Speaker 2 (00:08.93)
Hi, I'm Brad Boyant. have a engineering degree from Santa Clara. I spent eight years in construction management on the general contractor side and I also have a master's in sustainable design and construction from Stanford. I've always observed that there seems to be an incompleteness to the designs of projects once we get to the construction phase. I don't have as much expertise on it as Dee does, but a lot of passion for this area and I've been thinking about it a lot as I've been pursuing my business degree.
Thanks, Brad. I'm Dee Davis. Welcome to management under construction. I've been working in the construction industry for nearly 30 years and I've sat on every side of the table just about. I've been on the owner side, the installing contractor side, the general contractor side. So today we want to talk about speed to market and the consequences that we face in the industry of rushing design. I can say what I've experienced and what I've seen in the last 20 plus years doing this step.
But then I also like to go back to the data, go back to the studies and look up is what I'm experiencing, what's really happening out in the industry, because each one of us only experiences a very small segment of our local market, of the overall industry. So what am I experiencing? Is that what's happening in the rest of the world? So in 2024, very recently, there was a study by Mocha Systems using data from TouchPlan, which most of you
probably used at some point. The design issues and changes are the fourth most common reason for delays on projects, which I gotta be honest, I would have called it maybe the first or the second. I was surprised to see that it was only the fourth, but I'm not at all surprised to see that it's in the top five. So the number one reason according to this data is handoffs between disciplines and predecessors not being ready.
on projects. So that's not very surprising. We see that happen all the time. I think that probably gets minimized and shuffled under the rug a lot as the job site's going. The second one is staffing and manpower, which I think we've all seen and experienced, especially in the last five years. Both of those things are things that happen out in the field once construction has started. And we don't really have a lot of early influence over those two problems, the top two problems.
Speaker 1 (02:34.454)
Materials and equipment is the third one, which I think that has probably raised itself up in the list in the last five years or so. I bet you materials and equipment was probably not the third. was maybe fifth or sixth on the list before, would be my guess. But our number four issue, design issues and changes. This really all filters back to rushing.
Hurry up and get through design as fast as possible so that we can start building. This is a trend in our industry that I have seen over my career. The expectation that we can go faster, faster, faster has not waned at all in my experience in the industry. But we're going to talk today about why some of these things are happening, how different people are playing the roles in these things, what we can do about it.
And a lot of the consequences that we're facing in the industry as a result of this speed to market mentality. It doesn't mean the speed to market's bad, folks. It just means that there's consequences to these choices we're making.
It's not as if we want to go slower. I think it's just that we get this sense that there's this fire ready aim mentality that is slowing things down on its own. That people wanting to rush things is making the eventual construction progress slower than it might have been and less efficient, more costly.
Yeah, absolutely. We do need to say that I think the top two reasons that the handoffs and the staffing and manpower, I want to deal with that in another episode because I think that is worthy of a much deeper examination, especially being the top two reasons. But design changes and owners changes and incomplete design can be influenced early before we ever get to the construction stage.
Speaker 1 (04:31.766)
So getting it right in the beginning is going to absolutely influence how the entire project goes. It sets the tone. It sets the mentality for everything that happens. So what does a good solid design do for us? I feel like we all know the answer to this question. What do you think it is, Brad?
I think a good design tells you how to build a building. It tells you as much information as you need to estimate the costs involved before construction begins and then gives you a set of plans and documents that are instructions for how to go out and do the job at hand. An incomplete design to follow that thread doesn't have enough information to estimate fully, doesn't have enough information to build something in physical reality and therefore
although it may look complete on a 2D drawing or even a 3D model, isn't enough to actually go out into the world and make something happen in physical reality.
Right. And a lot of my consulting business is doing design reviews. I do a lot of those these days and you can hand me an 800 page set of documents. It doesn't mean that it's coordinated. It doesn't mean that it is a reflection of what is actually going to be built out in the field. You can have entire disciplines that are missing. have documents that are sent to me with
med gas in it, medical gases, and there's no plumbing drawings. We're rerouting medical gases. Where's my plumbing drawings? Just because you have a set of documents doesn't mean it's complete, it's coordinated, it's even relevant. The irrelevant details that I find in design reviews is incredible, where the relevant details are missing. I don't have that kind of situation. I don't have that kind of roof penetration.
Speaker 1 (06:30.53)
I don't even have that kind of roof on this job. Why is that detail on here? Give me a detail that shows me what I'm really going to be building.
You see that all the time. You see these copy pasted details that have no relevance, but that probably some designer used on their last project. And I don't bemoan that designers are bad at their jobs. I bemoan that designers are being forced to rush through their jobs and that the low bid mentality and the inexpert review process that often happens between a designer and the person paying for the design who may or may not be qualified.
to examine whether that design is complete or not. That's the problem that we're facing is that there's not an accountability system in the design, bid, build process that adequately requires the designers to have a complete design before bidding starts and before the estimating process begins.
On a lot of the speed to market projects that I am on, we are trying to solidify budgets way before design is complete. I mean, in very early stages of design that are really inappropriate. And this is yet another thing worthy of tons of examination. I don't know how much time we'll have to get into that today, but where we're deciding what our budgets are matter.
And this all filters back into rushing the design. An incomplete, uncoordinated design is going to make more RFIs, more resubmittals, more change orders, more coordination issues, and just tons of stress on the entire project team. Having sat in the GC role and the installing contractor role, I can't tell you how many times that I've sat down with plan specifications, whatever's given to me.
Speaker 1 (08:24.814)
And I'm thinking, there are so many holes in this, and these are supposedly 90 % drawings. We're telling the design team, you have this much time, and it's very small, this much time to get to 60%, 90%, whatever our goal is to start solidifying budgets. Is it 60 %? I'm going to tell you that most of the time when I do design reviews, the answer is no.
Maybe parts of it are 60%.
And parts of it are 30 % or 0%. So as a young engineer reviewing these 60 % CDs on jobs and being like, who decided this was 60 %? Do you have the answer to that question? Who decides? Yeah, these are 60 % complete. We are sure that we can put 60 % on these drawings.
Well, I can tell you what really happens is that we come up with a schedule and we say, need this level of drawing by this time, this level of drawing by this time, this level of drawing by this time. Most owners do not have a written definition of what that entails, of what is the deliverable at this stage. A lot of times it's left up to the designers and they're gonna do their best with the time that they have.
That's all I can say is that they do their best and nobody's really checking. A lot of times there is no third party design reviewer like me to come in and say, this is not 60%. This is 30%. And even if it is 30%, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to reject it and say, go back to the drawing board, take another month and get to 60 or whatever it's going to take? No, we take it anyway. We review it anyway.
Speaker 1 (10:12.942)
We make a million comments and send it back. That's what happens. Some owners do have a checklist and they say, here's what's required. You need developed details. You need specifications. They have the checklist. Guess what? Still comes back less than the percentage. Like I said, some of it might be 60%. Some of the trades are clearly closer to 30 or 40 % or 0%.
Missing that happens too. Because we're so schedule driven and we're so rush rush rush to get to the finished design so that we can solidify our budgets and start construction. That we just let it go. We just let it slide. Every time I've never seen anybody not let that slide.
Right, because you can't have a delay before you've been broken ground. That's crazy. Being the bearer of bad news in that circumstance, like, well, we just can't take this step. What do you mean? We're just in the made up believe world of design. If we keep going, what's going to happen? Well, the consequences of those actions happen much, much later. The impact in huge numbers of RFIs and delays because now you're having to procure a different set of roofing membrane adhesives.
something of that nature doesn't rear its ugly head until you get to construction. And that's a tough position to be in to explain, well, we have to stop here because we don't know enough to really be at this stage. It's a nearly impossible argument to make.
It's very difficult. I have a project right now that we just said time out on design because we had some design challenges. Could I put it on paper and issue it and say we're done? Sure I could. But the reality is that I would be doing my client a disservice because I know that it's not right. It's not complete. It's going to require some redesign to make it work properly. And I don't know what that looks like yet. It could impact.
Speaker 1 (12:18.848)
equipment selection. It could impact coordination on the roof. It could impact all these different things. So I called my client and this is never a popular thing to do. I called my client and I said, we can't proceed. It was not a fun conversation. It was not something that I wanted to do in any way, shape or form, but it's the right thing to do. There's all kinds of drama that happens in the background. And as contractors,
I don't think most contractors really have an understanding of how these things unroll on the owner's side. I'm the owner's representative, my client's the owner. Well, they have bosses too. That's who I interact with on a daily basis. There's many levels above this person. They have to go back and try to explain to their management why we need not only to pause where we are at the moment and go back to the drawing board on some of these things.
But I also need more design money.
Yeah.
I need more design money because this was an unexpected pickup in the process. I need more time and I need more money to pay the designers to work this out, to give you the product that you need in the very end. Fortunately, I've been working with this client for many years and there's a lot of trust there. So they know that if I say this, it's not arbitrary. I'm not just trying to drag our feet. This is legitimate and they know it.
Speaker 1 (13:51.222)
Not every client reacts well. didn't get yelled at or anything like that, but it happens. I've been yelled at before for having these conversations and sometimes I'm told just go. Keep going, just go. Issue it, we'll deal with it later. OK.
But where is it more expensive to deal with it, in design or in construction?
Absolutely, absolutely 100 % easier, faster, cheaper to deal with it in design. And I think what I really want to focus on is not just when we get to those snags to be realistic about to be honest with our clients and say. We need to take a breath here and we need to do the right thing for the project now because the implications later will be bigger.
Sometimes your clients are still going to say no. They might get mad. They might yell at you. They might accuse you of all kinds of things, but doing the right thing for your client is always the right choice. It's their money at the end of the day. They can choose to proceed with the more risky route if that's what they choose. But you've done the right thing by telling them the truth and laying it out there. We also have to tell our clients the truth when they're being unrealistic.
This is tough. It's really hard to tell somebody that their schedule, a lot of times the owner's the one that comes up with the original, like, I need this project delivered by X date. That's where it all starts. And when they come up with a date that is just crazy, it's never going to happen. You have to say so, and this is so hard.
Speaker 1 (15:38.956)
because we don't want to tell people no. We want to tell people yes. The people that have to tell the people no that are receiving the schedule are the estimators. And what are estimators? Usually the head of the estimating department is what?
sales and customer service, right?
Yeah, trying to sell more business.
They're your sales team. They're the ones that are receiving this information. They're the first ones that look at the schedule. And even if they're looking at it going, wow, you're nuts, they're not going to tell you that you're nuts because they're a salesperson and they don't ever want to tell a client no.
And it's the low bid environment. It's the lowest bidder wins. It's the fastest bidder wins. It's whoever says that they can meet my demands gets the chance to try.
Speaker 1 (16:28.312)
There you go. You just hit it on the head. And this is what I see when I sit in the owner's seat all the time. Even when I'm telling the owner as their representative, I'm saying your schedule's nuts. There's no way we're going to build that that fast. We're not going to build anything good quality that's going to give turnover to production or open for business or whatever the goal is on the day that you want.
with an approach like this. And they're saying, no, no, no, this is it. This is what we got to do. Okay. So we go out to bid, we put it out to all the GCs, to all the designers. It starts in the design process, by the way. I can want to keep going back to design because this insane schedule starts with design. And it starts with a designer saying, I need nine months for this design. And the owner's going, you have five or six.
And the designers going no, no, really need nine months to get this design done. And they go, it's all I'm giving you. And it's like a haggle. And the designers have the same problem. They're business development people, aren't they people that are being, they don't want to tell the client no. And they're afraid if they tell the client no, then somebody else will tell them yes. And the client will choose whoever tells them yes, even if yes is no.
And then, how does that work though? Earlier, we were talking about that moment when you're having to tell an owner that the designer needs more time and more money. At that point as a business manager, as somebody saying, well, I had an agreement with these people to provide this design within this amount of time. Whose fault is this? How do I get recourse for the delay that I did not sign up for? Is that the kind of thing where
You have to say, your requirements weren't refined enough in the conversations that we had as it went on. It turned out you actually needed more things than you said you needed. And that's why it's going to take more time. Or is it some other conversation to the effect that there were just unknown unknowns that we developed information about during the design process? Because that's what it is. It's a creative process where you're constantly uncovering, constantly refining the idea of what you need.
Speaker 1 (18:51.534)
Whose fault is it? Who's responsible is something that we perhaps sometimes spend too much time worrying about. It is important to understand how you got there. In this particular case of the example that I set out, it's an existing building with a lot of limitations. I only have a certain kind of roof. I only have so much space. I only have so much utilities that are available to me. I'm literally in a box.
And I got to figure out how to make this thing work inside the box. And that is a challenge that every design team faces in an existing facility. And even in a brand new facility, you only have so many square feet. You only have so much space to put everything in. You only have so much electrical service available, whatever your requirements are.
So you have to figure out what all that stuff is early and then make the design fit into that. So you're always kind of backing into some requirements. And sometimes we get hit with unexpected things. In design, you don't know what you don't know. You're taking educated guesses early on as to what the requirements are going to be. Sometimes the requirements change in the middle of a project. And it's just like, by the way,
We thought we were designing for this temperature, but it's actually this temperature. that's a difference that matters. Now I have to provide cooling at this level instead of this level. Big difference.
the whole system has to change as a result. You've got to have higher capacity this and that.
Speaker 1 (20:32.694)
Well, and now I may need chillers. Well, where do I get the electrical capacity for chillers? Where do I get the space to put a chiller? One little thing like that can unravel a design very quickly and design assumptions that we made at the beginning. So it's important to ask a lot of questions and uncover as much as you can, but sometimes we get hit with an unexpected, that's not what we thought was happening. And designers are humans too.
They make mistakes. A calculation was wrong. An assumption was wrong. Maybe we didn't ask enough questions. Maybe the owner has a lot of stuff in here in their head that they didn't come out their mouth. That happens a lot too. The users of the space, the engineers that are going to be the receiving end of it, they know things. And when you know things, you assume everybody else knows those things and you don't necessarily verbalize it.
So that's an important lesson that I've learned over my career is even if it's something seems obvious, say it in words out loud where everybody else can hear it because you never know. Sometimes that's the difference between getting something right and getting something wrong.
I completely agree. think the terminology and the communication in construction can be so opaque. mean, a great example of that from my early career. I know that you don't do as much of the finished stuff. You do all the really hardcore mechanical, these amazing plants and things. I only did a few of those in my career. But when I was early on in my career in the Bay Area, I was estimating the lumber cost for a rope fence that was going to run along a running track at the edge of some
property that we were doing. And it was just a one-off, hey, we need somebody to estimate this. Go figure it out. And it ended up being a month's worth of time to figure out how much this fence was going to cost because the architect specified a non-existent grade of red cedar, where it was like a self-contradictory term that didn't make any sense. It was like a fuel-injected carburetor. If anyone in the car world knows what that means, that's an oxymoron. There's no such thing as a fuel-injected carburetor because
Speaker 2 (22:45.166)
they're opposite things. It's like a cold hot. It just doesn't make sense. So we ended up having these conversations with the architect and saying, well, look, this fence is going to cost $200,000 if you want this grade of wood, but it's going to cost $25,000 if you want this grade of wood. Are you sure that you meant $200,000? And everybody's surprised. Like, yeah, we meant the $200,000 wood. I was like, OK, but I get that you're a big hospital and you have all this money, but are you sure that's the best use of your money and time?
And then they came back and said, no, OK, I guess you're right. We'll go with the $40,000 wood option. I said, OK. We're back in the realm of the sane here. It's just crazy how people can get defensive about having not understood some obscure wood specification metric that no one should have an instant recall on unless they're a woodworker. mean, it's just hard to.
live in that world where every single thing you touch has its own specific crazy detailed terminology system of words that are associated with describing that particular thing.
Language in our industry, each discipline has its own lingo and its own little shortcuts and working together with multiple trades can be tricky like that. So I want to get back to the schedules. The owners have an idea in their head, wherever it came from. So I have a lot of different stories about what I do know about where owners ideas of schedules come from. But whatever that date is that they're saying they need you back into that, right?
with construction and design. And then being afraid or being unable or having an owner that won't listen to a realistic conversation about what a schedule should be for this type of thing. I think most schedules are built for a tilt up or a office. And a lot of the structures that we're building are far more complicated than that. And you can't finish the design in three months or six months.
Speaker 1 (24:52.078)
And then designers agreeing to these unrealistic schedules. I have some very close friends that run design firms and we've had this conversation many times about why do you continue to agree to these unrealistic design schedules? You know it's wrong. You know you can't do it. And on top of the unrealistic design schedule, the owners are coming in and saying, and by the way, when they look at your, your estimate that shows I have
designers working on this for this amount of time and whatever, they say, well, that's too many people. You need to cut that down. So they're asking the designers to cut the manpower, cut the schedule, cut, cut, cut. I've seen grown men sit at their desk and cry because the pressure of the schedules that we put out there are just so unattainable.
So let's step back and examine why this is happening a little bit. The owners are under pressure from all kinds of angles. The people that we actually deal with on projects, they're one layer and there's many layers above them and they have lots of people that they're answering to. They're under pressure from the users of the space, whatever kind of facility it is, whether you're building an office building, whether you're relocating a client from one building to this other building.
you doing a remodel, it's a pharmaceutical production plant, it doesn't matter. There's users, occupants somewhere, and you're under pressure, you've promised them something. This is how long the thing's gonna take. And now if you have to go back and tell them, well, it's actually gonna take a lot longer, that can create all kinds of problems because there's things that they're doing that are feeding into this new space. They might be hiring additional staff,
They might be relocating. You don't know. There's all kinds of things that are going on in the background that feed into this date that has been established. There's internal clients, which could be people like facilities management. If you're building a new building, you need facilities management people. Well, usually you don't hire them right out of the gate. You're hiring new people.
Speaker 1 (27:12.706)
to bring on, but these people need to be involved during the design and during the construction. So there's lots of that kind of stuff. IT is another internal client that we all have. Most owners do their own IT on big commercial and industrial clients. They have their own IT department or their own IT contractor that needs to be coordinated with. They have things that most of us don't even think about like building artwork. I had a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant that I built.
And one of the last things that we did, we had to coordinate with was the wall art. There was a sculpture thing that went into one part of the building. These things are important. They're not really necessary for the form and function of the building. But when they bring clients in, they want things to look nice for the employees and for the clients and they want it to have a certain feel. And that stuff all has to be filtered into whenever this end date is. And then of course there's upper management.
And there's many levels in some of these large companies of upper management and those upper management people are dealing with in the case of a manufacturing plant, there's external clients that they're selling. If you're making a product, there's a client on the other end of that production chain that's expecting your product on a certain date based on all these things that have been brought up and discussed for months or years before we ever got to design.
And those things get worked into quarterly earnings expectations, which get worked into people's careers. And all of sudden saying, hey, I know it's going to be tough, but we just need another couple of weeks on this. like, those couple of weeks may cost 10 people their jobs. So this is a bigger deal than it seems like standing in the dirt on a job site or in a designer's office. It's not as if clients saying, I need it faster, are not coming from anywhere. It's not as if it's just,
demanding for the sake of being demanding. But it's the art of design. It's that thing we've been talking about of there are unknown unknowns that you're going to uncover during that process that will not be accounted for. mean, construction taking longer than it was supposed to has been going on for eons. It's a silly trope when people talk about a home repair project. It's not a real home repair project if you didn't have to go to Home Depot twice. There's just...
Speaker 1 (29:31.246)
.
Speaker 2 (29:40.95)
No way of getting anything done in the physical world when it comes to these existing old buildings or it comes to these complicated mechanical designs where it's just going to be, yeah, everything happened exactly how we thought it would. In what business ever does everything happen exactly how you thought it would? And there's absolutely no problems. mean, but nobody wants to leave that safety fudge factor for the unknown unknowns we will encounter because somebody else won't and they'll get the job.
And it becomes, you want to be right, but painless or wrong and hope that you wouldn't have arguments to be rich as a business owner at the design phase, at the construction phase, any of those phases. And it's a terrible system that we're in where people who are making those decisions want to hear what they want to hear and are going to go with the person who's telling them what they want to hear unless they have the trust and the expertise in the business to say no.
I'm going to listen to somebody who I know is telling me the truth and who's telling me a truth I don't want to hear, but that I need to go fight for it because this is the reality as it is, not just this person trying to make more money off of me because they think that they can, which is what that would seem like to me to be an expert to be working at a big pharma company or a big chemical company and saying, all right, well,
Bitter A wants to do it for 1.5 billion, bitter B wants to do it for 1.3 billion, bitter C can do it for 1 billion. Why would I pick A or B? That's crazy. That's not good business. I can't justify that to my managers. It's a lot more nuanced than people make it out to
And best value stuff is a whole nother conversation that we should probably do another episode on because that's that's a deep well right there. But I just want to go back to your Home Depot comment as a homeowner. I'm going to tell you if you haven't been to Home Depot at least 10 times, you are not doing a project. So.
Speaker 2 (31:37.582)
it.
We just finished a major remodel and holy Toledo. So we got owners under all this pressure. We have the reality that buildings under construction cost money. don't make money. longer you're under construction, the longer you're in design, the longer you're spending money, the longer that schedule drags out, the more it's going to cost. And at the end of the day, whatever your goal is, if you're producing something, you getting to that production day.
is your goal. If you're an office building, moving your users in is your goal. If you're making hamburgers, getting those doors open and getting those burgers out the door is the goal. You're not doing that as long as you're in design and construction. So it contributes to this rush, rush, rush, hurry up and get through design so we can hurry up and start building. And what I see project after project, we want to see
We want to see a hole being dug. We want to break ground. Some framing start going up. We want to see concrete poured. We want to see something happening so that we can take pictures of it and report it to our upper management that we have started construction. Now, whether we should have started construction never comes into the conversation. Is that design done enough?
to really start construction. So what we end up doing is early in design, we decide, you know what, we're gonna phase this thing. If the project's of any size, we say we're gonna phase this design. We're gonna get several structural done first, then we'll get MEP done, then we'll get finishes done. And we start phasing all these things. And if you're in a seismic state, seismic design is often deferred. What ends up happening is we miss the coordination piece.
Speaker 1 (33:28.386)
When we do this, because you're putting in underground utilities before I have even designed the plumbing, the mechanical, the electrical, I'm stuck with whatever you put in my underground as another constraint to design. We back ourselves into these corners. And then when I have to say, you know what? I have to have more electrical over here. I have to have more plumbing over here.
well, it's all under the slab. So now I'm busting up slab. That's a change order. All day in any scenario, I don't care what your contract says, that's a change order. You're busting up a poured slab to get a waistline run over here, to get some underground conduit run over there.
and we haven't even gotten really out of the ground and we're already doing change orders.
A friend of mine just wrote an article on LinkedIn about the phenomena of having a zero change project. He's actually had one. Now he's a little bit older than I am. We've worked together for years and he's had one. I've had zero. I used to think that it was impossible, that there was just no scenario under which you could have a zero change project, but
Knowing what I know today, I do think it is possible, but it starts here in design. This is where it starts in allowing design the time needed to develop everything that needs to be developed to coordinate, because that's one of the biggest problems that we have is that we're not coordinated among the trades. Even a firm that does MEP, I see internal coordination problems with MEP. So it's a rush.
Speaker 1 (35:21.046)
designers get talked into this stuff. Owners get led into this. And in the end, we have one of two results. We have a design that is incomplete, uncoordinated, is going to result in a lot of RFIs, resubmittals, change orders, and you drag out the schedule that way.
But it was a fast design.
The design might've been fast. just wasn't complete. Sure. hit that. We hit the schedule milestone of getting design done, but now construction administration for those designers becomes a huge burden. A lot of design contracts, the construction administration is T and It's not always a flat fee. So now all the money that I should have spent in the first phase of design.
I'm going to spend in construction administration. Now I'm not just paying the designer. I'm paying the GC and every trade that's still on that job site because now my schedule is going to extend two or three months because I have all this chaos on the job site. Out of sequence work. maybe this goes back to our first number one item on the list of the handoff of trades. When we have out of sequence work, the handoff to trades doesn't go very well, does it?
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:39.768)
So I'm going to say that item number four on the list contributes to item number one on the list.
100%. 100 % it does. There's never an instance of like, well, we don't really know where these are going to go, but could you just go build them anyway? No, no, I can't go build them anyway, because if you haven't placed that valve, I can't run controls to it. So it's really hard to hand off in that circumstance.
Yeah, I had a project that just finished up recently that I had valves that needed controls run to them that were 12 weeks late. Long story how we got there doesn't even matter. The point is is the whole building is up and running except for several systems in this one area because we didn't have the valve so we couldn't run the controls. So the project was delayed. There were a number of reasons why the project was delayed. That was one.
of the many reasons why the end of that project was delayed. We didn't take the time on the front end to define things clearly enough for procurement.
And most clients are not willing to live in the world that the Catholic Church lives in with the church that's being built in Barcelona. There's a church being built there that was the masterpiece of a very famous architect, the Sagrada Familia. If anyone's ever seen pictures of this church, it's one of the most spectacular architectural designs in the world. It's getting its main tower. It's predicted to complete in 2034.
Speaker 2 (38:17.262)
construction started in 1882, but there's one thing you could say about the church is that they're patient and they Made the decision clearly by starting in 1882 and being projected finished in 234 say well We don't care how long it takes. It just has to be this way because this architect and His design his vision for what this church was going to be his pyramid and that's all there is to it No business no client of ours that we've ever worked for gets that privilege of just saying
However long it takes, it takes just to go. We can't ask clients to say, well, enter design with the mentality of it's gonna take however long it's gonna take. We don't have that kind of time, but we still have to have a competitive process for bidding. We still have to have a way of determining who the best bidder is. What do you say to somebody who is new in a market? They're just opening up their first facility.
in a place where they haven't worked with any of those local contractors and local architects yet, but those local people have the knowledge of the local codes and the local inspectors and the local requirements they need. When you don't have the time to build that relationship that earns that trust, what's the right approach for somebody in that kind of a circumstance?
So I've definitely had clients where we've gone into a market, building a facility that they've never built before, into a market that they've never worked in before. They didn't know any of the GCs. They didn't know any of the trade contractors. And that is one of the riskiest things an owner can do. You need to build yourself some fluff in that schedule and in that budget too. You end up with the wrong contractor, the wrong GC.
a wrong major trade, that is going to be a rough project. One of the roughest projects I've ever done was exactly that scenario. We started off with an unrealistic schedule. That was half of what it should have been. The first thing out of my mouth was you need to double your schedule. And they said, well, we're not doing that. And I said, OK. Well, guess what? At the end of the day, that schedule was exactly where I said it was going to be.
Speaker 1 (40:29.142)
Not because I'm marvelous and wonderful and can see the future.
Although you are and you can. In my opinion. I'm a little biased.
But I built those facilities before. I hadn't built in that marketplace before, but I knew how long design was going to take. And I knew roughly how long construction was going to take. That's really where we ended up. It didn't have to be that way. Had we hired a better general contractor, had we hired some better and different trade partners, and had we allowed enough time for design, I think that project could have come in faster.
In fact, I know it could have, because it was unnecessarily drug out by the complications that we faced by bringing on a GC with no experience in that particular type of building. Trade contractors that were not as cooperative as they could have been. So on the flip side of it, we made some really good connections in that area.
And found some really good contractors that we were able to use again on future projects. But you've got to take some lumps when you're going into a new marketplace like that. You don't know what you don't know. And every marketplace, by the way, has its own tiny little microculture. I worked in San Diego for many years. That's its own little clicky culture in the construction community. And if you don't have a 619-858 or 760 area code, nobody's dealing with you.
Speaker 1 (42:02.454)
in San Diego, it's super clicky like that. But you go up to LA Orange County and nobody cares. It's just a few miles away and no one cares. It's really clicky with where you're located. They want to know if you're local. They're only interested in dealing with local people in San Diego, whereas in LA Orange County, no one cares. It's a much bigger market. I don't think they can afford to be as picky. You go to the Denver area and people are a little concerned about whether or not you're local, but they're not.
as concerned. It's a little bit more flexible, but it's also still clicky in its own way. Then I go back east and work and the states are smaller, they're much closer together. It's probably a little bit more like Europe is, you know, people are just like, whatever, it doesn't really matter. You're from this state, you're from that state, everything's 30 minutes away. It's not as big of a deal. You're from New York, you're from Philly, you're from Delaware, it doesn't really matter. People drive state to state for work.
on regular basis, whereas in some of the bigger, more western states, that's considered pretty weird.
If you're doing what you describe, give yourself more time, give yourself more budget for the unknowns.
And I think it's really interesting that you're not talking about picking the perfect architect, picking the perfect contractor. I think one of the great things that I appreciate about the construction business is that 90 % of the people I've met in it have all been the kind of people who are intrinsically motivated to do a great job because they have pride in their work and pride in what they do to the extent that they're not out to get you. They're not
Speaker 2 (43:42.99)
in the business to try to tell the lie that makes them the most money possible. They're not playing some economic game like that. They want to do a great job. They're not going to rest on their laurels. They're not going to just wait for things to go bad until they can make a lot of money off of it. They want to go fast. They want to build quickly. They want to build efficiently. But too often they get burned by clients who don't want to listen or by circumstances that are out of their control. I think
Being ready to pay attention not just to the data, not just to the words and terms and things being spoken about during a design phase, but paying attention to the content of people's character and the way that they convey that information is a really key indicator during that bidding phase of saying, OK, well, this is a person, regardless of what their number was, that I can trust, that has said things in an upright, forthcoming way, where I would want to do business with that person. Because they're going to tell me the truth of the matter.
whether I want to hear it or not. That's the kind of person that you want to do business with, not somebody who's gonna tell you the lie that you have told them you want to hear. And that's the thing that I've seen people be led astray by in construction and design and any walk of life.
There's a lot of frustration in the contracting community because there has been a bit of a shift from the owner side. In the past, it's been more about relationships and developing that trust and just exactly what you described in the last maybe 10 years. There's been a lot of shift to how fast and how cheap can you do it?
and not so much on the relationships. And that's frustrating a lot of contractors, whether they're GCs or specialty contractors. I see and hear a lot of frustration out there of like, doesn't matter anymore. It's all about fast and cheap. And sometimes choosing our clients can be tough like that because too many people are focused on fast and cheap. And I guess that's my ask to the community is we need to
Speaker 1 (45:56.184)
fall back a little bit. We need to think about more than just fast and cheap because we can actually go faster and get it done cheaper if you let us slow down just a little bit and take a breath and focus the time and the energy in the right places. And it starts at the beginning. With the design, a good coordinated healthy design is going to get done faster and cheaper in the end.
It just takes a little bit of trust and a little bit of faith that we're doing the right thing and investing in the right place. I have some really kind of fun statistics. I always love to look up certain key structures and what was their building timeline and how many people did they have on the job? safety aside, I always like to look up the whether or not how many people died.
Building it because I think that's an important thing. I do not advocate for going so fast for hurting people. There was a job up in Vegas that was built not too long ago. I was very, very disappointed in the industry for touting the speed under which it was completed because 12 people lost their lives. 12 people lost their lives.
Mm.
Speaker 1 (47:22.978)
That's not a success in my opinion. If one person loses their life, that's not a success in my opinion. If 12 people died building that project, I can only imagine the mental health and state of the people that were working on the job. I've been on a job with the fatality before one, and I'm telling you that job was never the same and those people were never the same.
I don't want to get grim. I'm not focusing on that aspect of it, but I have some really kind of fun stuff for you. So the Cathedral at Notre Dame. Everybody knows what that is. It did experience a fire a few years back and they've rebuilt it, but this is about the original construction. The original construction of cathedrals, as you pointed out earlier. They exceed the lifetime. Of the of the people that designed it. It took 182 years to complete that cathedral.
It went from 1163 to 1345 and there were a thousand laborers total.
Just a thousand.
Just a thousand.
Speaker 2 (48:36.206)
Yeah, for the size of that building, that's incredible.
Isn't it? Yeah. Which is probably why it took 182 years. You're talking about a very small crew over time. I'm working on a job right now that has 830 people average per day on the job site. And they had a thousand people total. So move forward in time quite a bit. So we're going from 1345 to 1930, the Hoover Dam took five years to build.
And by the way, the fatality rate for people on the Hoover Dam was extraordinary, but we're not going to get into that. A lot of fatalities on that job. About 21,000 workers total, an average of about 3,500 a day at the Hoover Dam. The Seattle Space Needle, which I got to visit two years ago, I guess it was maybe about two years ago. And I took pictures and I posted a blog about this.
at the time afterwards, because I of course did the tour and all the construction to statistics and stuff like that. It was constructed in 370 days, just over a year. Shut the front door, right? There were no fatalities by the way on that job. It was completed in 1962. So when we look at these three projects over,
hundreds of years, they're completely different types of projects, of course. Completely different economic circumstances. When you look at when the Hoover Dam was built during the Depression, that contributed a lot to the mentality of how that was done. And by the way, five years in the 1930s for a major project like that was breakneck speed.
Speaker 1 (50:29.326)
A lot of people died. And you know what? There was a line at the gate of people looking for work because it was the Depression. So safety was not a concern of that project when it was built. Labor availability, massively different. There were a lot less people in the 12th and 13th century when Notre Dame was being built. A lot less people in the construction industry versus the $3,500 a day.
average crew size of the Hoover Dam during the Depression when there was more labor available than almost any other time in human history. And the Seattle Space Needle 1962, very, very different materials movement, technology has changed. I don't always get excited when I see articles that tout how fast something went up.
I think there was a video that was out there a couple of years ago about a building that went up in, I feel like it was China. It's this huge high rise building and it went up in 15 days or something crazy like that. And my first thought is probably no building codes. My second thought is it's probably all prefabricated. So the structure went up, but was the building then? I doubt it. And probably in an area that
doesn't have seismic concerns. I'm always a little, ugh, when I see that because I don't know if that's the metric we should be focusing on.
funny aside, I don't watch TikTok, but I do watch reels on Instagram. And there were these reels you'd watch if you were on the construction part of Instagram, which there exists, by the There were walls in these Chinese sky rises, skyscrapers that they were showing that had been plastered over with ramen as the like integral material in the building, where it was just like, we don't care what's in the, just, just build it, build it, move on. I mean, it's just crazy with what gets done when
Speaker 2 (52:31.5)
when you prize speed as the number one. And I don't think anybody's out there complaining. Well, I mean, I know it's a gorgeous cathedral, but really, can you say it's a great achievement? It took them 180 years. I could do anything in 180 years. No, it's still Notre Dame because the thousand people that built it were multi-generational crafts people that had to be within two miles of the building because they didn't have a car or a public transportation system to commute them to the building.
Nobody's complaining that that happened too slow.
Right, materials movement alone back in that day. Literally, something's pulling a cart with rocks in it and stones.
had to stop and eat some hay, so the gargoyle is going to be a couple more days than we thought. Sorry.
Yeah, a lot different than our truck driver deciding to spend a couple days in Vegas on the way to the job site. The problem that we have these days, right?
Speaker 2 (53:28.43)
Different stuff.
Horsehead colic, I don't know what to say. I have to get a new horse.
One of the letters just broke.
Yeah, I mean, there's a thousand reasons why it took 180 years for a cathedral to get built back in the day. Not to mention the methods of construction are completely different. I mean, look at all the hand-carved, incredible stuff that you find in these cathedrals and the hand paintings and the frescoes and the, holy Toledo, we don't do anything like that anymore.
That specialty craftsmanship that I hate to say it might not exist at all anymore. I hope that's not true, but it might be.
Speaker 2 (54:15.342)
sure to do plumbing in the same room as to paint in the same room as somebody who's welding. He's like, I can't possibly do this. It's impossible. Whereas they were paying frescoes while the buttresses were being built, I'm sure.
Yeah, and there's no plumbing either. No plumbing, no electrical. That saves some time.
I mean, it's hard to get anybody to work in the same room as another trade these days. And I think there are good reasons for that. Welding will affect the paint finish in some circumstances. I get where those guys are coming from. But it's just a different environment, different circumstances.
Yeah. Yeah. And I can tell you that in my career, I've seen substantial differences in the things that we wouldn't even imagine doing now. When I started out in the field as a framer, I probably shouldn't tell this story, but I'm going to. When I started out in the field as a framer, I was wearing shorts and a tank top. I did have safety boots on, but I, didn't own a hard hat.
Let's do it. Yes.
Speaker 1 (55:18.71)
My safety glasses were my sunglasses cause I was outside and tie off. What's that? We never tied off. If anything, somebody would grab the back of your pants to make sure you didn't fall off the edge. If you had to lean over really far to get something. We didn't use man lifts. We didn't use tie-offs. We didn't use harnesses. This is all terrible. This is bad. I look back on it now and I'm thinking, my goodness. I cannot believe some of the stuff that we did.
Standing on the top rung of the ladders and stuff that I wouldn't do today, stuff that in the commercial construction world we would look at and go, whoo, no way, Jose. The first hard hat was literally a hat with tar put on it because stuff would fall and kill people from above. This was part of the Hoover Dam story was the first hard hat was invented on the Hoover Dam project. They just took a hat and they.
They put tar on it, let the tar dry in hopes of stopping the stuff that was falling from above from penetrating your skull and knocking you down and killing you. That was how a lot of the people died on that job. Safety? What was that? It wasn't even a thing. People were killed all the time in construction, really until modern days, where now we look at it and we think one job fatality is unacceptable, which is exactly where we should be.
But back then, that wasn't a thing.
Human life is precious. The I don't care, just get it done as quickly as you can when people are yelling in boardrooms trickles down because that person's stress and anxiety about losing their job is going to trickle down to the next person, to the next person, the next person. And they're going to ignore safety procedures when their foreman tells them, I don't care how you do it. You just need to get that done today. And that kind of anxiety, that kind of pressure that we're going to put on people, which is a subject of our next episode, there's no amount of
Speaker 2 (57:19.662)
quarterly earnings reports or goal meeting that is worth that human life that you could be jeopardizing by making the wrong kinds of decisions about how to promote a company's culture, a project culture, no matter where you stand in the process of creating a construction project.
There's no dollar value that can be put on a human life. And the pressure and the stress goes both up and down the chain. That's the message that I want to leave everybody with, regardless of what your position is, where in this industry you are. Are you a owner, a general contractor, a specialty contractor, you're a project manager, project engineer, or turning a wrench or swinging a hammer out in the field.
It's important to understand where all this stuff is coming from and that those pressures go up and down. But we need to have these honest conversations with each other. It's too easy to just point the finger and say, everybody's crazy. They're unrealistic. We have to take our piece and do what we can. We have to be honest. We have to represent our clients in the most honest way that we can. We have to talk people off the ledge a little bit.
We need time and design. We need time to do a good quality job. We're gonna have another episode where we talk about mental health and construction. I hope you'll join us for that. Thanks so much for joining us today. Have a great day.
Speaker 1 (58:54.69)
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at hayd.managementunderconstruction.com.
