End Tech Debt

Robert: Welcome back everyone to the Contech Exec Podcast. I'm here with the folks from Cavtera. Joe and Ryan back with me today on a part two of kind of what we started last week. We had a conversation last week. I hope that what happened was maybe we cleared up a few pieces of terminology about Palantir Foundry. Hopefully it's not so much of a black box if you listen to to to the last podcast with this. and if you haven't you need to go back and listen to that one first before you get to this one. I don't want to confuse anybody. You know, it'll it'll probably translate pretty well. But guys, how are things going today? Joe, you were telling me your guys have been pretty busy lately.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, really busy. A lot of lot of action here setting up the new company and yeah, really exciting.

Robert: Well, so from our last conversation we talked about some of the different definitions, some of the words that get thrown around. One was we try to kind of define ontology. hear a lot of hear a lot about it, you know. What what is ontology? Well, it's you know, as we defined in the last episode, it's the nouns and the verbs of your business, the peoples, places, things that you do. and and it's that's basically it. It's it's as simple as it gets. So we kind of define that. We we realize that Palature Foundry is not really a black box of mysterious things. It's it's a discovery of, hey, what do you want to do with your company? And and we're gonna help you get started with it at at Caftera. it's not necessarily a replacement. It could be, but maybe you want to start small, those types of things. So what that brings me to is kind of the origin stories of not just Caftera, but also the origin stories of using it with Thomas Kavanaugh, right? How did this all kind of turn into what is now Caftera, basically, you know, selling the product that you guys ended up implementing at Thomas Kavanaugh? And I don't care who goes first, but you know, let's just kind of get into it, you know, the bruises and scrapes. Ryan, let you

Ryan: Yeah.

Robert: start off here.

Ryan: Yeah, hey Rob. Yeah, gr great to be here again. you know what, I mean I think I think like many companies, we just set out simply to s you know, to solve some business problems. You know, we were using a collection of tools and in some cases heavily heavily Excel based. And you know, we we we set out to improve the business. That was really the driving underlying factor. And you know, a few of us internally got together, myself, Joe and and some others included, who who this was something this is a topic they got really interested in. Just this underlying feeling that there has to be a better way to do things. And you know, it's you know, no one's no one's coming to save us. You know, we're gonna have to save our save ourselves on this one is kind of one concept that we like to talk about. But that that started like so many companies where we we stood up some traditional off the shelf solutions. We actually got quite a bit of traction, you know what, like let's track some production, let's let's digitize some of our cost management with equipment and and our labor force. Let's let's use Excel SharePoint with couple Power BI, you know, to get some analytics. let's bring some people together that haven't normally, you know, met to plan operations and you know, let's let's start to build out what this, you know and one and you know, frankly we got we got a lot of we got a lot of traction, but the further we went down that road, we started just uncovering this this kind of new problem where With every solution we brought in, you spent more and more time, you know, with the complexity of making that integrate with your next thing. So, okay, so today it's gonna be, okay, we're tracking production and we're able to get, you know, much of our labor and equipment managed, but there's a few things that are there's some gaps left behind. And now we gotta s find a way to integrate this with the spreadsheet. And it's like, okay, now what about the ERP? And it's like, well, now we're asking the field, you know, there's some new, you know, it's excess soil environmental requirements and safety docs. It's like It's those are the barriers we s we started to encounter. And when when you kinda you know piece it together and you and you look to the future, it's it's we we just saw the requirement. Like this doesn't scale, basically is what I'm trying to get at. We realized that, you know, just one more solution after another solution and they're gonna continue to solve individual things, but we're starting to lose you know, I term tech debt comes to mind, but you're losing a bit of energy every single thing you every single every single time you implement something. You know, you're it's a disacconomy of scale.

Robert: Here it it reminds me of a lot of times this reminds me of plumbing with iron pipe. I don't know you guys have ever done any plumbing in your day, but if you've ever had an iron pipe job, I had a house had iron pipe and it was like when you want to fix a leak, you go to start fixing one lake and then you loosen up something else on the other end because you twisted that one too far, you didn't hold that one over there. It's very, very difficult to do by yourself. first of all, you you need a couple of folks so you got one guy holding. But it's like it's always seems like once I put this new section in, wait a minute, I gotta go back to this other section and re-tighten that thing up. Because I didn't get that right. I thought that joint was great. you know, I thought that was tight enough. no, it wasn't, because when you when you wrenched on this over here, it loosened this up over here. It made him you know, I'm not a great plumber. I hate plumbing. You know? I I don't know anybody who likes plumbing unless you're, you know, I don't even know plumbers that like plumbing.

Joe: I don't think they do either.

Robert: But but they do it because they, you know, they get really, really good. good at it, but I digress. The thing is that's what it feels like to me a lot of times when we keep implementing some new system and then all of a sudden this system breaks this one just a little bit. There's something lo and you keep going back and that's frustration and I think that gets to your point, Ryan, about that technical debt. You just feel like, well, we gotta keep going with it 'cause we bought it, right? But it doesn't quite work with this. But we w I think we can fix it somehow, you know, until we get back to it and then never happens.

Ryan: Well, and it's like, you know, and as we kind of touched on last time, and no and no two construction companies are the same and many are vertically integrated and have a lot of different pieces. So like sometimes even the solution you bring in fixes it for part of the business, but you actually need a different off the shelf solution within the same kind of company that's that's also solving like a labor equipment problem. So now you have like two pieces of tech really fundamentally solving the same thing, but they have to be different because of the of the inflexibility. And it just, you know, it it it didn't it didn't feel like the future. If you could

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: if you can chalk it up to a gut feeling, it's like this doesn't feel like, you know, w where the industry needs to be going.

Robert: Right. So Joe, I've watched a couple of your speeches and stuff. You give a lot of talks on this kind of thing and and so is that the kind of thing that j you just said finally, okay, man, there's gotta be a better way and I think you know, Palantir's got a solution here.

Joe: Well, and I remember Ryan alluded to it. You know, we're Ryan and I were in a boardroom one day and we were griping about something. We were in project management, so you know, operating in the business day to day. We were in a meeting for God knows what, and you know, I was griping about something, and Ryan said, Well, look around. Nobody's coming to save us, we gotta fix it. And so we kind of looked at each other, we said, Well, fine, frig you, well, let's do it. And so that kind of was the the birth or the catalyst for our group called at the time Project Controls. And like Ryan said, we just started turning over rocks and literally asking people, What about your day sucks and how can we help fix it? And we did a lot of that with just some off-the-shelf tools, a lot of SharePoint and Power BI. But you know, I had this feeling that and it always frustrated me, you know, in projects day to day and being on site that within our entire organization, all of the information is technically known. If you know who to ask and you ask enough questions, well you might just by the end of the day figure out when we changed the brake pads on that truck last or where are we supposed to get this material from. But it was never organized or available for the people who needed it at the time they needed it. And so we started by just trying to connect what we could. So, okay, well, if we type in all of our resource requirements in one SharePoint sheet, at least the whole organization can see them. You know, and we had some big wins by, you know, solving some of our scheduling problems and resource issues into, you know, some shared, you know, shared workbooks, essentially consolidating the data. So do you to the question, Rob, is We just so happened to fall into a Palantir boot camp. The salesperson for Palantir at the time had gone to high school with the owner of the company, Jeff Kavanaugh. You know, I was walking down the hall one day and they said, Palantir's coming here, they're doing a boot camp. And I said, The Palantir from the news, they're they're coming here to Kavanaugh.

Robert: Yeah.

Joe: They Yeah, yeah, you wanna you wanna come watch? You know, and so they they put on a boot camp. They showed us how they, you know, pulled some data together, you know, and myself and a couple of others, Ryan, we saw it and went, Holy crap, they did the thing. That's it. They they've consolidated

Robert: That's the thing, yeah.

Joe: the data. You can Build applications inside of it, you know, and we, you know, I was convinced from that point forward and we made it kind of our life's mission to get Palantir installed at Kavanaugh Construction. And so, you know, we proposal after proposal, and you know, we went on a campaign to do some initial use cases, were successful with those, and then went through all that, you know, the integration with our legacy systems, tried some real-time costing and a bunch of things, a lot of learning

Robert: Yeah.

Joe: as we went. But, you know, out of that, you know, initial boot camp, we just realized. You know, after integrating with all these different things, we just kept saying over and over again, Well, this would be so much easier if we just did it in Foundry. You know, we tried to tie to this up or wow, what if we just build it, you know, and you'd we'd do things like build a you know, build a simple time carding solution on the weekend just to show what was possible and show up on Monday and see, look, we could do it in here. And so eventually we were successful in that and we called the the the whole thing total operations management or Tom as an homage to Tom Kavanaugh. But you know, that was the birth of the the Kavanaugh operating system.

Robert: So yeah, it sounds like you guys are already doing the work. I mean, what you were doing with the with the BIM and the Excel spreadsheets and the other solutions for the analytics, obviously if it was available in, you know, the Palantir Foundry product, it's like, wow, okay. Instead of doing the work outside trying to kind of fit, you know, part A into into, you know, slot C over here, and then maybe we just kind of see if we can go with it. So let's get in

Joe: a lot of a lot of the learnings we took from, you know, getting a, you know, an entire project management group to use a shared spreadsheet is a lot harder than it sounds too. You know, it's it's in it's not elegant, it's really fragile. The

Robert: Yeah.

Joe: funny part is is, you know, once they got used to it, they all really liked that tool. And so we learned, you know, kind of how to roll things out and make things stick and the pain associated with the change management. So that set a lot of the groundwork as to, you know, a lot of things

Robert: And plus

Joe: we do now.

Robert: and I think there's a lot to be said. I I I know I've bagged on Excel spreadsheets in the past and I say, you know, hey, you it's time to throw those things away and do all these I get it. There's a lot of there's a lot of wisdom in Excel spreadsheets, there's a lot of pain, a lot of heartbreak inside those things and that you can learn from You really can.

Joe: Well, the funny thing with the Excel tools is they're actually the MVP or the minimum viable product it takes to do the thing you're trying to do. And so they're actually,

Robert: That is right.

Joe: you know, extremely valuable in a lot of organizations because you've got the framework for exactly what they're trying to solve.

Robert: Correct.

Joe: yeah, it's it's actually pretty interesting.

Robert: I think that's where the bumps and bruises kinda does start really. You've you you go through that Excel, that minimum viable product, you're sitting there going, Okay, bumps and bruises, I'm getting beat up on this, this and this, and I need to find at least a solution for this one part, you know, whether that's you know, a a payroll kind of thing or a time tracking spreadsheet, you know, just trying to figure out how many hours X guy over here has got with his crew or his truck or th the excavator, the operators, the the gas guys, the fuel guys, how how long are they out? The maintenance guys, which ones I mean, just getting started on one of those seems to be again, everybody gets, well, there's this, this and this, and then they go off on these tangents we kinda talked about last time about these edge cases that tend to take over the conversation. And I wanna know a little bit about that because I doubt that this was had any you know, had easy moments.

Ryan: Yeah, I can I can maybe chime in there. I mean, our you know, our the COO with a group of companies and our CEO, he I think he actually put it well. It's it's it's comfort isn't actually the goal. And you know, when you buy something off the shelf and I think, you know, the SAS products do so well because because there's a level of comfort because they are pre canned and because the the schemer of the workflow is kind of baked in. You you actually don't have the luxury of dealing with the edge cases. You kind of just have to fit into it. And there is a certain amount of comfort that comes with that, but there's a trade-off. So I think

Joe: Mm-hmm.

Ryan: some like a lot of the bumps and bruises that you're referring to come with when you peel all that away, you need to painfully expose, you know, any kind of shortcomings in in your business. And it's it's hard to kind of reimagine, you know, after decades and decades of using off the shelf solution, well, if we if we take all this away, the opportunity is huge, but the other side of that sword is is you you it's hard to imagine where you need to start. And like in a in this new world, what what do I how do I actually wanna run my business, you know?

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: Do I actually have someone that's gonna be in a position to make a decision if I surface this this information that may not have been available? You know, whether it's you know, I'm gonna have employees that I'm gonna have to to deal with or maybe let go or, you know, because their behavior is gonna be so present in my in your and in your face, or, you know, I'm gonna need to sell some equipment that I'm really attached to emotionally, but you know what, now that the data doesn't lie and it it's actually just not the utilization isn't there. And it's you know, the the blank canvas is the power, but also also the the the daunting the daunting part of that.

Robert: Yeah. Well I th no, go ahead, Joe.

Joe: I had a thought there, Ryan, while you're talking. Sorry, Rob. a lot of those edge cases are a symptom of the you know, the off the shelf product forcing you into that, you know, into that way of working. So you'll find that a lot of the edge cases actually fall away when you're allowed to build the tool around the way your business actually works.

Robert: Yeah. I think it's a double edged sword. I I think the edge edge cases have some viability to I think a a SAS product, you know, that is focused. Let let's just say I mean, let's just say payroll, whatever. Anything like that. You got a SAS product that focuses on payroll. Well, it does make you focus, right? And it makes you gives you a starting point. can we were talking Ryan before we got started here about maybe, you know, where do you start? I always say the same thing. Every time I go to another conference, I look around and I see ten thousand people at this show and they're all have the same problems. None of them know exactly where to start. Or they've started somewhere, but then they're they're like on a squirrel, you know, like a dog on a squirrel. They're like, wait a minute, I I really need to I need to focus on that too. I need to focus on that too. And then every path you go down then ends up getting into those. those edge cases, right? And it's not that they're not valid, but I think folks are looking for that sort of perfection in there and it's not there. There's no perfection in any of these. I don't care if you're going with Palantir or if you're going with a SAS solution. The perfection is gonna or I should say the excellence is probably just going to rely more on your team and how you engage with whatever product you're jumping towards.

Joe: People have this allergic reaction to the edge cases or exceptions or the nuance of business. One of the cool things we're able to tackle now is, you know, these things are different and that's okay. You know, a simple example of what I'm trying to say is, you know, from a permission standpoint, you know, there's this idea, this this desire to be perfect. Like if everybody had the perfect job description, well then permissions would be easy. But it's like, well we know damn well that operations don't actually match that perfect reality. It's like some people have extra permissions and this one person does this, though their title's that. It's like and that's okay. So this new world allows you to, you know, work closer to reality than this, you know, the the way we used to have to try to match the ultimate or the ideal.

Robert: Ryan, what if we're if we were talking about it, you know, when you guys decided what were you guys working on when when you said, Okay, we need to go down the the Palantir, but what was your first what'd you tackle first? Like thinking of places to get started. What'd guys tackle first?

Ryan: Yeah, and if you want to think of it like pulling a thread, you know, we we kind of started and I'll call it modestly, but it really wasn't that modest. Like we we started with we we want better visibility on on our project costing. We wanna be able to do a better job at forecasting as an organization. So all of the other people that need to be informed by that forecast, you know, how much equipment am I gonna need in three months, how much material, what's the labor force demand? You know, so when you start pulling that thread, you get down to kind of first principles with, you know, ultimately we need to la manage our labor force and we need to manage our equipment. so we started with our labor force management and dispatch, you know, moving moving our trucks and equipment. Well what as you kept pulling that thread in order to do that, you know, we ultimately concluded, well, we gotta get we gotta get everybody, we want every single employee to be engaged in this process. And what that means is, you know, a lot of them aren't aren't you know, most of them, most of the workforce isn't a computer or PC, laptop user. They're gonna be interacting with their everyone's got a cell phone, almost everybody. They're gonna be interacting on their cell phone. So once again, pulling the thread, it's like that that's gonna mean an app store application. We needed something robust, reliable that had Just had the bare kind of minimum functionality that had, you know, ability for two-way communication. You know, you could put your time card in, maybe you could ask HR a question and have kind of this real-time dialogue. You got visibility onto you, your your own personal profile, which, you know, and even something like that, which is seemingly trivial, but like for a construction business to keep, you know, everyone's emergency contact and next akin and personal details address up to date, you know, that's that's someone's full-time job, is is keeping that up to date but when you suddenly arm and kind of democratize that and everyone just has visibility, just like you know, if you're if you're in an office setting like everyone's used to keeping profiles up to date, suddenly just making it visible allowed everybody to participate and just correct these. You democratize it everyone's you know, responsible for their piece and then the sum of that is it's no one's job now to do that specifically. So labor force management, equipment management, that's where we we chose to start. and then we kind of built it from there. Like I I'd be lying if we said we set out with this kind of North Star all in approach. Like many that we talked to in the industry, we started out with really specific pain points and let's let's apply some pressure there. And then it kind of evolved. And grew from from that point on.

Robert: No idea why it does that, but

Ryan: All good.

Robert: it does. I've been thinking about that, which you're just talking about, you know, the SAS applications, you know, even though they say they're supposed to eliminate some of these pain points, there's still a lot of times you get the SAS applications and the pain points still there. It may just go back to the like the kind of redundancy of of I got three different solutions all are supposed to provide, but they don't quite get there. So therefore I have to have this one for this part, this one for this part, and this one for this part, and suddenly you're you've created a new paint point out of three solutions that were supposed to provide the solution for one paint point. It it's it's very strange, but I feel like the sometimes and it gets back to that kind of first principles kind of thing. Are we really solving for first principles here or are we just kind of putting a band aid over a bullet wound, you know?

Ryan: Well and I I and I think one thing that's important is I know we spend a lot of time talking about the downsides of SAS. Like there's some SAS solutions that do a great job. They actually solve the problem you're you're wanting them to solve. So I don't it's it's easy to turn the narrative that like and and you see it online sometimes, it's like SAS is dead. SAS isn't dead. And it's just you know, not to to quote Joe, but you just need to you you need to have each piece justify what it's doing within your business, does it make sense? And the answer's gonna be yes. It's not like an all or nothing proposition. but to to your point, it's you gotta look at your your entire ecosystem and and where you're trying to go.

Robert: Yeah. I think a lot of times what happens guys is that is that s you're right, SAS is not dead. There's a lot of great solutions out there. I talk to several you know, every week. a lot of great solutions out there. I think what it does it exposes it exposes some of the raw spots in our own behaviors. And we don't like that. There's a ton of companies out there that just they're It's kinda like when you first track productivity, right? And you start to track it and it starts getting some accurate numbers back and it doesn't quite look like you thought it was gonna look. Right? And then you're sitting there going, Wait a minute, this can't be right. You know, I thought we were doing great. I thought this money would I thought this job was making money. Or I thought this job over here and you know, I thought they were doing better. Why are we all of a sudden w this said this is telling me we're gonna be three weeks late. What what's going on? You know, how can we right? And then all of a sudden you start to realize the problem's not the technology. The problem is your p is your process, it's your behaviors. It's I I c I often say, you know, this this whole age of AI, this whole surge of technology into construction is gonna make us learn more about our own behaviors than it's gonna do before it does anything else.

Joe: Yeah, and I think it's the cool part is is we're actually now able to solve both. And so they they go hand in hand where not only do do you get the opportunity to look inward at your business and solve the problems the best way, you're now unencumbered by the software. So we say like we're able to solve the problems we always wanted to solve despite the software now.

Robert: Right. Yeah.

Ryan: I think you know, expo you're talking about ex exposing, you know, this vulnerability with exposing maybe the way you've structured your business or or the human element of it. Because essentially what you wanna do in this age of AI is you want a digital representation. of reality of your business, of your actions, of your you know, you want the data to match what's what's actually out there. And you're not gonna like what you're gonna find in in a lot of cases. But like you have to start there in order to start correcting that behavior, correcting your policies, changing the way you operate, putting people in a position to make a decision that there hasn't been historically. And until you do these precursor steps, you you know you're you're just simply not going to have access to operational AI, regardless how of how good the L Yeah.

Robert: Yeah. I I think one of those things you brought it up earlier, Ryan, was you know, tech adoption on your own personal device. there's a pain point in there, just again, back to first principles, back to the person in the truck. They're not at it you can't you can't take that office environment mentality and apply it to construction, right? Not everyb I can't just go down the hall and get a hold of Joe or get a hold of Ryan because I'm fifty miles away at some quarry over here, you know what I mean? And so there's this there's this whole different thing and I I think a lot of times people get in they get in the mindset it's like, well this, you know This company over here has got this building and there everybody's in it, th they can they can do this. Why you know, it should it should just apply. And it doesn't

Joe: Mm-hmm.

Robert: just apply. And it goes kind of that thing. It's like there's a difficulty just getting folks to get it onto their phone. plain and simple. Use the minimum viable product on the phone and it has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with the person that needs to just either talk into their phone, type into their phone, it starts there. It's behavior.

Joe: Yep, not only have we downloaded all the administrative tasks to the folks that actually drive the revenue, but construction's one of the last places where, you know, the the tech ecosystem doesn't match reality. And a really, you know, simple analogy or example of when it does match reality is like Uber. That that's a beautiful example of how you know your tech and reality are integrated seamlessly. So you order a ride, you watch the ride, the dot boop towards you, you get in the car. You go to your destination, you're still on the map in the app, you get out, the invoice hits your you know, your your bank account. It's like that everything that just happened was totally in line with reality. And construction's actually the total opposite. You sit in the site trailer, you plan the critical path schedule, you call and manage and plan your trucks, and then you go outside and something else happens. Right?

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah. I I yeah, and like I think I think, you know, that's a good example that kind of segues into like people use Uber because there's an incentive. That incentive is it's e it's easier to do that. Like it's just it's actually just easier for me to order my ride on Uber as an individual, as a as a private person walking around. But to get someone to do this in a company environment where it's your personal device and the company is not mandating, at least in our jurisdiction, that's you you can't do that. It's gotta be an elective process. You have to get the employee to to opt in. So it's it's one, what are they getting out of it? You know, is is this easier? Do I have better visibility? Like in in this case, maybe it's I don't need to wait two weeks to see what I'm gonna be, what my paycheck is gonna be. You know, I can see that accumulate, I can see the status of my time. card as my supervisor approves it as as it gets processed in payroll you know I can ask a you know a simple question in in a in a chat with with HR and they're gonna get back to me I'm not waiting for a callback and then this this this dialogue and this histories here and you know I always already mentioned the profile but in order even just to get to that point it's it's the simple things like you're talking about foundry you know one of the most powerful if not the most powerful platform in the world the thing that's gonna trip up adoption is You know what, I know my Apple ID. I forget I forget my I forget my password. I can't I can't read my screen because at some point I changed the zoom settings and I couldn't be bothered how to how to unwind it and like You're you're dead in the water in step one. Like you build the greatest thing, you know, you let's say you build the greatest employee application that's ever existed. Well, it doesn't matter if they can't log in or if they can't read their phone. So it's it's having real people support that kind of process. And, you know, that's like a really true like we're talking about base principles. It's like getting an employee, you know, giving them the ability and supporting them just logging in. Like that's that's kind of where, you know, we started.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah, I don't I don't know that I've ever s seen a software that didn't have like s a large portion of the support issues had n really nothing to do with the software itself. It had to do with login, single sign on, you know T I love your I love your zoom thing because th the struggle is real. I'm telling

Joe: Well what?

Robert: you right so my phone, I had to get a new phone because my zoom kept zooming all the way out and like I would literally

Ryan: Yeah.

Robert: have to reset my phone because it was an older phone, it started glitching out and then it it would just randomly I'd be looking at it like, okay, that's you know, the small pixel of a screen has been exp expanded. But that's real. That's that's a real problem. It's kinda like to your point, Joe, you know, walk outside the job trailer and then everything that you just planned out during the day is not going that way because your phone is on twelve thousand times zoom and I can't get a call out. I can't even get into it. I've got to spend the next fifteen minutes trying to reset my phone so I can see what's going on, and I've got a superintendent over here or a foreman over here that says, by the way, I'm quitting at noon. You know.

Joe: What's that?

Robert: you know, the it's these things that just Just they stack on and then you feel like you spend the rest of your day, you know, you're putting out some fire or another that had zero to do with the technology that you have been implementing to try to make these fires go away. I do not know of any technology that's going to eliminate somebody saying, Hey dude, I'm outta here. You know what I mean? I've had it, I'm done. Construction sometimes sucks. It really does. You know, if it's a hundred and twenty degrees like it is here in Texas and you're just you've had it, you've you're fed up, you know, people some people just walk and they're they're tired of it. Or I think in today's society we we know that there's a lot more stress on construction about how Hey, I need you there earlier. I need you to stay later. We gotta get more time in. We need better productivity. And we're talking about folks that really, quite honestly, and I'm one of like, I really would just like to go home, you know, get to my family, take my kids fishing, you know, do something, you know. I'm really not really wanting to put in all these hours, even though there's tons of pressures from some you know, major corporation, you know, or a way over and wherever.

Joe: That's where a lot of the the drive comes from our group too is because we've lived that frustration. And not only is there more and more requirements on them each day from health and safety or costing and production, you know, excess soils, you name it, there's new requirements every day, but the tools haven't kept up. And so the you know, the frustration is just mounting and we we felt it when we were, you know, in in the business. and that's where a lot of that we call it rage to just help try and fix things comes from.

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: Well, I mean and and wouldn't it be nice, and this is kind of like this is one of the one of, you know, our North Stars is just imagine the people that are in a position to actually, you know, improve that situation, you know, through better planning or, you know, catching things in advance so there isn't this kind of mad scramble, like, okay, we didn't see this coming, so everyone's gotta work an extra hour. You know, and you start unraveling that by giving some people their time back. And it's not easy, but just imagine if instead of s you know logging into even to that one extra platform and typing in, you know, the production aid data for here and now I gotta go and update my three week look ahead and I gotta do my long term plan. So imagine that, you know, the person's kind of sitting in the office with with great visibility on on the work that needs to be done. If they had just even a little bit more time in planning and starting to kind of catch some of those friction points, like that's how we start winding it back. You know, let's let's give the people that are great at doing the work and planning the work, let's let them do that. You know, let's let's let's get them out of fourteen platforms. Let's get them out of reproducing data that's already that's already known. You know, and it's it's it's it's a battle to do that, but it's it's a a fight worth having.

Robert: Well, I think there's there's something to be said for that too, giving the the people that are kind of planning the work the ability to to get a better focus on what's gonna happen. So one of my biggest pet peeves I was I was running jobs as a project manager is like you know, it we'd work I would start at five AM and work till like two, right? And then two o'clock would roll around, trades would be rolling up, everybody'd be trying to head off the job site and get to go where they're going. And there were some areas where I was like, Man, if we just had fifteen more minutes on this, or if I had thirty more minutes on this And I could because of what I would say to them because I've been experienced in that area, but like, look, if you just spent thirty more minutes and I know it's time to roll up tools, but if you spent thirty more minutes to finish that, then you don't have to set up here tomorrow and take another three hours and then and then reset someplace else. You could actually start tomorrow on the new area that we need to get going on. And but s what I didn't have at the time, a all I didn't have a tool to to be able to show by productivity wise, hey by the way, if you do this, if you get this done, if you ring if you hit this achievement mark right here, it's not a time clock thing, it's how much you get done. Bomb Friday I bet ya I can get you out of here by noon. Right. Wouldn't that be awesome if they had that data in front of them to go, Look, man, if we finish this up, give me fifteen minutes, let's finish this. By Friday I get you out of here two hours early, you still get paid the same amount. Matter of fact, we're gonna meet quota, we're gonna make bonus, you know, because we're gonna meet what we're trying to do. Up until now we really haven't the had the ability, you know what I mean, to kind of crunch that data. It was a little bit too siloed, those kind of things. Now we're starting to see the possibility where maybe we can start to calculate that. We can start to Say, hey, if we do this, this and this on Monday, Wednesday, you know, Thursday, I guarantee ya this is where we're gonna be on Friday and I'm we know we're taking everybody out for, you know, drinks or whatever. I don't know, whatever. You know. We used to go on Fridays, they'd g tequila on Fridays, but you know, that was just

Ryan: Yeah.

Robert: I'm older.

Ryan: Mm-hmm. No, and just like it's you know, when you when you're when you're imagine, you know, being able to measure things i in a way that's more closer to like a real time metric, you're better able to actually align your incentives with what's actually happening. When when everything's so delayed, it's really hard to match what do my efforts do are today really mean for the big picture. So therefore it's also hard to put an incentive around that. You know, when it's hard to measure it, you can't reward it either, you know. So it's hard to have production targets when we aren't measuring production on a day to day basis. Like how do you how do you set the target then?

Robert: And that surprises me too, the number of companies that say they're tracking productivity. I again I I think there's differences. You know, productivity means units over hours, right? That's some or hours over units how you want to do it, okay? But units over hours, it means and I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if you're hauling dirt, if you're whatever. You're do pouring concrete, hanging drywall, I don't care what it is. There

Ryan: Landpipe or whatever, yep.

Robert: Yeah, it doesn't matter. There's still some sort of measurement over the time that it takes to do it. And there's always such an argument. But then every all these guys are going, No, no, no, we're tracking productivity. We're just but it's in our budget. It's like, no,

Joe: yeah.

Robert: I could spend five hundred dollars and not get five hundred dollars worth of work done. You know what I'm saying? It's like it doesn't work that way. And then then there's tarki they're talking about tracking progress and like, well, we've made progress. I said that doesn't make a a big difference. I can make progress too You know what I mean? It might be shitty progress, but I still made it. So I'm tracking progress. And but I'm only doing it every every month. So by the time I figured out what my progress was or what my budget was, I'm already behind the eight ball.

Ryan: Yeah.

Robert: You know, when they say

Joe: Money.

Robert: that I I don't get it, but i I know it's hard to do.

Joe: It's funny, I having a conversation with a client the other day. We're actually talking that isn't it funny that there's all these different tools, you know, scheduling, you know, time tracking, cost reporting. And realistically, they're just all different ways of looking at the same data. It's just different states. I know this sounds really abstract, but it's like all there actually is to your point, Robert, is like there's work and there's resources over time. And

Robert: Mm-hmm.

Joe: all we're actually doing is all these different softwares are talking about those, you know, three, four things. in different states, meaning you've got past, present, and future. Scheduling, estimating, future. Time capture, time cards, execution, present. Cost reports, you know, costing and all that fun stuff. That's past. And so it's actually all the same thing, which as construction companies we do work with resources. And you're actually just looking at those four things in different states, but all those tools are so vastly different that it's actually really hard to make sense of them all. So anyway, kind of abstract, but as you were talking, I was thinking of these it's all the same stuff in just different states, but we've made it so complicated and really we just do work

Ryan: Well and i

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: as construction professionals that that are interested in s in solving this problem, like we we we do have one of the biggest challenges relative to other verticals. Like when you you know when you're working in a factory you can track how many widgets came out the back. You know, when you're working in a mine, how many tons did we blast or put down the chute or crush? With construction, like the whole operation's mobile. Every job is contract is often unique. So the pay items are unique and how you measured it on job A is not going to be how you measured it on job B. It's you know that's that's part of the contributing factor as to why our industry hasn't really fully solved this or maybe only solved certain pieces of it 'cause it's you know like s because some companies are doing it and they're they have solved elements of this and are are and have made some meaningful progress. But you know, it feels unsolved as an industry because it is so dynamic and we're impacted by weather and we're impacted by traffic and you know it's it's it's very, very challenging. Like it we you know, we're we're crazy for picking this industry to want to solve this problem but, you know, once again, who if someone's gotta do it, you know, we gotta start

Robert: Yeah. Well sometimes I think when we get into it and I've thought about this a lot, I've actually recommended this to a couple of people and it kinda I think it fell on deaf ears, but I was like, Why don't you change it up instead of tracking productivity, track your downtime. Track how much time you lose, right? Just to, you know, mobilization, moving things around, taking out the trash, you know, whatever. Track your hours of how much and then and then once you've got yourself a baseline, then figure out ways to take that same number and go, Did we improve our downtime from month to month? it kinda takes that impetus to try to figure out how to count grains of sand on the beach a little bit where you feel like, I gotta count how fast it takes me to put these screws in or whatever. No, that's not what I'm asking you. You know, figure out what it is that costs you the most amount of time where you get nothing done. Right? It's

Joe: Mm-hmm.

Robert: almost like the anti productivity protocol of, you know, because really if you stop and think about it, I've worked with companies in the past where they're like, yeah, we spend our first two hours of the day, you know, dealing with you know, we get nothing done. We know we're rolling out tools, we're mobilizing, we're getting so they're basically getting six out of the eight, you know.

Ryan: Well, and it's and that you know, and what you're touching on of course is like the change management and claims process and like actually our industry is, you know, we've got a reputation for actually for being pretty good at at tracking the downtime. Like when productivity goes to zero, easy to track. When productivity everything's firing on all cylinders, easy to track. Unfortunately, ninety percent of the work happens somewhere between zero and that upper limit.

Robert: Yes.

Ryan: So how do you how do you track and like anyone that's been in a claims discussion, client, it's like how do you measure well y you brought in this other trade or this weather event happened or this thing happened and it didn't stop me and I was still eighty percent effective but like how and trying to demonstrate that is as anyone that's had to dealt with deal with this knows it's like that's that's actually a much harder conversation than than the we're we're at a dead standstill. That's easy that's that's but to your point, maybe you start there, you could start there, measure measure the zero productivity effort or days or hours.

Robert: Yeah, I d I just think it's a narro I think it's a narrower focus a lot of times. You get to that, you know, how do you measure zero? That's

Joe: I like that that inverse thinking is fun too. We do that a lot of the time. You know, we'll jokingly say ruthless complexity. When we're trying to get to the yeah, how do we simplify this problem? It's like, what's the inverse of that? How could we make it more complex? And let's not do that. So we we do that inverse thinking as well.

Robert: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. How can we really screw this up, you know? I love that idea. Because you'll find you know, what's funny about that is is it gets you thinking a little bit outside the box. and getting kinda and t you know, what our conversation has been about and what your conversations were about, I'm sure, along this pathway where how do we get outside this box that we're in? 'Cause we've been thinking about it this one way for so long. and it's com you know, lowest common denominator too. It's you know, when we get down to the the folks out in the field and they're working with their device, they've been thinking about it one way for so long. How can we make it just a little bit different? How can we make it so that, wait a minute, let's get outside of our thought bubble or thought box here and go, how can we really screw it up? And then maybe some answers come out of that, you know. I think that's a great way to to approach it. And I'm sure you've had a few of those days where it's like you tried to go down that path where you thought you weren't screwing everything up and then all of a sudden, wow, we really screwed that all up.

Ryan: You know it. you know it it's it's it it's challenging because i if you try nothing, y you can advance. But you gotta go down some wrong paths and and people aren't happy when you do, and it's you know, there's some trust erosion and there's you know targets that you miss. And you're not gonna hit the mark every time, but you gotta keep failing forward in order to make progress with these types of initiatives. And you gotta have the the grit and the will, and your organization has the grit and the will to want to carry on for you know for the greater good. So you gotta backfill that with a okay, well, here's some wins, you know, but it's it's not gonna be real. It's not gonna be all rosy. I mean none of the none of the things we're doing in live art, right?

Joe: Try to adopt that winner you learn mindset 'cause otherwise, you know, losing's no fun. So try to at least

Robert: Yeah.

Joe: learn something.

Robert: And you know, that's a good one to stop on too, guys, because they can't all be wins. You have to lose. And I know there's a lot of folks out there be like, Yeah, we've been losing a lot, been getting my ass kicked on a daily basis. I've been learning, you know, mounds. When do I start seeing the gains from my losses? Right? When do when kinda you know, how do when do I start truly failing forward? Right. And and those types of things. And you know, you're gonna have to go through it. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if you're driving a truck for a living. I don't care if you're out there creating software solutions, whatever you're doing, Try not to screw up too big, but if you do screw up, figure out what it is that you learned from that screw up. That's how you fail forward rather than because if you're not learning anything from your failures, you're you're obviously just standing still, right?

Ryan: That's right. That's the difference between failing period and failing forward.

Robert: Yeah.

Ryan: You know, what did you learn?

Robert: Yeah, what did you learn? What did you learn? Well, I learned a lot today, guys. and I from this from the last one and this one learned a lot. And I really appreciate you guys hanging out with me and kind of giving us the insights. I'm sure a lot of folks were gonna enjoy this one. I I enjoyed hearing again. It's it's a lot of the same stories. We're gonna have to We really are gonna have to buckle down on our behaviors to make our technology work. we're obviously everybody's engaging with technology, trying to make it work, but we're gonna have to look at ourselves a little bit here, and to make our tech t tech work better for us.

Ryan: Couldn't couldn't agree more, Rob.

Robert: All right. Well listen guys, we got one more of these. We're gonna meet again next week. I'm looking forward to that one where we're gonna kind of wrap up this end of three part series on Palantir Foundry in Cavtera man, thanks again guys, and we'll see y'all next week.

Joe: Thanks.

Ryan: All right, thanks, guys.