Is the Tech Stack Construction’s Most Powerful Talent Strategy?

It's the people, right? And I had realized that we were kind of struggling to get collaboration on projects. And construction is—we're GCs. We are the general collaborator. That's what it really takes to build a building. There's no single person that builds a building. It's a group of teams that build the building. And if they can't collaborate well, then the communication breaks down and things go sideways. You know, the other side is this is a high-risk, low-fee industry. And I didn't want to build a technology company inside of a construction company. I just wanted to let the business do what it does.

I don't know that we have a choice, right? I mean, we're 600,000 jobs short—or 600,000 people short of jobs. And to me, automation is the way to get that done. And, you know, my career technologist background—like, that's what I was forced to do. You know, I couldn't just go out and hire more people nonstop. I created automations inside our business to make me more effective, the same way we do with our project operation folks. And so it's not much of a decision anymore.

I think, you know, the easy picks are the back office, right? And not that I'm looking to say, oh, we don't need your role anymore—kind of what you said there. In our situation, we've been growing since I've been there. And so it's about scaling and doing that effectively and not adding headcount at the same rate you're adding revenue. To us, that's the true meaning of scale: we're continuing to add revenue, profits remain good, and we're not having to continually throw bodies at it.

Well, I think it's really created an innovative foundation to the culture. You know, we don't have a specific role that is titled "innovation" or anything like that yet. We may at a larger scale, but right now my mind is blown all the time listening to our field staff talk about what they're doing on projects with technology. And it's not that I've gone around to every job and said, "This situation is coming up, you need to deploy that." And I think that's one of the values of being a tech-forward organization: you tend to attract people that naturally behave that way, that are constantly looking for a better way to do it, a new way to do it, and questioning the norm.

Well, ultimately, we can roll into it a lot easier with our tech stack structure. But what I'm not doing—I'm not developing my own language models. Right? I think, one, that's too much of a lift for a construction company to be taking on. You know, we talked about this last night. We're not a tech company—we're a construction company. And we leverage our partners like Procore, like Microsoft, like Workday to be our tech stack or tech staff, so to speak. We've found a ton of value in the super simple usage of AI. [He then shares the example of email summarization saving superintendents 15-20 minutes per complex email.]

Extreme Ownership, just because I always look at what was my involvement in whatever happened and how do I take ownership in getting to resolution.

People. Right? I love talking to people, especially people that disagree with me. You know, I love people that can get into spirited debate on topics—it just helps me build a better-informed decision.

Stay focused, stay committed. And I don't want to jump into some of the next stuff, but small steps make a big difference.

A.I.

Continually pushing them to add sophistication to their processes and truly build world-class solutions and teams.

Sometimes things like this, right? And just encouraging other people. I think that what I have to share, to me, isn't groundbreaking or revolutionary—it's just what I've been doing for 20 years. And I always want to encourage other people to get up and share a story. You don't have to be a polished speaker—I'm not, necessarily, I don't think. Just get out there, tell your story. If you help one other person be inspired to do something, make a change, then, again, it's just the small things one by one.