How Contractors Can Adopt AI Agents Without Chaos with Ryan Rademann

Reece is joined by Ryan Rademann from Wipfli to talk about why contractors cannot treat technology, AI, and systems as random tools anymore. As builders grow, weak integrations, messy data, and outdated processes can quietly limit cash flow, reporting, and scale.

They get into AI agents, cloud systems, process mapping, accounting workflows, and why the right tech stack has to support the way a construction business actually runs. This conversation is about using technology with intention so contractors can make better decisions, protect their team, and grow without creating more chaos.

https://ryanrademann.com

Show Notes:
00:49 Show Intro
05:04 Ryan’s Background
07:25 Wipfli’s Tech Evolution
11:12 Contractor Tech Adoption
13:23 Systems And Handoffs
18:38 Structured Data
21:21 AI Agent Opportunity
24:16 Contractor Pain Points
28:44 Process Before AI
34:13 Technology Company Mindset
41:01 Scaling With Systems
47:13 Robotics And AI
50:03 Finding Ryan

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast  Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

That's probably the last mile problem in AI. More so than the technology deployment is the getting folks rallying around their own retraining and their own re focus on what it is that they add value to in the process of getting something built efficiently. Welcome to builders budgets and beers. I'm Reece Barnes and I started this podcast to have real conversations about money in the building industry, the wins, the mistakes and everything in between. I believe builders deserve to feel confident about their finances, and that starts by hearing from others who've been through it too. This industry can be slow to change, but the right stories and the right tools can make profitability feel possible. Let's get into it. Do all right, Ryan, mics are hot. Oh, we're bringing it back. I got the old Bud Light toppers, little stuck here. We're bringing the beers back everybody. We've gotten some we've gotten some feedback from our listeners that's tasty. Gotten some feedback from our listeners that it's kind of hard to run a podcast called builders, budgets and beers, and I've been slacking on the beers. Today I am joined with my friend, my new friend, Ryan Rademann from Wipfli who came prepared with a beer. Ryan, thanks for jumping on the show, dude. Thank you. Thank you. And tell me what it is that you are sipping on. So I don't have near of near of a palette that you do. I've got just the classic Bud Light bottle. That's what was in the fridge. Okay, what do you what do you have? I'm in a corporate office, and so I didn't have my full pick, but I'm super jazzed about what was in there. So 312, representing Chicago, there you go. And my close friends and colleagues are gonna laugh at me drinking a beer on a podcast, because it's not what I'm known to drink. But I am thrilled. Beer drinker. What do you usually drink? I drink literally everything under the sun and just beers reach for I have a funny story about shotgunning a beer, which we should try on our next episode that I'll tell you after. I like to shotgun beers, or I liked to past tense. I don't know if I could hang now. I could probably hang, but Okay, so you're a Chicago guy, that's right, that's right. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I have been here for close to a decade. And, okay, super big fan of of Chicago, live downtown with my wife and my son. And, yeah, urban, urban density is there you go. Really love like we walk to the office, walk the baby to school, you know, I think it has something to do with, like, the enthusiasm we have for construction in the built environment. I remember being in a dorm room and kind of having a, you know, sight line to the Minneapolis Skyline back in the day, and to the Frank Gehry museum that was being built across the across the way from me. Just get to watch those guys all day long just painstakingly work through every little bit it's it's super cool and super painful, right? We get to see all the pain they've and grew up growing up in that space. Yeah, same thing. So it's kind of about being in love with the problem, not the solution. Sometimes, totally, totally well. And so I saw that, okay, because you're a Carlisle school of business guy Minnesota, that makes sense. Did I catch that? That's right. Okay, cool. And, and, yeah, I think I saw a little was there? Is there a family landscaping business sprinkled in there somewhere? Totally, yeah. I mean, my mom's in architecture and interior design. My dad in trees and landscaping, brought her family in the stone and exteriors business. So the job site was, was where I grew up. I've got a bad back to show for it. There you go. A lot of pavers, lot of pavers, a lot of wheel barrels. Always ask people, if they know how, if you order a half pallet of stone, how you get a half pallet of stone? And it's some poor guy who's, you know, a family member that's got to unstack half of it onto another palette. Yeah, that sounds very similar to my upbringing, Ryan, and that's exactly why I'm in tech. I love I love the vertical, I love the fine Contractors of America, but I have tender hands. I am not a bags on kind of guy. Hands for writing checks, right? That's right, that's right, or cashing them. But yeah, no. So we've got some, we've got some similarities there. I'm actually going to be in Chicago over Memorial Day. My in laws, they, they spend a lot of time in Chicago. I've got family in Chicago, so, you know, I think we stay. Is it River North? That's where I live. Let's get together. Okay, well, yeah, I think I don't know where we're staying, but yeah, we'll, we'll be down there. So we could grab a beer. Maybe we could grab an old style in the shadow mallort, which is known as the Chicago handshake bingo. There we go. There we go. He's, he's, he's the real deal. Everybody. Okay, so I am excited to have you on Ryan. First off, we kind of did this a little bit already, but let's give, let's give the audience a little bit of a more succinct background on yourself. We give the too long didn't read. We don't have to get super deep. Into it, but just who you are, where you work, what you do, just some of the basics. Sure. Ryan rademan, I'm in Chicago, like I said, I've been with woodfleet for my entire career, so focused on implementing systems for construction companies. That's evolved quite a bit, because early on, it was traditional things like CRM or a financial system. More recently, construction management has, of course, gotten a lot of traction, and I really set out a number of years ago to build, like the technology consulting powerhouse for construction. I remember being on my first real podcast. You guys know, bricks and bytes, oh yeah. And they were like, Owen on the I had no one on the podcast. Oh, beautiful. Go ahead, you know. And they're like, What do you follow? This was a number of years ago, like, for Construction Technology News. And I'm like, Well, when I started doing this, there was no construction technology wasn't a thing you know you and that you tend to learn more by spending time focusing on what the industries that are a little further ahead than tech now, construction is in the technology realm, and so I was really excited about this. I had plenty of people, even inside of my own organization, that were like, they don't spend money on technology. That isn't a brilliant place to spend your time. And I kind of had a hunch that that might change, and I consider it mostly luck that I, you know, happen to have been right about that That's right. Is it luck, or is it that you're a visionary? I think you're a visionary. Cool construction tech is really, really cool now, right? There are just things that needed to happen, right? Like, totally mobile needed to happen for the job site to work like I've been in manufacturing environments and in, you know, like, let's just say banking and insurance as an industry space, like they were always that was white collar work. You were in an office. You could use a computer a job, a manufacturing shop floor. You could strap a computer to a pole. You needed, you know, to have dust and water protection, but you could have it hardwired in from an Ethernet perspective, and it was kind of out of the elements. Like the job site was always going to be the last place, and it's still not solved because you're sometimes underground and don't have cell service in it. It moves every single day. So these are all real constraints that needed to get dealt with for and like, user experience needed to get good enough that people in this space were going to be willing to touch it. So that stuff all just happened. Now, it was inevitable, like inevitabilities are what we all organize around, right? Totally, totally. Okay, well, and so there was, there was a lot there. This is going to be a great episode. You'd mentioned right at the beginning, implementing systems for contractors. But you mentioned whip fleet, and I certainly understand that, you know, these large advisory consulting companies. You know, it's not always just tax audit. But if you could just give the listeners a little the high level of what whip flee is, because I'm actually curious, like, how much of the accounting world do you get into, or is it just like, purely, like, construction, tech, implementation? Well, like, I mean this, this honestly goes back 50 years. In the 70s, wipfly was an accounting firm that was, you know, offering their assistance in in these realms of keeping the books. So we had a pretty good visibility into the fact that this computer and software line was starting to grow as a part of the P and L and probably had a little bit of anxiety about whether that was gonna be cannibalistic to our wallet share. And so we bought a computer store in Wausau, Wisconsin, as I understand it, because really, people were spending a lot of money there to buy computers and to buy the accounting software. And so then you roll the clock forward another you know, so hopefully he's been around for 100 years. So from the 20s to the 70s, it was mostly just services around accounting. Then in the 70s, it started to be back office financial systems. Then in the 90s, people started to get into CRM. So now we started to work into other departments, with the technology rollouts and the 2010s when I started, that was the big move from on premise deployed software to the cloud, and then obviously over the last few years, it's been all about AI and building intelligence and automation into those systems by either moving away from the old ones or Trying to infuse the systems that we had with it. And so, you know, if you just take a simple example, like an ERP deployment. And I talk to organizations all the time that have this weird shiver that runs down their spine when they think about doing an ERP deployment again. And I'll say to them, like, you know, why didn't the last one go right? And they'll rattle off a bunch of reasons, and it's like, what, I bet you didn't have a CPA firm in the mix, like thinking through how that would work. Or maybe we're even just talking about how Procore was rolled out, and then they'll start talking about the Procore integration, and be like, Oh, that was rough. It's like, okay, I bet you didn't have CPAs there, as you let some people turn on some software that was going to start jamming data into your general ledger. Like, what did the controller used to do? The controller as I understand it. I wasn't alive in these days, they used to guard this wooden podium that the ledger actually sat on, and no one else was allowed to write in it. You had to come to it and convince the controller that he or she should allow you to make this entry. And so when I talked to controllers today, and they're getting a little bit like i. Uh, you know, sometimes they're like, I don't want to become a technology person. I'm like, What did you You were always that was always a data role. And so now, instead of you sitting there analyzing the individual transactions, I think your job is to be a little bit more focused on the API endpoints and the pipes that exist as other systems want to talk in a more automated fashion with the general ledger, and sometimes they'll kind of come around to that perspective and somewhat get excited about what that what that means for them. So I think there's an incredibly important overlap between an organization that is really deeply focused on accounting and an organization that's going to be helping with systems roll out. And as we now think about this turning agents loose inside of our organization, totally some someone's got to be the adult in that mix, thinking through how we govern the agents, how we set ourselves up so that we can absolutely go all in on agents. Yes, get them all over the place, and then where's the gatekeeping agent, or the gatekeeping people that are going to ensure that the general ledger remains a very reliable source of truth, in spite of all the agents trying to be really helpful, but perhaps a little jovial and overzealous, and how they're how they're behaving, sure, okay, that was, that was great. I'm just, I'm fired up because that's like, that's the same stuff that we hear on a regular basis. But you even mentioned, like, kind of it, like, the progression of whipley, right? It was like, you mentioned, like, the 70s and 80s, and you guys start to see that tech spend start to grow. And there was, you almost alluded to there being like, like, like, the accounting world was kind of scared of tech for sure, right? And then you start talking about the controllers, like, being protective, or just thinking about, like, what the like, the tactical blocking is of their role. And now need to think a little bit bigger in terms of systems. What do you think the, what do you think the the general adoption, or how contractors should be thinking about tech, because they are so antiquated. And I asked this based on the 70s and 80s comment from whipley, because it sounds like this has been a concern for decades, right? The new tech comes out, people are resistant to it. How do we adopt it? How do we apply it? So what's your general take on this in terms I know you just explained the controller side, but what are you hearing? Well, there's a chance that it becomes a benefit that construction companies didn't go get all in on systems pre AI. So I'm not going to nail this analogy, but they talk about how, like on the African continent, they didn't end up going and laying all these old telephone lines, and they didn't, you know, and so their banking system and so many other things were just built on over the air, cell phone transmission tech. And so I hear a lot of people, when I go to these conferences, speak about the construction space as that being a good analogy to think through is like we get to skip right over the old school systems that every other industry you know fought through and now has to figure out how to uncroft in terms of the tech debt, and we get to move right to intelligent systems and construction space. So that's one way to think about it. At the same time, I have a ton of construction clients who have a pretty serious, you know, host of systems that they're really desperately trying to figure out how to get to be better wired together on two fronts. One of them is, let's get a data warehouse in place so we can get all the data in one place, so that our agents don't necessarily have to go talk to a bunch of systems and maybe talk to one place slightly more centrally. The other thing is just the plumbing in terms of how those systems interact, right? So we used to think about connector middleware, right? Like, oh, we're going to buy this procor to Sage intact connector. I support that because it's simple and easy. But one reason organizations are investing in a more bespoke like middleware strategy on something like a true I pass platform like a boomy or a MuleSoft or a workato, is that the way that you make systems talk today, where it used to just be this, I need to make the table and system a map left to right to system B. That's where the intelligence actually needs to live. Now, that's one reason I'm pretty fired up about adaptive and talking with Matt, is we think that the intelligence isn't about embedding intelligence into the CRM, into the ERP, into the construction management system. Not that I have a beef with that. We want, we want those systems to be a thing where, for example, we can avoid digging through a menu and can instead just talk to it to go find a thing we need to look at. But the bigger pain point we think exists in a lot of when I say think I know, because I spend a lot of time process mapping and on site with contractors, is the handoffs between departments, because that's the stuff that nobody thinks they own. They kind of think it's the other guy or gals problem. And so there's kind of a lot of this hot potato going on. And so data moving between systems is where you've got that opportunity for AI to make a huge difference in starting to act so, like one analogy I give is the C suite likes to have this dashboard so they can kind of see what's going on, and then if they see something they don't like that's upsetting to them, what do they do? They either pick up the phone or they open up teams and they start hammering somebody to go fix this. Yep. Yep. So agents have made it easy for them to ask questions of their org, ask questions of their data, but then when they want to go pivot, to go fix this, they got to go tell a person to do that. Yeah, soon, naturally, with the right amount of data warehouse and plumbing in the form of an IPAs, they're going to be able to say, fix this back to that agent, and it's going to actually be able to go act on their behalf and do the work inside of those systems, but it's going to need right access into those systems, correct, which is your European CRM, and so I know you guys are cracking that to a large extent. I was on the phone with Matt, and the agent called me and asked me for approval on some, you know, AP element. And I was like, oh, boy, I haven't seen that before. How did that? How did that make you because you made a comment earlier about like, you know, mobile and like, field interface has to be electric in order for the big stakeholders in construction to use software. What did that do for you? Working with the voice agent, I view it as, like, you're essentially making software data entry less, right? That's exactly right. Oh, I mean, as a CRM consultant, when I was young and these guys would constantly complain, like, this thing doesn't add any value. Doesn't add any value for me. It just asks things of me. I'm like, listen, one day, this is all going to be ambient. It's going to monitor your inbox, it's going to monitor it's just going to be able to fill itself out. And I don't know how credible I was in pontificating all of that. Then I think that probably lost me credibility by saying that back then, I got lucky, and all of a sudden, now, to some extent, it's true, and you see it in some sort like a perfect example of something like Gong, right? Gong is monitoring your inbox, and it's kind of keeping things up to date for you. That's a cool example. But when the thing calls you and can ask you pointed questions in a way that's just more you're fine with giving the information or giving the answers what you don't like, I'll tell you what I don't like in my day to day is getting an email from senior leadership demanding that the close dates in the CRM all get updated because some are behind like that isn't fun or a great use of time to have to go into the system, search for the stuff, see if you're looking at the same filtered view they are, and just go arbitrarily kick out a bunch of dates because they aren't right when instead, what you wouldn't mind as much is if that same senior leader called you and was like, Hey, I'm looking at this one deal. And I was just curious, do you think July or August is more realistic for this? You're not going to be like, I'm not answering that question. You're just going to calmly tell them what you think and that totally everyone's happy. So I'm excited about this with probably more detail, right? And it's like, what we're seeing is, is how, as our clients start to engage with these voice agents, is they're they're even sharing context that they might not have directly saw being relatable when they're typing in or filling in the fields, or whatever they're like, old workflow was, but they'll come through, and they'll be like, Yeah, you know, I actually have a change order sitting in my inbox, and I need you to draft and put together all the details should be there, but make sure that I have, you know, just a draft that I can, you know, make adjustments to and approve. Oh, and by the way, the electrical subcontractor, they were delayed by this many weeks. They're going to be back out here on this date, and that's actually going to impact when we're going to pay this invoice, because they haven't fully completed their work right now, we're starting to talk about scheduling right now. We're starting to build, like, a reliability understanding for subcontractors right that might impact bidding and who we bid to in the future. So it's like, because you're harvesting all of that context, and then the software is transcribing it properly and putting and performing actions within the software for you, you're removing that friction, and software now becomes just like purely helpful. Instead of I have to go to my piece of software and get the right filters in place and look at the right fields and fill in those fields and make sure that they're all accurate, so then I can get what I want. It's about on I think I've got a client who's kind of a big thinker. His name is Michael. I'm sure he'll get to catch this after and he gets so frustrated by the idea, okay, so what we haven't talked about yet is the idea of structured versus unstructured data, right? But to get a little bit technical, like all these systems we've ever talked about in the past were always about a very defined and rigid set of columns and rows on a per data set per system basis. Now, everything that you just described probably ultimately can fit into a structured data set, but the conversation itself is unstructured and is like nuanced. There's a lot of value. And in before, when we only had a structured way of storing that, we ended up ending up like not storing it in a lot of cases. So I think the two things that we're spending a lot of time with clients on who are remarkable. It's It's remarkable, remarkable to me how patient the C suite is in basically saying mean, two things. One is, we're ready to make some investments without trying to validate in advance exactly what the precise ROI is going to be, because we both know that we'd be making a lot of assumptions that, like, what's the why waste our time doing that? So I'm happy to work through that, but I. More power to you guys, if you're willing to take a little bit of a leap of faith and and learn together on this. But they're also willing to, like, truly explore some of those slightly more intangible concepts, right? Like a few years ago, you a C suite could not be bothered to understand the basics of their relational database or their ERP today, they're willing to explore concepts that are very intangible, that may or may not ever apply to their specific architecture that they're going to put in place because they kind of want so badly to get ahead. So my point is, I'm having this conversation with CEOs, yes, weekly about structured versus unstructured data, whether we should be focused more on ensuring the structured data can fit every one of those bits, or if we just find a lake a blob to go put that in, because we assume that the agent we able to get value out of it in an unstructured Of course, unstructured data can also include photos and emails and PDFs and all these other file types. But what if we're just purely talking about interactions that took place that don't have a perfect place in a structured table. And this is my whole it's essentially my all day, every day now, compared with the rigid discovery, configure, test, deploy, migrate and train process that used to constitute my whole world five years ago, totally. I mean, we're hearing the exact same thing, actually. So in terms of, like, you know how sea level is looking at this now, it's been in the last even four or five months for us, just this, like, insane race to apply agentic AI, right? Like, I just, since I've been an adaptive I've been here for coming up on three and a half years, it was like optical character reading, right? Was AI, right? And then it was building, like machine learning algorithms to, like, perform tasks. And then it was large language models. Like the unlock for large language models gets you the opportunity to start actually categorizing invoices accurately, going through all these different steps. And now, in the last four or five, six months, agents have been the huge topic of conversation, and we've never seen like a drive and a flow for contractors to start actually applying agentic AI in a meaningful and impactful way. And to your point, with being able to put like a hard ROI to what that investment will look like is less of the conversation, because these contractors are looking at this as like research and development spend, right, right? It's also not that hard. I mean, all I do is ask like, Okay, do you have five people on your accounting function or 10? And how many do you experience? Like, let's just say it's 10. Naturally, one of those people leaves every year. There's a multi six figure cost to either replacing them or making your next hire as you grow 10% and so what if we could make that investment in something that was arguably going to be a little bit more reliable than adding another person to the team that you know that we need to to manage. So when we're starting to see these things produce outcomes that are equivalent to here's one thing I'm careful about. We don't want to go look at Jim and be like, Oh, this agent can do everything Jim can do. What we're trying to look at is your accounting department has 10 people, if they all work 50 hours a week, that's 500 hours per week of capacity. Like, can an agent bring 50 hours of capacity? We're going to bring five hours. I don't know if it's point one FTEs this month, or if it's one hour, but can it bring an FTEs worth of productivity to our department. If so, we're talking about a thing that's instantly a six figure annual return on this investment. And we solved it. We solved the ROI thing. But they're not even bothering to ask, because they all know. They all are completely clear on on this. They see the opportunity. I just think, I think it's the, you know, it's the race to to, not, yes, what system, what software can, can roll it out reliably, more like a menu setting, but just before that even gets there, is like, who can meaningfully get AI agents to perform those flows and really start building that confidence in the space? I think that's where we're at. But in terms of, we didn't touch on this, who do you typically Whitley? Might be too broad, but who do you typically work with? In terms of, like, the contractor profile over at whitfley, let's talk like top line revenue ranges, employee count ranges, sure, stuff like that. Yeah. So I mean, companies that are smaller than, like, 15 million in revenue tend to, you know, have to be pretty one foot in front of the other, and aren't always being proactive about their technology investments. So I'd say a lot of my clients are north of 50 million in revenue, 20 or north of a couple 100 million in revenue. Once we're talking two or 3 billion, you start to have a technology function that has quite a strong internal capability, and then your reliance on external implementation consultants and change in program managers and architecture folks like I bring to bear with my teams are not as important. And so that's a pretty wide range, obviously, 50 to a couple billion, 50. 50 million to a billion, or whatever is a wide, wide range. But you know what a billion dollar from? And then, let's be honest, like, what does revenue really mean if we're talking about a GC versus a specialty contract? There is there, you know. But company, you know, a lot of my clients have 100 couple 100 employees, and more than enough in terms of problems that they think they would love to be able to wipe out with some some better technology, yep, and a little bit of cushion from like, you know, capital allocation perspective, that they can play a little bit with this and not be the ones that are waiting around for somebody else to have completely proven it, because there's this semi real concern that once a couple firms solve this, like, look what's happening in the technology room. The takeoff is here, essentially, right? The whole they're building themselves and building Okay, when a handful of these orgs in each geography and each trade solve this. And all the value might accrue there quite fast, and it might totally quickly be there totally it's an account. It's an accounting. It's it's in, it's in every vertical, right? It's like the number of people that are talking about AI, just like further deepening like this, like wealth gap, or like, the conversation of monopolies is a real thing. I think, you know, I put a lot of faith in humanity right. I think that we're going to figure these things out. We're going to crack these codes. It's not to say there might not be an old bumpy patch there for a while, and there won't be people that arrive to win it at first. But, you know, generally, everyone's talking about that. I think that's a less important problem. I don't think we should let that problem, like, get in the way of innovation and progress and like, applying these types of solutions. But going back into those problems, like you're talking like 50 to a billion dollar a year contractors, what are the what are some of the specific problems that they come with that they're wanting to solve when they come to wipfly? Is there a theme there. I imagine it varies quite broadly. But like, what would you say is the general theme when you have a contractor that comes you saying, Hey, we're trying to solve this problem. What is that? Yeah, I mean, the really common scenario can be, you know, my Procore and sage 300 instance, have this connector, but I've got a power cycle that thing every morning

at 9: 27:19

30am or I know it's going to stop working. I got to get out the can of air, and I got to blow it off, and I got to turn it back on, and then maybe it'll behave for 12 hours, you know. Or, man, when I'm doing my reporting, I've got to do, oh, do this export out of, you know, my financial system, and then I've got to do this export out of Procore, and I need to try and blend those two things together. And I'm doing this dance, and I did write this macro, but it's pretty brittle, and a guy will move a cell around, and then I got a big, you know, re engineering effort to get that report to work that same way again, totally. And so, you know, a lot of times what we're doing is working on building a little bit of a data warehouse that they can more automatically combine the data so that we're not sitting there trying to interact with each of the underlying systems all the time when we could just have a quick Power BI report to show us, you know, something that we're always trying to go really get at day after day, totally, you know, or we're on some, you know, non cloud product in any one of these areas. Like, one thing I tell a lot of my clients is when they want to go down the AI path is, like, there's two things I need you to do. First, I want to make sure we get some process mapping done, right? So, like, well, so people don't necessarily come to us saying, hey, I want process mapping. Yeah, totally. We're about to build an AI super intelligence that's going to pour kerosene on this entire thing. Then I'd like to see to it, and I'll tell you this. Okay, so I've got an open claw instance. I'm a vibe coder, like in the worst way, right? Yeah, these agents running all night long, yeah? So I can tell you, as you know confidently as anybody can, what happens when you go tell the thing go nuts, on a somewhat shaky foundation of what one ought to be doing and what good looks like. So we spend a lot of time process mapping to try and get and we careful about too much as is process mapping right? Because if you map what we're doing right this second, there's a lot of what we do at this goofy way because of this goofy system limitation, try and be a little more focused on what it would look like if the inefficiencies were kind of wiped out, managed to whack out of the system. And then, and then the whole data cleanup undertaking, right? Like getting one warehouse in place, kind of building the pipelines to get them on place, big one and all third pieces is people, right? So they kind of all come to us with the same series of problems around this report is painful. These systems aren't talking well, so we try and get them all up to the cloud across right? So if you're on a cloud, a non cloud, ERP, like, let's just not kick that priority down the path anymore, because I know you want to spend all of your time on agentic systems and agentic engineering, but like, we're going to be pushing a rope uphill if we're. Fighting with a gateway to an on prem ERPs back end. Why don't we just go through that quick, hard work right now, when the ROI is somewhat limited on the agents we're going to put in place over the next 90 or 120 like, take this time right this moment, get your get your stuff, all, all your systems in the cloud, say, all of API endpoints that are easy to interact with simultaneously. We're gonna do that process mapping simultaneously. We're gonna start working on indexing and benchmarking your people. Because there's kind of this thing with every department having a whole spectrum of people that are okay. On one end, you got fired up about AI. They got their open cloud instance running. They're they're doing more than proofreading their emails and yeah, coming up with recipes on chat. GPT, totally, yeah. God bless everybody that's doing that much, but more to even be done, right? Yeah. Then you got the people that are morally opposed to the technology because of water or electricity or job displacement, and I empathize with all of those positions. But I don't necessarily intend to now go like, make my family the permanent underclass, because I, you know, felt that way. So I think we'll kind of deal with that sooner than later. And then there's a spectrum in between of people who don't have a strong opinion. They're not leading the way. They're not at the not I'm not touching this thing realm. Those are the people we got to kind of focus on, right? And so I know I'm on a diatribe about the people here, but here's the biggest piece of advice I'm giving on this. I can't necessarily promise that we can totally upgrade and uplevel everybody that's in the org, but we can control who gets promoted and who gets hired into the org. So on one hand, if we're going to do a job rec, because we think we need another person, I want to first go through filter like, are we sure we can invest this money in an agent to create the capacity for the department? They say, Nope, I need a body. Fine. We're running that thing. You're already using AI to write your job wreck. We're going to run that thing through to make sure it is clarifying that our minimum expectations are, what are the components of what are the components of? Ai literacy? It's it's data literacy, and it's aI curiosity. Like, I need those two things out of a person if we're gonna let them anymore. And make sure my interview questions are pretty effective at separating out the real deal from those that are just willing to say, Oh yeah, I'm all about it. Yeah, totally. So, you know, those are what I spend all my days, kind of like working with the C suite on in pursuit of that answering the only question I pretty much get now, which is, either, hey, I need you to help me get these agents being built out, or, Hey, I need to upgrade my old on prem ERP, because I want to go do some stuff with agents, and I can't with it like it's all because they want to go do stuff with agents. Totally, totally well, and you touched on a lot of really good things. We're talking, like integration between legacy platforms. We're talking upgrading from on prem to cloud. We're talking about the people that are in place and really understanding the process of what we would potentially be sending these new leading edge technology concepts, like agentic AI down, but And you talked about the adoption curve a little bit with, like, the early adopters, the middle of the bell curve, and you got your laggards in the back end, like you'll see that, you know, forever, right, just when it comes to, like, innovation and new technology. But I'm seeing that gap close, and maybe it's just because, you know, now AI has been coming along so much, and it's so much of a buzz that now it's like, normal, uncomfortable. But I'm telling you, dude, like, when I started three and a half years ago, in our pitch, we were like, do we even mention that we use AI, right? Because it would turn so many people off, right? Okay, so my question to you is, I'm seeing that there's much more of an appetite for this, right? It doesn't mean that they're necessarily ready for it, and it more times than not, means they have to, you know, make adjustments, to get prepared, to meaningfully apply AI. But what are some of the noteworthy trends that you have seen contractors go through just in your career. I mean, are you seeing the same thing, of them being more in tune to apply this stuff? Are you still seeing like they have the right idea, but there's still a lot of resistance or friction and actually making the move or taking action? What have you seen? Well, I think a couple of years ago, I heard folks in construction at the leadership level sometimes saying, we're on a mission to become a technology company that happens to do construction, sure, and I thought that was such bogus before, and it was only people. It might even be true, that the only people that were saying that five and 10 years ago were maybe a little disingenuous and the reality behind it. But if there is a trend, it's a trend where, 10 years ago, people that were saying in construction leadership roles that technology was really not going to get them very far, because what they do is build buildings. And all of this automation kind of inconsequential to them, like maybe we're actually the ones that were correct a decade ago. And then what's fascinating, and we'll go to the whole what happened along the way. But today, I think the people that run a paper only, GC, that say we're just a technology company that happens to be building buildings are actually the most correct today. Okay, even though that was the most bogus statement 10 years ago, and what happened in between was, I think definitely this appreciation for how, here's what's funny when you think about data, like, I'll talk a lot about data by accident, but what I kind of mean is like tight accounting, right? Like, what's the difference between those firms? Like, even people that are very dis distant from accounting roles could tell you that their employee experience being at a firm that had it together from an accounting perspective versus those that didn't have it together from an accounting perspective was relevant. But let's take it aside from accounting for a second, even though that's a really, really true thing, in my opinion, employee experience and customer experience matter a lot, like right now we're in this big talent war. The technology companies are all in this place where, I mean, they're paying LeBron scale salary for certain talent. And we'll see if that starts to play out in other industries Beyond the Frontier labs, model development, you know, realm, I think it might. And so. So we're all competing for really high quality talent. And let's just think about two general contractors, like user experiences right this moment. There are some that just don't have any systems. They're doing everything on paper. I literally do talk to some orgs who will complain about one of their problems, being that they've got to wait for folks to drive the time sheets back to the office on Friday, and so that's part of their data to delay, is they need the physical, handwritten logs. But what's more, realistic scenarios like I had a guy who I was really close with, who came from a GC that was reasonably well technology enabled, went to another one that was a bigger brand in the local market here in Chicago, like well respected firm. And he's like, I was mind blown when this was my day in the life. Like I'm a month or two or three in my whole compensation is tied to the performance of my jobs. So now it comes time for me to go check on one of my jobs. Open up my laptop. Things slow to get booted up. Booted up. Got to get on the VPN, because if I'm not on the VPN, I can't get on the remote desktop. Get on the remote desktop, load the Crystal Reports server for the report viewer, wait three minutes for the report to compile, and the little last updated date on the data is three days ago, and it's not showing costs from the last 12 days, because those time entries didn't make it daisy chained through the system. And so, oh, I got no information about why would I do anything about the fact that this profit is fading on this job? I don't even know if it's fading it and, oh, by the way, that's my entire Okay, so that's what I'm entirely compensated by. So my employee experience, my ability to even feel like I can do what I'm here to do, is, like, non existent, totally. So that's the that was beautiful. The interim state, right? Was like going from they didn't believe it existed to starting to really recognize that employee experience was relevant to how well we're going to perform. Because if we can actually retain solid talent, that's gonna matter to this place now, where we're all in on agents to make sure that they have a really great employee experience. Totally, that was, that was beautifully put. And that's like, that's one of my biggest talking points, is, like, AI is it depends on, like, what, what side of the coin you're on, if you're the owner of a company, like, there's people like, oh, wow, I can use AI, and then I don't have to hire. All these people. Like, they're looking at this room, like, how do I keep my piano lean right? And then there's other people that are like, I don't want to apply AI because I think it's going to take my job. And it's like, okay, well, what is that really indicating? Here? It's indicating that the AI is going to be doing the task. And that's what people fixate on. While, yes, that's like a very important part of what AI is doing in the process. But the most meaningful and valuable way to look at what AI is doing is it's shortening the timeline that it takes for you to arrive at the information that you are trying to get to begin with. And that's what you just explained, and that's where, I think that's where the contractor is starting to turn that leaf, and they're starting to look at what's really happening with AI is they know enough about it, and they're getting creative in their day to day, and they're seeing these bottlenecks and these things that are keeping them from getting done what they want to and they're like, can't ai do this? Right? They're like, shouldn't this be able to do that? So it's more of like, they're starting to understand that, like, while this might remove functions in business or the need to perform certain tasks you're getting to the information that you want much more quickly. And it sounds like every software pitch that's been made in the last 1520 years, but now, when you look at what AI is able to do, it's actually happening, right? I would think. Go, I probably don't think that you've got a lot of folks that are tuning into this, that are in the camp of, we don't want this to happen, right? Those people aren't hanging out watching YouTube, yeah, about AI and so maybe they're really like, valuable thing is to to try and be giving advice to those that are kind of like hanging out here in this audience, but dealing with exactly that uphill battle of some folks that are kind of more obsessed with the task of going and taking out the air can and blowing out the dust out of the server, and less about, like, why they were going to go get the server turned back on when it you know, when it stopped working like this is, this is, that's probably the last mile problem in AI. More so than the technology deployment is the getting folks rally, rallying around their own retraining and their own re focus on what it is that they add value to in the process of getting something built efficiently, totally, totally. It's, it's when we're talking about these tasks, right? Or that the the resistance, it's what AI is applying to, or, most commonly, the tasks that could complain about the most, like it will use expenses for an example, right? It's like expenses are such a large component of, like, tracking costs in a project, right? My wife, she works for a huge contractor, and what's the one thing that she puts off all the time, turning in her expenses, right? And it's like, one of those things where it's like, and then the person who needs to track those expenses is hounding her, saying, hey, I need these expenses turned in, right? And it's one of those things to where these are tasks that people don't want to do regardless, even if that is, like their focus. That's the goal of this podcast, is to get people to start having conversations and come to terms with, okay, AI is doing all this stuff that I really don't like to do, even if it is like, a big component of my job. What are the opportunities for me to advance and, like, get, you know, more ingrained in an organization past just hounding someone down for tracking expenses, right? So, no, I love it. Let's, I did have one piece because, you know, I think we talk a lot about the problems that people have, the bottlenecks that they come across, kind of the dominoes that they need to line up before they can really, you know, make it go. What does that do to scale for these contractors? Like, are there certain points? Let's say they're at $50 million or $50 million contractor. They want to get to 100 they're at 100 they want to get to 200 or whatever it might be. And of course, there's growth skills in there. But what are you seeing contractors that apply this stuff and they're set up appropriately, being able to do a scale, and the ones that want to scale that aren't set up? How is that impacting those trajectories? Yeah. I mean, I've heard from pretty impressive leaders that have, like, been around the block a few times, maybe starting more than one construction company, that the main thing that can kill a construction company is growth. And so what I see more often than than not right now, when I'm talking to contractors, is folks that are in this place where they have grown 100% in the last couple of years, they've been a 30 or 40% growth clip, and so, you know, they think they're on top of the world. And I think we've got two things you need to kind of be concerned about. One is, are we resilient to a potential retraction? With regard to this abundance, this extreme abundance of work that exists right now, and if we have had to purely hire higher, higher, higher to keep up with the fact that, like, if we have doubled our overhead, if we've doubled our office headcount, while we've so rapidly doubled our top line revenue, how culturally is this all going to feel if we end up experiencing a drawdown, and I don't mean a broader economic drawdown, I have very limited concern about that, because I'm so enthusiastic about this. But there's so many different sub niches that people exist in. Not everybody is working on data centers or power infrastructure directly, they're probably gonna be okay for a little bit. Contractors do also pivot, so let's hope that some of them can do that if there's a drawdown in a certain area. But that's one thing I think we really got to watch out for. And then on the whole like, opposite side of the coin of like, how has this enabled that scaling? I mean, like bonding capacity is a pretty real growth bottleneck, and bonding capacity has a pretty direct correlation, or tie, to how solid our books and how quickly can we kick out audited financial statements. And that has a lot to do with the giant chain of data that is coming in from the field, in the form of invoices, time cards, you know, and all the other things that are accruing against the budget on a job. And frankly, how profitable and how reliably profitable our jobs have been, and how profitable a job can be has somewhat to do with whether we can observe well enough in advance that we are. Totally heading in the wrong direction, making sure we're actually getting change orders for those things, or trying to otherwise correct some root cause, like, you know, a bad site layout that's preventing logistics, for example, totally so I think we are, I don't know, fortunate to be in a position where we've enabled a whole bunch of organizations to get on really stable footing at 70 and 80 million in revenue. 80 million in revenue, and then watched them honestly, the biggest and best example I can share here is some that have been private equity backed, and so they've gone on these M and A tears where, sure they have been able to we'll start with an org that was 80 million in revenue, they recently at PE, or they got PE thereafter, and then all of a sudden they start doing these roll ups, and they'll they'll merge in, sometimes more than one company per month, sometimes more than one company per week. Yeah, and we're able to do that, and they're able to do that in a way where they're actually driving process consistency across their new portfolio companies, and where, I mean overheard in the lunchroom seriously one time, not too long ago in Detroit, was one of the guys who was on the management team of the firm that was acquired, saying, we need to be selling this technology platform, essentially, right, like, holy smoke, you know? And that's a big departure from what I was used to for a lot of years, where folks would be coming in and getting their systems thrown out and having to inherit the company that bought them systems, where they're kicking and screaming. Now they're like, This is unbelievable. Why are you? It's like we are selling it in the form of it being the reason we are the platform that folks are rolling up into, because we have the technology that's going to make it such that we can support, support the scale, totally, totally. I love that. Um, okay, just for, just for the sake of time here, I've got, I've got two other pieces. So just to, like we talked about a lot of things here, but I always, I like to have guests share just their short, succinct point of view on where they think contractors should be focusing the most. Okay? This is like, kind of like, the opportunity to share what you think they need to be focusing on, and then the second we'll do, how do they find you? How do they get in contact with whipley? If they are people that are like, damn, I got to get more Ryan time. Sure, sure. You know, we didn't talk about robotics today. I'm pretty fired up about robotics. RPA guy, well, that's, that's with regard to the white, you know, like the computerized thing, but like, you know, when it comes to the actual, you know, Boston dynamic spot, the dog that can roll around and take pictures temperature and, you know, sensing of any number of things, right? You can strap whatever sensors you want to these things, put them in hazardous conditions, have them working while it's sleeping. Everybody's seen the dusty robotics bit that is, like you're looking at a virtual overlay of the plan, and then this, and then all of a sudden, the plan is printed on the floor. You know, there's just all kinds of like work that's kind of unsafe or not that fun. That is, you know, going to soon be, there's just so much money rushing into that space that it's not going to be long before I think there's probably some real stuff that's going to be truly adding value to the physical job site. And we're not purely just talking about the back office anymore. At the same time, I wrote an article for construction executive that will be published any day now. That was like, here's why I have stopped talking about robotics as much as I was a couple years ago. And so I'll give you my quick 30 seconds. Let's hear it. Let's hear it five years ago. Three years ago, this automation of office work thing was also more of just a futuristic concept. So robotics in the field were futuristic and robots in the office were they're both but all of a sudden, now the robot, it's tangible, are here and so, yeah, so then just purely look at venture capital, right? There was about a billion dollars, maybe two, that went into non autonomous vehicle, physical robotics. Autonomous vehicle is kind of a different category, interesting. Relevant to all of this will be a tailwind that this will arrive. But take that out, the amount of venture capital that went into pure white collar AI, was 200 billions. Is 100 to one ratio on a problem that's actually more solvable, right? Like, we're going to need 100 times the amount of capital to solve the physical labor environment, yeah. And so, you know, there's orders of magnitude and difference between size of problem and amount of capital chasing the problem. So it's just going to be a little bit on the robotics thing. But that doesn't mean that, if we think about our people and trying to improve the index of the data, literacy and AI curiosity that exists inside of our teams, that making those investments and how we hire and who we hire right now isn't going to mean that we get to accrue more, you know, market share capture and value capture, when the physical robotics start to become a part of this equation as well. Okay, so, so, okay, you guys hear you heard it here. First Robotics get into it, and also you got to be. See Ryan's article on construction executive, you said it's coming out any day now. Yeah, there's, yeah, there's plenty out there. So in terms of how to get in touch with me, yeah, I knew my new party trick is ask AI, yeah, yeah. There we go. AEO, just ask him. Who, who you should talk to about construction. AI and I have pretty reliably here. Let's try it. I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try it, maybe put in Chicago as a more you know, specific specifier mentioned, mentioned Procore. You put in some of these qualifiers, and you're sure to see so that'll link to my whip flea bio. I've also got Ryan rademan.com that I've used to try and kind of aggregate all of my aggregate, all of my stuff, because between talks that I'm giving a Procore groundbreak and CFMA, and stuff that I'm doing on podcasts, I've just found it to be valuable for my own purpose, to like, have a place where I can get to all of it and point to all of it. And it's turning out to be an interesting kind of repository of this, this whole progression that's happened with regard to construction tech, so beautiful, beautiful. It's it's pulling up. It's pulling up a ton of these, and I'm skimming, I'm gonna do Chicago after this, and you're gonna get pulled up and clawed. I can guarantee it right now, Ryan, I appreciate you for making the time, dude, and tuning in. If I am in Chicago. Well, when I am in Chicago, I'll shoot you a text. Will I will try and grab a beer if you have time to split away from your family. But yeah, I appreciate you jumping on, and we'll just chat soon. Thank you for the hospitality. This is an awesome, awesome show you got going on. Cheers, awesome. Appreciate it, dude. We'll see ya.