Speaker 0 | 00:08.918
Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Mike Infinger, Director of Information Technology at Clancy & Thays Construction Company. Hey, how’s it going today, Michael? Mike, you go by Mike, right? You go by Michael, you go by Mike, right? So I wanted to just kind of start off. Usually when we start these podcasts, I ask people about the names of the companies and stuff like that. And I want to point this out because I’ve already tripped over this, even saying this, right? It’s Clancy and Thays. Clancy and Thays. Am I getting it wrong every single time I say it? Why won’t you say it so that we get it right?
Speaker 1 | 00:52.292
Clancy and Thays Construction Company.
Speaker 0 | 00:54.653
Thays. Yeah, it’s,
Speaker 1 | 00:58.055
yep. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how you say it. Most people hear it a different way.
Speaker 0 | 01:05.398
It’s just one of those words, right? So the amount of talking I do, I generally, you know, try to get these things right. But most of the time I trip over them. It’s time for our icebreaker segment that we have called Random Access Memories. I ask a question and then you respond with the answer that comes to your head first. So your first question, Mike, is if you had the chance. to be any type, any computer part for a day, what would you be?
Speaker 1 | 01:33.777
Any computer part.
Speaker 0 | 01:35.217
Yeah, you get to be any computer part. And it could be a peripheral, like, you know, like, go crazy with it. Like, if you want to be, like, you know, connected via USB, go ahead. Like, you know, figure it out. It’s interesting.
Speaker 1 | 01:47.541
Yeah, that is. Well, there’s so many different options.
Speaker 0 | 01:51.382
Well, there’s a lot. I mean, listen, there’s so many different. You could be an adapter. Raptor? I mean, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 01:56.344
I don’t know. Yeah, no, I’m thinking just the main bus in general.
Speaker 0 | 02:01.147
Oh, you’re going to be directing traffic. That’s what you’re going to do. You’d be out there directing traffic. Oh, that’s an interesting one. We might have to come back to see why that was the answer. I’m going to come back to that one and we’re going to see why, in fact, you want to be a traffic director. All right. What I.T. position have you secretly. been jealous of security security yeah good uh good one i like it yeah uh why it’s always something yeah why is that why is it what’s the answer to security why do you think uh i mean nowadays more than ever but you
Speaker 1 | 02:41.711
know over my whole career they’re always busy doing something it’s just it’s just more to the more to the forefront of the discussion now over the last 10 to 15 years right And especially within the last 10 years. And there is always room for someone who is an expert in security to give an opinion, right? Or a recommendation on something. But oftentimes, they know more about what’s going on in the room than the people they’re talking to. And, you know, I sort of like that feeling. Right? But it’s knowing when to open your mouth and knowing when to keep it shut, too.
Speaker 0 | 03:20.867
Yeah. I like it. I like it. Oh, we’ve already started off in such a good foot here. We’ve got so many, so many questions to ask later on. Here’s your last icebreaker segment, and then we’ll kind of move into the main one. But let’s talk about what does unplugging look like for you? Because, and I’m going to just kind of set this up a little bit, right? You know, people will refer to the term, well, listen, I’m taking a vacation. I’m going to go unplug, right? So. What does unplugging look like specifically for you?
Speaker 1 | 03:56.249
Well, yeah, it is often vacation. We’ve been taking a lot of vacations lately. The best that I can get away with, that I feel comfortable with, is not paying attention to everything work-wise on my phone. I don’t know that I could do without my phone just for general information. And I try to stay off of social media as much as possible while on vacation. It’s very difficult.
Speaker 0 | 04:25.554
I bet it is. And it’s interesting that you say that. And I’m going to dive into this a little bit. Most IT individuals that I know, even when they go on vacation, are still answering messages in whatever chat they’re using. They’re still sending emails. They’re still responding to requests, especially with the technology that we have now that makes it so accessible to just do everything from your phone sometimes. You know, I see this all the time. No matter if the boss or the executives say, hey, no, no, take some time off. They still don’t. There is a passion or something or an insanity. Sometimes those are two things that are easily combined that comes with IT. Right. I mean, am I alone in thinking this or have you seen this?
Speaker 1 | 05:33.885
I think one of the bigger problems is in IT is that everybody feels like at least when they’re in IT that they’re the center of the room and that if they don’t answer, then something’s going to go wrong. Right. If they’re not responding as quickly as possible, which is a good attitude to have, then you’re going to, you know. you’re letting down your customer essentially um it’s it’s been something that i’ve been trying to get away from lately uh i’ve got a really good employee that works for me um does a lot of work and we split duty when we go out of town right he goes on vacation i cover for him and he i leave him alone i don’t want him doing anything exactly it’s better for him to have a relaxing vacation sometimes than it is for me um but you know he knows he knows the same thing. I try to stay out of it because if I’m a thousand miles away and I’m putting my hands into something that he’s already working on, I’m more than likely messing it up. Now, my boss emails me, I’m answering that. The president of the company who’s his boss emails him, I’m answering that. There’s no way of getting around that. But I’ve tried, my wife will tell you different. I’ve tried to balance my way away from it when we go on vacation. But it is hard. It’s really hard.
Speaker 0 | 07:02.320
Yeah, no, I, you know, I, I, I see this and I see this everywhere. And it’s interesting too, that you said, you know, you almost feel compelled to answer the question as quickly as possible. So, you know, you’re, you’re, there’s this, nobody else knows the answer. I have to answer this. Otherwise. stuff will stuff that stuff that will happen will be very bad right that’s the so so i guess the that compulsion that does that come from a lack of understanding does that compulsion come from uh no i know how to fix it uh and i and i gotta jump in quicker so that you understand it what help me understand where you think that that compulsion to answer that question comes from
Speaker 1 | 07:53.571
Yeah, so I’ve gotten a lot wiser in that in the last several years where I know, like I said earlier, when to keep my mouth shut. Because in general, the gentleman that I hired, he is much quicker than I am at responding. So it’s almost annoying because I thought I was doing a good job. And now he’s beating me to the punch, which is great. But he has the same problem. right he wants to provide that genuine here’s something to try i will get back to you in a moment right i’m working 10 other things um and you know where it came from for me is i mean i’ve always been the person to help somebody out i’ll pull over on the side of the road change a tire i will stop and get out of my car and tell you your tire is going flat you know um i’ve always wanted to be helpful to give assistance needed or not um but you know or opinion frankly um and it’s just always been that way i mean i started working in help desk in a computer store when i was 17 and didn’t
Speaker 0 | 09:07.695
stop from there i built the network at my high school um so it’s amazing back then though right i mean you know you gotta you think i mean uh um you have about the same amount of you IT experience that I do. And when I know when I was back in my school, right, they didn’t really have IT departments. The IT department was find a guy that knows, you know, and to be inclusive, to find a person that knows IT and use them, you know, and, you know, you got some perks along with it, you know, usually. if you were lucky and negotiated well. But it’s interesting that you say that because that’s the same experience that I had.
Speaker 1 | 09:55.461
Yeah, I think a lot of people who didn’t actually switch careers into some really specific niche. And even those folks, they come from some origin like that within IT or it was just like, you know what? It’s either that or it’s just one day, man, I’d really like to work on computers or I’d really like to provide this service to a lot of people because it’s a great job. And it was back then that one guy at our school and I went to private school. He was the Bible teacher. Oh, wow. So he just knew more than everybody else in the building. And I helped him set everything up. And then I went to work for a company later and we replaced the entire network in the whole school about two years after I graduated. So, wow. Yeah, it was great.
Speaker 0 | 10:43.260
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Speaker 1 | 11:56.639
Yeah, I think I may be the first guy to have at least one five-year plan actually work. That started when I was 14. Daryl had joked about, I said, you know, when I was talking to him, I was like, help me out. You know, what are you guys going to talk about? What do you normally ask? And he said, you know, this, that, the other. What is your first computer? And I said, well, back in my day, we added with sticks and dirt. that’s how we got it done but my very first computer was a trs-80 and that’s an ancient piece of junk an ancient did it have like a turbo button it had um it had a tape deck a tape oh my that’s how you saved programs and every time i wanted to do something on it i had to sit down in the living room hook it up to the tv and code every program like if i want to play a game i had to write it
Speaker 0 | 12:53.623
At least it was a step above, you know, card punches, right? I mean, that’s…
Speaker 1 | 13:00.407
That’s far away.
Speaker 0 | 13:03.229
That’s a lot of… I refer to the card punching times as, you know, the arts and crafts of IT. It’s a great story of my dad, you know, having stacks and stacks of these card punches to… program out stuff and then them tripping and falling over the floor and then having to try and make sure he puts it back together again in the right order i mean that’s a you know it shows my worst nightmare but it shows the evolution of it it’s just a continual evolution of new thing after new thing and it’s getting it seems to be getting quicker uh you know more and more uh um changes uh to keep up with um construction right that’s what you that’s what you’re in right now that’s your industry you’re in construction yeah we’re a general contractor um commercial construction so um are we talking uh commercial buildings and or or
Speaker 1 | 14:08.621
or what um i i describe it jokingly as we build everything but strip malls and uh like chick-fil-a so um you know small buildings but We do do a lot of everything. Some of our biggest projects are… We’ve got one going now that’s like $240 million. It’ll take probably three or four years for that to be completed, right in Raleigh, actually. We built the building for a client that we now built out our own office in. So we were literally the first… the first tenant, which is great because that creates a really strong relationship. The vast majority of it though is mixed use nowadays or we’re building schools for particular counties, one or the other. And we do that anywhere all over the country. We have a great relationship with a couple of large warehouse organizations, retail spaces that need humongous, I mean, like 2 million square feet warehouses. And they build these all over the place.
Speaker 0 | 15:20.863
I can’t even, I’m trying to conceptualize what 2 million square feet is. Can you provide an example of?
Speaker 1 | 15:28.752
how big that is in uh to my small brain about you know some analogy no um because it’s hard for me to even understand it i know what i know what roughly a million square feet looks like when i see the buildings um most most uh most commercial spaces that are leased in um a a fairly decent sized building or a floor you know where a client will come in and lease out a whole floor for their company our floor for example i believe is like 10 000 square feet or something like that there’s gotcha people you know wow yeah that’s yeah it’s it’s uh a million square feet is is an enormous piece of property um gosh i really i really wish i could uh have something to equate it to i i just can’t i mean it’s probably off guard a little bit but
Speaker 0 | 16:25.676
well not i mean because it can go vertical too right so that’s what’s really like really kind of messing with my head because it’s like you know how how like wide is it lengthwise and width and then how what’s the height that’s just got to be uh that’s gotta be huge i mean i i did i mean it’s it’s amazing that i can’t conceptualize it in my head um you know thinking about that but i think it’s because
Speaker 1 | 16:53.224
when you look at the dimensions up and down side to side that just makes uh it makes it difficult to um to really feel it well i mean you look at a football field how much is a football we’re gonna do some math on this podcast right now yes we are we’re gonna learn a football a football field is 50 57 600 square feet it’s 57 okay all right so wow
Speaker 0 | 17:20.622
that is okay That’s pretty huge. Yeah. We stack football fields and still. Wow. Okay. That’s a lot. That’s a lot. That is a lot.
Speaker 1 | 17:32.788
Yeah. So that’s what? 20, 20 foot, roughly 20, 19 to 20 football fields for a million square feet. Wow.
Speaker 0 | 17:41.556
That’s, I mean,
Speaker 1 | 17:43.698
but you know, these warehouses are flat, right? I mean, the most of the stuff that we’re the particular client is, uh, Most of it’s all goods that are in bins. They have some robots that do a lot of things too, but mostly it’s people running around on forklifts and various different things. Right. Gotcha. I don’t even think like a, like a Lowe’s, like a Lowe’s home improvement, 350,000 square feet, 400,000 square feet.
Speaker 0 | 18:11.997
It’s amazing that that’s even that’s, that seems small now. So, oh man.
Speaker 1 | 18:19.403
Well, I mean, this, You know, it goes off into commercial space, too. It’s like you talked about, you know, you look at some of these listings and stuff that we have because we do a lot of where it’s mixed use. Right. So it’s apartment buildings or condos and apartments on top of commercial space because it’s the big seller now. Like,
Speaker 0 | 18:36.486
right.
Speaker 1 | 18:36.786
It’s below the below the people that are going to do business at these places.
Speaker 0 | 18:41.471
It’s a true hyper converged infrastructure there.
Speaker 1 | 18:44.674
Yeah. And you’re alive.
Speaker 0 | 18:45.915
Well.
Speaker 1 | 18:46.828
Yeah. Yeah. The value add there is like all of that. It becomes sort of a destination, not just for the people that live there, but for the local community. And, you know, so you get more foot traffic, et cetera. Yep. And, you know, when they say there’s 60,000 square feet of, you know, commercial space and there’s 200,000 square feet of residential, there’s five floors above that commercial space.
Speaker 0 | 19:09.877
Wow.
Speaker 1 | 19:10.257
Wow. So it adds up quick. That. and we build a lot of we got we got some great clients that uh their development group and their backing um they’re they’ve got some wonderful vision and they they have us build some beautiful property and these architects and these engineers are are magnificent what they do so
Speaker 0 | 19:35.837
let me let me tie this to i.t a little bit because i um uh why i love construction so much is that i end up using construction analogies when referring to projects, especially projects where things are still running in IT and you have to build around them. I use analogies all the time, construction analogies, to try and help. people understand uh you know how you build something that’s already there or you know how do you how do you end up um you know upgrading it and uh and or uh you know has the time to just demolish the thing down to its core and then and you know start over again um there’s actually a big tie-in on in my belief between construction uh and it in the way that you know, certain projects are handled. What’s your thought?
Speaker 1 | 20:34.394
Yeah, I could definitely agree with that. Yeah, I’ve been in AEC for probably 20 years, one way or another, right? One of the jobs that I worked at was a modular pharmaceutical company. So they basically built buildings that manufactured drugs for Pfizer, Eli Lilly, several other companies. It’s a nice… And what made it modular is that this happened in Charleston, South Carolina, and these things would get shipped all over the world. We had a building that was big enough that had three bays that were 100 by 330 feet. And this building was like three of those next to each other. And it’s 250, 270 feet on the inside. And each bay… I’m getting there with this. Each bay had two 40-ton cranes in it. And what we would do at that facility is they would assemble each piece of the building like a Lego. And inside the building itself, they built another building. Literally built the factory inside the building.
Speaker 0 | 21:46.557
Oh, my God.
Speaker 1 | 21:47.717
One end to the other. And, I mean, it was a magnificent process. It’s very dangerous because you’re talking about stuff that, you know, you’re talking about a nine-story. concrete wrapped steel I being built staircase that is fully built that has to be stood up, put into place. So the rest of the building can be built around it.
Speaker 0 | 22:10.005
Oh my God.
Speaker 1 | 22:10.825
You’re talking about a very, very, very dangerous thing. Um, I mean, some of those things would be weighing 120, 140 tons.
Speaker 0 | 22:20.770
Yeah. Yeah. Um, so these, these, not a Lego, not a Lego that you would like to fall. No, no.
Speaker 1 | 22:25.332
No, and to get to the end of this, the amazing process is that prior to one customer asking us to do this, and then they start doing it for every customer. Before that and after that, the tolerances on the pipes for the liquids, the chemicals, the gases, and all of the things that it takes to make the building work was one one-thousandth of an inch. So by the time it left our building and went to Puerto Rico or wherever it went, Brazil, it doesn’t matter. When it got to that end. All they really had to do was stick that steel pin through the two flanges when they met, and they would be perfect almost every time. Because you have to have that close of a tolerance. So for me, understanding a lot of that back then, and how they actually did the design, and how they did the BIM and the CAD work, and relating that towards IT is, right, there’s no way to have one ten thousandths of an inch of tolerance in IT. That’s such a small margin of error. Like I’m good with one in a hundred, you know, but it’s getting, getting these projects to fall in line and learning from those experiences in the past have really, really helped me sit down and be able to talk about a topic, visualize what it’s going to look like in the very end, and then design every step with the greatest of consideration that I could possibly give them in the end. Um, working with, you know, like I mentioned earlier, CISO, working with a CISO on security, making sure that everything’s there and working with my, my lead, uh, network engineer, working with my lead senior, uh, senior, uh, server administrator, right? It’s a lot of things that have to be done and put into place, uh, especially probably over the last two or three years, we’ve done a lot of upgrades on things, um, to, to make sure that at the end of the day, either one things, one of two things is going to happen. One, it’s going to go right. It’s going to be perfect.
Speaker 0 | 24:21.615
Two.
Speaker 1 | 24:22.440
there’s a red line that leads you back up to the first one because you gotta you gotta fall back redesign the whole thing um i don’t like that second one that much right so what happened recently to me oh no well so okay but
Speaker 0 | 24:38.191
let’s let’s talk about how we prevent that right because that probably is this is a gem of a discussion uh because it is such a um this is such a uh uh a problem sometimes with it because lots of times we’re rushed. Lots of times we’re pushed into deadlines and stuff like that. And you don’t get the chance. to go well no i want to get everything right you know and you know down to what you mentioned uh which was uh less you know what was it less than a it’s one ten thousandths of an inch one ten thousandths of an inch how do we design uh projects
Speaker 1 | 25:22.800
That’s like human hair kind of thing. I know. It’s so small. It’s ridiculous.
Speaker 0 | 25:26.741
How do we design projects to be as close as 100% as a molecule? Walk us through that design process. How do they do it? And how can we apply that to IT?
Speaker 1 | 25:41.287
Wow, that was 20-something years ago. Commercial construction nowadays, it doesn’t fit. You need a bigger hammer. But, you know, I can say that in my current role, one of the things that I’ve observed with, especially with our visual design and our BIM coordination team, is they put a massive amount of work, even before we win the bid, into coordinating not only between the architect and the engineer, but with the subcontractors, right? They want to make sure that the subcontractors that we work with, because we have new ones that we’ve worked with, they’ve never worked with, we have ones that we’ve worked with all the time. It’s the same thing in IT, right?
Speaker 0 | 26:26.507
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 26:26.627
that’s right. They want to make sure that the bid that those teams of people are putting in on that project are as 100% or close within a margin of error as possible to, you’re saying you can do it for X number of dollars. We’re not missing a beat here because… you’re not getting any more unless they change something yeah that’s unless there’s a change order it ain’t happening yeah so you know and then and then once the building once even before the foundation is poured these visual design coordinators are going in and they’re looking at everything they’re looking at your hvac your duct works uh your your um all your mep so all your plumbing your electrical mechanical hvac they’re looking at all of these things even on our building on our own fit up, right? The architect designed this beautiful space. I could tell you the number of things that they actually had to move around where they had to have me in the discussion because it was relating to what was going on in IT. Because we had to redesign how we ran, not only electrical, but low voltage. So, it comes down to doing a massive amount of due diligence at the very beginning. And for a lot of people, like what we talked about earlier, always having the answers, right? You have to know when you don’t. And you have to find people that do. I don’t want to walk in front of the vice president and the president of my organization and suggest something to them that either A, I am not confident in, or B, I don’t have a fallback.
Speaker 0 | 28:10.327
And this is why. You should wait to answer questions. Right. Right. I mean, we come back. Yes,
Speaker 1 | 28:17.098
it is.
Speaker 0 | 28:17.818
Back to that. That reasoning is you ask me a question. I will get you that answer, but you’re going to wait until I know it.
Speaker 1 | 28:28.023
Yeah. Two things I would say sort of get me on that one. One, I want to make sure I’m answering like if I’m sitting in front of the president. Go ahead. conversation a couple of weeks ago about something and there was half a dozen people in there. We’re talking about a piece of technology that was a touchscreen board and they were asking all of these questions. And his bottom line question was, can this thing be connected to the internet? Instead of just saying yes, I started thinking of all the ways that I could explain what yes meant. That’s just me trying to be nice, right? Instead of just saying yes. I started talking about, and in the most simplistic way as I possibly could explain it. I didn’t know he was intelligent enough to understand it, but that was it. It’s like, just say yes. Just stop. Stop talking and just say the word yes, or I’m going to find the answer.
Speaker 0 | 29:23.995
Well, and that stems from the, and actually it’s funny because I’ve seen this happen with a lot of IT individuals, including myself, over the years. And it comes from knowing all the things that can go wrong. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 29:41.264
That’s 100% where it comes from.
Speaker 0 | 29:43.565
Right? I mean, so you’re like, you know that if you say yes in that situation. That Murphy’s law will make the thing not connect to the Internet through some weird problem that it has that, you know, it will give you this adapter that, you know, you can only you it requires that you can only get in a far and distant land. You know, after you answer three questions from, you know, a troll, I don’t know. This is this is what happens in I.T. all the time. You want a simple answer to something and you answer that question knowing. that it’s probably going to come back to haunt you later.
Speaker 1 | 30:22.154
Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a good answer for what happens when it comes the other way, right? What happens when you get asked to provide a solution? And then at the last minute, how do you deal with the people that own the solution that you’re trying to provide them changing it,
Speaker 0 | 30:43.880
right?
Speaker 1 | 30:45.721
So they’ve asked you to put… to put pie in the sky, right? They want the pie in the sky and they want this and they want that. And you’ve designed it out and you’ve worked with your subcontractor and you got a quote and you’re ready to go and you got like your AB quote. It’s like, all right, here’s what you want, but here’s a little bit better of a product that’ll do this, wipe that out. And they go, that’s great. You know what else would be good? We found this one thing that we want to add. Well, wait, no, no, no. You can’t add that. Good. But I got to go back and talk to that other guy because what you just said is probably going to cost another couple thousand dollars. Are you okay with all this? You just changed the whole scope. I mean, that’s my entire career, right?
Speaker 0 | 31:30.850
Scope change is so real. And it’s easy, incredibly easy to change scope if you’re not paying attention to. Or if you’re just, oh, you know. Well, yeah, you know, something comes in. Hey, I can’t do it this way. I need to do it a little bit differently to put it in. OK, that’s fine. Go ahead and do that. Scope has now changed. And now that one decision to just do it a little bit differently has now changed, you know, 10 different things down the down the line. You know, that one little small decision just to work around something that didn’t work now has caused a butterfly effect down the line and will haunt you. I think for the rest of the project,
Speaker 1 | 32:16.300
I think I think where you and I come from in our careers that I think you probably also agree with me on this is it is 100 percent our jobs to understand even when we’re doing our own projects. Right. Because you and I both came from a world where we did all the projects. I know I did a lot of them, but it’s when you’re in the middle of your own project. And you understand that you have to change your own scope. Being able to eat a little humble pie is probably the hardest lesson to learn in that respect. Because now you’ve got nobody to be upset with other than yourself. And you realize at the very beginning of that project that this might come up. And you may or may not have prepared for it. Or you’re sitting there another eight hours that night. Do you know what I mean? Yep.
Speaker 0 | 33:09.053
Yeah, you’re right. And, you know, and it can be even, it could be, and I see this all the time where, you know, you go in and you create this great project and then you go and talk to, you know, the people that are in charge of paying for the project. Right. And they might be like, well, that’s great, but I actually want it to be cheaper. Right. And then you’re like, okay, well, let me make it cheaper. And. that’s where scope change will murder you. Right. Because to make it cheaper, you actually have to go back to the, uh, back to the game, you know, the original game plan and start all over, but you can’t change it in the middle and make it cheaper. It just doesn’t work like that.
Speaker 1 | 33:57.030
Yeah. Cheaper and more expensive do not equate often to the right or the wrong thing to do. And I think, as IT professionals and leaders, we often have our own opinions of what the right and the wrong thing is, right? We know what the right result is because somebody has already told us what they want. But we feel like there’s almost sometimes there’s always a better way to get there or a better end result, right? Can we give you more than what you asked for for the same amount of money, right? But when it comes to cheaper, I can’t really guarantee that you’re going to get exactly what you asked for now. it might be pink instead of blue but you know um those are those are difficult discussions always the best ones though because you have to inform people of what’s going on
Speaker 0 | 34:50.606
I, you know, I, I bought a shelf from Amazon and it was a cheap bookshelf. I got some books back and I, and I was like, oh, great. I got to put all these books back. And this, this shelf was supposed to be, you know, five levels high, very cheap, $27. Like I got this thing and it was just because I just wanted to get my books on it. And I just didn’t want to deal with it. And, um, and when I got it. uh nothing fit uh um there was bent uh um you know plastic uh and and and stuff and and so i i tried to put this thing together i ended up cutting my hand uh during this process um more things broke i can’t the sides to it aren’t on so you can’t even stack the books they’ll just fall off the side um i get the end result was that it was uh it was three tiers high not five you I have some of my books on it, not all of them, and they’re not stacked the right way. And I looked at this, but I stared at it and I said, I don’t know what I thought I was going to get for $27, but it’s my fault. And I just thought for a second, this is like what happens in IT all the time, right? I found this cheaper thing. It should work. It’s not pretty, but it’s just good. And it should hold books. Nope. Nope, it won’t hold the books the way it will. And this is what happens in IT, and it relates exactly to what we’re talking about. A $27 bookshelf on Amazon. Just spend the money and get the better bookshelf. I should have done that from the start. Now I’m down $27 and two levels of books.
Speaker 1 | 36:37.538
And you know what the worst part is, is that labor isn’t getting any cheaper.
Speaker 0 | 36:43.060
No,
Speaker 1 | 36:43.880
no. And what we do, and it’s… you know i remember asking for similar things three or four years ago right and like oh okay yeah that’s a lot of money but grand scheme of things what we do for business you know where where the budget is and all of that right okay that’s affordable that’s a reasonable amount of money now you look at it and you’re like oh um can you sharpen your pencil on that at all well that includes engineering that includes travel time and labor and this that Well, why is it six times as much as what the product costs?
Speaker 0 | 37:20.091
But that’s the reality. And you’re right about that. It’s interesting because you are seeing some of the products have come down in price as they’ve gotten better and more affordable. But the labor to install things has just gone through the roof. And you can’t. It is what it is. And and being the fact that we’re in a period of high inflation, you know, we’re seeing this throughout every industry. And so it’s just compounding. And I would imagine even in the construction world, too, not just from IT perspective, but from a supply standpoint and labor. I’m sure that’s going through the roof.
Speaker 1 | 38:07.147
Yeah. You know, we talk about it. So from the. the digital side of things like my responsibilities right a lot of our folks in the field use ipads and one of the things that has come down the pipe is that autodesk is a product uh they have uh acc autodesk cloud connect i feel like i’m saying it wrong is uh autodesk build is what a lot of people know it as um and that’s uh that’s a piece that’s a piece of uh application that on a normal ipad like an ipad air you can use it and function in it but if you get into wanting to look at like the 3d model and the design and all of that. All of that is functional on a normal iPad, but you lose a lot of the quality. And sometimes it even actually will cause some problems on the app. Where we’re finding ourselves now is I’m having people more often than not request larger screen iPads that have the pro iPads that have the higher end processors in them because they’re really wanting the performance. And they’re like, Mike, I literally can’t do my job. I need to have this device. um what can we do and you know it’s a simple conversation but it’s like now i’m finding myself with a lot of ipad airs sitting in my office that i’m waiting on new people to start so that i can sort of pawn them off on them you know i know eventually i’ll see them back but um you know it it’s it’s not an overwhelming stack but that that is the way our technology is changing and um Frankly, I’m quite proud of some of our guys in the field. And we’ve got a lot of young guys. Construction is still booming from an opportunity perspective. But a lot of our older employees, I mean, we’ve probably 20 to 30 percent of our employee employment force has been with us more than 20 years. I’ve been I’ve been there 10.
Speaker 0 | 40:02.987
Yeah, that’s and that and that’s forever in an IT job. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 40:07.350
it really is. My our last CEO, our last CFO, sorry, CFO retired after 55 years. Um, the current CFO has been there since, since she was 18. I won’t tell you how long that is.
Speaker 0 | 40:27.199
That’s probably a good idea.
Speaker 1 | 40:29.040
Yeah. Um, she, she’s really, really good at her job though. It keeps me on my toes quite well. Um, but you know, she’s got somebody coming behind her too. So when she retires, you know, I have no doubt that the young lady behind her will be there for 20 or 30 more years too. So, um. is definitely within the possibility. We have a lot of people over 30. It’s amazing.
Speaker 0 | 40:53.720
Wow. That’s, I mean, that is amazing.
Speaker 1 | 40:56.282
Yeah. And I mean, I’ve got everybody from older super experienced superintendents to young superintendents to people in accounting coming to me asking me for different types of devices so that they feel like they can actually contribute and be more efficient at doing their job. So I’ve got to, you know, that’s the… That’s just the daunting part of our job, right? You got to listen to what everybody needs. You don’t go too wild with it. Well,
Speaker 0 | 41:22.919
my first director of IT that I reported to, he was at that position for what I believe is 30 something years. And, you know, the amount of knowledge that was imparted to me from his, you know, from his experience and and stuff like that is is i’m still using it today i mean the way he he broke down issues and problems and got to the root of uh situations and troubleshoot all of that stuff is still you know you know was passed on so i can only imagine uh having multitudes of that in a in an organization and then installing and instilling that and passing it on what a what a great way to keep those processes moving and also adapt them to the new incoming group?
Speaker 1 | 42:19.319
Oh, yeah. We have in our operations team, they have a huge intern program. And we bring those interns in not only in just operations from the field perspective and superintendents and project management. We have interns for marketing and do all kinds of things. And that program is enormous. i never thought that we would hire that many interns that we did this past summer they all wanted ipads um so you know that’s a problem but um you know it is it is growing i expect that much if not uh if not maybe you know 25 more next summer um and many of those people from the first internship program from two years ago have now are now working for us why do you think um there’s there’s such a um longevity um you know frankly it’s it’s the people it’s the employees it’s uh it’s the real family atmosphere that that the organization has um everybody feels comfortable right um they put a lot of effort into hiring the right people um and they put a lot of effort into making sure that they still want to keep working for us and with us and stay um We’ve hired on a person that’s sort of in charge of making everyone happy. She loves her job, by the way.
Speaker 0 | 43:52.075
She does.
Speaker 1 | 43:53.976
She does. You know, one of the best things that she and I and the guy that works for me sat down and did whenever she started, and this came from the president, was let’s improve the new hire process. Because it was a nightmare for IT and human resources. But what was even worse was we got people that were bringing on as interns that should be going through a proper new hire process. And something that’s structured, something that’s repeatable, something that somebody at each office can remember how to do. And it’s not just about handing them an iPad or a laptop and telling them, you know, good luck, you know, here’s your keys. And telling them to walk out the door. It was about… improving that first day experience so that after being engulfed with what it means to work at Clancy and Thays for eight hours one day, and perhaps the next, depending upon what they were doing, they’re going back to the people. that they’re friends with, that they go to school with, that they’re neighbors or their parents, and they’re telling me, you know what, I’ve never gone anywhere and had an experience like that. And that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Mom, dad, have you ever had anything happen to you like that? Or aged or experienced employees, they’re calling the people that they used to work with and they’re like, hey, you know how you guys told me not to come over here? You know,
Speaker 0 | 45:23.616
it’s, it’s, yeah, I’ve,
Speaker 1 | 45:25.076
I’ve not, I’ve worked with a lot of smaller family owned businesses and I really enjoy that experience. Um, this company has been really, really good to me, um, from all of my various personal things, uh, over the years. Um, I’ve seen them go hand over fist more for other people that have worked for us. Um, One of the stories I remember when we started was because there was such a fluctuation in construction 10 years ago or before that is they would lay people off, but they would still keep paying them. Wow. Because they just didn’t have work for them. They would say, look, we can’t give you anything to do right now, but what we’re going to do is give you something to do in three months, but I need you to go home.
Speaker 0 | 46:16.281
You said it’s like a temporary furlough almost.
Speaker 1 | 46:19.263
Yeah. Yeah. And it basically was that happened for that happened for a lot of employees. You know, not hundreds. Yeah. It was the ones where it’s like, no, I might not have work for you, but somebody else might. And I don’t want you to go work. Stay,
Speaker 0 | 46:36.688
stay. That’s I mean, what a smart move, really, honestly, to keep the keep the talent going and and be able to keep it there. I. It’s really is amazing to see and to hear that there are companies that still exist like this. I’m, you know, the company I work for is I absolutely love. Right. You know, so I work incredibly hard, but I love every minute of it. And and that’s the you know, and that’s what you want in a job is, you know, I don’t mind working hard. I don’t mind throwing in extra hours and stuff like that. Um, but I, I love the people that I work with and I love, uh, uh, who I work for and I love what we do and I believe in it. And I think that’s similar to kind of your, uh, your, your thought, right?
Speaker 1 | 47:33.040
Yeah. Yeah. If, if I went and doing this, I’d be digging ditches with backhoes.
Speaker 0 | 47:39.604
Well,
Speaker 1 | 47:39.864
let’s be on the other side of the table.
Speaker 0 | 47:41.785
Yeah. You’re sitting at a spot. um let’s talk about uh the it crystal ball or the future future of it um and you know we’ve talked about so many different things here um for me um we’ve talked about um uh um a whole range of issues and things but i want one of the things that kind of stood out for me right as you were talking about projects And you were talking about, you know, how projects have basically changed and evolved over time, not only in IT, but in other industries as well. It seems to be like, hey, you know, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just kind of move it, move it forward. Is that a trend that you think will continue or or is it a, you know, as we kind of look into the future here, right? Maybe you can expound in that arena and think about where are projects going to go? When you talk about costs and labor costs being so high, even higher than sometimes the product itself, right? And you start thinking about this future of where we’re going. Where do you think that that’s headed?
Speaker 1 | 49:11.439
So let me see if I can. do a good job of explaining how I think about this because I always look at our estimators as if it wasn’t for good estimators in construction, none of these companies would be in business. Because if they weren’t excellent every day at calculating how much it costs to put a building, to get a building to come out of the ground and figuring out that… small percentage at the end of that, that’s how much money we make, then we’d be breaking even at best, right? I don’t think that’s what Mr. Thays or Mr. Clancy had envisioned whenever they started this company 75 plus years ago. For the estimating team to do as good a job as they do. And now I’ve seen them so heavily invested in the more visual design coordination side of it, which is what I saw from operations was doing for a while. Right. and my boss is the VP of technology, that’s his whole responsibility is to make sure that Visual Design and BIM are doing what they’re doing and doing it the best they can. And he has grown that department massively since I started with the organization. But to go beyond estimating, you get into the field and we’re so heavily invested in virtualization of the of the build and of the design at the field level in the hands of the gentleman who is responsible for telling the subcontractor exactly what to do or documenting it when it goes wrong right um what’s missing what’s not there you know okay you did that that room’s great let’s move on uh i am over vastly simplifying this but um you know and and then when i mentioned earlier about the visual design coordination team inside of um inside of the BIM group and working directly with operations, they have coordination meetings on some of these projects on a weekly basis. Because it’s important to have these meetings with these subcontractors and these project managers within these subcontractors to make sure that they’re all aware of the situations that are coming from one floor to the next or one room to the next or whatever’s going on. Because, I mean, if you just think about what comes out of an electrical room, right? everything’s in conduit. That all has to go somewhere. Someone had to design that. And someone had to make sure that it got from A to B. And that’s just the piping. That’s not even counting the electrical that has to go on the inside. And then you got to have a guy who can actually read drawings and understand it digitally or not, and put perfect bins on conduit and put all these things in place. So getting back around to it, all of that really comes down to efficiency. productivity uh no loss of time due to errors or mistakes um we’re we’re looking at we’re looking at using robots and there’s a lot of construction companies out there that are doing this now uh looking to use some robots to spray down lines for um the contractors to come back in and know exactly where the walls are supposed to go right they still got to read the drawing and they still got to cut the wood yeah but it gives you that visual uh yeah oh wait a second that’s not going to work because of this yeah yeah or we’re off or where a floor box needs to be or a hole needs to be cut in concrete or uh where a ceiling fan supposed to go right um and there’s a lot of great products out there that do this line drawing now um and we’ve been we’ve actually been working with a lot of colleges on and universities on developing those programs for these bigger companies too um and you you know some of the things they’re also talking about is those those robots right everybody knows what spot looks like in the construction industry the yellow dog from boston dynamics running around taking pictures right but even it’s even better than that because this dog can run autonomously to some extent um and run with the laser system a lidar system on its back and take visual representation of an entire room and go through and go through and go through and go through right on the floor and then and then do it again tomorrow same floor. So, you know, one of the things that I always like to tell people too, is when you talk about efficiency and you talk about all these different things and all these tools that we go back to is one of the projects they were building right next to the building that we work in now was one of ours. And one of the assistant superintendents was going around room to room. And almost every room in this apartment complex had the very same closet design, roughly. But it’s required, I believe by code, that you have a sprinkler in each closet. And he’s going room to room and he gets to this next apartment and he walks in there and he’s like, hey, there’s no sprinkler head. What’s the deal? And so he calls the superintendent. Superintendent comes up, pulls up his iPad, looks at a 360 degree picture that was taken a month ago when the plumber was in there. and says yeah there’s actually a pipe in the ceiling right there when they cut the hole out to look to find the pipe where it should have been it was exactly where it was supposed to be there’s no end on it right So, if they started testing plumbing, the amount of time that it would have taken to get to the point where they figured out exactly where the water was coming from, unless by chance somebody was in that room or the room. Correct. Right? That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of damage. That’s a lot of setback. Wow. I mean, immediately collecting water off the floor is not the most enormous problem in the world. We’ll build buildings all day long. It rains, right? But. Having damage occur and then continue to occur without being accounted for would have potentially led to an even worse problem. I’ve got a number of other stories like that, too, that go even further. Wow. About pipes coming up through floors in places where they weren’t supposed to be that would have been in the middle of people’s living rooms because it got moved and it got concrete poured around it or could have gotten concrete poured around. Right. So, yeah. It is all about efficiency. It is all about that’s where I feel like it’s going to be. I mean, we’ve really been designing it out ourselves and growing this group in this department to be more efficient. Our current VP of operations is all about technology in the field and has been for quite some time. But he is really trying to push the envelope on this. Nothing like too extreme, right? No, you know, no Google goggles from way back when or whatever. you know whatever they you know meta headsets now but um we can do that and we have tested it but it’s it’s all about putting it in the hands of somebody that can understand what they’re looking and it’s not only our people yeah it’s the people on the other side too right um not every contractor knows how to do this but we teach them we want them to do it this way because it’s better for them in the long run well you know what i like about what you just said
Speaker 0 | 56:43.086
And it’s a great thought through answer that the audience should probably take to heart. It started off with, yes, you’ve got to have people that have the passion to take the time to get all this done correctly. And then you connected it with, and we have a whole bunch of new tools coming in that are going to make things. that are have the op you know the opportunity to make things easier uh and and if and if integra you integrate those two correctly right um then yes we can have much uh much uh um better estimation much better uh um you know any type of project you’re working on you have the you you have tools at your hand to help you make them better uh coming your way in the future um But you have to use them correctly. You have to understand the basics. You have to work with other people and other teams to spread that knowledge so that all of that can get disseminated. What a great way to summarize and probably one of the most thought through answers to one of my questions about the future of IT. It’s…
Speaker 1 | 58:07.626
It’s amazing where things are going. I mean, I could talk to you for another hour on this, but…
Speaker 0 | 58:13.150
And you can come right back on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 58:16.072
The power of what business analytics are going to do. I mean, there are companies bigger and smaller than us that are already doing it. I’m aware of that. But the power of what business analytics are going to do and a lot of the changes that we’re making in this organization in a year’s time, two years and three years time, these things that I’m talking about today are going to be small. in comparison to what we’re going to be doing. And we’re going to be blowing the socks off of our competitors and our clients. And we’re going to produce some amazing buildings. And it’s wonderful to be here now to know that not only all the work that I did before this, but a lot of the stuff that a lot of people have been laying the groundwork for a long time have really come to this point.
Speaker 0 | 58:57.783
Michael More Nerds, this has been Michael More. And I’ve been hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds with Mike Infinger, director of the of Information Technology at Clancy and Thays Construction Company. Mike, I got it right this time, right?
Speaker 1 | 59:13.536
Yes, you did.
Speaker 0 | 59:14.638
Thank you so much for coming on the program. I really appreciate it. And please come on again.
Speaker 1 | 59:19.446
Absolutely. Thank you. I really enjoyed this.
