The Real Reason Construction Tech Dies in the Field with AJ Waters

When Leadership Ignores The Data

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In in fact, you can get all of the answers to align, you can get all of the requirement boxes to be checked, and you can still run into that executive that says, I don't care, choose the other system.

Meet AJ Waters And His Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:18

What is going on, LM family? I'm like extra, extra stoked because our guest today, I've been able to do some cyber stalking and seen his content on the TikTok and on the LinkedIn and in all the places. And we have never had a conversation before, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's not going to be amazing because he too is here or on a mission to leave the industry better than he found it. He's got a background in construction engineering, transitioned to tech, and it's interesting, right? There's a lot of, you'll know the guests that we've had have had transitions in their career. And he's had many, many failures, like many of us, and some successes that he's picked up along the way in which he uses and applies the lessons from those things to leaving the industry better than he found it. His name is AJ Waters, and there's a lot more to this gentleman, and we're going to get to know that here shortly. And if this is your first time here, you are listening to the Learnings and Missteps podcast, where you get a front row seat inside the head, between the ear look, and how amazing people just like you are sharing their gifts and talents to leave the world better than they found it. I'm Jesse, your selfish servant, and we're about to get to know Mr. AJ Waters. Mr. AJ, how are you doing, my friend?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

I am doing fantastic. It's a beautiful summer afternoon. What is there not to love about a day like today?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Man, for

Legos, Stadiums, And Love Of Building

SPEAKER_00 2:00

real. And I'm like geeking out over here looking at all the Lego sets. So I see Titanic, I see the Millennium Falcon, I think I see Optimus Prime, the Ghostbuster mobile, and the Back to Back to the Future. What was it called? The Son of a Gun. There you go, the DeLorean. And is that the Batmobile?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Oh my goodness, dude.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

You and so did you assemble, did you put those together? I did. Yeah. So I'm kind of a Lego nerd. It allows me to still build, if you will. And so it's one of my passions. And also a move a holic, if you can't tell, because most of them are movie related in this particular room. The shield and the hammer are Legos as well. And no way. Yeah. The shield's probably my favorite because it has straps and you can actually put it on, but it is heavy because it's all Lego.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

That's serious. Oh my goodness I didn't know it was so funny. If you're listening and you're not watching the YouTube version of this, he's got the Captain America shield and the Thor hammer, and those are both Lego kits as well. Dang, so you're like serious. How long did it take you to or which one was the most tedious?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Oh wow, that's that's a difficult question. It's actually the most tedious one is not in this room. The most tedious one is down in the basement by in our kind of sports bar man cave area, right? That is it's a replica of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium, and it's made off of a out of an off-brand Lego that's really small, and you build it in layers all the way up. But the reason it was most tedious is because out of the box it's wrong. And it always gave me such such grief being a husker that this this stadium build was incorrect. The inside bowl of the stadium is right, but on the outsides, east and west stadium are flipped. So if you look at this box in the store, I would walk by it and always complain. And my my wife finally got sick of it and just bought it for me and said, then rebuild it. And so I built it the right way architecturally, so that I have the real Memorial Stadium replica in my house, not the one that's out of the box.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

That's awesome. I'm assuming you didn't have to submit any RFIs for that.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yeah, yeah. There were definitely some major adjustments at the top. Luckily, they included way too many extra pieces in that particular set because I had to make some tweaks up around the roof when the thicknesses weren't right as you got up to the top layers. But yeah, it's in my opinion, it's much better than the version out of the box. But you're exactly right. There were a lot of change orders on that one.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

That's awesome. Oh, and I bet that just added to it. Like, okay, this isn't right. I gotta figure it out. And oh, okay, let me take it apart. Let me okay, this is good. It was it kind of just kind of hit and miss as you went through it.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, it was it was definitely a learning experience. And what what was great about it is it was right at the beginning of COVID, right? So my birthday was weeks after the whole world shut down, so it was like my it was my little game to play while I was sitting at home by myself just at the kitchen table, rebuilding this stadium, and I got into construction to build stadiums, like that was my major goal as a kid, and so I was doing it even in miniature.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Oh, that's awesome! All right, so did I hear right? Like you knew as a youngling that you wanted to get in construction and build stadiums.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah, so as a kid, I played with Legos all the time and I was constantly rebuilding the sets. And as I moved into middle school and high school and started playing sports, I would constantly sketch stadiums in class. Oh wow, I think you're supposed to be listening. I was doing my best, but I was always doodling and they were always stadiums, so I had all different kinds of high school through college stadiums that I would sketch out myself, and and I that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to build and design stadiums. So, what was it about stadiums that captured your interest? Well, so again, kind of growing up in Nebraska and being a Husker fan, I lived through the 90s of the Huskers, which many people will remember as the glory days. And I remember going to my first game with my dad and just that experience and that feeling. And I wanted to give that kind of feeling to other people, right? Like those are lifelong core memories that a lot of folks have of their first game with their parent, whether it's baseball or football or soccer or whatever it might be. And and there is nothing that I love more than watching a sporting event live. I don't care what the event is, I'll learn a new sport if I get to watch it live. And so that's what I wanted to be a part of. And plus, I played sports, so like it was tangential.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I had the privilege of playing our high school playoff game at the Mission Stadium, which is minor league baseball. And man, that field, I felt like I was walking on air, like it was not uh like your normal baseball field. Just I was faster. I could had another two inches on my vertical, like it was amazing. The dugout wasn't as impressive as I expected it to be, but getting on that field, man, definitely had a different feel. Uh yeah. And I can only imagine how much goes into that, right? Especially when they're like transitioning for a concert and all the different things that go on in a stadium. It's it's amazing to me how they can disassemble it, reassemble it, pop stings them, and then take them out. And or I think the last cool one that I was really fascinated with was it the Falcon Stadium that had like the closing the shutter, right? The roof that would close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's amazing what they do out there. Um, okay, so I'm assuming, all right, you were sketching, you had this thing, the experience, I totally get. And then you went, like, did you go to university and say, okay, I want to be in construction. This is the course, this is the track. Like, how did that play out?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

That's it's actually a funny

Told Not Smart Enough For Engineering

SPEAKER_01 8:33

story. So I was told coming out of high school that I wasn't smart enough to be an engineer. So I felt I went to a fallback plan and decided to go to school to be a coach instead. And to be a coach, you had two options. You were either really good at the sport, which I was never good at any of them, or you taught. So I went to be a math teacher. I was like, fine, I'll just teach math. I'm somewhat good at that, and I'll be a coach. And thankfully, after my the summer after my freshman year, I took an aptitude test, and it in fact said I would be a decent engineer. Plus, at the same time, my high school sweetheart had graduated. She decided she wanted to be a teacher too. I was good at math. Those two incomes didn't add well. Yeah, and so I decided to change majors. So I changed majors into into the school at university, switched to engineering, did a 3-2 program where I ended five years with a master's in structural engineering from the University of Nebraska. So got through it, ended up being smart enough. Yeah, it was all right.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

That's pretty damn smart, my man. It's interesting because I'm a ding dong. You probably know that. The listeners know that for sure. And when I was in high school, that was the message, Jesse. You you need to mechanical engineer. Over and over, I heard from my teachers and that you should be a mechanical engineer. And I'm like, and of course, when the adults asked me, like, what do you want to do? I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be a mechanical engineer. I didn't know what the hell that was. Like, I didn't even know what they looked like or what they did. But my experience was different, right? I got on a job site that summer and I was like, forget school, man. This is amazing. I'm gonna do this part because the classroom was torture for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, and and it's worked out, it was definitely a struggle, and I had a similar experience because it like my first internship as a design engineer. I was like, I really don't enjoy this, but I was minoring in construction management and I was loving that. So I by the time I graduated, I never actually got my stamp. So I'm not officially an engineer in the design sense, but I went straight into construction management and estimating and vertical build right out of college on the job site.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Yeah. Okay, so for the uninitiated, can you paint a rough picture of like the difference from the engineering, like intern, the type of work you did in the engineering internship versus construction management? Oh, yeah. Because for some people it might it sounds the same, but like it's different universe. We're gonna do the LM family member shout-out. And this one's like super, super fresh and a little bit unique because I got to have breakfast with one of our LM family members this morning, and Paul pointed out he was listening to one of the interviews. He's like, Jess, it takes me so long to listen to a whole interview. I'm like, oh my god, like am I am I just too verbose? He's like, No. I said, because you or your guest will recommend a book, or y'all are talking about a book, and so I pause the episode and I go and listen to the book, and then I come back. I was like, dude, that's like real commitment. I'm like, no, man, it's awesome. Like, I'm I just started making it a practice. So, folks, if you're out there, it's something to consider. And also, Paul, thank you, man. I super appreciate that you listen and then that you took the time to tell me about your experience with it. It's it's extra special to know that people are listening. And for the rest of you, you already know I love attention, I love getting feedback, I love the stars and the shares. And when you do leave a comment or a review, it gives me an excuse to shout you out in a future episode.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, and it it was interesting.

Design Office Versus Jobsite Life

SPEAKER_01 12:39

So, design, you're in a room crunching numbers, and you're drawing and you're you're sketching it out, and you're you're running the math, and and at the end, at the end of a design, somebody puts a stamp on it and away you go, right? And so I didn't quite enjoy sitting in a corner crunching numbers all day long. When it comes to the job site, or even just construction management in general, I I became an estimator, which sounds funny because I still crunched numbers, but every project was different, every drawing was different. You you got to go out in the field and do time studies, so you were literally building the thing, right? Versus just drawing it and wondering what it looked like someday. You were as an estimator, you were looking at 2D drawings, doing takeoff, putting prices to it, and then three months later, you were in the field doing a time study on the foundations in 3D, and you actually saw the stuff get built. And that's what was so cool about moving into construction from just design, nothing against design because that's awesome in and of itself. It just wasn't for me, I was more of a people guy.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Ah, yes, yeah. Important distinction. I I get to talk to parents every now and then about their kids getting into the trades because you know I'm a huge advocate for careers in the trades. I also know it's not for everybody, and for whatever reason, people want to be a welder, right? And I think it's just because it looks super cool, right? And I tell them, like, if your kid is like very social, being a welder is gonna be difficult for them. Like, why is that? So, well, it was difficult for me because the two days that I tried it, I had to have my hood down and weld, which meant I wasn't talking to people, I wasn't interacting with people, and it was the most miserable two days of my life, like besides valve tagging, right? Yeah, it I hated it, and looking back, it was because of the isolation. Like, sure, I was working on a big project, I was a helper and I was trying to learn this skill, but it was the isolation of being under the hood the whole time because I like the human contact, right? I like the the the arguing and the razzing and just the interconnectivity of working with other human beings, which is what I love, and I I think you you know this. Our industry can accommodate like a diverse range of personalities and mindsets. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

100%. Yeah, it did. It's so funny because I I'm right with you, huge advocate for the trades and people looking at construction. Because, like, where else can you go and put something together that for the next 500 years could impact the community around you, right? Whether it be a road, a pipe, a stadium, a building, like those things live on so much more past you. And I have yet to meet a construction person that won't point to something and say, I built that. You know what I mean? There's just so much pride in this industry, and and it regardless of your background or your personality or where you come from, that's a cool place to be when it comes to work every day.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. I think I was just on a call with Maya with the crew collaborative, right? So they do every so often they have these calls with the with a group of students. I think these were middle school students. And I'm like, look, if y'all get in trouble in class and and and you can't sit still, and you're always getting in trouble because you can't sit still and you got too much energy, construction, right? It just might be the place for you. Because for me, the like the most beautiful thing was it was the only environment where my natural energy wasn't a delta, wasn't a problem. Like, I I first job out of high school, nobody cared about how much noise I made, nobody cared about me climbing and like it was nobody noticed it. I was like, wow, I'm home. Like, what is this place? And more importantly, because of the physicality, the problem solving, right? Like my math, because I was I was good at math, it just engaged me in such a way that it was like, man, this is where I belong. And and I think we we don't spend enough time understanding how people or the conditions people mainly young people thrive in, right? Like if the classroom has been difficult, it's not that they don't have an aptitude to learn, it's just that the environment and those conditions aren't optimal for them. Unless, of course, they have a discipline problem, which by the way, I did also.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah, that sometimes gets itself ironed out in construction pretty well, too.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

For sure. Okay, so you got into the industry, you were on estimating, and my assumption is you've probably wore multiple hats over the years, yeah?

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, from from time to time we'd get to go out into the field and do a little bit of the work, or you do a lot of time studies in or or you'd work project controls or some scheduling, right, with the superintendent as you built out a project. So, yeah, there were a number of different hats that you got to wear and different processes you got to be a part of so that you could learn the ins and outs of not just estimating, but the build in general, like what you put together, how it went together in the field and what it impacted, and then how that all came back to inform the next

Becoming The Accidental Tech Expert

SPEAKER_01 18:34

estimate. And a lot of this I'm I'm dating myself. Like I was coloring drawings, right, and doing the takeoff by hand before you could do it on a computer. And and Excel we get to use every so often, right? But but my second day on the job as an official new hire past the internships, I got handed our first and only license of on-screen takeoff, which was a PDF markup tool on the computer. And they were like, hey, check this out. Tell us if it works, and if it does and it's better, we'll get more for everybody else and you can teach them. And I looked at the digitizer sitting next to me, and I colored up a PDF in like five minutes on my on my computer, and I was like, Yes, this is better. We're gonna go this route. And so so literally on day two on the job, I was handed like my first digital transformation, if you will, with just this one software that I had to then teach everyone else. So I became, as the new guy, I became the on-screen expert, which just meant I could color boxes on a PDF really well. And the next software that they gave me a year later was the invitation to bid software, right? So we started collecting some of these point solutions, and so by the time I was a couple years into my career, I was kind of a pseudo-it guy managing a couple of little softwares that back then they weren't nearly as complex and robust and platform-specific as they are today, but it was it was that first taste of what technology felt like.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Oh, and so so how was how did you reconcile the fact, like just the data to second day, first day, right? And now you're the SME on this brand new thing, and everybody looks at you and treats you like you're the all-knowing wizard, but you know, like, bro, I just started touching this yesterday. Like, how did you come to terms with that?

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, that it was an interesting place to be because you're exactly right. People come to you with questions, and what what I found out is I must have like a unique way to Google or something, because I just happen to find answers easier than other people. It's not that I was smarter than them, I just found it, right? Is all in a lot of times back to your problem solving brain. I I feel that a degree in engineering is simply a degree in problem solving, which is why pivots for engineers make so much sense because problem solving is is a premium skill, regardless of where you're at. And so that's really all it was was a figure it out mentality and and trying to go find and being willing to say, I don't know, but I'll figure it out and get back to you. And again, thankfully, the software was relatively simple. I mean, anybody who's used Bluebeam today or on screen takeoff, it's it's pretty straightforward. You created geometry and you color on top of a PDF. It it's not super complex, so there wasn't a lot to it. But to your point, many of these folks, right, barely typed with their Facebook. Fingers. So this was all new to them. And the more you could kind of walk them through how you just point and click and it follows along, the easier it became.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Yeah. Oh man, there's so much here, AJ. One of the I took a few night classes. I went to night school, right? As I was going through my plumbing apprenticeship, and the most valuable course I took was keyboarding. And the reason I say that is because when I got promoted to superintendent, I wasn't like I used my laptop. Like I used my computer. I would send emails. I would go into the drive and open up folders, which I thought all my peers, I was the youngest superintendent at the time. I thought all the other superintendents did it too, because we all had computers. And then the PMs were like, man, Jess, I love working with you. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like you send emails and you go into the drive. I'm like, well, yeah, we all have access. I don't, I don't get it. Like, you don't understand. The other guys don't. I was like, oh, so I had a just an advantage just because I was comfortable. And I think maybe one or two, maybe not, but I think the primary reason my peers or contemporaries at the time didn't use their laptops was because they didn't know how to type. It took so much longer for them to interface with it. So they just said, forget it, right? Give me, give me a helper, give me an assistant, and they'll do the the they're faster than me doing my chicken pecking. Like it was a simple, dumb thing that it made a huge, huge, huge impact on me. Now, you mentioned that maybe you Google better. And and I I I understand what what the thinking is, or I think I do anyways. And as it relates to problem solving, problem solving requires people to be resourceful.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Having access to resources is not the same as being resourceful. And I'm gonna say that it was probably your resourcefulness intertwined with your problem solving mindset that helped set the stage for you to be the optimal person for that role. How does that land with you?

SPEAKER_01 24:27

I mean, I'll take it. That is very kind of you to say you're you're probably in I would I would say you're probably right. Like it it just was a a perfect storm, if you will, of me being having just enough aptitude with tech because I'm right on the borderline Gen X millennial, right? So just enough aptitude with tech and just enough figure it out mentality that I was taught by my parents and in in my upbringing that that you're right. You just you go find the answer, regardless of what it takes, and regardless of what the resources are.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah, yeah. Oh man, it's so so awesome. Okay, so you were engineering, right? That was the the calling, stadiums. That was the calling. And then this little avenue of technology seems to have presented itself. Or were you interested in technology before you became the the automatic digital takeoff guy? Was that even a thing when you were considering your career path?

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Yeah, not not really, not at all. I was not interested in tech at all at that point. But as I continued to progress through my career and years after that digital takeoff, this thing called the iPhone was announced. And so, like everybody remembers that original. If you were around back then, you remember that original Steve Jobs keynote and how just how mind-boggling the device was. And that's when I started to get a little bit more interested in tech and what tech could do. And I mean, we're still like this is still early phases in in where we're going as an industry and how things are evolving, but that's where I at least started paying attention and getting better at tech at home outside of work. And so by the time the opportunity presented itself in my construction to career to really make a change, I had I had already gotten to the point where I felt like the Jetsons at home, but when I was at work, it was like I was the Flintstones. And I didn't really like I didn't have the same access. I could do so much more at home when it as it pertained to tech than I could at work because I had gotten an iPhone myself. Like we we had started investing in in the digital ecosystem around the house a little bit with an Apple TV and things like that. And it was it was still early in this whole development, but we were playing, I was playing with it outside of work a lot more than I could inside.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, so you got you were on the front end back when this thing, because I remember when the iPhone came out, I think I had a Nextel. I loved the Nextel. I wish it never went away. Then I had a Blackberry. I hated the Black. This was all company issued, right? Yep. I hated the Blackberry because it got me in trouble because anytime I sent emails with pictures attached, and sometimes it would take days before it made it through. And so that created problems. And then the iPhone happened, and I thought it was amazing, and it turned out to just be the biggest or smallest pair of handcuffs ever because then I was emailing everything else, they could get a hold of me all the time. Now, you used the language earlier, and I used it in your introduction, but digital transformation who have played a lot of times, you're guilty of contributing to digital transformations for teams, for firms. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Yeah,

Timesheets, Pushback, And Field Adoption

SPEAKER_01 28:18

it is. We had a major initiative happen while I was at Kiwit to totally transform the entire company's operating system in the early 2010s, and I volunteered for that project. And I was like, please pick me, pick me, pick me. Because again, we were past kind of that phase of the initial iPhone hype, and and I was getting into things, and sure enough, they didn't. They did not pick me initially. They sent someone else that had more experience, which is fine. And but thankfully, a project came up that we won that they needed him back, and and his decision to come back and go to that project opened the door for me to say, Hey, hey, I'll go replace him, I'll go replace him. And and so that was kind of my my opportunity to jump in and volunteer. A lot, a lot of the people who were sent to that project didn't want to go. That was not high on their radar, they wanted to keep building, but I was one of those weird ones that was like, I'll volunteer as tribute, send me, and and so it it started off just like you had said earlier. I was an SME on the estimating evaluation, and I just slowly worked my way up as that project went on and and got deeper and deeper into understanding the end-to-end processes that we were building into our new tech. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Did you have any surprises? And when I say surprise, it would be specific, people's behavior surprises as a result of being involved in the digital transformation.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Oh, yeah. Oh, 100%. You mentioned the superintendents that don't want to use the laptop. The very first version of our timesheet, of our digital timesheet that we built, was laptop-based. The iPad still wasn't really a thing yet. We didn't have mobile apps quite at that extent. So we built it on a laptop. And you want to talk about trying to get a foreman to enter their cruise time on a laptop instead of a piece of paper. Like it would take them 30 seconds to write in a name, an activity, and an hour on a piece of paper, and it'd take them five minutes to try to find the name in a list, then try to find the activity in a list, right? And and so there was a lot of pushback, if you can believe it. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, that that's why it's okay. Like, that's a truth. And I'm hoping the LM family out there, something that they should be taking away is like any change is difficult. Introduce like that transition to any, like it's funny because now there's a lot of people that are very like they live, they grew up in with all kinds of tech, access to all kinds of tech, right? And in their head, like, man, construction is just so far behind, they're so archaic. And it's like, bro, you don't know how much progress we've made.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

Yeah. The number one lesson that we learned early on in a lot of that development, right? Is we did things that made our lives in the back office easier, right? Like this digital timesheet made processing payroll and collecting it. It automated it, it was already punched in, and it made everybody in the back office much more efficient. We didn't stop and ask ourselves, real quick, what's this gonna mean to the person actually keying in the data? Like the the end user in the field, what does this mean for them? Right? And and so we learned that hard lesson right out of the gate. Like, you got to ask their opinion first, or expect it to be a major revolt, and they're gonna go off and totally deny using anything that you try to force on them. And so that was one of the first lessons that we learned the hard way is we're gonna design something that makes our life easy and not really ask anybody else. And we went back and totally rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up on a mobile platform after getting it in front of the people who would actually use it and saying, Is this a little bit better?

SPEAKER_00 32:52

Right, yeah. Oh, that AJ, props to you, because I'm sure you know there's still people today that don't consider that. Like 100%. Like, okay, there's business enterprise value, but the person that's carrying the burden of the transition, what value are they? Like, is it a value add? Most of the time it's not, and it's like too bad, you just need to do it. Like, really? Yep. I mean, true story. Had a one of my back in the day, fellow superintendents, iPads were already out in the field. They weren't up like we were a subcontractor and where all our foreman and superintendents had iPads, but we were the only subs on a project that had them. So we're kind of like on the front end. Anyways, we went from handwritten timesheets to Excel to an internal the company, somebody in the company made an app, right? An app specific for us to do timesheets. It was pretty you like it was pretty had drop downs, it was pretty easy, but it was still a lot of work that we weren't used to. So one of our superintendents he paid his daughter to input time. Like he paid her four hours a week. It was on a massive project, 80, 90 people to just like forget it, guys. Just keep doing the XL or the sheet, gave them to her, and she sat there and did it in the little appy thing and did everything she was supposed to do. Because nobody took the time to say, wait a minute, how like let's train people how to use the thing, let's give them the device, like walk them through, find out how to make it better for them. None of that happened, right? And so we found workarounds, and we always will. I'm assuming there was a point where it was like, okay, I'm doing this internally, and then you started getting calls from other people like, hey, can you help us with this? Hey, we have a similar situation. We heard you're good at it. Somebody maybe you worked with in the past. Did that happen at all?

Turning Internal Tools Into A Product

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Yeah, so um essentially what ended up happening is is when we had finished that major transformation at Kiwit, we had custom-billed a whole bunch of product internally to make it work, and we didn't like that situation. So we decided to take all of that intellectual property and the people who knew how to use it, like me, and rebuild it. That became a company called Innate. So innate's a product in the marketplace today, and we went back and rebuilt it, and I spent a number of years doing that. We rebuilt all of the the keyword apps into a more commercially viable solution, and then we went and we sold it. And so I was demoing that. And then the phone call came. I got a random LinkedIn message one day.

What Owners Need That Contractors Miss

SPEAKER_01 35:48

I actually thought it was spam. I did a lot of research on the person to make sure that they were legit before I even responded because it was from Google, and Google said we need to implement a project management platform for our data center construction. Would you come help us lead that evaluation? And so I did. So that was that was my first transition away from tech into the owner space. I had been with a contractor, been in technology. Now I'm at a large-scale owner trying to figure out how they look at the world and what requirements are important to them, and bringing in a lot of the lessons, right? Like all those lessons from Keywit. Get with the users, make sure you have their feedback, understand everything they want to do, and and get the requirements right and get the demos, and then have the users who it impacts involved. All of those lessons learned. We put those into practice at Google. We learned new lessons at Google, but that was that was one of those phone calls, and it was it was a really neat experience, and I learned a ton about the other side of the industry from the owner's perspective.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

Oh, I love that. Okay, so what were some of the similarities of being that change agent for a massive, massive contractor and being a change agent for like a almost a different world? What were some of the similarities? Because the reason I'm asking is it's we like to think construction is so different, and there are differences, but it's not like we're this chronically unique snowflake. We have some similarities, like we could learn a lot from other industries. So, what were some of the similarities in terms of the work that you did for Kiwit and then went and did for Google?

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Well, the first and foremost, Excel is everybody's best friend. If at first you can't get the math to work, export it to Excel and make it look the way you want. So that was a big one. Even if it's Google Sheets, it's still everybody's best friend. Yeah, yeah. But the other thing that was very similar is Google was very mature in their construction management processes, but they had the same kind of problems that contractors have: schedules, budgets, procurement issues. Hitting milestones was difficult, regardless of whether you're an owner or whether you're a contractor. And a lot of that is optimism built into the schedule. A lot of it is schedules are just as much estimation as the budget is, right? But but there you ran into many of the similar challenges. At the same time, there were very big differences too, right? Because you don't have nearly the level of detail in managing your capital project from the owner's viewpoint as the contractor does, and the amount of data that the contractor is creating on the project, that's not in alignment with the owner. And so surprises are often they happen more and they're bigger. So, like, yeah, we're not we're not talking about, oh man, we look like we're behind schedule when it's week two. We're talking about tomorrow's a milestone, we're gonna miss it by six months. Like the day before getting the notification, right? And so the level of transparency and the the ability to look kind of and see into the future was a lot more difficult at the owner level, which was why they were trying to evaluate their own project management platform so they could get to another level of detail. And and so while the processes and the the construction knowledge and all of that was just as mature as a contractor, their ability to manage it wasn't because of the lack of systems in place.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Okay, so I love you use the word system because I'm totally a systems guy, and I also know that human behavior can really jack up us any system. Oh, yeah, and so in terms of you deploying change, because like helping people with digital transformation, sure, you're mapping out processes and understanding the whole value stream and the interdependencies and all of that. From my perspective, that's the easy part. Yeah, because you still have the human behavior part. Am I wrong?

SPEAKER_01 41:21

No, you're absolutely right. In in fact, you can get all of the answers to align, you can get all of the requirement boxes to be checked, and you can still run

Politics And Executives Picking Software

SPEAKER_01 41:34

into that executive that says, I don't care, choose the other system. In fact, they'll audit you with a third-party consultant, and the third party consultant will come back and they will give the same answer you gave, and the executive will come in and say, I don't care, use the other system. And because they have whatever reason, whether it be a political reason, uh tie to that person, or or just they feel that it's the right move long term, or it looks better on paper, whatever it might be, they have their reasoning why they make their decision. You have your reasoning why you made your recommendation, and when they don't match, human behavior gets involved, and and all of a sudden change becomes twice as hard because you're you're going back to the people that you just spent six months with evaluating and getting to a decision and saying, Well, we changed our mind, so we're gonna do this one instead. I know you didn't like it as much, but it's pretty close and we'll be okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

Yeah, man. I remember, oh, and thank you for like shading that because I think I know in our industry we have overinvested in technical skills and technical abilities and underinvested in our social skills, right? And it's a technical social world that we work in. And for whatever reason, I feel like maybe since COVID, the the awareness of the value of people, like human beings being human beings, has begun to grow. But we we get we get so into the weeds of like the technical, logical, database decisions that we we forget that people are people, yeah, and people are gonna make dumb decisions. My first experience with that was we were testing out PlanGrid and Procore. And this was back, man, this was back, I don't even know how a long time ago, right? They were both pretty new, they both had similar functionality. Today that's not true, right? I mean, hell, somebody else owns Plan Grid now, but anyways, it's not even a product anymore, right? Right, and I loved PlanGrid. Now I was a field guy, right? I was superintendent, and so in San Antonio, we were testing Plang, we were running it through its paces. In Austin, they were running Procore, but a project manager was like leading that. Guess which one won? After we ran the test and we had all our and we had massive usage from our the guys loved it because you could take a picture, attach it to the drawing, like in terms of field application, it was phenomenal, but it had no project management functionalities. Right. Guess what did Procore did, right? And guess who got the damn attention? So when we sat down, they said, Yeah, Jess, we're going to make an Enterprise commitment to Procore. It's all Plan Grid. Like, yeah, it does it, it's not that good. I'm like, according to who, according to that ding dong? Like, he doesn't even walk jobs. Come on, man. And I was really disappointed back then. Which, of course, I said, well, you know what? I'm gonna keep my Plang Grid account. I'll pay for it myself because it was a valuable tool for me. But again, the politics, like the perspective, did it make sense? Was it the better tool for project managers? Yes. That doesn't mean I'm gonna like it. Now, fast forward, right? Obviously, Procore has won, and they've they're a behemoth, like they're the Goliath now. Um, which brings me to another question. This might this is accusatory, AJ. Yeah, go for it. I this is my accusation. I think all the tech builders out there that are building appy things and

Why Subs Get Ignored And How AI Changes That

SPEAKER_00 45:34

solutions or whatever they call them, exclusively build and design them for general contractors and or for management and up. They do a piss poor job of designing anything that's gonna help the installers, like the people that do the connecting of the things on the job. And if they do anything that's like valuable for subcontractors, it's kind of like a watered-down version of the thing they're building for GCs. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 46:11

Well, Jesse, if you know anything about me, you know that I like to keep it honest, and I will 100% agree with you. Historically, the industry has ignored both the contractor or the sorry, the subcontractor. The industry has ignored the subs. And in large part, they've ignored the owner. There have been a couple of owner solutions out there. There have been a couple of owner solutions out there that are smaller that are legacy things that have been around a long time, but you don't see the same pizzazz and the same attention at the owner level or the subcontractor level. You're exactly right. But I say that with a big butt because it's historically, they've heard the feedback, right? They understand that miss and are actively pursuing it. And what's interesting is I hear a lot of the noise around AI. And the fact that AI is going to scare the big platform players like Procore, where I'm at, or the others, is going to scare them and threaten them because these startups can develop so much faster. Right? You can write a new app in your basement tomorrow night, right? And uh and be off and running. That's fantastic. You're right. AI has sped up development, but to your point earlier today, resources are resources, and how they're deployed matters. You getting a hold of an arc welder is very different than me getting a hold of an arc welder. I can't do anything with it, I've never touched it. It's obviously a powerful tool, but you would know what to do. I would not. AI is the same way. So those startups that should be threatening the big platforms, they might have the tool, but we've got a 20-year head start in construction. I've done digital transformations for the last 15 years. Like there's there's having the tool, which we both have now, by the way. AI makes our development faster, too. There's having the tool, and then there's understanding how to put the tool to use, right? The resource to use. And so I hear a lot of that noise, and I and I'm all for people going out and building their own stuff and making it work and making it work for them. But the platform play and the the feedback that we've gotten, AI development tools make going out and servicing the subcontractor community for the first time that much easier. And building something that actually resonates with their feedback because we've gotten the feedback for years. Now we can implement that roadmap that used to feel like it was a mile long, is now maybe a quarter mile long because we can do it so much quicker. And so that's what excites me. Again, it's at the sub-level, it's at the owner level, too. Lots of cool stuff out there happening now for owners to see their projects and get to that maturity level when their budgets and their schedules and their funding are all at the highest levels of scrutiny that they've ever been. And so you're exactly right. We have historically done a really bad job at looking at anyone outside of that core general contractor market because boy was that market pretty and it was wide open, and we could go do whatever we wanted, right? But now that market is heavily saturated, it's time to listen to the people actually doing the work, right? And that's that's what we're after.

SPEAKER_00 50:10

Yeah, the awesome. I'm glad to hear that. And it's that, right? Like, I get it. I'll never do a tech startup, but if I did, I would chase GCs. Why? Because they got bigger wallets. Duh. Like, I get that, but it still chaps my ass when I hear, like, oh, this is gonna be great for production in the field. It's like, no, it's not. You're going to slow my production down because now I gotta click something that I didn't have to click before to feed data to somebody. I'm I'm a data monkey now. I'm supposed to be installing pipe, so don't tell me you're doing something that's gonna help me. You're not helping me do my job, you're helping something else, not me. But the inverse of it to your point, and hopefully, some ingenious folks, resourceful folks out there. It's like go talk to some subs, they need some help. Like, build something for them, and they will love you because they're so it's easy, they've been neglected. Give them a little bit of attention and they'll love you, yeah. Right now, before the market gets flooded, right? Exactly. Oh my goodness. Okay, now so AJ, I super, super appreciate being able to have this conversation with an expert. Like, you've lived the change side of it, you have a an appreciation for like the human beings, and also like what the the leading change is different than understanding process management. Those are not the same things, and so being able to have that conversation with you is awesome. Now, you're you've kind of you've given us a bit of the arc of your career. Where does the engineered life come into this? Like, what does that have to do with anything that we've talked about so far?

SPEAKER_01 52:10

Excellent question. So, a couple of years ago, I wrote a blog

The Engineered Life And Learning Out Loud

SPEAKER_01 52:16

internally that everybody loved. They couldn't figure out though how they wanted to use it. They were thinking of spinning up a whole campaign around it, then they were like, Oh, but we could do it this way. And so, for like almost nine months, this blog just sat on a shelf and everybody loved it, but it would it just sat there because we couldn't figure out how to use it. And I was like, Well, that's not the only thing that I have. All the stuff that I've done wrong that other people should not have to do it wrong, like they can avoid these. I could say more. So, where I worked at the time at Kahua, we had Christmas week off every year from Christmas to New Year's, and during that week off, I had this idea to start a blog, and I was like, I'll publish it myself. Like, it's been sitting on the shelf for nine months. I'll publish this myself. So I created a blog, I'd been called an engine nerd most of my life. It just a play on the word engineer because I'm a nerd. You can tell if you look behind me, so so that's where it came from, and it was just because I I felt like I had some things that I could say that I couldn't get out fast enough inside of a corporate enclosure, and so that it started out a year and a half ago as a blog, and after about the first year writing a new blog every single week, I was like, I'm really tired of talking at people. I want to talk with people, I want to have conversations and learn from their experiences and share more. And so I was like, Well, it would be really rude to just reach out to a guy like Jesse and say, Jesse, you're an awesome person. Would you write a guest blog for my blog? Like, would you put in all this work to write a blog? Like, because that was my first thought. I was like, okay, so that's kind of rude. So then what I'll do is I'll put together some questions, I'll interview them, and then I'll write the blog and just make sure that they're okay with it. And it's like a conversation. And but then I got to thinking about like some of the people I wanted to talk to, like a Matt Graves or a Tyler Campbell, or and I was like, Well, we have good relationships and we tend to laugh a lot. People are gonna want to see the whole internet, not just the blog part. So I'm like, Well, I'll record it, that'll make it easier to transcribe into a blog, plus they'll be able to see the whole thing. And then I hit you hit the epiphany of the whole thing, is well, if you've got a recording, you just strip the audio and there's a podcast. And so the so six months ago, right? It turns into a podcast, mainly because I got sick of just talking at people, I wanted to talk with people, and and so that's that was the genesis of the engineered life, was just to get conversations going faster around stuff that was kind of confined. It's nothing major outside of, I just wanted to, like you said, contribute back to the industry. I grew up a Boy Scout, so that's where the leave the industry better than you found it comes from. It we were taught to leave the campground better than you found it, and that's that's what it kind of led to. And so what we do on the Indianerd life now is we highlight individual people's superpower, but at the end, the whole concept is that the fact that these aren't things like flight or invisibility or x-ray vision, these are learned skills that you can implement at the end of the day. Like anyone can have this superpower. That's why Captain America is my favorite superhero, because his best superpower is just wanting to do the right thing and being a good human. Like, that's his best power, and anyone can have that superpower.

SPEAKER_00 56:12

Oh, I love that. I love that now. For clarification, I think I heard you say that the podcast started six months ago. Yep. That did I hear that right? Yeah, yep. Wow, I thought you've had it like for a long time. I didn't know it was that fresh. That's awesome, dude.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

Super awesome. We're I think episode 21 will drop next week.

SPEAKER_00 56:35

So you're dropping an episode a week? Yep. Dang, okay, that's that's work.

SPEAKER_01 56:43

Yeah, so far a lot of people said that's aggressive. Well, we're I want to get stories out there, man. That let's go.

SPEAKER_00 56:50

Yeah, I mean all I I feel you, I feel same once a week. I just like the recording is one part, then there's the editing and the clipping and the posting. Like, there's folks ask me, like, Jess, I'm thinking of starting a podcast. What do you think? I'm like, well, first of all, how do you feel about recording and putting stuff up and nobody listening to it for like a year? Like, if you can't tolerate that, don't even think about it, man. Right. Because it's gonna take there's a lot of work you got to put into people listening and getting the word out, and and then the editing and all the things. So, man, applause to you and and really thank you, man, because this with our industry needs it, it needs all of the voices that are coming out, all of the people. I'm sure you interview people that are kind of behind the scenes that don't that aren't super visible, but we need to celebrate those people because there are amazing, amazing human beings with phenomenal superpowers in the industry, and so I'm gonna ask you the Grand Slam question, but before that, what where do we send people if they want to tap into the engineered life or connect with you? Where's the best place to send them, man?

SPEAKER_01 58:04

Yeah, so the easiest place to connect with me is on LinkedIn, and it's just AJ Waters, the like the liquid with an S. That's the easiest way to connect with me. The Engineered Life, that is the website www.it, it'll trip people up that the and it's a double e in the middle there. Yep, the ingineerd.life.com. So, but it's way easier to hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to go that route. I'm I'm pretty active on there and in the in the direct messages, but at the engineerd life on Instagram or TikTok or even YouTube as well, if if you want to go that route.

SPEAKER_00 58:48

Bam. Well, I will make sure that those links are in the show notes so that people can connect with you because you're you're a real one, Mr. AJ. Appreciate that. Thank you. So the Grand Slam question, I'm excited, really, especially after you talked about Captain America or your perspective on him. I'm excited about your answer because you clearly are an individual that has an appetite for growth, fearlessly learning and taking on challenges that most people run away from and continue to build new skills for the purpose of contributing and making things better for the people around you. Because of those things, AJ, I'm excited to hear what your answer is going to be. So are you ready for the question? Yes, sir. All right, here it is. What is the promise you are intended to be? Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 59:51

Again, I think that that goes back to

The Promise To Leave Things Better

SPEAKER_01 59:55

at the end of the day, I want to walk away, just like you said. When I walk away from a situation, a person, an industry, whatever it might be, my hope is that you feel better after than you did before. Whether that means you learned something new, whether that means I was just there to listen to you, right? Because you needed someone to talk to, whether that means we put together some content as a group that made a difference or impacted people or made people smile, or we built a stadium that families keep coming back to every single year, right? Whatever that means, at the end of the day, like my hope is that you feel a little bit better as an individual because we met. And if not, tell me where I'm wrong, what I did, I will make that adjustment, like you said. And so hopefully I hit on that more than I miss. I know I'm not perfect and will miss plenty of times, but that is the goal is to just leave the situation better than you found it, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:10

Man, I love that. I love that. It reminded me of Mr. Buddy Brumley, who's passed on, but he told me one time, Jess, we don't get do-overs, yeah, but we get do betters. Like blew my mind, like, yep, you're right. I'm not gonna be able to redo that one, but I could do better on the next one. Dang, AJ, I you brought it, my brother. I uh I super, super appreciate that, and I'm sure it's given somebody out there some chills on listening to that because it's I feel like it's a massive thing, right? To commit to leaving things better. And it's also a super achievable thing. So I'm hoping you struck some lightning into the LM family member out there right now. They say, damn, I need to pick it up. Yes, you do. Because there are people out there like AJ and others and previous guests that are doing it to make things better, man. So, AJ, I appreciate you. Did you have fun? I did. I had a blast. Thank you so much for this. You're welcome, brother.