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The SiteVisit
Leadership in construction with perspective from the job site. A podcast dedicated to the Construction industry. Construction professionals, General Contractors, Sub trade Contractors, and Specialty Contractors audiences will be engaged by the discussions between the hosts and their guests on topics and stories. Hosted James Faulkner ( CEO/Founder - SiteMax Systems ).
The SiteVisit
The Modular Revolution. With Russell Cook
In this episode of The Site Visit Podcast, host James Faulkner welcomes Russell Cook of Modular Interiors by Cook’s for a future-forward conversation on how modular construction is reshaping the commercial real estate and construction industries. From raised access floors and demountable wall systems to integrating smart technology and sustainable design, Russell shares deep insights and real-world examples—including projects like TELUS Ocean and partnerships with industry leaders.
Discover how modular design reduces waste, improves tenant flexibility, and aligns with evolving work environments. Plus, get a behind-the-scenes look at their manufacturing process, innovations in electric and data infrastructure, and how tools like SiteMax keep everything on track.
Whether you're a developer, contractor, architect, or simply curious about the future of workspace design, this episode offers actionable insights and real talk on how construction is adapting to meet the demands of flexibility, sustainability, and technology. With sharp commentary, behind-the-scenes stories, and a few laughs along the way, this is a must-listen for anyone shaping the spaces of tomorrow.
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The flight on the way in here. What's the deal with Canadian airlines and the cost and the inefficiencies? It's kind of nuts.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's got to be. The biggest problem is competition. I mean, there's only two or three airlines to choose from yeah, that's a good point Whereas if you go to the States, you've got 30 to choose from what's the airline in the States everyone always complains about late night is like Southwest, right?
Speaker 1:I think so. Yeah, yeah, they're always like oh, if you're on Southwest you're kind of screwed, that's right. Yeah, that's like. Every airline in Canada is like Southwest.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, listen, I think overall I've been pretty fortunate with my flights. I think overall, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I fly quite a lot. But yeah, I think just the competition is not there. It's got to drive in order to drive those prices down. I think we need competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so Is there money to be made, though. Do we fly around enough? I don't know. I don't think there is. There's a reason. There's no competition. There must be. Yeah, there's no money in it. It's true. I mean, a lot of them are propped.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I don't know. It's an interesting thing. We're also talking about fuel prices, and then Canadian dollars too. That's true, you know yeah. So you know is that I guess $800 Canadian flight is a $500 US flight. Yeah, so I mean it's. It's different. Yeah, it's not like the fuel is cheaper.
Speaker 1:That's true, that's very true. Yeah, to have you here, because very rarely are you in Vancouver. You were here how many times, actually? How many times have you been here since we saw you Last April?
Speaker 2:Myself personally, probably just a handful of times, maybe two or three times presentations and stuff, but the team is here quite often.
Speaker 1:We do a lot of work down here. Okay, cool, nice, that, that's cool. Well, it's a pleasure to have you back in the room here again, and are you without?
Speaker 1:your Australian sidekick, I am I was talking to him just yesterday, I said I'm coming back on the podcast. He was a little choked but we'll make sure he listens to this one. He was like a really fun. If anybody hasn't listened to it, it was a really fun opportunity. He's got a very, I would say, a sense of humor. That is vulnerable and you can kind of he puts his mildly, puts his foot in his mouth. He doesn't know it and then when you call him on it, it's a funny moment, paul.
Speaker 2:Paul is he's honestly an amazing person. I've known Paul. How long have I known Paul? It's got to be six years now. We've had a lot of. We've traveled a lot together obviously doing the thing, and he's a great guy. He's a great family man. He's met my family, We've had him over for dinner and stuff. He's just he's brilliant. Asp in general has been just fantastic to deal with. So they trusted us when we were fresh out of the gate.
Speaker 1:And for people that don't know, ASP is the acronym for their company name. Yes, ASP.
Speaker 2:Do you know what's? Funny enough, I actually only found ASP stands for recently and it's Anthony Scott. Now I'm going to ruin it. Paul Paul, no, it's not Paul Peter. Sorry, peter, there you go. Peter, anthony Scott, peter. So it's the dad and the two brothers, the two sons brothers, that are owners of the company now. So ASP Access Floors, that's a provider of rates access flooring systems.
Speaker 1:Right, so all of the materials and all that comes from their planning and their. That's right. The product doesn't come from there. It comes from other places though. Yeah, so the manufacturing is in China.
Speaker 2:They have four manufacturing facilities in China, so everything is designed, engineered, tested out of Australia tested for. We have different testing criteria in different regions and they just conform to all that yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:China being a nice hub for shipping. So the product is great. Actually, we're just about to kick off Telesocean in Victoria. Okay, it's 85,000 square feet of ASP access floor going in there.
Speaker 1:Nice, all right. Well, I am super pumped to get into this and, yeah, let's get to it, let's do it All right. Russ, I always think Russell Russ, russell Cook, but you're Russ, russ. Yeah, unless you're mad at me oh, is that what you get?
Speaker 2:I get Russell and the lower tone. Yeah, oh yeah, the wife lowers the tone and Russell, I get Russell.
Speaker 1:My mom used to be Russell as well, so oh yeah, yeah, I hear you, do you know? The weird thing is, is that certain generations that people call me Jim I'm like, yeah, there's a guy in my, in my building. He's like, hey, jim. I'm like when have I said Jim, I'm James, I've always been James. Right, I can understand Jamie, but the Jim thing is kind of like the Robert Bob thing right, dick Richard thing Similar.
Speaker 2:Easy on that. Sorry, yeah, dick Richard.
Speaker 1:Unfortunate name. Hey, my name's Dick Richard, right, yeah, so Dick Dick yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I've got a family friend of mine, Well, my wife's uncle. His name's Richard Steele, so we call him Dick Steele.
Speaker 1:We said that's one hell of a porn star name. It is. That's a great name. Welcome to the Site. Visit Podcast Leadership and perspective from construction With your host, James Faulkner.
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, you read all the books, you read the email, you read Scaling Up, you read Good to Great.
Speaker 1: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 trip for a while and actually we had a semester concrete and I and I ordered a Korean-Finnish patio out front of the side show these days.
Speaker 1:I was down in Dallas and a guy just hit me up on LinkedIn out of the blue and said he was driving from Oklahoma to Dallas to meet with me because he heard the Faber Connect platform on your guys' podcast.
Speaker 2:Own it, crush it and love it.
Speaker 1:And we celebrate these values every single day. Let's get down to it, let's do it. And we celebrate these values every single day. Let's get down to it. So you are in the raised access floor modular business. To me, you've got to go to your new website. Everyone's got to go check that out. So the URL is Modularinteriorsbycookscom.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so I went to that before the podcast and a bit yesterday, and right off the bat I was thinking of how sideways today commercial real estate is, and because it's very volatile right now. I've looked at some of the offices that SiteMax has been in over the years. They're empty right now. I'm like that's still empty. How is that still empty three years later? Right, so we're.
Speaker 1:I don't know what it's like in Calgary, but obviously you're here, you're meeting with a customer and you do a lot of stuff in Western Canada. Calgary might be a little bit more busy from the commercial real estate side, but when I see how the model of I'll just give you something where we as a company who would be going into a commercial space where we kind of get lost is, there's a lot of speculative real estate that's now in the strata owned buildings. So people have in the past, when real estate prices and interest rates were different, they got into these places thinking that they're going to be able to have this great recurring revenue from a renter. But the problem is they're not finished. The floor is not finished, the HVACs it's basically just got a hole up there. There's like maybe a T-bar structure at the most, without even the panels. And it's like that because people want to go in and make it their own, obviously right, but we got to pay for that. So when you look at that from the renter side, you think I don't want to leave money in the walls, right, or on the floor, right.
Speaker 1:So the opportunity, what I see this is the first thing I thought, because I've gone and looked at a lot of spaces and that's what I'm finding. The spaces that I really like, just the old, crappy stuff. That's kind of like whatever. You'd have to just go in as is. But the newer stuff is all like this You've got to go fit it out.
Speaker 1:So if the owners of these straddle lots, what's happening now is they've got these places that are empty and they're thinking, well, do we want to invest and get these ready? Because they probably would have been collecting revenue already if somebody didn't have to go and put 100K or 200K into doing this stuff, but if they went in and put that in themselves but made it modular enough so that when that person leaves it can swap around. You have a value proposition there and a sustainability over the years to be able to be like, yeah, move it around, you can pull up the floor, you can move walls around. So that's the first thing I saw when I was on your website. How off am I on this?
Speaker 2:No, you're bang on. You may as well come to my presentation after this. You're speaking my language, so I'll give you an example Telus Ocean right now. If I'm not mistaken, telus has taken two out of six floors. The rest is speculative. But they're putting the raised access flooring as part of the base building. Nice, and they've done that in every major tower across Canada. That's so smart. Every major tower across Canada, that's so smart. Vancouver has it, calgary has it, winnipeg, toronto, they've all gone. Ottawa, they've all gone with a raised access floor base building. Yeah, so that when the prospective clients come in they have that modular aspect to it, so they're not having to deal with the cost of fit out from an HVAC standpoint, because your HVAC is there.
Speaker 2:The raised access floor is your plenum space, modular power. You're not running lengths of cable up and over the wall, so take me through the HVAC. So the HVAC's in the floor. Yeah, so the way we look at it, and it's not every job but TELUS specifically has done they've actually done a really really nice case study on what we call UFAT.
Speaker 2:so underfloor the raised access floor as a duct. So the raised access floor is the top layer of the duct, the side of the building is the side of your plenum and the floor the concrete slab is the bottom. So you've got four sides to a duct, the raised access floor being the top layer of that duct. So we actually pass the air through that space, freely commissioned, through the space.
Speaker 1:So the vertical that you would be taking up from the access floor, you're gaining from it not being in the ceiling, that's right.
Speaker 2:So what was once reserved is, say, a 24-inch ceiling height. So if we were to lift out your ceiling tiles now, you'd probably be in around 20 inches of space to fit the ductwork. We can do the same thing in about 12 inches 10 to 12 inches Right, so we can shrink that plenum space Right.
Speaker 1:And everybody wants higher ceilings and the T-bar ceiling is like the worst.
Speaker 2:Not only that, the cost of construction, because instead of building something say, if you want a ceiling height of, say, 10 feet, now you're building a building of 12 feet because you've got that two feet of dead space. Well, now we can do 11 feet. So over the course of a tower, if you're saving a foot every floor. You know 10, 12 floors now you're almost getting what we call a free floor, essentially because your cost of construction, your materials, your glazing, your concrete, everything.
Speaker 2:A free floor I like that A free floor, especially in places like Vancouver, toronto, when you've got things like airport restrictions, so you can only build buildings so high we can actually condense the size of the cores of the mechanical units. So, due to the fact that you're pumping air onto the floor, reduces the mechanical size. Um, that allows the developers to actually have more net rentable space overall. So there's a lot of give backs to it. So, from a development standpoint, if we can get the developers to think about a raised access floor off the hop, they may actually be able to charge slightly more per square foot because you've got a significantly lower tenant improvement cost to the client. But what's also happening there is you're retaining your clients for a lot longer because as the client grows, whether they grow, whether they change organically, whether they lower their staff or they increase their staff, they're not confined to the space.
Speaker 2:That space can change and manipulate. That's the cool part. That's the cool part, right. And then our kind of claim to fame is, like you said earlier, about the sustainability. Sustainability is a word that's thrown around a lot these days. Sustainable construction products is one thing, but those products are only so good if you're, if you're, building practices aren't also sustainable, then what good are those products if you're just going to have to change and manipulate them anyways? If we can do a product that's A very sustainable which we're very fortunate, our access floors, our demountable and operable partitions are very, very sustainable If we have those products to start with, and then we can manipulate the space and minimize 90% of the waste during a tenant move out or a tenant fit out, then now you've got a truly sustainable methodology behind not just your product, but your also.
Speaker 1:It's a really dumb question. Is there a financing company that views this as office equipment and can finance the entire thing?
Speaker 2:So it's great, you know it's funny you say that. So I often get asked by people why would I choose, say, a demountable wall system, right, so a demountable glass wall system? We're looking at your what we call fixed storefront glazing right now. So you've got what's called fixed glass, so that glass cannot move unless you physically take the whole apparatus out, framing everything With a demountable system. It utilizes basically snapped together aluminum that would actually allow you to take panes of glass out and actually allow you to take the aluminum out and physically move it. Now it's classed as a furniture system, so it does actually give you that depreciable asset. So I think it's 70% year over year you can write off as a furniture component.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, okay.
Speaker 2:So from a development or an owner standpoint, after seven years you can write that whole component off. So again, you pay a little bit more, but you get more out of it. Access floor is very similar to that. Access floor is definitely more of a fixed product. But when we talk about your finishes and your modular finishes, the clients can literally take it with them.
Speaker 1:But that makes sense because that's attached to the ground or to the slab or to the surface. So that makes perfect sense. So everything that goes and clips into a rail system, that is considered that write-off component.
Speaker 2:The nice thing about the access floor, though, is then you can utilize your furniture equipment, you can utilize your modular, because you have power connectivity anywhere in the floor space. Yeah, that's the deadly part too it is Especially on the technology side.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know we, you know you want to integrate cameras, you want to integrate different types of cabling, all that kind of stuff. That's all dialed in, yeah, and it's such a mess to do that in other ways.
Speaker 2:Best analogy is a casino. Go back, go back even years to a casino. Let's go 15 years. There was virtually very limited connectivity to a slot machine. It was just a big pull handle, coin operated. Now look at them. Some have three or four screens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cat5 cable you have to be plugged in, obviously for security reasons. You can't have Wi-Fi signals getting hacked into casinos. But if they want to take a slot machine and move it or they want to have any downtime, you know how much it obviously costs a fortune for a casino to be down for any length of time. Having that raised access floor allows them to quickly maneuver, switch, add, change and a drop fat. Take that same theory. Put it into an office building or a school. We do. A ton of universities, ton of colleges. The technology, as you said, it's factoring so fast. Things are being added and taken away and students need to plug in. When I went to school I don't even think half the students even had laptops. Now you have laptop, ipad, cell phone, everything's plugged in. So you need to be able to.
Speaker 1:So is the paradigm shift from an interior fit out point of view, similar to going from the old gasoline cars to electric cars, like there's kind of this thing where when I look at I'm going to say the T word, the Tesla word, there's lots of people that hate that. But whatever, I don't care. The reality is, the first time you got into a Model S I don't know eight years ago, when they first came out, it was radical. It's like holy crap, this thing is not. I've never seen like a massive 17 inch screen in the center of a console. So when I look at your website, to me the what is really cool about this is is when most people hear the word modular I don't know what it is I think of those movable panels with the burlap kind of shit on them right, yeah, yeah yeah, that's anything movable or modular doesn't sound well-designed for some reason.
Speaker 1:It's almost like I hear you. It has this connection to it's clunky, it's not tight, it's loose yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But when I look at your website I'm like this looks the glass panels. It looks like the great work that WeWork did to make all of their environments look super friendly. They spent a lot of time making that a place people want to hang out because that increased their revenue. They did a lot of work on that, on the environmental design of the inside of the interior. So the quality of the materials, like even how the glass hits, to the black aluminum frame Aluminum, I was wrong. Yeah, yeah, the black aluminum frame. It's just so well done.
Speaker 1:Have you ever seen like the difference between a car in the 80s, the edge of the windshield versus one now? Right, this is the cool thing is you are basically windshields of cars. I'm a totally going obscure here. No, no, but when I look at a panel that is already integrated into the frame, the level of technology you can put into the glass in terms of you know how it meets and seals to the aluminum, can be a way higher thing because you're not getting somebody to make it on site. That's right. It can come in just like a windshield assembly would come in.
Speaker 1:It's got little dots all around the edge, that's 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:So I think that the opportunity for these panels. Oh, I just want to say one thing have you seen some of that latest technology out of China, the film that goes on the glass? It instantly goes from frost to like Smart film. Yeah, Shit, Are you guys putting that in here? We do.
Speaker 2:We do, yeah, we're actually integrating.
Speaker 1:You have to change everything right.
Speaker 2:We're integrating it into our operable wall system. So we've got two wall systems. One is I don't want to use the term fixed glass, but it is what we will call like a stationary, even though it's a demountable system, meaning you can essentially demount it, move it, change it, adapt. Ideally we have a raised floor. We have a demountable system on top. You maintain your electrical connectivity in the floor. You're not plugging into walls, so your walls don't have to be fixed. They can move, they can be glass, they can be solid. Those are interchangeable. So if you system today in a solid wall, tomorrow that can be changed. The solid wall advantage is you can actually put insulation inside and make it very, very high from an STC standpoint. Our operable partitions you've seen those in doing those build-ex shows right, you know how they have those big walls that come out from the closet and they section off. Hotels have them.
Speaker 2:We kind of take that into a corporate world and we have really, really high STC glaze panels. We're actually manufacturing those in Calgary now. We'll maybe get into that shortly here. But our company that we're partnered with. So our company is a partner in this other firm. It's called Teraflex Solutions and we bring frames in from Portugal. So we just bring the framework, the aluminum framework, again kits, very, very well-made kits, and then we do all the glazing internally. Part of that is a smartphone. We're actually able to integrate smartphone on one of the panels, one of the inside parts of the glass, and, like you said, it's hooked up to low voltage. You press a switch and it goes opaque or on and off. So it's a really cool feature.
Speaker 1:Is there a solution? I'm just thinking of, like the collaborative work environment, because we're seeing a lot with hybrid these days. It's kind of this COVID hangover. Thank you very much. It's true, yeah, hopefully we'll get back there. I think we are Well sort of.
Speaker 1:The problem is that now the work from home is now a perk, right. So it's like, yeah, I get to like do my laundry and I get to like, you know, you know, do whatever. I don't have to get ready for battle like I do every other day, or drive in or whatever. There are some efficiencies there works very well for a and b players, c and d players. It's just, it's not a fit but um. But with that in mind, I have these, these visions of how collaborative work environments have evolved over time.
Speaker 1:So I remember when I had one of my not my first company, my second company. We had this awesome boardroom glass boardroom hung off, looked down at this beautiful pool on Georgia Street here and I wanted a video screen. So I obviously had the projector up in the T-bar pointing down into the. But what I did is I got a large, my brother-in-law's in the glass business, so I got him to make a frosted glass panel with standoffs on it. And then I got the projector white vinyl film and I stuck it on an inner square and it looked super cool, because it's not a projector thing you pulled in.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right. So when it was not on, it just looked like this nice white piece of glass. So now, when I think of the environments that you guys provide with the technology of smart film, what could be very cool is, if you wanted like a small little breakout idea that wasn't a private meeting or whatever it is, it was within a hallway you could, via mobile opaque, this one panel which is eight feet by like four feet, let's say, sure, are they that big? Oh, yeah, yeah. So and it goes instantly like that, and maybe there can be kind of some kind of a. I don't know how they would do this, but if you could interact with that panel and that's your whiteboard for now, and then it turns back to a piece of clear glass, love it, shit. Imagine that, imagine yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure that's coming. Oh, definitely, yeah, Well, I mean we I haven't done too much research, but they do have the LED screens behind glass now too. So it's like a whole glass wall is like a video. I'm not even 100% sure how it works. The ones I've seen is actually part of a film and they stick on and they produce a video on there. So that's kind of what you want Very similar to what you want. Yeah, super cool yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know how they interact with it and it knows where you are. But, um, early days of cymax I was. I had these grand visions of having these um, um, because in the job site trailer on larger projects, um, you kind of want to, you know, have the tv with, um that you point to it and pull open the digital plans. Tony stark, I know, yeah, exactly, and I had this frame that would know where your finger was.
Speaker 1:It was a bezel that went around the TV, okay, but I couldn't quite get the computer connectivity because that was the gray area, whether or not you plug a laptop into it or whatever. Anyway, totally getting out of context here, but I think where we're going to see this utilization of the workspace and how AI is obviously making a lot of efficiencies, it's going to make people who are really innovative and good at what they do incredibly good at what they do. But I think you are so with what you're doing, you're so poised for the future of work in your industry within your specific vertical, because the old days of demo and drywall, I mean it just seems so archaic when you think about it. It does, it absolutely does, and we've got a really great company we work with that's a SiteMax customer Fusion Projects here, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're doing a project with them. We just want a project with them.
Speaker 1:They're incredible, very forward thinking. They're great. You go into their place. I don't know if it's Razak's before, I don't think it is, but they're in an older heritage. It's awesome, that kind of vibe. It's just so you kind of want to be there Totally yeah. So, anyway, I think that the raised access floor to me is the Trojan horse for innovation.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. Our raised access floor is what we, that's how, the base of our technology. That's where you start, because all the good technologies are hidden right. Everything is hidden. So everything is hidden under the raised access floor. Not only is it hidden, it's perfectly flat too. So you have an absolutely perfectly flat floor. So, no matter what that concrete is doing underneath, that floor is perfectly flat, which allows you to put that lovely black aluminum extrusion, which allows you to use a modular wall system that can feed out from one side of the wall, which we have. You press a button and these walls open a door and they just drive themselves out Fully autonomous. It's amazing. They're each independent motor. We've got chain-driven systems. The adaptability and modularity of these walls encompass what the raised access floor having that connectivity under the floor is the future, because what you've done there is you future-proof your space. There's nothing that's Totally absolutely you've done there is you future-proof your space?
Speaker 1:There's nothing that's Totally Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You can be in that space. Today. Our kind of tagline is that you've created a space that works for today and tomorrow. Regardless of what happens tomorrow, you've solved a problem that you may not know you have. So even when we're doing projects like, for example we had a big project a few years ago and everything changed the drawings. I don't know in the background what happened to the company A lot of things changed Because of the raised access floor, as the wiring was happening. All the modular components were being installed under the raised access floor. Rfis change orders, everything changed dramatically.
Speaker 2:But because we had the raised access floor in place, those costs were extremely reduced across the board, Because it's just simply plug-in. You're not ripping down drywall. You're extremely reduced across the board. Yeah, Because it's just simply plug. You're not ripping down drywall, you're not punching out conduit, it's all platinum rated wires. Yeah, it just makes sense. Yeah, and there's no extra added cost to have this. There really isn't. It just takes pre-planning. And I think now we do have a lot more, just, I guess, with social media and how the world is so much more connected connected and we can see different building strategies. For example, our demountable supplier is out of the UK. They're called Optima, Pure Optima in the US, but everything they do is on a raised access floor. Everything in Europe, China, Asia, everything's on a raised access floor. Because it just makes sense and that gives them the allowable. They allow for a very, very thin aluminum extrusion.
Speaker 2:Right, you can get your proper seals that way it looks, perfect it looks slick, everything's flat, and if it's not, you just adjust the raised excess floor, make it perfect. We're not flooding the floor, you're not floating the floor. You're not adding weight to a floor, you're not punching through concrete holes. You can only do that so many times in a building. You can only punch so many holes in a concrete floor before your engineers say no more. Yeah, you, because we've got that raised floor Now.
Speaker 1:You've now allowed for a different type of uniform load on the floor as well, because we can brace things differently, we can add supports, so you've just got so much more flexibility with the space so I think I mentioned this last time on the podcast is that are you finding new innovations in terms of front entry transition into the raised access floor? Obviously, it needs to elevate at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or are you getting buildings to actually drop?
Speaker 2:Yeah, both, both for sure so if it's a new build, start off with a higher hallway. Yeah, I mean, if it's a new build, we see like a depressed slab. So if you were to say, for example, telsocean, if I was to go in there today, we were there a few weeks back. Where our team was there a few weeks?
Speaker 1:back. What do you call it? Depressed slab?
Speaker 2:Depressed slab. Yeah, poor thing, it will be happy once the raised floor is.
Speaker 1:I don't want to be a depressed slab, no, once the raised floor is in.
Speaker 2:It's not depressed anymore. See, raised floor does its thing. When you come off the elevator, you basically have to step down 16 inches. We infill that with raised floor and away you go. So you got to get in there early, though. Right For the design component. We really need the developers and the architects, mechanical contractors, to really have that conversation off the hop. I mean by the time the drawings are produced the first time. If we're not talked about at that point, it's too late for a new build.
Speaker 2:However, we do a lot of old buildings, older buildings, where we come in just like you said. You come in on grade and then we have ramping systems or steps that we do create out of raised access floor and then we can just ramp up. We do a lot of stuff downtown Vancouver, downtown Calgary, much older buildings. We put in just a two, three inch raised floor, just enough to run all your cabling, get your data controls. Leave the HVAC in the ceiling it's doing its thing. Run all your data controls and all your wiring under the raised access floor. But again, what it does for you is perfectly flat floor. You can have your modular walls, your glass walls, because you keep all that power inside the floor so you're not tethered to any wall space. You don't have to worry about drywall, you're not worried about fire rating.
Speaker 2:You know it's all there for you, so it's a much again. It's just future-proofing that space for years to come.
Speaker 1:So is there? I'm just thinking of, like, if I was Cadillac Fairview and I did any new thing, right, like new wing or new like, wouldn't you put this in?
Speaker 2:That's the argument. So the the kickback often is price point. A lot of times the argument our biggest competition is traditional thinking. People think to us well, look, if you're adding this raised floor, if it's, if it's 15, 20 a square foot, I mean I've got to add 15, 20 bucks a square foot to my budget to build this thing. And it's like that's the wrong way of thinking, because the amount of stuff that we can pull back out of a budget by implementing a raised floor system almost gets you to a cost neutral, pretty close to cost neutral. But then when you look at a five-year churn or you look at any kind of tenant changes, that's when the world gives back, then you're saving.
Speaker 2:And then from a developer standpoint, it's that client retention. Not only are you maybe able to get a little bit more per square foot because now you've turned a space into a definitely a class A grade space, because you have that flexibility, perfectly flat, they're not paying money to trench and level their slab and if they want to do something, if they want to bring power to a boardroom, they're not going into a full-blown construction. They were just simply lifting two panels and running wire. It's quick, it's easy, it's painless, there's no disruption. And if we can get through that traditional thinking space and just get people to realize that, you know, doing this now is going to pay dividends in the future. And we are getting there.
Speaker 2:Honestly, like I would say, out east Ontario, toronto, a lot of the big buildings going up do implement a raised floor from base building. Vancouver, the Credit Suisse Tower, here, like I said, telus Gardens, the new Telus Ocean in Victoria they all have raised floor, casinos, raised floor. A lot of colleges and universities are now seeing the advantages to this. That makes sense. So instead of them building traditional construction and then in five years having to basically demo it because the technology is too old, we're doing a lot of those tiered lecture halls, but out of raised floor so we can actually tier back. We've done it from six inches to 10 feet raised access floor system and that allows them to just simply upgrade those cables underneath.
Speaker 1:Add wire, add spaces, add Do you know, what's so interesting I've only just thought about this is that I think people have walked into more raised access retail than they realize.
Speaker 2:You know what? It's great you say that. So I've got a good friend of mine down in Texas His name's Frank Bruno and him and I have been talking for four or five years now, but we're essentially business partners and we do a lot of raised floor work together and when we started talking about this he's like man, I've never seen this anywhere. He's like I just don't see it. And I said keep your eyes open now. And it was only a matter of maybe a couple of months. He's like dude, it's everywhere. I said now, because you're looking for it.
Speaker 2:You see the rail on the side.
Speaker 1:You see everything. You see the little wedge going up and then you see the what's? The anti-skid slips, sure yeah yeah, the strip tape. Yeah, I know right here.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's because people don't want to like fall off the little five inch razor. Yeah, so it's everywhere. How many inches is it? Typically Depends, like, on a low profile system. If we're going to an existing building, we're probably five inches or below, because then you don't interrupt the existing ceiling space.
Speaker 1:Traditional buildings like a business card and wide to height, on top of each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's not that high. No, no, no, not at all. I mean we do. We've done floors that two and a half inches so it's really non-disruptive to the existing space, especially in older buildings. Maybe only have a nine foot ceiling, adding that small plenum or or raised access floor, and if it's a plenum like a UFAD I know that there's buildings out there that have gone to as low as eight inches it just requires a little bit different mechanical design, cause you've got to pressur output, so your supply air.
Speaker 2:It needs to get from there all the way to the perimeter of the building. So the calculations just change depending on what how many air handling units you have crack units, things like that so you have to be able to get the air to the outside. So I think eight inches to 12 inches is pretty standard now for UFAD, as opposed to used to be 18 inches, because they used to have a lot of more duct work underneath. We've eliminated now almost 90% of the duct work, again significantly more sustainable building methodology, and we achieve a ton of well lead, all those building standards that are now based upon people as well as product. So we achieve a lot of those points across the board, so that, in addition to the modular wall systems, now you've just got that space, that, whether it's a school, a casino or an office building, it's going to work.
Speaker 1:I just realized something. As I'm doing this conversation with you, I respond to the word, to what you're saying, with right. When you said something that makes me think I'm processing my next question because I'm already doing this and I'm listening at the same time. Sure, it is like patting your head and rubbing your tummy, but the biggest output I can give is right, it just makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so here's what I was just thinking is, when you were talking about all those different sustainability building practices LEED, et cetera, the Goldie Planum, and there's also social corporate responsibility type of things is that there should be some kind of is there a raised access floor brand? Like is there an umbrella or association in Canada or in North America, like something that is pushing this? And the reason I say is because, if you walk into a raised access floor retail, let's say and I'll just throw a brand name like Arterix, for instance, right, yep, high-end, selling $1,100 jackets, yep, why wouldn't they have? They walk up to this. You know, you've got the an innovative way. Yeah, and even when you have the railings on the side, it's a branding opportunity you can do there. And then maybe there is always this message which is raised for sustainability or raising sustainability.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:And then that is a tagline that is pushed by a bigger association, and it means something. What it means is that the dollars that people are spending on $1,100 jackets is not going to a landfill every time they move locations.
Speaker 1:I like it. Yeah, you know what I mean. So it's actually a message. Yeah, because I think companies really have to look at what their impact is for their growth, like arcteryx and, uh, you'll see, there's the store on barard and robson. Yep, yep, they're just moving to the old, the old roots, which was right on the corner.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they, you know the big hoarding up there, um, you know the big, very impressive, like I don't think I've seen hoarding with the brandings done as well, like even every single screw hole. They've got like a little cap sticker that goes on is completing the photo. Oh wow, good for them, it's unbelievable yeah yeah, but I look at that kind of thing and I think these companies like for the retail side of things, for re-merchandising, moving stuff around.
Speaker 2:It's perfect, right, absolutely, you kind of want to do that to keep your customers like fresh, like Best Buy, for example, best Buy uses raised access floors because obviously they're plugging all their TVs, they're moving things around, they're always changing. But again, mountain Equipment Co-op here in Vancouver, that beautiful, big building that's full, very sustainable standpoint. They did that was like full on from day one Full on With BD?
Speaker 1:I think yeah.
Speaker 2:The development there and one of the things that they did which was really, really smart was when they built that building they had, I think, 200 employees-ish and within two years they were at 500 employees and what they did was they basically pre-programmed their floors underneath to have all this additional modular power. So it was very simply at a desk you just pull up a tile, you pulled a cable up and you plugged it in. You're done. They had that foresight that they knew their growth was going to happen. Right, and even if they didn't putting that stuff in at the time, it was pennies on the dollar as opposed to traditional construction. When you're trying to run new wires and new cables and expand duct work and you know you're not sharing a single overhead diffuser or a supply air, you know you've got that supply air under the raised access floor. So it's it's. It's just it's right, it just makes sense. You know it's. I wish.
Speaker 2:I always tell people I said I wish I could just pull everything out of my brain. As much as I try and do presentations and preach to people about why I think this makes sense. I've done it for now almost 15 years and I can truly say that I believe in not only the raised access flooring products but the modular walls and the operable partitions that we sell, because it just makes sense A space that you can reconfigure over the course of I mean minutes, you're not talking days or weeks of downtime. Like our wall systems, you can pull out from the closet, you can move them. You could take a boardroom, divide it into three, divide it into four. We have the ability to do that. So it's just. You can have break off spaces, huddle rooms, you can open it up to big team meetings, you can close it down and again maintaining the power on the floor. I think I've said that too many times now, but it's just. It just makes sense, it's just the way to build.
Speaker 1:So there's um a amazing new building down on the bottom of granville street. Um, I think it's 500.
Speaker 2:Granville 550.
Speaker 1:Granville, the Beehive no, it's across from the train station. Okay, but awesome building. Okay, but predominantly empty. Oh, because of like, I went and looked at a unit and they were like okay, well, it's a couple hundred grand to even get in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, plus the rent, Plus the rent it's like you know, I don't really want to do that because I'll leave money in there. You're just going to pay for somebody else to have it in the future, or you're going to pay for the developer now to sell it for.
Speaker 1:So you know, I will say to the landlord who's you know they're all stratified in there. It's like you've been empty for the last 18 months. Right Like, put the time in for something that your investment isn't going to go to waste, were they offering you a TI budget at all, were they? Giving you any credit. They were. But who wants a seven-year lease these days? Yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 2:I don't want one.
Speaker 1:No, no, I hear you. No, I want to be able to, because you know we're a technology company, we're growing, that's right. You know, like I don't want to be stuck with something side of things. If you get the raise, access, flooring, and then you everything can move around, when I that's going to um, it's going to attract more people and like the biggest risk always is like what it costs to get in somewhere. Totally, yeah, right. So if you remove that barrier, you're gonna you're gonna be full all day long. That's right, especially because those costs on paper.
Speaker 2:Day one, you're at two200,000. By the time you actually do it, what are we really at? Three, two, 250, 300. I'm just doing my space right now. We went through a massive renovation and I had a budget and I think we left that budget and I'm in that space, you know. But it's just like you want to do a little bit more. A little bit, you know. I mean we're trying to make it a showroom and a show space and everything I get it.
Speaker 2:But budgets do get kind of blown out and, uh, it happens. But again, if you have that, that, that fixed glass cost, you have your demountable cost. You have your partitioning cost, you have your raised floor cost. There's not too too many surprises, right? You know, you're not relying on, you're not relying on things outside of your control when you're, when you're building these. And if was to put, say, a raised floor in that building that you walked into now and he can say to you look your airflow, you're not. Because from a base building standpoint, with an HVAC system, they don't have any design components in mind. So you have to do a huge HVAC redesign when you were to move into a new office.
Speaker 2:Because you don't know what your little office space?
Speaker 1:is going to look like.
Speaker 2:As soon as you start sectioning things off, you've got to do drops all over the place. You've got VAVs, you've got all these things. That's a huge cost. A raised floor has none of that Zero. It's a pressurized system. All you're doing is adding simple diffuser grills, basically air outlets in the floor. That's all.
Speaker 2:Credit Suisse did this and Telus is doing this. They're putting basically power distribution boxes which are like junction boxes under the floor. From there the tenant gets to decide do you want 100 electrical boxes, do you want 200 electrical? What do you want? And it's just simply. You know you've got a unit cost for each one which is very, very affordable, and then after that, if you really wanted to, you could take those things with you. Right, plug and play technology. They're off the shelf. It's not proprietary, same as your floor finishes.
Speaker 2:We've got magnetically adhered hardwood. We've got modular ceramic and porcelain tiles. Again, if the client buys those, the client could in theory take them with them. And we've had clients do it in the past. They've taken their wood product with them, they've taken their tiles with them. It's theirs, they own it. What is the, the, uh, the on the electrical side of things? Uh, for the 110. It's not bx under there, right? We do use a platinum rated bx cable just because it is just free flowing and there's no cable trays. It is just an armored cable it's an armor?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's just a three wire like bx cable.
Speaker 2:It's very similar. Yeah, it's just got a. It's got a like an adaptable head on it. So we it's a plug and play, so you and I could lift it before today, and we could, we would see the junction box, which is literally just closed so do you have to do the same junction box like the the little?
Speaker 2:no, it's basically what we call a power distribution box. I shouldn't, I shouldn't have used the term junction box. I say junction box so people can relate to hard, hard power coming into a junction box and then bx out. Yeah, ours electricians would hardwire into. This power distribution box is large, but like a 12 by 12 box under the floor. Yeah, from there it's got up to nine or even 12 ports. Those ports you would have a simple plug and play cable plug in one side. The other side goes to a floor mount electrical box. That electrical box can have up to three duplex receptacles in it. So essentially every desk would have a floor box.
Speaker 2:So that plug that goes into the junction box, that's a custom, that's CSA rated CSA approved off the shelf a company called Electec in Toronto, or we have another company in the US.
Speaker 1:And they're like they're plug and then twist. Not even twist, just plug and you're done Really For 110? And it snaps in 110. Holy crap, it's beautiful. How did they?
Speaker 2:get that done, not sure.
Speaker 1:Wow, and so I had to get out it's flawless.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great We've actually patented an electrical box now that the lid of the electrical box will actually take the same rolling load as the raised access floor. So, casinos of old, you're rolling your money cart Not that we have money carts too much anymore, but they have poker chip carts and heavy carts. They were cracking the lids. So now our boxes can maintain the same weight capacity as the floor so you can roll freely on it. But again, that tile with that electrical box in it. You can simply take that tile out and move it anywhere you want, and now you have that same connectivity anywhere. So it's really the best technologies are the ones you don't see, and this is where the raised floor and the electrical distribution. You just don't see it, but it's. I'll give you another example. We just hired.
Speaker 2:A new fella came over from ConocoPhillips. He's our new controller and the whole time he's been there I think two years he's been there he was sitting on a raised access floor. It was only when he came for an interview with us a few months back and we talked about the raised floor Did he go back. He's like holy crap, I didn't realize this was in my office. This entire time he's been plugging into the floor the whole time. Yeah Right, and we can even go further than that. We have furniture components now that are designed to take modular power. So you basically just plug the desk into a port and now your desk is live. So you've got all your plugs and your connections on the desk. You move the desk, you move the plug, move the port. It's so simple.
Speaker 1:Data as well. Do you know the guys from COI? Yes, oh, yeah, yeah, okay. So how does your system dovetail with those?
Speaker 2:guys.
Speaker 1:Steelcase, herman Miller, all that. They're obviously being selected as a provider for that kind of stuff, so you're obviously, I would think, a perfect marriage for them.
Speaker 2:They do have a proprietary connection to their system that we can buy and have our manufacturer of the electrical bring those components together, have it completely CSA approved and then sent back to us so we can plug right into their furniture systems. We're doing the same thing with data as well. Now we a modular data system. So it's a very simple plug and play data system. So instead of running all the blue cables, they do all the pre-work in the manufacturer, in the shop. Basically, yeah, comes to a power point there and it's under the floor again. That actually plugs into our electrical box as well, I see. So it's all plug and play. Right, it's, it's the brains and the nerves. So you like the Cat5 switch. You mean that's right, all inside the box. So it's all plug and play. Wow, yeah, it's like the Intel inside chip, it's just all in one. Yeah, and again clients get to come in. They just plug and play and it's done.
Speaker 1:You plug your LAN cable in, I is, and uh well, it's also depending how big the space is, and you know um like the wi-fi, signals can get interrupted by us you know.
Speaker 1:So if you have like different, um, I mean, what's very popular these days are the extenders, right, right, so if you have like a cat5 and then an extender and all that stuff, you get really strong wi-fi everywhere, sure, but um, that's pretty, that's pretty amazing. So, um, you're saying that you know you're, you're coming here, you've got a meeting with a large company. I won't say the name, but I would imagine, when you're coming into their meetings, like you're a pretty impressive guy, you're coming in, I totally know what you're talking about. You've got like your craft is like dialed in. How did you get this sense of professionalism, like you are just living, living this perfect brand for what you're doing right now, like when you even came in here, you're like here's your, I've got your mints.
Speaker 2:I've got your golf bag, I got all your stuff.
Speaker 1:That's right and it's, it's pretty impressive. So I mean a lot of, I think a lot of the work style in in Vancouver specifically. In Vancouver specifically, and in Canada it's very casual, right, and you come in just like I'm here to do business.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that. I think I guess passionate, I think I border on passionate and I don't know what's the next one above passionate, I don't know if it's there's an immaculate precision thing to you.
Speaker 1:So it's kind of like if you were like a knife, you'd be like a sushi knife. Okay, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. You're not a cleaver, no right okay, right, so you can do.
Speaker 1:you can julienne things perfectly but you're really sharp.
Speaker 2:I've been in the raised access floor industry since 2010. So I was fortunate to be. I was in the field and I was brought up installing these. As we transitioned and as I transitioned in my career, becoming a foreman and a kind of project manager of sales, when we branched off and created what was Cook's Construction, which is now Modular Interiors by Cook's, when we started getting into the demands of an operable world, one of the first things I did was just jump on a site and start installing it with the guys and get the hands-on experience, and I think I think being able to being able to sell something that you believe in wholeheartedly is is probably the most important part. So our our operable wall line. Last time I was with you here, we were working with a different company I won't say the name again, but they actually unfortunately went bankrupt. We ended up taking the proprietary information from that company, working with the manufacturer in Portugal, and we now build these walls in Calgary. So we bring them over in kit form.
Speaker 2:Selling those or talking about those is easy. I get to see them. I get them shipped over in sticks and wires and just nuts and bolts, and then I get to see it transition into this absolutely magnificent, operable glazed or solid wall system and I can sit here and say I can tell you all about it because Cause I've been on the in. Well, first of all, I built the warehouse with a, with a, with a lot of help and a lot of people, but we built the warehouse that these they're built in. We made the warehouse, we, we. We have it set up. We've got specific machines and shelving and racks and glass cleaners that are doing all the bits. So I can sit here in front of you today and say this wall is a good product. I'm not relying on somebody else to do anything for us. We're doing it all in-house and they're just absolute flaws.
Speaker 1:So yeah, okay. So I kind of missed that part. So I did hear that you brought the components, partial components, from.
Speaker 2:Portugal I got that.
Speaker 1:You said that earlier in the podcast. But so you are an assembler here, also known as a manufacturer, because it's just the way things work these days. You get components from places and they're assembled in the USA, assembled in Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we bring in just the framework. So if you looked at an operable partition, let's just say nine feet by four feet, so the frames would come in, they would come nine feet tall, they would come four feet. We basically bolt all that together. We have different wiring components, fastening systems. A lot of that stuff is part of the kit. There's a lot of stuff that we have to buy outside. We purchase the local glass, whether it's low iron, clear temper, whatever the glass is, if there's film going on. We put all that in. Our local team. In-house team builds everything, we fab everything. We do all the testing to make sure everything works properly. We package it up, bring it to site and then we install it. Does everyone wear white gloves there?
Speaker 1:Lab coats.
Speaker 2:The glass cleaning process is definitely a very tedious process. We've got a really really good way of. The glass comes in, it gets shelved, tabled. We do one surface, we flip it, we suction cup it, bring it over to the table. Everything stays like that for 24 hours. We flip it, clean it, put the other piece of glass on. So we've got. The reason we've done that is because we've done it wrong a few times. And when you put something up and it's beautiful and then all of a sudden you look in the middle and there's a big thumbprint and you try and clean on the inside of the glass oh yeah, on the inside of the panel, yeah, yeah. So you gotta be really careful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you could be pretty proud of that I'm extremely proud. Yeah, so you get to go and see this stuff. It's your invention, you've got to basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I definitely can't say it's my invention, no, but you have not invented it.
Speaker 1:Brought it to life, yeah, yeah, but your process and the people involved, and we're going to do things this way. This is all your invention.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, we can say that Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Maybe your operations? That definitely yeah.
Speaker 2:I definitely had the vision for this and I yes, yes, we've definitely put that vision into place. I was extremely fortunate that we've got just the absolute crack team behind us and they've. I should say that the team behind us has also just kind of believed in me this whole process. I get it wrong quite often, but we get some stuff right too, and they've just believed in me the whole time and they're just it's almost an ongoing joke.
Speaker 1:Do they call you Russell when?
Speaker 2:you get met Sometimes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, kobe, who I've worked with now since 2010,. We came from the other company together. We started this company now. He's trusted me this whole time.
Speaker 2:But again, it's like I made a joke to him the other day. You know Warren Buffett and what's his right hand man, charlie, there. Yeah, there was a funny meme that came out the other day and I was watching it and Warren Buffett, he's asked a question every time and he just all he does is turn to Charlie Right and say, charlie, charlie, I, you know, ran past him and then at the end of the day, he's got to implement the crazy things that we're coming up with. But I guess I feel like I I try and drive it forward and it's if there's any kind of sense of doubt behind something. It's like listen, if somebody can do it, we can do it. Where there's a will, there's a way. I mean, it may not work the first time, it may not work the second time, but eventually we're going to get there and if we can do it, we can do it better than everybody else.
Speaker 2:We can control everything. Control is a big thing Relying on. We've got an issue now with planes again, just so. We're trying to get frames out of Portugal. They come on a plane, so we air freight everything out. Apparently, there's an airstrike in Amsterdam where one of the KLM flights is coming out of. We've been delayed now three days, out of our control. So we're going to try and mitigate those moving forward. How do we mitigate that? Can we stock a variety of products so we don't have this happen again? You know what can we do? Those are things that are coming out of all this. But again, we're fortunate that we've been successful thus far and we're increasingly successful. We're attracting some amazing talent. We've got just great people that work with us.
Speaker 2:Again, trust is a big thing and it's it's an ongoing thing where I get off of a phone call and Kobe's kind of looking at me like what did you just do? And I said, well, we'll figure it out and we're going to get there, you know. But yeah, I like to drive it forward. Ask me too. She's like when do you think you know things are gonna calm down, maybe, or when you think you're gonna maybe take a step back? And I honestly can't even answer her because it's like we're just not that. My headspace isn't able to to think like that. Yet you know, yeah, you know um well, maybe you haven't achieved the big.
Speaker 2:Maybe yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, I mean, you know you can, kind of. What I find interesting is that you know you might have had like an initial goal and then you just keep putting these other goals Absolutely Ahead, right, and then the people around you are like, yeah, but you accomplished this thing. You're like yeah, I'm not done, Not done, no, we're not done.
Speaker 2:It's a good thing. I said that exactly to my wife not too long ago and she asked me that question. I said but I can't answer you because we're just not done yet. I'm not there yet, I don't know. We're still growing. And yeah, I mean we're now working with a couple different firms in the US and we're looking at distribution of these walls into the US. We're helping them from the access floor standpoint, developing that and that, developing that and that construction methodology. Uh, my friend frank that I talked to you about there and there he's got. He represents the same three products as what we do. He's got teraflex, asp and optimus systems down there. So we're basically a mirrored company to one another, so we work together. We got my other friend, kevin, down there. Um, do we work with a lot for the raised access floors and it's it's really driving that. But they believe in the system that we're, that we're promoting and and it does just make sense after all.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of the, you know, even though you're a assembler, slash, you know, manufacturer, if you will bringing proponents, putting them together, yeah. And then you're also a subcontractor because you've got to go there and do all the stuff, that's right, yeah. So you, I would imagine, like the communication that you have to, or the level of communication for the trust that you have to be able to have, you know, between the different parties, the GCs, the higher years, the sub trade. You know I think we chatted a little bit before the podcast about you know, the systems you use and you know it was we were. I think everyone on Sitemax was blushing a little bit when you were saying these things, but it'd be really cool if you. I mean, it means a lot to us. I mean, we don't typically ask people to talk about these kind of things and this was totally off the cuff. So anybody listening, this was not planned. No plug, yeah, no plug.
Speaker 2:But I was just fascinated to hear what you're doing with SiteMax, how that is it was, but definitely the podcast had a big thing to do.
Speaker 1:You hadn't at that point. No, we hadn't. Perfect, you didn't even know, I didn't know about it?
Speaker 2:I don't think so. We now use SiteMax absolutely daily and it's and again, this is no plug, this is me just talking off the cuff it's been, it's been a tremendous tool for us. So for us, what we do is we have a. Our process and procedure is very simple. So we have an estimating and sales department. We have three individuals that are part of that. Once we win a project, we then turn it over to two other individuals that are kind of like our pre-execution team, so they'll bring everything from an estimating and contract startup base to order. So we'll go through shop drawings, we'll go through design phase. We'll get all that done. Once we get from estimating to say order, then we populate Sitemax. So what happens in Sitemax for us is we put all of the issued for construction drawings, we put our shop drawings in there, any details that we need. We create a folder on SiteMax because SiteMax basically allows us to add our job number and a folder, and so the team in the field have a very, very convenient app on their phone. They click on the phone, they click the job number that they're going to go to that day. It opens everything up for them Inside of that what they're able to do is then they do their FLHAs, which is mandatory on all commercial construction sites. Flhas are done. That gets instantly submitted to the general contractor. So we tag the safety guy on the job when we create a folder that goes to the safety department. And then, obviously, during breaks and lunches, they got to re-sign their FLHAs. But what the real big thing for us is is the end of day reports. We ask for a daily report from each one of our guys, or at least from the site foreman, and in that daily report we get site pictures, which, again, no plug, but you just go on the app and, in the same form, you just press the camera button and it takes pictures for you. You don't have to upload to an email, you don't have to save and share and, oh, you can only put three pictures on site max. And then we have a little comment section. We've created our own reports because it's very you can use a template, but you can customize it. So we just got very simple yes, no, is the site cleaned? Yes, did the GC sign off? Yes, no, whatever it is, and we've even created a sign off for it too. So in this one app we have where the GC start to finish, has an insight into our project because every night those daily reports get sent to the GC. So now he knows if he's not on site or he is on site. He's got a good idea what problems we ran into, if any, and what progress we're at, where we're at, roughly what our timeline is for finishing. And at the end of the job, that same folder there's a sign off that we've created for the general contractor.
Speaker 2:If it's an operable wall we have, you know, is the glass free and clear of defects? Does it operate? Do the seals, all those little things? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Gc signs it. Job done, invoice sent, happy client. We can go back to that. It's all cloud-based, obviously, as you know, I'm explaining your system to you, but it's all point in time. If there is ever an issue on a job site, things happen obviously. Hey, the glass is cracked, it's hypothetical Glass is cracked. It wasn't cracked six months ago when we signed off the order right.
Speaker 2:And that's obviously hypothetical, but it's a nice tool to cover your butts right. It covers the GC's butt because they're everybody's butt as well, and everything was operating at this time. What happened? Well, we can find out and look, but yeah, so for us, SiteMax is we can find out and look, but yeah, so for us, SiteMax is it's truly part of our entire process and procedure. We do it even in our warehouse. So with Teraflex and Modular Interiors, it's two completely separate companies, similar partners involved in both, but for Teraflex we do the same thing. So in the morning they sign on, they've got their warehouse operations, they've got to go through the FLHA, they document everything.
Speaker 1:Do they have all the materials on the material list?
Speaker 2:Yes, everything's on there. Oh wow, it's fantastic. Yeah. So when the glass comes in, everything gets itemized, Everything gets taken picture of and that's part of the report, Sweet. So we know that if there's any deficiencies to the glass, we go back to the manufacturer of the glass. You know how the windshield? You've got that black, what we call an edge frit, with the dots on it. Our glass is the exact same. I love it.
Speaker 1:So our glass has that black edge frit on it, so we can actually adhere it to our frame.
Speaker 2:It's called a frit. I just found this out not too long ago as well, but it's an edge frit. It's used for adhesion. It's actually recycled glass and other organic compounds that are better adhesion. I found out that those little black dots on the windshield actually dissipate the heat away from the glue, so it doesn't heat up too much in the sun.
Speaker 2:Interesting, pretty neat, but we use a very similar process. So again, sitemax is used in the warehouse so that we can we track and log our products as the build goes on. So we know if there's an issue down the road with one of the panels, which does happen, we can go back to our pictures, look at the wiring diagrams, look at this and we can troubleshoot while we're on site, just looking back at the specific panel.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:You know, I think what we're, what we're seeing, is, I mean, we did something, I would say, early on in SightMax, which is one of the best, which is one of the best.
Speaker 1:It is just a decision that we made and it is proving to be amazing for where technology is going. You know, like the different forms, you know you can do it. I mean, there's other platforms where you basically you go in and you upload a PDF and you draw over the areas where you would want to fill it in. Problem is that's just like fields on the top of a dumb photo. Basically 100% Right. With CYMAX, it's not that. No, everything all those PDFs that you see in there are generated from a blob of code, right? So the cool thing is is with AI, we can go and have that read every blob of code. So the cool thing is is with AI, we can go and have that read every blob of code. It says it's this syntax and at that point it just basically ignores the syntax and looks at all the values and labels. So you're like, okay, well, now we can pull data from it. So what that's done is everything in Sitemax does no dumb information. So what that's done is everything in SightMax. There's no dumb information Agreed, so it is from the backend side of things what we are deploying.
Speaker 1:And we do have a big announcement coming out in Q3 of what we're doing with AI, and some are saying that AI is just basically gonna just replace everything. And now there's an argument that I'm seeing a lot. As you know, cymax is a SaaS company. It's a software as a service. Is what that stands for? Is that utilizing AI on these platforms that have been taking in data for five, 10 years, hello, like this is a goldmine of information to be able to provide back to customers and the way things work and all of so I'm pretty happy about the fact that. I'll just give an example, like on our new drawings module, which I know we're going from a raster set of drawings to a vector set. Okay, because when you zoom in, you want that fidelity to be crisp. But now we used to. When you're uploading a set of drawings, we used to use OCR, which is optimal character recognition for the bottom right panel of the drawing. Sure.
Speaker 1:With the drawing information sheet numbers and all that kind of stuff and details. So you used to have to use OCR for that. So it was basically a script that would try, and, you know, recognize the characters and then it would be able to label what the sheet names were in our software, so in that object. But now we're using AI for that. So you basically upload it and it's getting us all cool kind of information on drawings. Sure, so now it's getting us all cool kind of information on drawings. So now it's like when we put that in there, the information we get back is like way more detailed.
Speaker 1:Sure, just, basically, it could I don't know, you know, from you know Claude or ChatGPT, yeah, yeah, yeah, you put a picture on there that's like a scan of a form or anything and it reads it and it just because it's so smart, right, yeah, yeah, so I am really, really excited about the future of what we're able to do. Yeah, so, yeah, luckily, what do you call it? Unfortunate mistake? Yeah, no, what do they call it? When you do something you didn't realize what a great move that was at the time, right, yeah, so we're pretty fortunate there.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's great move. That was at the time, right, yeah, so that's, we're pretty, pretty fortunate there. Oh it's great. I think the advent of AI is only going to. I realized that the people are concerned about jobs being taken, but I think it's just. It's just another evolution in the, in the. We didn't come out of the stone age because we ran out of rocks. You know it's just. It's just an evolution of of technology, and I think it's just. We're just going to adapt to technology. It's only going to make things better. I mean, I understand there's going to be some unfortunate situations where jobs may have to be pivoted. I guess in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:Do you see a world of robotics of putting these access flooring in?
Speaker 2:It's funny you say that I'm in conversations very early on, conversations right now with a company they did it wasn't Buildix specifically, but it was like a Buildix. I with a company they did wasn't Buildix specifically, but it was like a Buildix, I don't know the name of the show they introduced an access floor laying robot. We're interested to see how this thing can work because from a field perspective I struggle to see how it would work, but I'm really interested to see if it could do it. There's just so many little things with a raised access flooring system that make it very. You have to have that, that touch and finesse and you've got to have a set of skills that you know.
Speaker 2:As much as it is just squares on on pedestals. There's a lot of things that can go wrong very, very fast. Take if you've got a 200 long foot building and your your panel grid line is even out like, say, a 16th of an inch, eighth of an inch. If you extrapolate that out over 10 foot runs, you know what a sixteenth does over 10 feet. You know what a sixteenth does over 20 feet, and it's minor. You wouldn't even catch on a chalk line necessarily, and so I'd be interested, I'm very interested in adding technology. I mean I'm sure some of our installers would love it if they didn't have to lift.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is where we're. So there's the three Ds that robotics is going to really help with. Right, which is dull, dangerous and dirty, sure, okay. So the initial installation of a raised access floor for instance the initial part's kind of like okay, it's exciting, yeah, because you're planning it out and you're doing that thing, but then you're like I got to now do this 150,000 times. That's right.
Speaker 1:Right so that's the dull part. Is that the spark that you get from doing something, a new job or whatever it is? And then now I got to do the heavy lifting of doing the same thing and it's mundane, so that's where that can come in, so you can actually have more output.
Speaker 2:Just, remove the dull part. I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I mean, our guys love going. We do a lot of data centers and they're often here. We're doing data centers in, say, office towers where they just have a small, maybe 1,000, 2,000 square foot kind of data center just for each floor. And the guys love it because they kind of go in day one and by day three, day four, they're finishing up up and you can see a.
Speaker 2:You see a lot of progression in your work. When you go to say, somewhere like Telesocial, you've got a 20,000 square foot floor plate. Day one is very similar to day 10, which is very similar to day 20. I said by the time you get to day 30, you're finishing the job. You're like I don't want to be on this floor ever again. But then you're going to. If we can reduce the potential aches and sprains and backaches of our guys and use them to assist the robots and make sure things are happening, absolutely we should be doing that. Who wouldn't want to do that? Who wouldn't want to do that? That's fun.
Speaker 1:A thousand percent. It's fun, yeah, and this is where I'm finding that the requirement for brawn in construction is going to go away.
Speaker 2:I've seen the exoskeletons yeah the Hilti stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of industries being they're basically they're like here's my laptop on the desk. There's a lot of jobs that don't ever leave that thing 100% Okay. So those, the AI side of things that's kind of a bit of a problem. Right, when we know this, a lot of jobs are going to be kind of Agreed yeah, okay, but construction and the physical built world is never going to be kind of Agreed. Yeah, okay, but construction and the physical built world is never going to be stuck in there.
Speaker 2:Couldn't agree more Right, Because it's not virtual, it's going to be optimized. I think It'll be optimized exactly.
Speaker 1:But this is where I think that construction and the physical built world is the last bastion of technology opportunity for human beings. Couldn't agree more Right, human beings Right. And it's like so when I hear uh, when I hear a uh, you know a parent say to uh, the school body, how dare you put my kid into into you know what a trade came in to present at a high school? How dare you? They're going to go to university. I'm like, oh yeah, you want to go to a place where they train you to be in a box. That's going to be gone.
Speaker 2:I could not agree with you anymore.
Speaker 1:So I mean like hello, like we need to up the and this is what I find. Like you know, we go to a lot of conventions, we go to all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:No one zero.
Speaker 1:People are actually scratching the surface on making construction cool Zero, like I'm making construction cool Zero.
Speaker 2:I'm like holy crap, guys. Our construction association is doing a really good job. I'll be totally honest with you Is that Bill Black?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is Bill Black. He's. Awesome.
Speaker 2:He is doing, him and Tammy they're actually doing, and I actually okay, let me start again. So they're actually doing a really, really cool initiative for grades one through six and they're called Steam Boxes STEM Steam. They're called Steam Boxes STEM Steam. They added the A, I think architecture. I'm not 100% sure. I donated. Well, my company donated a box for my two kids' schools, or two kids' school. So grades one through six. They get the steam kit. You open it up and it teaches you how to wire a doorbell, teaches you how to do some plumbing and get water. It's very, very, very rudimentary but they're super funny for the kids because they get to basically pour water in one thing and watch it go down this tube and come over here. Or they get to wire a doorbell they press a button and it chimes Like that stuff is super cool. I think we need to promote trades, because the old days of oh, there's construction workers and this, that's gone now Even though let's just think about that for a second.
Speaker 1:I never actually thought about this until now. Maybe it's because you said it so well. Even the word trade, yeah, trade, yeah, I do this for you. Give me that Sure, it's what it basically means.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Trade yeah. Trading time for yeah. But I think it's going to transcend that word even yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I think like people walk into a space and like our space right now and I think it's. I'm so proud of what we've done. It's beautiful. We had a gentleman come the other day to put some logos on our wall, very similar to the site max. You got here. We had a gentleman come in. He's like, oh my gosh, this space is absolutely beautiful. You know, it's like trades built that Trade worker and it's you created this space. That is just everything you look at when you're like, oh, it was like the people that built that are less than somebody else. Why is it like that? Why is an artist that paints a picture this put on a pedestal? Why is an artist that painted a picture any different than somebody that built the building? Why is the job of somebody less important than somebody that built the thing that they're working on? I don't understand the divide there.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about this for years now and it's come down to me, as there's this transfer of purpose and someone else has to execute someone else's passion, if you get to execute your own passion on your daily job, you're winning. You are winning. Yeah, I agree. Okay, but most people in the trades are executing someone else's passion.
Speaker 2:And vision, I guess at the same time, right.
Speaker 1:You're taking somebody else's paper and Right, so it's not necessarily yours, however, when you integrate in technology robotics, et cetera. I don't have to do the part that sucks, so I get it, that's right, yeah yeah, right Now I get the passion part is look how well I made that thing, do that thing. That's cool. Yeah, totally different. Right, so you don't have to worry about the transfer of passion because the passion is compartmentalized throughout the construction process via technology. Right, so you don't have humans doing this dull shit all the time, hammer, hammer hammer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get you, you know yes and every, every last hammer, you know 359 is like I'm doing this for someone else. I just need need a paycheck, yeah, right. So that will change, yeah, and we will just be able to build faster. I totally agree.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's going to be less people. Build better, build faster. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I love the concept of taking something from a. I love when I see a set of drawings and yeah, we're only one part of this thing, but I love seeing it come to fruition. I don't do all the work in the building, but I love going in there, even though half the stuff I do is you can only see it right. It's all hidden and covered. I mean sure, operable walls and partition systems look great. But I'm looking around at the whole thing and I'm thinking to myself. This started off as a few people sitting around a desk or a computer set people sitting around a desk or a computer set of plans. And now we've got the space where people are dying to work in. They just love going to work because the space is so awesome. To me, that's the. What better thing than there is than that? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Do you know something? I was just thinking about in terms of when you're coming and you see a set of plans, when I think of BIM, right, yeah, yeah, I think BIM will have its place for essentially what BIM is. It's for humans, agreed, it's not for computers?
Speaker 2:No, I agree. Yeah, so you can visualize and plan and maneuver.
Speaker 1:But what I'm saying is that the BIM is going to be for the human's dream and then, when it gets executed, it won't need it. True, because all it needs is actually the drawing and elevation. True, because all it's going to, all it needs, is actually the drawing and elevation. Yeah, yeah, it just needs, because you're basically taking 2D to 3D. True, but it doesn't need to go and see this shaded wall with a thing that looks like real finishes Right.
Speaker 2:It doesn't need it.
Speaker 1:No, you know what I mean. Yeah, so I think that there's. Yeah, I think the BIM thing is going to be for the office. Cool, yeah, it's a good way to look at it. I know I'm kind of way out there. Maybe. No, no, no, I agree totally. Yeah, well, russ, this has been awesome and I look forward to the next one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too, Me too, I know Paul wasn't here, but this was really good. Yeah, like good. Yeah, well, like I said, we'll try and bring maybe frank next time. He's, uh, he's a character, he's, he's great to have on. He's very passionate as well.
Speaker 1:So, all right, be super fun, yeah, but well, we appreciate you, uh, everything that you you're doing and working with you with sitemax, and oh, it's great, it's very impressive what you've done. Your website everyone's got to check it. It's so good. Thanks, it looks wicked. Yeah, um and uh, from everyone, uh, best of luck on your meeting today.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for having me again, and we'll look forward to the next one as well. All right, I appreciate it. Thanks, cheers, cheers.
Speaker 1:Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom slash the site visit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the site visit podcast and Sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.