Why Digital Transformation Fails, and How to Fix It

Thank you so much, [00:01:00] Orion, and I appreciate you having me. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I don't know if I'm quite the most traveled, but I definitely enjoy the ability to get out and talk with people.

Just like you said, those hallway conversations are gold. And so this should be a fun chat.

That's a really good question, because I grew up dreaming of construction. I was one of those kids who obviously built a lot of Lego, and I wanted to build stadiums and be a part of major projects. So when I came out of school I had a few folks tell me that maybe I wasn't quite sharp enough to be an engineer, and that's where the math and physics came in.

I was like, "Well, if I can't be an [00:02:00] engineer, I'm good at math. I'll be a teacher, and I'll teach math. That'll be the way that I go." But what happened was, along the way a scholarship that I had earned at school provided an aptitude test, and the gentleman took us out to Denver.

We took a test. The aptitude test came back and said I'd be a good engineer. And well, all right, then maybe I can make this 360. Well, the other thing that gentleman knew was he knew people in the construction industry, and so he connected me with a few folks that helped me refine my resume, helped me understand how to interview for internships, and that landed me an internship with Kiewit the summer after my undergrad senior year before my post-grad work, and that's what started the role.

So I knew a guy who knew a guy and that, [00:03:00] that was like guilty by association in a good way.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So I was an estimator at Kiewit. We would do second estimates in my internship for major projects across the country. So the district that I worked for, we were doing second estimates on 500 million and up power plants on infrastructure, interstate jobs.

And so I got into doing takeoff and estimating by hand, coloring up the drawings before it was on screen. And then when I moved into the full-time work it kind of was by accident that I ended up being [00:04:00] the guy who would estimate the general conditions on any one of our mega projects that we were chasing.

So most of the time they were joint ventures, so I would put together the general conditions estimate for our half, and then we'd have to go into an estimate review, and I'd be sitting across the table from a counterpart that was 20 years my senior trying to argue why we need this many engineers or this many porta potties or this many labor hours to clean the site, right?

And it ended up I got to travel a lot because of that. So that's where I got the travel bug, because most of those projects weren't based in Omaha, where I was. And so those estimate reviews would be in DC, in Denver, in South Dakota. I got to go a lot of different places for that.

Oh, that's a really good question. So in the early 2010s I was still at Kiewit, and they were overhauling all of their systems. And many people were being picked to kind of go help with that as subject matter experts to review technologies, to roll them out.

I actually raised my hand. Instead of getting voluntold, I volunteered for that and said, "Hey, I kind of see this new iPhone thing and where it's going. It looks fun, and I wanna go hang out with these folks and work on some tech for a little bit." And I fell in love with it [00:06:00] while I was there.

And so I kind of, instead of rolling back off like a lot of the subject matter experts did, I looked for ways that I could continue to provide value there and asked if I could stay in the technology side, continue to develop the center of excellence and things like that. And it was a lot of fun for me. I was just one of those strange cases where it was like, "Oh, that looks cool. Let's go try that."

So I referenced earlier a lot of the major projects that I worked on were [00:07:00] joint ventures, right? And for me, one of the first things I notice when I walk onto a major mega project, if they're a joint venture and there are two different hats, right? If you see multiple hard hats around the job site, different colors or what have you, then right then and there I say, "We're not a team. We don't even... We're not even wearing the same colors yet." And so there's going to be some push and pull that's gonna happen, and whoever's got the extra half a percent or whatever in their side of the project is the one that's going to be trying to force their authority, if you will.

And so the first thing that I look for when I walk onto a mega project that, especially if it's a joint venture team, is, is everybody wearing the same hat?

Yeah. It's just an inherent us versus them that you never addressed out of the gate, right? And so how can you feel like a team without wearing the same colors? Did you play sports, Orion?

Okay. So when you're practicing against your own teammates, right, and you're wearing the different color jerseys, it's a different feel than when you're all suited up in the same jersey on game day, right? Like, you go at each other in practice in mostly a good way, but sometimes it becomes adversarial. But it feels different when you're competing against the [00:09:00] person across from you, even when you're technically on the same team.

And it's just natural with us as human beings, the way that works. And so psychologically, getting in the same colors changes the way that you view the person next to you, even when you're supposed to be doing the same thing. And so I think that it goes a long way, and it's one of those intangibles that it's hard to measure.

Oh, man. Okay. So I had just started in the tech side at Kiewit and we were at an Oracle conference, right? So Oracle construction conference. I'm a young pup, right? I've been, I've been in the industry maybe five or six years. I'm still green.

And I get there, and I'm supposed to be presenting with a more senior gentleman from our office on a couple of different topics in that day. Well, he gets there, and his travel was rough. Like, he was struggling. And he says, "Hey, I need you to start the presentation for me. Just get the first part going, and I'll jump in when I'm ready."

And I'm like, "Sure, that'd be great." So I go up there, and I start talking, and I'm giving the first half of the presentation. And I'm getting to the part where it's time to transition, right? And the guy that I'm gonna throw it to is standing in the back of the room, and he's just signaling, keep going.

So I give both halves at in the same talk, and we did four before lunch. We did four after lunch. They proceeded to let me do the [00:12:00] last three by myself the rest of the day. And just so happened one of the gentlemen who came through as an attendee during one of those sessions was looking for a new lead to run the training and the rollout for the remainder of the tools after estimating, and so that's what led to me taking over training for the system as a whole.

So when it came time to rebuild the system and do the InEight thing, I knew the whole system, and it made sense to be one of the InEight subject matter experts. So it was really a crazy story, it's one of those skills. I have this unique ability to memorize songs in movies after one time hearing or seeing them. It's totally useless unless you like karaoke. But it worked for me there because that's what I used to figure out that talk when I had never even rehearsed it. [00:13:00]

Yeah.

Oh, that's a good question. I saw a presentation once on new tech, and it was drone tech. They were doing a major earthwork project, right? And they were showcasing how the drone would fly and do the quantities, right? Every day. And what made this intriguing was instead of just sitting there, [00:14:00] and slide after slide after slide after slide, the drone flew in.

And they had it scan across the top of the audience, and just run a flight path during the presentation. And you could hear it, and it was... It distracted a little bit because it was obviously up there flying around, but for the most part you're still following along in the presentation.

But the purpose of that was the gentleman on stage said, "Hey, look the drone's done. We have theoretically a brand-new set of quantities, and I never stopped standing up here presenting to you. Like, I never had to step out and do something else." "The capture of the data did not interrupt my flow."

And it was a really well-executed delivery of a point, of a very important point that impressed me, that hey, this technology is non-invasive. Which is something that we all want from our tech, right? And so that one really [00:15:00] impressed me because you think you're just, "Oh, he's just here to show off his drone, and it's distracting," and all this stuff. And really what he was doing was delivering the most important point of the entire talk.

Ooh. So that's hard. I have two. My first favorite is one that I called kind of the owner's dilemma, where it came to... It's the whole concept, you know how... Finish this phrase: growth solves, Orion Matthews: All ills. [00:16:00]

Yeah. Growth solves everything. But the second that you apply that to digital transformation, it totally screws everything up. Like, growth causes your people to have to go work thin, learn new things. You have to take what could be an awesome core team on one project, and you spread them out, right?

Because you need those people to make other projects awesome. When it comes to your processes, growth can either bloat them or expose them, right? And then when it comes to your tech, growth causes you to either not be able to scale the tech that you got or you start trying to force stuff into the tech that you have that it wasn't really meant for, which is why Excel ends up getting used for so much stuff.

And so growth is actually a dilemma when it comes to [00:17:00] digital transformation. And so that talk would walk through how to solve each one of those kind of issues, your people, processes, and tech as it pertains to growth.

And then the second one is one I built off of Simon Sinek's kind of famous TED Talk, Strong Opinions Loosely Held. So he actually stole that phrase from another gentleman, Saffo, I think, was his last name. And the whole idea is, like, we've been so focused on how construction should do things that even our technology went out and digitized how we did things, right? Like the RFI, for example. We didn't innovate the RFI with tech. We just made the paper form digital, right? That's all we did.

And we never stopped and asked ourselves, "Is that actually the right thing we should be doing? [00:18:00] Now that the paper's out of the way, what could we do instead?" And so the idea of strong opinions loosely held is, we hold tightly to these strong things that we've done for so long, and it's okay to have that grounded opinion, that thing that you're adamant about, but the second that you get proven that it's no longer necessary, maybe you should let go of that stronghold and hold it a little looser.

So those are my two favorite talks to really test people.

Well, and what's so crazy about that is we plan for it operationally but not with our tech. Because when you look at how we schedule projects, like we know there's a learning curve at the start of an operation, and we don't expect to get our full production in the first couple weeks of that big operation, right?

And we just inherently know that there's gonna be a learning curve, and we're okay that we're slow the first two or three days that we're doing something. But when it comes to tech and we go through that lull, that little dip, whether we're scaling up a team like you said or we're introducing brand-new tech for the first time and we're like, "Oh, we're gonna turn this on, and day one we're all gonna be more efficient."

No, you're gonna be slower because you've never used it before, just like you are on an operation. And we just inherently get that when it comes to the operations, but when we look at the tech [00:21:00] we're like, "Oh, this is terrible. The tech must suck because we slowed down."

It's a good question. I think it's a little bit of the overselling and it's also a little bit of, like, we're just not open enough to have that conversation. We all know it from the tech side, and even if you're in the IT department within the construction company or the owner, you know it, right? And we just don't have that conversation up front because maybe we're afraid that it'll risk the deal, or maybe we're afraid that people will get cold feet on the change and turn back.

But yeah [00:22:00] it's definitely something that as soon as we can get it out in the open and plan for it, just like you were saying, it really makes things better for everyone involved, as long as we just have to be open and honest with ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah, and one of the offshoots of that is true innovation, a true culture of innovation takes courage, number one, because you have to be willing to challenge that old school thinking, and number two, it requires the psychological safety to fail. Which in construction, we're so risk averse, we don't often give people that room to fail.

And to your point, if we're gonna allow these young [00:26:00] people to challenge us, which we should because some of this stuff does need changed, then we also need to be okay with a little bit of failure here and there, and not just reward people who are right, but reward people who are learning.

Because every failure is a new lesson learned, right? And so as long as it's not life-threatening, which could be some things, I'm not saying go out and let people fail when it comes to life safety, but if it's a new system, if it's a new process, if it's a new way of thinking, let's iterate on those. Let's fail fast. Let's see what we can do to move forward, and let's be okay with testing something and it not working.

Well, for the longest time construction has been one of those just beat it out, tough it out, do the hard thing, right? And there were great rewards for people who were hitting numbers, and there was a lot of not reward, it's just been a tougher, more brutal industry for a long, long time. But to [00:28:00] your point, we're seeing changes, not just the culture because of who the owners are, but the culture because of who we need to bring into the industry if we're going to survive some of these labor numbers, right?

And so we're starting to see that shift away from just gut it out and go do your job to, "All right. We do need to pay attention to the mental side of this for people, and have a little bit more care and respect for one another."

Yeah, I mean, it is, right? We're retiring more than we're bringing in. That's for sure. I would agree that I do see more people my age and older than I see my age and younger at conferences. However, I am inspired by some of the people that I am seeing at conferences that are younger. The younger folks that are coming with energy, are coming with cool ideas, are coming with great stories.

And so there are pockets where I see contractors empowering younger folks quicker. A lot of times it's out of necessity, but those folks are stepping up to that occasion and delivering. And so while it's [00:30:00] not at the level or pace that I'd like to see in all cases, I am inspired by some of the shift that I'm seeing, and the younger folks that I do find at conferences definitely are the types of people that can take us to that next generation.

Oh, boy. One of the first estimates that I was the lead estimator on was an addition to a hotel, and we were adding like eight stories above the parking garage that was gonna extend the hotel. And the drawings, when we did the preliminary estimate, the drawings for the concrete, it was post-tension concrete, one of the structural drawings said floor seven and eight, right? [00:31:00]

Like, there was a drawing for every floor except that one. It said floor seven and eight. And I caught it the first time we did the preliminary takeoff, and I duplicated that page in on-screen takeoff, which doubled up the quantities, right? And we got everything done. Well, we moved from conceptual estimating into design estimating into the final number, and we're doing the concrete, we're self-performing it, so this matters, right?

And by that time it was a full estimating team. I was the lead estimator. Someone else was doing the self-perform estimate, and I totally missed the fact that we didn't have floor seven and eight duplicated again, right? Everybody missed it, but I take full responsibility as the lead estimator.

Our form work [00:32:00] number was right because it came from a sub. We were just off on material, and we were off on labor. And we didn't know. Like, we didn't even notice, right? Everything went in. They're through like floor four and I get a phone call from the job site, "Hey, we're burning through quantity on the concrete and we can't figure out why."

And we start digging in and sure enough, there it was. We skipped a whole floor on concrete material. Luckily, we had a good contingency on that job and we were able to cover it, but that was a major fail that I caused, and to this day, people don't let me live that one down.

Yeah. Yeah. It was one of those where I was like, "Here it is. We're missing an entire floor when it comes to the quantity." We got lucky because it didn't affect the form work. It's really just the purchase and some hours for the labor.

We have this bucket of contingency. It more than covers it, thankfully. Like, a lot of things went right so that we didn't lose our shirt on that particular operation. But yeah, it was one of those where within an hour I knew what was wrong from that phone call when they said, "Hey, we're burning through quantity. Can you look at it?" And yeah, you walk into the office and go, "Well, here's what happened."

Yeah. Own it. The worst thing you can do is try to cover it up. [00:34:00] Own it. Explain what happened. "Here's what I learned. Here's how we move forward," right? So come to the table with some options to move forward. Own the mistake. Tell the truth. That's the easiest way to get past it. And it's way better than trying to cover it up or trying to blame someone.

The worst thing is blaming someone else, which I could have easily done, right? I could have easily pointed at the self-performing estimator and gone, "They missed it. What do you want me to do?" But no, that was my responsibility as the lead estimator to double check that work.

And so yeah, just take ownership of it, move forward. The book Extreme Ownership, right? In every situation you played a role, just accept that role and move on.

Agreed, 100%.

Oh, gosh. It's a tough one. My easy answer, the CliffNotes answer is we get the order wrong. Okay? So in my personal opinion, digital transformation, the reason that the people process technology framework works is because we do it in that order. You get the people right first, then you figure out the processes, then you pick the tech last.

Why do digital transformations fail? Because we picked the tech and then tried to shove it down the people's throat, right? Or something of that nature. Or we decided that we needed to revolutionize this one process, and we went out and got the tech, and we never once asked the people who had to use it what they thought, right?

So if you mess up the order of operations, the digital transformation fails. And by golly, put the people first because [00:37:00] regardless of what that new shiny tech looks like to an executive in a boardroom, "Oh, that's the dashboard I need," or "That's the process that we want", the person pushing the buttons out in the field makes it look that way, and if you didn't ask them if it's harder or twice the work or triple the entry or whatever, and you find out after the fact, it's never gonna get adopted.

Yeah. It's always the people.

So that's actually pretty easy. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. [00:38:00] I tend to hurry. Not because I'm in a hurry, I just like to work fast. Like, I just like to go, go. And so I have a real problem with the slow down a minute, let's pause, let's double take and figure this out. I'm just like, let's move. Let's fail fast. All those things where I could have avoided the fail altogether if I paused for a minute.

Yep. And you're absolutely right. I stole that phrase from the Marines. They're the ones who are famous for it.

What's true today is not necessarily true tomorrow. A perfect example is a drawing revision. So if the drawing gets revised, what was true today is all of a sudden not true. And so truth, when we always talk about the single source of truth, is a moving target, and we've gotta make sure that we're connected in a way that we're always on target.

So it's an argument for the single source of truth, and that being an important piece, but also everyone having access to it. Because if that single source of truth, if anyone has limited access to where the updated drawing is or where the updated change order is or where the updated RFI is, if anyone is missing access, truth to them is no longer truth, right? [00:41:00]

And so what is true to me is not true to you if you have a different view of it, and that instantly causes conflict and trouble and rework, right? And so truth on a project is a moving target, and we all need to be connected to that moving target in a positive way.

That's exactly why you make the statement the truth is [00:43:00] a moving target and everyone needs access to it. What you're explaining are some of the issues that have brought us to this point. Now the solves are a lot of people have gone to unlimited licensing, right? So that unlimited licensing model, some people don't like it, some people prefer the seats. Now your target is a lot harder to track.

It's led to the conversation around digital twin, right? Like, that's what people are trying to get to when they talk about a digital twin. But then you talk about the stakeholders, right? And who gets access and where the system's at, and this is a whole nother topic that we don't probably have time for today, but it's created the data wars, or what I'm calling the data wars, because of data ownership, right?

Because which system is the actual [00:44:00] truth, and who owns it? Does the owner? Does the contractor? Whose system is the actual source of truth, and how are we gonna fight over whose ownership that is? Because at the end of the day, the owner wants all that when the project's over, and they need the actual truth when the project's done.

And so we've gotta play this kind of balance of who's allowed in, who's not allowed in, whose system is it. At the end of the day, how are they connected with one another? Some of the technologies are starting to figure this out. I think IFC was the first thing. BIM went, "All right, we're gonna have a single file type no matter the authoring platform." And IFC kind of was the first thing that headed that direction. Now the platforms are starting to connect themselves a little bit, and I think that's gonna help a lot.

Yep.

Yeah, and I think that's why it's so important, if you're an owner and a contractor in today's environment, the fact that the platforms themselves are starting to talk to one another so that you don't have to duplicate the data in both persons' system so that you both have ownership of the data, that is going to be vital as we move forward with AI.

You're exactly right. It's just like the people process tech thing. If you don't get the data right first, the AI's just gonna [00:47:00] be faster at being wrong.

Yeah. The thing is it always looks like an incredible answer, and it's incredibly wrong.

So the vacation test is like a systems question. It tests how well your systems are and really your leadership in general. If you can't walk away and your team operate without you, your systems are broken, and your leadership is not transferable.

And so that's what the vacation test is. If you can't take a week off of work and everything still runs smoothly, then you have a systems problem and a leadership problem. And so it's [00:50:00] both personal and organizational, which is interesting. And that's why I like that test because it points powerfully at two different things.

It is. Essentially a way to test it would be, pick someone in your weekly standup and say, "All right. This week you don't get to do your normal job," and pick the second person, "You don't get to..." [00:51:00] And swap them, right? You kind of swap it out and make sure that people can operate without. But ideally the best way to test it is to just practice it, to take time off, to renew, to refresh, and to avoid your email.

This is probably another one that I fail at really badly because I'm not very good at avoiding email even when on vacation. I get pretty good at not responding to stuff that's not necessary. But I'm a zero inbox guy, so at the end of every day when the kids have gone to bed and I'm sitting in wherever we're at by myself, I'm clearing [00:52:00] out all the spam and the crap that I don't have to respond to so at least I don't come back to 1,000 emails. I come back to 100, you know? But I'm not very good at this one, but at least the team is operating without me having to make decisions.

So I'll go back to construction's very risk-averse. And you mentioned kind of blame and hiding things being like death sentences to careers. One of the things that I've [00:53:00] noticed or at least experienced is what can be a rocket ship for a career is being willing to take risks.

Volunteering for crazy, right? Like that one project that sounds like it's gonna be a horrible project. It'll be awesome to build, but it's gonna be like a bear. We got a tight schedule, bad budget, logistical nightmare, whatever it might be, and volunteering for that. Or taking something as crazy as your company's gonna overhaul their entire tech system and say, "Hey, that sounds fun. I wanna go do that," right?

Like, what I get most inspired by when I'm at conferences is a lot of times the people who are up on stage sharing a success volunteered to do something crazy or risky or that wasn't a sure thing, and it paid off, right? And so that's one [00:54:00] thing that I'd say I've learned over the course of the years, being willing to do crazy.

And then when crazy fails, going back to being honest about it. Like, most of the stuff that I talk about at conferences, most of the stuff that I write about in blogs are things I've done wrong. They're failures. And here's what we learned, right? So just be okay with saying, I'm talking right now because I just screwed up a lot. I screwed up more often and I was willing to admit what I learned. "Here's what happened. My goal is to hope that you don't have to screw up the same way," and that's why I share it, so you don't have to step on the same landmine that I already blew up on.

Yes, sir.

Yep. Yeah, I would reach out on LinkedIn. I'm open to messages all the time. I love to hear from people. I'll respond as fast as I can, so it's usually less than a few days. But yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, AJ Waters, super simple.

First off, we already kinda hit on it, we need people. So the first thing that I like to say is construction is cool. Go tell all your friends, because we'd love to have you all. And it's purposeful, it's fun, it's ever-changing, it's challenging. [00:00:45] Construction's an awesome industry.

So first off, there's that. For the fear that maybe AI is starting to eat into some of the entry level stuff, one of the things on that rules list, AI is not gonna replace you, but someone who knows how to use it will. Just get good at using it. The prompt engineering is a real thing. Like, asking the right questions of AI means a lot. And so get good at using AI and it will help you immensely as you tackle that entry level stuff.

But really, right now, when it comes to our industry we need the people, and we're willing to work with you, challenge you, give you opportunities, and I couldn't be more excited about the level of opportunity that's out there for a student that wants to come into the construction industry.

Whether you're coming from college in a degree for more of an engineering role, or whether you're coming straight out of high school and you wanna be a superintendent, a foreman, out in the field, [00:01:45] we got room for you either way.

Oh, that's a really good question. I think, again, part of that goes back to getting good at AI and understanding AI. And the other part goes to being curious about alternative topics and industries.

Because if you get super laser focused on just the data or the software or the math side of the house when it comes to the algorithms, if you get really focused in on that and you don't see the bigger picture of what you're trying to solve for, get curious about the [00:02:45] industry.

Go to a construction conference. See if you can visit a job site with the engineering department at the school that you're at. Or just read up on the industry at large on things like ENR and Construction Dive and other places, because the context is huge in this industry. I was having a conversation with someone else this morning about how they're thinking about robotics when it comes to certain tasks on the job site, but they're assuming a flat concrete floor has already been installed, and they don't realize that the slab on grade pad inside a building isn't necessarily there when the roof is getting hangers on it.

Sometimes that is last because they're doing in-floor recesses and things like that. The concrete, you're not always gonna have a flat concrete surface. That context is huge [00:03:45] in whatever you're trying to build technologically. And so get curious about the industry.

Oh. For me it was a comparison thing. Someone else had gone off and flunked out that was way smarter than me in high school, and so they were assuming that I was gonna flunk out, too, right? What I would tell you is, you are you. You're not someone else. You're not someone else's experience. You're not someone else's learning abilities. You are you.

You know what you're willing to put in. You know what you're willing to study. You know the effort that [00:04:45] you're willing to give it. And so don't let comparison steal your joy.

Yeah. I love that. I couldn't agree more.

Yeah. So I have a couple of really great books. I already mentioned Extreme Ownership. That's a pretty good one. My probably favorite book to recommend to people is Leadership and Self-Deception. [00:06:45]

And it has to do with your role in what could be a problem state. And so there are several examples in the book, but the easiest one is like, baby starts crying in the middle of the night. You wake up. Your wife's not getting out of bed yet. And you aren't getting out of bed yet. You're kinda waiting on each other, right? And so you're thinking in your mind, "I've gotta do this tomorrow, I've gotta do that tomorrow. Doesn't she understand? Doesn't she..." You're kinda raising yourself up while putting them down. Like, "Why don't they get this? They don't have as much work to do or whatever." [00:07:45]

Yeah. And so you're deceiving yourself about how good of a person you are and how terrible the other person is, and now you're blaming them for not... Whereas if you would've just gotten up at the sound of the cry, it would've been over already, right? And so that's just one small example from the book, but it's an incredible book about how problems really start based on your actions, not someone else's.

Well, there's a lot of those. So I came up on Construction Brothers, so Eddie and Tyler Campbell, still one of my all-time favorites. The ConTechCrew was one that I kinda grew up with as well. There are so many podcasts out there, it's really not [00:08:45] hard. But there's this one called the Megaprojects Podcast. I would really recommend that one. It's super good. The host is a lot of fun, and does a great, great job with it.

And then as far as conferences and associations, I've been a part of a lot of them. ASPE as an estimator, CMAA, CURT. There are tons of great ones, DBIA. It kinda depends on what your role is in construction and what makes sense. I would kinda ask around your peer group. See what they're up to and who they're listening to. But don't just use that, also do a little bit of searching so that you can expand. Be curious about the rest of the industry.

And then when it comes to conferences, there are so many to name, but a lot of those associations have their own conferences. DBIA's got multiple, CURT, CMAA's got multiple. Yeah. AACE. [00:09:45] There are so many different conferences out there.

My favorite two, the one that happens yearly that I really love is Western Winter Workshop. It's more networking than conference, which is why I like it. And then the one that happens every three years is ConExpo, and it's like the world on steroids for construction. 100,000 people descend on Las Vegas. It only happens every three years. It can be overwhelming, but if you have the week to spend there, man, can you see some cool stuff, learn some neat things, and meet some great people.

Oh, good question. So a couple of years ago, I started a blog. It's been a little over a year and a half now. And the reason I started the blog, I wrote an article for the company that I worked for, and marketing loved it, and then put it on a shelf. And it sat on the shelf for like nine months, and I was like, "But it's so... Like, I wanna say this to people." So I finally came to the conclusion over a Christmas [00:11:45] holiday that I was just gonna publish it myself, which means I needed a place to put it, which led to a blog. And so I asked if I could have it back, if I could publish it myself, and they were totally fine with that, so I started the blog.

And after a year of talking at people, I was like, "I don't like this. I don't wanna just talk at people. I wanna talk with people. I wanna share stories with people. I wanna learn from people." And that's what led to the podcast. And so this year, it transitioned from the blog that it was last year to a podcast.

We're recording this in August, so I'm eight months in to having it as a podcast, and it's been a lot of fun. I've learned a ton. I'm meeting great new people. And the whole point of the show, the purpose of the show is to talk about someone who has a unique gift when it comes to construction.

Whether that be reading contracts, whether it be understanding [00:12:45] data, whether it be developing technology. And to walk through the journey, like how they found that gift, but at the end, kind of the twist is this isn't a superpower or a unique ability like invisibility or super strength that only one person can have.

This is a practical thing that you could go implement tomorrow to make your project better. And so every episode ends with some practical takeaways that should help the individual make their next project a little bit better. So that's the goal.