Buildex 2023 D1E2 | Accountability, Avoiding Rework and Finding Purpose in Construction with Daniel Loney, Owner of Excelsior Measuring | EP67

Day 1  Episode 2 | In this episode, live from the tradeshow floor at Buildex 2023, James and Christian are joined by Daniel Loney from Excelsior Measuring. 

Together, they delve into two critical, yet very different, issues facing the construction industry today: the high rate of errors on job sites and a culture of purposelessness that has pushed younger workers out of the workforce or prevented them from joining all together. They share insights on how to increase accountability and avoid costly rework by building a culture of responsibility and ownership in construction. Additionally, they explore practical solutions to empower the younger generation and create a more productive and fulfilling work environment for new Construction professionals.

Daniel Loney is the Owner of Excelsior Measuring Inc., a family-owned and operated company based in Langley, British Columbia that was established in 2014. As a professional measuring business, they are able to provide services such as thorough 3D scanning that is used to create plan drafts/exact specs. Their clients use their services to set up and plan for their current or future projects. 100% of their business is done right here in Canada, nothing is outsourced. They pride themselves on the quality of their work and we ensure that each client receives top-notch customer service. They excel to bring you the best!


EPISODE LINKS:
Daniel Loney LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielloney
Excelsior Measuring Website: https://excelsiorlevel.com/

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:30

All right, okay, Hildex 2023 episode two. This is uh Daniel Loney from Excelsior Measuring. Cool. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Hello. How are you? Good. Yourself? Good. Enjoying the show. Love being here. No, this light isn't this thing.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

Just shooting. Just judging. No, no, you're right. This is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah. I mean, they they're having us here, so thank you, Build X. Awesome. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Alright.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

I wasn't then the intro.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

No, sorry. I was joking. It's all good. But we do have Daniel Loney. Loney, I'm saying that right. Daniel Loney. Excelsior measuring. We're also joined by a listener. Krista. Here she is. She's micless, but she can hear it all. Which is perfect. It's awesome to have you on here. We had a bit of a conversation. One of the guys on our team, Braden, introduced you, and then we had a chat. And it felt like I was being interviewed. It was phenomenal quality on your end. Your setup is next level. And now we're here at a trade show.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Thank you. I'm really glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Cool. Okay, let's get into the let's get into uh let's do more about Dan.

SPEAKER_03 1:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

We want to know all about Daniel Loney. What's your background? How did you get to where you are right now?

SPEAKER_03 1:43

Interesting enough, my background is finance.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Oh left field.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Grew up in a right. I know. It's it's kind of like of course, my first job I ever did was being a uh a laborer in a field being a big kid. But um my father owns a financial advising firm. And uh I had the choice uh going the route of being a football player out of college or I can see that yep, and uh or being a financial advisor. And uh after pushing 350-pound men around in the field for a bit, I figured pens and paper were a whole lot nicer deal on the body. So yeah, so I I did that for about 13 years, and um in the meantime, my wife went to school for architectural engineering and design, and um she was amazing at it, loved doing it, and I thought that was great. And uh the first firm she worked with ended up due to mismanagement, going out of business, which was really rare. But her main job was going out on the site and taking measurements. Ah, okay. My wife is like a human Xerox machine. She won't mind me saying this, she is not artistically gifted, but she can copy anything, just open sketch, beautifully. So that kind of like really wrapped into her being able to go out in the field and do really good ads builds for the firm that she worked with.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Ah, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

So when that firm went under, um, I was like, well, you know, when I'm I had a couple architectural firms that were in my clients at the time. Whenever we're in their boardroom talking about their benefits and stuff we're talking about, there's always be this echo background what the plans are wrong and that's not accurate, and this was supposed to be that. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna start you a business, I will call these guys up and say, you're gonna use them. You that you're gonna use her for all your plans going forward, and I guarantee you're happier I'll pay for it, right? Is this like you're gonna be happy with right? Yeah, and and at the same time we changed things up. We're first we're doing it on paper and pen out in the field and drafting by hand. Um, and then uh what we ended up doing, I forget this tape for me. Um first guys to adopt using laptops in the field and using these fancy new lasers that you'd hold in your hand and measure. And within about a year, we had about five employees working for us full-time. Right. We went from, I think in our third month, we already had broken the $40,000 a month.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

How many do you have now?

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Uh we have about 10.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Yeah. Uh we had bloomed up to about 30 at one point. Um, and then we had to tear back on where the market was going and also where technology was leading. That's what kind of popped into this. And so I thought this was amazing. And we were interviewing people from around Canada, and there was somebody who coming from Newfoundland to work from us. We got a girl from Calgary who was excited to work for us, and we had a really good interviewing process, and um, we were doing really good. And but what I found out fairly soon was that I had unbeknownst to me, had been very lucky at the first few hires I had that were capable of doing this kind of work, including one of them being my wife, to a point where it wasn't scalable. We were actually going through rounds of hiring 10 people and only keeping two of them after about three months. Oh, yeah. And like the burn through rate on people doing it. In fact, we had to be so creative on hiring people that at our first office it was about 4,000 square feet, and you'd walk through about first 30 feet of it and take a left, and we put people in our boardroom, which had no windows or nothing in it, and be like, okay, write the floor plan of this building. All right, and now tell me where north is on this plan. If they could do those two things, they're basically hot air on the squad. It was like we're gonna do a bunch of other stuff. I'm just gonna make sure I actually like you as a person for this, but you're basically we're good to go here. Because like 90% of people couldn't even tell north if they were standing outside.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Uh right. It's it's a funny thing. Right?

SPEAKER_01 5:29

It really is. My wife can't do it. I love my wife more than anything next to my daughter. But she cannot figure out where north is. I'm like, no, those mountains are.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

Well, that's what we we use. Or like, is it a street you're on? Is it going north or south, or have you? Yeah, yeah. Or even odd numbers. All these things we learned before there were cell phones. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the big defining factor realized. I'm like, oh, these all these late millennials never had to get directions on a map and then figure out okay, I want to get there, I gotta turn north.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Yeah, the whole instinct's gone.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Yeah. And so, like, that was an interesting thing because then it's like the mental space they had. And then then the other part was just like people being naturally good at that. Like, can they see a plan in their head and visualize it in their head? Which you guys in construction know that most people in construction can do that, but not all of them, right? And it's this giant lie a lot of them give. It's like, oh yeah, I can look at a plan, I know what totally what's going on. And really, it's like mile above their head. At the same time, we were winning bigger and more expensive projects and on the Asbuilt's and on the we also would do the BOMA square footage calculation for lease agreements and stuff like that, um, taking on more and more liability to a point where we did one of the most expensive penthouses in Vancouver at that time went for $5,800 a square foot and was over 3,000 square feet. Wow, that's big. It was actually only $2,600 square feet.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Oh money, some money back anywhere? Oh no, no, money lost. Money lost.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

Somebody had been sold three times at that. Yeah. And the architect who calculated the strata plan included the open double logs, a two-story penthouse at a big open area.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Crazy.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

So as as somebody from the finance background, that was a big eye-opener for liability for me. I was like, whoa, okay, so we dodged a bullet on this one, but then how do we make sure we don't do this? So I, being a nerd, was like, okay, how can I solve this with technology? Um, and at the same time, we had a couple jobs that were uh double arc exteriors that didn't follow a linear line with rooms that were breaking it up, and I'd have my top techs coming back literally crying, both guys and girls emotionally, because they've been so proud of everything they could do and they couldn't do these things. So I was looking into LIDAR scanners. And it just happened at the time, one of them came out by Leica that was affordable, air quotes at $40,000. Um and it ate up my liability on these high-risk jobs. I'm like, great, so then how do we take this LIDAR scanner and get more value out of it? Because it's only gonna sit here for like, we're gonna use it like five times a year if this is what we're using it for. Um turns out it's really good for doing exterior elevations on buildings that anybody who's done a site plan without being a surveyor with a total station will know it's a pain in the butt, a nightmare, and there's a massive amount of assumptions you make to do a plan. Well, these LIDAR scanners will send anywhere between 250,000 to 2 million points of data per second and will scan for minutes at a time. So we're talking, in some cases, almost every blade of grass is captured. So not only are we getting every window and every ease and every gutter, we're also getting every pebble rock step that can be slightly off. We're no longer making any assumptions on anything. From uh a liability investment insurance background, that's like, oh yeah, like it doesn't get better, right? We absolutely love that. So um then, of course, me being a savage business manager, okay, then how do we expand this and scan and go up and how do we push the limits and where is it where am I not allowed to go? And how am I gonna take surveyors off my butt? Okay, I can never call myself a surveyor. We're drafters, and we install that. But we literally show up with the gear that the surveyors wish they had.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Right.

SPEAKER_03 9:01

And they either don't know how to use it or can't afford it. Uh yet we're showing up in some cases with over half a million dollars a year on site. And they're like, oh yeah, you guys are gonna bring over control. I'm like, nope, not surveyors. I'm like, then what are you? Drafters. You know, we just like accurate plans. It just blows their mind.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

So one thing you said when you sat down, which I thought was like a super like a great quote, is that construction in construction that there are either assumptions or lies.

SPEAKER_03 9:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah. So I guess that you guys are the truth tellers of the business.

SPEAKER_03 9:33

Well, it's it's there's either assumptions or lies because the truth is disturbing, is would be how uh I would finish that because um and we were having a good conversation on the way here that nobody wants to own the pro like like the building in a way. Like, for instance, we have a real problem right now with concrete floors being flat, right? And not one person business or entity in the whole entire workflow wants to be responsible for that whole entire thing. Yep. Because it almost always has a problem. Yep. And none of them know why. Yeah, and the engineers are like, we did it perfect. That's not us. We know what we're doing. The surveyors are like, we surveyed into two centimeters perfectly every single time. They did not. Um and then so everybody will generally place off to the weakest person in the link or the weakest contract in the link, yeah, which is the placers.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

The placers, yeah. Yeah, right? For sure.

SPEAKER_03 10:26

And yeah, the placers can do a bad job. I've seen bad, right? But it's not them always. And quite frankly, it's the placers get away with doing a bad job because so much of it up until that point has been a bad job. But they get blamed with it, but because their budget was so small it gets lost, and then the somebody through the contract gets paid to fix it. So they're literally getting paid to do a bad job and fix it because nobody wants to deal with the reality of it. Interesting, right? And so for us, it's really hard when the data we bring in is not perfect, but we know how imperfect it is. Like I can tell you that our primary scanner we use is accurate to 1.6 millimeters at 10 meters. And it shoots 2 million points per second, and we'll scan for 58 seconds on average. So when we generally do a floor for somebody or a wall or ceiling or a building, we degrade the data resolution down to five millimeters. Like so there's a dot, basically a two millimeter accurate dot every five millimeters throughout the whole entire structure of the building.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

So in the in the construction process, like how many times are you brought in? Like what's the what's the the typical thing? If the if this is, let's say there's a multifamily high-rise, you know, 30 to 40 stories, where do you guys come in? Where do you hop out? Where do you jump back in again? How's that work?

SPEAKER_03 11:48

The last two years, because the industry is really evolving right now, uh, the last two years we're generally brought in when things have gone wrong. Okay. Where there's been repetitive issues. So we didn't get into the concrete portion of it until there was a very large distribution firm that was building a very large warehouse in Vancouver here, but the two previous placers for the concrete had failed to meet spec.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

I see.

SPEAKER_03 12:10

So the new placers had kind of heard of what we were doing with these cool lasers and doing stuff. And were like, hey, can can you guys help us place flat concrete? And my answer was, well, I can do anything, sure, if I have enough money. And I told them what my bill was going to be, and they said, sure, come out and pay it. This is a spare no expense, because they were pouring about 650 cubic meters a day of concrete before. So these are huge labs. We did about 12 of them. Um so we showed up with literally half a million dollars in gear, a little bit over actually. Uh pretty much all the high-end stuff that Leica makes. We spent two days watching them pour, learning the whole process of the concrete, and came up with a whole new method for them to pour concrete. That they went from pouring an FL of 20 when it was spec'd out at 35 to pouring a 45 on double cage rebar or like this nightmare job that everybody hated. So, but it speaks to as like we're always being brought in as a solution provider after the fact because we can see the truths.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

People were making assumptions that this was what was happening, and other people were lying that this was happening. Right? When in reality it was this thing in the middle. It's awesome. Right?

SPEAKER_02 13:25

And you're like, So do the dots get connected here in terms of you coming in and making sure that the truth is actually or reality becomes that truth?

SPEAKER_03 13:34

So yeah, when we come in and present it, because I have this model where we have to dumb everything down to be on paper. It can't be on paper, the average guy in construction is not gonna understand. They're not gonna want to fly through a 3D model and do all this fun stuff that I love, but um, they just don't have time, honestly, to compute it. Most project managers, we walk on site into their box, so we do the the on the you know the sin that no sales guy is supposed to do. We show up on site at the box, bring donuts, and say, give me five minutes.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Right?

SPEAKER_03 13:59

And you know, like there's a sign that says no civility, do not care. We're coming in.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

And they're like, why? Because we can fix this problem. We show the PM and they're like, amazing, I want this. And then I gotta go talk to the finance guy, and they're halfway through a tower and haven't included it in their budget. Yeah. Right? So that's where that evolution on a lot of these projects are right now.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 14:18

We are most helpful at the pre-construction stage. Yep. One of our good friends, Etro, who I don't mind uh putting the inscreen to the phone. Still trying to get Mike on the pod. Oh, he's a great, his staff love him, and I know why, because the guy does amazing leadership there. Um they brought they they brought us in on another prop a number of projects locally where the architects had made major assumptions. Um and they didn't lie, I'll give them that. But there was major assumptions made on when they designed a new building added into a new building that equated to uh the mechanical aligning from one structure to the other being off by 200 mil.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

So this is like hundreds of thousands of dollars, oops, at the point of when they're supposed to integrate. Basically, you show up and your pipes are supposed to fit, and that's a little bit of a difference. A big difference. And you know what? Thanks to Etro's real push for technology and having VDCs actually know what they're talking about, and I call them all by name, they're great there. Um, we were able to identify the problem, work with the surveyors to confirm it, through the through knowing what the actual truth was, follow backwards until where we found out where the flaw was. It turned out that the Asbuilts that were delivered for this building that was 20 years old were assumed to be Asbuilds, and they weren't. It was a junior who had showed up on site and signed off on it. There was no architect or nothing. And so they had thought that those were Asbuilds, and they weren't. They were assumed plants. So they either assumed or lied.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:48

And I can I won't say the name of the architecture firm because it wouldn't be fair to throw them, but they didn't lie, so that's why I won't. They they they owned it and they fixed it, and we all worked together and realigned the model. It was a it was a probably a 72-hour fix.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

Right? So that we want to be at the pre-stage on everything. Right? And then as the building goes up, confirming that things are being installed correctly. Right. Right? We were just consulting on a project yesterday where one of the columns is about two inches underwater on the fifth floor.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Nice.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Like, and they're pointing out, oh, it was the engineers, or it was the forums, or it was the placers, right? Well, if you had us in there from day one, we could tell you exactly who it was.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Sure, like the judge duty of uh construction.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

Yeah, yeah. And we're rootless too, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:36

It's Judge Judge Looney. Yeah. Judge Looney.

SPEAKER_03 16:39

But but we try to, like when I found when we first started identifying this, and I'll go back to the etro job, it was I thought it was hilarious because here I am at a stakeholders' meeting with a large construction company, a very large entity, I won't say, of uh for for these buildings that are going in, and the and then the architects. And here I am, a guy who's not an engineer or an architect or a designer, I'm a finance guy, and I'm adjudicating through the steps of okay, our error on our scans across this whole entire site, which was quite large, was uh five mil. And we double checked, we went back a whole extra three days to make sure everything was like bang on. Surveyors come back and they're like, we're within side of two centimeters of what you had, and that's what we had to do. I'm like, great, and we went back to the architects, where'd you get your as built? And the surveyors start giggling, and we're like, and they start following through. I'm like, okay, the as built aren't accurate, let's find new ones. We didn't spend any time throwing the architects under the bus.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:31

This has been an acceptable sin for the longest time to just assume that this is correct and to not confirm it. That it's become industry standard at so many steps. And I think the part that's interesting for me is I come from a finite, I've skipped into this halfway. Right. I've got no business being here.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

And I come from fresh eyes, fresh perspective. From unbiased.

SPEAKER_03 17:52

Unbiased from a world of compliance that makes most people sick.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Right? So it's it's but I'm I am from the the the world of truth where if we have it all on paper and everything lines up and we have all the information, we can make an accurate decision and help our clients. We don't assume on things, right? We know what they are. Uh and I'm hoping to bring that more and more to the construction industry.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

So the biggest thing here is educating people, right? Yes. Because everybody knows it, like you said, doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't want to acknowledge it. You're like, hey, I'm here. There's a fix, and it can be done pretty uh in a straightforward manner. Yep. So a lot of what you're doing is gonna have to be educating and then mass educating on this stuff.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

Yeah, and finding partners who are willing to take a risk.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_03 18:39

Because it's it's very much a pay it forward. You're being proactive instead of being reactive.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 18:45

And to to the finance guys, like my last meeting yesterday on site in a box, at least this one was scheduled, um, the PM goes, Yep, absolutely want it. Talk to this guy, he's the finance guy, make it work. So I sat there for an hour, we're going over like, okay, this is proactive. Like, what are you budgeting right now for your floors? Probably $2.5 to $3 per square foot to repair. If you do this, your cost is cents to have us do this for you in many cases. And like 10 cents.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

And where do you fit it into the budget? Like when you're coming in again, this is part of the educational thing, is like you have to approach construction teams and let them know this is obviously what you offer, this is the value, here's the ROI. Construction, general contracting, margins are razor thin a lot of the times. But where do you factor it in? Like, what's the where's the value prop? Where's the selling into like is it in the flooring budget? Is it in placing budget? Is it in where where do you propose that it goes and where have people been able to find it or make room for it?

SPEAKER_03 19:41

The two parts is I can almost guarantee that you don't pay out of your pocket for anything because you know who's gonna have done it. Right? And on your average floor to have us do that it's like $2,000. But we actually, for instance, have a process at most, it's about $7,000 a floor, no matter how big it is for how much you can pour in a day. Um and we can almost eliminate all the rework past the third floor on a tower.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

Which it makes it all by yeah, we catch it.

SPEAKER_03 20:09

We can generally pour uh a floor that requires absolutely zero flooding. Where the opposite's happening right now, where we have some PMs that are like, nope, do it a quarter inch short, we'll surface it and flood it anyways, because I have no faith in these guys placing it properly.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 20:24

Right? Um, where we can actually like and that ends up to being millions in towers. Like I have one placing firm I was talking to, um, they got stuck with the bill for a tower and equated 1.5 million dollars of reworkable floors, right? Our cost to even help them with that to prevent all that, or even show so well, our cost to be able to show that it wasn't their fault would have only been like 80,000 for the whole building.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

Right.

SPEAKER_03 20:52

Right? To have us come in and make sure every floor was placed perfectly 200,000.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

You gotta share case studies on that kind of stuff. Yeah. Like that's part of the idea. Yeah, I would imagine you yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.

SPEAKER_03 21:03

We we haven't honestly the the part I've been spending the most time with is uh making sure we don't get sued in the process of this.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:10

And making sure that we're playing fair with all the parties involved.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, for sure. Otherwise you yeah, you're not the not the fun person to have around.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Well, yeah, like yeah, like like uh to all the design firms out there for structural uh we love you and uh we want to talk to you because there's stuff coming your way. We may be the first people to figure it out, but yeah some of the stuff being designed is not being designed accurately. Oh wow and that's falling on the placers.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Cars are better with seat belts, and that's kind of what you are, right?

SPEAKER_03 21:35

Yeah, or or even being able to show what's there, like uh we have a way of showing every single piece of rebar that's in there before it's poured in control to a m uh two millimeter of accuracy, right? What does that mean? So when i if the floor fails, you can go back and show the design firm for structural the rebar you wanted was there or it wasn't.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

So then it's the placer's fault or the concrete mix. And then you do your test on the concrete and you find it. But what should happen out of all of this is not pointing fingers that we want. We want to build a perfect building.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

Because people are making mistakes. And they don't know they're making mistakes. They don't know they're the problem. They think they're s the solution. They think they're doing an amazing job. And release one little bit of their method is flawed.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Yeah. Okay, so we um I was gonna there's uh when you sat down, like we kind of like to have like a little topic thing that we can talk about. So there's one thing that was amazing that you sat and you started talking about was getting new people into construction, you know, the uh the ecosystem of bringing new talent in. And we were talking about the younger generation, the sort of 16 to 30 uh crowd. Yep. And uh you alluded to it earlier about you know the the having phones around and people don't know where North is. Yeah. And uh so take us take us through the your um you had a pretty good bent on that, which I thought was pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

Yeah, I'm trying to fortify myself and not go on a massive rant here about it. But uh uh That's okay.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

This is a good forum for that. This is what podcasts are for.

SPEAKER_03 23:10

So let's let's go back to like one of my biggest failures then. So I had 30 employees. Okay. Um and like I had one in particular that was extremely be careful behind you, by the way. Oh yeah, like you millennials, I tell you. Actually, I'm an early millennial, so I'm not gonna hold my fair. But yeah, um, so they undervalue themselves so much that they undervalue themselves out of the workforce. We don't have a labor shortage in Canada. The stats don't add up. The bodies are there, they're just not moving, right? And when we talk about immigration in a way, and I say this, my wife is an immigrant, my mom is an immigrant, okay? So I have absolute love for immigrants. But when we talk about immigration to solve our problem, it's more of not a labor shortage, but a slave labor shortage.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Right. And you see that in the food industry.

SPEAKER_03 24:02

Exactly, and that really aggravates me because there's the kids there that need to be working because they need to have self-value.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:10

And this became apparent to me, because so when we had that large 4,000 square foot and we were gangbusters growing, and this is actually what had me shrink my company because all of a sudden my top employees who were all under the age of 30 were all doing amazing stuff, doing stuff they had no business doing, working in LiDAR and making a scan to BIM of a huge building, we're doing it first time, great stuff, were coming to me in private and saying, I want to resign. And I'm like, why? No, like like I've raised you up from a field tech to doing this drafting, leading this department, doing amazing. It's like, I just don't feel like I fit in. Everybody here is doing great work, and we're all pushing for them, we're all happy, and I just feel like I'm not part of it. I don't deserve to be here. And I was like, that key, I have the office that I gave up my personal office and put a couch in it and took the door off, and I said, if you guys want to nap at one o'clock because you're tired or whatever, leave your phone at your desk, you can go lay down anytime. I do not care.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Your phone at your desk? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:09

No, no, that's my only you can have a nap for 45 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no TikTok.

SPEAKER_03 25:14

No, well, your point there is go in there and sleep and nap. Like sometimes we got stressful stuff, and you just need to like, because coffee's not gonna do it, you want to have a nap and said, Cool, do it. I had that kind of office space, right? We have company events and parties and dual stuff, and and it's fun. And that was the first one I was like, oh, that was that was weird, and I'm trying to work on okay, how do I fix that? And then not even a month later, another guy comes to me, almost identical to me.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

So what do they call that? Browning out, right? Or like quiet, quiet Rosani, what's that called, Christian? Browning out.

SPEAKER_02 25:48

Quiet quitting is the and browning out. Well, I mean, yeah, that's yeah, if you're if you've given up and you're still sticking around saying there's totally here for you, Daniel, but you're one foot out of the door.

SPEAKER_03 26:00

They were working hard. Yeah, they were still working hard, but they didn't feel like they fit in the side.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Oh, I see it was like a personal values feeling.

SPEAKER_03 26:08

Imposter syndrome.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Oh, okay. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that yeah, that is.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

And and and I was not gonna grow my business if I was gonna run into this uh every single one of them five years into it. Right, that makes sense. Because I'm gonna do it, because I'm not gonna grow a business where I'm going to sweatshop the crap out of my employees. Right. Right. So all my employees are paid well, they all have employee benefits, we all are um like for I I treat them like family and I do that for everybody. I know there are other firms I compete against that are sweatshops. I refuse to do that 996. If you guys know what that means.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

What's 996?

SPEAKER_03 26:42

Uh nine to nine, eight, so nine a.m. to nine p.m. six days a week.

SPEAKER_02 26:46

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_03 26:47

Yeah, it's a very common thing in the Asian culture right now. My wife being from Korea, that's like everybody's life there. And I'm not a part of that. Yeah, I got and you know what, it's been a really hard thing. And I look at it, and as a financial advisor for many years, I saw these. Like I have very wealthy clients in their 50s, and they have kids that are in their 20s or teens, and they're not being productive, and but they're they're hopeless. Yeah, they sit downstairs and play video games or or hang out on Twitter and all this stuff because they see this fake world out there of all these people having these things, and they don't know the joy is actually in the suffering. Like going out there and living that life, failing a little bit, but knowing that it's yours.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

That's an interesting point you make, and I feel like, and this could get all philosophical, and I think we are gonna break out into a have you in studio and do a longer discussion on this because I think it's a really key topic, but you said the word suffering, and people try and avoid it. It's like they think life is supposed to be completely void of effort beyond a certain point, hardship beyond a certain point, or work not beyond a certain hour, but of a certain caliber or intensity. Yeah. Right? And that is just, I don't know what you do to kind of you know educate around that again or display it, I guess you'd have to do. But if you were to sum this up and just to kind of tidy up um this uh part of the conversation, yeah, what would you kind of say? Or to be continued.

SPEAKER_03 28:18

Yeah, um, if if I were to give some advice to anybody who may be listening to this, yeah. If you've ever been in a lake, it's freezing cold nine out of ten times in BC. Yep. When you first hop in it, you go and you like and you swim around again and get used to it, and then you get used to it, and then you enjoy it.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:36

That's life.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

But the thing is, some people know that they avoid the lake altogether. Yeah, that yeah, yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_03 28:45

Then uh they need to really question what they're aiming for in life.

SPEAKER_02 28:48

I I know, and that's what I was saying. This kind of goes, but that is a that's a very wise point. And honestly, it's uh that's a great sound bite to kind of cap off our conversation. Yeah. And and I know it goes quick. We've already been at it for 30 minutes. That was quick. And we are gonna get into this because I mean we were just getting started on that, and that is what I think would be fantastic to dig into because people like to talk about labor shortage, but they don't actually get into the nuts and bolts and the real P. I was really when we had that conversation even in before this, I was like, my mind was turning on it for a while. I'm like, holy smokes, this could be really dealt deep into this. But we always end every episode that we do of the site visit with a rapid fire round. We'll do a proper rapid fire round when we have you in the studio, Daniel. All right, but we're just gonna give one, and it's kind of lighthearted. But Daniel, and can't be the answer cannot be financial industry, okay? Because you came from the financial industry. Okay, Daniel, if you weren't doing what you're doing right now, which I think is really cool, what would you be doing?

SPEAKER_03 29:48

If I wasn't doing what I'm doing right now, um I would probably be a psychologist.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Oh. Oh yeah. Dealing with the millennials, huh? Oh, yeah, millennial clients.

SPEAKER_03 30:02

No, it is our number one biggest problem.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Like you've already got a part-time gig, you got a side hustle already. Yeah. So how are you feeling? The plus is all in your results. Do you have value? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:14

How much?

SPEAKER_02 30:17

Uh, I think that's a great answer. It sounds like, you know, no joke. You're you kind of are doing that already, you know, and that's that's it's a great part of being a leader of a business. Um, well, Daniel, it was fantastic having you join. Thanks for having you. Thank you for coordinating everything. Really nice job. And we look forward to doing this again and um digging deeper into some of the labor. That's awesome. Thanks very much. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Well, that does it for another episode of the SiteFit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at SkyMacSystems.com slash the SiteFit, where you'll get industry insights protests and everything you need to know about the SiteFitz podcast and the Skype 5, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Stop next is also the engine that powered this podcast. All right, let's get back to the