Innovation Expo Series: Featuring Join
What role does communication play in successful project delivery? At this month’s Innovation Expo, hosted at STO Building Group’s headquarters, Chief Innovation Officer Rob Leon sat down with Join co-founder Andrew Zukoski to explore that question. Their conversation covered how communication gaps can lead to budget and schedule issues, the need Join identified within the construction industry, and how technology can foster more effective collaboration across project teams.
Innovation Expo Series:
Featuring Join
HOST
Rob Leon
Chief Innovation Officer, STO Building GroupView Bio
GUEST
Andrew Zukoski
Co-founder & CEO, Join, Inc.View Bio
Rob Leon (00:00):
Welcome to the STO Building Group Innovation series, the Expo series. We are here today with Andrew Zukowski from Join. So Andrew, thanks for coming. We really enjoy having you here. It’s been quite a journey I think, for us together and probably longer for you. So I’d like you to just tell us about a little bit about what the opportunity that you saw in the industry was from your point of view, and how did you go about solving that?
Andrew Zukowski (00:25):
Yeah, great question. It’s funny, we started in a very different place. And like, one thing to keep in mind is that I and the rest of the founding team don’t actually come from industry. We’ve been in technology companies that have served the industry for a number of years, and as we were getting Join together, we thought there were opportunities for technology to move forward what we call project outcomes, like the actual quality of the built environment and the lives and, you know, businesses of everyone that contributes to that. But we started in a very different place. We started thinking that what we needed was a, you know, better version of Revit and we needed better to design technology. And you know, we were building things and shipping things and like we have a bunch of patents from back then.
Andrew Zukowski (01:04):
But fortunately we were talking to people as we did that and talking to architects, talking to owners, talking to general contractors, talking to trade contractors, talking to you know, building product manufacturers, just sort of everyone in the ecosystem that delivers the built environment. And this led us to a lot of people pointing to the OAC meeting, like the owner, architect, contractor meeting as like a particularly critical crucible for a project. And a place where there was both a lot of pain associated with it, just with things that go wrong. You know, the stories about miscommunications with owners and them like, just like losing it, like just these like intensely painful things. People sweating bullets going into these things like not sleeping for weeks because They need to like prepare reports in ways that like these other stakeholders will understand.
Andrew Zukowski (01:53):
And we heard that and said, okay, this is interesting. There’s more and more of this true like owner architect, contractor collaboration happening with the shift to, you know, CM models and design build models doesn’t seem like there’s good technology here. And we said, okay, we think this is an opportunity for, and that, that turned into spending a lot of time with pre-construction teams around the country. So our team’s mostly on the west coast. We work with a number of folks on the west coast. We got connected in with latent construction early. And you know, we don’t, we don’t come from industry. And so it isn’t the, I think a lot of industry startups, you know, it’s someone from industry who felt a pain point when they were in industry and they built technology to solve it. And it’s this amazing, beautiful story. We had to get really good at listening, right? We had to get really good at that and we listened to these preconstruction teams about what would deliver value to ’em, what would improve, particularly the owner experience and that collaboration with the owner and the design team stakeholders from sort of early stages of design through GMP and beyond. So,
Rob Leon (02:56):
Interestingly enough, right? A good PRECON team is a good listener. So listening to the client is a really good and important thing to do to, to do pre-con effectively from a construction point of view, from a design point of view, and from a team point of view. And I think you hit the nail on the head, which is, it’s not that we are not able or we don’t have the skillset to do all the things that are necessary to set up a job properly, but there’s a lot of moving parts and pieces in the decision making process at the beginning. And what I don’t think we’re very good at is communicating that well and, and like visualizing it. So a lot of things happen as you know, which is a client will say, hey, what happens if we change, you know, carpet to terrazzo?
Rob Leon (03:36):
What does that mean? And sometimes it’s just, oh, well this is what the cost could be. Well, there’s the cost, there’s a schedule impact as well. Yep. Right? And then what are the other details of connecting down to the floor to terrazzo versus what it would be and then what’s the maintenance afterwards? So there’s this whole thing of like, they ask a simple question. They think it’s a simple answer. We know there’s complications back and forth with it, but we don’t necessarily communicate that very, very well. And then all of those things going through the, the, the process and the timeline of pre-construction, there are so many of those. And when you keep pulling different levers back and forth, what does that mean at the end of the day? And I think what we really love about your product is that it helps visualize that, but then also helps like memorialize that as well. Yeah. So talk a little bit more about that and how you got to that point.
Andrew Zukowski (04:23):
Yeah, it’s a great question. We heard a couple of, there are a couple of stories that made us focus in on sort of the decision as a unit. A lot of this was around communication and understanding as well as just the tracking and trending. And so I’ll do like one specific one and then I’ll just share something on sort of trends we see for decision making as a whole. The started thinking of, I was sitting with an owners rep and he described, you know, they’re working on our project, it was mixed use some somewhere in the Bay Area concrete structure. They were over budget, surprise. They’re sitting around and said, Hey, what can we do? Like it’s pretty late. We really got to, we really got to do something, but we can’t shift the program. So we said, okay, we’ll lower the floor-to-floor height, like you won’t be able to rent for quite as much, but we’ll save money in structure.
Andrew Zukowski (04:59):
We’ll save money in skin. It’s okay. Right? And they said, yeah, okay, you can price the concrete and like you can price the glass. Okay, we’re good to go. They didn’t ask the dodge engineer, right? They didn’t ask the mechanical engineer. They called back later and first say like, Hey, you’re going to have to pay a lot more to, for us to redesign this, right? Because you moved everything that all our systems connect to. And the mechanical engineer called and said, Hey, it’s not as much space for our components. We have to use more expensive components. Right. so you end up in a situation where you get a worse project out. That’s right. It’s like a hundred, the building’s going to last a hundred years, right? And the ceilings are all going to be twelve inches lower. Right. And it will have cost more to deliver because there wasn’t good visibility into these decisions that were on the table. There were people who had pieces of the puzzle that were appropriate for that decision. They couldn’t see it.
Rob Leon (05:39):
That’s a great example.
Andrew Zukowski (05:40):
Yeah. It’s interesting you talk about the need to communicate it. One of the, one of the things we observed is like you know, coming in, coming in and really trying to wrap our heads around these problems of pre-construction was that it’s a diverse team that comes together for every project. It’s a new owner, it’s a new design partner, it’s new trade partners.
Rob Leon (05:56):
And at different points in time.
Andrew Zukowski (05:57):
Yeah. And they’re always coming on and off. That’s, and you speak a different language actually, the owner’s like very programmatic, like, and you know, general contracts, if you’re speaking to cost, like where’s cost, like early on it might be by system and then by like CSI division. And then it’s actually by bid package. And so the need to be able to take this information and trend it, but then also reflected in a way that like you, the owner or you the architect will actually understand and be able to reason with and get confident with is this that’s an area that technology can help with. Right? Like really easy to quickly and cleanly pivot data that you’re confident is up to the minute Correct. And is memorialized that the owner or whoever’s making the decision can’t come back and Yeah. Try to re
Rob Leon (06:36):
And it’s not, no, it’s not even a matter of that. It’s not saying, hey, we got you. Because like, you know, we’re trying to put somebody in the position of, well, you said this or you said that, but it really brings back the fact that a lot of these things happen so quick. Yeah. Right. That you have to, you forget you literally, what did I do? So you can, you can go back into the, into the past, into the process of looking at that. You can see, well where was I? And then how did things change? How did things change from there? It’s like every time you take another step, something is going to change. And then also communicating to the client. They have, you know, they have clients internally that they’re working for. Yeah. Right. So the people who we’re dealing with around the table are usually representing the business and the business has different needs and they have to understand what those needs are.
Rob Leon (07:21):
And there are things that they’re not going to do till the last minute. Usually the technology doesn’t happen till the last minute. So all of these parts and pieces fitting in that puzzle together, along that chain of, of what is happening is so important that the fact is, is that when we are around that OAC C meeting, there’s an intense focus, an intense concentration, and we’re all like, we are there for the client, but quite honestly, the client is there for whatever it is that half hour, the hour that we’re there, and then they go back and do their day job, which is dealing with the clients that they have to deal with. Yeah. So it’s like we are arming that client that we see day to day with as much information as we can give them in order to get the decisions from their leadership. Yeah.
Andrew Zukowski (08:00):
It’s like an education problem. There is a huge amount of construction education problem. It’s like, not like you understand construction, math, and construction costs. That’s right. You’ve got to get this representative from the client, not only so that they understand it. That’s right. But they can represent it out to like other internal stakeholders that they might have to deliver bad news to. Exactly. Like, yeah,
Rob Leon (08:15):
It’s fascinating and that’s why it’s like not coming from the industry is not, I don’t look at that as a weakness at all. And I think, you know, we’ve met a lot of people, your team, and we think you have a really strong team. And that’s like one of the things that we really look towards. It’s like, yes, we are on the same level playing field of yes, that is a problem or that’s an opportunity that we need to fix or make better. And we think that the technology where it stands today is a really good platform’s. Nice. But what about the team? Is the team going to be able to grow and take input from the industry now? So now maybe not part of the industry at the beginning listing. And now what’s going to happen as it starts being used piece, it is a collaborative platform. So you’re not going to just hear from us. You’re going to hear from the architect, the engineer, and hopefully the client as well. So tell me like, that part of the journey is actually another separate track. So tell me a little bit about that and like, what were some of like the milestone successes along your journey to say, hey, alright, this is great. We’ve nailed that one. We can say that’s a, that’s a success and now we’re going to move to the next thing.
Andrew Zukowski (09:15):
Yeah. I think you look at like a, a technology company coming together and there’s like some externally visible milestones. Like one, like, do you have a product? Is someone using the product? And so like, that one happened faster than we thought. You know, we shipped the first version of the product the week before Thanksgiving. We’re like, it’s great. We’re shutting down the company. We get to go take a week off. And like Tuesday before Thanksgiving, someone’s like, I got an OAC meeting like on Wednesday, I’m, I’m going to do, I’m, don’t push on this. And like, of course he broke everything because it was like the first time anyway, I like pushed on the product. That was good. That was actually San Jose State University integrated science building was one of the first projects that ended up running to completion with Join.
Andrew Zukowski (09:56):
It didn’t, it didn’t open for another four years, because that’s sort of the nature of construction. But that was like when we were able to get to that team and talk to the pre-construction team from the general contractor who was working on that job and hear from them and just like, see their body relax. When they were talking about what it let them do with the client, that it, like the we were very confident at that point that it wasn’t this abstract problem that we were solving. It was like that it actually connected. Like we can like point to like the thing in someone’s life that we made just like vastly better. And that, like, that was a big milestone for us confirming like that we were onto something real. And then, then after that, it starts to be a lot of, like, you, you worry sometimes like, oh, you’re building only for like crazy West Coast collaborative, like pre-construction.
Andrew Zukowski (10:41):
And so there’s, you know, we were, we were working to make sure we had diversity of clients sort of throughout the country and then by project type. And so there were a series of milestones just nailing healthcare, nailing multifamily. Right. So sort of like more merchant developer stuff rather than like Yeah. You know, you think of construction technology, you think of like a billion-dollar hospital Sure. With like a target value delivery process and like lots of money to throw around for technology and people. And it’s, it’s interesting. It’s so interesting. Like that’s true. And there’re on these big iconic projects, like there are, there are complex problems that the OAC team has to come together and work through and on commodity developer led construction projects that like Right. Aren’t going to be written up in any magazines. They’re complicated problems Yeah. That the owner, the architect, and the contractor have to come together to work on. And for both of those teams, it’s still the most important project they’re working on that day and the thing that they’re going to like, take their career to the next step where like, or not like. And so starting to feel that from a wider set of teams around the country and like in different project sectors.
Rob Leon (11:43):
That’s awesome. It’s really important. And you know, I’ve been on that end a lot. I mean, coming through, I did come through the construction business. So sitting in those meetings you know, sometimes they’re, they’re very painful. Not because let’s just say we have, like I said before, lack of information or lack of skill. It’s sometimes we just take for granted that we know what they’re TA that we’re talking about. Like our audience knows what we’re saying. And sometimes we just take it for granted that it’s, the language is the same when we say something that, oh, of course it’s going to affect schedule or of course, but, but it doesn’t necessarily translate that way. So kind of taking that step back, being able to use the tool to kind of like translate that from all different points of view to the end user, I think is very, very impactful.
Rob Leon (12:33):
Not just for the client, but I think also for the people who are working day to day, like you said, especially for some of our younger you know, our younger employees that are like, you know, they’re also just learning. Yeah. So let them learn in yet another new way because you’re the technology is also helping us drive analytics a little bit better than we had, you know? Because It’s all in one place. So they have that mind, I think because that’s their paradigm. They grew up with a lot of technology, a lot of data, a lot of analytics, they have it every day on so much of what they do. So if it’s not in their everyday lives, I kind of feel like they feel a little bit lost. Right. How am I going to do this without, you know, something to help me show the visual aid? How am I going to get that message across? And I think that, again, your tool is really great for, for doing that for us. Cheers.
Andrew Zukowski (13:22):
Yeah. I appreciate it. It’s funny, the, like you’re mentioning the like impacting people’s lives. There one of the things that surprised us, you know, coming from software, I’m like buildings, it’s all about the materials and the design and so forth, right? And like, and point of fact, that’s not what shapes like the built environment. Like people shape the build environment, small groups of people project by project, working together in a room trying to solve these problems. It’s all, it’s project by project that like the built environment gets built and the, like, the difference in how you can run between, like where it’s a team that’s working together informed by data, and one where the team is questioning the data that someone’s bringing forward. And technology. Like if you’re able to give people access to the data a little bit before the meeting and they can get over the shock of the bad news, like on their own time, you can have just a very different working environment that’s a lot more fun. Like everyone tells us it’s a lot more fun to build awesome stuff like, you know, with an actual team as opposed to fighting your way out of every interaction. That’s so true.
Rob Leon (14:28):
Yeah. And that really drives that, that, you know, conversation to the transparency of it all. Yeah. And you know, we’ve had projects that you’re, you just feel like you’re battling every day no matter what it is. Just battling every day what whatever the, the reasons are. And when you come out of a job where you feel like that was a really collaborative effort, it still may have been a difficult project, but it wasn’t difficult because of the battles that you were having because of emotional issues. You were the battles. Of course every project is, has its own challenges. But when you come together and you solve those problems as a team, then you come out of that, quite honestly, you’re, you build your network because you’re friends for life, quite honestly, with those things. And if the tool, right, if the technology can help, let’s just say seed, those conversations and seed the collaboration, then just more power to us. All right. Yeah.
Andrew Zukowski (15:23):
Yeah. We had a, you’re asking about milestones, we had a case study we did was the YouTube has a new headquarters it went up throughout Covid and we got to, we got to visit it. They, they sort of continued using Join throughout construction to communicate with the owner. And this was sort of at that time unique. And so we were spending a lot of time with them to try to understand that. But they talked about, and we, we wrote along like, Join wasn’t the cause of like this amazing project, like all credit to the project team. But they talked about how from the very get go, they had this collaborative environment. And every time they onboarded a new stakeholder, whether a design consultant or a trade partner, they were able to bring them into that way of working. And they all like, you know, these are like hardened construction people and like, I swear they were tearing up like talking about how they hoped they ever got to work on another project like this. Because of how the site felt every day as people came together to build this like amazing forward looking structure. And so, yeah.
Rob Leon (16:14):
Well that’s awesome. So what’s on the horizon for you?
Andrew Zukowski (16:16):
Yeah, great question. So we you know, the joint platform comes in two principle components, what we call a joint project, which is a lot of what we’ve been talking about. It’s completely focused on the project experience, the owner’s outcome. We’ve been starting to invest more in what we call joint core, which is all about the data that comes from project usage. And so every project is shaped by a team. Every project is unique. You know, the decisions that happen in the OAC c meeting we believe are among the most critical and the most critical data for like, you know, what’s going to come out of a project and without Join tends to happen in spreadsheets, emails, it gets lost. Yeah. It’s this incredible shame, right? The like r and d effort that goes into like, especially a high rise, like what’s around us is like at least as much as like, you know, complex aerospace projects.
Andrew Zukowski (17:09):
And those come off the assembly line. This gets built once, right? And like all that effort, all that knowledge that was gained, all that education blows away in the wind. Like some pieces end up locked up inside one individual’s head. But it’s, it’s so hard to leverage, it’s so hard to bring up junior staff members. Like the next project starts from a blank sheet. And we think with joint core, which gets fed data from usage by joint project, we have opportunities to help projects build on the shoulders of others. Whether it’s by leveraging historical cost information, by leveraging, you know, common substitutions that have shown up before by leveraging the history of ideas that the team has brought forward by leveraging, you know, standardization and process or approach like across an entire organization. And we’re, we’re really excited about that. Just because it’s in other industries when you’ve been able to close that virtual loop, like coming from software development just like magic happens. And there have been there’s sort of inherent challenges in construction to bringing that virtuous loop, the uniqueness of every project, the fragment nature of every team. But we think with joint project in place, we’ve got to, we, we get a look at solving some of those projects.
Rob Leon (18:14):
I think that’s a great place to go. So we now have this partnership with STO Building group and, and Join how do you feel that we can help shape and grow your platform?
Andrew Zukowski (18:27):
Yeah, great. So I feel like STOBG is unique in a number of ways. One is just the nationwide scale that the that the group brings to the table, but then it’s also the diversity of work. So we, we got started I believe first with latent construction, which is a lot of ground up institutional like construction. Other members of the STOBG family of companies they very different. And Join gets applied to a really wide number of projects. But we definitely have sort of sectors that we do very well in and other sectors where we can do better and better in. And so I’m really excited about the opportunity with some of the companies to take Join into, right? Like new sectors and refine the product and solution as necessary to deliver a ton of value to those projects as well. Awesome.
Rob Leon (19:09):
Well, we’re looking forward to it too. Cool.
Andrew Zukowski (19:11):
Thanks so much, Robe.
Rob Leon (19:11):
Andrew, thank you for joining us. Join us next time at STOBG Innovation Expo.