Inside AWI’s First Engineering Summit:

In this solo episode of Verify In Field, host Jacob Edmond reflects on the first ever Engineering Summit at AWI Spring Leadership in Las Vegas. What started as an idea to fill a long standing gap in the industry quickly turned into a record setting event with more than 200 attendees focused on one topic that has long been overlooked at conferences: Engineering.

Jacob shares where the idea came from, why engineering has historically been left out of industry conversations, and how this summit became a turning point for both AWI and the millwork community. More than just an event recap, this episode dives into the deeper issue facing shops across the country. Engineering is the bottleneck, and most companies are still trying to figure out how to solve it.

About This Episode

Unlike a typical interview format, this is a transparent and reflective solo session. Jacob walks through the inspiration behind the summit, the planning process, the speakers who helped bring it to life, and the unexpected lessons that came out of it. From engineering throughput and training challenges to AI adoption and leadership evolution, this conversation offers a candid look at where the industry stands and where it needs to go.

Where to Learn More

AWI National Website: https://awinet.org/  
Verify in Field Podcast: https://vifpodcast.com/

Jacob´s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobedmond/ 

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

A year ago, this was just an idea. We weren't sure if anybody would show up. But last week we had 200 plus people in the room talking about engineering. Not just ownership, not just sales, but engineering. And a lot of those were engineers themselves. A new type of audience at an AWI conference. Welcome to Verify and Field. Today I'm talking about the first ever engineering summit at AWI Spring Leadership just caught back from that last week in Las Vegas. And I wanna talk a little bit about how that conference went if you weren't there. Where the idea came from and how this conference came to be and some of the highlights from it. And ultimately years ago Microvellum used to put on this event Microvellum TechCon every year. And for me, early in my career, this was a foundational event. It was focused on Microvellum engineers. It was a much smaller event. I think at most it would maybe have around a hundred people, which was large. For what it was educational, but more than anything, it was. It was networking. It was an event where me as an engineer to go rub elbows with other engineers like me who understood the work I do. And in the day to day in most companies and in where I was. It was something that a lot of the time I was the only person doing what I did, which was Microvellum engineering in a company of other positions. There's always this gap of not having something built for us that really has existed since then. We have the regular AWI conferences, we have the trade shows. There's educational summits and events for estimating and for sales and for contracts and for project management. But engineering is left out and, part of it's our fault. We're hard to understand and very technical in what we do and a lot of what we do difference depending on the software we use. Putting this together, wasn't. Intended to be just an event, but solve a real industry blind spot that I think everybody feels the pain from, but nobody really knows how to address. And so about a year and a half ago, I brought this idea to AWI and said, Hey, I really think there's a void here that we could fill, which is catering towards engineers, but also. I think it would be great for AWI and to get a new audience, a new kind of demographic of people coming to the conferences, getting outside of the shop, getting outside of the office walls. And, the spring leadership and the AWI National Conference always have a great turnout for owners and leaders and executives, sometimes project managers or estimators or salespeople, but. It's very hard to get individual contributors to go there. It's hard for owners to justify sending them. And but consistently engineering as a bottleneck and a pain point is been a core pain point described by everybody who comes to these conferences and really across the industry. And they heard me out and they agreed and said, Hey, let's give it a shot. Initially we thought about trying to rush it and have it in Alexandria, Virginia a year ago. Said, Hey, that's too fast. Let's give it more time. And they reached out and said, Hey, we're doing it in Vegas. Do you wanna put this together? Let's do it. And so really the last six months has been planning for this, getting the presenters and speakers, engineering leaders from across. The industry to who volunteer their time. We've, been meeting almost weekly for the last several months, planning these sessions, putting together what the sessions would be, putting content together. That's really adding value across a lot of topics, the whole spectrum of what engineers do and touch. And so we had a great turnout of speakers Curtis Kunard from Hollywood Woodwork, Jeff Richard from Dovetail. We had Jonah Coleman from Energy. We had Curtis Ard from Stevens Industries who, Adam Kessler from MSPM Design, I believe it was. We had Hunter Morrison from AWI, James Drewry from Master Millwork. And I'm hoping, I'm not forgetting anybody, but we had a great. Great turnout of just really intelligent experienced thought leaders across a full spectrum of Millwork engineering. And the fact that they saw value in this, and we also pulled some existing AWI leaders and members, owners saying, Hey, does this idea have merit? Does this idea have value? And if we were to put. Energy into putting something like this together. Would you send your engineers, not only would you see value, but would you take people from your organization two, three days out of their productivity, out of the office flying to Vegas to attend this? And the answer was a resounding yes. And so we said, okay. Initially we thought this was gonna be way more technical. We wanted to do a hackathon, we wanted to have software specific solutions. And the more we heard was like, hey, this needs to be high level. And not only that, speak to the engineers, but we wanna send our operations leader, we wanna send our project managers our CEOs, and people to learn. What are our engineers doing? What are their struggles? How can we better manage them? How can we better help them? And so it really evolved into something that I think was way better than what our initial idea was. And so the big takeaways, now that we've completed it and, we went, we had a record turnout initially. These were gonna be breakout sessions, small rooms away from the main auditorium and once signups opened up. The other thing is we started this on Sunday, which is very rare. Usually people are coming in, we have, chapter officer council meetings and some generic stuff, but people are rolling in Sunday and not attending sessions, maybe coming for dinner. But we had the first two engineering summit sessions on Sunday, and we had 180 people show up for that. And so we expected 20, 30 people, and I thought that would be a success. And then each session quickly exceeded 40 people signing up they wanted to see. And so we had to move those sessions from the breakout rooms to the main lobby. And very quickly, every single session, we had six total sessions across the three days, exceeded the capacity of the breakout rooms, and we had to move to the main auditorium. So amazing turnout, amazing response to these topics that we put together. But across the board, confirmed engineering is the bottleneck. Shops feel constrained by engineering capacity, and I think more than the actual capacity is by how to manage it, how to get more through engineering, and how to make it not the bottleneck. Not labor in the shop, not sales, but engineering throughput, getting work from sales through engineering process to release a production. That whole phase of planning a project is a consistent pain point across the industry. A big topic that came outta this, and we talked a lot about this in our sessions, is training is broken. There's no clear path to develop new engineers in our industry. Everybody's figuring it out on their own. More engineers are retiring than are coming into the field, and we did have a whole session, Curtis and James did on training and onboarding engineers. And based on four different categories of new hires. And so that was a huge pain point. Another is the industry's behind, but we're starting to wake up. There's still, even as we talk about all the innovation, all the technology we have in the industry, it's not consistently adopted. We're, AI is a huge topic everybody's thinking about, but we still have shops that are, not adopting existing, established. Software and technology we have today. So there's still tech adoption gaps, still process and consistency. A strong willingness to improve, but not A willingness to change how we used to do things to get there. This is probably the biggest one. Engineers are we want community. They're striving to network and the core group of those speakers. We spent the last six months meeting with each other multiple times a month. Spent the whole conference there on site and, it was just a different sense of like right off the bat, we understand each other. We live the same pain points and problems. We live in the same world day to day. There's a consistent pressure and stress related to what we do. Schedule time constraints, constantly dealing with problems. And most engineers are stuck in their own world without a whole lot of people to lean on or reach out to, and I think they feel the most pressure to keep what they do confidential. And it's no, we don't wanna share best practices, we don't wanna share too much technical information that's I, company ip. And so we live in this world of I'll just keep to myself, but we're all dealing with the same thing. And. Owners and executives and people get to kind of network and are better at it naturally. And so engineers need community. People that were there were engaged, asking questions. We spent way more time and could have spent more than we gave on Q&As And this just doesn't exist enough in the industry. And so that was the biggest goal with this. And I think the biggest takeaway of the success we had was how many people came. And the community that just naturally was there. And I think that surprised me, one, how many individual contributors and engineers showed up the majority of each session? Was that. I was extremely proud of the content we put together that we pulled together and provided both handouts, takeaways, and content that was actionable and I think valuable and really brought some sound advice as well as some different perspectives on how to do business today. Things people can do to improve as well as different ways to think about. And really more than anything, connecting people to start having those conversations. I had some amazing conversations with a lot of people there that caused me to come back and think differently and change some things about how we do business today at Duckworks. AI has been a big topic and it's something that we've been leveraging here at Duckworks for, years now. We've had licenses of chat, GPT for my leadership team. I use it on a daily basis. But AI itself is evolving so rapidly and, talked to a lot of people there that were using Claude and kinda the things that it was enabling to do Claude and Claude code. And so came back with my team and said, Hey, we need to give this a try and try something different. And my God has it opened a whole. New world for us. And so yeah we're switching gears. We're putting, I've got licenses of that for my entire leadership team and we're using it both for, financial analysis, operational analytics as well as some kind of behind the scenes testing of some, piloting some things that we had put on a back burner that we wanna kickstart again'cause. Six months ago what we tried with a different AI models and hit a dead end now it seems possible with Claude. And so, that was a huge takeaway for me based on just being there, networking and talking with other people in the summit. Obviously putting all this together has been a lot of work, has been stressful behind the scenes. It was a huge relief to get it. Through it, over with. And I think, I'm extremely proud and already talking about, how can we improve it and level it up for next year and do it again. If you were there, if this is something you're interested or you didn't get to make it, but you would love to go next time, please would love to see you comment on posts or share in the AWI community or any way you can provide feedback to AWI that hey, this is something that I see value and I would love to be a part of. And so yeah, I'm extremely proud of what we put together. Doing something new, this was entirely something to give back and invest in the community. The industry that has given me so much has given, duckworks so much. Develop, my career and I really want to see one, those engineers who are where I was 15 years ago, starting their career trying to decide, is this a career for me? What do I go? Maybe you're in a company that doesn't have a whole lot of resources or invest a lot in resources for you, your development. And that's where I was, I worked at companies. I was the only engineer. And I was just Google searching, like, how do I get better? What is there out there? And, to provide those type of resources for those early career people is vital for all of us in this industry. And I, if I, my experience can be any kind of example, it's that anywhere the way that you're able to give back and add value. People in this industry want to help. And so where, when you provide value to them, they wanna return that to you. They want to, Hey, look I might not have the solution for you, but I know somebody does and I'm gonna connect you with them. That is happening in every conversation at these conferences and at this engineering summit. And even afterwards, now those conversations continue and people are reaching out to me already. It's been less than a week and I've got people saying, Hey, I talked to this person, he was there with you last week, and he said I should reach out to you. And that is invaluable and I'm doing the same. There's so many other suppliers there that we connect with, that we have developed relationships with that are brainstorming and helping problems solve. Brad, with Rise Up label, we're talking between our booths about how hey, he's got a client who's struggling with this software, but he doesn't know where to point him in the right direction. I can give'em a tip and vice versa. That's happening amongst supplier members at AWI and amongst. Engineering teams, I had James jury and Curtis Kunard both on a couple different of the panels and they were sharing things and then taking ideas from each other. Hey, James said he does this, and Curtis is I'm going back and doing that with my team. So even amongst the speakers, we're learning from each other. And so. I set out to do this, we as a group set out,

13:05

Doug Adria with AWI

Speaker 13:07

and the seven or eight of the speakers, of how can we start something, a seed of something that hopefully can continue for years to come and is bigger than any of us on our own. But what I didn't expect is what I would get out of it. And, I came away. Being forced to look at my own business differently. And so, that's also goes into, what I'm working on is I started out this year, transitioning a little bit away from the engineering summit. But, talking about DuckWorks and what we do for several years now, I have been the only US presence and employee. I've been, sales is largely there with me and client relationships and we've gotten to a size and a scale now where, it really made sense to bring on somebody else to be dedicated to client relationships. And so that is actually, last week started onboarding our first Business Development Manager. So which you if you follow our content here, you're a client of ours or a partner of ours you'll start to see Curtis Woods. Pop up and we'll be introducing him and he'll start reaching out to some of our customers, especially new ones. Ultimately we are dealing with the same problems our clients are. As we grow, we're discovering where our bottlenecks are, we're discovering limits to growth and what our customers need from us and our ability to meet those needs. And we're constantly having to evolve. And as we reach new stages of growth and reach new stages of capabilities. Our clients are growing too with us, and we're having to grow with them. And so I know, every millwork shop experiences this. As you go through stages of growth, your bottleneck shifts, your process needs evolve. You need to continually be evolving. And so we're going through that as well. And so as I'm trying, I'm constantly thinking about our customers. How can we help our customers be better? How can we help our customers processes improve? I have to apply that same thinking internally and, that, that is my number one role. And over the years as I've brought on and developed, leaders for each functional area in our business, I've been able to download and offload that. That functional area to this new leader and allow me to level up or elevate to where an EOS company is the visionary role of like, how do I cast the vision and make it clear, hey, here's the direction we need to go. And empowering that leader to execute and to guide their functional area of the business. And so we're starting that journey now with business development and account management and bringing on Kurtis. And what I hope this unlocks and what the intent is best, better customer experience, more responsiveness and frees me up to build our capabilities a little bit more on the technical side. Continue to level up our technical capabilities with our team, which is more my background. But also to implement some of these things that we're sharing with everybody else that they should be doing. Investing in ai, investing in training, investing in teaching, investing in career development, and making our company a place that is thinking long term and adhere to be a partner for our customers long term. And that was something that I didn't go into this thinking about, Hey, how is this gonna change? Me and us and our business, but I took away a ton of valuable lessons as well as some new connections. And I think this ties these things together very well and that, we put together this engineering summit at Spring Leadership to hopefully, maybe this is. A little bit hopeful, wishful thinking, but to bring on industry evolution, or at least be a part of the evolution of our industry and the changes we're going through now at Duckworks, is our small piece of our response to that evolution of our industry as a whole. We're continually seeing the needs to raise, need to raise the level of engineering in the industry. And with that, we, as our part of servicing our customers and our technical capability to, to raise our ability with that not just be a drafting partner, but develop our capabilities across the team to be true engineering partners. And our purpose at Duckworks is we grow people who grow businesses. And I think it's easy to fall in the trap of thinking that, we provide a service, or really we provide a product, which is drawings, but we're positioning ourselves to be partners with our customers to help them grow their businesses. And we do that by investing in our people. T for them to have the capacity to help our clients grow their businesses. And so I know this is, a departure from our normal type of episode of Verifying Field. But I like to do these solo podcasts every now and then. One to kind of share my journey, and how I'm evolving and learning through this, I learned so much. A big part of why I started this podcast and why I do the format I do is'cause I just. Early on in my career, this is how I learned, was listening and hearing about people's stories. And so I get to do that every time I come to this podcast and I interview somebody, I get to hear their story and learn from it. And what personally do I take away from them? And I wanted to share that experience with the industry as a whole. Because there's so many amazing people in our industry who each have their own story and each have their own experience. And knowledge and lessons to share. But I wanna share that I'm learning with you through these episodes and I am growing and evolving as a person, as a individual contributor, as a, a member of this millwork community with my audience. And I think that's valuable. I hope to to anyone who's listening to this, if one, if you subscribe to this podcast. Thank you. And if you share it with other people and you find value in this, thank you. This, it is, it's not a sales pitch and not intended to be. It's just another vehicle that I didn't have when I was coming up in this industry. And so that is my goal. But I wanna have, moments of kind of transparency like this to share one, some things that are going on in the industry that maybe, I don't get to talk about on guest episodes. And two, like I said, just about how. I am experience in growing and learning from this podcast and the experiences I get to have through involvement in industry events. And if nothing else, I hope it encourages you. If at ever you get a chance to get involved, attend an AWI conference, attend a trade show. It's in one of these things where you get to get outside your shop's walls. And network outside of your company and your customers because there's so many other people just like you that are experiencing the same problems, and one could learn from you, and I think you could learn from them. And one, if you are listening to this and you would be open to sharing your story, your Millworks journey on the podcast. And have me interview you, please. I would love for you to reach out. That is the goal. I love to share people's career stories, people's, how they got into millwork, how they got to where they're at, and I think there's so many unique backgrounds and stories. Or if you know somebody you think would be great to be on here. Please reach out and shoot me a message on LinkedIn or ship me an email or shoot us a contact form. We would love to, to cut out and set you up two if you didn't make it to the engineering summit, I encourage you to look out for some of the content from that and look out for it next year. We're gonna be doing again next spring. And I appreciate you tuning in today. We will be back. In two weeks with a, another normal installment of verify in Field the Millwork podcast with a guest interview.