Embark on an international tour of construction innovation with Russell J. Cook from Cook's Construction & Consulting and Paul Wszola from ASP Access Floors International, where we dissect the transformative impact of modular flooring systems across the globe. We uncover the secrets behind the burgeoning popularity of raised access flooring. If you've ever wondered how the concept of "one throat to choke" revolutionizes client experiences and simplifies complex construction processes, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Unravel the intricate workings of cutting-edge construction technology, as we investigate how urban interlock products are reshaping Canadian markets and why casinos are betting big on the efficiency of sustainable flooring. Witness the fusion of art and industry, where modular wall systems meet raised floors to craft workspaces that not only adapt to change but thrive in it. We'll unpack the ways in which these innovative systems are not just building spaces but also constructing the future of eco-friendly manufacturing.
As we look ahead, the narrative shifts to the promise of robotics in construction and the role of education in the evolution of the industry. By the end of our conversation, you'll be inspired by the personal philosophies and family ties that drive our guests, Paul and Russell, to create success stories that are as much about the heart as they are about hard hats and steel beams. Join us for this episode full of leadership insights and a hearty dose of construction perspective.
PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH
FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit
Embark on an international tour of construction innovation with Russell J. Cook from Cook's Construction & Consulting and Paul Wszola from ASP Access Floors International, where we dissect the transformative impact of modular flooring systems across the globe. We uncover the secrets behind the burgeoning popularity of raised access flooring. If you've ever wondered how the concept of "one throat to choke" revolutionizes client experiences and simplifies complex construction processes, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Unravel the intricate workings of cutting-edge construction technology, as we investigate how urban interlock products are reshaping Canadian markets and why casinos are betting big on the efficiency of sustainable flooring. Witness the fusion of art and industry, where modular wall systems meet raised floors to craft workspaces that not only adapt to change but thrive in it. We'll unpack the ways in which these innovative systems are not just building spaces but also constructing the future of eco-friendly manufacturing.
As we look ahead, the narrative shifts to the promise of robotics in construction and the role of education in the evolution of the industry. By the end of our conversation, you'll be inspired by the personal philosophies and family ties that drive our guests, Paul and Russell, to create success stories that are as much about the heart as they are about hard hats and steel beams. Join us for this episode full of leadership insights and a hearty dose of construction perspective.
PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH
FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit
Hello gentlemen, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good sir, how are you? Very well.
Speaker 1:Very well, so fresh off the plane from Calgary. But before that all the way from Australia, I'd have to say down under.
Speaker 3:It's kind of cliché. Yeah, it is a bit cliché, but that's okay, that's fine. What are the other?
Speaker 1:clichés that you hear when you're here. The shrimp on the barbie one is always my favourite. Yeah, are you? From the outback? They say that yeah, do you fight kangaroos? What about that guy that punched out that kangaroo? That's pretty crazy, right? Oh, that's gone everywhere. Publicity things, is it?
Speaker 2:yeah, so we've been talking about kangaroos a lot because I part of the presentation. I put up a picture of a deer and then I put up a picture of a really jacked kangaroo and yeah, they kind of look similar big monsters. Kangaroo is simply a deer that went to prison welcome to the site.
Speaker 1:Visit podcast leadership and perspective from construction with your host, james balkner.
Speaker 2: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 emails.
Speaker 1: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:One time I was on a job sale for a while and 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.
Speaker 1:Let's get down to it. Celebrate these values every single day. Let's get down to it All right. So Paul Wazola, perfect Paul Wazola and Russell Cook Much easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a lot easier. Yeah, I struggle with the Russell a little bit If you're mad, you can call me Russ.
Speaker 1:Or if you're Russell, Do you get Russ a lot. No only if I'm mad, only if people are mad. If you're mad, you can call me Russ. Do you get Russ a?
Speaker 2:lot, no only if I'm mad, only if people are mad.
Speaker 1:Really Russ, russ, yeah, are you married? Yes, does your wife say Russ when she's pissed?
Speaker 2:No, russell, when she's pissed.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, that's when it's serious. Yeah, does the middle name come out?
Speaker 2:On occasion.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, things are heating up, the heating up, yeah. Yeah, I know mine's angry when, um, when paul comes out, just paul, so all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, got it pretty much yeah, it's pretty much 24, 7 pissed off.
Speaker 1:I like that, okay. So, uh, let's just go through the companies here so everyone can understand. Cool thing is today I've got the tv so we can talk product talk, like vision of what you guys have been doing. So, paul, you are the international sales and marketing person director. Bdm, yeah right, snm. Bdm okay, this, these acronyms are getting at us in trouble. Um, for asp access floors correct.
Speaker 3:Okay, international, international. So we're an international monster right.
Speaker 1:So, um, in a nutshell, you guys do modular flooring, raised access floor, which is kind of ubiquitous in many areas of North America, low in Canada and so low in the US. What's the percentage in the US?
Speaker 2:The percentage in the US is a little higher, for sure, than Canada. I would say eastern Canada has definitely adopted the technology a little more so than the Than Canada. I would say Eastern Canada has definitely adopted the technology a little more so than the West, but it's coming Definitely.
Speaker 3:Australia it's utilized in many environments.
Speaker 1:But you were saying commercial buildings. We're talking like 90%.
Speaker 3:Correct and then in Europe. It'd be the same. Okay, yeah, around that 80%.
Speaker 1:So North America's just behind, and then Russell Cook's Construction Cook's, cook's, yeah, cook's. How come you did the S Well and you started this company, you're the founder.
Speaker 2:I did, I did and when we started it, we.
Speaker 1:You have a partner.
Speaker 2:No, myself. Yeah Well, my wife.
Speaker 1:Or there are two of you.
Speaker 2:There's two of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my've got a really really good team.
Speaker 2:Awesome Cooks. We kept it kind of vague Cooks Construction Consulting when we first started. We were strictly just installing access floors or access floors and glass partitions, but there was never a. I didn't want to be just associated with one type of building methodology, so to speak. I had a vision to kind of really harness the modular concept and bring that to market. I know that there's a market for the whole turnkey solution, so we use the term one throat to choke.
Speaker 2:So go to site Now the contractor is basically just going to yeah, one throat to choke. Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, instead of having this guy to do this this guy is basically just going to, yeah, one throat to choke. Oh I see, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Okay yeah, Instead of having this guy to do this, this guy to do that, move this wall, move that wall. Cooks can do that.
Speaker 1:So you say you've got a team. What's a headcount? Look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so today I think we've got to be close to about 20 people.
Speaker 1:We've got actually a couple small people that are the fraction when you say you're close to 20. Close to 20, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, you know the construction industry is, it's difficult. Sometimes we got some really really good talented people, but yeah, there is a bit of a turnover, unfortunately on the installation side.
Speaker 2:So we're a little bit of an outlier. We actually do all of our own installations as well, so we don't subcontract anything. So we try and employ um, you know really good installers and um. So today I think we're probably sitting around 20 people. Yeah, I think we've got five or six um in calgary in the office, we've got a business development guy in toronto, um, and then we've got, yeah, I'd say nine ten 10 on the installation team currently.
Speaker 1:Cool, yeah, okay, and let's just go through. You know, elevator pitch the products you guys sell, install, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Just give us that, I'll give you the quick, I'll try and keep it quick.
Speaker 1:Don't say Cole's notes, I want to do Cole's notes.
Speaker 2:No, paul, give me a kick under the seat, but yeah, so what we do is we start off with a raised access floor. That's our base, that's our technology platform. So if people don't know what raised access floor means, right, so think about a drop-down ceiling, think about a T-bar ceiling, how you've got those interchangeable ceiling tiles. Now put that whole concept on its head, so put that on the floor. So you've got modular two foot by two foot squares that are interchangeable with the next, and they sit atop an adjustable pedestal system, or legs as they're sometimes known Adjustable pedestal system. So we can actually adjust the pedestals to suit.
Speaker 2:So we have a perfectly flat floor. So, no matter what the slab deviates underneath, you got a perfectly flat floor. What that does is allows for a beautiful slimline aluminum glass partitioning system, especially nowadays, with the designers designing a lot of things out of Europe. Europeans obviously have adopted raised floor, so everything's perfectly flat. Having a really slim aluminum glass partition system, you really need a perfectly flat floor, obviously. So the whole concept is we run all the power, all the data, all the infrastructure within the raised floor plenum space. So the plenum space is from raised floor to slab, all of that open space reserved for your electrical. Your data controls your HVAC.
Speaker 1:So how much elevation does the whole system take?
Speaker 2:We can go as low as about two and a half inches. We've done installs all the way up to four or five feet, depending on what the requirements are Four or five feet tall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we did actually just out here on the coast we did LNG's new facility, so liquefied natural gas, so they've got a huge data center. It's about 25,000 square feet ASP icon data system. So we have a specific access floor for that environment and, as you know, with Vancouver it's a high seismic zone so it's all engineered to withstand. It's actually called a post-disaster building so the whole thing can fall down the access floor. Where we're main. They've got critical infrastructure on top of the access floor that needs to be maintained in the event of any earthquake. So any kind of lateral movement that that access floor takes the system on top. The infrastructure on top is completely sound With 48 inch access floor. The reason they went so tall was because they have a triple-layer cable tray going underneath this Australian cell phone in the background.
Speaker 1:Jeez Paul, it's like it's his first podcast.
Speaker 3:It is and he actually just kicked it under the desk he did.
Speaker 1:I love it. Okay, continue.
Speaker 2:So 48-inch high access floor. The reason being is they had three levels of cable tray, and in the first cable tray, a little bit over my head, but they had some type of cabling that couldn't be within so many inches of the next cable for interference, so they needed to have that separation between, and they had a whole bunch of just cable tray snaking under the floor. Hence the reason for being so tall. And that allowed for future expansion and additions to to the site, so that data center specifically actually controls all of the navigation systems for this liquefied natural gas plant, all the it, all the controls that are again over my head, but everything that's going on in that plant is controlled by this facility.
Speaker 1:so right, so with four feet, then I mean can they crawl under this thing?
Speaker 2:Essentially yeah, that sounds freaky what it does for the technicians and stuff when they're adding cabling, instead of being on ladders trying to work overhead. Now they have the option just to remove a series of access flooring panels and just lay the cables, so it's safer. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah 9-11 changed the structure and design component really across the world.
Speaker 1:You had to bring 9-11 into it didn't you, I did it was going so well, didn't you think so, russell?
Speaker 3:It was for Canadians, so it was a substantial corner, I think. With regards to commercial infrastructure, building infrastructure, it was an elbow there yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So let's just go through ASP for a second. So product-wise flooring, and you guys are a distributor for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Cooks is the Canadian distributor for ASP, so we're fortunate to be partnered with ASP, so we're direct distributors. We buy directly from the factory ASP's factory and we service across Canada. We've directly from the factory ASP's factory and we service across Canada. We've got projects, obviously, in British Columbia here, vancouver, northern BC. We've been fortunate to do all the BC Hydro substations All the way across to PEI in New Brunswick we're doing the new Kodiak police facility out there. So yeah, our boys travel clear across the country supplying and installing the ASP product.
Speaker 1:So tell me, Paul, how long have you been with the company? Tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:So the company ASP has been running for about 30 years and that was developed. So it's a family-run company and they were installing access floor and partitioning during that commencement and then saw the problems with the access floor system in regards to its design, what it was capable of doing, and they decided so the family decided that it could go above and beyond that, so they started altering designs, doing some R&D associated with it, and we've continued that R&D right through the company's lifespan. So I joined the company in 2015 to move infrastructure from domestic Australia internationally because we realised that the new technologies that we had and the increased footprint that it was gathering within Asia Pacific and those technologies were just taken up so, so rapidly. So everything the movement towards Canada and the US is is our sort of final encroachment on onto the globe and which led me to meet Russell and Cook's construction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how did you guys meet? Well, it's a bit of a funny story and a bit of a bold move, I mean. So there's really two or three Bold move, bold move.
Speaker 1:It better be bold, the bold move.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, here let me backtrack a second.
Speaker 3:The bold move. Does bold mean the same as Australian bold?
Speaker 2:I don't know what does it mean in Australia, Anyway?
Speaker 3:continue Heroic. What does it mean in Australia? Risky? There's associated risk with it. I would agree.
Speaker 2:I would say heroic, heroic.
Speaker 2:Heroic, yeah, I'm going to look at the glass half full. You can look at the glass half empty. What I meant by bold move is okay. So I was employed by another company raised access flooring company in Canada. There was two two raised floor companies, predominantly in Canada, both manufacturers of access floor. When we went independent we were working very closely with one of them. We had a slight disagreement on a few objectives, agreement on a few objectives and I was looking for a product at the time that was going to be was going to allow us to move into bathrooms, wet areas, restaurants, kitchens and things like that.
Speaker 2:And the access floor industry here in Canada just didn't have something. Typically with an access flooring system, when you have a situation that you want to put ceramic tile or terrazzo or marble or some kind of a sheet good and you need waterproofing, you would have to lower the access floor, which would intrude on the plenum space below. You'd also have to add a plywood substrate or a concrete board, just like doing traditional tile. So what that does for the contractor and the client is it just simply adds cost, it delays schedule, it interrupts that plenum space again because you're lowering the access floor, oftentimes from tender stage, especially competitive tender stage. By the time we get to site, that cost is not really picked up until it's too late, right?
Speaker 2:Who's doing this? Well, you are. No, I'm not doing that, you're doing it anyway. So we're looking for a product that was going to suit. So the urban interlock product the asp offers is actually a tongue and grooved raised access flooring panel specifically designed to act as a second slab scenario. So so you can actually tile mortar, liquid terrazzo liquid epoxy right on top of this floor panel. So four or five years ago I tapped Paul.
Speaker 3:And before then there was just failing hard finishes over access flooring system, and so this product eliminates that. It can be waterproofed. It goes straight into those type of environments. We find them going into rooftop bars, all those types of various environments, and slowly encroaching into the residential market. Slowly, slowly, encroaching into the residential market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the residential market's funny because, with the raised access floor.
Speaker 2:Part of the sales pitch is obviously a cost um. There's a cost factor associated with the raised access floor, albeit um. Once you start to pull out the other components that it saves money. We we kind of realize almost a cost neutral solution. So adding a raised floor doesn't necessarily add cost because you're able to pull so much back from the traditional build. We've got some pretty cool cost studies done now.
Speaker 2:We just did one, actually, with a construction company in the States. It was about a 47,000 square foot project that they had. It was three floors, 47,000 square feet. The contractor came to us and said look, it cost almost $10 Canadian a square foot. We did the math conversion it cost almost $10 a square foot for them to flood. So by the time they engineered the floor to make sure it could take the weight, garbage removal, all the things that were factored in, it was about $10 a square foot for them to flood the floor between two, two and a half inches. We realized that we could put a raised flooring in there for $12 a square foot. So for 12 bucks a square foot versus 10 bucks a square foot. Sure, you're adding two bucks, but now when we talk about tenant improvement costs for future tenants, future moves, ads and changes, reduced electrical, even things like scanning the floor for x-ray and coring you start pulling those costs back, you're going to save at least $3 or $4 a square foot. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's just for those who don't know, including myself, if we just kind of just imagine for a second you're saying it's basically an aluminum tongue groove system. Yeah, so specifically, so a standard… Does it slip together that you can't pull it Like?
Speaker 3:how does that… so there's different access floor systems for different environments, and that's where we're probably really changing the components.
Speaker 1:Is it?
Speaker 3:vertical? No, so there are systems that sit together. So, russ, you're talking about the urban interlock where it's sort of a male-female connectivity on all four sides of the panel.
Speaker 3:It behaves like a second slab scenario. It dissipates loading through its footprint and then it's able to then accommodate higher loads, higher rolling loads, and therefore you don't get movement within tiles. There's no substrate for which is a potential failure of cracking once loading goes over that. So, um, and then there are other access flooring systems. There's still cementitious systems like our icon series, which I into icon data, data and comms environments, universities for tiered seating, stadium seating with regards to high loads, entertainment environments and then, of course, standard commercial application. But we're finding it's sort of encroaching into other areas. Architecture's really coming on board internationally in specifying access flooring because it makes the actual environment more modular, more conducive to change as the building's life component changes. It may be a commercial space today, but it may be taken up as residential tomorrow because of residential housing issues and so on.
Speaker 1:You're definitely in sales, paul, do I do well? No, it was good, it's thorough and true, and factual.
Speaker 2:Factual and thorough. What we found with the raised floor game in general is the approach is more one size fits all. There's good access flooring manufacturers, don't get me wrong, but it's like. The approach is like more one size fits all. You know, there's good access flooring manufacturers, don't get me wrong, but it's a very much. This is what we have, so this is what you get, whereas ASP has developed systems for different environments. So the system for an office is different from the system from a data center, which is different from a casino, and I don't mean just the panel, the pedestal itself Going into an office building.
Speaker 2:We've got gaskets that suppress the noise, we've got anti-vibration O-rings and silicone nuts that are specifically designed for that environment. Right, we do a lot of lawyer's offices, things where acoustics are very, very important, casinos, areas of very, very high loading. We've got heads that actually spin right into the pedestal base to really lock it in. So when you've got a ton of activity on top of the floor, that floor doesn't loosen up over time. It's subject to a lot more loading conditions than, say, an office building.
Speaker 1:Okay, so do you guys use BIM modeling? We do so that you can basically see what was underneath that whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we've done some like that LNG project that we were discussing earlier. Specifically, we actually did a whole BIM modeling. We could actually take a tour of the underfloor space, what it did there because of the amount of cable trays that were snaking through it. Our pedestals are two foot on center, so in order for us to mitigate any kind of interferences with the floor, that BIM modeling really helps navigate where the cable trays can and can't go, or vice versa, where the pedestals can and can't go.
Speaker 2:And then we go one step further and we've actually got a software that'll actually, when we lay the access floor grid out, it'll tell us what kind of cuts we have on one side. Can we put those cuts on the other side, like the off cuts? Can we use them over here? It goes even further. When we talk about furniture layout, the architects and designers will say I want a row of desks. You know, down here we can lay all that out and we can actually have our panels pre-cut, uh, when they come from the factory, to have penetrations, electrical boxes, furniture feeds, all that kind of pretty cool, super cool.
Speaker 2:It's like an ikea set of parts coming to site okay.
Speaker 1:So let's um, I had some notes here, obviously, which you guys begged for a lot, which was was cool, but let's get to those. So let's just talk about sort of the macro effect of all of this. Here We've got the environmental side, we have the revenue side of traditional tenant improvements. They basically come in, rip everything up and put something new back in and then also, as we move forward over time, there will be it'll be quite a while, but there will be robotic installations, because when anything's modular, you obviously know its form factor. That means it's not far away.
Speaker 1:No, it's not, it's not far away, so let's just chat about that for a second. So you were saying it's 90% in your area and maybe 15% in Canada, and that is in commercial applications.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you said residential is barely few and far between. The casino environment has really adopted the technology because it just makes sense, right? So when you walk into a casino you're not tripping over They've got to move the machines around and you're not tripping over cords. You don't want pack poles coming from the ceiling, you want the all the infrastructure underneath plus the new machines. So what's the height of a because is this like?
Speaker 1:this is secret knowledge no, no, no, what's? What's the height of the uh of the raised access flooring for a casino?
Speaker 3:look, it could be 60 for just power and data. So 60 millimeters.
Speaker 2:What was that? Two and a half inches, two and a half inches Two and a half Canadian inches.
Speaker 1:And then, just so I can understand this, they use, like the feeding poles to get all the stuff through, like, if you think from an electrician's standpoint.
Speaker 2:They love it because they're literally able to just open up an entire row of panels, because every corner of the panels, when four panels come together, they share one pedestal.
Speaker 2:So you can actually open up an entire run of access flooring panels, so you can open up a corner and it opens up when you remove one panel. What you've done is you've exposed four pedestals in a way where they're still sharing three other panels. But if you take a whole run of access flooring panels, if you poke onto the raised access flooring section, of. Cook's. There you might get a better idea.
Speaker 1:So we're looking at your website now, which is cooksconstructionnet. You got it. Yeah, what's with the net?
Speaker 2:That's a damn good question. We're going to be going through a bit of a rebranding in the next six eight months.
Speaker 1:So we'll, oh, I see, no, this is actually pretty good, okay, so I see, so are there so?
Speaker 3:this project here. This is in Sydney. This is a client's particular access floor that they wanted pre-finished, I see, so we pre-finished that in actually beautiful Canadian maple, which is spectacular.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3:Australians love your Canadian maple.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do, and the syrup probably Okay. So is.
Speaker 3:this are some of the panels. That sits on four pedestals? I see that, yeah, and then they have a stringer system.
Speaker 1:But are some of the panels designed to be only accessed or to be specifically accessed and others are more locked in? No, okay.
Speaker 2:Every single one is accessible. It's a whole floor plate. That's cool, completely interchangeable with one another. No, okay, every single one is accessible, is accessible the whole floor plate. That's cool, completely interchangeable with one another. So this system you're looking at here specifically is a pre-finished system. This is not I wouldn't say this is typical. I would say this is something that more supports a corporate identity. So this is concept plus.
Speaker 3:So within Australia, the Australian market, this is commonly used within office fit out, so pre-finished timbers, architecturally designed or specified with regards to the actual species, or even parquet on the panel. So we work closely with architecture to really shake up that environment for the client.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what you're looking at there is you've got a two foot by two foot panel that's been pulled out of the ground or pulled out of the uh, the installation there. So now you have access to that plenum space. So if you can imagine an electrician coming in if they wanted to say remove, yeah, one, two, three, four more panels, they can actually just simply lay their cables down in their cable tray or whatever they're going to do, and they can lay it right in that pot and they just put the panels back pretty, pretty sweet.
Speaker 3:Great, great project, high sustainability, credentialing on this one as well, right so?
Speaker 1:let's just talk about the revenue impact of this a little bit.
Speaker 3:Can we go to the sustainability component? No, that was number one, wasn't it? No?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's right, Money first, money first.
Speaker 1:Money first is it, that's true. So, yeah, I just. Who are the people out there like, ah yeah, that cuts us out of the equation, or is there?
Speaker 2:You're not necessarily stepping on too too many toes when it comes to a raised access floor. I mean, you know it's not replacing anything, it's simply again it's. What was once reserved for a ceiling system is now being put under the access floor. So from terms of revenue, what it's doing, from a developer ownership standpoint, it falls into the category of a depreciable asset like furniture systems or a wall system. So developers are realizing the cost benefits because within seven or eight years they're able to write off the entire investment. Cost benefits because within seven or eight years they're able to write off the entire investment.
Speaker 2:From a revenue standpoint for them. They're also able to garner potentially a little bit more per square foot in rental or lease space because as that tenant grows, that tenant doesn't have a huge cost to construction. As that tenant comes in to do a new fit out in the raised access flooring space, their cost to construction or their tenant improvement cost is significantly reduced because the infrastructure is there. They're not moving ductwork around, they're not moving wires around, they're just simply popping up areas in the floor yeah and bringing that up yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, um, when it comes to you as the contractor, let's say, this is pretty much a is there a service license around this? That you guys have a service program Once you've installed this? You guys are the ones that are here to make changes et cetera, and does this have some kind of a guaranteed next customer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are great questions, so there's some fine lines there for sure. I mean, the nice thing is about an access floor is it is simply an access floor. So if there are small moves, ads and changes to do, we do a bit of a tutorial with the maintenance team and if they need to move a desk or swap electrical box around, they're more than free to do so.
Speaker 2:It's not something where there is not proprietary to us. Now we would like to be involved. If we're going to start cutting access flooring, re-supporting it. There's been situations in the past where demising walls have been introduced or underfloor baffling. So we talk about baffling sound protection from office to office, demising walls if they're adding storage rooms or they're adding shared hallways and we've got fire rating situations. We need to be involved because cutting of the access floor and then re-supporting the access floor is very important. If it's done wrong, it can be obviously quite dangerous because it's a structural component of the floor.
Speaker 1:So when you let's say that there's a new tenant, let's say it's a 10,000-square-foot office and it's a tech company or whatever you know office, and it's some tech company or whatever and currently it's going to be demoed, all the existing stuff is there old drywall, steel, stud, all that's been taken out. Or who is it the architect that's going to suggest hey look, we should go with because your company is flexing and changing and your requirements are going to be, you know, oscillating over time. Is the raised access floor plus the modular wall systems? Is this like the more conducive to the way business is these days? Is that, do you have to? Because I would imagine if you can do raised access floor, you're not going to want to be doing steel stud are you?
Speaker 3:Actually, there's a lot of studies going on at the moment with regards to workspace, work environments, what's better, what's not better, and there's a lot of debate backwards and forwards. But certainly what we're seeing within australasia is open space, open workplace, spacing, um and breakout, workout and break out workplaces and then set off smaller offices that are acoustically sealed. Yeah, and it's working really well. Some of the newer builds are working very, very well. They're bringing back people into the office towers, into the commercial environments, and it's working quite well. And I think the access floor component allows that flexibility, um, allows the flexibility for changing of tendencies and allows the flexibility of that working space and that movement of the working space around. So they, the actual um tendency, can change and reconfigure after 12 months, two years yeah, no, I totally get that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the value proposition is pretty clear. I guess what my question is is that you're probably not going to want to do a hybrid, you know, like traditional steel, like even it going down to the slab. It's like kind of weird if you're going to interrupt the floor system with drywall.
Speaker 2:If I had it my way, paul had it his way and we came in and we designed the perfect office space. It'll be full raised floor throughout, including bathrooms. The only thing you're not going to do is, obviously, the elevator shaft. So you're gonna, you're gonna have a curb where the elevator is. You're gonna cut right up to it stairwell. Everything else is going to sit on that slab. So, like paul said, you've got that open office environment yeah, how do you do the?
Speaker 1:how do you do the transition from the from from like elevator hallway to a raised floor system?
Speaker 2:So typically what we see. So we're talking base build design now so we're talking a tower or a building that's been designed with raised floor in mind, meaning you come off the elevator, pardon me, and you've got essentially a curb, just a very small six-inch curb, and you're stepping down into a depressed slab.
Speaker 1:But that's if it's purpose built for raised access. I'm just talking about retro so retrofits.
Speaker 2:So you're going to, you're going to maintain your elevated core, so you've got your shared space. Yeah, once you start walking out into the occupied space or the client space, we actually have a system where the heads will swivel and we'll create a ramp so we can actually swivel them down and create a ramp or or build a set of steps of it so you can actually enter the access floor that way. So we will ramp or step down to common areas, bathrooms, existing elevators, whatever the existing infrastructure is.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Okay, unless you've got a fire reason to partition or separation of two areas, then it'll run slap, slap.
Speaker 2:Well, here's a neat example. So we did a project here in Vancouver I can't remember the name of the company, it was kind of like a WeWork scenario, right? Well, they had a floor. It was about a 12,000-square-foot floor plate and there was nine companies moving into this one floor. Obviously, vancouver real estate is expensive. So they had nine companies sharing the floor space and what we did was we installed a raised floor, a completely open race floor system, right. So it was about, yeah, like I said, 12,000 square feet, so full race floor. And then what we did was we removed rows of panels for the demising spaces. So we removed a row of panels. Yes, we cut around the new wall that separated it for fire rate. But then once one company moved or moved out one company, either they went belly up or one company expanded. We actually, when the walls removed, we just dropped a new full panel in and opened that space right back up, I see. So it's pretty cool from that.
Speaker 2:But I want to go back one second Paul's note. So Paul was talking about how today's world is moving to that open office environment, which is great. Having a raised floor, having an open office environment, allows for that to happen very easily. However, when we have scenarios like what happened recently with the pandemic and we go back to that more closed-in working environment, you can come in and add partitioning systems whether they be temporary or glass partitions or whatever on top of the access floor and now all your services are under the floor. Yeah, so you can put that glass wall or that glass pod right anywhere you want. If you have pre-built pods, they have glass. You can put that anywhere in the floor plate, a corner, anything like that and and your and your infrastructure services are under the floor.
Speaker 3:so you simply pop up yeah, or if you have plenum management underneath the actual access floor system, you can create air curtains for delineation of zone to zone just with simple air curtain coming up through um the access floor system. So it's got some benefits there, especially around the pandemic era.
Speaker 1:The old pandemic. I mean some of these photos you guys have. I mean this is so cool, Really cool, yeah, yeah, really neat, Really nice.
Speaker 2:So I guess this. So that's actually just a glass wall system on a slab, unfortunately. So they didn't utilize the raised floor in that scenario, so everything's still maintained. So how much of this stuff are you guys doing? I would say like for cooks. Business-wise I would say we're probably about seven, sixty to seventy percent access floor. Thirty to forty percent is our walls. The wall market, um in canada, um, especially in in calgary, vancouver, in the west, is very, very competitive, um, which is good for consumers, um, bad for business. Very competitive, which is good for consumers, bad for business, but it's very competitive marketplace. But in saying that, there's significantly more opportunities. So every project essentially has a wall system, whereas not every project has a floor. So the floor is less competitive, but there's less opportunities, more of a niche market. What we try and do is promote the entire space as the modular space, so demountable and operable walls. Operable walls are, do you?
Speaker 1:have pictures of those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you go up to the top of the website, there should be the leading to the operables.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 2:Well, this is really neat for us because we're actually halfway through a bit of a merger acquisition of a company that produces these walls and manufactures these walls. Which one would I go to Go down a little bit. Let's look at the Aqua. Let's look at the one on the top left. Oh, the eye wall is pretty neat. Yeah, so I really like the operable partitions more so even than the demountable partitions, the reason being is you can really open and divide a space quickly, so you have the access flooring system. I don't know why the video is not playing. It should be playing the access flooring system again being your base. These walls are great because you can use these as room dividers, office dividers, and they're on a track system, so they're all top-hung. That's awesome yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, these are really, really cool and they have such high STC ratings as well. So this is a company called Unique Wall that manufactures these in part in Toronto. Part of it comes from Europe, part of it comes from Toronto.
Speaker 1:So what's that little footing that came down, yeah, so what is that that's? Actually an actuated. It's for dust and acoustics.
Speaker 2:It's acoustics mainly, so you kind of see that nail.
Speaker 2:It's like felt or whatever it's actually gives us such a high acoustic rating. We got all the way up to a 54 STC rating with these walls. You'll see the top here in the video. No, you won't, because I lied. But the top and bottom seals are actually actuated. So when they touch one another and the electrodes make that connection, the top and bottom seals protrude, or bottom drops, the top rises and that gives you a locked-in seal. So you can pretty much be on one side having a verbal altercation with somebody and not be able to hear it on the other side. It's pretty impressive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean from a. I would think this stuff looks very German, you know yeah, like the European.
Speaker 2:So, honestly, most of the demountable systems out there are European design. Yeah, that makes sense. The glass wall systems, the operable partitions, to me are really cool because we're doing one for PricewaterhouseCoopers right now where they've actually got a big open office room and then they have got three walls that actually converge into a T. So they've got one that comes one side, one that comes the other side and one that comes the the other. So they've really got an open layout, like paul was saying, but they have the ability to section it off into three separate areas where there's meetings boardrooms, offices, yeah, I mean this kind of uh.
Speaker 1:The concept was kind of uh pioneered by the banquet space, right exactly yeah.
Speaker 2:So basically mini banquets, mini banquet space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah that's what you're going on your website's a little bit uh. It's probably our internet, not you.
Speaker 3:Within Australia we're sort of finding the opposite, where it's more open plan, commercial, yeah, and then so let's talk about the other part, the environmental part.
Speaker 1:So, obviously, what was I? I was reading something the other day that was talking about what isn't talked about in terms of gases is glue glue is like very.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy you brought that up because Paul's going to go into it, yeah, so you know gluing down stuff, you know construction adhesives, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:yeah, in terms of you know how long adhesives all that kind of stuff? Yeah, in terms of you know how long that off-gas is for, et cetera. I mean, even when you can't smell, that's probably still off-gassing.
Speaker 1:It's still off-gassing yeah so just take us through the just. There's obviously the environmental sustainability when it comes to waste and efficiencies, et cetera. Being able to move from tenant to tenant, that's A. Waste and efficiencies, etc. Being able to move from tenant to tenant, that's a, but b. Just the human impact side of things in terms of materials. Maybe just take us through the. What the benefit is for people working in these environments.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've taken that sort of sustainability measurement within the industry. So we've looked at our products from really for raw material, so they call it a life cycle analysis. So we've conducted like a life cycle analysis third party looking at how we do business with regards to manufacture and where we pull our material. So it measures from where we pull our material, from our raw materials, the steel, the cement, cement component, the calcium sulfate, the recycled component, um, utilizing it, looking at our electricity all the way through to installation on site. So it's that full recycle, a full life cycle analysis of the product, uh, transportation, shipping, whatever it be and then that's measured. So that has a lifecycle analysis. And utilizing those measurements then score other sustainability credentialing like EPDs, environmental product declarations, and those measurements then go into other areas to achieve certain ratings. So internationally, this is not something that isn't regulated internationally. There are many ways to measure sustainability. We use that word really quite loosely.
Speaker 3:Not baldly.
Speaker 2:Not baldly in that one no.
Speaker 3:Australian, baldly maybe, but yeah so. And then really that's ASP's particular sustainability. We invest a lot of money with regards to the R&D of our product, so we recycle all of our product. We've got a closed loop. So, for a manufacturer, if any access floor is taken up or removed because it's old or whatever it be, you guys take it back, we take it back. We have a take-up program and scott does, and then you guys do that as well in calgary.
Speaker 2:What we're trying to do is depending on like lead requirements. Uh, the part part of the big part of lead is uh. What kind of waste is left over and how much tonnage goes back to the landfill? What we do with the access flooring system, even from the pallets that they come on. We take back all of the offcuts and we send it back to ASP to be recycled, not into existing.
Speaker 1:You can ship that. Where do you guys manufacture?
Speaker 3:So what we do is we're manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Are you manufacturing in Australia?
Speaker 3:No, so we manufacture, so in australia.
Speaker 1:No, so we manufacture, so we have a plant, uh, three production plants, okay, um, in china, just outside of china.
Speaker 3:So you guys are shipping that back. We manufacture, we manufacture, yeah, out of there. Do you air freight that?
Speaker 2:and then everything is done on the right here. Right everything comes into the vancouver port so you guys fill up containers and you send them correct? Yes, and we stockpile everything in calgary, so we maintain a very large stock in Calgary. We're really close to quick ship scenarios, but giving the stuff back to ASP is very important because a lot of buildings now are going LEED Gold, leed Platinum and the access floor weighs a substantial amount.
Speaker 3:We don't recycle and reuse that in access flooring systems. That's utilized in other components.
Speaker 1:I got it, yeah, but it's not in a landfill, I guess is the most important. That's right 100%. We don't know, it might be in their landfill.
Speaker 3:No, that's not the case.
Speaker 1:So the LCA would identify that you would Okay, so you guys track that all the way overseas as well.
Speaker 3:Actually, we've just redone our environmental product declaration, which is linked to the EPD, which is linked to the LCA. So yeah, and that's just re-gone credentialing for another five years, I believe the last five years. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and sorry, where was I going with this? And that credentialing then leads us to where the industry really wants us to head, and that's have a minimal carbon footprint and the carbon measurement component of the product, and that encompasses the lca as well.
Speaker 1:Life cycle analysis right so that carbon footprint includes anything that has to go back for recycling.
Speaker 3:So once it's recycled and goes into other industries, that's a closed loop. And then, with regards to the actual raw material facet, we always maintain that point of quality control and so we utilize a particular grading of steel for our access floor system. So you know, there are industries out there that sort of say we recycle the steel and then we reuse it in our product. So the steel component should be of good quality, a specific rating, and that's what AS, what asp, does. So we maintain that quality component.
Speaker 2:But, that said, it's a measurement of about 97, 96.8 percent um recycled content on our different access flooring systems we should talk a little bit about even how cool the uh the factory is when they pull out the pot ash from around the different electrical plants. Correct, yeah, so that's pretty neat.
Speaker 3:And that's all part of that LCA measurement. So we actually pull out the fly ash from four electricity plants around our manufacturing facility. So ASP manufactures their own systems it's not third party and then we pull that someone else's waste being from the electricity plants like a fly ash type mix and then we then incorporate that into our core fuel of some of our products.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I would imagine that there is a composite material of some sort, so it's aluminum composite, and then whatever the top finishes.
Speaker 3:So aluminum is a separate system altogether. Okay, yeah, so a calcium sulfate system. Okay, yeah, so like the urban interlock, we were sort of just-.
Speaker 2:Calcium sulfate. Calcium sulfate Like a drywall type compound, like a gypsum style, but it's extremely dense, very dense, like a fiber, like a fibercrete almost. Okay, yeah concrete, almost like a concrete board inside.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very, very dense very low tolerable steel Steel okay. Yeah, aluminum, aluminum and steel, Aluminum and steel, but even the calcium sulfate has a sub-steel structure to it that increases in thickness according to the load. So this type of system urban interlock utilized within a casino is totally different to being utilized in a car sales room and with, you know, multiple cars over that access floor system.
Speaker 2:okay, so we've got yeah, we've got panels that range anywhere from a 1250 pound panel meaning it's measured the outside edge, the weakest edge of a panel. You put a 1250 pounds of pressure on it before you see any kind of indentation. It ranges all up to 3500 pounds, depending on the environment right, but I do want, I do want to go back.
Speaker 3:We could go higher with custom. You know these certain projects that require a higher rating of loading.
Speaker 2:I do want to circle back a little bit because your comment about glue, specifically in the industry. So one of the things that we've noticed over the years and I've I've worked on a lot of access flooring projects where they've taken carpet out and the access floor is covered in glue. Right, it's covered in that carpet glue and it gets tracked and you're walking around in your boots. So one thing that we're trying to really focus on now and promoting now I guess educating is the right word the industry on is that we have an array of modular and magnetic finishes so they actually magnetize If you click on the raised floor and you go down a little bit to the Magnus system, if you kind of go down to the finish section, if my website will ever load up, so what it is.
Speaker 2:So when we talk about a raised access floor, asp offers a standard 20-year manufacturer's warranty on the access flooring system. They can go a lot higher depending on if they're involved in the. There's the Magnus there. So if you go down to the Visit the Magnus collection. So what we got here is actually a hardwood flooring system that is actually magnetically adhered to, the access flooring system.
Speaker 2:But what it does is it allows you to actually hinge out portions of the floor in the middle so you can actually have the aesthetic of a hardwood, but the functionality of the access floor that removes any glues or screeds, right um, we've also got a porcelain tile system.
Speaker 1:That's very so when you say magnetic, where where's the magnetic contact? Just on the base there?
Speaker 2:right there.
Speaker 3:So that's magnetic, that's a magnetic strip, yeah so, uh, so we've done a lot of R&D with regards to magnetic finishes and this is where we're at at the moment with regards to porcelain finish and a timber finish, and it's all liftable that way. It just maintains that investment of the access floor. There's no glues, screeds, substrates, so, typically, what is the sandwich?
Speaker 1:here. Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? So, in this material, here is typically what. So this is manufactured?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sorry. So this is manufactured, so it has like a high show face on it. So natural timbers of various species, but is that just the top veneer? So that's like a top veneer, okay. So what's the center then? And then the center is eight compressed components of ply substrate. But that ply substrate it's extremely dense, so when you sort of look at it, so the longevity.
Speaker 1:When you say ply, are you talking ply?
Speaker 3:wood, wood. It's a wood pulp that is actually placed in a weave to give it the strength Gotcha. So yeah, so each layer is a specific strength and a different rating.
Speaker 2:Well, it has to be too, because of the environments that we're playing in, where we have such potential for cold or hot underfloor activity yeah.
Speaker 2:Because a lot of times we're using the access floor to cool the space. So we're introducing very cool conditioned air within the access floor plenum space. So we've almost got a hot above and a cold below. Yeah, the contraction. So you've got that contraction expansion. We have this installed in our showroom in Calgary and, embarrassingly enough to say, we've got absolutely zero humidity control. And you know what Calgary is like plus 20 to minus 20. In the same day We've got this exposed to the elements, essentially by the front door opens and you're in our showroom and this stuff has really stayed true. Do that compressed kind of construction material that they've used for the base of the wood. There's no separating. The tongue and groove holds it together, the magnet holds it down, so we don't see any twisting or warping.
Speaker 3:In Australia we've got within untenanted areas this material laid and so it's getting into that 30-degree Celsius mark and then into cooling it into around the 10-degree mark and I was surprised to sort of see there is just no difference between the actual environments, even though you do control testing of the product to actually see it in the environment. It's um, it's good, so it's a great product yeah, I mean being anywhere outside of really vancouver.
Speaker 2:The climate in canada um it's conducive to hardwood. It's tough right, so I some of us have been hotter than that.
Speaker 2:Here I mean, like truthfully, I put this stuff in the showroom because I was very. We had an old product back in the day that we tried to install. There was no tongue and groove to it but it twisted, it warped, it contracted like almost an eighth of an inch. There was gaps everywhere, yeah, coming from winter to summer and that was in a humidity controlled building. So we put this in our place and, uh, we said, look, if we're gonna, if we're gonna, sell, need to. So 18 months, two years, has been in there, paul, and.
Speaker 2:I are looking at it this week and it's flawless.
Speaker 3:I mean the design with the R&D like it has to have the longevity of the system has to be robust. I mean it has within. In some areas of the world they turn around and throw a 10-liter bucket of water over the top of it to give it a good mop, Whereas in some other areas it might just be a dry mop, and so that's why that timber has to be a dense timber. It has to sort of have that longevity component built into it.
Speaker 1:So just a thought around when it comes to the a TI project, I mean, traditionally you have a general contractor and then they're going to hire all the subtrades, blah, blah, blah. So you get flooring, electrical, as you guys know, you've got all the, all the different divisions. So do you find, with cooks, that you're G-sing this thing?
Speaker 2:No, no, no definitely not, because what's left?
Speaker 1:You got HVAC to deal with and then so well, it depends.
Speaker 2:So if we're talking, we got two trains of thought, so we've got base build, say designed with access floor, we've got retrofit. So if we're talking, retrofit, even from a modular power solution, we still need electricians obviously to do their work.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying, but are you GCing?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying. But are you GCing? No, no, we're working underneath. So you guys are a sub-trade, so we're a sub-trade. Yeah, we're a sub-trade, and so. But you might be absorbing, or you're mixing walls and flooring together.
Speaker 2:Right, but it's almost. We're not necessarily. I mean, there's always a need for drywallers. There's always a need for steel stud framers. We're not trying to step on too many toes when we talk about the modular.
Speaker 1:Well, it's not an intention thing. You know you guys are providing a service and if people want that or not, that's not your no harm or fail on your side.
Speaker 2:No, I mean where we come from, is we preach, we preach, we preach sustainability and we preach future proofing and we talk about all this, so having the products to back it up. So we have, you know, the access flooring system that comes as a kit of parts. We take away the waste, so we're now mitigating all the construction waste. With a glass wall system, aluminum wall system, you don't have any waste, you have reduced construction time. Tenant fit outs, you're reducing waste, modular power you're reducing waste as well, so that the industry is going that way like it's. It's, it's becoming. Everything comes to site in a kit of parts, it's put together furniture systems and then you're moving on. But it needs a buy-in from all the trades to make it work perfectly, I would imagine.
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:If you don't have people to buy into the system, especially when we're dealing with an underfloor air application if you don't get trade buy-in across the board, it will not work. We've had projects that are just not not been efficient.
Speaker 1:There's and is this an old school, new school kind of thing too?
Speaker 2:that's going on. Is there a cultural element to this change? Yeah, so I would say there's definitely a generational shift and I'm going to. I'm going to lean on the engineering world in terms of having the new, the new engineers and new designers and architects coming out of school, being more trained in that kind of european technology. I mean, it's easy to to say copy and paste from a building that worked before.
Speaker 2:Uh, in terms of just traditional like over the head systems and just no access floor. It doesn't make sense, um, once you start to really get involved in the costing models and the benefits too. So tell us our internet cell phone. They standardized on raised access floor under floor air for their every building. So they built a major commercial tower in every city. Now we're fortunate to be a part of the TELUS Ocean Project that's going on in Victoria. They've actually done studies not only from their tenant fit out, because they typically occupy a few floors and they lease the rest of the building out. So they've seen a huge advantage there for raised access floor from a tenant retainment, higher leasing costs, lower tenant fit out costs, which is all just good for the client and good for the goose, good for the gander, but also going as far as sick building syndrome, reduced absenteeism. They put numbers to their employees.
Speaker 2:So with an underfloor air application you're bringing in conditioned air. So filtered, conditioned air right underneath the occupants. That air that's coming in is virtually 100% fresh air. It's actually pushing up all of the exhausted, spent air. So today we're sitting here. All the air is coming from over top.
Speaker 2:So what we have here is what we call a mixing system. So the air is introduced overhead and it's mixing with the room air. Here is what we call mixing system. So the air is introduced overhead and it's mixing with the room air. So in order for us to get to our desired set point or to effectively ventilate the space, you've got to introduce X amount of air into the space to effectively ventilate what we're off-gassing. Now, with a raised floor, you can actually bring in substantially less air, which means you're heating and cooling less air. So now you're running more efficiently. You're also entering the air is entering the space and it's effectively ventilating the space much quicker than its counterpart. So we're actually reducing the size of the equipment that we're using, we're bringing in fresh air to the occupants, we're reducing sick building syndrome or absenteeism, and TELUS has done an amazing cost.
Speaker 2:And it's Sick building syndrome. Yeah, so sick building syndrome is one of those things you know. If one person's sick in the office, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know everybody kind of gets it because you're all sharing that Kind of like a mask conversation, kind of like your mask thing, right? So today if we all get sick, it's your fault because you don't have underfloor air. Thanks, Russell so was that too bold?
Speaker 3:It was bold. That was the opposite of bold. Strange state of bold.
Speaker 2:The glass half empty. So sick building syndrome. I'm not sure who coined the term, but essentially you know like one person is sick in the office, the person next to them gets it. With a raised access floor, the rule of thumb is that every individual in the office would have their own diffuser, so they have their own air grill, essentially. If I could get you to click over to the UFAT section of the website, so right at the top on the right there's a section that says UFAD.
Speaker 1:Oh, I thought you said UFAT, yeah.
Speaker 2:UFAT. That's not very PC, my friend. So what you see here is we're actually replacing or trying to mitigate 90% of the duct work. So the raised access floor is acting as the top layer of that duct, the slab is acting as the bottom layer of that duct and the walls being the sides.
Speaker 2:So we're introducing the air. There's actually a pretty neat video if it loads up. That's the idea right there. So you've got the air coming in, servicing the space. So, again, what it's doing is it's basically taking fresh air, recycled air, conditioning the space and bringing in almost 100% fresh air to the space there.
Speaker 3:It's pretty slick. Yeah, your warm air rises, yeah, yeah, so you're getting that cool circulation from underfloor. Thanks, paul. Yeah, I thought I'd throw that in. Yeah, so 50, 60 years ago there was a data center.
Speaker 2:I do talk a lot. I know this is my last spiel.
Speaker 1:He's just like, yeah, no, I've got to get something in there. Do you know what that hot air rises for?
Speaker 2:everyone. I just thought I'd throw that in there just to make sure everyone knows I'm here still. You state the obvious. So Paul and I have been together the last two weeks now. We've done a presentation almost every day and Paul's gearing up for the presentation and Russ just doesn't shut up the whole time.
Speaker 3:I did ask you a specific question.
Speaker 2:We do. We do so. The thing on the left there is the air tower, so picture that as almost your furnace, except for and where's that going? Air is introduced. This is the really cool part. So you're going to have one of those in the core. What this does for a developer. We actually reduce the size of the core because we actually put those back into the tenant space. So the tenant is actually taking those. The air is mixing underneath the floor. Now the air is fresh, air is being dumped into one or two of those and there's more of those dotted around. So they're actually taking the recycle or the return air, putting it back.
Speaker 2:Conditioning through the filter, heated, cool, depending on the nature of the building being shot underneath. If you look at a data center, for example, um, they have those really hot equipment racks. Um, we noticed this is a cool thing. This is our space actually. So this is our showroom in Calgary. You got the smoke test. So what we did, we put a fog machine under the floor and what it does is it shows how effectively that space is ventilated. So that's a commissioned floor plate essentially. That's great, russ. Yeah, it's fantastic. That's how quickly that space is ventilated in terms of the air entering the space right. So it's a swirl diffuser. It's got that swirl effect of the air coming up. The rule of thumb would be Marijuana on your brain. That's not my video.
Speaker 2:It shows all the stuff I've watched. The podcast is over in five minutes. We'll save that for 10 minutes. I lost my train of thought. Now.
Speaker 2:The whole concept of underfloor air distribution kind of came into play when they were designing data centers. Right, so, those hot, hot cloud computing, the battery units, they produce an intense amount of heat and, as Paul told us, hot air rises. Yeah, fun fact. So trying to introduce cold air over top of this hot air rising was just kind of combating that, right, yeah, exactly. And then wires you have wires that are hot running overhead into the machine. Somebody said listen, if we raise that floor up, use a raised floor, bring the cold air in underneath. It'll naturally come up, It'll naturally rise up through that machine. So cool it. You're also cooling the cables as they come in. So it's so much more efficient that technology just enters into the office space now. So it's so much more efficient. Yeah, it's cool that technology just enters into the office space now. And instead of data and comms, the components you've got people, computers, TVs and this adds to the ratings, like the sustainability ratings, for that build as well.
Speaker 1:So all of these markers rate that tower highly and then also reducing that carbon footprint or getting to like a carbon neutral measurement, get control and give you visibility on your job site. If you have multiple apps in the field and want to consolidate down to one simple app so your people can just get back to building, sitemax is for you, and also if you've been in a large construction software platform and you're just finding you're not using it all and maybe it's costing you too much money and you need to be more agile in your business decisions, then Sitemax is also a choice for you.
Speaker 1:So if you're looking for a change book, a demo at sitemaxcloud and let one of their fantastic people be there to help you through your software needs, again that is sitemaxcloud. Now let's get back to the episode You've seen often technology that seemed new at the time and then years later you're like you know that old thing Is. What is the swapability of new tech, to be able to sort of come in and out of this? I mean the whole modular I would imagine, provides the opportunity for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's, extremely adaptable.
Speaker 1:I mean, are there crazy stuff that you've seen? Uh, with your company that you're, you guys are working on the next number of years.
Speaker 3:You're like, wow, we're really excited.
Speaker 1:Okay, can you share anything?
Speaker 3:not really, no, so so sustainability international man of mystery, living up to his word. So sustainability is really the key for us and I think that's going to sort of that is going to be the future with regards to manufacturing. So looking at a completely carbon zero access flooring system that can be totally recycled without by-product waste.
Speaker 1:When you say carbon zero, okay, so just like life cycle-wise, from all the way from manufacturing to installation to everything, is like zero carbon, zero carbon.
Speaker 3:So that is nirvana, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So for any…. But the benefit besides virtue. There is tax breaks et cetera, Tax incentives.
Speaker 3:So the industry is sort of catching up with that, governments around the world are catching up with that. There are tax breaks, there are incentives for developers to go down that track. There are incentives for even local governments to go into that realm.
Speaker 1:Well, because they have their own numbers, they're trying to hit right, that's right, correct, correct.
Speaker 3:And you know it's great. And you know it's great and I mean hell, since I've been. I mean I'm 21 now, so I've been hearing, you know, in the year 2021, in the year 2025, we'll hit carbon neutral, in the year 2033, we'll hit, but that date just keeps stretching out. So it would be nice eventually, and great for the industry to sort of see actual projections come to fruition. How does that work?
Speaker 1:on the carbon side in China, where it's manufactured. I mean, are they like adhering to the same?
Speaker 3:standards Correct? Yes, so ASP access floors. We manufacture the access floor systems, we control that quality component, we control the materials, we make the decisions with regards to our product and that's extremely important as we R&D further into the future and head towards that sustainability market that we really want and that the world really wants at the end of the day, because if we look at the access floor industry, it hasn't really changed that much. I mean, the Romans invented access flooring systems, you know, utilising marbles. If you've been to Pompeii, have you been to Pompeii? Beautiful?
Speaker 1:city no, last week no.
Speaker 3:That's fantastic, beautiful city. But you see marble flooring there that has running water underneath it to cool a proximal environment. They were doing this back then. They had lead pipes that took the water and ran that under the actual flooring system. They heated the sink.
Speaker 2:They were heating their bathhouses they were actually using. There's actually a blog on my website that I wrote that talks about the Roman.
Speaker 1:That website yeah.
Speaker 2:I've plugged that a few times now. They have these basically brick legs that they built and they would actually light a fire on one side. The term is hypochasm. So they would light a fire on one side and they have an opening on the other side and it would actually pull that smoke and hot air underneath the bathhouses. This is obviously if you had a few bucks in the Roman days, you had a hot floor for your bathhouses, so they would actually pull that fire through these systems and it was essentially the first raised structure.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the stuff that they do is incredible. So let's go through just the industry impact and sort of. What reception do you have in terms of the you're saying it's like a cultural shift. If you're saying that in Australia it's 90% to get to 90%, that's obviously been a transition over time to get to those numbers, correct. What did you see that we might, in Canada, might be encountering as we move forward to be more raised access.
Speaker 2:Our biggest competitor is traditional thinking.
Speaker 1:Exactly so what were the things in Australia that made that Like? What barriers were broken down in order to achieve 90%? Because obviously it wasn't that to begin with.
Speaker 3:I think, architecture, so architects, play a part where their future designs for these environments, their schools, and we're seeing now a movement towards CLT structures, compressed laminated timber structures, densities, the dense population we're finding, rather than going out, they're going up. Hence plenum environments, plenum management under the access flooring system and really, from ASP's perspective, educating the public, educating architecture engineering, becoming engaged with um engineering, um developers, and we had, we now have, developers approaching asp with regards to the access floor system. So normal approach for a design and um tower, say um, would be we would be approached with the architect prior to it even touching ground, breaking ground, and we would we be working with them on the so.
Speaker 1:So one vector of change, then, is is educating the architects to suggest to the developer, or whoever the client is. Hey, you should go with this.
Speaker 3:I think the development's like a social permit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know it's it's almost like a social permit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know it's almost like a Well, it's their client. The developer is the architect's client.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let me just conceptualize this for a second. So if somebody comes to an architect and says like I don't want to go, access-raised flooring in Australia, does someone go? Well, good luck finding anyone to not do it. Is that how it is? And it's almost a social contract, like a professional contract, where people like good luck trying to find that, because everyone's gone this way. Is it like trying to get it? Is it almost like trying to get asbestos drywall you just can't get it anymore. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Like you hear what I'm saying though I told I'm just trying to think of what are the?
Speaker 1:reasons why it did what it did and how because Because from your side.
Speaker 2:Where can we get it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, where can you get these cues to be able to make?
Speaker 3:change. So I mean costing. I mean, you know, like if there's costings associated they don't see, the developer doesn't see a benefit. With regards to Tennessee, if we're talking the commercial sector, if the developer doesn't see a benefit associated with the access floor system, even once they've looked at other environments with access flooring system and they don't see the benefit associated with it, then they're probably going to get that stage C, they're going to get that grading of a CD tower as opposed to an AB, which attracts a higher client, calibre tenancy, I would say If it looks good from the outside and longer term.
Speaker 2:sorry, If it looks good from the outside too, and good address etc and well yeah, I think honestly, one of the biggest problems is with an access flooring system is people look at it as you look at line items in the spreadsheet, so you're just like flooring well, you're building a tower, so you've got however many lines on a spreadsheet whether it's mechanical, electrical, blah, blah, blah, all the way down floor finishes everything and then you've got a line that says access floor and it says x amount of dollars per square foot, right and and that can be, depending on the size of the building it can be. It can be anywhere from eight to twenty dollars a square foot, depending on, again, economy, scale and complexity. Sure so when somebody looks at that number and they say, why, when I look at that number, am I going to plug that in? And what they haven't done is they haven't looked at the cost associated with all the savings. So when you plug one number into a spreadsheet, you're able to remove so many other facets of that build and we can almost get to a cost neutral, even though the access floor component is one of the top four or five expenses in a building, as in, we won't call it an expense, we'll call it an investment. So when the access floor is an investment in the building, there's all these other facets that you can pull out. A clear cut case.
Speaker 2:An example we were doing the ExxonMobil campus years ago and the economy turned and we were building five campuses, five campus locations on one, on one site. Each floor was about, or each building was five floors. One of the buildings that we were doing almost last we were doing the access floor and it had all modular wiring underneath. So we were plugging, playing, moving all the panels around, with the cutouts and stuff. The oil economy literally tanked I can't remember the 2013, 2014. The economy went kind of sideways. So they actually we actually-established the tenant fit out during the build.
Speaker 2:So instead of it being sectioned offices, we went to more of a bullpen style layout where they had all the desks in the middle, and we did that change during the build. There was no cost to construction, there was no cost to replan things. It was just really, everybody came together and said look, we got to change quick. The access floor allowed them to do that. So our our biggest competitor and what we have to change is traditional thinking where people think, no, this building works, overhead everything, boom, it works.
Speaker 2:We also got to get buy-in from the developers and the architects and saying that we can't just pass the cost of all the fit out to the, to the potential new owner, when you sure the developer may take on the initial cost, but they need to be educated on the fact that it's not an additional cost. We can get cost neutral, then you can. Then you can bring clients in mountain equipment co-op. Here is a perfect example. In vancouver, when they first built their space all raised access floor they had about 150, 175 employees, it was all. But two years later they were all of a sudden at 350, 400 employees, yeah, and their space adapted organically to suit their needs. Because they had the floor Right, they had the raised floor.
Speaker 1:Did they have the walls as well?
Speaker 2:They had a lot of. They actually had a very open concept, yeah, but the joke that they made was every time somebody got hired, somebody lost half their desk. Before lost half their desk before. Now we add to this floor. They were doing all the maintenance themselves over the weekend. They were adding desks. We had a series of panels that were left with holes in there and they were just pulling up power. They knew enough to look forward.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and also in reverse. So if business for a particular tenant is slowing down or it's just that curve, then they can sublet, so that tenancy can still maintain the tenancy, but sublet the tenancy and it can be adapted. The access floor can take up that adaption for a new tenancy, a new sublet tenancy.
Speaker 2:And it's so much more inviting to clients because you're not. The cost of construction is just not there. You're not running all new infrastructure everywhere. So schools, for example, universities, tell us all the time look, the reason we're going access floor is because we're a business. We've got to attract new talent. The talent that they're attracting is students, albeit foreign or domestic students, that they're trying to attract. It's a business, yeah, it's a business, right? So what they need to do is they need to say look, a potential applicant, why are you going to choose us? You know, share our programs or whatever, but we can also have the, the ability for you to plug in your wi-fi hots, whatever the connectivity issue is with a raised floor. They're not going through a two to five year cycle where they're completely reno in the school to add that new technology technology. You've heard the. You know. Look what we've done the last hundred years. Look how fast it's going every year.
Speaker 3:The technology is just going faster and faster and faster yeah it's factoring, yeah, and the component of AI into the industry as well. I mean that's going to change All right, Paul, tell us about that. Access is right there Come on, let's have it.
Speaker 1:No, it's true, I know, but tell us about the AI.
Speaker 2:I want to know.
Speaker 3:You Canadians are aggressive. Oh yeah, very, we call it Bolt, curious, curious.
Speaker 1:I'm curious anyway. So tell us about the AI. How is AI going?
Speaker 3:So the access floor can take up that adaptability as technologies improve, even in medical facilities, hospitals with robotics, the high cabling, the high thickness of cablings. So we're quite.
Speaker 1:So what is the AI part, though? Or would you just throw that out there?
Speaker 2:No, well, within universities there's that high-tech component, so the tech component now, when you're like so we've gone into several schools that we've done recently and we've put the raised-access flooring in, we've had the electrical boxes, we have USB connectivity, they've got fiber optics and then now they need to add components to that, whether it's uh, we have got wireless hubs underneath the ground. Well, whatever the, whatever the wireless hubs. So, like you know, like wireless, uh, like routers, like like routers and things like that built into the access flooring system so that can be moved around as well.
Speaker 2:So, so you can have the whole plate and antenna. It's. It's literally a box that goes inside the raised access floor. That can promote that. Yeah, but with the universities and schools instead of a school after five, like you said. Factoring is so important, right, because that factoring of technology is expanding. So when we have a situation where a school comes to us and says we have a raised floor, we can go in over the weekend. We can remove a bunch of panels, the fascia plates if it's a tiered lecture hall, we carve them out, put usb connectivity in there for the students or whatever, whatever they require, but it's done over a weekend and then they're back to it monday morning. Yeah, you're not shutting down for weeks or months at a time do you have all of those uh connectivity?
Speaker 1:little yeah on your site.
Speaker 2:If you go up a little bit, um, let's go to, if you go back to the raised access flooring for a second and let's see if we can pull you down to the bottom a little bit, let's keep going. Let's see if we can get down to the that's underfloor air. Keep going a little bit. Further Data Look at me lying to you Back to the top. We've got modular power on here somewhere.
Speaker 1:Let's go back, if I go any further.
Speaker 2:You've got to go back to the top. You're always going Under floor, magnus. Let's keep going for a second here and see what we've got. Magnus again there he is. Let's try this. Let's try going onto the blog for one sec and let's see what I've written.
Speaker 2:The blog, the blog. Yeah, all right, keep going down, keep going down. Modular power, plug and play. Click on that one for a sec. See that image. So the image gives you an idea there of the plug and play. So we've got no images on here, unfortunately. But so when we're talking about modular power, plug and play and connectivity, if we're talking about the traditional system, so you've got what we call like a junction box or a power distribution box. So the power distribution box is hardwired by the electrician. So from there the power distribution box is hardwired by the electrician. So from there the power is distributed by plug and play technology. So it's a connector cable that plugs into the box, which then plugs into either a, a furniture system or be an electrical box. An electrical box is a floor mounted box. You can kind of see under the guy's desk those wires come up.
Speaker 2:Yeah okay yeah, so those boxes?
Speaker 1:that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:So it's herman miller, you guys dealing with them yeah, yeah, that's uh, so that's uh, that's furniture system. So we actually have technologies that will adapt to herman, miller, uh, steel case, all the different types of steel case. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, um, we work with a company in toronto called electec, and they do all of the modular wiring components. The only thing that we've done differently is we've patented a box design. The lid of our box is actually rated for the same rolling load as the floor. Yeah, historically there's been issues.
Speaker 1:So it can be lower?
Speaker 2:you mean no. So what happens is historically, people are rolling, say, carts or money carts, a casino, whatever. They're rolling a heavy load or the chair even, and they hit the box and the box collapses because it's plastic. So we've patented a box where the lid is actually rated for the same rolling load as the access floor. So now the entire floor plate is, say, 1,250 pounds.
Speaker 1:That's cool, yeah. Nice, that's awesome, yeah. So let's get into a little bit of the future, of where things are going. Do you guys think about the future of these products and who will be installing them? Will robots be doing it at some point?
Speaker 2:We're having this conversation about a robot today.
Speaker 1:I saw the painting one. Have you seen that one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have seen the painting one. That's pretty dope, amazing. It's cool. I'm all for the next technology. I'm all for how we have to train the new generation of people that wants to be building and programming those robots. So I'm not necessarily on the side of robots stealing our jobs. Now, there's always going to be a place for humans. I think utopian is all of us just sitting on an Australian beach somewhere watching robots do all the work for us Dystopian or utopian, yeah, utopian.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say utopian.
Speaker 2:See, I'm glass half full Glass, half full Bold, very bold. The future of raised access floor, I think is, is in. I think now um technologies are going to be catching up to where asp is in terms of again providing different solutions for different environments. Um hindering or hindering on the sustainability aspect, which is very important in terms of installation, robot, robot installation for access floor. I I struggle to try and see how that would work, especially because every environment is so different. Right, so we do what if it has?
Speaker 1:a BIM drawing then.
Speaker 2:I know, but for the actual installation component you're going to have to actually have some of the access floor installed to put the robot on the access floor, because you can't have him rolling on the slab because nine times out of 10, there's so much infrastructure already on the floor prior to the access floor going in that I don't believe a robot's going to work perfectly. Now, maybe some jobs are going to work. I don't know how a robot would necessarily take over, but let's just look like way down. I think, yeah the.
Speaker 1:thing that's going on might be different, Maybe different yeah. In general Like the floor plate might be completely different Everything could be different.
Speaker 3:Correct, the building may be very modular, which we've already seen.
Speaker 2:So I mean we do do quite a bit of modular buildings. So we do do like shipping containers that are built to be shipped up north for the oil sands. We put a raised floor in there, Everything's ran and then they get shipped out. So there's actually a site right around the corner from our showroom that does modular buildings I can't remember the name of the company now floor in them and then they ship them out. That's great. So all the services are underneath and these containers go to site Boom.
Speaker 1:Is robotics moving? Is it more popular in Australia? Do you see the uptake of all that stuff?
Speaker 3:Within the access floor industry.
Speaker 1:No construction in general.
Speaker 3:Construction, not that I've seen, no, no, is there chitter chatter about it? There may be education circles, but I haven't seen it.
Speaker 2:No, we haven't seen a robot painting any walls yet either. I've seen it on the videos On site. No, we haven't seen any.
Speaker 1:The coolest thing I've seen on site is the layout robots. You've seen those guys? Yeah, I had the guys on it. Oh, did you? Yeah, those are cool.
Speaker 3:I think potentially manufacturing. I yeah, those are cool. I think potentially manufacture.
Speaker 2:I think manufacturing is going to go all. Yeah, automation is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, correct yeah.
Speaker 2:That's, I think, where we'll see it Once. That industry is like raised access floors. I mean the manufacturing of ASP's panels, primarily fully automated, with the exception of some of the finishes that go on, but the actual manufacturing of it is virtually.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's how we sort of also achieve that quality component. Is that human factor? So, with regards to our timbers, architectural designs on the timbers, on stones and things like that. That's all human For now, finishes For now, yeah For now, yeah For now.
Speaker 1:That's actually the kind of stuff that this will do really well. It's classic, no, but this is anything that was like a, anything that had a model of what quality was will be, redone, I would agree with that too.
Speaker 2:I hear what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah the human craftsmanship can be emulated. It just can't, especially when it's. I mean, you're not talking about art. Art is so true. I mean, even you could anything can copy art. But when anything's modular and it's been made a thousand times and you just need to model something that will be more.
Speaker 3:I mean, we see, some great prototyping and we're asked to do some great prototyping for access floor systems, with architecture and interior design and there's just some talented heads out there on the planet it's just and it is art. You know, and I know you sort of said it isn't some of some works are art. So from a particular angulation, the access floor system looks like a receding tower that's been parquet into the access floor system with timbers. So there's some great things that can be done Creativity-wise yeah, creativity-wise, with access flooring system, which we haven't really seen, and the architectural, the interior design component that is open with our access floor systems. That's attracting some interest, which is great.
Speaker 2:It's great for clients, it's great for buildings, it's great for humans going into those types of environments they want to go back to work, maybe to walk over our access, even like I got one point to make, even about the uh, the advancements that we're making. Technology, like even our software that we have now and I'm not going to say our, our software is, by any means, you know, heads and tails over anybody else's. We have a software that says you rearrange the access floor grid to suit this. It may push us say an inch this way, an inch that way. It'll tell us that, hey, that wall over there, you can use the cutoff piece here, you can go throw it over there, you can use that triangle, that cutoff piece over there.
Speaker 3:So that the software tells you yeah, the most cost-effective we have.
Speaker 2:We know we use a software. Uh, it's a takeoff software that we use stack takeoff software and what it does is when we work with ASP on their CAD and their BIM modeling, we use the two softwares together and it'll basically say to us like we'll shift the grid one way or another and it's just a very simple CAD program that will actually give us the the okay, this is 12 inches, the panel is 24 inches. You've got an eight inch piece over on this wall. We now know that we can use all of that row over there.
Speaker 1:So do you see a future where I mean this is a great picture, uh, to be able to imagine. So you have your pedestals. Could you imagine a robot going and laying down down those in perfect sequence, perfect front, to back on a?
Speaker 2:I'm going to say today. I'm going to say no. The only reason I say no today is I think there's just too many obstacles. Okay, I would say that that would work if we could get rid of and eliminate the other obstacles that are in the way. So the other obstacles may be the other types of building that is going on, the Caesar lift that's running around the electrician's, running around the of building that is going on the other season that's running around the electricians running electrician with conduits on the ground you've got mechanical.
Speaker 2:Potentially under the ground there's data cabling, the cable tray. So if we can circumnavigate that too, plus a lot of the times when these pedestals are going down, the way that we do it and the way it's done is the pedestals are glued down right, so there's a specific seal bond glue that's used. It's an access floor pedestal adhesive. They are glued down right, so there's a specific seal bond glue that's used. It's an access floor pedestal adhesive. They're glued down and as the boys come behind it and they're putting the tile on, those pedestals are actually slightly moved into place. They're done wet purposely because we can just never line them up. A lot of times people say, hey, will you come to site and do all your pedestals, leave and come back and do your tiles? No, it's a. We glue a pedestal, we level the pedestal, the tile gets pulled. We move the pedestal so it lines up, screw it in. I mean robotics could get there.
Speaker 1:It could do it, and.
Speaker 2:I'm definitely. I'm a huge fan of AI. I'm a huge fan of robotics in general. Paul loves AI, paul is AI, paul knows a lot about AI. I'm a huge fan of it and it's really I don't want to say it's definitely not impossible Will it get there? Absolutely. I'm just what I see today on site what the constraints we have on site, even from a human building it, where we've got to step over things and move a box, put a pedestal. There's a huge human element. We work so closely and so well with the electricians on most sites. They're putting cable trays down as we go. They're grounding the access flooring system may have to be grounded.
Speaker 3:Uh, copper wires yeah, you're negotiating and time and movements and a robot that just does things systematically.
Speaker 2:Now, I'd actually say, a robot would have to work in conjunction with a robot that's laying the conduit, which is laying the power, which is laying the hvac system, if there is one. Um, so they'd all have to work in unison. Do I see it happening? Absolutely, I think one day. Yeah, look at what China was doing that last skyscraper they put up in like four days.
Speaker 3:Especially if you're talking, like you said, modular.
Speaker 2:Yeah modular, modular construction.
Speaker 3:It's repetitive. Putting in an access floor is potentially repetitive within a set area.
Speaker 1:There was a new hospital that's being built here Huge project, the new St Paul's Hospital. Do you think they did raised access floor?
Speaker 2:They did floor, I believe, in the MRI rooms, so they ran all the cabling under the MRI room. So raised access floor does have a place in hospitals, but there is that cleanliness and bacterial component, albeit they needed the ability to say flood the floor and wash it off. That's why they have the coved.
Speaker 2:So, we can use a raised floor. We would use urban interlock in hospital situations and they put a sheet good, so they wouldn't necessarily have access floor. They would have a plenum space created by the urban interlock and we would have a series of access hatches for different things.
Speaker 3:So raised no access floor. Pretty much, yeah, in a funny way, you're utilizing the plenum space. Yeah, in that type of environment you don't need to get out under there all the time, right, but it's able to manage those high rolls, low rolling loads, um, that fluctuate from human traffic, but the mri rooms yeah, because you got all the cable and it comes in.
Speaker 2:And those are the machines. Technology is changing and the technology is exactly data and communication rooms there's also in those hospitals. Yeah, so there's always a, there's always some type of a data and comms room in the hospital and some hospitals over that hide standard what about?
Speaker 3:hallways. It can be done. Oh, definitely, yeah, 100, but they're all.
Speaker 1:They all have to be the animal.
Speaker 2:They do right, so we would. We would look to an access flowing system that would accept a sheet good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just roll vinyl, because you do need that bacterial component, that clean component, that infection control management.
Speaker 2:The best scenario I can say to an access flowing system. Take the casino environment and look at how it adapts in a casino environment and that's where that technology is. I mean the hospitals.
Speaker 3:They may not be… so we're seeing it being taken up in the medical field, medical architecture and infrastructure. It's just increasing year on year for those types of environments Like dentist's office.
Speaker 2:Those are all too, because all the chairs and stuff.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, dentist's office yeah medical facilities, chiropractors, all those types of medical General practitioners. Those are really, and they.
Speaker 2:Those are really and they're saying the same things. They're factoring in that technological advancements that they're having. Everything is just advancing so rapidly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially the dentists. You'll see the cables and stuff all over the ground. The cabling is like monstering cabling.
Speaker 2:It is yeah Instead of having those things where you'd walk over. You know how you have wires in the ground you walk yeah, and at the end of the day I've got rolls of them over there.
Speaker 3:We don't use them and at the end of the day, they're tendencies and they should be managed like a tendency as well, because today the dentist will be there and tomorrow he'll be in a hospital, in a larger facility, who knows? And that tendency moves on.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting when the what sort of does it change the relationship of the money attached to a TI and what you're leaving, like when you move somewhere? Like, let's say, I go into a place and I've got a $200,000 TI budget. What sucks about that is when I leave.
Speaker 3:I've left $200,000 in this place not with modular finishes so just take me through that part on where what I can take with me so it depends, like if you've got a base build like which is just the raw core access floor with no finishes on the top, which some developers do and then the tendencies as they're tenanted out, the tenancy comes in and designs their space and you can utilize magnetic finishes, porcelains and literally once that-.
Speaker 1:So I could take the porcelain, you could take the porcelain away. So what is considered in the? What do they say? Anything that's attached.
Speaker 2:Base build, yeah, base build. So the access floor would be considered nine times out of 10.
Speaker 1:The system would be, but maybe not the finish. The finish is no, or it could be, so this could be some value. Would there be a reseller market for that stuff? Definitely.
Speaker 2:We were talking about this this morning. A lot of companies in Europe have that model. We talk to companies all the time that are simply refurbishing existing access floors.
Speaker 1:That's all two foot by two foot, whatever you want to find Nice, refurbishing existing access floors, that's all. Two foot by two foot, two foot by two foot. Whatever you want to find Nice, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:So typically with a development here, we would see the access floor going like Telus Ocean is an example they're going in as base build. Telus is taking three floors. There's three floors remaining unoccupied so they're going to tenant those out. So they're actually giving the elevator that's going to be part of the base build. Any of the finishes that are done in the tenant space. That tenant moves out, they own those finishes. The access floor stays With the modular finishes. The access floor now maintains new. It's not sticky with glue and screeds and all that. So the new tenant now comes in. So what about the walls? The walls, same thing. Right, you can take the wall systems with you. It's like your furniture If you have this. The table is no different than the glass wall system. The glass wall systems are categorized as a furniture component. They fall into that category. So you can literally like if you're going to move today and you're going to go next door, you're taking a table with you. If you had your glass partitions up here, you can take those with you. Interesting, interesting.
Speaker 1:So let's say, a landlord, landlord, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah, let's just call it that for lack of a better term.
Speaker 1:Had two potential clients that were going to go into a space. One's like no, I want to go, raised access floor and modular walls. Another one's like no, I don't believe in that, I want to go the other way. I want to have a, you know, just traditional build. Do you think the the landlord would be would want the other one? Because he's going to keep all the stuff and the other ones at the end of their nightmare relationship? At the end, the guy's going to be pulling out the furniture. Air quotes, right, which also means that they're moving out at the midnight runs a little harder.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, I suppose it depends where you are on the planet, but certainly what we see is that they go more for the access floor component because it is there's a much better business plan.
Speaker 1:So they'll be left with something else.
Speaker 2:The developer gets an access floor out of it. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:So that's the benefit, that's the benefit. So they would probably be like oh great, okay good. We don't care if you take your finishes on the top.
Speaker 2:Because, think about this the developer can then tell you to the next tenant after that, guess what we get? This is RAF, this is RAF. We've already got it here, so You're now spending $75 a foot. It's pretty awesome, pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:It just makes sense the investment and the education needs to happen at the early stages so we can see those cost savings. Because even if we get in at a virtually cost-neutral solution from base, build the givebacks year over year or tenancy changes five, ten years, that's where you start to see significant cost savings for everybody, not just developers, but new tenants, old tenants, everybody is realizing those cost savings for everybody, not just developers, but new tenants, old tenants Everybody is realizing those cost savings.
Speaker 1:I like that because you know what? Even when I look at I'll give you a perfect example this studio here. When we got this place, I just painted the floor black Because I don't want to put any money in here, because when this is too small I don't want to leave like $2,000 with the carpet or carpet tile or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and leave money in the place, but also, at the same time, even carpet tile is glued down, you've got the glue problem, it's going to go into a landfill, et cetera. So having this secondary marketplace for the materials of the finishes, that's wicked Like that. To me, that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:What's really cool about the finishes? Let's say unfortunately if you break one. Let's say you drop something on a tile that breaks just pop it out, you put a new one in, like there's that aspect to it too.
Speaker 1:In order for so the transition from, let's say, the, the front door there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the front door I, so we what's you need, like two inches, so we would do like if we came in here, um, what we would do is we would ramp up and we probably put about a two and a half inch floor, depending on the the deviation of the slab, which probably wouldn't be too bad in a small area like this. Two and a half inches. What that allows us to do is maintain a perfectly flat floor. So our ramp, if it's two and a half inches high, our ramp is two and a half feet long, so inch up, foot out.
Speaker 1:So inch up, foot out, and so 12 to 1.
Speaker 2:So a t-shirt, I do. Yeah, I go. It's on the back. Yes, there's one inch up, is it right? No, just, I don't have any sleeves on it. The uh, so we would ramp up from the front door. So you'd open the front door, you'd walk up on a ramp, um, and then you would be, you'd be on, so this table here would be on your power. That's coming up into your table. We have the same thing in our showroom.
Speaker 1:All the power is maintained. This is pain in the ass, so for a podcast studio.
Speaker 2:It's perfect. I mean again, there's no environment that it doesn't work. Even in Calgary we're seeing a lot of office to residential conversions because we need to fill the vacancy before we're going to be allowed to build new commercial towers. I guess you can stick plumbing right now, that's exactly right so what we're seeing in the office conversions to residential is that they're using the access floor to service the space below, so they're actually bringing components down to the ceiling whether sprinkler or plumbing.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool, are you?
Speaker 3:seeing that in.
Speaker 1:Australia too.
Speaker 3:No, not that. Like. We have a housing issue, housing crisis issue, so we haven't seen commercial builds being renewed. For, yeah, you seem to have a demand for it here.
Speaker 2:The opposite. In Calgary We've got too much vacant space, unfortunately right now downtown office space. So before we're going to be building any more A-grade commercial facilities, we need to get rid of some of the vacant space we have, which is interesting.
Speaker 3:It's great Because the adaptability to convert from a commercial infrastructure to residential Because typically plumbing is the biggest problem.
Speaker 2:Well, typically, in an office building, all your plumbing and bathrooms are stacked on top of each other. That's the design. But in a residential scenario it's not quite like that.
Speaker 1:You've got multiple bathrooms on a floor.
Speaker 2:Having a raised floor allows you to take from those chase walls or those risers and spread left, right, side to side or down. So we did a project at University of Calgary. It was an existing building and the building was very old so it didn't have a sprinkler mandate at the time. So when they redid the building, the development and they actually reshrouded it, it was really cool. They added a floor. Super neat building. They used the raised floor to house obviously all the technology but also to puncture through the roof to add sprinklers. So instead of having the sprinklers on the ceiling underneath they punctured through the raised floor and just had all the plumbing.
Speaker 1:There's also an argument to get rid of T-bar.
Speaker 2:That's correct.
Speaker 1:So that you can pull up and pop correct so that you can pull up and pop off, so our cost model that we have.
Speaker 2:That we've done over the years in order to get to kind of that cost neutral solution. We do, unfortunately, remove all the ceiling components Because we see it basically just left open as a slab, just whitewash the concrete. The only thing that's left in the ceiling is lighting and life safety, so sprinklers. Everything else is under the floor. So part of that cost neutral, you're not always doing hvac on the bottom of the floor not always no, no.
Speaker 2:So I'm talking about, like I say, a new build, for example right so if we're, if we can, if we can get in a new build design build scenario, we're putting an access floor with ufad. Part of the cost saving structure that we put forward is removal of that t-bar ceiling. So your materials, your cost to install all that stuff, so you remove it. These are horrible. Yeah, I mean they work, but why need? You, don't need. If you've got nothing to hide, you don't need it and you know what it can do. What's really neat with a commercial tower is if you open the ceiling system up now you've probably got about 20 to 24 inches. We can do the same thing in seven or eight with an access floor. So seven or eight inches access floor, you can actually save 12 to 14 inches of curtain wall of concrete. So in a 50-story tower with access floor versus its neighbor, his neighbor would have 47, 48 floors. You'd have 50 in the same height because you're shrinking that slab to slab.
Speaker 2:So there's all those cost savings to go into it too. That's for the next podcast, maybe, but oh yeah, yeah, there's so many cool things that that that the raised floor can do for a building. Um, you know, and even even if you're just putting that technology platform, you're removing all that stuff from the ceiling. We see a lot now where they're spraying just the duct work, leaving it, removing all the wires and everything from putting it onto the floor and I just have that exposed ceiling. It gives you the illusion of a much higher ceiling.
Speaker 1:So, paul, just from from your interaction here, are you mostly repping the product side, telling people how to, how they can, how they can represent it, or are you getting these contracts in Australia as well, like, like Russell?
Speaker 3:is getting like are you doing both? Yeah, we are. Yeah, so we're direct in Australia. So we install the access floor, so we manufacture supply and install.
Speaker 1:So are you both then early on in the developer conversations about, before even plans are drawn up or concepts are even done.
Speaker 3:Oftentimes, if the plans are done and the access floor is not there, we're too late, okay, so if a developer holds out, you know, like an architectural competition or if it's that type of a component, then once that's announced, then we start immediate engagement with architecture or the structural architecture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mycophobia, it looks like there, I'm not talking correctly. There you go.
Speaker 3:Sorry, I'm not talking correctly.
Speaker 2:There you go. I'm not used to it. We need buy-in from mechanical structural engineers as well, because one of the biggest conversations in new build first people introduced is mechanical. So we need those guys to buy in to the system. Architecture obviously Architecture is great because they design a space and it looks are you engaging them early here in canada?
Speaker 3:is that you know engineering?
Speaker 2:yeah, like my background, I mean, I went back to school specifically for mechanical engineering, specifically to go and talk to those guys not body, not body okay no, I.
Speaker 2:I wanted to be able to walk into a room, uh, of people that are much smarter than me and uh, and just be able to at least hold a somewhat of a conversation. It's hard to sell somebody on an access floor. You've had design, you know, if you've got no mechanical experience, so it was at least able to talk, to talk with those guys and you're not telling them something that's redesigned. The displacement, ventilation has been around for years. Auditoriums and things like that. They all imagine a 15 or 10 000 person auditorium.
Speaker 2:Trying to heat or cool that thing from above is next to impossible. Right, like a movie theater. Yeah, trying to cool that from above, the people in the back row versus people in the front, they're getting a very different ambient temperature. If you're producing, if you're bringing cool, conditioned air from below their feet, they're all getting the same delivery method. So that's that, that technology. So yeah, in terms of who we got to get to, we really have to touch everybody. Air from below their feet, they're all getting the same delivery method. So that technology. So yeah, in terms of who we got to get to, we really have to touch everybody we like to present to the architecture world because when they're planning a space now they have architectural freedom. They can design a space to look however they want without fear of having to core through the slab. They love that.
Speaker 3:They love that yeah.
Speaker 2:So architectural freedom is you want a table over there? Boom, they love that yeah.
Speaker 3:So architectural freedom is you want a table over there that's changing, that's changing the structure of all these different environments in the introduction of access floors, sort of allowing that. And then from the design component, that might be the structural component, from the design component, those guys are just loving the freedoms to actually explore design on using materials that would normally just be put on slab actually being prototyped onto an access floor panel. I see to have that loading, so that's cool yeah, that is cool.
Speaker 1:That is cool, as cool as it gets.
Speaker 2:It's like the feedback we get from the architecture world is, is half the time. They're going through design and you, like, you've had different guests on here about the, the changes that happen during construction, yeah, yeah, like how many addendums, how many RFIs, how many SI site instructions go on during a build. I've got projects that we haven't even started yet. We're on SI 200. There's just site instruction after site. Those costs or those changes are extremely costly. Now, I'm not saying that we want to promote a whole bunch of changes during a project, but if things change and clients adapt and but we are adaptable, we're adaptable.
Speaker 3:The access way is adaptable.
Speaker 2:Essentially, it's an organic system that's going in. It's going to work for the user. It's going to work for the space. You're not tethered to any infrastructure, it's free.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, let's do some closing questions, shall we? Let's do it All right. So I'm going to ask you guys do you guys see these ones at the end? Yeah, okay, the rapid fire, the rapid fire. You both get to do it. So this is the cool part, and this is a shout out to Christian. He used to be one of our hosts here.
Speaker 2:We didn't really research this document first, we have nothing planned, but you asked for it, I did ask for it, did you ask for it, and then you didn't read it. At nauseam Okay.
Speaker 1:All right, so here we go. I'll go with you first, paul. What is something that you do that other people would think is insane? Would think is insane.
Speaker 2:Is this personal or work related.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:It's everything, it's everything.
Speaker 3:Medicated or not medicated Either. So I think I don't give up. I'm a dog with a bone. There's always a solution. You're a dog with a bone. I'm a dog with a bone.
Speaker 1:On a bone.
Speaker 3:I don't give it up. I don't give it up. Yeah, so with work I'm especially like that.
Speaker 1:I like that. I like those glasses, by the way, do you? Yeah, they're cool. Thanks, man, that's very nice. Changes the old face I can't see without them. I know I was doing the same thing with the TV here, okay, so you would say you just don't give up.
Speaker 3:I don't give up. So, with regards to anything with access, flooring, architectural engagement In life do you just not give up?
Speaker 1:Are you just one of those guys? Yeah, I'm a pusher.
Speaker 3:I'm a pusher, I like to find the solution. It is good. It's good now and again, but then it gets a bit of pushback.
Speaker 1:It can All right, Russell, same question. Why do people think you're a nutcase? What is?
Speaker 2:it? What do you do? Why do people think you're a nutcase? What is it? What do you do? Well, I'll be honest, my good friend and colleague of many, many years, Kobe, who I should give a shout out to, he's honest, I couldn't do this business without him. So what is one thing that I do? I come off conversations on the phone. He's looking at me side eyes and I've said yes, sir, and he just looks at me and says what have you done? And it's always I've got a very much a yes mentality. I don't mean a yes man mentality, I just mean we're going to find a solution. I guess it's similar to what Paul said we're going to find a solution to a problem you may or may not know you have. That is so his character. It is you come to us with a situation, find a solution.
Speaker 2:So I don't want to say that I just say yes to everything for to get a sale, it's a. I like to challenge the team. Unfortunately, kobe's going to sit when he hears this. He's rolling his eyes, maybe laughing a little bit, but and that's the industry.
Speaker 3:find a solution, Find a solution.
Speaker 2:One of our model like our motto is part of me is that we find solutions for problems you don't know you have right. So is that something that's insane? Yeah, I guess. So I've always had the attitude that if we're not growing, we're dying. So we're always looking for the next challenge, we're always looking for the next bit of excitement, and yeah, so self-inflicted pain on the yes.
Speaker 1:Super self-inflicted pain, Gotcha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's why I go to the gym and figure it out after. Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, so this is also another life question. This could be a passion, it could be whatever. What would you be doing if you weren't with your company?
Speaker 3:now, paul, I love where I am.
Speaker 1:I know it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Is that a cop-out?
Speaker 1:But I love so much where I am, I know, but you got to.
Speaker 3:The innovation that's behind there, where it's gone, and okay, I know you don't want my real answer.
Speaker 1:I do, I want your real answer.
Speaker 3:But you know what? If I wasn't here, I would be with my fantastic family sitting on a beach somewhere.
Speaker 1:No, but if you weren't doing your current career? This is the question, Because it's trying to figure out what else Paul does.
Speaker 3:What the hunger is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's your?
Speaker 1:other passion perhaps?
Speaker 2:coming to see russ in canada.
Speaker 3:Yeah, always russ um make it up. It's seriously. I love what I do. Uh, that is that. This is what I do.
Speaker 2:I can call paul at any time. Canada time seriously asp.
Speaker 3:It's a nirvana company, it like I know you've. You're looking at me like I'm spriting again he's not lying.
Speaker 3:They're a fantastic company, so it is. It is like a family. It treats all of its um employees like like a family and it is nirvana. So going home, I love it, and going to work, I love it so, and going to work, I love it. So if I wasn't doing work, I'd be at home with my gorgeous family. So that's yeah, black and white as it is. So I know it's probably not the answer that you're wanting. You're wanting something really out there, but Russ is going to give it to you.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, I'll leave you alone with that one, then, okay, you're a good man. That one, then Okay, you're a good man. Thank you, thank you, thank you Okay, russell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, honestly, that's a tough one too.
Speaker 1:I mean WWE, we love we love Listen I like Okay for everyone just so Russell's not as muscly as I have made him out to be. He's very fit. How about that?
Speaker 3:For sure very fit. Let's put it that way. He's like fit as a big red, fit as a big red yeah, the outback.
Speaker 1:We're going to tackle one of those when we get out.
Speaker 2:Alright, what else you got, russell, come on well, like again, I I mean so for me the fit out that we've done in our office space. I was part of that. Kobe, the boys, like I. I put the drywall on to do. We built the space, um. So I truly love walking into the office every day. I love what we built um the end of the day, I do it for the family as well.
Speaker 2:I can't I can't replicate paul's answer, but I I really feel like, um, I do, I do. I am replicating paul's answer, but I one of the reasons that we're able to start the company is not just having good people. But I knew what I was missing, um, from companies that I worked with in the past. I knew what was lacking there. So I had an opportunity to take some of the talented people we work with and be able to give back to them as much as I possibly can. There's obviously a give and take there as well. But if I wasn't doing, what would you be doing? If you weren't doing what you're doing right now, my wife would probably say be drunk dead in a ditch somewhere. But, um, I don't know what I'd be doing.
Speaker 3:I really don't know what I'd be doing I just love what we love, what I know.
Speaker 2:I know he loves what he does, he loves where he's come from and the passion and I love it, because the only difference would be just if I could have my family along for the ride a little bit more.
Speaker 3:That's right. That's the key.
Speaker 2:Being away from family, yeah it's tough, but we were talking today, just even the traveling that we're doing this month, like you said, your show is, you're on a high, like this is kind of our show, like when I'm done these things even after a presentation. I'm just like Is this the longest answer you've ever had?
Speaker 3:in this podcast. No, no, no, it's not, I'm just.
Speaker 2:I don't have a one answer, but I wouldn't change it. Honestly, the stress and everything that I put my wife under along the way.
Speaker 3:She's amazing, she's amazing, yeah, what's?
Speaker 1:her name.
Speaker 2:Her name is Lindsay and she deserves a lot of credit. Yeah, she's actually part of meet her. That's what the question should be. If I didn't meet her, what would you be doing right now? That would be drunk dead mid-ditch somewhere, for sure alright, let's get to the next question.
Speaker 3:Alright, so you can talk. Okay, here we go let's reverse this, okay.
Speaker 1:So Russ or Russ? Should I go Russ this time? What would you be doing if you didn't meet Lindsay? No, I'm just kidding. Russ or Russ? Should I go Russ this time? Sure you're not mad?
Speaker 3:are you have?
Speaker 1:you been saying Russ, what would you be doing if you didn't meet Lindsay?
Speaker 3:no, I'm just kidding oh, you said the question no.
Speaker 1:I'm just, I'm just joking maybe you can do this provide me some kind of memorable story from the job site or past project that just sticks out in your head, maybe something you're like that was crazy, that that happened. I can't believe that. Maybe you laughed after or you're like, whoa, that was nuts.
Speaker 2:Is there anything that you any anecdote that you could share that people might go, wow, that's a crazy story I'm gonna probably be able to think of something really good after we walk out of those doors, but uh, nothing has come into my. I mean, there's been so much over the years. I mean I've been fortunate to work on site for a long time, maybe something rewarding.
Speaker 1:How about that? You walked away. Someone said something to you. You're like hmm, that really was meaningful. What do?
Speaker 2:people do. Well, you know what, honestly in this? Okay, what I will do is I'm going to give my whole team a shout-out, because we our business was pretty much founded on reputation. We brought a virtually unknown that's a bad term. We brought a virtually unrecognized name.
Speaker 3:No footprinting, no real footprint in Canada.
Speaker 2:We've probably garnered quite a bit of market share in the West and we're hoping to garner a lot more in the East. But the most memorable, our team is one of the reasons that we're successful and we get emails all the time. We have GCs that come to us and say I just had one the other day. Literally she said it's yours, Just, you know, just give us fair pricing, in a way like stuff is not going to tender as much as like we're getting business walking in the door and that I guess that all, seeing where we've come from home office, truck and trailer no-transcript friendly. I don't know him that well, but a friend through through the industry smith hotel. The smith hotel is doing a bunch of access floor. Yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of access hang on a second third we're talking about 835 can be like form developments?
Speaker 2:um, no, not sure. No, I don't think so. Okay, uh, that's not the company that we're working with, um, but they called us and they said like we've, I've worked with the fella numerous times in the past and I had a meeting with him the owner of the building or the owner of the group and he said, basically, listen, don't worry, you trust these guys.
Speaker 2:They're, they're going to do what you're going to do and you know we had the product in stock and shop drawing is done. This was two weeks ago. We got the contract. We're on site. Actually, we start on site next week. We have lots of contacts for you, by the way. Yeah, that'd be great, yeah cool.
Speaker 3:Okay, paul, it's still a hardy, you know, but, um, probably much the same as Russ. It's really the people involved in the business and watching the actual morphing of the business ASP turning in from a domestic market within Australia and taking that because we only started out and we had 2% of access floors within Australia and Australia uses a lot of access floors and seeing that grow and change and transition and architecture engineering developers turning that circle and embracing access flooring. But then seeing the company dynamics, the people involved in the company we don't have a high involved in the company, we don't have a high turnover with our employee structure and seeing that family dynamic that everyone holds dear today, like with their own families, transition that into the workplace and make that work solidly. And that's exciting, that's a it's just that work component and that change over a 15 year period. Seeing that that's very strong.
Speaker 3:You don't often see that and then to then continue on with product development and then start to become a global monster. So all of those components they're strong components that are. You don't often see that in. Am I answering the question here, or we both kind of, I think?
Speaker 2:we both we're diverging, but this is the thing. I think that I've got to change these questions. Yeah, you do, I think no you've just got to change the guests.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or encourage. I can just encourage the guests to read the change. The guests yeah.
Speaker 1:Or or encourage I can just encourage the guests to read the notes before they come in.
Speaker 2:That is true. Yeah, you should do that. Yeah, you should send that out.
Speaker 1:By the way, this thing you requested, read it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know, russ gave it to me when I was walking in the door.
Speaker 1:I how much trouble I got in this week from Tatiana. She's like Russell needs the notes.
Speaker 2:He needs the notes. I'm like Jesus, okay, okay, relax. Didn't even answer. I told my kids. I said I don't even know what I'm going to say when I get on there.
Speaker 3:But something is really I think, just from a job perspective, is working with architecture, designing systems for an international client and actually seeing the finished product after multiple prototyping and seeing a happy, happy client. Are you getting bored with my story?
Speaker 1:No, I'm going to check a video, so you guys remember this.
Speaker 3:All right, that's polite Video or picture.
Speaker 2:Picture. I do, I did. I promised my daughter that I would give a little shout out. So I do want to say promised my, my daughter that I would, that I would give her a little shout out.
Speaker 1:so I do want to say hello to Murphy and Miller just because they're going to listen to this, yeah, little six and four year old girls at home.
Speaker 2:So I'm sure they're giving them a hard time right now, but we'll have to sit down and listen to it nice so yeah great all right, I'm done with the photos.
Speaker 1:Can we ask you a question?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, no it doesn't work like that it's not your podcast man. No, that is true, that is true, but I'm interested, I would be interested. Okay, I can see that look Well you can, you can no.
Speaker 1:That's cool. How short is this question?
Speaker 3:No, it's like do I like what's my?
Speaker 1:favorite color. Yeah, I can do that one.
Speaker 3:I think what you do is great go ahead.
Speaker 1:What's the question?
Speaker 3:well, let's go with the first. Oh, let's go with the first. What is something that you do that other people would think is insane?
Speaker 1:I take on way too much stuff. Yeah, I have this podcast. Another podcast started, sightmax. I'm in a band rent out my condo, that's cool. What's the other podcast? Can't tell you? Can't tell me, no, no, I can't tell you that one. Okay, I'll tell you after sure. Sorry, yeah, haven't pumped it out yet haven't pumped it out yet no, I have oh, okay yeah, but out yet. I haven't pumped it out yet. No, I have. Oh, okay, cool. So yeah, that's, that's a good answer, that's great Very concise you obviously.
Speaker 1:I've naturally never been asked it. So thanks, though, that's pretty cool. Is there anything that you guys want to say? Obviously, we're finishing up here. Thank you for coming.
Speaker 2:Honestly, that's pretty cool thanks so much for having us. I really appreciate.
Speaker 1:I'm glad linkedin works pretty well isn't linkedin linkedin is absolutely. You're like the king of linkedin, though huh, he's the king of linkedin.
Speaker 2:He is. I do use it quite a bit. We should give a shout out to frank. He's saying king of linkedin.
Speaker 3:That's right, yeah, I knew, distributed down in texas. Texas interiors they do, they do awesome work down there nice, we met through, met through Linton. Houston, beautiful place. Never been there before, I haven't been there it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:You should go there. You should go there. It's a lot of fun. People are so friendly, so friendly. It was like being in Vancouver, calgary. Honestly, really, it's cool, so friendly.
Speaker 1:So shout out wise anything you guys want to say thank you, or what do you guys got? Yeah, well, I'll say thank you for the entire team.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I just want to thank my entire team because, like, without them we wouldn't be here, obviously and my family, murphy, uh, miller, lindsey so thanks to all you guys.
Speaker 3:So yeah, that's like the last broadcast we're gonna do, it might be for us um, hey, sheridan, how you? That's my gorgeous wife. She's a goddess. Sheridan, sheridan, great name. She's a goddess. She's strong as, and no, no, apart from that, no, asp Access Force. Thanks for actually having us on here as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool the invitation.
Speaker 3:thank you, yeah, this has been really cool.
Speaker 2:Really fun Thanks to thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this has been really cool, really fun, thanks to you. Thank you, so good for the industry as well. Yeah, great, so it's ASP. What's the what's the address URL, asp access floors.
Speaker 3:Dot com. International dot com, dot com. It's coming on, dot com, and you're yeah, so it's cooks construction dot net.
Speaker 2:Keep an eye out. The next six to eight months will be pretty fun. So, yeah, it'd be really fun. So there'll be some exciting news coming out soon.
Speaker 3:That'll be really exciting.
Speaker 2:Merger acquisition a lot of stuff happens.
Speaker 1:Cool, okay, guys. Well, safe flight home, especially for you.
Speaker 2:Well, you got a long one, yeah All right.
Speaker 1:Okay, guys, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Well, that does it for another episode of the Site. 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. Sit SiteMax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.