Transcript: Workplace Innovator Crossover

The status roles we get ingrained into us as children have continued on into our work lives. Hopefully many in your audience will recognize the movie, The Breakfast Club. Well, the truth of The Breakfast Club was about status and status roles and clicks in high school, right? And I didn't appreciate it until later, but this idea that we put ourselves in different groups and there was the criminal and the athlete and the princess, you know, the popular girl and then the crazy girl and then the brain geeky kid, we put ourselves into categories and unfortunately sometimes either feel inferior to others or heaven forbid, feel superior to others.

And I don't like that. I dislike this idea of so-and-so can't work with this other person because their role or their title is not important enough or significant enough, but your significance does not come from your role or your title. So The Breakfast Club is a great analogy that these kids are forced to sit together at Saturday detention and by the end of the movie, they break down the walls, the silos, so to speak of their different clicks and they become this group of people that talk to each other and get each other and they find they have a lot more in common than they don't.

That lesson can be now applied to the workplace and the silos of departments. I try to inspire people to break out of those silos and do that more. Hello and welcome to The Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It, episode number 74. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about the construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires.

So last episode, we spoke with Michael DeLacy, principal and co-founder at Microdesk. He assists companies in overcoming the challenges of implementing and utilizing technology for design, construction and facilities management. Both Mike and I were panel moderators at the Build World Summit here in Chicago just a couple of weeks ago. And he really works to contribute to the cause for change in the industry to ensure we're using technology, particularly BIM, VDC innovation, with the integration of other technologies to promote collaborative approaches in the AECO industry. As of March, Microdesk was named an Autodesk Platinum Club Award winner for leading the Americas in the sale of Autodesk Cloud Software at the Autodesk One Team Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

So if you haven't had the opportunity to listen to that episode yet, go ahead and check it out at constructor.com slash EP73. In today's episode, we're speaking with Mike Pratchuski, Director of Events and Growth Marketing at iOffice. He is the host of the Workplace Innovator Podcast, Enhancing Your Employee Experience. So today is the crossover episode with Mike Pratchuski. He actually released the interview he did with me last week on the Workplace Innovator Podcast.

So you can find that at your preferred podcast provider. Just search for the Workplace Innovator Podcast. I highly recommend it. In this episode, you'll enjoy what Mike has to say from the facilities management and workplace perspective as he has served in a variety of leadership roles in this space. He has a marketing expertise combined with the experience of engaging with facilities practitioners, and it uniquely positions him to help organizations deliver workplace innovation to the built environment.

Mike is really passionate about affecting this industry, promoting collaboration, and really just getting people to understand that we're all humans and we need to appreciate each other. So I hope you guys get the sense of that as we step into the interview. With that, let's hop in. Today, we are interviewing Mike Pratchuski, Director of Events and Growth Marketing at iOffice. I actually met Mike in person at the IFMA Facility Fusion event last month here in Chicago.

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a panel where he invited me to talk there with him. He actually just recently transitioned from hosting the Facility Management Innovator Podcast, and is now hosting a new podcast. And I'm gonna ask him a bunch of questions about that. But first, Mike, welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Hey there, Brittany.

I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me on your show. I'm really excited to have you on today too. I wanted to first ask you, you're doing this transition to iOffice and you're starting a brand new podcast. Congratulations, but please tell us what the name of the podcast is.

Well, yes, thank you. It's very exciting. I have been hosting a podcast almost as long as you. I aspire to live up to you and your podcasting achievements, Brittany. I do admire your show, and it was an honor to have you on my show very recently.

And I look forward to being able to speak to your audience today and doing the cool podcast crossover thing, because that's what we do as podcasters. But for 18 months and 85 episodes, I have been privileged to be the host of the FM Innovator podcast. It's been amazing and a wonderful experience. And when I did become, just recently, as of March 1st, the Director of Events and Growth Marketing at iOffice, which is an incredible company based in Houston, Texas, that does workplace experience and employee engagement, technology, software solutions, we started brainstorming and said, what should we do?

Because the future of work and workplace and the built environment is changing so rapidly. Facility managers, the audience that I have grown up with and have been so privileged to get to know over the last decade or so, my involvement with IFMA and Cornet Global and other organizations, I've seen the elevation of the FM profession over the years to where it's a more strategic role and it's more about leadership, innovation. I just wanna know the name of the show. Okay, I don't wanna go too far.

All right, so you just wanna know the name of the show. The new show. The new show is called The Workplace Innovator Podcast and the subtitle is Enhancing Your Employee Experience. FM is a part of that. Corporate Real Estate is a part of that.

HR is even a part of that. And of course, IT, with all the innovative solutions out there today, we wanna bring the conversation across the traditional departmental lines, break down the silos in our organizations and talk about the future of work and workplace and the people. It's all about the people in our facilities, in our workplaces. So that's what we're gonna talk about on my new show. We're gonna dig into some of the things that you learned from the FM Innovator Podcast and learn a little bit about Mike Petruski.

For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to listen to Mike being a host, he is definitely the best DJ, Mike P, out there. You must look out for his stuff and learn from him. Who is Mike? Who are you? How did you even get to this point?

Who is DJ Mike P? Where does DJ Mike P come from? Well, let me do this. This is the way I'll explain it because you mentioned something about people and this is new analogy I just pulled together. Hopefully many in your audience will recognize the movie, The Breakfast Club.

Do you remember The Breakfast Club? Was that before your time, Brittany? It was before my time, but I was able to capture that. Well, The Truth of the Breakfast Club was about status and status roles and clicks in high school, right? And I didn't appreciate it until later, but this idea that we put ourselves in different groups and there was the criminal and the athlete and the princess, the popular girl, and then the crazy girl, and then the brain geeky kid.

Well, guess which one of those categories I fell into in high school? Maybe. The athlete, of course. No, I'm just kidding. I was the geeky kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, jock, right? That's gotta be it. Not the athlete, the geeky kid. I wasn't so much a brain. I wasn't very smart, but I certainly was a big Star Wars fan and more of a nerd with glasses and so forth.

Did you have a pocket protector? No, I wasn't that kind of geek. I was more just into more like sci-fi and Star Wars and video games than I was into, although I like sports too, I wasn't the greatest athlete. So I identified most with Anthony Michael Hall, the actor who played that. And some people actually said when I was a kid, if you see pictures of me from high school, I look a little like Anthony Michael Hall in some of the movies like 16 Candles and Weird Science and so forth.

But that's a story for another day. I just wanted to bring that up because the status roles we get ingrained into us as children have continued on into our work lives. I think we put ourselves into categories and unfortunately sometimes either feel inferior to others or heaven forbid, feel superior to others. And I don't like that. I dislike this idea of so and so can't work with this other person because their role or their title is not important enough or significant enough, but your significance does not come from your role or your title.

So I think that the Breakfast Club is a great analogy of that because these kids are forced to sit together at Saturday detention and by the end of the movie, they break down the walls, the silos, so to speak of their different cliques and they become this group of people that talk to each other and get each other and they find they have a lot more in common than they don't. That lesson can be now applied to the workplace and the silos of departments, whether you're looking at the HR department or the FM department or the IT department, we often don't communicate with each other.

So I try to inspire people to break out of those silos and do that more. So the DJ Mike P part came from as I got a little older, went to college at Virginia Tech, go Hokies. I'm a big Virginia Tech Hokie. My wife and I met there. My father-in-law actually attended there.

My children are third generation Hokies. Both my daughters are Hokies as well. We have this great family tradition of being Hokies. Well, while I was in Blacksburg, Virginia, back in the 80s, I was for a short time a rock radio DJ and I got to be on the weekends at the New River Valley's home of rock and roll, Rock 105 FM. It was during that time that I said, maybe someday I could be a DJ.

I wanna be a DJ for a career or maybe get into TV or do something like be the next David Letterman. Cause at the time I was a big fan of David Letterman in the late night show. Well, reality kicked in and I had to go into more traditional work and more traditional role. My background and my degree was in marketing. So I went into a sales career.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago, I stumbled into the world of facility management. Somebody invited me to an IFMA event, fell in love with the community and the rest is history. Man, that's such a great story. There's just so many things I want to ask you about now. Well, I fast forwarded through about 25 years.

So that was, how long is this podcast, Brittany? I can talk about all these different things, but no, I won't bore your audience. No, but I think you've been on an incredible journey and you mentioned you fell into facilities management. And I think that is sort of the world of facilities management. At least what I've heard, not a lot of people choose to walk into that world, but then once they end up there, they realize how impactful they can be and how necessary the role is in order for everyone else in the business to really work optimally.

And that's where we touch, say, workplace. That's where we touch construction, which we talk about on this podcast, and IT and HR. And I think that there's definitely more collaboration happening right now. Personally, love to talk about collaboration, especially as it relates to construction projects. But the only way I believe it is carried out, I think most effectively, is when you have the business aligned and not siloed, but aligned prior to even any of that decision taking place for the construction projects.

So what you've done to speak to the facilities management community and sort of tease out these different subjects about how best to approach getting people to treat each other well, understand the value in each other, collaborate, because we all have something to contribute. I think it's super valuable, and I really appreciate that about your messaging. Well, thank you. And that is great too, that you reminded me. The reason I got into podcasting to begin with was before that, my role at the capital chapter of IFMA was in the partnership area.

So each IFMA chapter needs to bring in support to help do what they do, put on wonderful education programs, provide information and education and opportunities for getting together, whether that's a golf event or a happy hour, or some type of a professional development gathering. The sponsors who make that possible, and we have these professional facility management practitioners, as well as associate members who are the service providers. And what I saw was some old school sales techniques being used by service providers that was really making some of our professional members uncomfortable, and I said, no, we need to work with each other.

The service providers bring an incredible understanding and expertise to the table, especially in today's world where everything is changing so rapidly, technology is disrupting our workplaces. There's no way an FM can be an expert in all they need to do. So he or she needs to rely on these partners, and that's what I call them. I didn't call them vendors, I didn't call them even service providers. I tried to call them partners, and I wanted to build a culture of collaboration.

I wanted to make it a win-win for the FMs to come to the table and learn from our associate members, and then have the business development or salespeople have the opportunity to have a conversation and learn more about their potential customers. And I am a marketing guy by trade, as I mentioned, so my background is in sales and marketing, and I was so adamant about encouraging our audience of suppliers to take on more of the role of educator, not traditional old school salesperson. So don't come putting out a bunch of information, instead put out questions to your prospective customers, ask them about their world, get to know their world, and what a wonderful opportunity through IFMA, Cornet, BOMA, USGBC, there's other associations, there's these places where the professionals are going for education.

You can go there too, go to the conferences, sit in on the educational sessions and learn about the world that you are serving and understand the real world problems that these professionals are facing, and then shape your message, your marketing message, your sales message, your product or service solution to meet the actual needs of what that FM or that workplace manager or that project manager is dealing with. You come to the table with a real solution for them because you know, even sometimes better than they do, what they need.

And it's not about fitting your square peg into a round hole, but it's you understanding exactly what they're dealing with in their workplaces. And the only way to do that is to invest time. It's a long game. You've got to put in the effort, put in the time and really understand your audience. Absolutely.

And I do think that whenever we have the opportunity to learn about another person's discipline, we have so much more capability to speak in their language and then collaborate more effectively with them on whatever the goals are. Yeah, definitely. Say for instance, you are providing a service to help them or if it's the other way around, you're requesting for someone to serve you an outsourcing role, if you will. If you learn more about their role, you can ask better questions. You can ensure that it's going to be a better long-term relationship when you're open to listening, really listening to each other.

So I think that's a great point. Hasn't that been one of the greatest benefits of doing a podcast, Brittany? I think that's a great point. You and I are in the same shoes there. You have to learn to ask questions and then stop and listen.

Listening is hard. It's really hard to stop and listen and really concentrate on what other people are saying without trying to insert our agenda. We're human beings. We want to get our point across. We want to share.

And we have that kind of selfish bent. We all do. So muting that voice inside of you that wants to insert yourself and just really listening and understanding, that's what podcasting has done for me. Obviously, I still interrupt people and get excited and I want to share something. But if we could promote that idea to both the service providers and also the people inside organizations, when they communicate with each other and collaborate with each other, the people in one department may look across at the people in another department and tell them what they should do or put their ideas out instead of asking questions, why are we doing it this way?

What is the technical reason for this solution not working and that one working for us? What are you looking for, madam IT executive? What do we need to do? Or Mr. Corporate Real Estate person, how are we planning to change our portfolio in the future and what projects we have on the horizon that we need to consider for taking care of the occupants of our facilities, the occupants of our buildings.

So there's so many people with different expertise and understanding, but they don't often communicate with each other and that's what makes change so difficult. I would love to get to the discussion about what you learned during the duration of the FM Innovator podcast. But before we get there, I wanted to just kind of ask you this question about your high school nerdy days, learning what you've learned thus far in your career, what advice would you give your high school self? Sure. I believe the biggest challenge that all of us face and what I've learned over these past many years is to not worry about what other people think.

And I know that's hard to do. Worry less about what other people think. I think we all have a default setting and I talk about this all the time. We fill our heads with the negative. For me and I'm sure for many of us, if you don't hear back from someone, you leave a message and they don't reply, you automatically fill in that gap, that no information with negativity.

They must not like me. That must have made them mad. There's something wrong here. That natural default setting, I call it, as human beings, we all can relate to it in some way but COVID often in numerous domains but all of the shifting members of society change in a way and form points, in some ways nine times five times 10 times a day. So I'm LIizing.

I'm waiting for you. I'm looking at the phone, something you forgot to say or you didn't literally turn on. Hopefully it'sโ Sophonем вокруг I'm looking at the phone, something you forgot to say or you didn't literally turn on. But no matter what you do, you're still the same, you're your child, you're not a good person. It may not be for everyone.

The advice I have to offer may not be taken, but I do have something of value to bring to the table. So confidence, I think the biggest thing I would tell myself is be more confident in who you are, but also be more aware of others and their perspectives. See the world a little bit through their eyes, empathize with other people. It's not all about me. It's not all about our selfish position, but look across the aisle at whoever that may be.

And this is just life lessons, right? I teach my daughters and I've taught myself to be more understanding and aware of the perspectives of others. And that could be somebody from another country or just another part of our town or another background. We all have different stories and I'm glad you asked the question because I think we're all human though. We're all part of the same family in that regard and we're wired the same in many ways.

So we just have to be more aware or self-aware first and then more aware of others perspectives and be more empathetic. So that's what I would tell myself because I think it would have saved me a lot of headaches and heartache over the years if I had known more about the truth of human nature. What you speak is really truth. I've been learning that lesson. And like you said, you speak to your yesterday self.

That's a lesson that once you start realizing that something you need to start learning, you kind of never stop. Thank you for sharing that. Well, a lot of that comes from Seth Godin. For those who don't know out there, Seth Godin is a marketing author and expert by trade. He's a guru or a guru depending on how you pronounce it.

Seth is a marketing guru for sure. And I always call him that. But the reason his books and his blog and his now podcast, he's got a podcast, Brittany, you should check it out. It's called Akimbo. Not sure what that means, Akimbo, but it's a cool podcast with Seth Godin.

And he understands people. Because of his advertising and marketing background and his research background, and that's what marketers do so well. I was never a marketing person in the true sense of consumer product sales or trying to do market research to kind of manipulate the audience, get them to buy something. That never appealed to me and I never went down that path. And advertising has gotten a bad rap, but a lot of it's deserved because they do.

They look at human nature and they stoke those flames of jealousy and desire for something we don't have and get us to spend money we don't have and do things we shouldn't be doing because they know how to manipulate human beings. So Seth has that understanding about human nature and human beings, but he applies it in a positive way and teaches us to be better people and again, be better relationship builders and really understand why we do the things we do and why we don't do the things we do.

There are certain things about us, the fears and the inability to wanna get out of our comfort zone. He always talks about the comfort zone and the safety zone and the fact that we wanna stay safe and comfortable. But in today's world, the fast paced age of acceleration in which technology is changing everything, we need to be uncomfortable. We need to feel uncomfortable to stay safe because the uncomfortable feeling that we get when we pursue something new and something we don't already understand, a new technology, a new expertise, a new education we have to get into, getting into that new thing is uncomfortable, but that's what is gonna allow us to stay relevant in our careers, in our future and we're gonna be safer that way because we're gonna have a job and we're gonna have a way to maintain our living because we did learn something new,

whether it's a new software, some new technology solution or just listening to a podcast and learning something that you need to know to work better in your organization. So let me ask you this. I'm trying to see if I've read any additional books. I think I've only read The Icarus Deception. I've only read that book.

It's really exactly what you're talking about. It's flying that close to the sun so that you don't lose your wings but still fly. Ah, yep. I mean, he goes into great detail from a marketing standpoint, but that definitely really hit me when I read that. I just feel that that messaging is consistent.

Let me ask you, what's your favorite book? My favorite Seth Godin book is The Dip. And why is that? It's because it's this idea of getting through the difficult downward dip. In order to get to be an expert at something or be proficient at something, you have to go through that struggle and most people don't.

They quit at the bottom of the valley in The Dip. So you start a new adventure, whatever it might be and he uses the example of snowboarding. It's really difficult to learn how to snowboard from what I understand. Chances are a lot of people will try but people will get all excited. They'll buy a snowboard, they'll invest in ski boots or whatever you need.

All the equipment you need, it's a lot of money. They go out to the hill. Maybe they take one lesson, and then they struggle and they can't do it, and it's very hard, and they get into The Dip, and then they quit. And they wasted all that money, all those resources to try this new thing. Where the cool people that are going down the hill and looking really great, they become an expert in snowboarding, they went through The Dip and they got to this other side and that analogy to the workplace or to our careers, it's that idea of having to learn something new and it can be hard.

Get into this dip where you feel like you're not competent at something and nobody likes to feel incompetent. That's the worst thing to feel like. And I tell this story and I'll just share it with you just to experience it in real life and this still happens to me. But one day I came home about three months ago and my wife had bought a new ceiling fan and she's like, we need to replace the ceiling fan in our kitchen. And to me, now that sounds like a simple project, do it yourself, easy thing, it's only a few wires and you put up a fan and no big deal, right?

But to me, I am not the handyman. I am the opposite of Tim Allen from Home Improvement. I am DIY is like a four-letter word to me. So I don't like anything related to Home Improvement projects because I just feel less than competent and I hate that feeling. So I put that off for literally months.

I just didn't want to deal with the fan because I didn't know what to do, didn't know how to do it, was afraid. I get fear about what if I do it wrong? What if I miswire the fan and I burn my house down and everybody hates me? You know, that kind of thing goes to your mind when you have human nature, right? That default setting.

So one day I did finally start the project and I got into it and I started coming across a couple of little problems and I won't go into the details, but it was this very difficult time. It took me like six hours to get this thing hung, but I finally got it hung and now I'm on the other side of the hill and looking back, it was so easy. It was so simple. If I could tell myself the six hour ago, Mike, hey, when you get this thing hung and it's behind you and you learn how to do it, you could do it again in 20 minutes.

I literally could hang a ceiling fan tomorrow in 20 or 30 minutes because I've been through it, I've learned it and now it's easy. But when you're on the front end of that, it's very hard. Well, yeah, I have a ceiling fan that I could use some help with. We have what, 12 foot ceilings in my condo, so. Whoa, that's a unique challenge.

I'm not sure I could do that. We might need some help. But I think that's a great example of having the fear of the unknown, especially with an age where technology is all around us and we have to either adapt to certain pieces of technology. I'm just thinking in like everyday life, it doesn't necessarily have to be in the workplace. There's something always changing.

I think that's sort of the mindset that we have to take with tech, but in addition to that, how we communicate with people, there's something to learn about everything and there's always a better way to do something. We challenge ourselves to learn something new and apply something new so that we can better our lives and better the lives of those around us. I think we'll probably be in good shape. That's sort of a lean culture, plan, do, check, act. It's an iteration.

It's always doing something small to improve yourself and your surroundings, take us to the next step. So I think that's a great example that you shared, how you took yourself to the next step. Well, thank you. And I agree with all you just said there. We'd all be better off if we would just recognize some of these things that we all experience and we all have in common and spend more time focusing on the commonalities than the differences.

You just wrapped up a two-part series on the things you've learned about facilities management and the workplace in your FM Innovator podcast. We've been on this journey of learning about my, I really wanna hear what you've learned as it relates to workplace because we do have the owner-operator audience and I think that they could definitely get something valuable from what you've learned as you're talking to FM professionals and workplace professionals during the duration of your podcast. Well, there's been so much and I know we have a short amount of time here, so I'll sum it up this way.

85 episodes, amazing thought leaders from all different perspectives, whether it was an FM practitioner I was speaking with or an industry consultant or a book author who's written about these things. I just asked a lot of questions and started seeing a certain number of themes coming to the table. And the first one we've already talked about is this blurring of the lines that seems to be happening in just very recent years, this idea that the workplace is changing, the built environment is changing, technology's disrupting many things, automation is coming in, software technology that allows us to do a lot of different things, whether it's internet of things, monitoring sensors, dashboards that bring all this data together.

And there are people that know the details of these technologies much better than I and I don't go into the tactics and the do's and don'ts of how to make things happen. I just talk about the idea of disruptive technology and the trends that I hear about. Then I ask the question, who's gonna own this? Who's gonna make the decision? Who's gonna make the best decision?

And how do you make the best decision about which technologies are right for your organization? So the things I've learned from all my guests is that there's a blurred line as to who owns these things. It touches all of us as we've already discussed and we need to collaborate whether you're an FM or a corporate real estate leader or an HR person or an IT person. We need to have this conversation and say, what does our organization need? Where do we wanna go?

A lot of times there's a vision set by leadership about the culture of an organization and then that needs to trickle down and we need to understand that as the goal and then decide where to go from there. So the backwards approach is to walk into a exhibit hall where you see all these cool demos going on of all these flashy technologies and all these toys essentially and saying, I want that, that looks cool, that looks great. But how does it apply to your organization? So what I've learned is that the first step needs to be listening to the people within your organization and find out what the needs are and what the vision of the corporation is and where the leadership wants to go and then work together to come to implement some of these solutions.

And that brings in all this conversation that I've also heard so much about which is change management and working with project management and getting the projects implemented and then having the training necessary to make the adoption of the new technology or the new solution successful over time. I think the bottom line of all of that is it comes up to servicing the people. It comes down to servicing the people. It's about the people occupying the facilities or in your case, Brittany, at the front end of a project, the construction project, you've told me, when I had you on my show, I asked you about this and you said, you've got to bring the stakeholders to the table at the beginning.

Bring in FM, bring in HR, bring in the people who are going to be living and breathing and occupying the space after this construction project is complete and those are the folks that will tell you what the needs are and you can design to accommodate those needs. So I think that's the biggest summary if I could put it in a nutshell, focus on the people and then no matter what your role is, realize you have a voice that needs to be heard and bring that voice to the table and communicate better than we traditionally communicate in our organizations.

There's these walls that keep us from talking to each other. We've got to break them down if we're going to be successful long-term and especially in a fast-paced world we live in. I really, really appreciate your perspective. I think I appreciate it because it's so similar to my perspective, but it's really just from a different vantage point. Yep.

I think we're super aligned in that. I just want to be able to direct people to your new podcast with iOffice, the Workplace Innovator Podcast, Enhancing Your Employee Experience. Could you please share where people can learn more about the podcast and then also get in touch with you if they'd like to do so. Absolutely. We're available on iTunes and Stitcher Radio and Google Play and all the traditional podcast platforms.

Just search Workplace Innovator and then you can also find us at the iOfficeCorp.com blog where you'll see the show notes and all kinds of information about our guests as they come out. So Brittany has an episode, folks. Check out Brittany Campbell Turner, the personal side of Brittany Campbell Turner. I do ask her some questions that will get you a little more information about her background. That's why I love the crossover too.

You'll also find on all my shows, I ask people questions about what music they like and what they do in their free time and what books they've read and if they have an inspirational quote because I want to inspire our audience and really focus on the fact that we're all people no matter what our specialty is or where we spend our days. We do have a lot in common and Brittany, you and I have discovered that. So thank you for having me on your show. It's been an honor and a lot of fun.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this interview with Mike Pratchewski. Find out more about Mike and what he is up to at Constructor.com slash EP 74.

If you've learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn. You can email me too at Brittany at Constructor.com. That's BRITTANIE at ConstructRR.com. Next week, we will be speaking with James Salmon, president at Collaborative Construction and executive director of the American Subcontractor Association of Ohio.

James was part of our panel at our blockchain and construction event here in Chicago, where Constructor, the Chicago Blockchain Center and the Construction Blockchain Consortium hosted it. If you remember Kimon Enuma's episode found at Constructor.com slash EP 57, we talked about creating agility and efficiency and open architecture as a platform. Kimon actually mentioned James Salmon in this episode and we connected after that. So I invited him to speak at my blockchain and construction event. James by trade is a lawyer and is passionate about the common data environment.

Also BIM integrated contract models, which actually led him to blockchain. The interesting thing about James is that even though he's a lawyer, he's more passionate about the openness of information to everyone so that everyone sees the cars on the table facing up versus a closed competitive and adversarial contractual approach. Like we typically see here in construction. So we have a lot of interesting things to discuss. I really look forward to sharing this interview with you guys next week.

If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so as your preferred podcast player. Please leave a review to show you support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.