How AI and Diversity Are Revolutionizing the Construction Industry with Chloe Smith, Founder of Mercator

Ever wondered how artificial intelligence is transforming the bricks and mortar of the construction industry? Mercator's visionary founder Chloe Smith joins us to unravel this tech enigma, sharing her unique transition from data strategy in marketing to revolutionizing project opportunity detection with AI. With Chloe's insights, we crack open the secrets of a widely distributed development team, the importance of diversity in talent, and how Mercator fosters early connections in the development process, providing a treasure trove for anyone curious about construction industry innovation.

This episode is a masterclass in the synergy between AI and human skills, where we explore how machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing are not just changing the game but enhancing our human capabilities. Together, we peel back the layers on how AI is becoming an essential craftsman in construction management, shaping the future with every project profile and smart saved search.

As we navigate the depths of digital market intelligence, Chloe unveils Mercator's annual fixed-rate pricing model, which democratizes deal flow and sharpens business development strategies. Finally, Chloe gives us a glimpse into her thrill-seeking hobbies and mentoring dreams, rounding off an episode that builds a bridge from entrepreneurial insights to actionable intelligence in the construction industry. Join us for a blueprint of tomorrow's building blocks, as told by those shaping the landscape today.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

so, so build x. How, how was that for you, chloe?

Speaker 2: 0:06

uh, it was good, interesting, we learned a lot. Um, probably not a place we would head back to, it's just not our audience, but uh, it was really interesting to get to know a bit more about the city of vancouver and, um, get to know about, you know, a lot of the sub trades on the exhibition floor and building product manufacturers. So, yeah, it was. It was great to just honestly walk around and be amongst the people. It feels like been a while since COVID.

Speaker 1: 0:36

I have to say I really liked the fact that you are a very motivated entrepreneur. It's very cool. You came up and you're like, hey, let's, let's talk, let's do this, and you're like hey, let's talk, let's do this. I'm like, yeah, why not?

Speaker 2: 0:48

I've heard of you guys before. I mean you're the founder, right?

Speaker 1: 0:51

Yeah, no that's awesome, that's cool. So, yeah, I mean, buildx was awesome for us. We were there, as you could tell. We had a lot of interest. We've going out and, yeah, it's too bad we didn't know you sooner. We could have done one there. But this is better, because I shouldn't say better. Build x was awesome, but it's better the fact that we can have a little bit of a longer conversation and really dig into stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:13

I got a whole bunch of points here to to chat with you about your business and, uh, you know, so people can really understand. You know benefits etc. And you can take me through a platform and all that kind of stuff. So, welcome to the site. Visit podcast leadership and perspective from construction with your host, james balkner. Business as usual, as it has been for so long now that it goes back to what we were talking about before and hitting the reset button. You know, know, you read all the books you read the evening. You read Scaling Up, you read Good to Great. You know I could go on. We've got to a place where we found the secret serum. We found the secret potion. We can get the workers in. We know where to get them.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Once I was on the job site for a while and actually we had a semester concrete and I ordered like a green finishedished patio. How fun did this HLH taste?

Speaker 1: 2:04

I was down at Dallas and a guy just hit me up on LinkedIn out of the blue and said he was driving from Oklahoma to Dallas to meet with me because he heard the Faber Connect platform on your guys' podcast. Own it, crush it and love it, and we celebrate these values every single day. Let's get down to it, let's do it All right. So here we are with Chloe Smith. Chloe, hello.

Speaker 2: 2:31

Hello, thank you for having me, James.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Well, you're very welcome. So you are in Calgary.

Speaker 2: 2:37

We are. Yes, we are stationed in Calgary. However, my team is across Canada, into the UK, into the States. We're all over the place.

Speaker 1: 2:47

So you have a well-distributed development team.

Speaker 2: 2:51

Yeah, we try and make sure that I mean talent can come from anywhere. We try and make sure to hire talent locally because that's always important, especially in a growing market, and we're super long on Calgary, so that's a, you know, that's a. That's a big driver for why we would grow talent here. But in a startup environment, we try and pull talent from everywhere. It also gives different perspectives, helps us make sure we're not insulated, and especially in the construction market where we're selling, you know, cross Canada across states. Uh, it's important for us to get kind of a diverse perspective in-house, um, so that we're not potentially alienating or creating models that might have specific biases that we're not aware of biases wow, the b word.

Speaker 1: 3:37

So, uh, you got a little bit of a james bond film villain thing going on. You're stro stroking. Yes, we will take over the world.

Speaker 2: 3:45

Yeah, I have a cat. Is that your cat?

Speaker 1: 3:47

Your cat just came by for a visit.

Speaker 2: 3:49

I have a little great cat, it's now the cat visit everyone.

Speaker 1: 3:52

Okay, so this is cool. So how do I pronounce the name of the brand? Is it Mercator?

Speaker 2: 3:58

Mercator.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Mercator.

Speaker 2: 4:00

It comes from the Mercator projection. So your Google map, the map that you're most commonly seeing, is a Mercator projection. So it's the we kind of simplify it and make it instantly usable for our users to find early opportunities of new projects.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Cool. Ok, so without putting you on the spot with the whole elevator pitch, you know the whole startup thing, just just give us, like if we were at a party. I'm like, hey, so you know, mercator, what does it do? Like quickly, like what is that?

Speaker 2: 4:47

Yeah, so we do early project detection. So we tracked land development over time and then RAI stitches all of that together so that we can detect early project opportunities and put you in front of projects at any stage that you sell at. And so the biggest value prop that we see from our customers is that one it reduces pursuit time dramatically. I just was on a customer call today where the customer said you know, something that would have taken years, took 15 minutes, to do in our platform All of that research one place combined together. The other thing that you know we seem to generate a lot of value with our customers is identifying projects that they would have never known about, um, so getting projects, new developments, um in front of them at a stage where they can actually build relationships, um and engineer in value and trust instead of constantly being compared to, uh, their bottom line and and cost. And so we primarily work with general contractors today, but in the future here we'll start to open up outside of just the GC realm and serving more stakeholders across construction.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Cool, okay, so I have to ask the million dollar question. Why did you start this? Like what, you're crazy. Like, what was the? What was? Like? What's the ethos? Not the ethos? What do you call it? The Genesis story? Like what, what made you think that there? A, there was an opportunity? B why did you think you're the person to do it? And C? Um, like, who are you? Like, where did you come from? Like, what is. What is this whole? What's the Chloe Smith story? Tell us.

Speaker 2: 6:23

Sure, sure, I mean probably very similar to you, james. I mean, first off, I believe the statement is if you're founding a company, it's usually because there's something wrong with you, something like that. So we're a little off our rocker to begin with, no, but I started, so my background's in data strategy. So you come from brand strategy. I come from the same space. I just come from the marketing and advertising space.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Interesting Okay.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Working for some of the largest marketing and advertising firms globally, working on some of the largest brands in Canada and the US and globally. And specifically, I had the opportunity to be a head of innovation at a very young age, kind of given carte blanche to build the ideas that I wanted to build with the team I wanted to build. I had restraints on budget so I had to be creative, but one of the products that we had developed kind of sparked this concept of we were working with our business development teams and we were bringing in all of the data and insight that we needed. Every single time we went and pitched a new customer and keep in mind, we weren't vertical specific, so we would go automotive to healthcare, to consumer brand and back right, so we would be constantly bouncing around different industries and to have to learn those industries really quickly to be able to pitch a really unique brand strategy was quite difficult, and so we ended up building a platform that automated a lot of that work and that gave me, you know, kind of pause for thought and, coming from a construction family, I didn't think I'd come back into construction.

Speaker 2: 8:04

I've never been in construction in the first place.

Speaker 2: 8:07

I remember my dad bringing drawing packages home and marking them up at the dining room table.

Speaker 2: 8:14

But I've never been in construction, and so we ran a market research study where we had the opportunity to speak to agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, insurance, finance, construction and construction was really the group when we started talking about market research and understanding your market, where the projects come from. They're really the ones that said, look, if the clients aren't working with us and the spend isn't happening with us, we really have no idea where that work is or who to contact, where to find it. And so we started to break that problem down into okay, could we stitch together the entire construction process, not looking at projects, because I think this problem has been addressed before from the perspective of let's have the industry generate the data? Well, can we have the data generate the insights for the industry? And so that's really where we said, okay, well, let's take what we were doing in the marketing, advertising space and mapping different markets and see if we can actually map the construction market using the data that it produces.

Speaker 1: 9:21

And you do this for a customer while you're still in advertising. First, is that how that works?

Speaker 2: 9:25

Oh gosh, no, oh no, you know, you take the big leap right.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Okay, so that's yeah. Okay, let's look at the Grand Canyon leap here and just talk about that part. So you left the advertising company and then how did you go from there with zero tech left over and you had to start a whole stack yourself and then get this deployed. Like how long did that take?

Speaker 2: 9:52

Well, it took about a year I want to say maybe a year and a half before we actually had something built.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So MVP was kind of like like took about a year and a half Nice, and did you so? Did you go and get funding? Like how did all this work? How did you pay for it?

Speaker 2: 10:10

No, in fact, actually I had a really great mentor, um, who is still a mentor of mine today who said if you're going to do this, make sure that you can pay yourself for two years, because your company will not pay you. You will not make enough capital in order to pay yourself. And so I started consulting, and that was a huge leg up, because the first milestone was I needed to get myself financially secure. The second milestone was I needed to find a market, build a product and get one customer signed on, and then after that it was I needed to go and figure out how to get funded. And so those were kind of big milestones that I'd set in front of myself at the start.

Speaker 1: 10:51

So did you go into some accelerator program somewhere?

Speaker 2: 10:55

No, I mean accelerator programs work for some, but at some point you have enough industry experience. You have enough experience building new things that an accelerator will just tell you what you already know, and there really wasn't a lot of value for us to go down that path. Now, if you're coming out of university and you're going and you're building something, yes, absolutely. You have no foundation. However, if you're, you know, if you've been in industry for many years, you understand how businesses work, you know, you have you, you have an idea on how to build something from scratch. They're not going to tell you much more than what you already know.

Speaker 1: 11:33

Okay, so that could be a hot take so so you went to um to a, to a like um, do you do a friends and family round? You know, you went got a lawyer. You put your all your share packages together. You did all that. Do you do a friends and family round? You know, you went got a lawyer. You put your all your share packages together. You did all that. Do you do an offering somewhere? Did you raise a little bit of money first? How did that work?

Speaker 2: 11:52

yeah, so we. So I would have quit my my job in september of 2020. And we would have. So we spent about. I mean, we did all kinds of stupid things. We thought we needed a website first. We thought we needed to pitch and raise money first. We didn't really have a focus on a proof of concept yet, so we kind of meandered a whole bunch and then, around kind of 2021, the spring of 2021, we started raising money from friends and family.

Speaker 2: 12:32

We still hadn't had construction as a focus yet. It was more of like a agnostic, you know, market intelligence platform that we were building off of kind of a previous concept we had raised. We had raised 140,000 Canadian-ish from friends and family. We got our butts handed to us on a silver platter by some investors that we approached that will never talk to us again today. That was a learning. But what we learned from that was we needed to go talk to more people and, specifically, we needed to find who we were actually servicing. And so that's where we ended up running a market research study from a good friend of mine who started her company Cashew that does market research studies for very affordable costs for startups, and they helped us to find the construction market. We needed the types of questions we wanted to ask. We needed the space we wanted to be in.

Speaker 2: 13:30

It was business development, market intelligence, and that's really when we started to build POCs for construction, so proof of concepts for construction, and I tell you it was myself only open data and a bunch of spreadsheets and some Tableau dashboards and we would get our proof of concept out there.

Speaker 2: 13:52

And that's really when we started to see traction. We started to see that we could generate new opportunities, new invitations to projects for companies who would have never had that relationship in the first place. And so, from there, we then pulled together a team. Over six weeks we actually pulled together a team of contractors from our past, so myself and my co-founder and basically dictating the platform, and over a solid three weeks we worked from 8 pm to 4 o'clock in the morning and managed to build the product the first. And managed to build the product the first MVP, so minimum viable product, sold it into our proof of concept customer, who became our first customer. And then, all of a sudden, we were facing the fact that we had a first customer. We had to make sure that the product could actually change and be modified according to what their needs were.

Speaker 1: 14:48

Yeah, the customer customer led developments. It's always interesting.

Speaker 2: 14:51

Exactly as well, as we were like staring at $40,000 in our bank account, so we had to figure out how to raise Right? So, yeah, it was really about getting thrown into the deep end.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Okay, so, and then, and then you did you go to raise money after that?

Speaker 2: 15:06

We did. We did. So I, I actually took an approach that, uh, learning or looking back now was, I don't know what inspired me. Um, but I, I actually reached out to the portfolio companies, the CEOs of the portfolio companies, to ask if they liked their investor. And now, being on the other side of that, that happened so infrequently that it was a pretty odd thing to receive as another founder. And so that ended up snowballing a ton of introductions and that momentum, and I learned how to create, you know, a fear of missing out, some FOMO while I was raising, and that momentum helped us close a million just a little over a million, uh, canadian for our pre-seed round, and so we took that, built a team out of that, and then yes, so how many rounds are you in now, then?

Speaker 1: 16:02

And then we can, then we can get onto the product.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Yeah, absolutely. So we just closed our uh, we closed our seed round back in 2024. Um, so we took that money.

Speaker 1: 16:12

Back in 2024, this is 2024.

Speaker 2: 16:14

Oh sorry, 2023. Oh my gosh, it's, still February.

Speaker 1: 16:18

See the problem with all you AI people. You're already in 2025. So you're way ahead of all of us.

Speaker 2: 16:23

I know Um, we closed in 2023 in January, grew our team from five to 15 and focused intently last year on product market fit, and so, you know, right now we are at a state where we are delivering consistent value to our customers and new customers in a very reputable way, which is exciting for us. I mean, it's one thing to have an idea. It's another thing entirely to see it grow and become something that is, you know, consistently valuable to the people who are using it.

Speaker 1: 16:50

Okay. So for those who who haven't seen Mercator work, so essentially this is a you focus in on a map and you figure out exactly, you put in criteria for what you're looking for I guess that's how that works and then your platform has aggregated, via, I would guess, a whole bunch of APIs you've probably implemented, and then it brings that into a machine learning model. Where is this providing product, sorry, project pins? And then is there, is there, is there basically a a like a profile? So how, how is each product sorry, not product project categorized, um in in the platform for what a GC might want to see? So I guess it's a a developer's pull, developer has, uh, uh, pulled a permit, and then that gives them information on do you know when a permit is issued, Do you know when it's, when it's, and all that kind of stuff. So just take us through what that nugget of information would be. The GC is like oh okay, good, I can call ABC developer and say hey, do you guys have a GC for this job?

Speaker 2: 18:11

So imagine coming into a platform that's already told you hey, there's a project that is smack dab in your wheelhouse.

Speaker 1: 18:20

Here is not only the information Hang on a sec. So when you say, do you create a profile for your like ICP customer, as a Mercator, like user, do you? So you put in, we look for these types of projects. Let's say it's okay, and then this will show you your, your, your ICP kind of projects within a map, and then also other stuff that might extend your ICP to something else very much white glove, very hands-on, and we support them by building out kind of their search criterias call them like a smart saved search We'll really kind of detail up the type of profile of projects that they have or that they're looking for, and so that might be you know what particular market are we interested in or stage of the project that we're interested in.

Speaker 2: 19:15

And keep in mind that we extend from like conception through to pre-con, through to construction, then post-construction, so really depends where you want to sell into and then we will help them get that set up. They can do it themselves in the platform and that starts to generate emails into their inbox and so typically a Mercator email. We target about 80% to 90% relevancy in those emails of projects that are actionable immediately for you to start pursuing. And so when you go from your email to a project page so basically you'll get a list in the morning links to the Mercator website that'll open up project pages and in there you're seeing you know who owns the land, you're seeing any sort of permits that have been pulled, you're seeing any real estate information. You're seeing you know other companies that are involved, what role they're playing.

Speaker 2: 20:12

You can click through and actually see those entire company profiles, other projects they've got going on contact details. So we usually say if it's not in your Rolodex. It's usually in ours, because we can take you from finding out to seeing all of the project details, as well as any materials that have been created so far, like drawing packages, for example, and then into the company's profile. So if I'm going out to lunch with someone, instead of asking the question, hey, what do you got going on, you're going, okay, you've got these three projects going on, let's chat about how we can help on these, and you're having, you know, a more productive conversation instead of just a discovery one.

Speaker 1: 20:53

So how is this AI? And not just, like you know, categorized and organized query searches Like how is it AI?

Speaker 2: 21:04

Yeah, so oftentimes I talk about the fact that AI is. You either have it above the surface or below the surface, and we talk about that in terms of the user experience. Right, it's either I'm getting recommended something or I'm directly interacting with a generative AI tool, or it's happening under the surface, in which case it is part of what the like the data that's being created. So keep in mind that we're in a space where none of this data has been created.

Speaker 2: 21:31

In the past, when I worked in marketing and advertising, yeah, we definitely had data sets that were funneled to us via API. In this instance, we're sourcing from government, we're sourcing from regulatory boards, we're working with some paid partners. At times, we're also generating that data ourselves. So, the amount of ocular character recognition, we do image recognition, we do natural language processing basically stripping out the meat of all of these different data sets that technically have no relationship across them, and then we have to then cluster all that together or stitch it all together to be able to detect these are. All of these activities are related to the same project and all of these companies are therefore all working with one another on that same project. Therefore, there's a relationship not only within the activities, but also within the companies.

Speaker 1: 22:23

Okay, so that's pretty, pretty cool. So what's your, what's your understanding of like how AI will be applied in construction in general? I mean, you're obviously this is, you know, the the procurement side sort of procurement or project opportunity side. You know, this is not about the actual building itself. Where do you see this kind of going in terms of AI with project management?

Speaker 2: 22:50

I think I mean, look, I think a big part of where this will go is how quickly we can understand the pieces that make up AI, and I think something that's really valuable to talk about is and we can go into the examples of, you know companies that are doing amazing things. I can name a couple off the top of my head here that are doing some pretty amazing things from a resource efficiency standpoint, from an optimization standpoint, from just honestly, like Document Crunch, for example, reading your own legal on site so you can understand what you can and cannot do in a contract.

Speaker 1: 23:34

Did you listen to our podcast that we did with them?

Speaker 2: 23:38

Did you chat with Josh? He's like I call him my big brother.

Speaker 1: 23:41

Yeah, he's awesome.

Speaker 2: 23:42

We're part of the same portfolio under Sequoia Ventures Great, great team. But it really comes down to how do you think from the lens of AI and that'll really direct where this industry goes with it and really we talk about. You know, oftentimes when I speak about AI, I'm talking about the different components. Right, we need to start demystifying the fact that this isn't magic. Right, we aren't at a space where you know, ai will take over our jobs, but it's here to enhance us and augment us. And I think the way in which you can think about AI is a lot of the things like machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, which are the subsets, a lot of the subsets of AI are all mass pattern recognition. We're just recognizing patterns within machine learning and this is a gross simplification, a gross oversimplification. But with machine learning, we're doing that with numbers. We're pattern matching on numbers, right. With computer vision, we're pattern matching on pixels. With natural language processing, we're pattern matching on words, and then generative AI is taking those patterns and creating something new out of them.

Speaker 2: 24:55

Yeah, right, and creating something new out of them. Yeah, right, so when we can start to just create that kind of foundation of understanding, then we can look at our problems and go, oh okay, I would love for a tool to be able to auto-populate an RFP for me right, based on all the RFPs we've done in the past, right? So now you've got a tool like Project Mark, which is a fantastic group that helps do a lot of that auto population and make sure that it's very easy for you to, you know, generate your proposals as well as track them in a CRM environment and make recommendations on how you can, you know, be more effective or more efficient From. I mean, you've got your Procores and your Autodesk. They're buying AI like it's going out of style. They've got so many tools and so much data running through their platforms that they're able to start cross-comparing different companies and making recommendations accordingly to improve their operations or point out opportunities or point out risks in a project that they may have overseen or that may have gone overseen.

Speaker 2: 26:06

So I really think AI and construction is about, first, how do we build efficiency and then how do we start identifying things that could be human error? Right, and we can start to bring that in as an extra layer of oversight into what we're doing, and then from there it really comes down to where do we want to go as people here? You know, do we want to be the robots or do we want, you know, do we want to be, you know, wearing our Google vision or Apple vision pros and you know, being told what to do in the field? Are we looking at robotics to solve a lot of our problems because we're dealing with labor shortages? How do us, as people, evolve in this process, knowing that we have, you know, automation at our fingertips now?

Speaker 1: 26:52

Right. Well, I mean, aren't we at the point where I mean we can sort of remember back? Well, I can't, at least is like we're processors, for instance? I mean, aren't we at the point where I mean we can sort of remember back? Well, I can't, at least is like word processors, for instance? I mean that was a huge thing for to be able to be, you know, typing going from a typewriter, which is you know you make a mistake and you get the whiteout. I mean it's ridiculous To a word processor that is, you know, checking your spelling. It's doing all this kind of stuff that you couldn't do before punctuation. And now we're at a point where we have predictive. You can see on your iphone, even when you're sending a text, it gives you the suggestion of what it thinks you're going to say and then you just press the space bar and keep going. I mean these kind of things are just a natural progression of helping us out.

Speaker 1: 27:34

So I think that you know, I think that the ai is getting a bad rap in terms of its connection to taking over humans versus tools that can really help us. So even when you talk about the, just from, I can tell from the psychology of the customers that we have, that a lot of the entrepreneurs in construction started their own company because of having autonomy. They wanted freedom, they didn't want to work for somebody, etc. A lot of the people listening to this are those folks and when they hear, oh well, pro core autodesk, they're taking a whole bunch of information and then, you know, comparing it, they're like, well, hang on a second, this is all my stuff, this is my stuff and I want to know that you're not actually doing that to my stuff, because I pay you to house my stuff, not to use my stuff, even if it creates value for you as a company. So there there's.

Speaker 1: 28:46

I think that that's. Even though in the long run, the long game, the benefit would be for them, the short-term risk is like, hang on a second, I didn't approve that. Blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. So I think we're in an interesting spot in terms of where AI is in construction, because I've said this multiple times on the podcast with multiple interviews is when you see the dovetailing of robotics and AI together, we're going to see, because the terrain continuously evolves. It's not like manufacturing where you have a, you know you want to make one car and then you switch to the next tooling to make the next car. Well, the tooling changes every day on a construction site because the elevation changes.

Speaker 1: 29:34

You know all the environment changes. You know different stages of the project. So you know once everything is bim and which I don't know how long that's going to take for everything to be bim modeling. I mean luke forrest we had on at from autodesk at the um at buildax and he's like I can't believe how many people are not using 3d models.

Speaker 2: 29:56

It's like well, not using 3d models.

Speaker 1: 30:03

It's like well James 2021 was the year that most construction companies got a CRM.

Speaker 2: 30:06

I know from the world that we come from that was like that was 2008. Right In our industry, yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:13

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 30:14

So I mean we are. I think. I think it comes down to a couple of things right, we've got and this is one of the reasons why we went into construction is because it's one of the last industries that had haven't become tech companies right, if you look at all of these other industries, they've had to hire their own analysts and their own data scientists and started to build their own developers and and and create their own products. And we and we haven't and I think I think there's challenges in that there's a lot of small players and the accessibility of technology, just the understanding of it. I mean, canadian government right now is doing a digital adoption program where they're literally paying people to go out and help small businesses become more digitized. Because that's what's? It's not the first 20% that accounts for 80% of the GDP, it's the tail end, it's everybody else who's not on it yet. And when you get somebody like that onto one of your projects, now you're dealing with archaic systems together with your you know existing systems. So now you've got, you know, 20 odd different companies all coming together with different, different tools.

Speaker 2: 31:34

We were at Built Worlds back in 2022. And one of the common sayings was we are the best industry at collaborating, but we actually suck at collaboration. You know our tools aren't the same. We're not supporting each other that way, and so I struggle with this concept that you know we are. If only we could all get onto the same systems. If only we could all get onto the same systems.

Speaker 2: 32:01

But it's because it's it's it's a foreign concept to most people who've started companies out there in this industry.

Speaker 2: 32:04

You do not need a prerequisite to understand tech in order to start a construction company, and that's okay. And so that's where I I always say come back to your vendors and you know. These conversations are important because if you're scared of what your vendor vendors doing with your data, you need to, you need to ask questions and know what, what your rights are. Right. There's too many companies out there taking advantage of the fact that you know smaller or you know folks that aren't as educated in data and what can be done with that data, are basically consuming that information or taking that data, storing it themselves, processing it in a way that's, frankly, you know, not respectful of the person giving that data in the first place, because they don't understand it. So I think it's on the vendor side, but I also think conversations like this help educate the industry of you know what can be done with that data so that you can ask better questions, and smarter questions, to your vendors.

Speaker 1: 33:02

Yeah, that's um. Can we? Can we um chat about your platform a little bit and just and just look at the the opportunities for um, for sub trades to be looking at? You know potential work and sort of where things are going. So do you have information about what? I'll give you an example. So if you know that a company is going to be using frameless glass with you know a lot of metal hardware and that's a specific of type of specific type of glass company that's going to do that kind of cladding, are you, are you going? Does it say that? And do you have detail like submittal plans that have all of the details of the project as it evolves?

Speaker 2: 33:54

we're still early days in that, and so that's why we've kind of focused very upstream in the conception stage, the pre-con stage or somewhere else. We want to be able to bring it in and process it so we can stitch that information together. So we are just kind of at the cusp of starting that work right now. But in the future the idea would be that you know, a building product manufacturer, sub-trade could come in and say, hey, who's recently won this project or who might be doing work of this type, or leading work of this type? Or can I even search some specs to see what's getting specified right now? And so, moving into that realm, I think it's going to be really critical for us to tell the whole story, not just a portion of it, not just the pre-con portion or the conception portion, but the whole story of a project and of all projects in a market.

Speaker 1: 35:02

Interesting? Yeah, because currently, right now, you're using public information.

Speaker 2: 35:10

No, so which part of?

Speaker 1: 35:11

it is private or not. Should say private, but which do you have to gain access to? Which do you have to gain access to?

Speaker 2: 35:24

Yeah, so for some instances we actually have to be a licensed realtor in order to get certain information. So that might be when we get into things like land transactions or deed transactions, for example. Sometimes we actually purchase data from aggregators where they have custom relationships, where they've created a certain type of data set, so in those cases those are paid but would allow us to then process, say, things like PDFs, to extract additional data that we would need in order to paint the picture of the project.

Speaker 1: 36:04

Cool. So right now, when you go and pitch a customer, I saw a book, a demo button on your website. So what is the? You're calling GCs, typically Certain size GCs.

Speaker 2: 36:20

Yeah, so we work really well for general contractors that are over 100 million in revenue, so that mid-range or that mid-market, so 100 million to 500 million size. We can go higher than that. We certainly have some large enterprise customers on our platform today. I would say the challenge is when we go smaller than that at least for right now we get a lot of interest. However, those companies don't have dedicated business development team members.

Speaker 1: 36:49

Right for retail yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:51

So they end up becoming project managers who are doing BD work and then, as a result, will either churn or become more seasonal users, and that's difficult as a startup trying to build up consistency and revenue and things like that.

Speaker 1: 37:09

So what is the pricing model? How does that work?

Speaker 2: 37:12

We do fixed rate. We do fixed rate because right now we love to learn from our customers.

Speaker 1: 37:17

Like fixed rate. What per?

Speaker 2: 37:18

month, no annual. We do an annual fixed rate contract. It usually I mean it'll include typically unlimited features that we launch. We typically give unlimited seats. That's super important. We're learning, actually, that right now, if you can put Mercator in the hands of your discipline leads, you can actually Mercator in the hands of your discipline leads. You can actually start decentralizing your deal flow so your business development people are focused on projects that they can or like pursuits that they can go and win, instead of doing a lot of the research, because you've got the whole organization tapping into Mercator on a regular basis. So that's really useful. And then we're also starting to open up geographies. So right now we're in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto and the Canadian markets and we're pushing pretty heavily in Austin and the States. But we'll start opening up Dallas and Houston and really focusing in on the Texas market first and then starting to grow across the United States, probably later this year.

Speaker 1: 38:16

So without naming any other names, because we don't like to talk about competitor, or maybe you do, but is there anyone doing this kind of like you are right now?

Speaker 2: 38:26

No, and I think that that's what has always really shocked me. Frankly and granted, you know, going into this and being almost four years into it, it is not an easy task. It is incredibly difficult, requires a very large team. It is not an easy task. It is incredibly difficult, requires a very large team, requires a lot of upfront investment for us to do what we're doing, because we're really digitizing an industry, like we're digitizing word of mouth in construction, with data sets that have never been created before, and so we have to go out and create those data sets.

Speaker 2: 38:55

So, really, I mean, you've got your downstream bid boards, who we hope to partner with someday as well and are already starting to partner with. We've got you've got your Zoom Infos or your Dun Bradstreet, which are more kind of your contact information but lack the construction side of things. And then you've got a lot of locally. You've got a lot of development boards or like permitting boards, which are helpful but don't share the like, don't give you the rest of the context that you can get just a piece of the story. So it's happening in fractions but not as a whole like we're doing it.

Speaker 1: 39:36

Interesting. Okay, yeah, I can think of a number of customers that we have that would use your platform. You probably already have them as customers.

Speaker 2: 39:46

We'd love to meet them.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Yeah, no, it sounds. Yeah. I mean the biz dev side is yeah, it's kind of interesting. So actually, christian, who used to be on the you know the host on the podcast he used to be with SightMax we should reach out to him for sure.

Speaker 2: 40:04

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1: 40:04

Yeah, I'll definitely do an intro there. So, yeah, it seems like so. On the biz dev side, I guess it really is so. To get to the sub dev side, I guess that's really it really is so to get to the, the sub trade side, you kind of need more detail, right For them to even know what the project's going to be. And then and I guess it also depends on on what the the market is like, too, right, if it's a the trend of I mean, right now, you, you can't get sub like we can't get them on the platform no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1: 40:44

Not that, no, it's. It's difficult to oh, like you can't get sub trades in the market no, because there's just there's too much work and there's not enough of a particular you know division of construction or typical type and you know they're just saying no to projects all day long because they just can't take all the volume. So you know when. But when that flips is when they're like God. You know we need business. It used to be. We had to keep turning down business because we couldn't handle it.

Speaker 2: 41:12

When that changes and it becomes sort of a certain you know the typical paradigm of buyer-sellers market, that ebb and flow is actually really important, and that's why it is especially for your business flow is actually really important, and that's why it is especially for your business and um, you know, for for us, I think the way that we address that is um, when, when you're up and you've got more work than you know what to do with, then you're picking the right work right, you're picking the right partners to work with, the folks that don't have a bunch of leans out on them or you know that actually pay their people, for example, or don't have a lot of site safety incidents.

Speaker 2: 41:47

When the market is down and you're trying to hunt for work, then you're able to find a lot of that new information in Mercator, even though it is like few and far between. And so that's really why I see, you know, the progression of where we're headed isn't necessarily sticking in lead generation, but rather in market intelligence and kind of growing and giving more of an understanding of who's doing good work. And we do a lot of that with the cities, actually helping them understand who does who, who builds great buildings, who could use a little more education, and how do we structure policy to better support that?

Speaker 1: 42:21

Interesting. So what kind of information from a developer point of view. So let me ask you this, so the information you have for a developer and then you have the information for, do you collect who actually won the job after won the job after Yep? Okay, so you basically have both pieces of information there. So, on the developer, do you have a rating scale of how good to poor they are?

Speaker 2: 42:52

That'll come with time. So what we're working on right now is improving the quality of our company profiles and getting them to be more specific per kind of stakeholder type throughout the construction lifecycle, and so starting to then beef them up and say, okay, you know, are we seeing, say, for example, liens that are going out, or what are their financial records looking like? How many job postings do they have out? Really starting to understand them as an entity outside of just the project-based information. And so that's kind of the next step that we're taking this year is how do we open up those profiles to become more useful from a qualifying perspective, to determine, you know, are we working with the right partners or are they bringing risk to a project that might be one or two degrees away from us that we wouldn't have known about?

Speaker 1: 43:58

had we not had a tool like Mercator in a way, because the the, the content that your platform is curating, is not opt-in and that's, and that's similar to the way that G2 Crowd is. They basically, and you know SourceForge and Capture, they all do the same thing. You know GetApp, they're basically all they scour the internet. They basically get the SEO nailed and you find their results before you find anything else. I'm not saying you do that, but essentially there is then a rating system based on something that, like Sitemax for instance, I didn't even ask to be on this thing and I'm on it, right, and then now I have which is useful right well, sort of, but I have to pay to control it because I gotta pay to now enhance my profile to make it not a crappy, all that stuff, you know.

Speaker 1: 44:52

Now they're like hey, do you want badges? I'm like I guess I want badges. I mean, they're not hard to get. You know winter, you know 2023 winter? I'm like okay, well, sweet, great. I guess when the customers use it they're like well I guess that looks like other websites.

Speaker 1: 45:07

I guess we trust it. I mean, I guess that's there. But from your side, going back to that developer profile, for instance, that you see on a pin on a map that here's an upcoming project, because it was a permit, pulled the rating system of whether or not. So what would you were saying some of the vectors? One would be past liens. What other vectors would provide a model for a rating? Do you think? I mean, have you thought of that stuff? Or is it you don't want to give away your secret sauce yet?

Speaker 2: 45:39

No, actually we're actually in development of this exact thing with one of our partners in industry, one of our GCs. We've been chatting about creating these kind of company directories and so we're looking at what would be the makeup of that so that we could create some really strong ratings. This is also again feeding that back to the municipalities also really helpful there too. Right now we have a risk score actually that we feed back to the city on residential developers who are building secondary suites and we let them know which ones have high risk factors and which ones don't, based off of a wide variety. I think there's about 14 or 15 different values that make up that score and that helps them to determine you know who to talk to first or who to you know build policy around or reeducate. I'll caution, or I won't dive into exactly what we'd be looking at there, but mainly because that's mostly in discovery and we'd have to be doing the analysis to determine what fields actually make sense.

Speaker 2: 46:52

But yes, absolutely I think having a profile score, also, things like accreditations and certificates, understanding who can build what, is also super important. I think when we get into, you know, the GCs or even the sub-trades, like I know on public projects. That's really important, so for the cities to even be able to pull up a profile and very quickly see the work that they've done before. What kind of certificates do they have? I mean, all this gets submitted, but as a first pass especially when you're inviting people out to bid on private projects super valuable to pick the right partners. Or even entering into a new market when you don't know who those partners could be and you want to understand who it looks like you in that market and who do they work with Right.

Speaker 1: 47:41

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty's pretty cool. So do you get an estimated so you know when they get the building permit approved and then they have a start date? Do you get that start date?

Speaker 2: 47:59

Sometimes we do, sometimes we can infer it. It depends.

Speaker 1: 48:03

Inference my favorite word inference. Okay, so if you do that, then, and then do you get the occupancy permit date.

Speaker 2: 48:14

Exactly, yeah. So what we try to do is triangulate all of our data sets so we should have at minimum two to three different data sets that describe the same thing.

Speaker 1: 48:23

Okay.

Speaker 2: 48:24

Because different sources will have different dates. For example, like on your drawing packages, you'll have your DP date sometimes, but then the city will have a different date and so which one's the right date? Right, a lot of that in terms of like dates and, you know, permit information. When we're talking about permit information, permit numbers and things like that, all of that is really critical for us to get right. So we try to look at it from different angles to be able to say, okay, how confident are we that this is the right piece of data? Because that data is critical to feedback into our models, and so we always want to make sure that reported data can sometimes be misreported.

Speaker 1: 49:05

So how do we find, you know, multiple angles to look at that data so that when we feed it into our model, we're not outputting the wrong outcome for you Interesting, because I would imagine if I was a GC who had worked on a project and there was the estimate that, well, the start time, and then the estimated completion, and then there is the actual occupancy permit that's issued, and then there's like, whoa, okay, well, what were the reason for the delays? So then you get into your G2 situation where you reach out to the GC and say, hey, would you like to add some color to this?

Speaker 2: 49:45

Well, so take it one step further Now. Start to analyze all the different projects in that market. Say, for example, we're looking at restaurant fit-outs right, and we now know all these different GCs that do restaurant fit-outs. Well, why do your restaurant fit-outs take you know about, you know 90 days longer than somebody else's restaurant fit outs. What do you do differently? What do they do differently to speed up that process?

Speaker 1: 50:08

Yeah, exactly. So this is where you're. Yeah, some of the data that you're creating is goes way beyond just a developer trying to find business. I mean a GC just trying to find business.

Speaker 2: 50:21

Totally. But I mean like, like you know, you got to sell what's on the back of the truck today, even though you've got quite the vision in your back pocket.

Speaker 1: 50:28

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So so, in terms of your, do you have business development, people that are calling companies and all that? Hey use our platform, all that kind of stuff right now.

Speaker 2: 50:51

Like BDRs. You know what's amazing when you get to use your own platform to do your own business development. Oh yeah, nice, it is so fun. You get to learn how to use your tool in a totally different way. No, we actually just hired our first salesperson. We had a really interesting.

Speaker 2: 51:00

Our journey's been really quite interesting in that when we did our seed round we actually stopped selling for six months. We pulled together a beta program really targeted a very specific group of customers that ended up becoming our ICP and we honed in on doing stakeholder interviews. We did product roadmap reviews with them. We did language studies, pricing studies, usability studies, value studies with them Basically any new thing that we were thinking of we put in front of them to get their perspective hitting product market fit with that group in three months. It was very quick to very consistent delivered value. And that's where we started to kind of build out okay, well, what's the ROI behind that and how do we build case studies around that? And then we went back into market like late September, early October and in six weeks we closed four net new customers on 30-day trials, 100% conversion rate on those trials, and so we went.

Speaker 2: 52:09

We've had quite a discovery of a journey in terms of coming from. Okay, we think we have value. Let's really face it head on and make sure that this value is truly worth building. You know we have two years of runway not considering revenue. Let's really dig in. And then now we're starting to really open up or go to market. And so what we're learning is how do we take this thing to market? How do people find us? We've constantly had people coming to our website requesting demos and requesting trials, but if we want to amp that up and start building real revenue around this and moving towards kind of our series A, how do we get out there? And so what we've noticed is it's not the typical go to site and knock on the trailer.

Speaker 1: 53:00

No, that's not the way.

Speaker 2: 53:02

You know it's about these types of interactions hearing us on a podcast, watching us speak, seeing an article that's been written about us participating and adding more value back into the industry than taking from it and that's always been an ethos that I thoroughly, thoroughly bank on is, if we give more value than we take, then we will build fantastic partnerships that um will help us to grow a really solid customer value for the industry well, I mean for a gc to get a job, I mean you know it's not not hard to return value there.

Speaker 1: 53:42

I'm sure your fees aren't that expensive, they're not excruciating, I can imagine. So, like I'm just thinking, you know, before I did SiteMax, I was doing, I did a rebrand of a construction company that's your ICP, like right there doing $100 and $500 million. And you know the VP of development, business development, you know the VP of development, business development, you know worked with him very closely. And I was just thinking of you know what they would, how often they would go into the platform and look at the map. It's mostly they're going to react to an email right Alert and then they're going to go back in and just take a look.

Speaker 2: 54:22

Yeah, if you, we talk about like no known searching and unknown searching, so it's. If I'm, if I'm trying to find something that I don't know about already, then it's my email. If I'm driving past something and I want to look it up in the platform and see everything that's going on, then I'm in the platform digging into that map.

Speaker 1: 54:41

Ah, so you can have guerrilla marketing. Way to look, you are going next to the development application here check this think, oh, there's information on mercator. There you go, mercator, right, it's mercator.

Speaker 2: 54:53

It's like I have to keep saying it's like alligator mercator yeah, well, and that's funny because we so many people screw up our name. They often, uh, say mercator, mercator. That sounds like a dungeons and dragons character, mercator, right, yeah, so we've called up our name. They often say Mercator, mercator.

Speaker 1: 55:05

That sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons character. Mercator Right.

Speaker 2: 55:08

Yeah, so we've called ourselves Murgators. So everything we do is green, and so the team calls themselves Murgators.

Speaker 1: 55:16

Murgators so close there with alligator. Yeah, alligator, I like it. Yeah, so I get the sense that this is a really clever way for I mean, it's essentially like product discovery and what is going on and what the pulse is open API on your end for companies to be able to do what they want with their data Not their data, but your data so that they can sort of pull it into. Can you download spreadsheets from your system? Can you download?

Speaker 2: 55:53

Okay, yes, okay yeah.

Speaker 1: 55:55

Integrated with Google Docs or Google Spread, Google or Smartsheet or something like that.

Speaker 2: 55:59

Right now it's a CSV download, but you'll be able to, in the future, here connect directly into your CRM. So we give you the option to be able to hide projects, watch projects or star projects right now, and so starred projects are projects you want to pursue and those in the future will get pushed directly into your CRM.

Speaker 1: 56:17

Right, interesting, yeah, and I would think that the Are you also pulling anything from LinkedIn as well? For project contacts.

Speaker 2: 56:29

We will be but we actually have our own contact vendor that we work with, and so we look at that data. It updates every single month for us to get the freshest contact data.

Speaker 2: 56:41

Like I said, we use it as well to reach out to folks, and so we have to make sure that it's very reliable. But it also helps us to map out who the organization like. How does the organization look in terms of structure and org chart, which is helpful to understand. You know how large is the organization and you know how successful are they. And how successful, are they? I like it. I can see your gears turning, james.

Speaker 1: 57:10

Yeah, they do. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I often stutter and start and stop because my wheels are. You know, I'm a dude too, so I can't do like 10 things at once. But I'm basically thinking spatial reasoning like way out here, and then I'm also listening to the detail right here. So I'm kind of doing this and that at the same time and, yeah, I can see some huge knock-on macro effects here that are pretty exciting. Okay, so what else? What's next on the menu for Mercator? But okay, so what else?

Speaker 2: 57:53

What's next on the menu for Mercator now? Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that we hear from our customers is just being able to centralize a lot of their research efforts. So that's a big goal for us this year is to really bring in your news, your project releases, all of our Mercator data all into one space to really make it like the central hub. The second thing that we typically hear is obviously that we're not in enough geographies and that if we could get into more geographies that would be great. So we've already done all of the scouting and prep work for 400 markets that we'll look to launch here over the next probably two years and that'll give us coverage over the entire US and Canada and that'll be really interesting because now we can start digging into cross-market comparisons and the future of that macro intelligence that we hope to provide kind of the future of that macro intelligence that we hope to provide.

Speaker 1: 58:43

So what would a piece of intel be? Cross-market comparison of what. What would be the vector that somebody would be like, wow, that's valuable information. What is that?

Speaker 2: 58:51

Oh my gosh. I mean even just timing of. You know, if the larger markets are getting hit by, say, a recession or a boom, how long does it take for smaller markets to then react? If we're seeing an upward trend towards more senior care being developed in certain industries or certain markets, geographies, how long does it take for other markets to catch up? Where's the kind of relational, kind of ebb and flow that occurs market to market? Another way to look at this is actually a huge value prop back to our customers as well, who are the municipalities to understand. You know, where are those? Where are there opportunities for them to become better partners to industry based off of, say, other markets that they're actually competing with, because everyone's vying for development to happen in their, in their local city?

Speaker 1: 59:46

I see, yeah, that makes sense. So you have municipalities as customers right now.

Speaker 2: 59:52

Yeah, absolutely. We work very well with them in terms of being the middle person between industry and municipalities.

Speaker 1: 1:00:00

Cool, all right, so I think we've we've talked exhaustively on your platform now, so let's, I want to do these rapid fire questions. So what do you think about that? You ready for this? Did you look at?

Speaker 2: 1:00:15

that.

Speaker 1: 1:00:15

Sure, let's do it. Well, you don't have to look at them because they're rapid fire anyway. So what is something that you do that other people would think is insane?

Speaker 2: 1:00:26

What is something that you do that other people would think is insane? Starting a company comes to mind, because I think you need to be a little insane to start one of these things, but I'm an adrenaline junkie and maybe that's because I have a real high risk tolerance, but I'm a rock climber, mountain biker, skier, surfer. I do it all, so probably hanging off of a cliff is probably the scariest thing that I do.

Speaker 1: 1:00:53

Do you free climb or do you like full on?

Speaker 2: 1:00:57

So I sport climb, yeah, so bolts in the rock, but leading my own ropes, bringing my own ropes up, bringing my own protection up.

Speaker 1: 1:01:05

A lot of trust there, a lot of trust. Okay, what would you be doing if you weren't doing what you're doing now?

Speaker 2: 1:01:16

I mean, I've only been in this, for I've had a much longer career than I have been a founder, so but I think what I've learned as a founder is that I would love to make my next step into mentorship and volunteering and working for, for organizations that don't get what you know private entities get in terms of talent and skill and guidance, and so I think I would love to spend a little more time giving back to the world versus maybe taking from it. In a sense, I feel like the capitalistic nature of being a for-profit founder feels a little like you're taking a lot sometimes.

Speaker 1: 1:02:06

Really, I think you're providing a lot.

Speaker 2: 1:02:09

I think you're providing a lot as well, but you're also, I would love to give back to the folks that don't get the capital to raise to do all the amazing things that they're doing from a human standpoint.

Speaker 1: 1:02:23

All right, that makes sense. That's very nice of you. It's very nice. Okay, Do you have a memorable story from dealing with a customer or something, maybe perhaps going to a job site and trying to talk about this stuff? I saw you at BuildX. You know you're pounding the pavement. Do you have a funny story or something memorable you want to share that you would think would be reasonably entertaining?

Speaker 2: 1:02:48

So maybe not, maybe wholehearted and wholesome. I mean, I grew up, you know, my dad's been in industry for almost 40 years and I grew up, you know, listening to his passion about this industry and I always just thought that was him. I never really thought that that was something that was so pervasive in industry. I've had like full blown, you know, men in their 50s and 60s like cry in front of me about how much they care about this industry and it's incredibly heartwarming and I honestly have never seen it in any other industry other than agriculture and it absolutely endears me to this industry and makes me want to work that much harder for every single person we serve. And I know that seems probably a little, you know, probably a little, you know, self-serving in terms of a story, but I yeah it's, it's actually just really shocked me at how much every single person in this industry cares so much about what they do.

Speaker 1: 1:03:58

All right. Well, that sounds pretty good. Another very, you're a very nice entrepreneur. Geez, you make me look like the devil, that's okay. That's okay. Maybe I should put some horns on the on top of my baseball hat, okay. Or it's a trucker cap, right? Trucker, I guess, with the mesh on the back. Yeah, I guess it's trucker.

Speaker 2: 1:04:19

Yeah, what do you have? Is that a? Is that a bighorn sheep or something?

Speaker 1: 1:04:22

Yeah, what do you have? Is that a? Is that a bighorn, sheep, or?

Speaker 2: 1:04:25

something.

Speaker 1: 1:04:25

Yeah, this one says black sheep Okay, yeah, these are, these Is that how you identify. No, it's not how I identify, it's just the hat that I wear. But yeah, like I don't know, it was just cool. I liked the cause. There's actually a black sheep embroidered thing. So before we go, let's just your website is Mercatorai.

Speaker 2: 1:04:46

You got it Very easy.

Speaker 1: 1:04:49

And Chloe Smith on LinkedIn Correct, okay. And then if someone does book a demo, you're going to be nice to them. You're not going to hassle them. It's going to be a very great experience. You're going to walk them through the platform. They don't have to buy anything. It's all good, even if they don't go forward with your platform, they'll be smarter after that. That would be the pitch.

Speaker 2: 1:05:14

Actually, we're quite rigorous when we do demos, and for good reason.

Speaker 2: 1:05:23

We will do a discovery call first with you, to make sure that you know it's worth us spending the time with you and it's worth your time spending it with us, um, and make sure that you know you're the right kind of profile to get success out of the tool.

Speaker 2: 1:05:36

And then we'll go into a demo and in that demo, that's really where we are at risk of pass, fail, right, um, in terms of making sure that it's it is there to solve, you know, the problems that you you have and and that you know it's doing so in the same vision that you had anticipated. And then, from there, we'll go into whether or not you're ready to do a trial, and so we do 30 day trials today. It may not always be the case, but we do them today and we make sure that our customers are ready to subscribe during those 30 days. And if they're not, then we you know kindly say thank you. And let's talk about a trial when you're ready to be able to commit to a budgetary spend. And so we want to make sure that we're a small team, right, we need to make sure that we're spending time with customers that have a vested interest in what we're building and want to become partners, and so, yeah, it's a little more rigorous, I would say, than your typical vendor demo.

Speaker 1: 1:06:34

Cool. Well, it sounds like a time well spent for somebody to do that. Yes absolutely All right. Well, that's good then. So yeah, everybody who is interested in this, head over to Mercator and take a look at this thing.

Speaker 2: 1:06:48

Well done, you said it right.

Speaker 1: 1:06:57

Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom slash the site visit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the site visit podcast and sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.