Business Innovators Radio - Episode 23: How to Use Technology to Lower Stress and Tension with Michael Pink

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Part of the Construction Executives Live Series After preserving the ‘old school’ wisdom of pride and work ethic in the construction industry, how do we use technology to lower the ever present stress and tension that exists in our industry. Learn valuable tools that you can take back to your team today! In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-23-how-to-use-technology-to-lower-stress-and-tension-with-michael-pink

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. Hi there. Welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements out in Sunny, California. Yeah. Hey, thanks for coming. Thanks for being here. Again, I see a lot of familiar names and faces here. I appreciate your loyalty to the program. We get some good feedback on some of the content that we provide, and we have another great show for you today. I wanted to let you know of a couple quick things here. One, if you want to check out the previous live shows, go to usconstruction zone.com, drop down to the in the zone section, and you'll see construction. from executives live there. We have all the past ones up now, as well as our podcast. It has some new, new shows as well.

So go to the podcast section if you want to digest that content as well. So again, thank you for being here. We have a new sponsor for the show today. It's sponsored by the great team at build12.com. And if you want to automate your construction

business into a revenue generating machine, check out the Build 12 system. Again, build12.com. They have free demos, you know, tell them that you know me. I just got linked up with them and I'm using it for my remodeling business, three generations improvements. And I'm just getting my feet wet with it, but it is robust. It's cool.

I can't wait for all the time. It's going to save me. And I'm really looking forward to saving some money on getting rid of some of the other programs as well. So, again, build12.com. Thank you guys for your sponsorship. Okay, our show today is titled How to Use Technology to Lower Stress and Tension. Last week we talked about preserving the old school wisdom of pride and work ethic in the construction industry. Now we want to talk about how do we use technology to lower the ever-present stress and tension that exists in our industry.

Today you will learn some valuable tools that will help you take back to your team and hopefully apply right away. because I know I'm one of them. There's just a lot coming at us in the construction industry. There's always tension and stress. And kind of like using Build 12, trying to figure out what technology to adopt and what to kind of sit and wait. So today we have a very special guest, and I want to introduce him now. His name is Michael Pink, and he has been the chief executive officer of Smart PM since 2017. Prior to founding Smart PM, Michael spent nearly 20 years in the construction industry providing analytics to assist in project controls, risk management, dispute avoidance resolution services on all different types of construction projects and across the globe.

So he's a certified cost engineer through AACE International and is also a licensed at a certified planning and scheduled professional through the same organization. He holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business and as a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Please help me welcome Michael Pink. Michael, thank you for being here. Hey, thank you so much for having me today. Yeah, totally. I'm looking forward to this content. It's funny, it's just like it's, I don't know, it's such a fitting time for this content because I know a lot of us in construction are getting just thrown, you know, different technologies.

it's coming at as fast and furious these days. So trying to figure out what to adopt and what to take our time with. Hopefully you can help us with today. Absolutely, yeah, I would love to give you my insights. Sure. Sure. So tell me a little bit about your 20-year career in construction and kind of, you know, when you knew that construction was going to be the industry for you.

Sure. So as you mentioned, I went to Georgia Tech and I graduated. I didn't do a civil engineering degree. I didn't do the building construction major. I actually was an industrial engineer, which is somebody who does process improvement and efficiency gain and optimization. And I wasn't thinking about construction. I ended up getting a job to make some money in college for a contractor. And I was sort of helping out at their office with the PMs and the supers and getting estimates out and running them down to, you know,

running them down to City Hall for bids and doing. payment apps and just driving things to and from the sites. And that became something on my resume. When I graduated, I was looking for different types of jobs that an industrial engineer might get in, mainly things like logistics or supply chain, you know, manufacturing, facilities, improvement, all of that stuff. But the job that really, the best offer I got was at KPMG with their construction solutions division, which is more of a construction consulting. job where they did a lot of dispute work as well as investigative work and then also some risk management type work. And I took the job because it was actually in New York and I wanted to move to

New York and I wasn't sold on construction. I was like good, good offer, good company. I'll see what we got here and I'll see how it works out and, you know, I got into the work. You know, I got into, I got lucky enough to get to be involved in, you know, some pretty large scale construction. projects for various reasons, whether it was doing a forensic analysis on a disputed project that had taken too long and gone over budget or getting involved in a situation where there was fraud, you know, or being involved in the World Trade Center cleanup, you know, things like that, auditing, making sure that they were not overspending or overbilling or, you know, the right processes and controls were set up. So I got some really interesting experience. And, you know,

Once I went to get my business degree, I still wasn't sold on whether or not I'd be in construction, but that sort of pushed me off into a path of wanting to start my own business and taking all the experience I had, both from understanding construction, being a part of that industry and many different facets of it. You become part of construction. And in my background in adding efficiencies, I had seen problems. And now I was merging these two worlds of being able to solve problems and add efficiencies and optimize an industry with all this relevant experience of how things fail. So that is when I decided this is what I'm going to be a part of.

I am part of construction now. I've been spent too much time here to leave it. And there's so much work to do. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it seems like your degree and your background really fit you well for what you're. doing now. I mean, obviously you're you've got to be analytical. You're probably your brand's always working and thinking about, you know, ways to improve. And yeah, but also I'm sure you're not immune to the stress and tension of the construction industry. So what's your experience for in that? I mean,

we all have it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, my first experience was, you know, I'm getting involved. I'm sort of a fish out of water in this industry. I, when I was young, young, like right out of college I'm getting dropped off in these, you know, office buildings to go dig through data and paperwork to go do these analyses for these things, that could be a claim or a delay, a dispute, or, you know, a procedural review where you can improve things. What I noticed was, it was interesting. It didn't seem like, it seemed like there was this tension in the office always. And that sort of piqued my interest as a matter of fact. Like, why are these people sort of angry? Why has everybody seemed so annoyed? There was stress, right? And then you'd go to like a trade show. That was

where it became even more evident. Like I saw this, you know, and I was living in New York. So was it New York? Was it New York construction? But now I'm going all over the country and you start to see these similar personas in the trailers and in the offices where there's, there's tension. And there's a toughness, too, and a very direct attitude to get through things. And you start to wonder, this isn't what other industries are like. You know, if you're involved in doing other, it's not how my office at KPMG was. And they were working on all different types of industries. We were consultants, right?

And then we as consultants started having this little persona and this little group of how we acted differently from the rest of the people in the office. working in different types of projects. And then going to trade shows, you start realizing that there's a broad, you know, persona here of some sort of, you know, frustration in the world of construction where people don't want to talk to you. They don't want to make eye contact. And, you know, it's not like a happy, you know, trade show or a happy conference. It's, you know, let's learn stuff.

Let's get to work. Let's get back to the office. We've got things to do. And then one of the. most interesting things that ever happened was my boss, my first boss at KPMG. He was pretty much the most abrasive person in the office, and that was very well known. And we were sitting down one day. And, you know, I didn't, I kind of had a little bit of an attitude, too. And he was reaming me out for something. And I asked him, I was like, why are you so angry? And he said these words. He goes,

I wasn't this way until I worked in construction. Before construction, I wasn't this way. I wasn't this way. I was a different person. And yeah, it all sort of felt like there's this just unseen situation of stress and tension that gets to you over time in this industry. So it was somewhat fascinating to see all that. Yeah. And my, you know, my viewers know that I talk about mental health a lot and I talk about the stress levels of our industry and, you know, there's no secret now where we're ranked number two still in suicide rates and we're really high at substance abuse rates. You know, why do you think we have that problem in the industry? I have a lot of thoughts there.

First of all, I mean, I go back to just construction's hard, right? Construction is a lot of moving parts, especially on the bigger the project or the more projects you're working on. You know, there's all these different moving parts that need to always come together. It's literally trying to manage something very big with all these different things happening and all this disruption that's occurring. But you still have to get things done on time and on budget. That is your goal in life in construction is to get things done on time and on budget with things coming from all over the country or all over the world, different resources, some showing up, some not change orders happening. You know, it's complex.

But throw on top of that that you've agreed to do. something for a certain price, and it's a competitive price, before you've even done anything. And then you have to pull together the teams and actually deliver in a world that's just very much disrupted, you know, with all the different moving parts. And then on top of that all, we as humans have this thing called planning fallacy, where we generally, when somebody asks us a question, like, how long is it going to take you to get to the store today? or when are you going to meet me to go see that movie and you say I can get there in 15 minutes, we're all wired to think best case scenario.

Like, oh, yeah, it'll take me 15 minutes to get there if everything goes my way, but we don't say those words. Nothing goes your way. And when you build out a plan and construction, we're wired to think of the best case scenario. Like, we should get the drywall up on that floor in five days. And then we can do the next floor and the next floor. but the reality is we're not always factoring in the risk. And in that competitive bidding world, you don't have that room to do it.

So it creates this environment that's difficult and never very hard to deliver upon if you want to win the job. And you want to also prove that you can be the best at what you do. The reality is you're coming up with a budget that's best case scenario. and a schedule that's best case scenario in a world that's not really going to be the best case scenario. And that, to me, is the root of it all. Yeah, so true. And then you have, you know, like you talk about, you have those bosses and managers that are abrasive. And, you know, that doesn't help.

You know, you go to work and you're already stressed with this on-time, on-budget efficiency stuff. And then you have someone barking at you. Man, it just seems like there's just a lot that can pile on you. I know that you have a lot of experience in the risk management side of our industry. You know, is our industry, you know, very high with legal issues and risk assessment? I mean, I'm assuming so. But that obviously has to contribute to these stress levels, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, if you think about it from the get-go, usually most projects are over-budget or late. I mean, we're talking 70, 80 percent, those types of numbers of projects that finish late and or over-budget. I mean, if you think of financial risk, that's what we're talking about. Most projects are at risk of being over budget. You know, not to mention the other more important risks, physical and mental risks that are layered on top of that. But getting into the financial side, yeah, I mean, most projects have a lot of risk. That's why there's so much insurance, right? And it's not the types of risks of just like, you know, a subcontractor defaulting or a big hurricane coming through. It's the risk of getting done late and over budget is what's the real issue that happens on most because you want to be profitable. Your profit margins are thin.

And yeah, the chances of that happening are very slim unless everything goes your way. And that doesn't seem to always happen. So, yeah, I've seen that. And that does drive legal disputes because on top of it all, construction is not cheap. You know, a delay for a month can cost over a million bucks on a decent size project or at least quarter of a million on like a, you know, $30 million job. And then, you know, who wants to fund that, right? You know, not only is the contractor losing that time and money, they need to get paid to make profit while the owner is losing the revenue from the assets. So it's kind of a double

whammy. And that's really where that delay word, which is to me, when I did a lot of customer discovery back in the day, that is the biggest taboo word in construction is delay. And that was what was very clear through our interviews. And yeah, nobody wants to be delayed because of that risk. And then that goes into a discussion, hopefully a settlement, which is not always the case. Yeah, people want to avoid court like the plague. But when the dollar amounts are that high, you know, it's hard to find a person who's going to just fund it without much support as to why that was their fault and not somebody else's. Yeah.

I mean, so much of our problem is margin, right? I mean, I know there's a lot of industries that are razor thin. I mean, the restaurant industry has been hit with this. But, you know, on some of these larger projects, what are they at? 5%? Less than that. I mean, so it's like, like you said, there's a lot of moving parts, you know, including waiver changes and cost and material changes that are just,

they're fast and furious. I know during COVID, it was an absolute nightmare in it to keep up with this. So I know that cost is cost, but an increase in margin would solve a lot of these ills, right? Like having more of that fudge factor packed in, like, hey, I don't know exactly some of these things. And instead, it's just so razor thin that that's got to lead to a lot of this stress. Oh, I agree 100%. Yeah, if you had some sort of ability in all your contracts to have some wiggle room, which in a lot of cases we call contingency, but still throw back in there the company that says,

I want to win this job and I'm going to give myself less wiggle room, right? And then that creates that environment of competitive bidding that starts the process off wrong because somebody's going to need to come in lower if they want to win, who's making the most concessions? And we, again, as humans, aren't just looking at the company and saying, well, I know they're the cheapest, but these guys are the best. Let's pay a few extra million dollars for it. that cost, that minimum cost always creeps in and it's always a consideration.

And you really got to understand at the estimating, you know, from the estimating level, which ones are achievable and which ones aren't. But when you sign that contract, you're, you're signing it up and saying, this is what's going to happen and this is what I've agreed to, which give the owners, you know, a, you know, a safety net, really to a point. So it's a, it's a bit of a difficult situation we're in here. Yeah. Yeah, no, and I kind of described this earlier.

Like, I'm fully struggling with this paralysis with technology. I happen to get hit up probably more than others just because of my network with what's available in technology. But, you know, I guess starting with the negative side, how can technology not help our businesses and potentially maybe even lead to more stress for us? Absolutely, yeah. You know, it's funny because now that I'm in this world and I didn't. You know, last year we noticed something was going on with how we were selling. Like things weren't moving as quickly for a period of time after, you know, 2021 where we were, you know, selling very, very well.

What I realized was last year, a fever pitch of technology occurred. Like, I looked at some document that showed all the technologies. I mean, there's literally easily 500 technologies out there that you can probably, probably over a thousand out just for commercial construction, bucketed into like six or seven categories where, you know, you're getting inundated by these people, everybody in your company is hearing about this technology and why it's valuable, that technology and how that's going to make, you know, solve this problem or that problem or this problem. It all boils down to cost. It all boils down to efficiency gain. So you are paralyzed by trying to understand that. I mean,

that to me. And then if once you start rolling out 20 or 30 technologies, the people in the field are inundated. I mean, trying to learn all those different things all at once, and then trying this one and then trying that one on this job and, you know, deploying this one over here or these ones on those projects. I mean, that's what's happening. And it's because in my mind, you know, there are so many people who are hearing about these things and so many opportunities to sell these things that nobody's really understanding, well, what exactly do we really need? And how do they all fit together and have essentially a conductor of an orchestra pull that together? I mean, IT's inundated, and I can't tell you how many times we were told, we'd love your product, but we're trying out

17 different ones right now. We're going to have to wait until we deploy these ones. And that's fine. I get it. But yeah, that is definitely an issue. And you hear it from the field, too. I mean, very often I hear, you know, we don't want to, you know, become too cumbersome to our, you know, teams out in the field. And right now they're showing this frustration that they have too many things going on, which is actually resulting in more work for them every single day. And it's all, they just want to get back to building. And that's, you can see that happening in a lot of cases, yeah. Yeah. And I've heard you talk a lot about like how overcomplicated a lot of the technology and processes is? Why is technology in presenting data at a level that everyone can

understand so important to you and it needs to be important to us? Well, that's just something I learned. You know, that was my job, right? It was, you know, we have a problem and we don't know why. Like, we have a project that was late or we have a project that seems to be spiraling out of control and we don't know why, right? And that to me was my job. go figure out why. And I had to walk into a situation I never was a part of, right? And all I can do at that moment is collect information. So that was my job was go find information, analyze it, turn it into something that makes sense and is accurate. And then it speaks to the people around you to really understand, well, what's this picture here? What does all this really mean? What happened and what do we do about that?

You can't understand or you can't think about what to do about that until everybody actually sees the same thing. And that's really, to me, was the opportunity for us was there's data sets out there. Understanding that data is imperative. If you don't have that information and you're not studying that information or you do have it and you're not studying it, you don't really see the forest through the trees on these jobs because our brains can't comprehend a construction project without drilling it down to a level of understanding. that multiple people from multiple different vantage points can communicate to each other about. Right. It seems like we're on that.

Obviously, we're at that digital age for us where, you know, the old school had none of it. Like literally pen and paper. And then a lot of even the field workers have had nothing but their tool belt. So it's like we're at this time where they have to learn something brand, brand new. I mean, not even not even something new to them for the industry, but new. to them personally. Like personally, they're not technology rich either. So it seems like we need some time, you know, to get through this little area of, like,

growth until we're able to start to understand some of these and which ones to adopt and which ones maybe are not going to be good for your team. Yeah, I agree 100%. Yeah. It will take time. It has taken time. I think one of the most interesting points in time, which we can't discount. because a lot of people had asked early on in my time was, you know, what do you think spawned this digital revolution, this technology revolution?

And, you know, technology was available 40 years ago, scheduling software, accounting softwares. You know, a lot of that was available. The issue that I think was most important to the industry to ultimately result in this revolution was the, mobile technology and the cloud technology, being able to connect the site teams to the home office, being able to feed data to and from through network technology, cloud technology, and mobile tech. Because prior to that, if you think about a construction business or even just the owner's side, you know, you had your headquarters and then you had all these little projects all over the place with not too much ability to communicate and feed data or automate processes through these

these tools that you can put in your hand or on a computer which can be fed back into a server or the cloud. That to me was the game changer here, but now all of these other technologies are sort of booming right now. And yes, in order for it to work, it's going to take time. And yes, these things are all going to have to fit together like puzzle pieces. Right now it's like a million puzzle pieces that aren't stuck together yet. Right. Slowly and surely they need to get stitched together for this to fully optimize this industry, which it can do. Yeah, yeah, so true.

And you think a lot of these startup companies took COVID as a time to, you know, to introduce it. Like maybe it was an idea and they're like, well, shit, we're kind of sitting for a little while here. And then they started to develop it. Like, because it seemed like there was a big push, you know, during COVID, especially out of COVID. It was like, boom, we just hit with it all at one time. You think people were doing that? We were a little bit ahead of that. It's an interesting thought.

I do know that when COVID happened, the lack of ability to get to the site or the uncertainty about the conditions of the site or the uncertainty about the industry as a whole was something. And you saw technology in that year in like 2020 into 2021, the evaluations for technologies went through the roof. And I would think that part of that, you know, when you saw like Zoom and Netflix and all these technologies, Palaton and, you know, all of them were blowing up as well as this buzz in the construction industry, all the VCs are going, this is the next big industry to really try to invest in.

I think that that pushed a lot of people with ideas and the time that they might have had to go after that because they were sitting at home. in a lot of cases and had some extra time on their hands. And all the buzz about construction tech and all the valuations going up, I do think that that played into it. Yeah, no, you're right. And when we're looking at these technologies that can increase our efficiencies, to lower our stress, what are some things that we should be looking for as an industry? And I know that obviously we're all in different things.

We're in remodeling, we're in commercial, because we're all in these different things. But maybe to dumb it down and like, what do we, what are we looking for exactly? Is it as simple as efficiencies are replacing people or time? Like, what are we looking for? Yeah, I think, number one, I mean, let's not get into what does it do. Because I'm sure a lot of them do things. No, they all do things for you. But the question is, number one, is this, does this align with the process I currently, you know, have?

How in alignment with how I do business, does this technology really align? And that's important because change management is a huge, huge challenge in construction. I mean, especially because people are all over the place doing their things a little bit differently, but at least as it relates to a process that is consistent across your business, does this technology align with it and does it add value to that process? Does it save me time? The other thing is, is this a pain? Is this a pain point for me?

You know, if it's not a pain point, then why do it? Like, even if you're asking, you know, superintendents to log more data into their phone so that you can have better, you know, daily reported information that's digitized so you can analyze. If it doesn't align with making their day better, it's going to be a hard ask to get them to actually do it. So you'd rather have, like, a drone come. collect that information. So what does it automate, right? Does it align with the persona of the person using it and does it make their life easier? The other thing is how well does it connect and fit into the rest of the systems that we're doing? Is it a perfect puzzle piece to the overall puzzle?

Or is there a lot of overlap and how much overlap is there? You want to avoid doing double work. People in the site don't want to do double work. And if you have two systems that sort of have overlap so they have to do things twice, it's not going to work out. Does it promote collaboration, right? Does this give me information that we can talk about and it's accurate enough to make decisions on? You know, and the other thing is, does this company that we're going to be working with understand this industry, right? A lot of these technologies, there's not necessarily people who worked in the industry. I mean, it was a buzz to get into construction technology and there's people out there that are building products that didn't

actually live it. And how is their customer success team? What's the implementation like? Is it going to be non-invasive? Does it sit on top of something we're doing? All these different things that you need to think about. One of the most important things is also, you know, thinking about not just winging it, you know, the more I see companies that are actually being thoughtful and putting a task force together or even an innovation team to look at the big picture of all the technologies and also thoroughly understand their business and figure out how to stitch them all together to for the greater good of the business is really the ones that are most successful. Yeah, I mean, the one I'm concerned about the most is the collaboration piece because,

you know, some technology can push us apart, you know, where it's like, you know, instead of reporting to me, then now you're going to report to this thing. and that's the way we're going to get our information. I get the value in that, but I'm concerned that the field team and the inside team is going to get further apart. There already is a divide, right? So are we going to make the divide greater? Because the inside team is going to be asking the outside team something to do an extra thing to do

that probably they're not going to get paid for. And then are they just going to get pissed and dig their heels in and go like, oh, great, they're adding another thing here. that we have to learn. I mean, so is it going to create more divisive, divisiveness? Yeah, it's a dance, definitely. And I do think that you've got to straddle that line of, you know, making sure that the site team is getting something out of it that's valuable to them and it's not invasive. It's not making them work more while it also results in the, you know, corporate team getting what they need to be a better business. And,

all the while, providing visibility into information that enables them to be connected and have good collaborative discussion to make good decisions and solve problems. Because that's what most of construction is, is putting out fires and making sure that there's less fires and making sure that the fires are seen sooner and making sure that, you know, everybody who has a decision-making authority understands the data and can communicate back and forth between the areas. and those are the types of technology on top of it all that it's aligned with the process is how you should be thinking about, you know, laying out this technology.

Yeah, and I got a question in the chat previously to this. And there was a couple in the startup community they're tuning in. So they wanted to find out, you know, because they know that you have a lot of experience in this, you know, what are some characteristics of an accomplished startup leader in this construction space? In this construction space, again, it's somebody who's seen it and lived it. Number one, I think the more people understand the community of construction, the more you can talk to somebody and prove that you understand their world, the better. I mean, we all know in construction that it's a club, right?

And if you don't understand construction and you're trying to tell somebody in construction what they should be doing and you didn't live it or understand it and understand their day-to-day pain points, it's not even going to fly. I mean, it's not for a second. That's number one. The other thing is, you know, the willingness to admit that you alone are not going to solution the problem. I ran into that problem. I thought I knew a lot.

I saw a lot of projects that most people don't see a lot of worlds. I mean, I was able to work on 100 projects in my first four years, right? So I've seen a lot of projects and I'm not necessarily on a single project, but I get to see all the data. I thought I knew a lot. But until I actually tapped into the industry and heard from them and told them what I know and then heard from them what they know and we worked together to build a solution for a problem, we weren't going anywhere. So we take our customers very seriously in that they know a lot that we don't know, and they're the ones who are the ones who are going to be using this tool. So they have a lot of say in how we develop our tool and how we continue to innovate. So I had to go through a serious customer discovery effort and get out of my own way to be able to really truly bring a software that the industry can embrace.

And that to me is another very important piece. So you've got to think of your customers as your partners for innovation. Yeah, and I'm curious. When did you decide to enter in the technology space? Was there a certain, because obviously you were in kind of more of the risk management side first, right? When was there a decision that you, like, I'm just going to use all of my knowledge and schooling and jump into this other sector? Yeah, it was sort of a time frame where I decided, you know, there was a point in time where I decided, you know, there was a point in time where I decided. I didn't want to do.

A lot of the work that we get calls for as consultants is for delay claims and, you know, inefficiency claims. And really after the fact, right? Like, okay, this happened. Can you fix it? Can you build us a report that will help us not, you know, have to pay for it or ask somebody else to pay for it and, you know, prove our point? To me, that wasn't solving a problem.

And it was always sort of, you know, too much after the fact for me to enjoy. I mean, I could be able to get out of that to begin with. I don't want to be the guy that's just coming in and cleaning up, you know, this argument, right? And figuring out who owes who what instead of how could we have avoided that. I decided at some point that I'm getting out of that dispute world and I'm getting more into helping people understand their information before it's too late. Right. And that, you know, doing that manually was just tedious. I mean, I was working long hours.

I started my own consulting company, built up a little team, and we were getting on all these jobs and helping them understand their data. But it wasn't fun. It's a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of data capture and organization and analysis. But doing it over and over and over, it just became very patternistic of where do I grab this data? How do I structure it? Schedule data to me was gold. How do we rip through that scheduled data as quickly and efficiently as possible?

but still months at a time. Sometimes all year we'd be just coming in for a week and just ripping through schedule data and giving them a report. And I'm like, a computer can do this. And I don't want to do it anymore. I'm done. I want to build the system to do it.

And if you did do that, you would give everybody the ability to see what all this data means because there is a bottleneck of ability as well as time to be able to extract all this good meaningful information properly to manage these, you know, problems that we see out there. So I just decided after a couple years, and I was doing well in the consulting business,

made good money. But I saved a bunch and I'm like, I got to do this thing. I can't stop thinking about it. So I just jumped into it feet first and about, we'll call it, 2014-15, you know, struggled for a few years, trying to get something off the ground, turned it into a tech-enabled product that supported my consultant. And then eventually we did our deep dive customer discovery of what would the industry want and need to remove the human element of this. And that's what we ended up building since 2016-17.

That's when we turned into Smart PM. Got it. And I've heard you talk about this forensic schedule analysis. Was that kind of what you were doing during that period? Like trying to figure out all this analyzing data and like it's probably coming at you fast and furious. How do we take that and I'm moving into smart. Well, forensic means doing, you know, like an investigation, right? Yeah.

So usually the forensic delay analysis was post-problem. Okay. So you take all the data, you'd take like the last 20 schedules. You'd start with the original plan and look at the first update, second update, third update, all the way up until now. And you'd piece together the story of what happened after it had already happened. happened. And doing that, you know, to really usually support a court case was what that was all about. And there was a, you know, usually at that point, you'd be sitting in a, you know, an office for

months. And then you'd, then you'd have to pull it into a story that was accurate and then put it into a level that people could understand and write this really long report that was disputed by the other side. And they had another person doing the same thing. But, you know, pulling on these strings to make the story sound a little bit more advantageous to one side versus the other. And that's what I did a lot of early on. And even into my, you know, after a decade, I was still doing that. But to me, it was still part of the problem because we can argue to the end degree on this data. And that's, you end up spending time on somebody to argue something to the endth degree for months.

And that pushes in into court. it spikes emotion. To me, it's not part of the solution, and I needed to get out of there. Yeah, and describing the scheduling nightmare that is our industry to other people in other industries, they really don't have any idea. The, you know, the balls in the air, the changes, the rapidness of our industry. You know, describe that. I mean, obviously scheduling has got to be the toughest in our industry than any other, right?

Yeah. I mean, if you think about a construction project, I mean, usually you see thousands of activities, thousands of things that need to happen with relationships amongst them that to get from, you know, the beginning of the job until turnover. And it can't be like, you can't draw that on one sheet. If you want to manage a job, you know, you've got to put them into the discrete chunks of work. And usually they add up to, you know, hundreds, if not usually thousands, thousands of activities that are changing. Remember, in the beginning, you have a plan, and then there's actually what happens.

And then as things happen, you need to course correct and you need to change that plan. So that whole process is a process that needs to be managed very well. Not to mention the tools that you're using, there is a best practices, right? And most people don't truly understand the best practices for building and managing a schedule. and if you don't have those best practices in mind and you're using that tool as a as a resource to manage and you're listening to what it's telling you and you don't build a schedule properly, it's going to start telling you the wrong things and you're going to be listening and you're not going to see what's truly pushing the job because your logic's incomplete or you're,

you know, you didn't follow best practices. And then you're starting to make decisions on erroneous data, which to me is a whole other piece to this equation. And that's where we really wanted to hone in on. Yeah, for sure. And you kind of said it before. Like the scheduling is what kind of causes a lot of these legal problems. So how often does that happen?

You know, and what are the specific issues that arise in that scheduling process that you've seen from a risk standpoint? Well, first of all, you know, a lot of people forget to put logic in, right? You need to put in full sets of logic. Like every little thing. Like a lot of times you'll see just an activity doesn't have a successor. And the program believes that that's the case, right? It's not looking at it and going, look, drywall doesn't have a successor. It's just like, oh, I guess that activity doesn't have a successor.

But I believe the person who created it. But in reality, you know, there's probably something that happens after you put the drywall in. Like, for instance, the next trade or that drywall crew goes to the next floor. We see that a lot of times people forget to put in. logic or they have durations that are too long that are difficult to actually, you know, accurately progress from a percent complete standpoint or they are putting in too many constraints or they're, you know, stacking trades. You know, there's all different little things that that you can analyze or they're just updating too, you know, haphazardly and they're forgetting to put

in percent completes or they're saying that an activity, you know, started in the future. There's all these little mistakes that are made that will throw off. the data. That's number one. Number two, you know, lots of times people, when you do an update and the end date slides out a little bit, that means there was a critical path delay. The knee-jerk reaction is get that end date back on task. Get that end date back and change things to make it happen. But those decisions aren't necessarily fully vetted. Like, I'm going to shorten the drywall activities on all the floors and we're just going to have to hit that now. But I'm not going to talk to the drywall guy about that. I'm just going to change the schedule and not tell them. Or, you know, I'm going to

stack various trades and have to get another crew. But I didn't talk to anybody about getting the crew. So a lot of times people make these decisions without actually incorporating them because they're just really quickly trying to write the ship and say that happens over and over and over. You know, it just becomes part of the process is be delayed and then write the ship without necessarily getting buy-in. You run into a project that's going to become overly compressed and infeasible from the schedules perspective. It's going to result in contractors becoming inefficient, not making as much money on the job and starting to put their resources on other projects where they are making money. And that's a very common theme that you see. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

I read something that you wrote that you talked about getting to know your client is called customer discovery. Tell us what that is and why it's important. Well, like I said, until you actually sit down with the people that you're going to sell to and you really understand their world, and I'm not talking about just, you know, I want to sell to contractors, so I'm going to go talk to a contractor. I mean, I talk to owners. I talk to contractors. We talk to insurance. We talk to consultants.

and then within each of those organizations, we talked to various levels of people and we qualified our pain point. You know, do you guys think delay is not a good thing in construction? Yes or no? Yes, very qualified statement was delay is like the most taboo word of all construction.

But then you say, okay, so let's talk about how you want to solve this. Right now I know how to look at schedule data. I know how to tell you, if you build a good schedule, I can tell you if it's a bad schedule, if I showed you that, would you understand it and would you know what to do with that information? Would that be valuable to you? If I showed you how you were performing against the plan, if I was showing you exposing to you all the changes that were happening and which ones were, you know, likely going to happen and which ones weren't. And if I was documenting your delays for you, if I was giving you a predicted completion date, you know, you ask all these questions and you find out, is this something that somebody's going to,

want. And if they say yes, and then you say, okay, well, what if it looks like this? Do you get that? Can you do something with this? Or no? And they could say, I don't get that and I don't need that. It depends. And you sort of have to whittle away to a place where somebody finally goes, yes, I will buy that from you. And I need that today. Is it ready? And that's what you, you know, you sort of pull away a layer at a time. And you have to do it in a manner where you're not just saying, hey, do you like my product, do you think it's cool? Because everybody's going to want to tell you that, yes, that sounds great. But until you actually get an authentic response, like, you know, which in some cases, you have to really pry, right, and say, well, how much would you pay? Why will you buy,

will you write me a check today? You know, really, and you said this, but I don't know if I believe you. You know, you have to really pull out authentic information. And in some cases, some of our customer discovery, we got in arguments. And that's where I knew we are now talking in an authentic world because you're showing me a motion. Right. Yeah, so that's the customer discovery process that worked for us was really, really getting deep and asking questions, qualifying their answers, re-asking, you know, making sure that we didn't misunderstand. And then even, in some cases, challenging them on their response. Gotcha. Yeah. And your software, or smart PM. It doesn't create schedules, but rather identifies the potential trouble spots.

Can you provide it a little bit more details on how that works? Yeah. So we, like I said, the scheduling process is a process that exists and we weren't coming in to say, hey, you need to do it this way now. Right, right. You have a process, you have that data. You may not be managing that process as well as you could, but at the end of the day, you bought the software and you have people that manage it. We don't want to change that. So we want to sit on that. We want to sit on top of that and we want to make sure you do that as well as you can, which in some cases, yeah, it may require that they have to learn a little bit through the process. But it's not really invasive because we're literally pulling up

metrics and saying, hey, here's where your schedule might not be constructed well. And if you don't construct it well, it's going to tell you the wrong things. So these are the things you need to fix. So, yes, they can go back and fix that. But then once you have that schedule that we call it of good quality, you can start to see what all the data really means as it relates to progress and performance. So instead of just looking at a Gant chart and trying to, you know, understand all these different things, we pull it up to a level that actually makes sense, you know, in like a one-shot graphic of progress versus performance, as well as starting to document delay issues, as well as highlighting,

changes that are generally misleading or potentially infeasible, looking at compression, forecasting end dates so that, you know, that old adage of being in a trailer and saying, I don't think we're going to get done on time, or I think this is what's delaying our job, or I think this is what the true critical path is. You know, usually it's an opinionated question that's disputable, but once you start throwing our analytics into the middle of those discussions, you can't ignore that. And they become the centerpiece of that discussion so people can get on the same page and not have the whole, this is my opinion versus your opinion. This is what the data says too. Right. So true, man. God. Everyone needs it, right? Besides, you know, assuming that you

get the schedule in line with one of your clients, you know, what are the features or benefits do you do you provide? Do you talk about money savings? Obviously, productivity is, is an obvious one, but is there anything else that you talk about with them? Yeah. I mean, it's as simple as this. Our mission as a business was to help keep projects on budget and on track and out of court. So keeping them on budget and on track saves that risk that we talk about, the average projects 10% over budget or whatever it may be. You know, a month at a time could be several hundred thousand, if not a million dollars, and in some cases, tens of million dollars.

Liquidated damages to the owner can cost $10,000 a day. So every single day that you save of time is a lot, is potentially a lot of money. So that's really where we want to start is making sure that you're set up for success to keep your projects on track and on budget. But then out of court, right? There's the lawyer fees.

There's the consulting fees. And then there's also people that actually do have professionals in their organization and consultants that are doing analytics to manage those things. We're automating all these analytics that they would even pay to, say, a proactive consultant. So eliminating consultants. eliminating consultant fees or eliminating, you know, time necessary from, you know,

project controls resources is a whole other area where we, you know, add value. Gotcha. Gotcha. And if someone wants to take a look at your platform, what does that process look like? Is it a demo or what does it look at? Yeah, no, we do. Well, generally, you know, we do a demonstration. You know, usually what happens is we'll hop on a call.

We'll talk a little bit about who we are, what we do. then we'll show you the product and the next phase is usually you know send us your data you know give me a project that you're worried about let's get it in here let's take a look at your data on your project and see what we can tell you about this situation that you may be in or you know i usually ask for a project that keeps you up at night let's look at the data and let's figure out if there's things we can help you with now just from looking at the data if you buy the product or not you can at least learn something and then we do a free trial uh so a free trial we do for about two months. So most people, you know, will decide, do I want to move forward? Now, the free trial does

come with a commitment that you're going to show up to the meetings and you are going to, you know, apply it to your business on a certain number of projects. But we give you the ability to, you know, opt out after two months if you want. So if you decide you want to move forward, at that point, you're literally just going to move forward with the agreement that we put in place. And usually people end up moving forward and actually expanding the usage after that two-month period. But we don't want people to think that they have to make a decision without using our product and seeing that value before. Yeah, and how important is that ongoing training, right?

We talked about that with the field and, you know, obviously there's a lot of data that you guys are trying to collect. That's got to be the most critical part because, you know, just implementing it is great. But like that ongoing training and makes sure people are using it the right way has got to be key. Absolutely, yeah, we take customer success very seriously, and we actually have people, our customer success team is a lot of people that did what I did, and wanted to get into technology as well. So they wanted to be part of this solution, but have this vast knowledge about schedule analytics and scheduling and data and, you know, looking at projects at different points in time and understanding

quality, risk, delays, all of those sorts of things. So yeah, we have a pretty good process that, you know, usually I think every company that signs up, we usually spend about 10 or 12 hours on the implementation. So, you know, a couple hours a month. And then if they want to continue to have somebody from our team meeting with them, you know, hour or two a month, sometimes they'll purchase a few extra hours. So some companies might need additional handholding. But if you're thinking about a company that has resources that do project controls manually for, the last 20 years, they usually just run with it. You know, we teach them how to turn this thing on and they're just off to the races.

But then you get like a mid-market GC that never doesn't understand if they're very good at scheduling and if they need help there, we have a CPM boot camp. And then once they get to that level of understanding, they then have a gauge on keeping quality schedules. And then they start to learn about performance management and risk and delay analysis. And we will hold their hands. for as long as they need until they're ready to sort of go to that next stage and do it on their own. But our goal, and what I tell our customer success team is, you know, we need to ensure that they're

going to get the value they signed up for, Compeller High Water, and that's how we operate. Yeah, I mean, ongoing learning has got to be one of the most vital parts of our industry, and it seems like you're providing that in spades, right? I mean, whether they use your platform or not, they're going to gain so much knowledge about about this scheduling nightmare that that is just part of our industry. We got to learn and embrace it, right? It's part of it. We can't just ignore it, right?

And that's what's getting people into trouble. Yeah, we've actually built out a learning management system now that does our CPM boot camp. My goal a couple of years ago is, okay, for companies that don't necessarily understand scheduling, they're never going to be successful with our tool. So we need to learn how to teach people in a day. and a half of scheduling. So we created a course, which we call our boot camp for, you know, we'll meet with a, you know, a team of PMs and supers and we'll teach them in a day and a half how to be good

schedulers. And then we took that and put it online because nothing actually exists. You'll see how to turn Microsoft project on and how to use it. But it doesn't teach you like, how does this program really function and how does it support your job and how do you do it well? And what are the risks if you don't? and really layer in sort of the pain points that they felt for a long time. So we start there and we have this extensive knowledge base that you can tap into as well as part of our system where you can learn about all sorts of things.

Right on. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Well, I would say the best way is to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want or you can go to our website, www. smart pmtech.com, T-E-C-H-com, and request a demo. But, yeah, always reach out to me on LinkedIn, or you can email me at M-P-I-N-K at smart p-m-tech.com. I'm happy to discuss any and all of this stuff. Awesome.

Thank you so much for being here, Michael. You're a smart man. We need more of you in our industry, so I appreciate you being here and, you know, sharing your knowledge with us. Absolutely. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome, man.

We'll stay in touch. Awesome. Okay. Thanks again, guys, for being here on Construction Executives Live. I am your host, Jeremy Owens. Next show is going to be July 12th, and we're going to get into apprenticeship programs and the importance of those in our industry, and we're going to be introducing kind of a new organization that we can support as a whole.

So that's coming up July 12th. Look for an invite from me on that. Also, again, another thank you to our valuable sponsor, Build 12. Again, automate your construction business into a revenue generating machine with the Build12 system. Go to build12.com. Again, thank you for being here. I know our time is valuable, and I appreciate you taking an hour of your time with us and valuable insight today, as usual. And we'll see you again next month. You guys take care. 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.com.