TRANSCRIPT 🔗
speaker-0: Hey, it's Jim Christian. Welcome to Behind the Barricade. This one's a little personal for me. Our guest is named Danny Ornstein. And Danny and I go back several years, maybe longer than we really want to admit. But it was so good to have Danny on the podcast. Danny is the senior manager of real estate at Element, and Element is a very exciting company. If you don't know about them, check them out. They're a great company with lots of Great things happening. But his title really doesn't come close to covering it. He was the first head of development at WeWork when they were building 3,000 square feet of office space every single week. He's also worked with AZOP and Kate Spade, and he's helped many brands get started in the North American market. And we're so grateful that Danny was on the podcast today. Danny's gonna tell you about the day the team stopped accepting ten dollars a square foot for hardwood floors. Just because that's the number. And what happened when they went and found the real number. He's gonna walk you through something he calls the RFI speed dating, pulling a stalled project out of Procor, getting everyone in one room, and knocking out weeks of back and forth in an afternoon. And he's got a line that his boss at Kate Spade had, seven words that I promise will change how you look at a stressful deadline in a project. If you manage projects, this conversation is for you. Now let's get onto it. Hi, I'm Jim Christian. Welcome to Behind the Barricade, a podcast dedicated to exploring productivity in construction. Our research shows that for a couple of decades, productivity's been flat, and the whole idea behind this podcast is to have real life conversations with people that are really working on construction in the field. And I am just so excited today to have Danny with me. Danny and I go back more years than we want to maybe say, but Danny is the senior manager of real estate at Element. And Danny, again, so excited that you're here with us. I know you have a lot of wisdom that you're going to be able to share with our audience. So thanks for coming to the podcast today.
speaker-1: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
speaker-0: You're welcome. Danny, for those that don't know you, could you give us a background on how you got into construction and what your journey's been like up to this?
speaker-1: Point. Absolutely. My background's in architecture. I went to school for architecture and graduated in 2008, which was arguably one of the worst years in recent history to enter the industry. I at the time was looking desperately for a firm that was doing interesting work in the States and had kind of run into a brick wall and was actually getting ready to move to China, where there was an opportunity during the Beijing Olympics to take on some work and kind of last minute. ended up working for a firm that's based in Brooklyn, New York, that at the time was working primarily in retail construction. Their big client at the time was American Apparel, who was building at their peak about 50 stores in a year. So it was quite a robust pipeline. And that really started me on a trajectory of construction project management, particularly in retail and consumer services, that has kind of stayed with me throughout my career. American Apparel, for those of you who are familiar with the brand, stopped business quite abruptly. My predecessor at that firm was one of the co-founders of WeWork and I was able to reconnect with him. And titles are a little funny when you're early on at a company, but one of ⁓ the first heads of development for We Work and oversaw their first quarter square feet of construction while they were just kind of getting off the ground. So very exciting time. We'll probably talk a little bit more about that later. But then went on after that to work in-house for a number of brands on a blend of Construction, design work, real estate. So for Kates Bade, New York, I led Aesop Skincare's North American Development for a period. Helped a lot of brands with their first location, particularly in the healthcare services space, getting off the ground, learning the ropes of what it takes to build a facility. Started my own co-working space with a colleague from WeWork, which was an interesting experience. And then most recently have been working in luxury fashion. So I worked for A brand called Kate that was doing global expansion. And then, as you mentioned, joined Element, which is the first consumer package goods brand that I've ever worked with back in February of this year.
speaker-0: What a journey. I knew some of that. I didn't know all of it. That was quite a journey. What drew you to architecture initially?
speaker-1: Yeah, I have to credit my parents for noticing an aptitude for, I guess, putting things together and taking it apart. I was deep into Legos when I was a kid. Okay. And like many architects I suppose. And got a nudge to start working in an architecture firm when I was thirteen years old. And I use the term working maybe a little bit loosely, but at the time I was organizing carpet samples and it was during a period where they still ran blueprints on ammonia machines. So I was in a closet kind of running. running blueprints and spent every summer basically from there forward working in architecture firms, learning AutoCAD and kinda cutting my teeth in the industry. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. There's maybe something about child labor in there, but ⁓ we'll we'll let that slide. That's not what
speaker-0: 13. isn't insinuating at all. Were either of your parents in this industry at all, or is this out of the blue
speaker-1: At all. No. My father was a therapist and my mother runs a a marketing agency. So yeah, nothing to do with architecture at all.
speaker-0: Two good skills to have in construction though, therapy.
speaker-1: Certainly. Yeah. There's a lot of emotional hand holding and construction for sure.
speaker-0: And having
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that marketing background to know that's awesome. That's so good. As I say, I knew some of that story, but it's fascinating. All that you've done in your career, it's great.
speaker-1: Yeah, I'm really grateful for the ride that I've been on. I've been able to work with a lot of brands that have all kind of shared the common thread of being really design minded and thoughtful about the way they present to consumers. And yeah, it's been a great experience.
speaker-0: That's good. That's cool. Well, Danny, you have seen lots of projects and you've been involved with them in various stages or saw them from cradle to grave. But I think you may have a project you want to refer to as far as when you saw productivity working well on a project. So be really curious to hear your story about when productivity really worked in a project. What did you see? What did you experience?
speaker-1: Yeah, I'll actually flash back to some of my WeWork days where productivity was kind of paramount. We were at the time building about 3,000 square feet per week of office space. And this is including demolition, sometimes with permits, other times without. We were running a little bit fast and loose, but I think the real thing that drove a lot of that productivity was an interest in being curious and critical about processes. And I think we can talk about it a little bit more about where the industry is today. But at the time, it was about poking holes in ways of working, existing structures, what was driving costs and doing your own research. I think the CEO of the company was really interested in understanding the why of why things cost as much as they did or why things took as long as they did. So we would initially come to him with at the time, as an example, installing wood floors was ten dollars a square foot. It was industry accepted. That was just kind of the the number that everybody ran on. And we would then go into a very deep dive of calling every wood flooring manufacturer that we could get our hands on, pricing out playwood for a substructure for our underlayment, understanding how many man hours it took and actually mapping timelines for each hundred square feet of floor that we were laying down so we could arrive at the real cost of what it took to get there. I think In projects today, asking your GC to do that is probably a big S and not something that most GCs will agree to. But what it allowed me to do in my professional career is come to the table with an understanding of what it takes to get something done and be able to poke those holes and really press when we're given just a kind of carte blanche understanding of here's where the industry is and here's what it takes to get something done. We at the time just again in the interest of flipping things on its head and understanding what could be possible, saw a lot of limitations in some of the structural pinnings, underpinnings, I guess you could say, of general contractors where they were really kind of bogged down with paperwork and administrative work and overhead. And we took a GC in-house and brought on a a full team that could self-perform work. And that also really ramped up productivity. I think Again, that was an education for all of us, the upsides and downsides of of running an organization. But I think it allowed us to understand what was possible and where those real kind of roadblocks would take place. And that served the brand as it got much larger and wasn't able to run on a kind of scrappy in-house construction team to know when they went out to GCs, where the limits were and how hard they could push.
speaker-0: Wow. You're a a paradigm breaker. Several paradigms by the sounds of it.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. It was it was a really great experience. And I think for now it has that same kind of mentality has stayed with me and has put me on a course where when I get into projects, I'm constantly evaluating what tools and ways of working and kind of organizational structures are serving both me and the project. I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Procor, which I'm sure many of your listeners use, which I think On one hand is great for paper management and allows everybody to kind of stay on the same page, but it also creates a kind of atmosphere of paper trail and of needing to document every single thing. And when you are working on high-paced projects that are needing agile decision making and need to move quickly, a productivity tool on one hand can be kind of anti-productive on on the other hand. Right. And I think understanding when you go into projects and also knowing your partners and what tools they like to leverage, being able to evaluate those things critically is really a good kind of boost to productivity.
speaker-0: So have you found any wisdom or any rhythm to how you use those tools to get productivity and how to stop the use of them when it's slowing things down or the grind is just too much glue on the wheel, if you know what I mean? Like it just sometimes what's been your magic to that?
speaker-1: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll guess reference a project which I recently completed for Element. So we just opened a project called Salt House, which is a bit of a consumer facing space in Big Sky, Montana. It has a tasting room and a wellness facility and kind of co-working space. We were on a very fast track to get the project open. The brand as a whole meets together two times a year, one of which is in the middle of the summer, around an event called PBR, which is the professional bull riding. Tournament, which the brand is a major sponsor of. We actually have a bull for the brand that participates in the event. And outside of the rodeo, the brand meets together as a kind of team building time. So we were looking to leverage the space for this kind of landmark event that we have as a brand. The date was really non-negotiable and we needed to be in the space. There wasn't any real way around it. I
came on the project after it had been underway for a little while. The team had been in place for, I think, nearly a year at that point. And I was sensing that things were running a little bit more slowly than they needed to be to be able to hit this date. And it just gave me a moment to look at the teammates, see who was kind of on the team, how they were working together, where there were things that were getting a little bit gummed up. And I noticed that RFI's submittals were a real challenge to the project. We ended up doing a sort of charrette almost like a speed dating RFI process when I came on to just kind of knock out the low hanging fruit as quickly as we can. And that was taking it out of the ping ponging back and forth through Procore, waiting for the formal response to say revise and resubmit or whatever it was that then inevitably pushes things down the road another week. And it's just about taking things offline and using it as a place where you store your answers rather than where you derive your answers, I think. Good and yeah.
speaker-0: Vince.
speaker-1: I found that was a real boost to the project. We were able to move a lot more nimbly and yeah, we continued using it in that way throughout the rest of the project and things I think sped up quite a bit as a result. And ⁓
speaker-0: We have this line at Cornerstone where project managers, not project witnesses. And what our experience has been is sometimes these tools really can move people to be more project witnesses than project managers. It's checking the boxes, getting it out of your box, into this next person's box, but really not getting a solution for the project. We need to be focused on the project and the success of the project. So That was cool. How did you do that? Like when you came in, you got a team that may or may not have known you very well. How did you set the tempo or change that to thinking? Did you have a in person meeting? Did you hold a multiple calls? How did you s shake the snow globe if you want to call?
speaker-1: The visualization. Hopefully, it wasn't shaking the snow globe too much. I hope that I entered those first conversations with a decent amount of humility and just kind of acknowledging that there's a lot of context behind what's been done so far. I think in any project, the team wants to be seen for their efforts and want to be seen for the hard work that's going in. I think the first step is just acknowledging that, hearing independently from those groups what their pain points have been, where they've felt. a little bit tied down or what they wish was different. And then really a kind of meeting of the minds with everybody and seeing how we can all get together and maybe not shake things up, but how we can make some nudges that work for everybody's benefit. And then I think just a re-clarification of goals and making sure that everybody's aligned around the same expectations, making sure that the North Star is the same for everybody and
really focusing on that. And how do we all achieve that in a way that results in the least amount of hair loss and one of our teammates had a great line that I plan to use for the rest of my life, which is I wanna make sure that at the end of this we can all send each other Christmas cards and feel good about it at the end of the project. So yeah. Just making sure that you're approaching it with a soft touch and that everybody's really bought into what we're trying to do collectively. Yeah.
speaker-0: There's this line I've heard I'd like that Christmas card one, the kind but not soft, right? Like Yeah. Yeah. How can you be kind but not soft and get done what needs to get done?
speaker-1: There you I would say part of what we were able to do there is understand as a group what was possible in that time and what we were willing to compromise on a bit. And I think, you know, we had a handful of punch list items that to folks who were deep in the project would certainly notice. But for an internal meeting and for our use of the space, I think we were able to pull off an installation that everybody was really happy with. And it was really great during that event to see our entire team in the space and enjoying it. So that was
speaker-0: Cool. How many square feet would that of space have been?
speaker-1: It was just under four thousand square feet. Okay. There's a bunch of program, as I mentioned, kind of fit into that space. So the main area that we were occupying, we had people on couches, sitting on the floor, sitting in chairs, standing up, out on the patio. It was really maxed out. But yeah, it was great to see everyone there.
speaker-0: Well, I've got a burning question that has nothing to do about the project productivity, but did you get to ride the bull or
speaker-1: Absolutely not. You could not pay me any amount of money to get on a bowl. It was pardon the expression, but my first rodeo and I man, the bravery or insanity, I don't know what you would attribute it to, but the amount of intensity of that sport is really remarkable. Yeah, but not for me. Thanks. I understand.
speaker-0: Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that story, Danny. And ⁓ that's a great segue into, you know, when in your experience when you've seen a project where it didn't go well or things were grinding a little bit, what story would you like to share about the elements of that and your experiences when what we need to be aware of when we see these kinds of things happening, that productivity may be slowing down?
speaker-1: I think the project that comes to mind is one when I was working at Aesop. We had again a kind of hard-ish deadline trying to get open for Christmas time, which is a high sales season. And the real driver was time. I think that was the priority. And we got so myopically focused on time, we lost sight of other parts of the project. ⁓ so what seemed to be productive and that we were all moving quickly was actually quite disorganized behind the scenes. We
lost track of budget. the schedule again in the interest of time, we set it up to be a kind of cost plus situation and weren't doing proper check-ins. I think some of the finishes kind of went by the wayside. And it comes down to just making sure you're in touch with everybody who's a partner on the team. And there may be a North Star around schedule, but understanding what you may be compromising or losing by achieving that timeline. In hindsight, I think more regular budget check-ins, making sure that As we were moving quickly, we knew what each of those discrete ⁓ even if it's just kind of a napkin sketch, here's a rough order of magnitude of what this decision's going to result in dollar wise, those kinds of check ins and just making sure that all aspects of the project are being considered, if even in a more informal way as you're pushing things ahead. What
speaker-0: been the rhythm of the financial review that kind of got away on you in this case? Like did it completely kind of go to the sideline because of the pressure on the timeline or how did that play out?
speaker-1: Yeah, it was kind of a perfect storm of a project. Okay. We had, and this has little to do with the day to day project management, but it was in Los Angeles at a time when there was a massive fire on the freeway outside of the building department, which shut down the building department for a month and slowed down review times. To answer your question, I think even a weekly or bi weekly check in would have been sufficient. Enough to say, here's where we're tracking. Maybe we need to slow down or adjust some portions of this or even just give the opportunity to report back to management and say, Here's where things are are not where we expected them to be. Are we still good to kind of keep on this trajectory that we're on in the interest of time and make sure again that all the incentives and goals are aligned across the both the organization and with the G C team. Yeah.
speaker-0: It can really distract if you want from some of the other key elements that need to be kept in check, right? That of course we have this one group that we work with and they often say, Well, it's time to turn on the fire hose, right? We we gotta hit the date and ⁓ I know when they say that it means we're gonna be spending some money very quickly.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean on that note, I think it's a wise move and one that I try to incorporate to keep a kind of last two weeks specific contingency in your budget just for whatever needs to get thrown at the project. If it's an extra cleaning or you know, an extra set of hands to help you install furniture, whatever it may be. Yeah, those last couple of weeks are definitely a spendy spendy couple.
speaker-0: Do you have any other insights when productivity slips? What can happen? The distraction of a time schedule? Is there anything else that you've seen in your career that says, ⁓ when I see these kinds of things, I increase my attention to a specific idea or topic?
speaker-1: Yeah, I think just going back to what we were discussing earlier, if you start to find submittals, documentation, drawing iterations in this kind of whirlpool of back and forth, you just need to pick up the phone. Like it just needs to be a moment where you get everybody together and say, Okay, I know that everybody's trying to go through their paces here and do what they need to do to get this across the finish line, but can we voice some of this over and then document it afterwards? That seems to kind of short circuit some of those instances.
speaker-0: It's been a common theme that we've heard ⁓ through the podcast and we've talked about it internally here at Cornerstone where if that email's bouncing back and forth more than twice, it's time for a call or face to face. Email wasn't invented for conversation. It was meant for in my opinion, at least meant for transfer of information, not have a conversation.
speaker-1: A hundred percent. And I would also say in addition to like waiting for those moments when things are feeling stressed, proactively going out, visiting sites, spending time with vendors and just getting on the same page, not just about the project, but also just human to human. Yeah. Is also a great way to make sure that you're all just working together and that everybody's kinda in the same boat and that interests are aligned. We
speaker-0: We sometimes can lose sight that we're building a space. We're not saving a life or doing surgery at times. We're building a space. Let's keep it real and I love that. Make it make sure we can all send each other Christmas cards.
speaker-1: I had a a boss back when I was working at Kate Spade and I was very stressed about a flagship project that we were working on and he took me aside and he's like at the end of the day, we're just putting dead cows on shelves. It's like Okay, I got it. That's a really good perspective.
speaker-0: Yeah. Thank you. Well, Danny, you you've had a lot of experience from multiple fronts and seats in a project, but I'm curious to explore with you what are you keeping an eye on right now? And what do you think we should be keeping an eye on as a industry when you think about productivity in construction project management? Is there one or two, or maybe it's just one idea that you're thinking about a lot or that you think we should be paying attention to as an industry?
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ this is probably not going to be a new new topic that you're covering, but I think AI has really impacted my work. Going back to the Element project, I'll just give you a quick anecdote of something a way that I've used AI in the past. We have this very beautiful ceiling installation right when you walk in the door, and it's five hundred individual five by five oak posts that are arranged in this kind of sinewy curvature. And it took so long to nail down what that curve was supposed to look like. And rather than going back to our fabricator and
having them use Grasshopper, other kind of slightly more antiquated modeling programs, I spun up a program using Claude that basically gave it the parameters, let me put in some sliders in there to say like what the curve amplitude was, the spacing, ⁓ what kind of height limitations we had, and was able to in real time model this fixture. a thousand times in the span of an hour. And it became such a time saver and way to align internally on creative. And it goes back to just what I was saying earlier about the tools that you're using and are they working for you or not. In a similar vein, I had a budgeting spreadsheet that I'd been using for nearly twenty years. And every time I opened it up, I was like, man, I really wish that I didn't have this four step process for logging every invoice. And, you know, just spun something up in AI really quickly that solved that specific problem for me and it's made my everyday workflow that much smoother. So I would say identify the pain points in your personal process. See what would make your life more enjoyable or less painful. Yeah. And then just go in with a basic prompt and see what you can get out of it. Sometimes it'll yield hours of frustration trying to like tweak a thing until you can get somewhere and other times you can get a product or a worksheet or a template made really quickly that will ultimately really impact your your personal productivity.
speaker-0: It's fascinating and changing so quickly, isn't it? Like it's hard to keep up to it. But you use the word earlier when you were talking you used the word curious. And I think ⁓ as an industry and as individuals, we just have to be curious about what is possible with AI and be careful that we don't get into a rabbit hole that takes hours and hours or days and days. But that example of the ceiling, how long would that have taken if It had gone through the normal process probably several days, if not longer.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think it's a mixture, right? Like take the technology upsides and make sure you're not losing sight of all the manual, hand holdy, personal parts of the business at the same time. Yeah.
speaker-0: Keep it in perspective that it's our tool. We're not its tool. Exactly. Yeah. I'm quite fascinated with it in how it can help us be better at communicating and free us up for impactful communication, being able to be a better leader because we're not spending time doing some of this work that AI can do. And I think that to me is one of the gifts of that technology. It should free us up.
speaker-1: Right. That's a good yeah.
speaker-0: To have more impact and influence on what we need to have impact and influence on. So it's an exciting time.
speaker-1: Yeah. Absolutely. I would say other ways that I have used it in the past and maybe some helpful tips for your listeners, just thinking about, to your point, ways that you're presenting data to your internal shareholders, to contractors, where budgets are sitting, how things are tracking, even potential sites that you might be scoping, being able to spin up a quick website that shows those side by side. I think that ⁓ there are some real opportunities in the way that we present information that Yeah, it can be a great tool for.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. We don't lose our role in it all. Of course. But it can really it can definitely be insightful. Well, Danny, I am just thrilled that you took the time out of your hectic schedule to take some time with me on this podcast. Thank you so much and appreciate your time. If people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way for people to reach out if they're interested in connecting with you?
speaker-1: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, very active there, so feel free to drop me a note. Would love to chat.
speaker-0: Yeah, amazing. You are an active LinkedIn person, that's for sure. Well, thanks again, Danny. Really do appreciate it. And thanks to all that are listening. And if you liked what you heard today, please leave a a comment, review on the platform you're listening to. It's how we are able to share this. You never know. There may be somebody that's entering into the project management world and construction that this conversation can help in the way that they perform. So please like or make a comment. We would appreciate that. At Cornerstone, we're kind of dedicated to creating a better journey for our clients, our staff, our project partners, and ultimately the world. And we feel this podcast is a way of doing that. So thanks for watching. Thanks, Danny, for being here and look forward to connecting in the near future. Be well.
speaker-1: Thank you so much.
speaker-0: Thanks, Danny. What a conversation. I loved it. There are three things that are gonna stick with me after this conversation. First is be curious about the number. Danny's story about we work digging at the number really stuck with me. We can do the work, just like they did. They found out how much the raw materials cost, how much the plywood cost, how do a labor study and really determine what the cost is, and it's certainly. Change the way they negotiate it. The second one is something's gonna go up on the wall here at Cornerstone. Procor is where you store the answers, not get the answers. When the RFIs and submittals are starting to ping pong and things are going in, but no decisions are being made, get in the room, voice it, then document it. That's project managers, not project witnesses. And the third, the Christmas card test. If you can't picture everyone on this project sending each other a Christmas card in December, something about how you're working together needs to change. And the last one, we're just putting dead cows on shelves. Keep it in perspective. Now, one small ask I have before we go. If you enjoyed this podcast, please like or subscribe or leave a comment wherever you're listening on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcaster wherever you're listening. That helps us get the podcast out, helps the algorithm, because we know there's a project manager out there right now that's got a challenge that they might find the answer in the podcast behind the barricade. So thank you for that. At Cornerstone, we're dedicated to creating a better journey for our clients, our staff, our project partners, and ultimately the world. And we feel this podcast is a way of helping the industry and the world. So thanks for listening. Can't wait to connect with you on the next podcast. Be well.