Transcript: How to Consistently Deliver with a Top Performance Mindset - w/ David DeYarza, CEO at Builderbox

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 31. Hello and welcome to or welcome back to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships within your project teams, helping to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule in your construction projects, and most importantly exceed your end user's desires. This episode features David de Yarza, who is CEO of BuilderBox.

If you don't recognize the name, this is a Where Are They Now episode. We have been catching up lately and there have been a lot of changes since we spoke last in episode 10. We spoke with Vishal Parwal, his business partner in episode 7 as well. You can learn more about the growth and the journey these two amazing guys have been through in those episodes. This episode we not only talk about BuilderBox, but we discuss the mindset around not just giving bare minimum or the status quo, but we talk about how to deliver with conviction to do our best.

I love his responses. So without further ado, here is my interview with David de Yarza. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, David. How are you? I'm doing very well, Brittany.

Thank you very much for having me. Oh yeah, my pleasure. If you guys who are listening don't remember, David has been on the podcast before. He's been on episode 10. This is the Where Are They Now podcast.

We're going to talk a little bit about what has transpired since we talked in episode 9. My first question to you, David, is what's the deal? Why BuilderBox instead of Gameplan? Last time we talked with you, we talked about Gameplan. The name has ultimately changed.

You've rebranded. What's going on? Yeah, good question. Certainly, inquiring minds certainly want to know about that. If you remember, Gameplan was a company that came out of an AEC hackathon.

It was just a couple of people getting together and doing a bunch of experimenting and doing some work at a hackathon. Then we continued it. It was something that needed to evolve. We hadn't quite figured out what we wanted to do in terms of our offering of features and modules. Certainly, we hadn't figured out what our pricing structure was going to be, what our licensing type was going to be, or subscription type was going to be.

At some point, it made sense to hit the reset button and say, okay, we've done all this development. We have learned all these lessons. Let's actually launch something that has a little bit of a different basis and its starting point and let's start anew. From that sense, BuilderBox is not a development product or a startup trying to figure out what it is that we're doing, but rather a product that is quote unquote shipping. Obviously, software as a service doesn't ship, but it's out there, it's beyond 1.0, and it's ready to go.

One of the lessons learned was something just very simple. A name with the word game in the domain had a tendency of ending up in spam filters, some of our automated emails. That was certainly one of the lessons. Oh yeah, that's great to know. I think that we're going to get used to seeing BuilderBox.io around.

It definitely speaks to what you guys are providing a little bit more closely. Has Builder in it, so that's awesome. We're going to get into the details of the new pricing structure and licensing a little bit later. I do also want to touch base with you about your transition into the company. Last time we spoke with you, you were a collaborator slash star user with Vishal, and now you're in the company.

I just want to talk about that transition. Both of you guys were working quite closely. Obviously, you guys met at AAC Hackathon and were developing that partnership in a way there, but I just want to get the history and background. Yeah, certainly. Like I said, we met at a hackathon and I was quite honestly, my life changed on that hackathon.

I had the light bulb moment of, wait a minute, we do not have to wait for big developers, big name software developers to decide that they want to prioritize the features that we're asking for and include them in the software. This is something that we have technology now to accomplish ourselves. That was really eye opening. I think that it really brings up a point that is one of the things that I consider to be part of the Builder Box DNA and part of our main selling point.

That is that we are not a group of software developers or serial entrepreneurs that decided that this market is ripe for disruption, as everybody loves to say. I quite frankly don't like that word, but that seems to be what everybody else is doing. We were builders first and we had a need for certain tools that quite honestly didn't exist in the market and if they did, they were packaged in maybe the wrong way or the wrong bundle. When I say wrong, I just mean for my particular use case and my particular need, I was not able to deploy those things for various reasons.

To be able to create those for ourselves, for our work is what we set out to do. At some point, we really realized that there was something there that would be viable as a commercial project. I think that Vishal always had the eye on that particular ball. I was looking at it as sort of the killer app that I could create for myself and increase my productivity and increase my quality of work. At some point, it quickly became something that I knew somebody else was going to want.

I will honestly tell you that happened relatively quickly after the hackathon and it's been well over three years since we started that. The tipping point for me really was that I had to do a great deal of homework and a lot of proving the case to convince my wife that it was a good idea to leave a perfectly lucrative job at a well-established mid-size contractor and go out on a limb and join the world of a startup. Full disclosure, that is probably one of the biggest drivers of the timing and the decision.

It's something that pretty quickly I had resolved together with Vishal to say at some point this is going to happen. Well, you know what? You had to sell it to your wife first. Now that would just practice, right? You put together all the copy and got her to understand the value in it.

I'm glad that she's given the stamp of approval. Yeah, yeah. So am I. That's great. I do want to talk with you a little bit more about the culture of what is now BuilderBox.

I do see you guys as, you both, you and Vishal, and unfortunately he wasn't able to join us, as definitely having the constructor DNA as well, which those who listen often know that the tagline is the best way to build it. And it's just not building construction. It's not actually that active building, physical. building relationships, building on collective innovation. And you guys are definitely aligned in that.

And I did want to talk to you about a couple of things that you guys talk about in your blog and definitely check out builderbox.io and check out the blog section, guys, for those of you who are listening, because they have some awesome stuff out there. Thanks. Yeah. But yeah, you talk about elevating the standard of care versus delivering the bare minimum. And sometimes in this industry, we settle with delivering the bare minimum.

Can you talk about your convictions around that? Certainly. And that's, I think that you're spot on when you say, you know, we are really in line with some of the philosophies that you have been talking about at constructor. And, and, and it's not just building buildings, but it's building a better culture of building, if you will. And I think it's no, no secret, the challenges that we face, the, you know, the inefficiencies that we have, that we have essentially decided that we're going to live with.

And, you know, the people that pay our checks at the end of the day, I believe, don't necessarily know everything that, that goes into building a project and all the inefficiencies and all the problems that our collective culture as builders really create. I think that in any other industry, if you were to say that you are going to throw away 30 cents out of every dollar that is spent, I think they would look at you like you're absolutely insane and they would give the job to somebody else.

So yeah, standard of care is, is one of those things that I believe a lot of people in this industry are still hiding behind. And I, I say that sort of under the framework of some of the industry events out there, if you take, for example, the AGC BIM forum, you know, happens twice a year and it's been going on for a number of years. And it's one of the events that I have attended year after year with regularity. At the end of the conference, undoubtedly there's a Q&A session where somebody says, oh, this is all wonderful.

This is all great, but here are the reasons why I can't do it. And what I'm hearing year after year is this, this hiding behind, well, the contract type doesn't let me do this or our, you know, our insurance company has certain requirements. And if we do this, we're going against them. And I'm opening myself up to all this liability. There's still this, there's all this willingness to move forward and explore and use new technologies.

But at the end of the day, we tend to revert into our safety zone, which is this quote unquote standard of care, which essentially has been around. You know, we haven't really changed much in the last hundred years as far as what we consider the standard of care. And everybody hides behind it and everybody silos. The contract types are, you know, by definition, we're going to war with one another, if you will. So the architect is, you know, siloing their information and making sure that their responsibility somebody else is.

The consulting engineers do the same. The contractors, you know, build a framework around it so they can then start to poke holes at the information and everything can become a change order. And let's face it, there's I mean, I think that we have to be honest about this if we're going to move forward and nobody ever really wants to say it, which is there is a profit motive behind that inefficiency. If I sell you a product or I'm trying to sell you on a product where I tell you that my pricing structure means that I'm going to save your project engineer six hours a week.

Some people might think that that sounds great, but other people look at that and say, well, wait a minute, those six hours a week are hours that I'm I am billing and I'm paying that project engineer a lot less. So you're taking money from my bottom line by being more efficient. So that's what I mean when I say the standard of care. We need to make the standard of care whatever it is that we want to make it. At the end of the day is whatever you want to do.

If you're going to do BIM on a project, you're going to do VDC, well, then decide that you're going to do VDC on all your projects. And that is your standard of care. Don't hide behind, well, the customer didn't ask for it. Therefore, we ended up with all these problems that became change orders. Do it because you believe in it.

Do it because it benefits you in some way beyond just the bottom line. And I mean, I believe because I have lived it. And because I have seen it that when you when you make the decision that you're going to be efficient, when you make the decision that you're going to use technology and find the problems at the end of the day, you end up with a product that may be the same and may even cost the same amount of money to to arrive at. But people along the way have been a lot happier and there's going to be a lot less conflict and a lot less putting out fires.

We we have this tendency to prioritize what's urgent at the expense of what's important. And I think that that's a cultural mind shift that needs to happen in this industry before anybody really is able to disrupt. Again, there's that word again, everybody wants to disrupt everything. What we really need to disrupt is the mindset and the contractualization of the company. The mindset and the contracting nature of the work that we do in the industry.

Oh, I'm so glad you said that. And that's something that's been a common theme. It's been a common topic that we discuss here on Constructor. It's how do we focus on developing the relationships differently? And a lot of times it is based upon what's written.

It's based upon the contractual language. It's based upon the insurance requirements. It is based upon. The legal the legal setup, ultimately, and. That's when you get around.

The focus on profit, not that profit isn't important. OK, but is it is it now focus on improving process so everyone gets. Guess what they need at the right timing, just in time as we talk about on lane, right? Right. And and but more so, are we are we going backwards from what the client is truly asking for?

Is it really client focused? Is it are we delivering for their ultimate enjoyment for them to ultimately have the best possible quality for the price? So that's again, raising that standard of care, you know, and it's not just quality as far as like high level finishes. I mean, quality of customer service. And that's when it comes down to saving your six hours, like you mentioned.

When you can just do something more efficiently, because guess what we can. Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's really, you know, those six hours that you save because you deployed some kind of technology that gave you those six hours back. Those that doesn't mean that you spend six hours less working on the project, but now you have an extra six hours to focus on what's important and maybe be proactive about the next task or anticipate something else. So, I mean, a lot of technologies, you know, we saw this with BIM when when we were doing the, you know, when when BIM and VDC were really starting to first appear in the construction industry and, you know, be part of the everyday vocabulary.

You know, every company very quickly tried to prove an ROI to BIM and it proved to be a very difficult thing to do. And it's really not at the end of the day about how many pennies you save, but it's about the confidence that you have and the product that you're putting out there, the risk that you're reducing. And, you know, being able to, again, be proactive and really focus on the things that you need to do. I mean, our projects are complex enough as it is.

So that's why we end up, you know, managing projects essentially from crisis to crisis. And that's what our customers are really desperate for and really pleading for is tools that allow them to to spend their time better and to focus on things better and to not have to constantly be reacting to that email or that phone call that just came in with the, you know, some other problem that now we have to fix. We want to be able to anticipate and all these technologies, I think, you know, from BIM on down, they've kind of started to go in that direction.

But, you know, you know very well and I think that the work that you're doing at Constructor is very important because you're focusing on owners. And at the end of the day, you said it. I mean, it's going to come down to the owner and what the owner requires and what the owner puts down on paper as their spec for how they want people to behave. You know, we see that with IPD, you know, we see that with design build and with some other, you know, more collaborative contracting methods.

And, you know, the owners that get it and that are knowledgeable, they're getting very creative and they're they're putting really good frameworks in place for good work. And like you said, there's nothing wrong with making profit. And in fact, I think that you should let that be the filter that you make decisions with. But you have to take a long view. You know, is the profit you make in a change order worth not getting that client to work with again?

Right. Right. Very good points all around. Yeah, I appreciate your response. I appreciate your perspective.

So I do want to move into the utilization of contractual methods and relationships and talk a little bit more about how that elevates the standard of care. How do you guys see that come up even on the software side of things? Well, I part of our philosophy at BuilderBox is, you know, that the sheets of drawings don't build buildings. People do. So, you know, part of our secret sauce, if you will, or the thing that really makes us different than some others is we we've added.

We've not only digitized a status quo process, we have, you know, we're taking best practices and lessons learned from the experience of the company. And lessons learned from things like Lean and IPD and enabling workflows to to follow naturally those paths and for documents, for example, to work the way that you would want them to in a lean environment. And we've created some tools that enable that. Right. But in addition to that, we've created what I call a social layer on top of it.

And what that aims to do is to capture the context to every decision. So if there's a decision on a submittal, if there's a decision on a change order or an RFI, I want to have a way of capturing everything that led to that decision being made that way, which typically now gets lost in emails and nobody ever finds them again. So we've got a social interaction layer to the entire system. And where we have found really great success is where, whether it be the owner or whether it be the project manager, somebody in a leadership position and the project has decided that, you know what, this is what we're going to do.

We're going to talk to one another and we're going to capture it here. If you send me an email, I will delete it. So if you want to weigh in on this conversation, have it on this platform. And that's when we've been very successful. If, on the other hand, we've had a leadership team that's wishy washy about it and doesn't really care and, oh yeah, sure, no, you can email or you can do this or, oh, you guys are going on Slack and these guys are doing that over there.

Wonderful. Everybody do whatever you want. Our product, quite honestly, has not been that successful at those implementations because we just end up being another silo of data, another log in for somebody to remember. And that's not what we want to do and where we want to be. So it really is driven.

Ultimately, I think that the owner is in the best position to do that and create a contract type that allows people to talk to one another. But, you know, even if it's just the general contractor, you know, the project manager or project executive on that job that decides this is the way we're going to do it, we can still have a great impact, even if there needs to be a chain of command that's very clearly delineated and with a lot of steps to it because nobody can talk to anybody except for who they've been told they can talk to.

Well, at that point, we can use the technology to automate and to really mine that information, push it through to the next level with the least amount of loss or with the least amount of inefficiency. But, you know, the natural sweet spot for the platform, the way that you get to use it with the least amount of setup is if you say, hey, you know, this subcontractor over here should be able to ask the consultant engineer a question. And, you know, we have a method for capturing it into, you know, it's not just some email that gets lost and nobody knows about it.

It's in the system so you can track it and you can create notifications that are rules based so that the right people know the conversations that are going on. But if you enable people to simply talk to one another and take ownership in what they're doing in their work and not feel completely constrained, just I think you get a much better result. I really appreciate the response and I'm curious about your familiarity with PAS 1192, the UK standard for BIM. Superficially. I wouldn't, I mean, like the rest of us, I think that I have been following it and reading about it, but I wouldn't claim to be an expert at it or be that familiar with exactly what they're doing.

Yeah, and I think that I have some similar familiarity. I mean, I haven't implemented in any of my projects either, but I do find that the utilization of a platform like yours, like BuilderBox, it could really allow for that level of communication to take place with the amount of customization that's allowable here, especially since you have pretty much the most collaborative, you know, like the social media platform way of communication integrated already. So I think that's really cool. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I think it's very effective and again, it was one of those light bulb moments where, you know, I've not historically been a huge fan of social media or a big user of things like Facebook.

I'm on Facebook, but I'm, you know, I'm not glued to it all day long, but the fact that you can share information in a way where you're posting it out for, you know, the group that you have defined as, you know, the people that you want to see something and they can consume it. They get notified however they choose to be notified about things. They consume the information whichever way they want to consume it and they're most efficient consuming it. That really was a model for the social interaction layer that we put on top of the system.

And again, like the same way that, you know, my move to BuilderBox was really, you know, predicated on me convincing my wife that it was a good idea to do so. This goes back to a family interaction too. I realized that since I've been on Facebook, I have not emailed a picture of my family to my parents, for instance. So email got completely eliminated out of that workflow. And, you know, I wanted to do something very similar but with, you know, work information.

Of course, that means that you have to define certain workflows. You have to define security criteria so that people have access to the right information. But that's relatively easy to do. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm sure you have to answer to your parents now if they're not on Facebook as well. No, but it's still it's understanding that workflow and falling into it for the right type of communication that is predicated based upon the agreement, right? Right. Right. Okay.

Okay. Oh, awesome. I think we're getting into a little bit more about understanding BuilderBox and kind of revisiting some of the features here. I don't know if you want to just do a high level. I don't know if you want to call it spiel again about what what BuilderBox has for us.

And then let's talk about some of the things that have changed from when we spoke last. Sure. Sure. So, I mean, it's a little bit difficult for the, you know, the listening audience without getting the visual of it to really get a sense. But, you know, I'll try to do my best.

You know, it's a web app platform like any other. You know, you access through a browser and based on your login, it knows who you are. And you've got certain permission credentials which grant you access to whatever the administrator has decided. You should have access to and you've been invited to. So, you know, you can manage or participate in any number of projects.

And the thing is, we have a really modular platform. So we do a bunch of different workflows and I won't try to get through them all. I'll just hit on a couple of highlights. But our pricing structure in our modular nature means that, you know, we don't really expect a whole lot of people out there to use 100% of what the system can offer. We've got clients, for example, who came to us and said, you know, we're a small contractor.

I just hired a few people and I want to make sure that I know where the money is going. That's the only thing that matters to me. So we've got a way to do real time budget forecast on your project and to manage pay apps and draw requests. And, you know, integrate into an accounting system so that you can, with a click of a mouse, take a look at your at the financial health of your project and see where money is going. So that's one case.

And in a lot of other cases, what we get is people that tell us our accounting is completely separate. We don't want to touch it. We don't want to integrate it because we want that hard stop, if you will, to the data so that we have a quality control checkpoint. And we're just interested in submittals and RFIs. So great.

Let's focus your training and your onboarding on that. But our system, our platform is able to relate anything to anything else. So, for example, you can have a task that is upcoming. And this is part of our lean production production management system. We've got something we call the readiness index, which essentially allows you to relate any document in the system to that particular task.

So if you have, say, a foundation pour coming up, you can very quickly see it. It works like a like a traffic light. You get a green, an amber or red. And if it's a red, it means you probably shouldn't go pour those footings and you can start to drill down. And the particular example that with these footings, it could very well be that there was an inconsistency.

The architectural drawings called the foundation depth to be one thing. The structural drawings called the foundation depth to be another. And the footing schedule didn't match either one. Now, how often does that happen? Pretty much every project, right?

So, and again, these are things that I'm not a software engineer. I'm not an entrepreneur thinking that this is a problem. I have lived this. I have made that phone call to say, guys, you probably shouldn't pour that because we just found an inconsistency only to get a text back with a photo of the poured footing and the caption, oops, we just did it. Exactly.

So this stuff really does happen. And this is kind of a low level example of something very, very concrete here. Excuse the pun there, concrete. But so you simply pull up the system, pull up the platform, log in, go look at your schedule, see your three week look ahead and one of the tasks is pour footings. Well, it's red.

Why is it red? You can see that there's a list of anything. It could be, well, we do not have the concrete mix available to the crew is not available for that workspace or there's an RFI that hasn't been answered. There's a pending RFI on this issue. That's a really clear example of how you can utilize the task function.

And I really do like the stoplight idea. It really implements the utilization of lean. Yeah. Giving everyone that voice to say, you're on the right path. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's just one example, but I think that derailed me a little bit from maybe just at a high level. I could, you know, most people that know about construction management are these things are all familiar. Right. But yes, we submittals, RFIs, task management, you know, site photos, plan room, although I will say about the plan room, we kind of take the approach that we shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel and create something that somebody else has already done really, really well.

So in the case of our file cloud and plan room, you know, we integrate with things like Google Drive and Box, Dropbox, all of those. And we're actively working on a on a integration with Bluebeam Studio, just because I particularly like Bluebeam. I believe that it's a great product. They philosophically fall in line as far as the licensing, you know, that they do. So for us, it's very natural to say, well, we're not going to create a plan room because we're going to use Studio and we're just going to make the two talks.

If you go into if you go into Builder Box and you pull up your plans, they're actually going to be whatever it's in Studio. And anybody doing anything in Studio is going to still get captured. But if you need to, you know, initiate a quality control punch list item from a drawing in Bluebeam, it'll be a punch list item in Builder Box that will have all the accountability and all the, you know, the social media layer. Same thing with, you know, same thing with an RFI.

You could, you know, cloud your drawings and call out an RFI. But instead of calling a hyperlink to another PDF that happens to be an RFI, you're calling it to our database where there's an RFI and you can in real time see what the status of that is. So, you know, that that's kind of part of our DNA to to be to integrate in our technology back end really allows for very easy integration with just about anything that will let us integrate into it. And that's definitely something that we're doing a lot of.

But then, you know, like everyday things such as, you know, like meeting minutes are hugely underutilized. Meeting minutes is something that typically, you know, project engineer sits in an office and jotts down some things or maybe is using Excel and, you know, maybe that Excel file gets emailed around but nobody ever really looks at it. But our meeting minutes are very easy to set up and any action item or agenda item that you have, you can instantly promote to a task which you can now assign to a person.

You can assign a due date. You can create followers for that. You can create a notification or a reminder date other than the due date you can. And then you can use that task to assign to a schedule item so that it can, you know, make its red light red if that person has not accomplished that task. So, again, in the sort of the spirit of relating everything to everything, you really have a lot of power if you start to use more of the modules of the system.

Oh, that's excellent. I do like the idea of relating everything to everything. That's what we have to use at this point. I mean, it's not like we're not attempting to do that in projects already but things get missed because that linkage itself is not there. Well, it's typically a manual linkage and what we've done is we've created a digital link that on top of it you can report on and you can dashboard its metrics and you can assign it to somebody or a group of people.

Yeah, I think that's really the game changer is that, you know, I always say computers, the only thing computers do that you and I can't is they count a lot faster. So, you know, process automation is a very simple thing to do from a technology standpoint. So that's it's kind of it's a little bit sad that it's 2017 and we're talking about this but, you know, that's where we are. But I think in that sense, we've done a really good job of creating an automation system that's very flexible.

In fact, you wanted to talk a little bit about some of the differences between BuilderBox and, you know, when we were developing it as Gameplan. I would say that, you know, other than being extremely more robust and because we've gone through a great deal of testing, one of the things that's probably the biggest difference is the amount of flexibility and customization. Because, you know, Vishal and I went back and forth a lot every time that I put the system on another pilot project with a different group of project managers and engineers and architects.

Somebody wanted to do something slightly different. So that process automation, for example, a document approval workflow, which again is relatively simple to do. But you have to make it flexible enough so that you can accommodate the particular scenario and no two teams ever want to do something the same way. And I'm not a big fan of, you know, a software developer dictating how something should work just because they think that that's the best way to do it. I think that you need to have the flexibility to let project teams really make those decisions.

There's nothing wrong with having some out of the box guidelines that, hey, these are probably going to cover most cases. And, you know, but I would rather save that for a blog post than for a software setting. You know, it was interesting. One thing that sticks out really clearly from my first discussion with Vishal is he said that the system is built in a way for people to work the way they work and documentation is a byproduct. Right.

And and I think that you guys have gotten to a place with the ability to integrate with different team styles as well as different software integrations in order to really allow for that through BuilderBox. So I think that I think that you probably have more of an evolution even from here, but you've definitely gotten to a really good place. So that's that's great to hear. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, in fact, I some of the conversations that we have with with clients really hinge around not so much our software and what it will do, but how they work.

What are their systems now? What do they find success in? And we don't want to come in and say, we've got this great new tool. You need to work this way now in order to use it. No, it's let us understand how you work and we can tell you if we can help you or not.

There are going to be some cases where, you know, we might not be the best fit, but, you know, nine times out of 10, we're going to be able to create the system to work in the way that you work and add that layer of automation at the layer of the social interaction. Capturing all the all the all the documentation. I mean, our our tagline really is, you know, communicate effectively document everything and make data driven decisions. And that's that's really out of, you know, we've got a system that will allow you to get away from email, you know, get issue specific conversations, stay with the issue.

That's that's something where you communicate effectively. We can document everything that happens, you know, every time that somebody looks at something, every time that somebody updates a file, every time that somebody responds to something, there's there's a log. Again, you're you're talking about a web app where you log in so that the server knows exactly what time and date you did something to a particular submittal, for example. And that becomes really powerful later at at close out. And if you ever have to go back and figure out who did what, when, which again, I've been on the receiving end of that order of, you know, David, go find that that RFI response because we have a warranty issue.

OK, well, I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Let me go, you know, rifle through all those email backups. And even then you don't have a guarantee that you're going to find it, even if you're really good about saving emails, which I consider myself to be. But it's, you know, Outlook or any other email client does not prevent you from putting something in the wrong folder. If you if you answer an RFI in a database is pretty difficult for you to answer the wrong question in the wrong document.

I suppose you could do it, but you would really have to be going out of your way. But, you know, once you have all that documentation, you can really start to mine the data. And that's what I wish that Vishal was here because he explains this a lot better than me, because, frankly, he's the brains behind the operation. And this goes over my head pretty quickly. But, you know, some of the algorithms that we have working behind the scenes that are the same system that's making a decision of whether the light is red, amber or green for your tasks are are able to start predicting and able to start mining the data across your entire project portfolio and eventually across our entire user base.

And we've got the system looking for patterns and looking for things like that. Going back to the example of the foundation pour. Well, what if we have a piece of software now that can tell us these conditions that you are starting to meet are the things that usually lead to this task being delayed? You know, then we can start to to throw up red flags and say, hey, you should probably be paying attention to this kind of thing. That also a little bit more of a day to day level and already in the software.

I mean, that's that's obviously a little bit further up, you know, as far as the the timeline of when that data will become useful. You know, we're going to need a lot of data in the system for that to really become smarter. But we already have a system that does a really good job of prioritizing things that, again, are important, not necessarily just urgent. So we've got a virtual assistant, which is the first thing that you get greeted by when you when you log into the system.

In fact, one of my favorite stories about a product demo is I had I had created a project for our our home and I was showing Blair, my wife, how to use the system. And I showed up at a product demo and there were about seven or eight items on my honey do list that showed up on my virtual assistant. And the last one for the following day was to show her how to assign a date because everything had that same date and it was today.

So I had I was already behind. Yeah, so it does a really nice job of of saying, look, these are the things that are most critical. And it's not really just looking at your schedule is looking at the project holistically and understands what other items and what other tasks and levels of responsibility for other people are going on there. And it's a system that affects those tasks and it it basically presents it to you in a way you can filter through it a lot quicker. That's awesome.

So I do want to be cognizant about time. I do want to hear a little bit about the pricing model that you've changed to. So tell us about that. Well, I think that we this is one of the struggles that we had to really figure out what the pricing model was going to be. And in this industry, everybody seemed to be going towards a well, let's let's figure out how big your project is.

And based on that, we'll do some back of the napkin math that will let us estimate how many people more or less you're going to have, how many users and how many drawings and how many attachments and what kind of storage are we talking about. And that that is a pretty big task in and of itself from a pricing standpoint. And the result of that is that as an end user, anytime that I ask for a proposal from any other software software vendors, I could never get a quick answer.

And that really meant that I could not deploy something on a project. I mean, typically, by the time that I can answer the question, well, how many people are on your project and how many millions of dollars that project is, it's too late for me to get a number because the budget is set and I can't all of a sudden add another $30,000 light item. You know, even if it's something that's going to save us a ton of time. Well, it's very difficult to make that case when you've got a budget already set.

Likewise, I was always left with a very icky maybe for yeah, that's the right word, icky feeling anytime that a that a software salesperson would answer. Well, how much is this going to cost me by asking, well, what's your annual revenue? You know, that that's that doesn't sit well with me. And I know so many people that that are in the exact same boat. I mean, one of the sort of on the side, one of the things that I do, I am the current president of the board of the Seattle Revit user group.

And we just went over a thousand members. We're up to a thousand and three as of today. And thank you. But that really translates into having the ear of a lot of people having conversations with a lot of people. And this was something that everybody seemed to be unanimous on is like that feels wrong.

Software should cost whatever it costs. And, you know, how well my company's doing should not have any bearing on that. Now, of course, I I understand that the reality is that they're going for some kind of volume there. But in the spirit of creating a business model that did away with the roadblocks that I as an end user encountered, that being one of them, we decided on a very simple subscription model, which actually is what all most other software as a service out there is is based on.

So we've got, first of all, a free tier. That was another one. It was always very difficult to to do a pilot project or to even get in the interface and push the buttons. I mean, I'm I'm a visual learner. I like to look at screenshots.

I like to actually poke around and break things in order to learn them. And I I couldn't get access to some of these systems out there until we bought them. So we've created a way that you can go onto the site. You can start today. You can create a free account and that'll give you unlimited time.

You can keep it forever. And it it limits you and the number of people you can invite. And it's only for one project. You're also going to hit some limitations on on the features that are available and on the modules that are available. But it does about maybe seventy five, eighty percent of what the platform does with a little bit less option to customize.

But you can check it out. You can actually try it and see if this is going to be for you or not. Then we have a small business plan, which is nineteen dollars. And I better make sure that I'm giving you the right numbers. I'm fairly confident that I am.

But I will pull up our pricing sheet just to make sure. And by the way, this is all on the Web site. Builderbox.io. That's that's the other differentiator. Most other software you actually will not know.

You have to interact with a salesperson. But we actually have a pricing page. So our small business plan is nineteen dollars per user per month. You know, again, some limitations on what you can do with that. But by and large, you can get a lot of value out of, you know, just under twenty dollars a buck per per user per month.

That's pretty good. Advanced business, which is probably where most people are going to fall in. It's at forty nine dollars per user per month. And our enterprise, which adds our production planning and, you know, some of the more advanced features and it gives you unlimited number of projects, unlimited file storage, et cetera, et cetera. That's ninety nine dollars per user per month.

Now, one thing that's really important to note when we're talking about users and fees per user per month is just about everybody else out there is going to ask you to maintain a license for your collaborators, your external users. So if you're a general contractor, that's your your subcontractors, your architect, consulting engineers, the client. If you want them to play in the same sandbox and participate, you're going to have to buy them a license. And that's maybe from a financial standpoint, not not really that big of a problem.

If you know that that's the case, you can build it into a subcontract, for example, or, you know, if you can forecast it, you can deal with that. But what that does is it puts you in the business of managing other people's email addresses. So if you have let's say that you've got a company wide account and you've got a certain number of licenses. Now you have to worry about, well, this project, we have these subcontractors and are we are they working on the next project?

This one's being closed out that we have to go cancel those. So it gets complicated very quickly. And, you know, my the IT director at the company that I left before, Builderbox, was always very adamant. He doesn't want to be in the business of managing other people's emails. And he's absolutely right.

So in the case of Builderbox, anybody that's not on your domain is unlimited and it's free. So you do not have to pay for the owner, the architect, the subcontractors. Now that makes it so that you can run a project with a relatively minimal investment. And I think that that's perfectly adequate and perfectly fair to do. I don't feel like we're losing out on opportunities to charge people just because, you know, they have 30 people.

If maybe there are just three people that are managing the project and they're part of the general contractor. Well, they can just get three licenses and have all those other people participate. Of course, all the users you can, you know, the level of control over what people can do and see and get access to its its is so flexible. In fact, that it's, you know, anything with a lot of power also brings in a bit of complexity. So setup is pretty important.

But yeah, so that's that's the pricing structure. I mean, I I will say like with any other, you know, software as a service and a lot of the companies out there, we really like enterprise deals. We really like people that sign up for 12 months and we can give a pretty aggressive discount on that. But you don't have to call us to find out what that's going to be. You can go on the website, know how many users you have, extrapolate that 12 months out and you know that's a starting point.

Now, our enterprise deal is going to be below that. We're always going to be below the retail published price. And I think that that, you know, that gives you a safety margin. And if you're looking for a solution and you need to plug something into a budget, you can look at our numbers on the website and know that it's not going to go above that. So I think that that's a pretty important point.

Yeah, I think that gives a clear understanding of what people will get when they test out BuilderBox. I mean, to be honest with the free version, it makes a whole lot of sense to create your own demo, if you will, and see if it works. I'm the type of person that likes to kind of poke around things and see if it works for me, like with any other software as a service, like you mentioned. And there's some that I have chosen not to use because it's not working as I would have hoped.

Or maybe, you know, maybe that's the next tear up that will allow, you know, those whatever features I'm looking for. So at least it gives you a sense of the user interface and things like that. So that's great. Yeah, I mean, I will admit it's a double-edged sword, right? I mean, anything.

We're not trying to do something simple here. Building a building is not a simple endeavor. So, you know, neither are the tools to do it. And I, you know, I want to stay away from claiming this particularly complex, but it's a powerful system that can do a great deal. So, you know, set up onboarding, those things matter.

And I think that, you know, we've got a pretty good user base or help base on the on the site. People that know how to do this will probably, you know, people know how to manage projects can figure their way around. You know, it's on the upper levels where you get some of the onboarding set up and help with, you know, training and things like that. And so sometimes the free version, excuse me, sometimes the free version, it's, you know, somebody will log into it and some people will walk away from it because it doesn't look like much when there's no data in the system.

So definitely walking people through it is our preferred way to do it. But if somebody wants to poke around, they certainly can do it. Okay, great. Good, good, good. Well, I do want to ask you a couple of conclusive questions for this interview here.

And we know that we can obviously join the free version or test out BuilderBox and obviously getting some support and getting a real project in there to see how it's working is the best way to do it. But with BuilderBox or outside of BuilderBox, I do want to find out some steps that you may recommend for organizations who are looking to implement a better standard of care. Just kind of pointing back to our earlier discussion. Yeah, so yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I think that you have to first make a decision that that's what you want to do.

And it's like with anything else, right? It really has to come from the top. If you don't have a culture that values, you know, a higher standard of care is like saying that you don't have a culture that values innovation or a culture that doesn't value safety. You're not going to put an emphasis on those things. You're not going to empower your people to do that.

So if you do, you have to make it very clear that you do and really empower your people to do the right thing for their clients. And in fact, I think, you know, some of the resources out there like you were talking about, you know, we talked about the blog earlier. And it's because I'm not historically a software developer or, you know, not been a CEO of a software company before this. You know, most of my focus on our blog has been around this topic. And so if you go to our blog page, again, it's builderbox.io, but you can go directly to it with blog.builderbox.io.

I think you'll you'll you'll notice that Vishal and I have been contributing content here that is really around that topic. So, for example, I published a blog a few days ago or a couple of weeks ago on using the safety culture as maybe a model for innovation and standard of care. And, you know, it's really not that long ago that we were really arguing about having to wear hard hats on our sites. And, you know, people were against it. It was something that, oh, it gets in my way or having to spend an hour doing a safety orientation at the beginning of the job.

I mean, that that seems very wasteful. There's a lot of money spent on that. But there's a mandate for that. You've got, you know, first of all, you've got OSHA and rules like that. And you've got, you know, your insurance company saying that you're going to have higher premiums if you have a certain, you know, a certain recordable rate or, you know, those are all things.

You know, if you have been on a lot of project pursuits, you know, trying to sell a client on, you know, hiring us to build your project. And we had a pretty big slide with our EMR, you know, directly up on the on the slide and the lower the better. And we would tout, you know, all the safety awards that we've gotten. Well, you know, maybe we should get a slide in there that shows all the VDC awards we've gotten and all the, you know, what our standard of care is to our to our customers.

I think there's a very similar thing. You've got you've got something that was not necessarily well received. It seemed like it would go against your bottom line, but it's done by a group of specialists at your at your company. And now you do every job and you start with a safety briefing, you know. So why are we still having a conversation about whether we're going to use VDC on a project or not?

Why isn't it the same exact model? So if you've got a successful safety culture, take a look at that safety culture. Look at what your safety department looks like. Look at who's in leadership there in what it took for you to really create that safety culture. And that's probably a pretty good blueprint for bringing in innovation into your projects and technology adoption and really start to push up the what you call your standard of care towards your customers.

Excellent. I think the answer is fantastic. And and to be honest, if you're if you're not a construction based company, maybe you're an architecture firm or maybe you're an owner, anything that you guys have put a true standard in place to make sure that you're implementing something very seriously and efficiently. I think that any sort of set standard of that nature is something that can be modeled. So great, great answer.

I really like that. Well, last question for you. How can someone contact you if they want to reach out to you or learn more about BuilderBox? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the easy answer is the BuilderBox website and that's builderbox.io.

We've been putting the I.O. on everything just so that people don't assume it's a dot com. But builderbox.io has links to everything. There's a way to get a hold of us on the on the on the website directly. There's a form.

Some of our contact information is actually on there. Like I said, you can see the blog. See what else. My email is really easy. It's just david at builderbox.io.

And I'm happy to to interact with any anybody that that wants to. And, you know, we can put I'm sure that we can get links to Twitter and LinkedIn and all those things if we if we need to. But I'm not a huge, you know, I'm not hugely active on Twitter. So, I mean, if people want to follow me, that's great. But other than the hey, I've just posted a blog post here.

Come go to this link to go see it. I do little on there. Yeah, no worries. Well, we'll put all your information in the show notes so that people have access to it. And well, I just want to thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Constructor podcast again. And this has been a really enjoyable time catching up with you and learning more about BuilderBox. No, thank you. It's nice of you to have us back. And we're delighted to to speak with you and really like what you're doing and the emphasis on owners that you're that you have.

So I think there's it's a very natural fit. So thank you for having us. Awesome. Thanks, David. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to subscribe at Constructor.com to get email updates from me about upcoming podcasts and other nuggets that I'm planning on sharing with you.

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