Welcome everybody out to podcast number 1364. In this podcast, I've got a really neat topic for you. I'm going to talk about uniqueness in the construction industry.

Stay with us. Welcome everybody. I hope you're doing well and staying safe out there.

Let me go ahead and do something right away. Let me say if I sound funny, that is correct because I have the invisible or Invisalign or clear retainers. My dentist is moving my teeth wider apart because as I get older, they're scrunching together and it's harder to floss and I need to take care of my health.

So I thought I could take my retainers out and not annoy everybody on the podcast and go against my dentist wishes. Or I could just ask you loving people to forgive me. And I went with the ladder because I'm really attempting to prioritize my health.

So I love you all. I appreciate you. I know it's probably super annoying to listen to me and I do apologize.

I will try to get less of a lisp and be more and more accurate in how I speak. So thank you all very much. Let me start out with the builder's code or the super's code.

Let me read it. Haste in planning. Sun suit wrote in the art of war, thus though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

Stupid haste is heading into battle without planning. When we move with haste, we move quickly to begin thorough and effective plans. If you want to move fast, plan sooner and better and plan more efficiently.

Never move with haste to begin. Move with haste to plan. And then later on, you'll also I'm off script here.

Later you'll hear me also say that haste to plan, but you plan to finish. Not plan to start. You plan to finish.

Let me go ahead and move on to some feedback from our listeners. I just did a post on my family actually on LinkedIn and can you believe it? It got, I think right now we are over, um, oh, I can tell you right now, we're at 1,169 reactions with 200,000 impressions. That's, that's quite remarkable.

Anyway, getting lots of, uh, uh, connections and feedback from people. And one of the comments that I got back that I really wanted to respond to right away and promise that I would respond to right away is this one. Let me go ahead and read it guidance on becoming a superintendent.

Hi, Jason. I recently came across your YouTube channel and have found your content to be very helpful. I recently made a career change and have been in a carpenters union for about a year now in hopes of becoming a superintendent.

If you are open to it, I would be super grateful for any advice, guidance you can give me. Please let me know. Okay.

Let me go ahead. I'm going to do this a couple of different ways. First of all, I really appreciate the comment.

I love working with people to help them in their, um, career growth, trying to get to the next position. And I really, really consider it a privilege to even be asked this. Now on LinkedIn, the other day, I did a post that talked about the key things that everyone should do when they come into the industry.

Let me go ahead and just quickly read those. Then let me add some more advice. Number one, show up early to dress like you already got promoted three, and that's actually crucial to the person that wants to be a superintendent.

Three, keep a daily to-do list. That's huge. Get start getting organized right now for stay clean and organized five, write in block letters.

This sounds basic. I remember a day when basics like this weren't treated like, uh, like they don't, like they weren't, like it didn't matter. Right.

Where things like block lettering and typing were, you know, punctuality were actually really important. Here's the thing. Usually, oh, this is going to maybe offend people.

I don't want it to, but this is one of the biggest things that hurt, uh, craft workers from being promoted is that they short change the importance for the small things. They're like, ah, I got everything in my head. Oh, I don't need to keep it to this.

I blah, blah, blah. I'm good enough. No, that's not true.

And when a craft worker is like, I want to come become a superintendent. I want to be a field engineer. I want to be an assistant and they don't know how to type.

They don't know how to write. They don't know how to keep a personal organization system. They don't keep to do list.

Then that's what hurts them more than anything. It's not their intelligence. It's their habits.

Um, you take correction like a pro start asking more questions, read how to win friends and influence. People get a mentor, read a book a week. This is one for craft worker.

Read a book a week. Start right now. 11, get addicted to patterns and processes.

12 learn tool by tool 13. Don't rush for promotions. 14 work harder than everyone else.

And 15 be the honey badger. Then the wolf meaning figure things out. And then once you figure things out, you will be the go-to human that people go to.

All right. So those are some basics, but here's the deal. What you want to do is grab West Crawford's book, construction, surveying, and layout.

It's actually a little bit mistitled, meaning that it, um, it really isn't just for survey. It really is to build construction leaders, read chapters one through eight and you'll get started. Then start to volunteer to help the field engineers, even if it's after hours, then volunteer to do something here, do something there, uh, take one of the field engineers or the assistant supers out to lunch, go grab, this is such good advice, go grab one of the supers and say, Hey, if I buy you lunch, will you give me 30 minutes of your time and start to ask for opportunities? Ask, ask, ask, ask.

This is how dramatic this is. Imagine that you're single and you want a girlfriend. And my advice to you would be ask every single girl you see from here till forever, until you get a girlfriend for their number, you'd be like, Jason, there's zero chance I'm doing that.

That's how dramatic you have to get. That's how, that's how you have to approach this apply to every company. Ask everybody on the project site, do all of the basics, find an in.

And once you're in, you've got it from there. Uh, he actually responded to me. Thanks, Jason.

And just for more insight, I graduated from Penn state with a BA. My union is offering certifications and construction and project management through a partnership with a local university. My question is, is it worth it to get that certification now and transition either this year or next into a superintendent type role or finish my apprenticeship and become a journeyman to thereafter become a superintendent? Um, I'll give you this advice, put everything into the superintendent basket.

Now having the journeyman stuff as a backup, it's not a bad, bad deal. You'll probably end up getting both accidentally start doing the certifications to get to your ultimate goal. That's my advice.

And so this was, uh, a bit of, uh, uh, uh, it's a, it was a comment or question that, that I wanted to answer on the podcast and there I just did. There's more to it, but people don't understand the, the effort that's going to go into getting in. You've got to put in the effort and that's 10 times what we think it is.

And so that's not the criticism in any way, shape or form. That's basically me saying, I care. And that's how you get in.

Okay. Um, let's go ahead and hop over to the podcast at hand. Our end.

So Kate, who is our CEO has been doing a great job lately of attempting to guide us and she's been learning these concepts about standardization and customization. And she said to Kevin and me, are we standard and cheap or custom and expensive? And I, we've been arguing back and forth and Kevin and I are like, we want to be cussed or no, sorry, sorry. We want to be standard and chief as chief as we can be, meaning that people can afford our services.

And she constantly sees us doing different things with different buildings, a hospital here, a bridge over there, a multifamily here, residential. Like we do all these different types of projects in our consulting. And so she's pushing back on us, which is great.

This is what she does best. And saying, Kevin, Jason, I don't think we're as standards as you think we are. And we were arguing about it this morning in a positive Jim Collins kind of a way.

And basically one of the realized, as I was listening to Kevin and Kate kind of argue about this a little bit, I realized that one of the biggest problems in our industry is we think it's more custom than it actually is. And hear me out for just a minute. Are our projects complex? Absolutely.

They are, are do you know, are buildings all different? Of course they are. Are there different things on every project that require different things like a one project you'll need showing on another project you'll need, uh, you know, core forms, you self climbers, possibly a tower crane on this one, a mobile crane on the other one. Absolutely.

This is, this is a common theme. They're always different, but interestingly enough, and I've been doing this a long time, the process is not that different. And actually what keeps us from being successful in, in construction is that we all think our project is unique.

And here's what that does to us. Uh, shout out to Lauren Atwell for originally pointing me to the book, how big things get done. That book is quite remarkable.

What they say is in project planning, everybody thinks they're unique and they come up with a different duration. And then that duration ends up putting them. The project into a downward productivity spiral into a crash landing because they didn't use the reference class.

They think they're unique. Here's another thing that, that hurts us in construction where we think we're unique. We're like, our building is different.

You can't do tack planning. We've got to stop identifying things by material type. And we have to start identifying it as the process or the process of here in Canada.

And we have to understand that the process pretty much is the same every time. And you can tacked through every area, every building type, every program type, because every area has a foundation floor, walls, in wall, overhead, ceilings, fixtures, furniture, right? Everything is, everything is the same. And us thinking that construction is so unique is preventing us from understanding the science properly, understanding production rates, standardizing and stabilizing our operations and our methods of working.

It's keeping us from using templates by program type. It's keeping us every, we treat every situation like it's unique and it's hurting our industry. And when you think about it, it, the same thing happened.

Let me give you a third analogy or an example is a software. We think that everything is custom right now. We know what it takes to research drawings, work package, create a tack plan, handle one-offs and deviations, all the science, all the formulas, everything that we need to know.

And people don't do it because they think everything is driven off of a pull plan and everything is unique. No, it's not. One of these days, I, if nobody else beats me to it, will train AI how to pull plan better than a group of trade partners.

It is coming and we've got to stop thinking, thinking that we're unique, unique thinking that every project is different and unique. We'll turn it to a situation where we never improve because we're always reinventing the wheel. But when you start to think, wow, this is all pretty much the same stuff, the same process, then you will learn the process.

You will get great at it and you will be able to scale it and we will make progress. I hope I've been clear enough on that because I strongly believe in this. We are not in construction as unique as we think we are, even when buildings are different.

We must learn that pretty much every build follows the same process. We need to be a little bit more like Hensel Phelps in that regard, because that's going to allow us to create standards, stabilize, and move to our next level. I hope everybody's enjoyed this podcast.

On we go. Please join us next time in elevating the entire construction experience for workers, leaders, and companies coast to coast. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to share with your construction colleagues and help us spread the word by rating, subscribing, and leaving a review on your preferred podcast listening platform.

We really appreciate it. We'll catch you next time on the Elevate Construction Podcast.