Transcript: Use of Gaming Technology to Build 20K SF in 4 Days Part I

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number two. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. My name is Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. My goal is to help property owners foster trusting relationships with your design and construction team, lower risk in your construction projects, be under budget and on schedule, and ensure that your end user's desires are exceeded. Well thank you Chris for joining.

I just want to ask you to start. How did you get started in the industry? Well, it's kind of an interesting journey to get here. I have a culinary background more than anything, where my original passion was, and I think still is a little bit, but life kind of takes you along in these strange paths. How I got involved with Dirt and really started to appreciate taking a look at construction in a totally different manner goes back to a company that I ran out in Elgin, Illinois going way back to the early 90s called ROI, Rikki Office Interiors.

It was a little company and we started buying and selling used office furniture and we slowly turned into our own manufacturer, so it was really interesting to get involved with the client, starting to understand that it really starts with the client. The A&E community is super important and everybody else is a relays to them being educated in all the latest and greatest things that are out there. It's just interesting how a client, when they see something that they really want and they get to explore it, they're willing to take risks.

They're willing to put their neck out on the line and try something unique or different. As we grew as a company, we started to spin off and develop a couple different divisions within that company because part of it was the economy forcing some of that stuff to happen. In 2006, we launched a modular millwork company called Wahoo and stood for Wahoong Wahanoo. Everything we did prior to that was all based in Chicago land. We were just selling in the Chicago land market and most of it, and I would say most, probably 90% of our business was in the burbs.

A very small percent was actually in the city. We had all this fabrication capabilities. We stumbled across an opportunity to look at vacuum form, three dimensional laminates and the durability of it and what it could do for cleanability and so forth. We decided to take a 2 to the 16th of an inch modular approach to building millwork cabinets. We launched that, went out throughout the United States, started to travel and tell the world all about it and stumbled across Dirt.

Dirt at that time was already five years old at this point. They were already the market leader in interior construction. Wait, so Chris, wait one second. Can you just tell us what is the acronym for? Dirt stands for doing it right this time.

I'll get to the owner and the meaning of why it's named that in just a little bit. They were at that point mostly just in corporate. As a matter of fact, all in corporate, a little bit of higher education at that point. Again, they were only about five years old at the time. They were being dragged into healthcare.

They were using the same construction methods as before. They knew about what we were doing. We had a handshake partnership. I was fortunate enough to then use their distribution, their reps, all of their distribution partners. Instantly, I gained 140 distribution partners all throughout North America.

It was super powerful. Quickly in just a year, we became a brand name because we were associated with Dirt. Dirt had such a high end reputation. Their service was second to none and so forth. We were just really fortunate.

About a year and a half into it, Dirt, as their healthcare sales started to grow, they acquired Wahoo. When Wahoo got acquired, I came on board. From that point on, I have been in charge of the Chicago market, Illinois. I support North Sea as a team leader. I help with Michigan.

I support Michigan and Nebraska and Iowa. That's how I got to Dirt. What's really interesting about this company is their approach to everything. It's meant to be highly disruptive. Purposeful, not to do it just to do it.

It's to do it because there's a better way of doing things. Doing it right this time goes back to the founder, Mogan Smed. He's the founder of Dirt. He owned a company called Smed International years before and sold that to Hayworth for well over $300 million. While his non-compete was going on for five years, he stumbled across two really impactful people, Jeff Gosling and Barry Loeberg.

Jeff Gosling is the architect, if you will, our design engineer behind the approach that we take to interior construction. He basically modeled what we do after the Lego. If you think about that perfect toy, not only can you make it anything from that square block, but it lives on. I can play with my dad's toys and my kids can play with my toys and their toys and their grandparents' toys. It's just this everlasting approach that nothing discontinues.

That was Jeff's focus. How do we create this everlasting interior solution that is future-proof, regardless of what the market brings to it? That's a pretty bold statement. In order to make that work, Barry Loeberg is really the technology side of it. We have our own software called ICE.

ICE Edge is a division of Dirt. It's a company. It's a division of. We have over 50 companies that use our software in the same manner that we do, which is we take the design intent that the client has. It instantaneously draws in plan view, creates 3D fly-throughs like, if you imagine the game Doom, where you can walk around, duck, jump, turn right, turn left, shoot.

You can make decisions. The software allows clients to make a decision. They get to see what their space is going to look like a year before they move in. Very powerful. And it's pricing it instantaneously.

There's none of this terrible VE that happens. There's no such thing as value engineering. It's really making it cheaper. If you can take that process and now do it sooner, where a client understands exactly what it's going to cost to the penny, they can make decisions today that they know are going to impact everything. Because the interiors is an important part.

And so is the exteriors and so is the location of where the building is going to go and so on and so on and so on. Well, they all have a cost impact to it. And in most cases, the client isn't aware until it starts to really get deep into the build. And they got to make tough decisions that aren't necessarily what they want. So, Chris, can we just back up for one second really quickly?

So, you've explained Dirt. You've explained at this point kind of how we've gotten started, how you got associated with Dirt in the first place. I think it's actually pretty awesome how you eventually had the opportunity to get Wahoo acquired by Dirt. I'm sure that wasn't in your plans. So that's really great.

I do want to ask, who does Dirt service particularly? Do they do ground up or is it basically interiors or can you talk a little bit about what type of client you guys service? Sure. So our client, we're all interior construction at this point. And if you think of pre-engineered tilt up exterior walls, we're the same thing but for the interiors.

So we can participate in commercial, which we're in today, so that'd be your typical offices and so forth. So the dividing offices into conference rooms, private offices and so on and so forth. To higher education, K-12, so within classrooms. We're in healthcare. So we are the entire, like in Cincinnati, we've had a great project, we're the entire hospital.

We're the walls in between the patient rooms and so forth. There's no reason why, and we do some of it, retail is also an area where we're in. And then residential is an area that we're going to start to be going to. We'll be displaying a lot of that this year, June, coming mid-June at Dirt Connects here in Chicago. Yeah, okay.

So that gives kind of a better idea of who would be looking to get a pre-engineered solution like Dirt. Can you just kind of walk us through the process of how, say for instance, one of your higher education clients would get involved with the process of, you know, even going through software and making the decisions and understanding the pricing. Can you just kind of walk us through how that would occur? Sure. So generally at the point where we're getting involved, there's actually two moments.

At the very beginning, early on, it's really showing what's possible. Because in higher education, for that example, technology is driving that industry in a big way. Students are, you know, expecting to get online. They're expecting to get access to files. They're expecting to use that in order to transfer data and so forth.

So to see what are some of the new, latest, and greatest, those clients get to understand the capabilities of Dirt, that flexibility. Once the project starts to kick off, it really becomes taking their initial plans. It's loaded into our software instantaneously. Literally three clicks of a button. And from there, we're actually populating that AutoCAD file with the elevations defined by the architect and the interior designer as well as the client depending on what they're looking to do.

So once that process is completed, which could take an hour, could take 20 minutes, depending on the size of the file. We're doing it right alongside them. They're getting a sense of what it's looking like. They're making changes. Oh, we want that, we'd like to have power and data located at this elevation or that wall.

We want mill work hanging off of this area.

Whatever those things might be, we manipulate the software. So it's kind of a design charrette is what happens. Yeah, that's really helpful to really get an understanding. So it's not similar to a design, bid, build process where they'll explain what you want, the client will explain what they want. You go back and design.

Come back, show them your SDs, your DDs. It's literally that they're sitting right there with you making decisions and the design is also changing simultaneously. Correct. Yeah. So just that process alone, if you really think about what that's doing to the construction environment, it is just taking a process that would take, call that six weeks maybe, four weeks, depending on the workload that a typical design firm would have.

One day. That's incredible. It's huge. That's absolutely enormous. So the other part that's really cool too is the fact that due to the speed of how that design process takes, because we're taking four or five or six weeks out of it, sometimes what the design intent was started on, let's say we met a client today, May 18th, 2013, May 18th, 2015, they're probably not going to move in until maybe late 2016, right?

Depending on the size of the job. Just imagine what the technology is going to look like December 2016. What are our phones going to look like? What are the capabilities of that? What are going to be some of the new things that students are going to be looking for?

How can iPhones and Samsungs and tablets and all of that all be talking together as opposed to being on their own platforms? Maybe that's going to be solved by that. Well, if you designed it today and you have this slow process, you can't allow the client to adapt. They're now stuck with the decision they made in 2015 for something that's happened in 2016. Or worse, how about a hospital?

If that started today, we're talking about opening up in 2020, right? Five years. Imagine five years from now what they're doing to save people's lives, right? Wow. So the impact of the changing technology, the idea that you could potentially be wasting a design for the future from one to five years where you have to change or constantly plan for a flexible solution, that right now is somewhat eliminated by doing this design charrette, if you will.

Yeah. Wow. Exactly. Yeah, it's big. It's really big.

And then we're now taking it one step further. So our software that we have, it's a patented software using gaming technology. It's truly written on the same platform as Doom, and that's why I use that example. Is we're able to use Oculus technology now, the Oculus glasses, the virtual reality glasses. So mock-ups.

Think about the mock-up process that happens now. So in healthcare, they mock up a patient room. Think of the dollars that the hospital is paying for this. It all gets thrown away, completely the most unsustainable thing that you could do. And what happens?

It gets close, and I understand the necessity, but changes are made, and then what do they do? They build another mock-up room for them to finally sign off. That also gets thrown away because it's not in the building that they're actually building, right? So with the Oculus glasses, we literally have clients walk into their entire building. Think about that.

And you're... I gotta come by and check that out. You'll see it. I'm telling you, you're gonna put on the Oculus glasses, and you will literally walk through the entire hospital. That's a game changer, and that's what...

To me, I think is the part that on the general contracting side and the A&D side, they gotta embrace it. They've gotta... They can't fight that because the clients, when they put it on, they just... The decision process is instantaneous. They know exactly what they're going to get.

It's pretty cool. It's enlightening. It's amazing watching people go through it. So our goal is we bring people up to one of our factories. We'll have it at Dirt Connexus here, but when they come up and tour our Calgary, and we are working on a project, we have it all loaded, and they walk through their space.

They see our factory. They see how we make it. They get the culture and the vibe. But that's huge. Yeah.

Now that you've sold us on the idea of dirt, tell us how does pre-engineered solutions, how does this fit into your passion specifically about this industry? How does it fit into how you think and how you approach construction? I hope you guys enjoyed the first half of this interview as much as I did. You can find the second half of this interview in episode number three. Look forward to catching up with you there.

Bye.