Spec Shaman
The Spec Shaman podcast explores the world of building product manufacturers, architects and engineers, sustainable design, technology and trends. We engage in thought-provoking discussions with renowned experts, industry pioneers, and visionaries who are making a significant impact in the construction industry. Join us as we explore groundbreaking ideas, revolutionary concepts, and the latest advancements shaping the built environment.
Spec Shaman
Demystifying Product Specification Resources
In this episode of the Spec Shaman Podcast, we discuss the theory and practice of Master Product Databases, the landscape of specification software development for the construction industries and the value of perspective when it comes to the evolutionary progression of programming capabilities.
We are joined by Matt Johnson, Director of Manufacturer Solutions at RIB SpecLink. Matt has spent the last 35 years in product management with a focus on products built-in support of construction specifications. As former CTO of ARCOM MasterSpec and, he has designed or managed the technology platforms driving almost all construction specification and product selection done in the United States.
He’s also spent four years as the American delegate to the International Construction Information Society, providing an opportunity to collaborate with international efforts focused on improving coordination between BIM and specifications. He has a unique perspective on what can often be a confusing array of solutions available to Building Product Manufacturers as they attempt to influence product selection through specifications, which is the reason he’s with us today. Welcome Matt we are so glad you are joining us today.
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Good morning. This is Laura Elliot with RBA and I am here with Matt Johnson, Director of manufacture solutions with our IB. Good morning, Matt, how are you? I'm doing fine. Thank you, Laura, for having me. Absolutely. We are so excited to have you here today and learn all of the things that you know that we don't. So could you provide us with an overview of how you got started? Yeah, certainly, certainly. So been in the this industry for about 15 years. But I started off with about 20 years in product development, with some background in marketing actually owned a trade school for a while where I taught hundreds of developers and so forth looking to get into the industry and even hosted a kind of a technology radio show at one point. And I was originally brought in to create the manufacturer supports Services Division for Master spec, years ago. If the time manufacturers who wanted to get listed would just kind of call in and talk to spec writers and and hopefully sometime in a 10 year period, they would get around to putting them in the system. And so I was brought on to set up that department from scratch, and put together the process of how do you identify and prioritize and review products for new building, you know, new building products, and so forth and make sure that they're getting out there and distributed, and, and so forth. And that kind of gives me my start in doing a lot of the data mining and everything for that platform and setting up a lot of the technology they still use today. And I eventually worked my way up to being their CTO, and was part of the sale as part of their board when they they sold a few years ago. Then I moved to my current position at our IB back when it used to be called BSD building solutions design. And I think everybody's undergone name changes and so forth 234 times. But it's currently the most widely used software platform used to manage Office masters and specifications in the world, and also as their own master content library. And so been involved in adding some some depth to the flagship product spec link for architects and engineers. And then ran a number of special projects, everything from bringing outside spec content into the platform. So somebody could actually bring your office master into spec link to running their analytics platform called spec live where they would analyze a lot of the product decisions made on the platform and give building product manufacturers a view of what projects they were getting into before they would ever show up on that construct, connect or dodge. And then it's also worth mentioning, I was the sole us delicate to the international construction information society called it isis back then, I always tried to write during the height of the ISIS scare over in Iraq and everything was always my first motion to change the name, but I don't think they ever did. But it was built around you know, kind of the shared construction information that we all were hoping to build in generally like them dispatch automation. But being involved in almost all the technology platforms that are kind of driving product selection today is given me, you know, kind of a unique perspective to see it from, you know, all the different platforms, the analytics, getting an idea of what works and what doesn't, really is kind of brought me to where I am career wise and what I'm hoping to talk to you a little bit about today. Well, that is highly impressive, and I'm really looking forward to getting into it. You mentioned I think that you have like a unique perspective because you've seen this happen from the ground up. What does and doesn't work when you are getting things specified. Yeah, it's it's interesting. I mentioned before I kind of worked in this industry, I had worn a lot of different hats, and buying a lot of marketing everything from TV commercials and, and radio to obviously a lot of print. You learn the most of it doesn't work. There's a lot of things out there where people put together marketing plans where they they look around and I think it was told once that the the average lifespan for Director of Marketing is like 14 months. And you can imagine just the pressure there is to come up with something that's going to move the needle, something nobody has thought of before for your company. And generally speaking, you just don't have the time to go through and learn. You know, all the play places to waste your money. And so I kind of became a skeptic. I've read a lot of books like if you're looking for one of these insider books and you get a chance to read something like chaos monkeys about the early days of Facebook, were people selling a lot of marketing solutions. And you know, we're still in the same business in the spec side, we're trying to get opportunities, you know, increase that the number of opportunities to get specified out there, it's very similar of people that are putting down these solutions behind the scenes, they're like, man, you know, I hope nobody sees our data, because it doesn't look promising, you know, way, and you see big names that are spending a lot of money and other people buying these solutions, take a look at that and say, Well, you know, this big company can't be wrong, and these guys are doing it too, it must be okay. But as you get in, and you become a little bit more discerning, behind the scenes of you learn a little bit, you know, the analogy that I always use, is Moneyball. And if you had a chance to read the book, or, you know, I love the movie, great movie, I've never been the the guy that had that unlimited budget, where I could go through and afford to put money on everything. So there's a certain amount of that I love about being able to, to work with limited resources, and say, I'm not just going to throw money at the problem. But I'm going to actually learn how things work and figure out where to actually place my bets. And by being able to be innovative and understand where the creases are, and so forth, we can come up with, you know, some strategies that can allow us to succeed, but it's not going to be by doing what everybody else does. And by being a little bit more discerning about those. So it's created a little bit of an environment where a lot of the solutions that I put together over the years, I've probably pushed away and stopped the companies I've worked with, from engaging in a lot of things that, you know, we had people with, you know, checks in hand and are ready to spend money, but you kind of push in another direction, because you realize that these types of things aren't gonna be really effective. There's a lot of places out there where people can waste a lot of money. And, you know, specifically they're all based on tell a little bit of a disk goes right back to the background of how I got started. The very first day, the very first day, I was responsible for kind of setting up the manufacturer, Department of master spec, Chris Bushnell, who was the CEO at the time, get an architecture background was true kind of founder, you know, somebody that wasn't necessarily in it to make a lot of money. But he had big problems that he wanted to solve and, you know, big things that he wanted to be able to do. And he told me that it was only a matter of time, there were two big things that were coming. And we could depend on, and one was the master product database, this idea that all these products are going to be in some big database someday and an architect in the future is going to be able to go through and say, Well, I'm, I'm looking at a building product, and here's the the nuances for the job, I'm going to tighten up some of the requirements here and you know, the list of products that are available would shrink or expand, and you'd select those, then you'd hit a button, and it would specify, and it hasn't happened, we're still waiting for it. And the other one is this full BIM dispatch automation, somebody's going to build a model, they're gonna hit a button, and the specs are gonna fly out the other side. And so most of the places that people are wasting money right now are because they've heard for years that just the promise of those two ideas that they're coming, that it's only a matter of time, so when somebody shows up, and they've got the basics of something that sounds like that people look at it, or that they recognize it, they're like, that's the wave of the future. That's how product selection is going to be done. That's how decisions can be made. And they don't really understand just how difficult it is to make those things work on the you know, in the background, and that's one of the places where I've really done a lot of my outreach and tried to explain to people, there are some methods that are going to work and some that aren't and with both of those product ideas, which are pretty important, and you can't necessarily draw a line through them, but the approaches to make them happen, have been wholly unsuccessful, thus far. And so you know, when we're doing our spec shaman summits, for example, I tend to go into this a little bit more detail, and give people some background on things like, you know, understanding what does and in what isn't isn't possible for a master product database or this, you know, BIM dispatch automation, and where to put your money and where you might want to hold and and wait until the technology improves, because you're not going to see much of a return. So what is possible? Because I know you said there there are things that that are possible and things that aren't possible. What is well, if you're looking for things that probably have the higher highest ROI, that if you just like let's say you're just starting out the industry and you're well, I shouldn't say starting out maybe you're a new marketing director responsible for Getting specified, the things that tend to be the safest are getting like a general guide spec listing, you know, just getting your products listed in the appropriate places, and so forth. And that's probably not only for spec link our content system, but also for Master spec. There are some nuances there, we have the ability to list somebody and push it out to all of our users immediately, Master spec tends to be, there's not a lot of people that actually use the editing software, most of it just sort of exists in in Word documents. And so it might take three, four or five years, in some cases, for a lot of those products to percolate out there. They're both worth being in, but it, you gotta see what your horizon is, as far as kind of getting out there. And the other one that I really like, we actually don't sell this, but I know, Ron blank associates does is the CEE courses, if you're trying to go through, and especially if you're trying to inform the market about a, a better mousetrap, and you'd recognize they've been doing things the same way for 30 years, and you're trying to steer the ship a little bit differently, you really got to do a lot of that education in that one to one to get enough people to start specifying that to reach critical mass and the product listings are great first steps, you know, what's an in option, but going out there and doing that education, that tends to be a pretty safe bet, not in all cases. But you know, if you're looking for what does work, that's probably one of the safer things out there. So continuing education is a great, a great complement to the list as well, it is it is getting those basic listings. In our case, it also allows you not only to get into the jobs, but you have an analytics platform where you can see, let's say, you're making a widget and everybody up to that point. And I'm using obviously, a generic example here that has been making, you know, steel widgets, and you got to laminate widget. And you know, it may take a little while even getting something like that listed in there under a different product category, it takes a little while to pick it up. But if you've got an analytics platform, you can see everywhere out there that is doing it the old way, the one that you know is going to fail, and you know, it doesn't last as long and so forth, you can use a combination of using, you know, the analytics platform to see who's specifying the older method, in combination with those CTE courses, and that outreach to go through and say, Well, maybe only 10% of the market, you know, is is out there that I actually need to contact and I can identify who has the high value projects and on our platform, hey, people that have Office masters, we have an office master management program. So you can go through and get it in one place. And it gets distributed to 100 different projects, as opposed to it goes into a single word document somewhere, you you're you're trying to win over one spec writer at a time, as opposed to, you know, for the whole organization. So all right, yeah, the more eyes the better. There you go. You mentioned BIM to specs earlier, we've been hearing about that coming. And I know you said that you don't, you don't see it really as achieving what you think they think it might achieve. What do you think, why do you think it hasn't taken hold? Well, it's the, you know, the promise of BIM to specs has been, you know, so widely talked about, and there's not a person that will ever listen to your podcast, that hasn't seen or probably attended something where they say the, you know, presentation, the future of specifications, and there's a lot of nonsense about how all this automation is going to, you know, either get rid of or kind of devalue, you know, the job that spec writers do. And it's, it comes from a couple of different things, it's a little bit of a lack of understanding of just how complicated the process is, and how many disconnected things are in there. But I usually refer to a little bit of this Dunning Kruger, you know, model, you know, and it's this idea that if you take a complex problem, and in the early days of talking about BIM to specs, the idea was, you know, people didn't understand everything that was involved in putting it together. So Dunning Kruger, hey, if you're somebody who's a beginner, hey, can you solve this problem? They're always going to be Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's simple. But you take a guru, somebody's been doing it for a long time, they're gonna give you more nuanced answer, like, there's still so much we don't know. And, you know, every new technology has to go through this phase where it's the beginning, everybody thinks it's easy to put together. I think Gartner does a great model. This they called the Gartner hype cycle where the peak of inflated expectations where That's where investment happens, you get 30 companies and a lot of money down it what they think is a simple problem. And then it drops into the trough of disillusionment. You know, everybody's like, Oh, man, almost all those companies fall away, you know, and a lot of money's wasted, but they figure out All right, there are some some things that we can deliver that are a little bit more modest. And if you're betting your marketing dollars on something you want to buy on the dip, you know, you don't go through and say somebody's trying to deliver in all in one solution is going to, you know, be able to make something like that happened, you recognize that it's a normal part of the process, it's, it's something that all new technologies need to go through, you could be talking about driverless cars, or VR or whatever all of them go through it. And it's probably not where you want to invest. But you recognize that once those, those are the companies kind of shake out, and somebody comes back with kind of a 2.0, more modest way of kind of engaging in everything. There are, there are some upside, you know, there's a story that sometimes I tell about how I get it, the beginning of this, you really are in an environment where everybody's drinking the Kool Aid. Yeah. And I was had an opportunity as part of ISIS in international construction information society. You know, where as part of a conference, we'd get together with firms that were engaged in basically, you know, BIM to specs work in specification technology all over the world. And this one was actually in Tallinn, Estonia, which beautiful place a little bit of recommendation, I'm not sure that that's on anybody's bucket list. I went there, just because that's where it was being hosted, amazing city, you've got Soviet architecture, in one area where you got these big block buildings, and then you have this old city that's, you know, like 800 years old blocks away. It's gorgeous, amazing location, time that I was there, the sun would, you know, set at like 1030 at night and come up at four in the morning. Just a very different type of location. But we had these great presentations, everybody would come in, and we had one from NBS, and Great Britain, where they came in and showed us a survey. And these are the types of surveys that are still affecting a lot of the conversations that we have today. And from a marketing background and my jaded perspective, it's sort of recognized it as a push survey, meaning you're asking sort of a general question to solicit a response that is going to give you the sort of perspective that you want. And in our surveys, everybody saying, oh, yeah, we're gonna be we're gonna be using BIM. Within the next five years, you know, we're gonna be doing this, we're gonna be doing that. And the impression that it gave us that everybody out there was going to be doing this within two to three years, if you weren't investing in this, you were going to be out of business in a couple of a couple years. It was just overwhelming. And I raised my hand, I'm usually the emperor has no clothes kind of guy. And I pointed it out, it was sort of a we're all friends there and, and ask some of those questions. It's kind of like to use an analogy. It's similar to saying, you know, hey, do you believe in a higher power? And somebody goes through and says, Well, yeah, and then you say, Okay, well, that means that there's this many people that go to church every Sunday, and it's not the same thing. You know, it's it's, it's a little bit apples and oranges been can meet a lot of things as far as will what level you just have some objects in your model, that you'd have some information or you're really using it in the way that if you're building product manufacture, you think about when you say, hey, I can plug into this process, and it's going to help me get my product specified. So I got the impression that it was very lukewarm at best. But the real nail in the coffin came in the afternoon, we had Scott TSA come in, and Scottson is one of these amazing international companies that has, it's really the perfect environment for the whole BIM to specs, environment to flourish, you've got, they're putting together the project, they're writing the specs, they can have somebody at the front end of the project, do a whole bunch of extra work to benefit somebody at the end of the project. In other words, you know, the Revit tear can be using, you know, a very specific library to make the whole thing work. So that suspects happened a little bit more automatically, and so forth. And they gave this great presentation where, you know, they show the people with the iPad on out of the job site, they're pointing off in the distance, because the plans are there, that kind of thing. And it was the example of, you know, the the promise of where, you know, this full Data Automation was going to be, and they do like 10,000 projects a year. And they were held up as the example. And I asked pay it of these 10,000 projects, how many you're actually using the BIM, the way that we've described, you know, because we've been told to hate 65 70% they're going through and using it to inform the whole project. And in a moment of honesty, they said, well, of all the projects that we're doing, but the thing where we literally have the BIM object, you know, fully With all the data in its kind of driving specifications, and it's driving product selection, it was one half of 1%. And, yeah, it's just the difference between the industry saying 65% of companies are doing this. And the perfect use case, you know, the company will never find a company that has fewer barriers to going through and making that work. And it was really, you know, one half of 1%, from my perspective, that was enough to really start investigating and digging in and saying, I'm not so sure that the hype is, is delivering here. And so, you know, we went through and did some investigation, and there are some things that I think are possible with BIM to specs, and BIM to specs, automation, but there's a belief out there, and especially when it comes to people spending money, that there's this process going on behind the scenes, that they probably don't understand that they can have a fully featured, you know, object show up in one place, and it's going to mean that somehow it's going to automatically make something happen. As far as product selection later on. There are so many good reasons, so many important reasons to provide a fantastic BIM object library out there. It really is something that most manufacturers need to support, and I fully get behind it, but thinking that it's gonna go through and mean that you're gonna get spent specified more? I think that's a little bit of a stretch. So is it something that maybe it's a longer game than we anticipated? You know, is it something that maybe in 10 years, it might be more fully realized? Or is it that it's more of a complimentary service, to the art of spec writing? Well, there's, there's a little bit more of a nuanced answer. And so, you know, when you're going through, and you're trying to think about it, I will exercise that I do a lot of the time where, if there's 20 factors to consider, you want to focus on the ones that are the toughest. And so often, with these technology platforms, people do the fun stuff, they design the interface, and they talk about the promise, rather than say, man, if we can't solve these tough issues, then let's not bother, right. And there's two issues that haven't been solved yet, as far as BIM respects automation. And the first is sort of normalization and classification. So thank, you know, in the average environment, people are using all kinds of different geometry and something that's a door one time can be a different type of door, if you just cut and paste it, there's so many different issues that need to be solved. That's a solvable problem. There's enough going on with machine learning and so forth, that if we think about gap analysis, we've got the model it a bunch of questions over there, and we got the specification, and we got to make sure that everything is represented correctly on both sides. That's something that I think can be solved in the companies that focus on that they're gonna find that 90% of the companies that have dollars to spend would love to have something that makes the process easier of coordinating what's in the spec, and what's going on in the, in the model, the problem that cannot be solved, and I don't mean, it's difficult, I mean, it can't be solved, is what I kind of call it the Hal 9000 problem. And it's this generalized intelligence that can go through and get to the point where it understands all the individual building codes and all the, it has all the product data and can go through and take those product selections and so forth and get to the point where you can hit a button one place in it writes the spec on the other. That's not solvable. And there's no amount of AI or anything else that's going to do it. Now, you do hear about some companies that do have largely, you know, full spec automation done, but they're in we work with a lot of them, by the way, we provide a lot of the enabling technologies, you know, companies like Prologis, that build, you know, warehouses for Amazon, and so forth. But they build the same box over and over again, with a different facade on the front, they go through and if you're going to build the same, the same church, the same building, and so forth, and almost everything's the same, well, you can work with a limited object library and, and they'll go through and put that together. But it still needs to be normalized for local building codes, and so forth. But you can actually get some benefit from that process. If you're building product manufacturer, though, and you're thinking great, I'm going to contact those companies and get my, my content in there. They all work very tightly curated libraries. They're not necessarily pulling things from the internet, so forth. So it's somewhat limited in scope. It is, it is. So if I was going through and I have advised I've done kind of patent analysis and done a lot of analysis when one company is looking to buy another. I can go through and take a look at what their technology is and say, Yes, this is this piece over here. They're working towards that as possible within a certain amount of time and a certain budget. This piece over here. They may not have realized it yet, but that's not going to happen, and if it does happen, it's only going to happen for two to 5% of the market at most. And so there is some upside. But if you're going through and you're waiting, you know, there's good news, bad news here, if you're building product manufacture, you're waiting for some great process to come along, but you're going to be able to put it all together and benefit from it's not happening. If you're in a spec writer, and somebody's been whisper in your in your ear and say, Hey, technology's gonna replace you sometime soon. That's an absurd statement. It's not going to happen. The general panic and in a lot of spaces, you know, I'm a, I'm a writer, I'm the lead instructional designer here at RBA, and, you know, AI just made a real big splash with chess, you know, chat GPT. And, and everyone kind of panicked. And writers unions got up in arms and school districts are outlawing it and things like that. But you can't replace the person, at least not yet. You know, and I think that that's really the lesson. It is, well, everybody sees things from their own perspective, like you can, can you replace the person? I think you devalue the work that they that they do. When people there isn't anybody out there that isn't somewhat conversant in the promise and the peril of Chet GPT, for example, and there's some warnings that I tried to, you know, pass along and so forth. Like, I obviously use it, I will use it to write a first draft of a press release or something along those lines. But you know, when it comes to specs, there's a couple things to keep in mind. Number one, if you use anything else, like you know, some of the the AI tools that create images, and so forth, and we'll go through and say, Hey, create something in the style of, let's say, Dr. Seuss illustration. Well, all that works derivative, you know, it's taken from somebody else's hard work. Yeah. And so, you know, these tools aren't miracle ng things out of thin air, when you're talking about something that's creative, and isn't necessarily right or wrong, you can go through and you can use that type of an approach. But if you were talking about, hey, are specs going to be written by, you know, a chat, GBT equivalent or something like that? From my perspective, the answer is no, because all work is derivative. Right now, the content systems that are out there that provide a lot of this work, they already have checks in place to make sure that somebody who was unlicensed isn't using their content. And so they don't even have to do anything, you can go through and come up with some great tool. By the way, if anybody's listening and thinking about starting up a company that's gonna write specs, I can tell you right now, it's a bad idea. You know, just like there are tools in place for professors to catch, you know, kids who are plagiarizing, and so forth. There are tools in place that make it very easy to go through and say, Great, I got a full spec here. Well, somebody's gonna go through and say, well, a lot of this content came from our content. And so you still owe the license to us. Which begs the question like, why aren't you just paying the content licence in the first place, and, and so forth. So I don't think there's really a way to do an end run around something like that. And so for all the money that's being put into AI equivalent products, and so forth, there's an equal and less understood effort, from a technology perspective, to play defense on the other side for people to protect their intellectual content. And, as I'm sure you've seen, there's more and more people out there that are saying, Hey, I'm suing because something creative that I took a lot of time to put in there, got gobbled up and is now part of this freely handed out, you know, content. And it's not going to take very long for companies to go through and say, Alright, if I use something like that the odds of me getting sued, are decent, because there's automated tools to spot every single thing out there. And it may even come down to the stuff that the average writer does for marketing and things like this. No, it's very tricky. And, you know, my background is academic. And immediately, I was like, there are some plagiarism issues here that are pretty foundational. And how do we, you know, how do we legitimize it? If it's if it's got that at its core as an issue? When it comes to the ACE AEC industry? Is there something that really excites you? I know that we have some a lot of automation that's happening. Is there anything else that's kind of in the works that you are anticipating? Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, a lot of the way products are built in the past is somebody has an idea and they build it for two years in a vacuum and they'll ask some ask some, occasionally for some people to take a look at some curated demo or something like that. And that works sometimes is that that's everybody's preferred way to develop. We've had an opportunity to go through and we're working with a lot of very forward thinking. companies out there that are right on the cutting edge. They're not doing the same thing everybody else has done the last year You know, 1020 years. And so I like being able to get that insider's perspective, you know, working with our development partners, so some of the stuff that we're, we're doing, like r&d has been really, really supportive of some of my ideas for coming up with a new product suite for a brand new market segment. So rather than focus on, you know, just getting listed, which is traditionally what firms like, you know, if you're listed master spec, or you're listed with us, in spec link, has traditionally been, you know, what companies like us have done? Well, you know, we sell eyeballs, we sell the traditional marketing approach, you know, there's a certain number of people building projects with our content, and we're going to give you access to those projects, and so forth. But there's a brand new market segment that we're focusing on, and that's, you know, there's, if you're a premium building product manufacturer, you know, imagine the problem that they've got, you're getting in those systems, and you're listed as equivalent with somebody that makes a product that may be inferior to yours. Now, yours cost 20% more, but it lasts longer. It, it weather's better, whatever it happens to be, but you're listed as an equivalent, next to the other five, that that contractor is going to, you know, choose from at the end. And that presents you with a problem, how do you go through, like, you're going to get beat on price, every time if you don't find a way to differentiate yourself. So we're working with a lot of manufacturers that realize, hey, there's an opportunity here, if there's something really complicated, and, hey, we want to support BIM, the first version of it, Hey, throw a BIM, you know, throw some geometry and some data up there, and it's gonna get specified, that didn't work, there wasn't much ROI, but we still want to support them. So they're going through and saying, there's a very complex part of the process. That's an opportunity. So if you're going through, and you're putting together, you know, electrical components for building in Transformers, and so forth, or you're putting together a very involved, new suspended ceiling for, you know, a lobby with all kinds of new angles and things like this, you know, the strategy going forward is to, to say, I'm going to help that overwork spec writer, by coming up with some sort of helper application often built in Revit. Or maybe there's a, something that lives on a website that can can help them configure something. And in exchange for, you know, some help becoming their trusted adviser. Hopefully, there's an opportunity for those companies to differentiate themselves and to be able to focus on why their products, sometimes a little bit more expensive, is worth being listed as basis of design or even, you know, sole source, in a lot of the investments that they've made. And the supplements, these are pretty big investments on the front end, and some of these tools, you know, they have fantastic products, we've got a company, for example, that has a visual product where you know, they will, they will go through and sit down with the designer, and you can take a look at the different types of ceilings that you could potentially have in this brand new flagship lobby and, you know, cycle through the different things and deal with different noise and you know, bouncing light and things like this that are just very involved. And, but at the end of it, now that you've sold the owner, or you've sold that designer, you had a problem to the spec writer, and the spec writer is like I don't have 15 hours to go through and figure out all these companies products, I'm just going to use, you know what I've used the last few times, and I'm just going to take a generic equivalent, and they won the sale or they aren't in the process by building this fantastic modeling tool and putting together the geometry. But companies are realizing unless they can coordinate that with specifications that make it very easy to just drop it in an active project that they're going to lose that. So that's what we've been working on. We call it our our spec live suite. Product sweet. And we have the ability to take any application and get a list of products and options and return a fully configured spec within two to three seconds. That is allow them to specs, and I'm talking about someone normally take 15 hours, yeah, putting it together, it's instant, instant. And we can go through and really lower the amount of work that the spec writer has to undertake. And that's normally something that makes them want to just go back to something they've specified 10 times before. And so a lot of these companies we're working with see this as the way forward. They don't just want to be listed as one of, you know, five or six equivalents. They're, they're banking on the fact that if they provide a lot of BIM supported help in a lot of cases or a product configurator put the stuff together. And it's all aboveboard. There's no sticky language in there anything else? Being able to go through and sell somebody on their particular configuration and make sure it makes it all the way in there. We've got a new product suite that you know, helps automatically create the spec. There's a tool called our collaborate Spec Editor, where you're not just sending out a word document anymore, and then losing track of the process. So you can send something out in, literally transfer the relevant content from left to right and everything and, and, you know, support them as they do that. And we even have a tracking system completely built around that type of work that they do. So they can keep track of hundreds of projects, at the same time, respond to inquiries, deal with different versions of things, and the track changes, and so forth. And recognize that this has been a an area of the industry that's been completely unsupported for building product manufacturers, and the amount of thought and effort that goes into this working with our development partners, it's really nice, because we've had full access, we go to their company conferences, and see all the detail about the strategies and the things they're doing. And then we build it into a platform for them. And then we offer it to everybody else that may not be quite as far along in the process of finding ways to maximize that and kind of turn it to their advantage. So it's a fantastic opportunity to go through and sort of, you know, get a little bit of a leap forward without having to spend the years and years of kind of learning those hard won lessons. How long did it take to develop that? Well, it's still ongoing. It's, we've actually had things that have been done for about two to three years here. But we've had clients that have rolled out, you know, we've got USG that rolled out their second Revit application, they were just doing a little bit of a demo at AIA in the Moscone Center a few months ago. And complex configuration, you hit a button, there's your specs, it's very, very cool. Wow, we're working with some other companies to roll out things like this collaborative Spec Editor do all the capabilities there, even to the point where on kind of our roadmap, we've got the ability to spot opportunities to improve the language. And for those that are familiar with that, you know, imagine taking somebody that is not a 30 year expert, being able to point out when you're helping them edit a client spec, hey, here's an opportunity right here, to improve some language and to fix something where you can go through and tighten that to make it a little less likely that a competitor is going to come in and kind of exploit that language. And this is something not a lot of people actually have eyes on. But you could tell a little bit of a story here because I thought it was just genius. And it was not my idea, but to to show you just how you know how much a smart person or an industry can exploit something like this, I was working with somebody in HVAC. And I'm not gonna go into too much detail because it's going to kind of give away maybe who I was talking to. But this person used to work for a Goliath. And somebody that went through and recognized that there were problems in their specs, the way that they were written, you know, they're sort of generalized. And if you took something that was made for commercial, and you put it in a large residential, that wasn't going to work. And so they retired, I think, kind of sold out. And then startup asked them, you know, to start kind of a spec Outreach Department, and they put it together and Moneyball, I don't have the budget, just have 100 reps and match these guys, one to one, and I can't do all the things that the big boy does, and so forth. So what they did is they said, Well, I recognize there's a hole in the specs for the place that I just read left. And so all I'm going to do is I'm going to look for large residential, I know that the specs are going to be written wrong, and that they need different products, and I'm not even gonna have a Salesforce, I'm just gonna use your platform to go out there and find that business. And we're gonna let the other reps find the business. And we know that the specs are gonna be incorrect, I will then call up offer to fix the specifications and provide a product that will do a better job for less money. And that's how they actually do a lot of their sales and so forth. So in less those things are corrected and fixed people know what they're doing can just drive a truck through that that part of the process. Right, that's, that's a lot of what we're helping people do. So you kind of learn about those exploits. And then on one side, you're handing out the, the weapons to exploit it, and on the other, you're handing out the tools to defend it. We're kind of on both sides of the coin. So you're innovating as you go. How do you stay ahead of the curve? Because you know, these ideas are phenomenal. What do you see next? Well, you know, I probably have for every one thing that my company does, I probably propose six and and to their credit, they are going to make sure that they do one or two of them well, rather than, you know, go off in 100 different directions. I really like the group of people that I work with, they have a pretty high bar when it comes to investing and kind of going in a new direction. You know, the spec like product suite is a good example. You know, you want to stay ahead of the curve. You want to invite forward thinking people inside, you're inside the tenant you develop. And so I like having critics in there who are taking potshots at some of those basic tenants and those basic ideas. And so we're developing and staying ahead of the curve in the industry, not just going through and saying, Alright, we're gonna put something together in a vacuum. And then when it gets released to the industry, people come in, and they look under the hood, say, well, this isn't gonna work, you invite those critics in there. And they're making things a little bit, sometimes it could be a little bit touch and go and a little bit more difficult as you're actually developing. But if you're invested in making sure that you're not just turning over what was available in the contract, but did it work for them? Or is it moving the needle and so forth, it's a little bit more painful process when you're going through it, but it allows you to make sure that by the time you take that product, which we're at now, we offer it to everybody else, you got something that really does work, because it's been through the fire, you know, it's not sad, the credibility is there. Yeah, sure, it's a lot easier to do that at arm's length, I can promise you, and not everybody likes having people inside that tent, but you get a better result. Yeah, I like to let people in my intend to I understand feedback is so critical, you know, immediate feedback is really what makes it better, a thing better. So absolutely true. As the industry is shifting, do you see anything that's disrupting it, or transforming it? Ah, I think we are, I just described having done this for a little while. I do see that. The next big disruption, it's not going to be been to specs, I think the next big disruption is going to be somebody's eventually going to nail the master product database idea. And so almost all attempts, I think, I mapped out one time 21 fails, in Lista, headache, kind of a NASCAR slide showing all the companies and, you know, giving recommendations and setting kind of strategy and so forth, you want to be informed with what didn't work and why those companies failed. And, you know, it gets to match a little bit of a pattern. After a while you know exactly what it is they're going to do wrong, right. So you recognize what the approach from the beginning and you can say, don't invest, don't work with these guys, I know where it's headed. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, if you identify the toughest problem to solve, and you don't move forward until you have an answer to solve that problem, you know, there's a pathway forward to solve this. If you're one of these companies, in basically, to broaden the concept, you know, your bosses said meant, wouldn't it be great, if during the purchasing product, we had all this data connected, and we can tell them the specs, you know, when something was specified, so we could be ahead of the ordering process, if you're trying to solve those types of issues. What I'm about to say, is really, really important. Because I'm aware of six projects right now, including one, and I'm not gonna say the exact number that has nine figures devoted to solving it, there are some very big checks being written to try to solve this problem. And I can usually tell from talking to the development team in the first few minutes, whether or not it's going to work or not. And the main problem is, it's not in the best interest of building product manufacturers to cooperate. You know, they don't want to be compared, you know, you know, going through, it's why Sherwin Williams has separate stores, they don't want to sit on the shelf at Home Depot next to the other, the other products, they want to be able to focus on, you know, their own unique, you know, it'll value characteristics and so forth, rather than just, you know, be listed by an NPI number is a functional equivalent. So the problem that has to be solved on there is, how are you going to get potentially 21,000, building product manufacturers data into the system without a brute force approach, and this is when every single product type is a little bit different, you're never going to find two architecture engineers that agree what the salient characteristics are. And so I've talked to a grand total of two other people in my lifetime that actually have an approach. Normally, this is what all these other companies do, and not to be too glib, but it's like, Alright, we're gonna hire an architect or engineer, they're going to design this beautiful interface. And people are going to talk about, oh, this is how product selection could be done. I've got a picture here, I've got this and I can throw it in there like a shopping cart or something along those lines. And then they build up one narrow category so that they can do product demos where all the data is already there. It looks fantastic. And then everybody shows up and the architects are like, wow, there's nothing in these other categories. I'll come back tell me when you got it filled out the building product manufacturers are Hey, when you get more traffic, let me know when I will put in the time and expense to to put in the product data. But there you can never get anybody to cooperate and actually put this data In. And in every case I've ever run across, you know, even with, you know, 1020 people in the back room, trying to manually add the state and so forth adventurer reaches a point of equilibrium where they, they sell just enough to keep the lights on. And that's usually when they reach out to a company like us. And they're like, Hey, can you force people to use our rating system or, you know, our index of products or something, and, and so you see a lot of the stuff from behind the scenes, and you recognize just how untenable it is. The solution here is somebody who solves this problem, it's not going to be because they have a bigger database, or muscle or anything along these lines, it will be because they have an innovative way that you've never heard of before it collecting the product data. And I've got an approach that I propose, we actually did a prototype and everything with a company in England and spent a lot of time on it, we just don't have the bandwidth to do all things that made a very smart decision, to focus on the things that were already had commitments to, and so forth. But I have talked to a couple other people that are 30 year veterans of the industry and all on their own, they arrived at the very same conclusion. And they had an innovative way is different from mine innovative way of getting that product data into the system. And the the master database winner, you know, is going to be the one that finds one of those people, and tries out one of those ideas. And if they're successful man, they're just going to have an absolutely overwhelming dominant position. They'll be able to control access to all these different technology platforms and so forth. And and it's going to be huge. So there, there is an answer for that out there. But I'm not aware of any of the six that are attempting it right now that are focusing on on that I think they're thinking that it's somehow just going to solve itself. By the way in the inspection shamans Summit, to cut to the chase, I kind of tell people, I don't want to draw a line to that concept. But if you're evaluating that as a place for investment, Hey, should I have my products listed in this new, beautiful looking interface that looks like Man, this is a great way for somebody to select products, you got to ask questions about you know, how much of the system is filled out, you got to be able to poke around and look at other areas other than your own and see how much is there and I'm expecting you're gonna find that there at 5% or something where, you know, obviously doesn't work? If they tell you that the answer is one of two things walk away. If it's, oh, the manufacturers realize how important this is, they're gonna put it in themselves. That's all that you need to hear. It didn't work, the first didn't work the first 21 times it's not gonna work the 22nd that's a no, if they say something like, oh, AI will solve it. That's the sort of half assed answer. You know, it's, if you understand a little bit about AI, it's fantastic at taking the same. The same situation, machine learning wise, and analyzing it and saying, Okay, I'm learn some things, and I can automate it. But with so many different products and everything, no agreement with, you know, how those should be judged, and no consensus about how the the data supposed to be organized, we spent a lot of time taking a look at that. And I can promise you that that's not an approach that's going to solve it either. The winner, like I said, will be the person that comes up with an innovative way of collecting that product data. And here's a hint without the cooperation of the individual building product manufacturers, which can be done. Well, and how would it address the evolution also? Because like, the thing that we're seeing right now is there's such an evolution in code changes and products and sustainability initiatives. And so once it's developed, how is it successfully going to continue? As a database like that, I think is a an interesting area. That's, that's an insightful, it's an insightful thing to say, because, you know, if I don't want to give away too much, because, from my perspective, I have what I think is the answer. But I will say that, you know, you could put 1000 people, you know, typing in all this information if you had it all organized correctly. And it is a largely manual process, but by the time you got done 10% of it would be out of date, you know, and so it's going to be a challenge in keeping it up to date. You're exactly right is just as relevant, you know. And so, I think people that design, you know, solution designers and so forth, always looked at other industries, and they're like, Oh, if it worked over here, I can apply the same approach over here. It doesn't work there are there are some approaches that I've seen that suggest that there's ways to solve this problem, you know, AI and machine learning. They don't solve everything, but you can use a combination of human processes to plug the gaps of the things that computers don't do well and come up with solution that's a little bit more hybrid. And so you got to have a solution that solves both of those problems, not just getting in as well. and off, but how can you go through and curate it, make sure that it's up to date and, and help the next person and so forth. So there is a solution to that. But I don't want to give away the forum a little. No trade secrets today. Not today, somebody want, if you want to stop me at a conference or call me or something, you've got a project underway. Man, I would love to help somebody solve this issue. Because it's, it's not something we're working on or anything else. But you have 15 years of work. And at the end of the day, you just want your child to get home, you know, if that means helping, you know, somebody, kind of get it across the finish line and everything. But there are some ways to get that done. Yeah. So speaking of secrets, do you have a personal philosophy that you kind of carry with you as you do all this work? Yeah, to be honest, just so that it's germane. You know, when we work in a very sales driven world, and so it's very tempting, the company I used to work at, I was not always the most popular person, because somebody shows up check in hand, and, hey, we want to do this, can you do this for us and everything, and it's tough to go down, and you see your competitors making a lot of money and to say no to something. If you take the time to work with, you know, I really liked the content department that we work with, you know, specifiers are a special breed. They're a different breed, kind of a weird breed, and so forth. But they're misunderstood. And I think, largely unappreciated for what it is that they do. And people tend to propose a lot of solutions that just don't help them on any level and make their job a little bit tougher. And so from my perspective, even though there's 21,000, building product manufacturers out there, I just keep running into the same 300 800 in the names that we all recognize. And so they have memories, if you go through and, you know, you put something in there that says, hey, everybody's really excited about this concept. I'm the guy that has to provide the data that shows that it worked, when it comes time to renew. So I want something that's tough to sell, and easy to renew. That's my personal philosophy. You know, going through it, if you have something that's sexy, and pay, hey, here's a picture. It's just like the last four things that you worked at when you're a director of marketing and selling soap flakes. And it makes sense, there's clicks, and downloads, and so forth, man, it'd be so much easier for our guys to be selling that we have to go through in sort of educate people a little bit and give them insight into a process that can be difficult to understand. It's going to constrain your sales a little bit. But the goal is to have that person there for four years and six years and eight years. And so the personal philosophy haven't been around for a little while as you want to come and back. And you don't want to betray that trust. If you're building product manufacturer, is absolutely the same thing that your tech department works from, you know, you're building that trusted relationship, if you're working with architect or engineer, don't screw up, tell them when your product will work. And they will respect you, they will go out of their way to figure out well, how can I do business with this person, because when they're turning me away, when they have a product that won't work for my application, that's honesty, and so forth. And so I try to do something similar. And it means a lot of the time saying no to a lot of the ways that we could make money. But that's one of the reasons that we're still here. And a lot of the 21 companies I've referred to a little bit earlier fell away. Yeah. Cuz you got to be able to prove it over the long term. Yeah, there's a through line there. You know, Integrity and Authenticity are really vital in the building environment. So it's awesome that you orient what you do to that. And I think that's why you have the longevity that you do. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any final closing thoughts that you'd love to share? Have to come on, you want to do a plug? Another spec shaman in Portland, I was part of the last one, and I absolutely loved it. Oh, that's great to hear, you know, it's an opportunity to go through and, you know, I do have a fairly lengthy presentation on the front front end, where I go into a lot of these things in a lot more detail. And I'll tell you some of the things that I probably can't go into on the podcast and so forth. And but I love getting the individual stories from people that are trying to solve issues and sometimes to learn things I didn't know before, there really isn't any one person. I feel I'm in a very good place to say this. I'm one of the people that probably knows a little bit more than most about this industry, in addition to Ron and so forth. No one knows at all. Absolutely no one we understand kind of a silo and so forth. And so understanding more about the processes is important. I love being able to talk to people at these things and get that two way conversation going because I learned a lot and so look it up online, you know, spec shaman summit in Portland, and the other is just direct people. You know our new product suite spec live.com Yeah, you know, we've got the traditional stuff, our product listings and and proprietary specs in our spec, live analytics platform, great product data, that we can't show the stuff because it kind of betrays light information, but get a demo that they'll even let you take a look at how how your industry is doing, your competitors are doing. It's very cool. Oh, wow. And then the new product suite that we've got, which I'm plugging a little bit is, you know, going through and what happens, you know, if you're a premium product manufacturer, and you're trying to find a way to not be judged as equivalent, and you're thinking about building one of these health helper applications, if you're telling yourself, Oh, my God, how did we get into the development business? I've spent a million dollars, and is there a way to turn it over to somebody else where they can handle all the rest of it, we can just be the experts. That's what we do, and so forth. We can come in and take everything that you built and kind of take it the rest of the way. So those are my two plugs, so to speak, and all nine. Yeah, I'll be the guy that I'm not a salesperson, but I'll be the guy that sits down and kind of works with you on scoping and seeing whether or not it works for your project and kind of working with your your CIO and so forth. And hopefully we can find a way to help you move the needle. Yeah, we got to push that thing forward. Right. There you go. Well, we really enjoyed having you today. I learned quite a lot. It was like driving in a fast car. I really enjoyed it. Well, thanks for thank you so much. Absolutely.
