Construction Disruption

“I live along those lines of open innovation, and… you can learn something from anybody. Don’t let your ego or disposition get in the way. So, imagine, you know, like you know already what you have in your mind and the values you stand for. Plus, imagine you can also learn 20% of everybody around you. We would be unstoppable, right? So, this is the kind of industry I think we need moving forward....

“I think that’s the biggest opportunity for business owners. The candidates are out there; they want to work. It’s just what business owners are going to invest: the time, the energy, and the money to find them. There’s no better time in history to own and have a great company with a great team of people. It’s the most valuable asset you can have.” Matt DiBara, CEO of DiBara Masonry, and The Contr...

“The programs that exist are built by lenders. They’re not built to benefit the contractor. We are building the platform and programs by home improvement experts for home improvement experts so that the pain points of the dealer are getting solved, which is a completely opposite approach to how everybody else is attacking it.” Jennifer Lau-Hatcher, Chief Marketing Officer at 1 & Fund As home i...

“If you put a system in place that can nurture those opportunities carefully over time and know what to do with each opportunity at each moment in the customer journey, then you’re going to always have things happening, and you can organize your growth in a very efficient way.” John Lenker is the Chief Vision Officer at Lenker. Starting your own business is a tempting proposition for many skilled...

“I want to be known, so when people look back on what I’ve done, I’ve been there when they needed it the most. And that is why we’re here. We’re here to make a difference in other people’s lives.” Chad Dunlap, Public Speaker at Upshift with Chad, Business Development Manager with Frost Roofing Suicide is a dire problem in today’s society, especially in construction. Mental health often goes undisc...

   “There was no playbook for us to follow. It was just a few people sitting in a room trying to map out what the next steps would be. And that’s how we got started, and the rest is history.”       Brian Kronberg- VP of Development at Brightline, Founder of Amerified      While American railroads enjoy a rich history of passenger and freight travel, for decades now, the ca...

“It took me a long time to learn that all of those experiences, all of the suffering that we went through, helped to shape how I think about people and what it means to be someone who says, Yeah, okay, I think I can help fix that problem. I can’t solve global poverty, but can I help intervene so that one person doesn’t have to suffer the way they are right now.” Andrew Olsen, Senior Vice President...

“We’re really working toward this end-to-end solution where a contractor can start with their estimate, get to a budget, and then push all that information that they’re gathering during pre-construction out to the field to be able to manage projects more efficiently. So, a holistic sort of solution for our contractor.” Aaron Henderson, Strategic Sales & Product Marketing at STACK Construction...

“I love training. I like explaining and answering questions that my clients have and come to me with. It’s helping them structure their system in the way that’s going to give them the end results, the reports that are going to help them run their company more effectively, more efficiently, more profitably.”     Diane Gilson, President, Trainer, Consultant, Developer, and Author at Info P...

“Buyers don’t want to get pitched. They want to know they can trust you. They want to know that you understand what’s going on in their environment. They want to know that you actually can solve their thing, and they don’t want to make a mistake.”      Chris Duprey, Chief Customer Officer at Impact      Vulnerability and transparency are hard traits to display for all of us, mu...

“There are 10 billion face-to-face conversations in a commercial capacity between consumers and sales and service marketing people every single month. And I said, what if we could take all those conversations and make the offline world, the commercial world, as searchable and easy to analyze and understand as Google did for the Web?”       Sebastian Jimenez, Founder of Rillavoice  ...

“I’ve borrowed money from private guys, traditional guys, and hard money guys. You know, I’ve never had a loan managed this way. And as a builder, once I get over the fact you’re not just giving me the money and I get to do whatever I want to with it, this is a way to totally change the residential lending industry.”       Brad David, Executive Vice President of Development/Construction...

“Roofers protect everything you hold dear. It deserves respect and we have to start standing up and saying we are not just roofers. I deserve a professional credential that shows I am awesome and deserve to be hired.”       Jared Ribble, Vice President of Certification for NRCA and Director of the Qualified Trainer Program      A roof is an essential part of every home. Sure, t...

“Wool is just an awesome fiber, and we’re proud to work with it here in our facility, and we’re even more proud when we get it out to people and let them experience it. It’s rewarding to help people understand there are better ways to do things. And, you know, the built environment is changing rapidly, and that’s a motivating factor for us on top of the products that we make.”      Andre...

“Cash is the north star of your business. You can have all the profit in the world, but if you’re not converting that profit to cash, your business is going to nosedive quickly. You cannot stay in business if you don’t have cash. You can stay in business if you don’t have a profit.”     Shelby Ashley, Founder/CEO at Optimized Financial Solutions      In the world of finance, wh...

“I just want everybody to embrace health and safety as a tool of your business that’s going to make you money. And it’s actually going to improve the quality and the standard of your work and that, you know, you will attract really good people to your business if you have a reputation for safety.”       - Gavin Coyle, CEO of the Coyle Group      For many of us, health and safet...

“I hated watching a lot of these smaller companies losing money, going out of business unnecessarily time and time again. They just didn’t understand how to do the contractual part of the construction game properly. You can absolutely deliver a really, really good job, do a great, fantastic piece of work for your clients, and still come out at a loss because you didn’t manage it contractually prop...

“Selling is not an art. It is a structured science. Now, when it’s done right, it looks artful, but it’s not like this free form, like taking a blank canvas and painting a new picture for each customer. We can’t afford that inefficiency today. We need to have structures and processes to make us both more efficient and more effective in getting it done.”      -  Jim Pancero, Sales Speaker...

“There is a huge opportunity in the construction industry. I mean, it has such a big impact on the economy, the carbon footprint. There’s all sorts of opportunities. So, you know, whether it’s attracting, you know, great marketers, great technology individuals, people that want to work in the labor force, whatever.”      -  Tatsuya Nakagawa, CEO at Castagra, Host of the Specified Growth...

“A client said to Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘You know, of course, you’re famous; all your clients are rich.’ And he scowled and said, ‘I don’t care whether I’m doing a chicken coop. If the client is open to doing something really special, I’m in.’ He would have said it a little more elegantly, but that’s the way that I feel.” - David Applebaum, Owner of David Applebaum Architect and Host of American Man...

“Trying to track hours and production and try and keep ahead of where you're at on your project based on budget and when you're committed to be done… often you were three or four weeks behind in your reporting… and it just seemed like there were more jobs left at the end of the money than money left at the end of the job.” - Mike Merrill, Co-Founder of WorkMax and Host of The Mobile Workforce Podc...

“Private equity and tech are two things you got to watch in this space because they will upend it potentially over the next even, I mean, I know five years doesn’t sound like a long time, but I think a lot’s going to happen in the next five years.”  - Gregory Hart, President of PSMJ Resources   Listen in as Gregory Hart, president of Boston-based PSMJ Resources, shares his expertise in t...

“If you hear a smoke alarm, get out and worry about it being a false alarm later, come back in, laugh, cry, get angry about it. But you get to do those things now.”  - Derek Gruchy, Program Coordinator at Seneca College of Fire Protection Engineering Technology   Many of us might remember being taught to “Stop, drop, and roll” in school or being excited to get out of class for a fire dri...

“We just need to figure out how to work better with the world around us. I think these hemp materials, natural building in general, is a way to move towards that so we can both have our great comforts that we’ve become accustomed to and work in harmony with our environment.”   - Jacob Waddell, President of the Hemp Building Institute   Construction is a stubborn field, as most people kno...

“Someone’s home is their comfort zone, and it also provides them the ability to express themselves, their taste, their style. And a majority of people don’t know where to access or to get [design services] done, right? And the thought of contacting an architect or a builder can seem a little intimidating.” -  Jackie Mosher, Partner and COO of Dzinly.   Home remodeling has been a turbulen...