The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – David Hernandez, Head of U.S. Operations, Elecosoft Interview

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

David Hernandez, Head of U.S. Operations, Elecosoft Interview Elecosoft.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the Big Show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you. Thanks for being here at the Big Show.

And as always, as always, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, for it's just Chris Foss. YouTube.com, for it's just Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, for it's just Chris Foss. Subscribe to that LinkedIn newsletter. I think it grows like a weed. It's crazy over there in the big 130,000 LinkedIn group as well. Go see us on TikTok, the ticky

talky thing where the kids are at. We're trying to be over there, but we're a little old and we're a little too serious for them too. They're like, what is all this highbrow smart shit? You're talking to billionaires and, and people that are, have intelligence. We just want to watch videos that make a drool out the side of your face, which is pretty much what I do on TikTok too. Cause it's, it's, it's addicting addicting stay away from it if you haven't gotten into that heroin yet hey guys uh we have an amazing gentleman on the show we're talking about his amazing company because that's what we do on here we invite these brilliant guests we put in the google machine brilliant guests and they just come on the show and they make the show look amazing because they're

the only intelligent one here usually. You've seen my movie for 14 years. Anyway, guys, he is from a company called Alicosoft. And Alicosoft is a pretty interesting organization. We're talking about everything that they do and how they do it and business in and of itself. David Hernandez is the head of U.S. operations. He's joining us today, and he's a specialist, or his company, and him probably, I don't know, imagine if he's hanging out with the company, right? He's a specialist who provides software and related services to the built environment.

Based in Austin, Texas. Oh, my God, those ribs. Their company's U.S. operation offers a software portfolio that is used during early planning stages through to construction and facilities management, driving the performance and day-to-day operations of the customer's business. He's been involved in the commercial construction industry for years and brings diversified experience to his his role at ElicoSoft. Previously, he was the head of sales at Cmod. Where do you guys get these names? By Built Safety LLC, where he helped companies with custom training, digitized safety plans and inspections, ensuring OSHA standards. I know what OSHA is. We're up to date. And improving workflow to

enhance accountability via the web and mobile software platform. Welcome to the show, Dave. How are you? I'm good. I had to bring you with me. You're like a hype man. I love it. I am.

That's what we do. We give hype and then we add a little bit of flavor to the bios. And sometimes they're funny and sometimes people sue me after the show. Anyway, man, uh, give us your.com. So people can find you on the interwebs,

please. So it's, um, so a lego soft.com and, uh, it's E L E C O S O F T.com. Yes. A lego soft.

A lego soft. And, uh, and those of you listening to the audience, cause most of the people pull this on, on audio, you've got to watch the video because, um, he has an Epic beard and epic is in like uh bold uh uh shifted up uh face whatever

the hell it is i flunked english you you must see his beard because there he's basically two people on the show there's him and his beard so we have two guests as it were so that's okay i i actually get that yeah we're trying to promote the beard i love it yeah he said his writer said though don't ask to touch the beard that's uh that's off limits so just so everyone knows don't ask dave to touch his beard um only his wife gets away with that evidently uh and even then i'm not sure about that because he's married. So it's a married joke right there. So, Dave, tell us about OverU, what this company is about and what you guys do there. So I think most construction companies probably know it as Asta. It was kind of a legacy name was Asta prior to being AlicoSoft.

It's planning and scheduling software primarily. Probably one of, you know, I would say probably one of the most important pieces of a construction project is making sure that it's scheduled properly. We've digitized that and we've been around 40 years now. U.S. presence a little over 11 years. Wow. So, yeah. Yeah. And they're a company that's based out of the UK, right?

Corporate headquarters out of the UK, but each business unit, we're our own standing entity. So we're a US-based entity. So they basically have been around for 11 presidents and one queen. Oh! Isn't that funny how long she lived through so many people? It's crazy.

Good for her, man. I would hope to live that long. She's just been living over over there going another one of these idiots coming over here these american presidents anyway just a joke there i'll get sued probably by the american some american president are any still alive anyway uh so uh do you guys handle mostly commercial residential or both so primarily commercial construction um, probably more on the general contractor side because they're the ones that drive the schedule. There are some subcontractors or trade partners if they act as a prime, like maybe a mechanical or plumbing, they probably do. But primarily commercial general contractors. There you go.

So how did you get in this business? Tell us a little bit of origin story about you. What led you down this pathway to specialize in this field? So I grew up in a construction family and like most people who grew up in a construction family, the parents said, go to school, don't get in this industry, go be a doctor or a lawyer. Didn't want to. I ended up following up up following sales, but I, but all along did construction remodeling. Um, and then I ran my own construction company where I partnered with somebody, we're in a construction company here in Houston. Um, loved, I loved the industry, but I got tired of wearing the hard hat and kind of running the operation side. I thought I would

just kind of retire. Well, I've said, nope, you're going back to work. So then I fell into construction tech. So, so construction tech was the, uh tech was the uh was was was my is my retirement plan i guess there you go and tell us where was the beard born and where did the beard grow up in his origin oh beard was born 20 night 2019 yes 2019 oh there you go there it worked well because covid because covid was locked down so i didn't have to worry about this i could kind of let it grow a little crazy. And then after I started going out again, I cleaned it up a little bit. There you go. Yeah, well, it's crazy, man.

I've seen these guys. I mean, if you can grow a good beard, man, I mean, you got your testosterone going. So that's always a good sign, especially at men our age. So basically, you guys do all major con, uh, construction projects, uh, and help them develop their schedule. Why are schedules important? Why does that make a deal? Big deal. Well, I think that's the primary driver of, of, of project failure. I think it's poor scheduling, poor planning, whether it's resources or just, you know, being able to kind of manage the actual day to day. So, um, we, we try to, we try to be scalable, whether it's a small project or a major project.

So, yeah, I think it's pretty important to know what you're going to be doing, not only today, but what are you doing in the next couple of weeks so that you can plan properly. Planning. I've heard that's a good thing when it comes to business. You know, one of the things about the construction business when you're building stuff is there's so many different vendors and subcontractors and so many moving parts as it were, right? Where you have to,

you know, you've got all sorts of different things going on. You know, you've got Bob, who's got to come put the nails in and the other Bob who's got to show up and do the inspection and, and everyone's got to do it according to plan or overruns can cost you a lot of money, right? Yep. There you go. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, I think there's also a different, a differentiator between planning and scheduling. And I think a lot of, a lot of people will say scheduling, but planning is much broader. And I think that's probably a weak spot within some

of the construction industry is they just hire schedulers it needs to kind of be more of a planning mindset like overall how does it how are we gonna how are we gonna do this and probably planning is important too because i know that sometimes if bob doesn't come in and put the nails in then the inspector shows up and goes hey bob didn and put the nails in, then the inspector shows up and goes, hey, Bob didn't put the nails in. And then they're like, yeah, well, Bob will be back tomorrow. And the inspector's like, yeah, but I won't be back for three months. So have fun with that. Right.

And it can, you know, just one sort of wrench can throw all the gears out of whack. Right. Yeah. And you look at the industry as a whole, they struggle with whether's labor labor shortages you missed you mentioned cost overruns budgeting if that's not planned properly for you know whatever reason your your project can shut down and the cost of the cost of a project shutdown per day could be exponential for a company you put a company out of business there you go so i see some different names of the software tell us about what you guys offer and provide in the way of software and what it does

so so the primary so the power project is our is our kind of our core product that's the planning and scheduling software um we've launched vision which is a complementary product to power project which is our business intelligence it's the data that lives in the planning and scheduling software. And then we've launched a new product called Connect, which is pool planning. So you have the planning and scheduling piece, and then now we have the execution, and that's the Connect piece where you've got trade partners.

Here's our look ahead for the next couple of weeks and being able to digitize that process. Right now it's being done by sticky notes on pretty much. Yeah. The wind blows in the city. Let's go out today. Hey, and then evidently you can use a mobile app to,

you know, work on the thing live. You're at a job site. Is that correct? Correct. So we have site progress mobile, which is more for your foreman and superintendents to just update progress. Typically,

you know, they can take a photo, send it back to the scheduler this has been done it's 40 completed or it's 100 completed they can then update it typically helps with pay apps too it's nice to get paid when you oh completion so you can pay your subcontractors through it well you could with you know i'm talking about just capturing the progress so you can submit your pay apps to get paid. Oh, okay. We don't have that yet. It's coming. Oh, okay. So it's not a great idea.

But if you want to get paid, you got to, hey, you should probably put your stuff in there and rock and roll, right? Yeah, keep track of it. That's always important, I always find. Because if you don't, then you don't get paid. My dad grew up in the subcontracting business in Stucco and half the time trying to get paid was a fun project. So there's that. So what else do we need to know about this?

What makes you guys kind of unique in the area of this type of software and how you guys service? Where do you guys stand out from other vendors that might compete with you? So I think we stand out in a couple of ways. One, our product alone, I think is, you know, I'm biased, I guess, but our product functionality is superior. Ease of use, it's a familiar looking product.

So there's a couple of players in the market, but typically Microsoft Project and Primavera P6 are kind of competitors. Ease of use is second to none functionality you can like i said customizable from if you're building just a single custom home or a four billion dollar airport a project and anything in between um so our functionality is pretty robust the data intelligence the business intelligence piece really, I think, brings a different level. And then I think our team, we look at it from more of a problem-solving, a problem-finding solution. We want to be involved in the industry.

We want to make sure that we're helping the industry. So we try to bring in industry experts. And even if our product solution doesn't make sense, we want to have that conversation to help them with processes and and overall just making the industry a little better so i think we approach it a little differently and it looks like people can use your software around the world i'm seeing some posts here about uh different places in the world that people are using your software as well correct yep it's in it's used now um obviously the u.s we're in um pretty much all of europe, Germany, Australia, Sweden. Yeah. It's a, it's all around the world.

There you go. Well, it's being used a lot then. You can either buy a subscription around if your guy's a website or you can get a 14 day free trial. Sign up for that as well. There you go. I think I've got a, I'm trying to come up with a local home business building joke and I can't find one. So that's going to have to be the laughter point. The laughter point. I need to remember that.

I've got to put up a shower curtain, so I probably should free trial the system so I can make sure. Possibly. Make sure you schedule the steps properly. I probably have to, otherwise that shower is going to burn down. If you've ever seen me try and handle tools, like my business

partners back in the day, I'd try and help them build desks and different things around the office they make no no no get away from you you're one of those people that don't be around tools i guess i'm kind of a tool that way but uh you need your little drum little drum set i do but it's a little it's my jokes are bad enough as they are they don't if i put on a drum thing a snare uh crash people would be like seriously i mean the joke was bad enough as it is uh but we've all been there we've all tried to put the shower curtain and burn down the house right is it is it just me um so you guys do this the software is available around the world um it gives i see some different terms here that i'm not really sure

about so there's project scheduling and 4d bim integration bim what is that so so 40 is the is is is the software is the technology of taking a 3d bim model which is the uh the 3d models that typically they take that technology and put it into the scheduling software. We've actually kind of tried to turn the industry on its head a little bit by starting with the model first. So grabbing that 4D model,

putting it into the software and actually letting the software build a schedule from the 4D model and the data that's in there. And it's actually, it's probably one of our best features. Um, it's, it's pretty cool.

It's, Oh, I'm seeing it on the site here. Holy crap. I'm only. And I, I think, I think in the U S,

um, our customers that we have conversation with, they're like, yeah, we want to get into doing them and more 3d and 40, but you know, we have to hire a specialist. You don't have to do that with Power Project.

It's integrated into the system. You can build the 3D models from there. You can transfer the IFC files. I mean, it's pretty slick. Plus, you can probably spin these around, right? Yep, there's animation in it. And it looks like it shows the different stages of things being built.

Like I'm seeing a central construct sort of thing and they're building the levels. Yes, it does. And it helps you. If you can take it from a model to schedule, we had a customer who actually did that and they had a project that was slated for 18 months or for 12 months, excuse me. And then when they put it into the schedule system,

it actually turned out to be an 18 month project. They had everything printed out. They showed the owner, the owner, you know, they put it into the schedule system, it actually turned out to be an 18-month project. They had everything printed out. They showed the owner. The owner, you know, they challenged it. They couldn't find anything wrong with it and said, you know what? You're right. It's 18 months. So they saved the customer six months of change orders over this project.

And that was a ridiculous amount of money that was saved to this customer. I can imagine. Just by doing it that way. It was actually pretty cool. It's actually the start of this, what we call Active 4D. There you go. Now you just need to get integrated with that new apple thing and people yeah that's a $3,500 headset and go wow look at this i literally sent that to my innovation team yesterday

oh serious we've got to figure out a way to do this yeah yeah i mean you could you know be cool as if you could walk around the uh if you walk around the building with those things and like your virtual building and you'd be like whoa okay i saw something really cool the other day uh i was on tiktok i think um and these guys had like a gymnasium they'd set it up in because i could see the basketball hoops but basically they had all these uh things on the roof that were that that would spray down a model. And you could see like the, basically the blueprint of a home, a residential home. And it even had like a welcome mat up front and you could basically be down there with the customer and the customer could literally walk through a scale version, you know, just

the flat part of their home and get a sense or feel of the walk through on it like okay you know three feet down you turn here and there's a bedroom here and there's a bathroom there and and uh i thought it was pretty freaking amazing i'm like holy crap yeah augmented reality is what they call that and it's um it's it's it's taking i mean it's taking hold across most construction industries already. There are plenty of companies that do that. So that's kind of another, I guess another add on is we're look, we, we love partnering with that. We don't do the augmented reality piece. However, with our,

with our planning tools, if they're doing augmented reality, there's some, there's some APIs that we could look at doing. We're totally, we love the partnerships piece as well. Yeah. I can see the future of having those augmented reality uh headsets where you could walk through the building and you could be like hey i i don't like the bathrooms over here they need to be over here closer to me because my prostate can't make it that far uh you know uh you know that sort of thing you know where you can be like hey who put this who put this but you know a pillar here? Like, what the hell?

You know, that sort of thing. And, of course, I'd be more concerned about, like, what's the view on my office and how big is it? So there's that. I mean, you know, you've got priorities. You guys also do business intelligence and simplified stakeholder management. Tell us about that and software, please. So the business intelligence, I guess, is just another way for saying that stakeholder management. Tell us about that and software, please. So the business intelligence, I guess, is just another way for saying that stakeholder management,

it's the, you know, when you go, when you look from an executive level or management level, you don't necessarily need to get into the granular pieces of the schedule. You just want to know some high level information. Are we, are we on time? How are we doing actual versus budgeted? You know, what is, what, what are delays? What's causing those delays? So I just need to see that in kind of a simplified, whether it's dashboards or business intelligence tool. So that data is there. So vision allows us to grab that data, share it from a, for a high level perspective and

also for the schedulers to manage it as well. But really it's more for kind of the executives, your stakeholders would be, you know, your owners, if they need that information, trade partners as well. There you go. There you go. So what haven't we touched on that you guys offer with your software and how you build it and all that good stuff?

I think we've touched on all the features and functionality. I mean, it's a pretty robust system. I mean, we could probably spend so much time going into all the weeds, but I think ultimately if we just, if we kind of tag it more of a planning a planning platform versus just scheduling because there's there's risk analysis there's business intelligence

there's so many other things in there that uh from a planning perspective resource management as well which moving people around and materials is important there you go and getting stuff out on time you've got six months off a project i I mean, you're building a skyscraper. That's like tens, hundreds of million dollars. And then everyone's happy

because you don't want lawsuits and legal stuff and problems where this person doesn't like that or

this person's saying, well, this person did that wrong, so this is wrong. Plus, you can probably help identify problems

in the system in different aspects and in different aspects. And then maybe re auto, you know, recorrect, uh, for issues that come up.

Yes. There you go. There you go. Well, this is pretty awesome. I love the 4d thing. And, uh,

yeah, it'd be cool, man. If, if, uh, you know, maybe Apple's new headset or other VR,

uh, AR XR, you know, you name it, BR. I don't know what pr whatever whatever alphabet we can throw at it yes we can throw it the the the chris foss virtual is called cr i don't know what that means anyway uh so you go any more you want to tease out on what you guys are doing before we go um i you know i think you know the one thing i guess i missed one of the things that separates us is we we started as a construction company back in 1895.

We were a construction company and moved into a tech. So we understand the industry. Our tag is built for construction. But there's some pretty cool things coming on the innovation roadmap that we're not there yet. But obviously, AI and some of these other predictive analytics and some things that we're really trying to get in. So any, like I said, partnerships, we love getting feedback from the construction industry, from our customers and prospective customers as well. So there you go.

And they can reach out to you on your site. Correct. Well, that's supposed to be the easiest way to contact us. There you go. Give us that site one more time. It is alicosoft.com and yeah it's not cheese it's e-l-e-c-o-s-o-f-t.com there you go guys reach out to him and stuff well uh dave this has been wonderful having you and your beard on the show thank you for coming it's been a pleasure thanks

chris there you go and thanks to my audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys because without you guys for 14 years and 1400 episodes we couldn't do this and actually we would be probably still doing it because I enjoy the guests we have but no one would be you know no one else would be listening but we love you and everything you do and all that good stuff be sure to further show your family friends and relatives because you wanted them to be at

least as smart as you maybe not quite as smart as you because you guys are the smartest audience ever but you know at least get them within a few IQ points of yourself go to youtube.com for just christmas goodreads.com for just christmas youtube and linkedin and tiktok thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time of course you will bye-bye