't work for an A-hole for longer than you should. Right. It's so easy. Back in the day, it was a little bit more difficult. Now, it's so easy to move to a different company. And I think that's why we see the new generation moving every two

years. Right. Start with a different company because they want more money. And then you have these old-school superintendents that'll stick around for 30 years and, you know, very loyal. But man, you know, it's okay to change positions. It's okay to go to another job. It's okay to look out for, you know, your interests as well. And it's going to work out, especially right now when there's such a shortage in people. Yeah. Yeah.

How do you get some of the old school guys to, you know, I know that they have their way of doing doing things and sometimes they're a little more gruff like you said the job sites used to be a lot more combative than they are now right but how do you get them to start to adopt some of the technologies that that will honestly if they adopt them will improve their lives from an efficiency standpoint like what if they can shave off an hour or two get home to their families at a decent hour maybe they're actually having dinner with their family where they didn't before how do we get that Yeah, I mean, it really starts with early adopters in that space, people that others respect. You've got to get some people at the top and some people at the bottom simultaneously looking at testing it, doing a pilot, making sure there's efficiencies there, showing, proving out the model, and allowing people to be pulled in.

right. I truly believe that a pull-in system is the best system for them to hear that things are going well, that they enjoy using it and working with it. That's what we rely on heavily at yards. You know, we tell customers all the time, you don't have to make a massive commitment. Let's just run a pilot. And let's run it with some people that, you know, some of them that are, are, maybe old school, right? Because we want success for this. Everybody always goes, oh, give me the best

people with tech. Give me the best people. We're like, no, give us some people that are old school. Because we want to prove to you that not only is this going to be successful with, you know, the 20-somethings, but this is going to be successful with the 60-somethings, you know? And you get this focus group, you get them using

it, and you really, again, give them a phone, a phone number to call, build a relationship with them, let them see that you're there to support them. And honestly, the old school people, if they realize that you care about them,

you're not just a tech company trying to push tech and sell, but you care about their day. You care about them getting home earlier. You care about them, you know, retiring happily, not with more stress, but less stress.

They'll look at you and go, you know, I'm willing to learn this. I'm willing to put the extra effort here and figure it out. Now, if you design crap, then you design crap, right? If you have a package that doesn't fit an older generation, then you screw it up in the first place and you're never going to get adopted or if you do get adopted, everybody's going to hate it. But if you design something that's easy to use and welcoming and very intuitive, then the older generation is going to accept it. They're just tired of using crap.

And they don't tolerate crap. They just don't. Right. You know, they're used to building. Yeah, I remember this engineer, electrical engineer, we're in this big meeting with a massive Fortune 50 company talking about building a data center. And this electrical engineer, he's an older guy, probably late 60s, early 70s. And he said, you know, I started in this business when men were men and concrete was concrete, you know. And he says this statement and everybody looks around like, oh, my gosh, we're going to get in trouble.

Yeah. Yeah. But everybody cracked up, right? Yeah. Because inside, a lot of times people laugh at jokes because they know there's a little bit of truth in there. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

So that's kind of the same scenario. These guys back in the day, they've gone through a lot. They've got the things that we couldn't imagine. Talk about recessions and all these types of things. and keep in mind that their parents went through the depression. Yeah. So the idea of staying at a job forever, as long as you have a job, it's a good thing. Right.

It's a different mentality. It's ingrained in you. Right. Yeah. So they're willing to work through whatever they need to work through. And that's probably a bigger flaw, like I mentioned earlier. They'll deal with A-hole bosses. They'll deal with bad conditions.

They'll work with broken legs. They don't care, right? They grind it out. And that includes tech. They'll grind out tech. But they shouldn't have to. to. We should be building something that's easy to use. We should build something that's, that's intuitive for an older generation to use that gives the efficiency that the new

generation's, you know, crying for. Yeah. And thinking about some of the younger generations that are coming in the industry and yeah, we need boatloads more of them, but it seems like they're too often behind the desk, right? So like you said, they need to learn how to build some of these things and not just work the tech behind the desk. They need to be able to boots on the ground. They need to be rubbing shoulders with with the crews. They need to be talking to these superintendents. They need to be talking to that old school guy that knows how to build everything on that site. And it seems like they're missing that visual, right? They're missing that putting an altogether thing. And I think, I don't know, I just feel like we need to get that that pride and

passion, those younger people at a younger age to have that pride factor that, hey, you want to go to the site because you want to see this thing through, right? You want to see this thing majestically turn into this awesome building. But if you're just behind the desk and it's all, you know, pushing schedules and spreadsheets and things online and then you're missing that, that really the key component that makes us love our jobs, right? 100%. My favorite part of the job was when somebody says, hey, I'm jumping in the golf car. You want to go? I'm like, heck yeah, I want to go, man. You know, like that's, that's, that's, That's a time that you get these little nuggets, you know, from these old school superintendents.

Right. You get the nuggets from the PMS. You get the nuggets from the trade guys. You see people cuss each other out in the field and then have a beer with each other later on that evening. Right. Like it's a different experience. And, you know, and we were missing some of that for the sake of, you know, ping pong tables and Nerf guns. You know, like we think that's.

what's building camaraderie in in in these project teams but but working through difficult decisions working through problems is what brings you together and what's what's crazy is people will pay 10,000 20,000 dollars for team building exercise hey guys let's get together and work through a problem that you know that's fun and need and a different environment. And it's like, well, we can do that every single day on a construction project. Right. We get to do that.

You don't have to pay $10,000, $20,000. Put any team on a construction project and you will have an infinite number of problems that you have to solve. And if you put them in a room and you say, hey, guys, here's the problem. Figure it out. Like, boom, your team just got stronger. Right. We get to do that every single day in construction.

We should literally have like special. up teams by the end of a project where these guys know the end of sentences before they're even said. I should know everything about, I'm not saying everything, but yeah, I know some haters out there will say, well, no, I don't need to know everything about your family. But I should. I should know just about everything about your family. I should know about what your favorite food is. What's your favorite color?

I mean, we're in a relationship. Sure. You know? And it's not just my GC team. it's it's every foreman and head of every other company like we should know each other we should be connected and and you know we're starting to lose that yeah i mean honestly we a couple of uh presentations ago with uh with uh a fisk was her last name and she is an educator she talked about this this struggle between the inside staff and the outside staff right it just seems like

We're not together enough. We're not working as a team. It's like two separate teams and everyone's barking at each other, right? They're pointing fingers when something goes wrong. It's not a collaborative effort. And I know a lot of them have like their Monday kickoff meetings or huddles or whatever. They try to do something to get on the same page, but there's still a disconnect. And I think that that's a real struggle for a management team is how do we get rid of that disconnect?

How do we make this all one team? you know, that we're all helping each other and not pointing fingers when something goes wrong. That's just a, it's a big missing piece right now in the construction industry. Yeah, I remember that was the interview with Corey Thomas. Yeah. Yeah. You know, she's very right. And this kind of, that piece is, it's kind of fun to talk about too.

Because ever since I was in construction, it was field guy versus the office people, right? Like, oh, those are the office guys. Oh, those field guys. But it was also like the designers versus the contractors, right? Or the constructors, designers, they don't know how to build anything. You know, we're the ones that build everything. And it's like, well, somebody drew those lines on paper and did the calculation for you to put the right stuff on in the first place. Right. Yeah.

And hopefully what we see in the future here is technology that starts to bring this together. What I hate to see is that technology ends up only filling the gaps so that people can talk less and people can deal with less and people become less critical thinking. And we rely so much on it and that if the computer didn't catch it, we have no idea what to do. Right. Right. And we ourselves become programmed. you know, I know this sounds far-fetched, but we ourselves become programmed by computers. If it didn't tell me to do it, I'm not going to do it today.

Right. If it didn't show me a red flag, well, the computer didn't tell me. So I got my job. Wait a second. What, walk the site. Like everything's our job. Yeah. Yeah, that whole AI component. I mean, obviously it's a, it's a huge win in a lot of ways.

ChatGBT, there's all these things that are coming out that you're looking at. you're like, dang, that's super efficient. But like you said, like, we have to have these checks and balances in place that we're not to rely on it. Otherwise, no, those errors are going to be big errors, right? We got to have those in place, but you're right. We're still a people industry. We're still a people business. And this is my least favorite part of our industry is that we don't care about each other enough.

We're not talking about our families. We're not asking how are you doing. but following it up with how are you doing? You know, like we've got to get to the heart of people because otherwise we're going to have, we're just going to keep having these problems with suicide rates and people who are you going to use alcohol and drugs to cope with just the high level of stress that we have.

So we have, and you're right, what if tech is taking away from that? Like we can't, we can't replace that people part of it. And we got to be better, period. That's right. That's exactly right. And like Mike Rowe, if we continue to see the value in what people do with their hands. Right. Because naturally, when you build something with your hands, there's a certain level of pride that comes with it.

And we've now kind of made it more just mundane. I'm going to put the pipe down and that's it. I'm going to go home. I'm going to put some more pipe down. I'm going to go home. I'm going to put some more pipe down. And it's like, no, you're not just doing that. You know, when you start bringing teams together to show how this all comes together

and how important what they're doing. And the reality is, you know, if every constructor stop doing what they do, like the world would be in major hurt, right? Like it is Yeah Some people say the biggest industry Some people say the second biggest industry Let's just go top two industries

In the world Right You cannot get your house You cannot go to the doctor You cannot Go shopping You cannot go anywhere Without it being built

You cannot drive on the roads You cannot get the poo to leave your house Right through sewers You can't do anything without constructors. Right. Yeah. So the people out there are super important.

And I just wish we would we would show people how important this industry is. We would show people how great of a living it can provide for you. And I also think connecting our children to it would help a lot more, right? Being able to bring your kids maybe a couple times a year to the job side and show. show him what you did and let him have some pride. I remember going to job sites with my dad. Now it was his company, but I was so proud to see what my dad was building and what he was doing.

And when we'd drive by something, he's like, oh, yeah, we did that, right? Yeah. That's a super cool feeling. That's exactly what I didn't.

I was doing it when I was, you know, five years old going on sales calls and seeing a project finished. And then, you know, doing the same thing to my kids, bringing them a job sites, going,

driving by a place. I did that. I did that, you know, just like, yeah. I mean, they're like, wow, that's really cool. That looks great. Exactly. There's that pride factor that they know we have, but also if you're not showing them at a young age, then it's almost like an assumption, right?

It's like, oh, all these buildings, they just go up real quick. Easy. They're easy. You know, it's like, and I think people who are really like, I look at like people who are in tech their entire lives and they take for granted how difficult it is to engineer a skyscraper. For example, and how difficult all that is and how much you need so many different trades and so many different hats to make that to make that work.

It's just like almost like you take it so far for granted that I think during COVID, there was a little bit of that feeling of, oh shit, it takes a month to get a plumber here and my toilet's broke. You know what I mean? Yeah. But check it out. That can actually happen. You can have a month before you can get anybody to show up at your house for that

emergency that you need. Then we're cooking with fire. Well, in our household, we all learn how to do all these things. And so we're very fortunate, but you're right. When you have a shortage like that, it can really become problematic very quickly. And we can start to grow a tremendous appreciation for what they do. Right. You talk about skyscrapers. Yes. You know, one of the things we look at sometimes at least me and we talk about his family is when you look at something like the Empire State Building that was built in one year in 45 days.

One year of 45 days. Okay. And yes, you know, some people are going to go, oh, but there was five deaths on that project. Okay,

well, it was built, you know, what, 1930s, I believe. That's fine. Five deaths,

one death is too many. I get that. Right. But the World Trade Center was built in 1970s and there was 60, right, fatalities during that. So let's take the fatalities out of this discussion. A year in 45 days. Could you even imagine a building being built traditionally?

Now, modular buildings, I know in like China, they built one like 15-story apartment building in 360 hours or something. They built another 57-story building in like 19 days, right? Yeah. 57 stories in 19 days, but it was all modular and it was, you know, all the type of. So let's talk about traditional construction. That just just wouldn't happen anymore. It just wouldn't.

And I get, well, they worked long hours. They did this. The conditions weren't the best. All this. Okay. Let's just assume that they used more safety harnesses. Let's assume that they worked a little bit less hours. and we had more shifts or whatever.

Right. It doesn't matter. There's no way we could accomplish. If we took all the lanyards away from people and we said work as many hours as you want, I don't see anybody building a building like that, right? Right. I mean, with the architecture and the amount of coordination, everything I went into that, I don't see anybody building that in a year and 45 days.

Just not happening. And I remember going to an AGC meeting and the head of economics was there. it was like three or four years ago and he said you know the efficiency rate for construction now is somewhere in the 40 percents right like percentiles like between 40 and 49 percent so so if we're only being efficient between 40 and 49 percent like maybe that's one of the problems that we're having and is if technology is supposed to be solving that why are we becoming less efficient with it right so your tech really has to address you address behavior.

It has to be tied to what people do daily. It cannot change what they do. It cannot add more things to do. For yards, every day we ask ourselves, are we automating the manual? Tell me what you do each day. And can I automate that so that you can take the points along this path that are most important to you and again, make the phone call right to the people that matter. Because we can show you what matters.

Or we can alert you. On the rental side, we can alert you on the last day of rental. Or on work orders, we can tell you, hey, this equipment hit this number of hours because we're taking telematics. We can tell you when to do that. Or, you know, logistics, we can tell you, hey, you got to sign something. Now you need to move it from here to here. Right. But now you don't have to pick up the phone.

You don't have to tell them the address because all that stuff comes in a text, email, whatever it is. Right. They can click. Boom, they can navigate. We're creating efficiencies. We're not changing behavior. We're not adding steps. What was your step?

Okay. Still the same step. We just, instead of you having to pick up the phone four times, we, boom, shoot it out to everybody that needs to. And they can respond back. They can't, like, whatever it might be. And it has to be more efficient. Clearly, we are not becoming more efficient. If 40% is where our efficiency is, are working, that's not good.

Two, we see it in the timelines of our building, not just in regulations, because that's another people, people are going to say, well, inspectors, regulations, all that stuff. Yeah, there's, there's some of that. But we're just not building anymore. We just don't have the excitement about building anymore, you know? And if you're excited about building, you're excited about being an electrician, you're excited about being plumber. Man, you're going to be a superstar and everybody's going to offer you way more money than anybody can. can never imagine because there just aren't those people out there anymore. Again, 20%, 80%, 80%, 20% right? Like 20% are getting 80% of the work done, 80% are doing 20% of the work. And we need to solve

that problem. Yeah. So I mean, I think you kind of answer my last question there is like it for all of us who are struggling right now at adopting technology, because we don't know what to do in terms of like for me it's all about hey how does this integrate with whatever you have because I don't want to create an extra step I don't want one extra data entry ever so I've already did it once that means that has to go to the next one and the next one the next one so I mean I guess that's that's the answer right is making sure that you're not creating an extra step because that's how you measure is it going to be efficient or not yeah you hit on something really, really touchy, which is

integrations and extra steps and technology. The healthcare industry hit this really, really hard. And at one point, everybody went electronic medical records. They started doing electronic billing. They brought all this electronic in all

at the same time in the late 90s and early 2000s. And the next thing that happened was every hospital had 20, 30 different applications that they're running. And none of them linked to each other. And then all of a sudden there was a sector that was created. And people in construction don't even know this word,

but we tell people this word all the time when we talk about yards. And the words interoperability. And this word became very, very popular in healthcare. and interoperability just meant people started building companies literally just to integrate all the different applications together. If you're running this and you're running this and you're running this and you're running this, you're running this. Guess what? We have an application that will come in and link all those together. Yeah.

So for yards, we've taken two approaches to solve that problem. One, interoperability. We can pull telematics from third party providers. So if you already have telematics, we pull that in. If you have OEM, right? So certain heavy equipment, we pull that in. Say you have other work order systems or other, you know, application that we can pull that in. But the other part was we also wanted to just make everything live in one place.

So even though we started on the rental side, immediately our customer said, we want owned assets in them. We said, okay, cool, let's do that. Then they said, well, we want to run maintenance. We said, okay, cool, let's do that. Well, we have telematics. Can you pull in the telematics? Cool, we'll do that. Well, we need to move that equipment from the field to the shop or from field project to project.

We're like, okay, we'll build dispatch logistics. Well, we got to inspect this when it's done getting worked on or every morning when it's on the job or, okay, we'll have inspections. And now when you click on that asset, you have every inspection done. You have every location. You have every telematics event that's ever happened. Right. Every work order maintenance, who did it with photos and. inspections of those work orders and all that types.

Like everything's in one place. You have the history of that asset. And we're going to, I think, you know, you're starting to see this more and more. You're starting to see these big companies, acquire other companies, and bring them under the fold so that they can solve interoperability. But I think you're going to start to see a lot of these one-trick ponies start to realize I can't be one trick anymore. I'm going to have to actually provide a multi-level solution to solve. the entire problem, which is, which is good because it's going to make it easier for people in the field. Yeah.

Right. And that's our job. Our job is to make it easier. People in the field, easier for people in the office, create efficiency, get them home earlier, get them enjoying their job, getting excited about construction. And hopefully talking about their kids about, hey, this is really, really cool. Look at what we're building. Look at what we're doing. Right.

You know? And by the way, you know, grandpa's a really smart guy. And the old guy on the job on the job sites, a really smart guy. Just because he doesn't know tech. Right. Doesn't mean that he wasn't a grandmaster chess, you know, player, right? Like, they can have an IQ 160. And they just might hate tech because of what tech's done in the past.

Yeah. But hopefully this new generation of tech, what people are creating, being intentional, making it more, more easy to use. and intuitive. Hopefully the old school can see, hey, all tech isn't bad. And a new school can look and go, we need to listen to these guys if we're going to make something that's great. Right. Because they built something great before, right?

Yeah. Let's continue down that road. So well said. Thank you so much. How do people get a hold of you if they want to learn more about yards or just stay in touch with you? Is it LinkedIn or is it what's the best way to communicate with you? I tell people send me an email. Jason J-A-S-O-N at Yards.

That's Y-A-R-D-Z as at Zebra.com. Yeah, please send me an email. There's a contact form on the website if you want, but again, I'm a very skin-to-skin person. Send me an email, say what's up. And not just for us. Please schedule demos with tech companies. Schedule as many demos as possible. Demos are free.

Figure out what works for you. Right. If it's not yards, I can point you to 100 different places. And if it's not those places, hopefully they're pointing you somewhere else because there is good tech out there. Yeah. No, I love it. Thank you so much for being here. And I appreciate your vision on having those old school values and pride that we both grew up with,

continuing that in your tech company. Keep going, man. And keep that message out there too because I think there's not enough of it. So keep going. I'm a big fan. Awesome. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, thank you, Jason.

All right, guys. Thanks a lot for tuning in to Construction Executives Live. I am your host, Jeremy Owens. That was another great show. We have another, in the second series on technology, and we're really going to focus in on how to lower our stress and tension. So really taking that efficiency component that we talked about today, that old school vision, got to have it, and really going to focus in on how do we lower our stress using technology. So that'll be next week and we're going to be,

or next month, I'm sorry, June 7th. And that's going to be with Michael Pink. He's a great guide to talk to regarding this subject. So that'll be another great topic to explore. So thanks again for being here. And we will see you June 7th, 10 a.m. Pacific. On LinkedIn right now, there is a, there is a link there to go ahead and sign up for that event, so go ahead and do that before you tune out. Thanks a lot for being here, everybody,

and we will see you next time. Bye. You've been listening to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry. To nominate an innovator or changemaker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry news. Be sure to visit usconstructionzone. come.