Listening Comes First With Landmark Structures CIO Adam Billmeier

At Landmark Structures, Chief Information Officer Adam Billmeier builds his team around the philosophy that they are not “the Department of ‘No.’”

Adam has adopted a "listening comes first" mindset to leadership, putting the experiences of field crews at the forefront when adopting and elevating new technology.

“At the end of the day, we are problem solvers, and we need to approach everything we do from a teaching mentality because we need to understand what people are saying to us,” Adam says. “We need to solve their problem, and we need to teach them how to use the technology, or how what we're doing makes their life better or their job better.”

Landmark Beginnings

Landmark Structures, based in Fort Worth, Texas, is an engineering and construction company with expertise in storage solutions for water, wastewater, power, industrial applications, and other sectors.

Landmark originated the composite elevated storage tank, comprising an elegant structure of a hollow concrete pedestal — used in some municipalities for storage, offices, and a fire station — holding a steel tank.

Adam Billmeier joined Landmark in 2002, “fresh out of college” with a University of Texas-Arlington degree in information systems. The problem-solving pieces fell together as he mixed his interests in engineering and enterprise systems with a background in computer education.

Teaching taught him “a good understanding of how to speak to people and relate to people.” His combined skills in gathering information, understanding problems, devising solutions, and education came into play in his early days with Landmark as “an IT department of one.”

While tackling connectivity problems from jobsites to back office, “The primary challenge has always been and will be the scattering of information, Adam says. He was also building comfort levels with technology among people accustomed to paper processes.

"The key to buy-in is listening, understanding, and asking questions, one person at a time," Adam says.“Don't assume you know better than they do, because as inefficient as the old system looks to you, the people using it believe it is efficient, because that's what they do every day."

“If you want to introduce anything, you have to really understand what that process is end to end, and propose a solution in a way that the person that you're proposing it to sees how it's good for them.”

As he tells his team, “The technology is always the last thing you talk about. If you're starting the conversation with the technology, you're already probably going down the wrong path.”

Closing Jobsite Gaps With Digital Tools

During Adam Billmeier’s initial years, Landmark was growing from its Canadian roots into a North American provider of storage solutions. By 2019, a patchwork legacy system of custom-built database tools and spreadsheets wasn’t adequate to serve complex operations spanning multiple sites.

Adam started planting the seeds about a changing software marketplace that was making giant strides in capabilities.

“As you're learning about new technologies, even if you don't think they're fully baked yet it’s not ready or your organization is not ready, it’s good to start exposing people in the organization to it,” he says.

The decision was made to begin the transition to construction management software with a small problem that, when fixed, offered big returns.

For Landmark, that was quality and safety.

The safety team was wrestling with aging apps, and Adam's team sought “a solution we could implement for them that would have wide reach across the organization but a low level of disruption, and also would be seen as a building block to greater things.”

The field-focused turnaround simplified submissions of incident reports, daily inspections, logs, and photos from the jobsite, “which was a historical pain.”

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'What do you hate?'

“I’ve learned that if you make the field teams happy, everything is a lot easier,” Adam says. “So we start with making the field team happy.”

In this case, training “was a breeze” because it heeded a popular request for apps that got people off their laptops. Soliciting constant feedback is a key to Adam's approach.

“'How are things going?'” Adam consistently asks his team. “'What can we do better?' 'What challenges are you running into?' 'What stinks? Complain to me.' If I ask, ‘What do you want?’, you're not going to tell me anything. But if I say, ‘What do you hate?’, I'm going to get a better answer.”

A straightforward approach yields honest answers.

“People know who I am,” Adam says. “I don’t sugarcoat stuff. I’m not political. I'm not like trying to say things a certain way. I'll say, ‘Just tell me,’ and I’m not going to be offended.”

Within the organizational culture, Adam believes he contributes transparency, openness, and a mindset of teaching and learning — recognizing that there are better ways to do old functions. He tells the hires for his team that he doesn’t want specialists but “rock-star generalists.”

Those in-house rock stars can build apps to solve the most pressing issues coming from the field, quickly and without costly consultants. Recently, they built unique apps for digitizing each form of information collected in the field books – information that, when paper-based, often got lost in the daily shuffle.

Staying the Course While Looking Ahead

At Landmarks Structures, Adam Billmeier continues to focus on steering a steady course.

“People tell me I have a very Zen-like level of patience,” he says. “They can say, ‘Adam, the server just crashed, and you seem very calm.’ Well, it's not going to get fixed any faster if I'm not.”

Landmark’s investments in technology align with its strategic vision and make information exchange actionable, for a competitive edge in a highly specialized sector.

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