Luigi La Corte: Hello everyone, welcome to Construction Technology Podcast. I'm Luigi from Provision. I'm joined by my two co-hosts, my two beautiful co-hosts, Andrew from Join, Mike from Build Vision. We're also joined by Hamad, Hamad Chaudri from Palmerlo. so Hamad and I have known each other for a while. really talented guy, was at Elliston, then went to a few construction tech companies, is now back at a large Canadian G C. Hamad, welcome to the show.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Hey, thanks Luigi. Great to be here. ⁓ good to see you, Andrew and Mike as well. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ Haman, tell us about what's going on. give us a bit of an overview of of of your work. Obviously, you're in the innovation space, you know, squarely in the general contractor bucket. You've dabbled in technology. Give us a bit of an overview.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, absolutely. So ⁓ leading innovation and digital construction at Provision. ⁓ ⁓ No, at Parmelo. So I made the beginning of June. So spending some time on the construction tech side with a couple of startups, there's an opportunity to join kind of a a really big growing Canadian leader. So Parmelow's been around for sixty plus years in Canada now, just over six billion on
Luigi La Corte: Provision? That's right.
Hammad Chaudhry: under seven billion in revenue, 5,000 employees coast to coast, 11 at any time, two to three hundred active projects. And ⁓ my is really helping ⁓ grow and guide direction of innovation and digital construction team. So the VDC kind of any those kind of aspects, but also some of the overall construction tech stuff that I've been able to work on in past and I think you three have been seeing happening as providers and and tech founders as well.
Luigi La Corte: So in the in your roles innovation digital construction, when you when you oversee that business unit, what what's like what's the specific mandate for what you should be accomplishing?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, so at Palmerlo kind of a long history. some people who have been following kind of the Canadian construction space will know they were the first ones with spot the dog. they've also had some interesting ⁓ initiatives ⁓ long I So ⁓ there's no shortage that kind of culture within the organization. My kind of goal my vision joining the company and working with kind of the executive team and also the group of companies that we have is to be able to set up For the next five to ten years, things have changed a lot. So before, maybe it was a little bit more, you know, BIM and VDC was new as innovative, drones were new and innovative, reality capture, ⁓ but are kind of table stakes now. And so really changed, I think, ⁓ the dynamic what you need from an innovation department now. And then also, course, there's the AI kind of that's come along too, which has helped change some that as well. So maybe ⁓ pieces of that you would considered innovation in the past or part of that department now really a lot of the large ECs have AI in-house and so focus is really trying to help set up more of the innovation ⁓ for ⁓ construction our and that will be of the novel stuff that we haven't seen yet ⁓ but some of it be as simple as you know changing some of the workflows in a more modern way based on the tools technology
Luigi La Corte: Is the general approach to sure that the team gets tools quickly, but not too slowly where you become a laggard? Like some some of the things I've seen with large GCs is like they're so concerned with security. security is very important, ⁓ but they're so they're so concerned with security, what is deemed secure, where their data goes, that they end up being quite paralyzed and are really able to adopt. AI or technology as fast as let's say smaller companies that are a lot more nimble. Like do you do you agree that that's a risk? And and if so, well, how do you balance that at Pomerolo?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I think it's a huge risk as well for a lot of contractors, not just just GCs, but also subcontractors, subtrades as well. The there's one size fits all, and I'm sure you three have seen that trying to help provide solutions as well to the industry, is some contractors much further along on that journey. They've got a well-oiled machine, others are just getting onto that journey. So the way I think about it is ⁓ Luigi, you gotta down before you can speed up. And so if you have all the pieces in place for legal data, cyber, you're going to be kind of drowning ⁓ many ways trying to appease requests coming from your project managers, your superintendents, and the other corporate teams that you have. Now the is of course something that you can have you're a smaller GC, smaller contractor, but there's also ⁓ ability to support that scale too. So almost like you've got benefits on both sides. other thing ⁓ you know I'm often kind of thinking about is if you've got a project, you know Got to pour concrete. So sometimes you don't have the luxury of waiting for all that kind of longer tail review getting those things. So what up happening is current projects may not be able to benefit from some of the newer technologies or or approvals. And so that's that you take into consideration as well. And not every project will in the right stage either. So say you get the review done and you're using something like provision ⁓ or you know join me. maybe and it's to handover. There might be some ⁓ cases or fits, but generally that window of opportunity may have moved on to. So If you're smaller, you can be more nimble, but you don't have the resources always to support the tech and the deployment and the rollout. you may not have the portfolio projects to be able to find the right project in the right stage. But then if you're larger, you've got a lot more at risk. So one I've seen also when I was on the vendor side was cybersecurity is really big ⁓ insurance kind risk now. And the cost cybersecurity insurance has also gone up. So you also need be kind of a prudent operator if you're a contractor to make sure that those are covered off. And again, I think slowing down a bit before you speed up is going be critical for a lot of the larger players.
Mike Powers: this is a question around like as you're thinking about these investments internally, I losing sleep at night running through Gemini tokens and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on I know how well the val the the ROI is. And I'm just like, hey, all right, let's say we we want to invest in provision for a project, it's twenty-five twenty-five-thirty thousand dollars for pre-con. How do you underwrite that cost ⁓ and about like the for that? ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: just like holistically, 'cause obviously like may you know, hey, you're if you're a pro core house, you're investing a million dollars, ten million dollars in pro core. I'm guessing if you're spending twenty five thousand dollars a project on provision, that cost does grow up to a million to ten million dollars. So I'm curious how you think about that ROI and have you been able to see real ROI by leveraging the tool so far?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. question, Mike. It's not a one size fits all. So I think the biggest shift seen now is that you're looking at these investments through the lens of what is the business case. And sometimes a case is gonna be a hard ROI number, otherwise it won't. When a hard ROI there's some instances that I can share that our team at Parmelow's done where they've been able to invest, your point, significant dollars into some of the AI infrastructure, the ontology. and all that kind of fun stuff be able to save millions of dollars ⁓ maybe how we're managing equipment or logistics and stuff like that. So of that stuff will be very, very clear and very hard. Other stuff be as clear and hard ROI. ⁓ And that's it gets interesting on the business cases as you're going through and you're trying to extrapolate, well what is the point and the value of it. ⁓ it can become a little bit easier to get the stakeholders involved. So if you're looking at project managers or project coordinators or some of the folks that are looking at lots of documentation, if you're looking at pre-con teams, estimators, business development teams and some of documents they look through, you know, ⁓ can just that exercise to say, look, before we were spending amount of time going this document, we were missing items quite a bit, there's a lot of risk that we're carrying forward. And now by kind of this 50 grand or 100 grand forward, here's we think the value is going to be is we can look at these items a little bit quicker, surface the risk quicker, and manage way that we're pricing a lot more effective. And there may be a total dollar value to that yet. And then you've got enterprise side as well, I think, which is a a challenge. So I've been with a lot of my GC friends across North America ⁓ and I asked them the I was like, guys, what is your ROI on AI? everybody kind of gave a smart ass answer, part of my French. But the answer got was, well, really, ⁓ the biggest is fact that we're building a lot of these data centers right now. So it's not maybe, you the net the the copilot investment as much, because people are optimizing for how people are using copilot instead of looking at, well, what is the business process that's being impacted by the use of the tool?
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: So
Hammad Chaudhry: And so, know, you can talk to eight different companies, you might get eight different results. You could talk to the executive team and they ⁓ they definitely will have a different viewpoint or vision. ⁓ can talk to the pragmatic kind of technologists and they'll give you a different answer. You can talk to the IT teams, PM So this is I think the industry right now is trying to digest and ⁓ prove out is which model makes sense. And I don't it's one model makes sense to be able to quantify what the value Is it's kind of going back to we started giving everyone iPads in the beginning I had to do a business case. You if I'm giving Luigi an iPad on site, ⁓ it's me a thousand dollars with all the software. I'm doing it because he looks at five hundred drawings a day and it's saving him two hours. But now don't even think about it. ⁓ It's just way that you give people equipment so they do their job best. If I'm getting super school when people were switching to kind of on-site internet or on Prem storage for management and having backups, same needs to come up, and then nobody would even think about it. ⁓ So I we're going through that transition where with AI it's going to become table stakes, and you're not going to look at it as much as just ROI, but where you are millions of dollars, definitely people are going to to know. And again, depending on which level of the organization you're talking to, they're to have a different viewpoint on that too. So I'm not sure if that gives you a
Luigi La Corte: Yeah, yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: good overview but it's not one size fits all.
Mike Powers: Let me yeah, let me pull that string as an example. So like let's go through the iPad example. All right, say you had, you know, a hundred people on a job site, so you spend a hundred K on an iPad. you know, in that example, if you were to like look back and do a post mortem, did business make did the profit on the projects or the on the project increase because of an iPad? Or was it more of just like table stakes expectation and your profit stayed the same or decreased? What I'm trying to get at, what's what what what I'm seeing in the space is like if you look at like the engineering world, the engineer's like, hey, we're all using BIM now. But if you look back twenty years, no one was using BIM. And you look at the EVADA, the profit margins of those engineering firms from twenty years ago and today, they're exactly the same. So hey, now I'm just taking I'm charging the owner ten cents more per hour, and that ten cents is just going to Autodesk and not actually going into the pockets of the engineering firms. And I'm curious if you're like, hey, is is this same exact process going to happen? The AI side at a construction site where, hey, we paid $25,000 for provision. now table stakes. I, Palmerloo or Turner or whoever, is not making $25,000 more in profit. My fee goes up $25,000 and ⁓ it charged back to the other.
Andrew Zukoski: Isn't this a this is a co sorry, this is like a question of timing as well as a question of quantifying ROI, right? The the stories from the early days of BIM were that if you got in early, you actually could make an insane amount of money because of the automation that it had. So that yeah, over time that that value got captured by owners 'cause they were like, ⁓ people can do this cheaper, like we will be able to like compress fees. ⁓
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah yeah.
Mike Powers: Right, but now it's table stakes. Correct. Which is a the recurring theme from like it's a Buffett quote is that like, hey, if you told me that there was a loom that made me three times more efficient, I'm selling my loom factory because I will not accrete any of the value. The value will go to the buyer of the fabric from that loom. And I'm curious of how many correlations there are for that with AI.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I mean, back to the iPad example, ⁓ got to be a less reductionist if that makes sense, that it's not like ⁓ one determines the success of a project. It is Projects are highly complex, meaning there's parts we can focus on and control, but there's parts that are outside of control, right? Acts of God, weather, know, the supply chain all these kind of things have happened as well. So So it's not just as simple as saying, yeah, I've got an iPad on a job, did the margins go up or not? There's also a lot of shifts that have happened. So the projects we build today compared to 20 years ago are more complex simply a commissioning standpoint point, low voltage IMIT. So that's accounted for in any of the productivity kind of metrics or whatever see is we're not building the same product we were. Now the other thing to ⁓ you know the workforce has shifted. So
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: So ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, could easily find people that were coming out of school that were early in their career ⁓ knew they had to read drawings. and they were comfortable with paper, then you had a sketch by hand, for example. you look at the people coming into the industry now as people call them digital natives, there's no in heck you're gonna be able to give them a set of and a pen and a paper, marker, highlighter. They need an iPad. the the view that can simplify and look at one deployment and extract margin improvement, I think is a bit hard to to especially With the multi-factorial approach, but other factors, people are aging, younger people coming in, things more complicated, there's a lot more information that you need to have on hand, ⁓ they to protect the margin so it's not decreasing more because construction become commoditized in many ways, right? So I the margins, I don't know if you guys remember specifically in Canada from like 2015-ish onwards, started to become a very, tight race. ⁓ And so alternative procurement models help because you're taking on the design risk, maybe the finance risk, sometimes the maintenance and operations risk, so can start to get more accrual of value and margin. Now, the thing if you look at they have different segments, right? if you're ⁓ hyper in one vertical, there's a maximum margin you're going be able to achieve. If you've got multiple different verticals that you're in, all have different amounts of margin that you can play with. But you look at it through the lens of a corporate machine and say typical business process mapping for a project has a hundred to a thousand different workflows or steps, and you start to at them through the lens of okay, where do we digitize them or make them bit more efficient compared to traditional workflows, you may be able to get a 0.02% improvement across multiple deployments, which will add to eventually like a two. 2 to 3% improvement in overall EBITDA or margin or whatever you want to look at it through that lens. again, guys, it's not as simple as just saying ⁓ used BIM, so automatically a project's going to be better, or used digital tools or an iPad is going be better. It's a very complex beast, and why the is so complicated from an outsider's view. you see people come in manufacturing or from high-tech, ⁓ they come into construction. you guys can probably attest to this better than I can. Their jaws drop. ⁓ like, we can't believe it's so fragmented and it seems so inefficient, yet industry's building these phenomenal projects. Well, there's reason it's been so fragmented is because all these folks along the supply chain that we rely on ⁓ have completely different business And if you're building a in the middle of the Arctic or if you're building one in New York, People who have never worked together come together to build that hospital the local supply chain and all that kind of knowledge. And that complexity also not as simple to boil down and say, okay, there's a margin improvement because we used X tool or Y tool.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: It's brutal. I I used to sell, so I I ran enterprise sales at Autodesk for a year, and the amount of that we tried to push onto contractors ⁓ was And it was very, very hard to reconcile. because like, yeah, you're like there isn't, hey, you used Vim, you used Plan Grid, you use Building Connected. There's no direct correlation to that ROI. And the the best path for us to sell was like, hey, here's how you build the owner. So for an arc an engineering firm, it's very, very easy. You charge sixty dollars an hour as an engineer. Now it's sixty five dollars an hour because they're BIM enabled. so just yeah, it's it's a there's no easy answer. I'm just curious to see how you thought through it.
Andrew Zukoski: Are there like we've we've we've been focusing on a fair number of like deploy a deploy a piece of software, mostly software technology. We did touch on iPads, which are hardware. like the flip side would be if lot of that is playing cash up, ⁓ like to like market the expectations of the workforce, or the value is gonna like flow back to the owners. Are there other places ⁓ to spend time. Like are there other innovations whether in the business model, or you alluded to some of this, that would provide a more durable and recognizable like lift to the general contractor's business?
Hammad Chaudhry: So this is very fascinating think about. So you look at the ecosystem of contractors, some of have gone about it differently. So there's the one is like if you're in residential, you got commercial, you've got industrial, you've got civil, there could be marine maritime, there could be nuclear blah blah blah. So verticals to your point think is definitely a different way of looking at it, like a business innovation if you want Then there's the other side of it too, where some of the contractors in the marketplace have said, hey, well, move up the value chain. And they've been looking at acquiring engineering firms or design firms and bringing of that kind of stuff in house. But that's a edged sword because if you're competing in an open market and you have your own engineering or design firm, ⁓ will the other and engineering firms want to work with you? ⁓ So there's a of a balance there. Then there's even more to that is actually where Luigi's
Andrew Zukoski: Mm.
Hammad Chaudhry: background kind of comes from the financing side of projects as well. And you can move into the capital side by kind of providing and playing in that, which changes kind of projects that you're going to be going after. Then there's the downstream kind of side of things. Where do you self-perform? looks really, really nice on paper because you can get much better margins. And give you a very, very abstract example of that. If you're contractor building, let's say a half a billion dollar, $500 million project.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: You know, maybe, maybe you could be in best case scenario making a twenty, thirty million dollar profit, know, potentially. But you self-perform on that let's say you're doing concrete or something, you could potentially double the profit by that. But the risk that you take on is way more as well. So your point, there's like all those kind of things that you can do in the business model across the board and the verticals getting into the side, financing side, getting into the self-performed side. Each them carry different risk. Then there's other side too is well, some of the we've seen in the market are trying to sell their services as a consulting firm.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Right. So you've seen this with recently Palantir and Kavanaugh out of Ottawa, ⁓ created kind of a new digital offering that they're going out there to do technology implementation and whatever. even some of the folks I used to work with in the past, ⁓ they have arm that they're trying to get out there and sell kind of technology services and implementation support and stuff like that as well. So there's that side. But then there's also a different angle is if you're at it through the lens of construction company, your is being able to look at how to bring people together, ⁓ how look at these different conditions, orchestrate it all and put it together, you gain quite a overview of what makes projects run, what can make them unsuccessful. And so there's opportunity for some of them move forward into owners reps or kind of the management support services as well. ⁓ so those are all business lines that you can go, right? Up, down, top, left, right, vertical, whatever. So that piece. But I don't if there's kind of really a golden answer ⁓ right now. if you look across North America and even some of the top European contractors, the way they've it is a mix of those. No one's kind of said, okay, we're just going to copy that approach for all of them. Some of them have so focused with just pure construction that they haven't gone into
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: There's try to go into modular in Canada. Two of the biggest companies shut down their modular efforts. But then if you look at DPR down in America where you guys are, you know, they have SurePods, for example. they've got kind of the the wall kind of prefab system as well and so on and so forth. So then there's ⁓ kind of modern methods of construction angle as well, maybe getting into that side of the business. So I don't know that gives you a good enough answer, Andrew, but there's ⁓ so many different ways could go about it. ⁓
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Zukoski: Innovate at the business model level. Hey, I have a question on a totally different ⁓ totally different front. you were in a construction company, you went to two startups, then you came back to a construction company. Like probably the experience was invaluable inside of the technology company, but maybe two parts. Like why'd you why why'd you go back to construction? And then what did you learn inside of technology companies that's helping you or aiding inside of a construction company?
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I mean I started off in architecture originally. got forced to shift into the construction industry because of the state of the economy. I'm in Alberta, oil and gas ⁓ is much the primary driver, although the economy's diversified now, but back then. And so I got into construction, I had no idea about ⁓ where I gonna end up. I thought maybe become a project manager, a construction manager, something like that. By the end of career at you know Ells Don, was leading the innovation. innovation and construction tech team. lot of my conversations were with people like Luigi and founders. And you as was talking to them, I realized they're asking advice and never worked in ⁓ a company like theirs. And it's kind of a weird realization that providing direction sometimes to people when don't have skin in the game. And so I was to other product people internally on our team, as well as realizing look, I've never actually worked on ⁓ product and customer discovery, to all this kind of stuff either. So, you know, it was a midage kind of thing, is do I stay where I am for the next ten years or do I take a risk and learn
Andrew Zukoski: Motorcycle. Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: This. Yeah. my equivalent was in a Porsche or a motorcycle, is let's join the startup side. And was good. I learned a lot. I got to travel across the world, meet lots of contractors, big, small, multinational, get a angle, ⁓ but also how do develop your product to support customers? ⁓ How do you your product? ⁓ There's a big sometimes between what technology startups and founders have ⁓ versus maybe what clients perceive.
Andrew Zukoski: Ha ha ha.
Hammad Chaudhry: And that's that's hard to manage and you don't know it until you're there. there's also the competition. You you're out there fiercely ⁓ getting sometimes. And what is balance? There's the fundraising side, venture capital side, or even looking at exits and IPOs or acquisitions. There's the MA for the as well, because you want to grow, you want to add more value to your clients, maybe you're too finite. so being able to see all kind of things. ⁓ made me realize that tech is a lot harder what maybe you see from the other side. Although a lot of benefits too, like I I really did enjoy it. It is hard. It's not an easy walk in the park. You've got to be constantly thinking outside of the box. And then you've this weird ⁓ kind of balance. got to appease investors and the people that have money in. You've got to appease your clients and the ones that you're trying attract ⁓ and then you've got to attract and keep them happy let's be honest no matter what construction tech company you are ⁓ are not a big tech company that's to be attracting top tier talent always so you've to do a lot of work to be able to bring the right kind of people in while keeping your happy while also serving your and those kind of ⁓ don't always align either. for me it's really good to see that and then getting back on the construction side I I believe this is kind of a once in a generational opportunity. Parmelo ⁓ sixty years ago in Bose, Quebec, or Saint George, small contractor, like and you mentioned, you know, maybe ten years ago, they were not the top three. Very quickly been growing within Canada. and so if you're the top three in Canada now, ⁓ the aspirations the has, the investment they're making in their leadership team and their growing businesses, some of the ⁓ and A stuff, the ability to come on and join an organization to lead their innovation and digital construction kind of contact efforts me is kind of not something comes up every ⁓ you every or every year even. There's a very finite amount of those opportunities across the industry that come up. And then at the end of it too, the people are awesome. So I got to meet with a lot of the people at Palmer Low ⁓ it changed kind of my my thought process. I was like, look, I didn't get to stay at a tech company through an acquisition or an IPO. I didn't I didn't build my own either. But learned a lot of valuable skills I think that helped me and ⁓ team kind of what they're building right now got me excited as well and I want to contribute to that growth and also help kind of set up for the next five to ten years. So I don't know if gives you
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. Ma maybe just one follow up.
Luigi La Corte: Hamano's also very tech forward too. It's like yeah, a bit of a tech company within a construction company. But they're they're very switched on. I'm sh as I'm sure Hamad could attest to.
Hammad Chaudhry: I I I really love kind the culture and the the organization has made, which is refreshing. think you guys have probably seen this with some of the clients you have. I don't really think an uphill battle of arguing why technology is valuable at all at Palmer Low. ⁓ The company knows that down and bottom up. ⁓ Everybody's got an appetite it. So ⁓ definitely makes my life lot easier. and And that culture is something again I can't take can't kind of highlight enough, right? It takes a long time to build a culture, ⁓ a lot of energy to keep it as well. And a company to go sixty plus years and maintain kind of that entrepreneurial spirit ⁓ and your point, Luigi, have that for thinking of what tech is where we need to go. makes it somebody like me easily ⁓ get along with people and the business and ⁓ find that passion.
Luigi La Corte: Have you guys looked at like obviously you're looking at co it sounds you're looking at copilot? Have you looked at enterprise licenses for Chat GPT or Cloud?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. So I'm just gonna caveat, man. We've got a good strong AI team. so ⁓ guys are running circles around anything I can talk about AI. Happy introduce you to those folks later on too if you want to really nerd out. But Luigi, know this as well as anybody. I'm not a deep, deep tech guy. I worked in the computer vision startups, all that, but I don't actually know the depths of of the technology terms of creating it, putting the guardrails or all that kind of stuff. But in terms of investment, we do have Microsoft and we do have kind of m365 premium does give you access to Seoul, whatever the newest model is for ChatGPT, and then also you get Claude and Cowork. So we have access to those across the enterprise and that's available on you know if you want it or not. But if you're just at all the employees, everybody has M365 kind of with the Microsoft Copilot.
Luigi La Corte: I see. And that I mean when you justify that investment, know to your point earlier on, you're not really looking at dollars and cents, but earlier on when I was talking to some of the large GCs in Canada, there was a lot of anger around their business model, how expensive it was. There was a question of whether people would be able to get value, whether would be hallucinations. I mean, could you walk us through how you think about that justification? I know you say, well, everyone's using AI, but at the end of the at the end of the day, you have fixed resources. You can only invest in so many tools. How do you decide what makes the cut and and what you know, what doesn't? y ⁓ sure I'm sure you're making those decisions, or at least you're part of making those decisions. But how how do you guys think about that when you have fixed fixed resources?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. Yeah, just to clarify it, is definitely a ROI on some of the business cases, right? So it's not like not of them will be ignoring ROI. But then places where it's just table stakes like we were talking about earlier. So depending on the case and where that fits in is kind of the key thing. But you're thinking about as a large enterprise, you're investing millions of dollars. Of ⁓ as a prudent financial kind of you're gonna ask if I'm putting
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. Okay.
Hammad Chaudhry: money in what am I getting out of it? so that's a reasonable kind of question to have. And has a clear answer on that except for specific use cases. So if we focus in on looking at maybe a good one I across Parmula, which is ⁓ managing the logistics and some the equipment and all that kind of stuff, it's very, very easy to quantify you know what you were spending, know what your wasted resource was, your downtime idle time, aggregated costs, so on so forth, and then you can see kind of how that rolls up. So can do a very clean ROI calculation. That's where business case kind of makes sense to do. And that will people identify is this something we're gonna say, you know, we're spending and we're recovering Y, ⁓ or is it the as giving people again like the modern version of an iPad or a cell phone or a laptop? Those things can only happen any organization if they go through that process of identifying the business process mapping, the workflow, the business case and all that. my intent wasn't to say there's no ROI. There's definitely ROI depending on that use case and how you're looking at it. But also not one size fits all because if you just looked at it through the lens of ROI, then you you're out on a larger opportunity as well. Now there is going be waste. ⁓ You're testing out new that may not be proven at scale. And that's a realistic understanding business needs to have. I think people forget whether you're an architectural firm, an engineering firm, construction firm, a firm, you have already. Otherwise none of would be talking about some of the things we talk about. There wouldn't be this movement towards lean or ⁓ digitization or any that. ⁓ There's a lot waste in the business. And the ability to up that waste and capture that value or block the leaky bucket, you want to call it, has a meaningful impact ⁓ on the process. Profitability. just there's many places you could start. Where do you start and how do you start to figure it out and prioritize on that? So, ⁓ you Luigi, think ⁓ depending on the company and the contractor or or their culture, ⁓ they're gonna have different approach. But you cannot blame CFOs because for the past ten year their IT and tech bills have been going through the roof, right? If you look at year over year increase, it's kind of ludicrous, ⁓ it kind of makes ⁓
Mike Powers: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: so being to justify to CFO or equivalent, the board the executive team, why you're spending so much more than you were ten years ago, five years ago, and what is difference in output isn't unreasonable. But sometimes not just gonna be we spent, you know, five hundred thousand and we saved a million. Other times it might be look had to spend that money because our people needed the tool. And if we didn't have that, maybe didn't attract the right kind of talent. Maybe we wouldn't be able to have the leaner team that we have to manage the risk as appropriately and so on and so forth.
Luigi La Corte: If you can
Andrew Zukoski: I'd to know I hear a little bit about this from Luigi, but on the front end of projects, sort of call it pre-cost certainty, like design phase, pre-construction, that sort of thing. like what are the trends that you and Palmerloe are seeing in Canada? what are new owner demands that are coming in? Like what's what's new and on the front end of projects?
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Well, it really ⁓ well pre is is fun, right? Pre construction is where I think ⁓ to your both of guys' focus points is a lot of energy is going into it. and it's something that's obvious now, but years ago or or several years ago maybe it wasn't as common ⁓ to think about pre con. the rise is hard to ignore. So why is there such a rise pre con? It's because clients
Andrew Zukoski: Besides join, obviously, and provision.
Mike Powers: huh. ⁓
Hammad Chaudhry: And customers are understanding that there's a value to be able to figure out a lot of the issues that you typically would wait until construction gets going. I think there ⁓ an that shifted across the board from clients saying, okay, we know earlier engagement is better for us, but maybe not as clear for every type of client what would be the right way to pull that off. If you're a kind of client or federal or something within that regard. have a lot more flexibility potentially with the size of the projects you're building to go for more integrated contract IPD, design build, so on and so forth. But if not, say you're a private kind of client, you're competing a marketplace with other developers and real estate and you're competing to get to capital, what does it come back to? the internal rate of return, right? So are you gonna be able to get better access to capital just by saying you're using more technology? necessarily. But you're able to kind of prove out what kind of contract type you're using or accelerated construction delivery through schedules and whatnot, there will an easier way for you to be able to get that financial backing as well. And so pre-con a really, really critical role on that. the estimating side I think, you know, to people in industry get it, but it's the lifeblood of any construction business. If you don't have estimating, you have anything. you to be able to qualify the that you're bidding, ⁓ make sure makes sense, the risk profile, and having the that are in the market today, it just makes that much more sense for us to be able to focus on, ⁓ you know, looking different cost estimates, going through like class five all the way down to class one, whatever you want to call it, being able to do and ⁓ analysis for different options owner may be looking at very, very quickly, and ⁓ also making sure that. lines up with your ability to execute. How do you plan schedule, logistics, subcontractor supply, all that kind of stuff? So I the the shift is that on the public side, there's a lot of money coming in, a lot of investment coast to coast. And they're gonna potentially looking at some of these digital delivery models or frameworks and asking for that more. On the private industry side, think it's hard to paint with one brush because of how different the vertical Are like if you're in the data center space right now, they want to get it done quick as possible. will potentially pay you a premium if you've got ⁓ needs, and methods or tech to do that. Yeah. But residential, mean, competing in such a tight capital market with you know as much ability to up front, so you've got to come up with creative ways to work with your contractor partners. And I mean, shameless pitch for Palmerlow but that's why.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. The to go fast. Mm.
Hammad Chaudhry: I'm excited too is because they cover those markets and ⁓ you the ability with helping you in design or pre-con estimating, value engineering, all that kind of stuff.
Luigi La Corte: Hamad, you've been obviously within tech, you've been within a GC. I'm sure when you were a tech company, you're saying, man, I wish we could just sell more product. And I'm sure as a GC, you're asking, I wish there was more ROI. Do you think if I if you had to choose, do you think GCs don't purchase software fast enough? Or do you think tech companies aren't providing the ROI that they're that they're advertising? If you had to choose one.
Hammad Chaudhry: I love reductionism.
Luigi La Corte: Ha ha.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah, good answer.
Luigi La Corte: option C, neither.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, no, I I don't think one size fits all Luigi. It really doesn't. I'll you an anecdote. This won't answer your question, but I'll give you a good story. When I out, I was really thinking BIM was change the entire industry. And my first project I worked on, we had ⁓ one of best kind VDC projects at that time in the company. Then I moved into special projects, so was r you know running maybe to seven projects at one time. They're very fast paced. Some of my projects are three weeks, four weeks long. was no time ⁓ value in being able to bring in in example BIM and VDC modeling reality capture because by time already wasted too where the field would have been able to build, figure out, coordinate, and move forward, ⁓ and we would have hit our schedule, even if we had to rework a few things. So my point there being it's hard for us to look the one lens, we really really look at every individual project, and based on that, it makes sense whether or not certain technology is too fast, too slow, where the value is gonna be. And sometimes hard for the people on construction side across the board because not just one type of makeup on construction companies either, right? You've got PMs, you've got supers, a lot of different personalities, even in those two personas. You've got the kind of like myself, you've got the executive team, you've got quality health. Safety. You've got so many different types of people and personas and focus points within contractors. And same thing on the tech side, it depends. Some contract, I mean, some startups will are honest. They're brutally honest their own detriment sometimes. Others will promise the and figure it out once they get contracting dry, right? They're like, now we got to figure out how to deliver it. So same thing on the tech it's really hard to paint it with one brush. It comes down to ⁓ the ⁓ the viewpoint of the founder, the culture and and what they can do. I'm I couldn't give you option one or two, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a ⁓ a picture. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: That's okay. It's it's it's a good it's a it's a good discussion. I mean, ⁓ I like I sometimes I sometimes find people saying, you know, especially in pre-con, like, hey, I I cannot adopt your tool. I'm too busy. I'm too busy. Great. This is it's even better. You should hop on a call and we'll specifically show you how I'm gonna make you less busy. I I at least look, like I think every company is different, every general contractor is b different. Some are really good at buying software, some aren't. And I'm not saying, ⁓
Mike Powers: Okay.
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ you know provision scope agent obviously is the best tool ever but there there's obviously some capacity that needs to be allocated to vetting and adopting technology and I like obviously to your like to your to your credit Hamad this is the thing that you did at Eliston. You have a lot of work at Al at Eliston obviously but Hamad set up the the tech accelerator where companies would effectively pitch to Elliston hey we want to pilot we want to partner with Elliston very deeply. and then that gave ⁓ that gave Elison ⁓ obviously this like wider purview into the tech ecosystem, but it was a different context here. I'm not just purely trying to get you a pilot. We want to partner with you. So wish everyone had that capacity because some GCs are like, I I'm busy writing scopes. I can't buy your scope writing tool.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. I mean I I get that. Like I while we've been on this, I've gotten two pitches for new payroll systems, like have come into my inbox while we have been on this call, and maybe I could save a little bit of money, but nobody ain't nobody got time for that. doesn't it come does it come down to like where that like tinkering and exploration time happens? Like it sounds like Elliston resourced it centrally. Many companies actually resource it at the project level.
Mike Powers: Switching payroll.
Andrew Zukoski: Where there's like there's a little bit of time and you got some of you have certain certain individuals that by personality or inclination like kind of want to check things out and you route things to them and then they try to fit it in on the project. But that makes it like there's good and bad to both side. On the corporate side, like, well, now you're a little further from particular projects, which is where the rubber meets the road in most innovations. ⁓ and inside of the project, it's like, well, yeah, you're closer, but at the same time, like If the owner makes a big change and you're under the gun for time, like no, nobody is adopting new technology until that's done. And so finding the time availability is much harder.
Hammad Chaudhry: mean, everybody's their own approach, but I can give you the feedback based on my experience and what kind of helped out. the first thing is you gotta be looking at it through lens of a relationship, not any individual one project. gotta invest in the relationship if you're trying to bring technology in. So if you've got it through lens of a large contractor I am now or or where I worked previously You can do top down, how well is that gonna be received in the field? Or you can decentralize it to your point and have it coming from the field, but then how well is the corporate and IT and innovation team going to react to it? the first thing is being able to really create and trust so that there's an idea at the periphery ⁓ on the site, ⁓ you're able bring that in and help support it along. Or ⁓ if something coming from up top, you know, you've got right relationships to be able to the right kind of fit to make sure that you're testing. it in a good environment or type of project. And of we did with my previous team that helped out with a lot of the kind of movement adoption was we said we don't expect you a PM or super ⁓ or as the CEO CFO or whatever executive role you have to be an expert in We have people on our IT team, on our cyber team, our data team, our construction tech team, take care of that part for you. But are the expert in your kind of domain. So that's matchmaking kind of we started to create wasn't to create just committee for the sake of a committee. It was to bring in right people so we could surface these ideas. Sometimes it would be ⁓ with project context. Actually a of time it would even like the Louis. Kind of example that he brought up. had no project in mind at the time. Instead, what we tried to do was just get the right people from the field all the way up to the C suite to able to look at it and think through that business process. And then we can help as those matchmakers to say, guys, maybe over the five years or ten years we've had X dollar of rework or insurance claims or whatever it may be. And then you know the PM might jump in and say, Yeah, actually, you know what? On my past. Four jobs, this has been a big issue. And the CFO might jump in. Actually, you what? I've been seeing this on our balance sheet. then maybe a different department jumps in. So there's one size fits all. I know I use that word a lot ⁓ because isn't. ⁓ You've to get down to the people, you've got to make them trust you, you've got to have a relationship, and then when you bring these kind of projects in, it makes it all a lot easier to scale and deploy. Now, if a tech vendor, how do you actually capitalize on that? And that's where got hard, is because some people don't have those relationships. Even if they're in a corporate role. so you could get the strongest champion, but see no adoption. And the field may be the voice innovation for a lot of smaller contractors, but they have way to scale it because they're only on one project, right? So I think if if looking at it through that lens for me, is you can't take a shortcut building a relationship. You cannot get away from the You have to be in the field and working with those people, and you've got to spend time with executive team. and the other corporate departments at the end of the day all those folks coming together is what's gonna happen or gonna make that shift happen, right, in the way that they do business. ⁓
Andrew Zukoski: It's interesting. Do you guys buy software at the project level or is it at the or do you buy technology at the project level or is that the corporate level? Because in many ways what you're describing is a it rhymes with like a more traditional enterprise sales process where you have to your arms around ⁓ a complex organization and understand the organization and the different needs of different people and have like trust in a relationship and the right aspects the message communicated to a bunch of different stakeholders and that ⁓ you you were on the you were on the software side, like coming from the software side, that can work and it's great, but it's a it's a lot of it's a lot of work. ⁓ there's a lot of time and effort that has to go into that and it can be economical if it to sort of a durable and sizable like commitment and investment in a solution. But if it if you have to go through all that ⁓ to capture first few projects and there's nothing that.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah.
Andrew Zukoski: the tech company can end up in trouble.
Hammad Chaudhry: ⁓ that that's why, you I think it's so tough to be a startup in our industry is because there is I mean you get lucky honestly, like I've seen that happen where they get the right relationship at the right time and they just kind of get that enterprise wide. But you can't bank that luck. ⁓ You've got to look it to your point as in an enterprise approach a project approach. Some of the startups we used work with and still kind of keep in touch with, I would purposely say look, ignore the folks like us for now because you're gonna have a lot more success on the mid-size and smaller market they don't have as much bureaucracy and requirement, they don't have that overhead, they don't have that legal cyber requirement as as heavily. So get quicker adoption, faster thing, but you're have to call a thousand companies to get potentially the same amount of revenue as you would from ten. but at least you you keep moving to your point, cash is coming the business, you're showing the right growth metrics and so on so forth.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: other times you're ready for that bigger market, ⁓ That's gonna have to shift and you understand that the sales cycle is really, really, really gonna be longer than some of those smaller GCs and contractors. If you at statistics from like I think it's Sales Institute of America or something like that, don't quote me on that, is typical across all is nine touch points for like enterprise level sale. And most people or most companies give after a four. Sometimes. so construction is probably 3, 4x the amount of touch points required for that kind of sale or growth in my perspective. And so Andrew, like you want to do it quicker, you go downstream into the smaller side of the market, but then you've got a thousand folks you've got to try and sell to, or if you go way longer time to burn, maybe you'll get one to ten kind of customers on that front.
Luigi La Corte: Mm-hmm. Hamad, I know we're ⁓ we're we're appreach ⁓ approaching the end of the hour. Are you up for a quick lightning round? Just a couple of questions. Answer as quickly as possible. All right, let's do it. Okay, one American general contractor you would want to J V with at Palmerlock?
Hammad Chaudhry: Absolutely. Let's go.
Mike Powers: Okay.
Hammad Chaudhry: look, there's a lot of great American contractors, but you ⁓ I've I've got really good friends at DPR, so I'll give a shout out to Hanu at DPR. Yeah.
Luigi La Corte: Heavily caveated answer.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah, many of your friends are G American general contractors.
Luigi La Corte: K D P R Overhyped Software Category.
Hammad Chaudhry: Oof would say that's man. I don't say it's pre con, but right now a lot of precon. Right I'm j but ⁓ well it good because there's a big problem there. But ⁓ I don't know if overhyped. Maybe maybe it's the BIM side of things at this point.
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ my god, everyone says free con. Everyone says free con right now. Mm. okay, underhyped software category.
Hammad Chaudhry: Underhyped is the boring stuff, I think, in the background. So like looking at modernized ERPs or financial management systems or some the things that are the backbone of any big corporation? I think that would be underhyped right now.
Luigi La Corte: maybe ⁓ wave a magic wand. You can you can buy one software instantly. it could be a name or a category. W which one is it?
Hammad Chaudhry: I can't give you a good answer on that 'cause it's too tough 'cause there's so many different kind of business units and business lines. yeah, I think if I could it'd a FinTech company maybe.
Luigi La Corte: Mm. Mm-hmm. which subcontractor do you admire that you know you work with that Palmer Low why?
Hammad Chaudhry: There's lots of sub ⁓ trade partners that we have coast to coast. don't know if there's one that sticks out. I'm ⁓ to get out there and meet more of ⁓ as well. So I I can't give you a full full point perspective on right now. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Yeah, it's it's probably a a tough question to ask given that you're leading you're ⁓ an executive at Mark.
Andrew Zukoski: Which of your children do you love the most?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, of ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Which of your subs do you hate and you never want to work with? Again, I'm kidding. amazing. Hamad, thank you so much for the generosity with your time. Really appreciate your perspective on obviously how you run tech implementation, how you think about it, the strategy of it. It's super tough. but obviously Pomerlo is very lucky to have you. Thank you so much, Hamad. We appreciate you.
Hammad Chaudhry: Ha ha ha. I thank you all very much and have a great day, everyone.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah yeah, thank you.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Hey, thanks Luigi. Great to be here. ⁓ good to see you, Andrew and Mike as well. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ Haman, tell us about what's going on. give us a bit of an overview of of of your work. Obviously, you're in the innovation space, you know, squarely in the general contractor bucket. You've dabbled in technology. Give us a bit of an overview.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, absolutely. So ⁓ leading innovation and digital construction at Provision. ⁓ ⁓ No, at Parmelo. So I made the beginning of June. So spending some time on the construction tech side with a couple of startups, there's an opportunity to join kind of a a really big growing Canadian leader. So Parmelow's been around for sixty plus years in Canada now, just over six billion on
Luigi La Corte: Provision? That's right.
Hammad Chaudhry: under seven billion in revenue, 5,000 employees coast to coast, 11 at any time, two to three hundred active projects. And ⁓ my is really helping ⁓ grow and guide direction of innovation and digital construction team. So the VDC kind of any those kind of aspects, but also some of the overall construction tech stuff that I've been able to work on in past and I think you three have been seeing happening as providers and and tech founders as well.
Luigi La Corte: So in the in your roles innovation digital construction, when you when you oversee that business unit, what what's like what's the specific mandate for what you should be accomplishing?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, so at Palmerlo kind of a long history. some people who have been following kind of the Canadian construction space will know they were the first ones with spot the dog. they've also had some interesting ⁓ initiatives ⁓ long I So ⁓ there's no shortage that kind of culture within the organization. My kind of goal my vision joining the company and working with kind of the executive team and also the group of companies that we have is to be able to set up For the next five to ten years, things have changed a lot. So before, maybe it was a little bit more, you know, BIM and VDC was new as innovative, drones were new and innovative, reality capture, ⁓ but are kind of table stakes now. And so really changed, I think, ⁓ the dynamic what you need from an innovation department now. And then also, course, there's the AI kind of that's come along too, which has helped change some that as well. So maybe ⁓ pieces of that you would considered innovation in the past or part of that department now really a lot of the large ECs have AI in-house and so focus is really trying to help set up more of the innovation ⁓ for ⁓ construction our and that will be of the novel stuff that we haven't seen yet ⁓ but some of it be as simple as you know changing some of the workflows in a more modern way based on the tools technology
Luigi La Corte: Is the general approach to sure that the team gets tools quickly, but not too slowly where you become a laggard? Like some some of the things I've seen with large GCs is like they're so concerned with security. security is very important, ⁓ but they're so they're so concerned with security, what is deemed secure, where their data goes, that they end up being quite paralyzed and are really able to adopt. AI or technology as fast as let's say smaller companies that are a lot more nimble. Like do you do you agree that that's a risk? And and if so, well, how do you balance that at Pomerolo?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I think it's a huge risk as well for a lot of contractors, not just just GCs, but also subcontractors, subtrades as well. The there's one size fits all, and I'm sure you three have seen that trying to help provide solutions as well to the industry, is some contractors much further along on that journey. They've got a well-oiled machine, others are just getting onto that journey. So the way I think about it is ⁓ Luigi, you gotta down before you can speed up. And so if you have all the pieces in place for legal data, cyber, you're going to be kind of drowning ⁓ many ways trying to appease requests coming from your project managers, your superintendents, and the other corporate teams that you have. Now the is of course something that you can have you're a smaller GC, smaller contractor, but there's also ⁓ ability to support that scale too. So almost like you've got benefits on both sides. other thing ⁓ you know I'm often kind of thinking about is if you've got a project, you know Got to pour concrete. So sometimes you don't have the luxury of waiting for all that kind of longer tail review getting those things. So what up happening is current projects may not be able to benefit from some of the newer technologies or or approvals. And so that's that you take into consideration as well. And not every project will in the right stage either. So say you get the review done and you're using something like provision ⁓ or you know join me. maybe and it's to handover. There might be some ⁓ cases or fits, but generally that window of opportunity may have moved on to. So If you're smaller, you can be more nimble, but you don't have the resources always to support the tech and the deployment and the rollout. you may not have the portfolio projects to be able to find the right project in the right stage. But then if you're larger, you've got a lot more at risk. So one I've seen also when I was on the vendor side was cybersecurity is really big ⁓ insurance kind risk now. And the cost cybersecurity insurance has also gone up. So you also need be kind of a prudent operator if you're a contractor to make sure that those are covered off. And again, I think slowing down a bit before you speed up is going be critical for a lot of the larger players.
Mike Powers: this is a question around like as you're thinking about these investments internally, I losing sleep at night running through Gemini tokens and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on I know how well the val the the ROI is. And I'm just like, hey, all right, let's say we we want to invest in provision for a project, it's twenty-five twenty-five-thirty thousand dollars for pre-con. How do you underwrite that cost ⁓ and about like the for that? ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: just like holistically, 'cause obviously like may you know, hey, you're if you're a pro core house, you're investing a million dollars, ten million dollars in pro core. I'm guessing if you're spending twenty five thousand dollars a project on provision, that cost does grow up to a million to ten million dollars. So I'm curious how you think about that ROI and have you been able to see real ROI by leveraging the tool so far?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. question, Mike. It's not a one size fits all. So I think the biggest shift seen now is that you're looking at these investments through the lens of what is the business case. And sometimes a case is gonna be a hard ROI number, otherwise it won't. When a hard ROI there's some instances that I can share that our team at Parmelow's done where they've been able to invest, your point, significant dollars into some of the AI infrastructure, the ontology. and all that kind of fun stuff be able to save millions of dollars ⁓ maybe how we're managing equipment or logistics and stuff like that. So of that stuff will be very, very clear and very hard. Other stuff be as clear and hard ROI. ⁓ And that's it gets interesting on the business cases as you're going through and you're trying to extrapolate, well what is the point and the value of it. ⁓ it can become a little bit easier to get the stakeholders involved. So if you're looking at project managers or project coordinators or some of the folks that are looking at lots of documentation, if you're looking at pre-con teams, estimators, business development teams and some of documents they look through, you know, ⁓ can just that exercise to say, look, before we were spending amount of time going this document, we were missing items quite a bit, there's a lot of risk that we're carrying forward. And now by kind of this 50 grand or 100 grand forward, here's we think the value is going to be is we can look at these items a little bit quicker, surface the risk quicker, and manage way that we're pricing a lot more effective. And there may be a total dollar value to that yet. And then you've got enterprise side as well, I think, which is a a challenge. So I've been with a lot of my GC friends across North America ⁓ and I asked them the I was like, guys, what is your ROI on AI? everybody kind of gave a smart ass answer, part of my French. But the answer got was, well, really, ⁓ the biggest is fact that we're building a lot of these data centers right now. So it's not maybe, you the net the the copilot investment as much, because people are optimizing for how people are using copilot instead of looking at, well, what is the business process that's being impacted by the use of the tool?
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: So
Hammad Chaudhry: And so, know, you can talk to eight different companies, you might get eight different results. You could talk to the executive team and they ⁓ they definitely will have a different viewpoint or vision. ⁓ can talk to the pragmatic kind of technologists and they'll give you a different answer. You can talk to the IT teams, PM So this is I think the industry right now is trying to digest and ⁓ prove out is which model makes sense. And I don't it's one model makes sense to be able to quantify what the value Is it's kind of going back to we started giving everyone iPads in the beginning I had to do a business case. You if I'm giving Luigi an iPad on site, ⁓ it's me a thousand dollars with all the software. I'm doing it because he looks at five hundred drawings a day and it's saving him two hours. But now don't even think about it. ⁓ It's just way that you give people equipment so they do their job best. If I'm getting super school when people were switching to kind of on-site internet or on Prem storage for management and having backups, same needs to come up, and then nobody would even think about it. ⁓ So I we're going through that transition where with AI it's going to become table stakes, and you're not going to look at it as much as just ROI, but where you are millions of dollars, definitely people are going to to know. And again, depending on which level of the organization you're talking to, they're to have a different viewpoint on that too. So I'm not sure if that gives you a
Luigi La Corte: Yeah, yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: good overview but it's not one size fits all.
Mike Powers: Let me yeah, let me pull that string as an example. So like let's go through the iPad example. All right, say you had, you know, a hundred people on a job site, so you spend a hundred K on an iPad. you know, in that example, if you were to like look back and do a post mortem, did business make did the profit on the projects or the on the project increase because of an iPad? Or was it more of just like table stakes expectation and your profit stayed the same or decreased? What I'm trying to get at, what's what what what I'm seeing in the space is like if you look at like the engineering world, the engineer's like, hey, we're all using BIM now. But if you look back twenty years, no one was using BIM. And you look at the EVADA, the profit margins of those engineering firms from twenty years ago and today, they're exactly the same. So hey, now I'm just taking I'm charging the owner ten cents more per hour, and that ten cents is just going to Autodesk and not actually going into the pockets of the engineering firms. And I'm curious if you're like, hey, is is this same exact process going to happen? The AI side at a construction site where, hey, we paid $25,000 for provision. now table stakes. I, Palmerloo or Turner or whoever, is not making $25,000 more in profit. My fee goes up $25,000 and ⁓ it charged back to the other.
Andrew Zukoski: Isn't this a this is a co sorry, this is like a question of timing as well as a question of quantifying ROI, right? The the stories from the early days of BIM were that if you got in early, you actually could make an insane amount of money because of the automation that it had. So that yeah, over time that that value got captured by owners 'cause they were like, ⁓ people can do this cheaper, like we will be able to like compress fees. ⁓
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah yeah.
Mike Powers: Right, but now it's table stakes. Correct. Which is a the recurring theme from like it's a Buffett quote is that like, hey, if you told me that there was a loom that made me three times more efficient, I'm selling my loom factory because I will not accrete any of the value. The value will go to the buyer of the fabric from that loom. And I'm curious of how many correlations there are for that with AI.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I mean, back to the iPad example, ⁓ got to be a less reductionist if that makes sense, that it's not like ⁓ one determines the success of a project. It is Projects are highly complex, meaning there's parts we can focus on and control, but there's parts that are outside of control, right? Acts of God, weather, know, the supply chain all these kind of things have happened as well. So So it's not just as simple as saying, yeah, I've got an iPad on a job, did the margins go up or not? There's also a lot of shifts that have happened. So the projects we build today compared to 20 years ago are more complex simply a commissioning standpoint point, low voltage IMIT. So that's accounted for in any of the productivity kind of metrics or whatever see is we're not building the same product we were. Now the other thing to ⁓ you know the workforce has shifted. So
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: So ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, could easily find people that were coming out of school that were early in their career ⁓ knew they had to read drawings. and they were comfortable with paper, then you had a sketch by hand, for example. you look at the people coming into the industry now as people call them digital natives, there's no in heck you're gonna be able to give them a set of and a pen and a paper, marker, highlighter. They need an iPad. the the view that can simplify and look at one deployment and extract margin improvement, I think is a bit hard to to especially With the multi-factorial approach, but other factors, people are aging, younger people coming in, things more complicated, there's a lot more information that you need to have on hand, ⁓ they to protect the margin so it's not decreasing more because construction become commoditized in many ways, right? So I the margins, I don't know if you guys remember specifically in Canada from like 2015-ish onwards, started to become a very, tight race. ⁓ And so alternative procurement models help because you're taking on the design risk, maybe the finance risk, sometimes the maintenance and operations risk, so can start to get more accrual of value and margin. Now, the thing if you look at they have different segments, right? if you're ⁓ hyper in one vertical, there's a maximum margin you're going be able to achieve. If you've got multiple different verticals that you're in, all have different amounts of margin that you can play with. But you look at it through the lens of a corporate machine and say typical business process mapping for a project has a hundred to a thousand different workflows or steps, and you start to at them through the lens of okay, where do we digitize them or make them bit more efficient compared to traditional workflows, you may be able to get a 0.02% improvement across multiple deployments, which will add to eventually like a two. 2 to 3% improvement in overall EBITDA or margin or whatever you want to look at it through that lens. again, guys, it's not as simple as just saying ⁓ used BIM, so automatically a project's going to be better, or used digital tools or an iPad is going be better. It's a very complex beast, and why the is so complicated from an outsider's view. you see people come in manufacturing or from high-tech, ⁓ they come into construction. you guys can probably attest to this better than I can. Their jaws drop. ⁓ like, we can't believe it's so fragmented and it seems so inefficient, yet industry's building these phenomenal projects. Well, there's reason it's been so fragmented is because all these folks along the supply chain that we rely on ⁓ have completely different business And if you're building a in the middle of the Arctic or if you're building one in New York, People who have never worked together come together to build that hospital the local supply chain and all that kind of knowledge. And that complexity also not as simple to boil down and say, okay, there's a margin improvement because we used X tool or Y tool.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Mike Powers: It's brutal. I I used to sell, so I I ran enterprise sales at Autodesk for a year, and the amount of that we tried to push onto contractors ⁓ was And it was very, very hard to reconcile. because like, yeah, you're like there isn't, hey, you used Vim, you used Plan Grid, you use Building Connected. There's no direct correlation to that ROI. And the the best path for us to sell was like, hey, here's how you build the owner. So for an arc an engineering firm, it's very, very easy. You charge sixty dollars an hour as an engineer. Now it's sixty five dollars an hour because they're BIM enabled. so just yeah, it's it's a there's no easy answer. I'm just curious to see how you thought through it.
Andrew Zukoski: Are there like we've we've we've been focusing on a fair number of like deploy a deploy a piece of software, mostly software technology. We did touch on iPads, which are hardware. like the flip side would be if lot of that is playing cash up, ⁓ like to like market the expectations of the workforce, or the value is gonna like flow back to the owners. Are there other places ⁓ to spend time. Like are there other innovations whether in the business model, or you alluded to some of this, that would provide a more durable and recognizable like lift to the general contractor's business?
Hammad Chaudhry: So this is very fascinating think about. So you look at the ecosystem of contractors, some of have gone about it differently. So there's the one is like if you're in residential, you got commercial, you've got industrial, you've got civil, there could be marine maritime, there could be nuclear blah blah blah. So verticals to your point think is definitely a different way of looking at it, like a business innovation if you want Then there's the other side of it too, where some of the contractors in the marketplace have said, hey, well, move up the value chain. And they've been looking at acquiring engineering firms or design firms and bringing of that kind of stuff in house. But that's a edged sword because if you're competing in an open market and you have your own engineering or design firm, ⁓ will the other and engineering firms want to work with you? ⁓ So there's a of a balance there. Then there's even more to that is actually where Luigi's
Andrew Zukoski: Mm.
Hammad Chaudhry: background kind of comes from the financing side of projects as well. And you can move into the capital side by kind of providing and playing in that, which changes kind of projects that you're going to be going after. Then there's the downstream kind of side of things. Where do you self-perform? looks really, really nice on paper because you can get much better margins. And give you a very, very abstract example of that. If you're contractor building, let's say a half a billion dollar, $500 million project.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: You know, maybe, maybe you could be in best case scenario making a twenty, thirty million dollar profit, know, potentially. But you self-perform on that let's say you're doing concrete or something, you could potentially double the profit by that. But the risk that you take on is way more as well. So your point, there's like all those kind of things that you can do in the business model across the board and the verticals getting into the side, financing side, getting into the self-performed side. Each them carry different risk. Then there's other side too is well, some of the we've seen in the market are trying to sell their services as a consulting firm.
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Right. So you've seen this with recently Palantir and Kavanaugh out of Ottawa, ⁓ created kind of a new digital offering that they're going out there to do technology implementation and whatever. even some of the folks I used to work with in the past, ⁓ they have arm that they're trying to get out there and sell kind of technology services and implementation support and stuff like that as well. So there's that side. But then there's also a different angle is if you're at it through the lens of construction company, your is being able to look at how to bring people together, ⁓ how look at these different conditions, orchestrate it all and put it together, you gain quite a overview of what makes projects run, what can make them unsuccessful. And so there's opportunity for some of them move forward into owners reps or kind of the management support services as well. ⁓ so those are all business lines that you can go, right? Up, down, top, left, right, vertical, whatever. So that piece. But I don't if there's kind of really a golden answer ⁓ right now. if you look across North America and even some of the top European contractors, the way they've it is a mix of those. No one's kind of said, okay, we're just going to copy that approach for all of them. Some of them have so focused with just pure construction that they haven't gone into
Andrew Zukoski: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: There's try to go into modular in Canada. Two of the biggest companies shut down their modular efforts. But then if you look at DPR down in America where you guys are, you know, they have SurePods, for example. they've got kind of the the wall kind of prefab system as well and so on and so forth. So then there's ⁓ kind of modern methods of construction angle as well, maybe getting into that side of the business. So I don't know that gives you a good enough answer, Andrew, but there's ⁓ so many different ways could go about it. ⁓
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Zukoski: Innovate at the business model level. Hey, I have a question on a totally different ⁓ totally different front. you were in a construction company, you went to two startups, then you came back to a construction company. Like probably the experience was invaluable inside of the technology company, but maybe two parts. Like why'd you why why'd you go back to construction? And then what did you learn inside of technology companies that's helping you or aiding inside of a construction company?
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, I mean I started off in architecture originally. got forced to shift into the construction industry because of the state of the economy. I'm in Alberta, oil and gas ⁓ is much the primary driver, although the economy's diversified now, but back then. And so I got into construction, I had no idea about ⁓ where I gonna end up. I thought maybe become a project manager, a construction manager, something like that. By the end of career at you know Ells Don, was leading the innovation. innovation and construction tech team. lot of my conversations were with people like Luigi and founders. And you as was talking to them, I realized they're asking advice and never worked in ⁓ a company like theirs. And it's kind of a weird realization that providing direction sometimes to people when don't have skin in the game. And so I was to other product people internally on our team, as well as realizing look, I've never actually worked on ⁓ product and customer discovery, to all this kind of stuff either. So, you know, it was a midage kind of thing, is do I stay where I am for the next ten years or do I take a risk and learn
Andrew Zukoski: Motorcycle. Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: This. Yeah. my equivalent was in a Porsche or a motorcycle, is let's join the startup side. And was good. I learned a lot. I got to travel across the world, meet lots of contractors, big, small, multinational, get a angle, ⁓ but also how do develop your product to support customers? ⁓ How do you your product? ⁓ There's a big sometimes between what technology startups and founders have ⁓ versus maybe what clients perceive.
Andrew Zukoski: Ha ha ha.
Hammad Chaudhry: And that's that's hard to manage and you don't know it until you're there. there's also the competition. You you're out there fiercely ⁓ getting sometimes. And what is balance? There's the fundraising side, venture capital side, or even looking at exits and IPOs or acquisitions. There's the MA for the as well, because you want to grow, you want to add more value to your clients, maybe you're too finite. so being able to see all kind of things. ⁓ made me realize that tech is a lot harder what maybe you see from the other side. Although a lot of benefits too, like I I really did enjoy it. It is hard. It's not an easy walk in the park. You've got to be constantly thinking outside of the box. And then you've this weird ⁓ kind of balance. got to appease investors and the people that have money in. You've got to appease your clients and the ones that you're trying attract ⁓ and then you've got to attract and keep them happy let's be honest no matter what construction tech company you are ⁓ are not a big tech company that's to be attracting top tier talent always so you've to do a lot of work to be able to bring the right kind of people in while keeping your happy while also serving your and those kind of ⁓ don't always align either. for me it's really good to see that and then getting back on the construction side I I believe this is kind of a once in a generational opportunity. Parmelo ⁓ sixty years ago in Bose, Quebec, or Saint George, small contractor, like and you mentioned, you know, maybe ten years ago, they were not the top three. Very quickly been growing within Canada. and so if you're the top three in Canada now, ⁓ the aspirations the has, the investment they're making in their leadership team and their growing businesses, some of the ⁓ and A stuff, the ability to come on and join an organization to lead their innovation and digital construction kind of contact efforts me is kind of not something comes up every ⁓ you every or every year even. There's a very finite amount of those opportunities across the industry that come up. And then at the end of it too, the people are awesome. So I got to meet with a lot of the people at Palmer Low ⁓ it changed kind of my my thought process. I was like, look, I didn't get to stay at a tech company through an acquisition or an IPO. I didn't I didn't build my own either. But learned a lot of valuable skills I think that helped me and ⁓ team kind of what they're building right now got me excited as well and I want to contribute to that growth and also help kind of set up for the next five to ten years. So I don't know if gives you
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. Ma maybe just one follow up.
Luigi La Corte: Hamano's also very tech forward too. It's like yeah, a bit of a tech company within a construction company. But they're they're very switched on. I'm sh as I'm sure Hamad could attest to.
Hammad Chaudhry: I I I really love kind the culture and the the organization has made, which is refreshing. think you guys have probably seen this with some of the clients you have. I don't really think an uphill battle of arguing why technology is valuable at all at Palmer Low. ⁓ The company knows that down and bottom up. ⁓ Everybody's got an appetite it. So ⁓ definitely makes my life lot easier. and And that culture is something again I can't take can't kind of highlight enough, right? It takes a long time to build a culture, ⁓ a lot of energy to keep it as well. And a company to go sixty plus years and maintain kind of that entrepreneurial spirit ⁓ and your point, Luigi, have that for thinking of what tech is where we need to go. makes it somebody like me easily ⁓ get along with people and the business and ⁓ find that passion.
Luigi La Corte: Have you guys looked at like obviously you're looking at co it sounds you're looking at copilot? Have you looked at enterprise licenses for Chat GPT or Cloud?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. So I'm just gonna caveat, man. We've got a good strong AI team. so ⁓ guys are running circles around anything I can talk about AI. Happy introduce you to those folks later on too if you want to really nerd out. But Luigi, know this as well as anybody. I'm not a deep, deep tech guy. I worked in the computer vision startups, all that, but I don't actually know the depths of of the technology terms of creating it, putting the guardrails or all that kind of stuff. But in terms of investment, we do have Microsoft and we do have kind of m365 premium does give you access to Seoul, whatever the newest model is for ChatGPT, and then also you get Claude and Cowork. So we have access to those across the enterprise and that's available on you know if you want it or not. But if you're just at all the employees, everybody has M365 kind of with the Microsoft Copilot.
Luigi La Corte: I see. And that I mean when you justify that investment, know to your point earlier on, you're not really looking at dollars and cents, but earlier on when I was talking to some of the large GCs in Canada, there was a lot of anger around their business model, how expensive it was. There was a question of whether people would be able to get value, whether would be hallucinations. I mean, could you walk us through how you think about that justification? I know you say, well, everyone's using AI, but at the end of the at the end of the day, you have fixed resources. You can only invest in so many tools. How do you decide what makes the cut and and what you know, what doesn't? y ⁓ sure I'm sure you're making those decisions, or at least you're part of making those decisions. But how how do you guys think about that when you have fixed fixed resources?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah. Yeah, just to clarify it, is definitely a ROI on some of the business cases, right? So it's not like not of them will be ignoring ROI. But then places where it's just table stakes like we were talking about earlier. So depending on the case and where that fits in is kind of the key thing. But you're thinking about as a large enterprise, you're investing millions of dollars. Of ⁓ as a prudent financial kind of you're gonna ask if I'm putting
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. Okay.
Hammad Chaudhry: money in what am I getting out of it? so that's a reasonable kind of question to have. And has a clear answer on that except for specific use cases. So if we focus in on looking at maybe a good one I across Parmula, which is ⁓ managing the logistics and some the equipment and all that kind of stuff, it's very, very easy to quantify you know what you were spending, know what your wasted resource was, your downtime idle time, aggregated costs, so on so forth, and then you can see kind of how that rolls up. So can do a very clean ROI calculation. That's where business case kind of makes sense to do. And that will people identify is this something we're gonna say, you know, we're spending and we're recovering Y, ⁓ or is it the as giving people again like the modern version of an iPad or a cell phone or a laptop? Those things can only happen any organization if they go through that process of identifying the business process mapping, the workflow, the business case and all that. my intent wasn't to say there's no ROI. There's definitely ROI depending on that use case and how you're looking at it. But also not one size fits all because if you just looked at it through the lens of ROI, then you you're out on a larger opportunity as well. Now there is going be waste. ⁓ You're testing out new that may not be proven at scale. And that's a realistic understanding business needs to have. I think people forget whether you're an architectural firm, an engineering firm, construction firm, a firm, you have already. Otherwise none of would be talking about some of the things we talk about. There wouldn't be this movement towards lean or ⁓ digitization or any that. ⁓ There's a lot waste in the business. And the ability to up that waste and capture that value or block the leaky bucket, you want to call it, has a meaningful impact ⁓ on the process. Profitability. just there's many places you could start. Where do you start and how do you start to figure it out and prioritize on that? So, ⁓ you Luigi, think ⁓ depending on the company and the contractor or or their culture, ⁓ they're gonna have different approach. But you cannot blame CFOs because for the past ten year their IT and tech bills have been going through the roof, right? If you look at year over year increase, it's kind of ludicrous, ⁓ it kind of makes ⁓
Mike Powers: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: so being to justify to CFO or equivalent, the board the executive team, why you're spending so much more than you were ten years ago, five years ago, and what is difference in output isn't unreasonable. But sometimes not just gonna be we spent, you know, five hundred thousand and we saved a million. Other times it might be look had to spend that money because our people needed the tool. And if we didn't have that, maybe didn't attract the right kind of talent. Maybe we wouldn't be able to have the leaner team that we have to manage the risk as appropriately and so on and so forth.
Luigi La Corte: If you can
Andrew Zukoski: I'd to know I hear a little bit about this from Luigi, but on the front end of projects, sort of call it pre-cost certainty, like design phase, pre-construction, that sort of thing. like what are the trends that you and Palmerloe are seeing in Canada? what are new owner demands that are coming in? Like what's what's new and on the front end of projects?
Mike Powers: Mm-hmm.
Hammad Chaudhry: Well, it really ⁓ well pre is is fun, right? Pre construction is where I think ⁓ to your both of guys' focus points is a lot of energy is going into it. and it's something that's obvious now, but years ago or or several years ago maybe it wasn't as common ⁓ to think about pre con. the rise is hard to ignore. So why is there such a rise pre con? It's because clients
Andrew Zukoski: Besides join, obviously, and provision.
Mike Powers: huh. ⁓
Hammad Chaudhry: And customers are understanding that there's a value to be able to figure out a lot of the issues that you typically would wait until construction gets going. I think there ⁓ an that shifted across the board from clients saying, okay, we know earlier engagement is better for us, but maybe not as clear for every type of client what would be the right way to pull that off. If you're a kind of client or federal or something within that regard. have a lot more flexibility potentially with the size of the projects you're building to go for more integrated contract IPD, design build, so on and so forth. But if not, say you're a private kind of client, you're competing a marketplace with other developers and real estate and you're competing to get to capital, what does it come back to? the internal rate of return, right? So are you gonna be able to get better access to capital just by saying you're using more technology? necessarily. But you're able to kind of prove out what kind of contract type you're using or accelerated construction delivery through schedules and whatnot, there will an easier way for you to be able to get that financial backing as well. And so pre-con a really, really critical role on that. the estimating side I think, you know, to people in industry get it, but it's the lifeblood of any construction business. If you don't have estimating, you have anything. you to be able to qualify the that you're bidding, ⁓ make sure makes sense, the risk profile, and having the that are in the market today, it just makes that much more sense for us to be able to focus on, ⁓ you know, looking different cost estimates, going through like class five all the way down to class one, whatever you want to call it, being able to do and ⁓ analysis for different options owner may be looking at very, very quickly, and ⁓ also making sure that. lines up with your ability to execute. How do you plan schedule, logistics, subcontractor supply, all that kind of stuff? So I the the shift is that on the public side, there's a lot of money coming in, a lot of investment coast to coast. And they're gonna potentially looking at some of these digital delivery models or frameworks and asking for that more. On the private industry side, think it's hard to paint with one brush because of how different the vertical Are like if you're in the data center space right now, they want to get it done quick as possible. will potentially pay you a premium if you've got ⁓ needs, and methods or tech to do that. Yeah. But residential, mean, competing in such a tight capital market with you know as much ability to up front, so you've got to come up with creative ways to work with your contractor partners. And I mean, shameless pitch for Palmerlow but that's why.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. The to go fast. Mm.
Hammad Chaudhry: I'm excited too is because they cover those markets and ⁓ you the ability with helping you in design or pre-con estimating, value engineering, all that kind of stuff.
Luigi La Corte: Hamad, you've been obviously within tech, you've been within a GC. I'm sure when you were a tech company, you're saying, man, I wish we could just sell more product. And I'm sure as a GC, you're asking, I wish there was more ROI. Do you think if I if you had to choose, do you think GCs don't purchase software fast enough? Or do you think tech companies aren't providing the ROI that they're that they're advertising? If you had to choose one.
Hammad Chaudhry: I love reductionism.
Luigi La Corte: Ha ha.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah, good answer.
Luigi La Corte: option C, neither.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, no, I I don't think one size fits all Luigi. It really doesn't. I'll you an anecdote. This won't answer your question, but I'll give you a good story. When I out, I was really thinking BIM was change the entire industry. And my first project I worked on, we had ⁓ one of best kind VDC projects at that time in the company. Then I moved into special projects, so was r you know running maybe to seven projects at one time. They're very fast paced. Some of my projects are three weeks, four weeks long. was no time ⁓ value in being able to bring in in example BIM and VDC modeling reality capture because by time already wasted too where the field would have been able to build, figure out, coordinate, and move forward, ⁓ and we would have hit our schedule, even if we had to rework a few things. So my point there being it's hard for us to look the one lens, we really really look at every individual project, and based on that, it makes sense whether or not certain technology is too fast, too slow, where the value is gonna be. And sometimes hard for the people on construction side across the board because not just one type of makeup on construction companies either, right? You've got PMs, you've got supers, a lot of different personalities, even in those two personas. You've got the kind of like myself, you've got the executive team, you've got quality health. Safety. You've got so many different types of people and personas and focus points within contractors. And same thing on the tech side, it depends. Some contract, I mean, some startups will are honest. They're brutally honest their own detriment sometimes. Others will promise the and figure it out once they get contracting dry, right? They're like, now we got to figure out how to deliver it. So same thing on the tech it's really hard to paint it with one brush. It comes down to ⁓ the ⁓ the viewpoint of the founder, the culture and and what they can do. I'm I couldn't give you option one or two, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a ⁓ a picture. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: That's okay. It's it's it's a good it's a it's a good discussion. I mean, ⁓ I like I sometimes I sometimes find people saying, you know, especially in pre-con, like, hey, I I cannot adopt your tool. I'm too busy. I'm too busy. Great. This is it's even better. You should hop on a call and we'll specifically show you how I'm gonna make you less busy. I I at least look, like I think every company is different, every general contractor is b different. Some are really good at buying software, some aren't. And I'm not saying, ⁓
Mike Powers: Okay.
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ you know provision scope agent obviously is the best tool ever but there there's obviously some capacity that needs to be allocated to vetting and adopting technology and I like obviously to your like to your to your credit Hamad this is the thing that you did at Eliston. You have a lot of work at Al at Eliston obviously but Hamad set up the the tech accelerator where companies would effectively pitch to Elliston hey we want to pilot we want to partner with Elliston very deeply. and then that gave ⁓ that gave Elison ⁓ obviously this like wider purview into the tech ecosystem, but it was a different context here. I'm not just purely trying to get you a pilot. We want to partner with you. So wish everyone had that capacity because some GCs are like, I I'm busy writing scopes. I can't buy your scope writing tool.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah. I mean I I get that. Like I while we've been on this, I've gotten two pitches for new payroll systems, like have come into my inbox while we have been on this call, and maybe I could save a little bit of money, but nobody ain't nobody got time for that. doesn't it come does it come down to like where that like tinkering and exploration time happens? Like it sounds like Elliston resourced it centrally. Many companies actually resource it at the project level.
Mike Powers: Switching payroll.
Andrew Zukoski: Where there's like there's a little bit of time and you got some of you have certain certain individuals that by personality or inclination like kind of want to check things out and you route things to them and then they try to fit it in on the project. But that makes it like there's good and bad to both side. On the corporate side, like, well, now you're a little further from particular projects, which is where the rubber meets the road in most innovations. ⁓ and inside of the project, it's like, well, yeah, you're closer, but at the same time, like If the owner makes a big change and you're under the gun for time, like no, nobody is adopting new technology until that's done. And so finding the time availability is much harder.
Hammad Chaudhry: mean, everybody's their own approach, but I can give you the feedback based on my experience and what kind of helped out. the first thing is you gotta be looking at it through lens of a relationship, not any individual one project. gotta invest in the relationship if you're trying to bring technology in. So if you've got it through lens of a large contractor I am now or or where I worked previously You can do top down, how well is that gonna be received in the field? Or you can decentralize it to your point and have it coming from the field, but then how well is the corporate and IT and innovation team going to react to it? the first thing is being able to really create and trust so that there's an idea at the periphery ⁓ on the site, ⁓ you're able bring that in and help support it along. Or ⁓ if something coming from up top, you know, you've got right relationships to be able to the right kind of fit to make sure that you're testing. it in a good environment or type of project. And of we did with my previous team that helped out with a lot of the kind of movement adoption was we said we don't expect you a PM or super ⁓ or as the CEO CFO or whatever executive role you have to be an expert in We have people on our IT team, on our cyber team, our data team, our construction tech team, take care of that part for you. But are the expert in your kind of domain. So that's matchmaking kind of we started to create wasn't to create just committee for the sake of a committee. It was to bring in right people so we could surface these ideas. Sometimes it would be ⁓ with project context. Actually a of time it would even like the Louis. Kind of example that he brought up. had no project in mind at the time. Instead, what we tried to do was just get the right people from the field all the way up to the C suite to able to look at it and think through that business process. And then we can help as those matchmakers to say, guys, maybe over the five years or ten years we've had X dollar of rework or insurance claims or whatever it may be. And then you know the PM might jump in and say, Yeah, actually, you know what? On my past. Four jobs, this has been a big issue. And the CFO might jump in. Actually, you what? I've been seeing this on our balance sheet. then maybe a different department jumps in. So there's one size fits all. I know I use that word a lot ⁓ because isn't. ⁓ You've to get down to the people, you've got to make them trust you, you've got to have a relationship, and then when you bring these kind of projects in, it makes it all a lot easier to scale and deploy. Now, if a tech vendor, how do you actually capitalize on that? And that's where got hard, is because some people don't have those relationships. Even if they're in a corporate role. so you could get the strongest champion, but see no adoption. And the field may be the voice innovation for a lot of smaller contractors, but they have way to scale it because they're only on one project, right? So I think if if looking at it through that lens for me, is you can't take a shortcut building a relationship. You cannot get away from the You have to be in the field and working with those people, and you've got to spend time with executive team. and the other corporate departments at the end of the day all those folks coming together is what's gonna happen or gonna make that shift happen, right, in the way that they do business. ⁓
Andrew Zukoski: It's interesting. Do you guys buy software at the project level or is it at the or do you buy technology at the project level or is that the corporate level? Because in many ways what you're describing is a it rhymes with like a more traditional enterprise sales process where you have to your arms around ⁓ a complex organization and understand the organization and the different needs of different people and have like trust in a relationship and the right aspects the message communicated to a bunch of different stakeholders and that ⁓ you you were on the you were on the software side, like coming from the software side, that can work and it's great, but it's a it's a lot of it's a lot of work. ⁓ there's a lot of time and effort that has to go into that and it can be economical if it to sort of a durable and sizable like commitment and investment in a solution. But if it if you have to go through all that ⁓ to capture first few projects and there's nothing that.
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah.
Andrew Zukoski: the tech company can end up in trouble.
Hammad Chaudhry: ⁓ that that's why, you I think it's so tough to be a startup in our industry is because there is I mean you get lucky honestly, like I've seen that happen where they get the right relationship at the right time and they just kind of get that enterprise wide. But you can't bank that luck. ⁓ You've got to look it to your point as in an enterprise approach a project approach. Some of the startups we used work with and still kind of keep in touch with, I would purposely say look, ignore the folks like us for now because you're gonna have a lot more success on the mid-size and smaller market they don't have as much bureaucracy and requirement, they don't have that overhead, they don't have that legal cyber requirement as as heavily. So get quicker adoption, faster thing, but you're have to call a thousand companies to get potentially the same amount of revenue as you would from ten. but at least you you keep moving to your point, cash is coming the business, you're showing the right growth metrics and so on so forth.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah.
Hammad Chaudhry: other times you're ready for that bigger market, ⁓ That's gonna have to shift and you understand that the sales cycle is really, really, really gonna be longer than some of those smaller GCs and contractors. If you at statistics from like I think it's Sales Institute of America or something like that, don't quote me on that, is typical across all is nine touch points for like enterprise level sale. And most people or most companies give after a four. Sometimes. so construction is probably 3, 4x the amount of touch points required for that kind of sale or growth in my perspective. And so Andrew, like you want to do it quicker, you go downstream into the smaller side of the market, but then you've got a thousand folks you've got to try and sell to, or if you go way longer time to burn, maybe you'll get one to ten kind of customers on that front.
Luigi La Corte: Mm-hmm. Hamad, I know we're ⁓ we're we're appreach ⁓ approaching the end of the hour. Are you up for a quick lightning round? Just a couple of questions. Answer as quickly as possible. All right, let's do it. Okay, one American general contractor you would want to J V with at Palmerlock?
Hammad Chaudhry: Absolutely. Let's go.
Mike Powers: Okay.
Hammad Chaudhry: look, there's a lot of great American contractors, but you ⁓ I've I've got really good friends at DPR, so I'll give a shout out to Hanu at DPR. Yeah.
Luigi La Corte: Heavily caveated answer.
Andrew Zukoski: Yeah, many of your friends are G American general contractors.
Luigi La Corte: K D P R Overhyped Software Category.
Hammad Chaudhry: Oof would say that's man. I don't say it's pre con, but right now a lot of precon. Right I'm j but ⁓ well it good because there's a big problem there. But ⁓ I don't know if overhyped. Maybe maybe it's the BIM side of things at this point.
Luigi La Corte: ⁓ my god, everyone says free con. Everyone says free con right now. Mm. okay, underhyped software category.
Hammad Chaudhry: Underhyped is the boring stuff, I think, in the background. So like looking at modernized ERPs or financial management systems or some the things that are the backbone of any big corporation? I think that would be underhyped right now.
Luigi La Corte: maybe ⁓ wave a magic wand. You can you can buy one software instantly. it could be a name or a category. W which one is it?
Hammad Chaudhry: I can't give you a good answer on that 'cause it's too tough 'cause there's so many different kind of business units and business lines. yeah, I think if I could it'd a FinTech company maybe.
Luigi La Corte: Mm. Mm-hmm. which subcontractor do you admire that you know you work with that Palmer Low why?
Hammad Chaudhry: There's lots of sub ⁓ trade partners that we have coast to coast. don't know if there's one that sticks out. I'm ⁓ to get out there and meet more of ⁓ as well. So I I can't give you a full full point perspective on right now. ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Yeah, it's it's probably a a tough question to ask given that you're leading you're ⁓ an executive at Mark.
Andrew Zukoski: Which of your children do you love the most?
Hammad Chaudhry: Yeah, of ⁓
Luigi La Corte: Which of your subs do you hate and you never want to work with? Again, I'm kidding. amazing. Hamad, thank you so much for the generosity with your time. Really appreciate your perspective on obviously how you run tech implementation, how you think about it, the strategy of it. It's super tough. but obviously Pomerlo is very lucky to have you. Thank you so much, Hamad. We appreciate you.
Hammad Chaudhry: Ha ha ha. I thank you all very much and have a great day, everyone.
Luigi La Corte: Yeah yeah, thank you.
