Plot — Q&A with CEO
I’ve said it a number of times: the number of serial entrepreneurs in construction tech is small but growing. Chris Callen is one of them.
I’ve known Chris since my days at Bechtel’s Office of Innovation. We met at an ENR FutureTech conference in 2018, right around the time that he was pitching his first start-up called Grit Virtual. We were both presenting at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco and he was shopping around new software that allowed users to interact with BIM models through a VR environment.
Fast forward to today and he now talks openly about lessons learned from that moment in time. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that, at least for now, construction technology “needs to build for the tomorrow that is actually coming and not for the tomorrow that we hope comes.”
I witnessed this with my own start-up too — there’s a huge gap in field user understanding and the needs that construction firms face overall today. We talk here about his new start-up called PLOT, the challenges of launching a new software product in construction, and we even somehow manage to sidetrack into a discussion about blockchain.
PLOT’s celebrating its one year anniversary soon. You know as a serial entrepreneur that building software, especially construction software, is difficult. Where are you at in your product development?
We’ve been making adjustments from idea to concept and going through multiple rounds of beating up different areas of the product over the past year. At this point, it’s like, “Okay, we have to put the weight of a project on it and we have to make sure it stands up under that weight.”
That’s been an exciting and terrifying thing as a new product. Over the last several months, it’s been a lot of working with our early customers and making sure that we can account for all of the little corner cases.
What are some of those corner cases?
Every single jobsite is different. It’s said a lot in the industry, but I don’t know adequate weight is put on it: every single jobsite — even if it’s for the same building spec, even if it’s for the same piece of land, even if it’s for the same project team — they all have different priorities.
It’s a lot of personal preferences, honestly. With each project team, those personalities are so different that we encounter new things as we go. But we just continue to build what we consider to be the fullest, most robust version of the product. Flexibility is something that we’ve leveraged from day one to make sure the project teams use everything they want and only what they want.
Let’s take a step back. Do you mind talking a bit about what PLOT does and what your vision for changing the industry is?
The one sentence description is that we’re a multi-company messenger connected to a map, connected to a calendar. The core of our product is the coordination that occurs across three modules for managing who and what go where, when.
It’s all the phone calls and all the emails and all the text messages that happen on our job sites between general contractor project teams and the leadership of different trades and inbound suppliers. Those are our main three stakeholders.
We are that last mile in construction that makes sure everyone shows up and is coordinated. We want to become the standard for jobsite communication, to build digital relationships that exist on the physical jobsite. We’re creating a communication network of companies and jobsites across the construction industry.
Got it. Just to be clear, your customer base is the GCs and subcontractors and then you’re essentially roping in suppliers and vendors through text messages for that last mile coordination. What type of suppliers or vendors are you targeting first?
I think there’s a lot of suppliers out there that have sophistication built into their dispatching. I think they’re going to see this both as something that they recognize for their internal management and also as a nice extension of what they’re already doing.
Ready mix is one that stands out. They have a massive amount of logistics and logic built into their dispatch systems already because it’s the only must have just-in-time delivery in construction. Ready mix concrete literally has an expiration clock running on it once it’s batched.
Also things like steel, curtain wall panel assemblies, large HVAC equipment that has to travel up a tower crane or on a hoist. For example, all of those require space and they require time and a necessary piece of jobsite equipment that’s likely shared by others.
Any time we get into that environment, the supplier’s going to benefit from PLOT because they’re going to be able to reserve their time, reserve a piece of equipment, and ultimately get in and out as quickly as possible.
Our eventual goal is that the general contractor would book, and have their subcontractors book, most of the deliveries coming to the jobsite using PLOT.
Because if supplier dispatch is American Airlines planning all of their flights, we’re air traffic control for DFW. We’re managing all of these inbounds that are coming in.
That coordination piece is huge. On some jobs I’ve worked, we’ve had plenty of scenarios where a delivery comes and the driver doesn’t know where to go and so they just turn around. You’re left not getting the material delivered when you need it and the project suffers. And so that’s a huge pain point.
I’ve loved that lean construction has really highlighted waste factors and you can point out a few others too. The fact that movement of material twice is something that doesn’t feel like waste in the moment, but that those that are experienced and understand it and have had their gaze pointed to it, they start to recognize that moving material twice is a big source of waste. And it doesn’t feel like a massive amount of waste in the moment, but it is and it is inefficient. Even getting stuff to the jobsite and not knowing where it’s at — searching for material is another huge source of waste.
I think there are very successful legacy products out there that are tackling the entire procurement chain from item shopping to actually getting a purchase approved, ordering it, managing invoices, managing the PO... That’s not what we are.
We handle the final leg of delivery to make sure that it plays nicely with the other inbounds. So I don’t care about takeoff. I don’t care about the in-flight beverage on that American Airlines flight. I only care about approach and landing and making sure that it works well with all the others.
So bear with me here for a second because I’m going to bring up blockchain and that oftentimes makes people either have a seizure or get really excited. In my work with large construction companies, I’ve always thought that blockchain technology — not cryptocurrency or so many of the other flimsy businesses built around it, but actual blockchain technology — could be used to improve trust and visibility and accountability for material installation in construction. What are your thoughts on that?
Good application. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different methods to accomplish similar things and blockchain obviously has some validity and certain uses.
Any new technology is going to have some form of a bubble. Dotcom is the one that can be pointed to most readily. There was a massive amount of pointless tech that was being funded and built and marketed around it. But after that bubble burst, it’s not like we got rid of dotcom — it’s where a lot of business happens now.
So I think there is absolutely application in construction, maybe by taking the right approach to building it on the chain without marketing it as blockchain?
Right.
If it’s used as a marketing tool, you can be pretty confident that it doesn’t have applicable use cases because our industry doesn’t care. They don’t care why it does what it does. But if it can deliver something tangibly different, that’s what they care about and that’s the value.
I read a book recently that was talking about the relativity of time and it got me thinking about buildings not being 3D. They’re 4D. Every building is temporary. It will leave some time and every screw and bolt and piece of metal is going to arrive and depart. And as we think about not only the supply chain and material going to the jobsite gate but then getting to the actual install location, worked on and then part of facility maintenance and then when it’s decommissioned and demolished. Yeah, there’s valuable information along that path.
It’s just a matter of tying all of that to actual business value, which we really as a construction industry, we have decades of tech to catch up on before a lot of this makes sense.
You’re always going to need a coordination or communication tool regardless. I mean, that’s the name of the game unless you’re building the building and then dropping it on the job. And even then you’re always going to have some degree of coordination, whether it’s prefabrication, modular construction, whatever that new method or trend is. You’re going to have to put stuff together on the jobsite. And I can see that’s where PLOT comes in.
A lot of the technology right now, unfortunately, is working around workers. We in the industry are doing things where we’re trying to calculate things that our frontline workers already know. They know because they did it. And we’ve not built workflows that glean information from them and capture it and make their lives better. We’re just shortcutting them. And I think that over the next ten years, a lot of that approach will lose steam because it doesn’t work and we will fall back to working on solutions that only provide value through a workflow that goes through the frontline worker rather than around them.
You have to work with what’s there today. And I think that’s what’s most exciting about PLOT. It’s an extremely simple tool — I think we’re probably the most simple tool marketable for construction teams right now.
What it does through its features and all of the workflows is set a foundation to continue to increase the sophistication of data being transferred between parties. It is the entry level tool for a lot of project teams. A lot of our users on project teams have never had access to project management tools or all the deep tech that’s currently being marketed to them but that doesn’t actually engage them.
With PLOT, we’re now working at least on a digital tier. And if we’re working in a digital workspace where their voices are heard, their voices are connected, then you have a shot at adjusting process.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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