Transforming Construction: the Future of Production Management

[00:00:36] Gary Fischer, PE: Well, today we’re really pleased to be sitting here with Bob Snyder with Binsky, who has some really interesting experiences to share with us. Bob, why don’t you start by introducing yourself, telling our audience a little bit about yourself and your background.

[00:00:50] Bob Snyder: Thanks, Gary. It’s really great to be here.

[00:00:53] Bob Snyder: Thank you for this opportunity. So Binsky & Snyder is a about an 80 year old mechanical contractor. I happen to be fourth generation. We do somewhere around 250 million dollars worth of revenue and hire about 400 plumbers and pipe fitters. That’s our main trade. We do a lot of work in the industrial sector.

[00:01:13] Bob Snyder: Pharmaceutical and stuff like that. So yeah, we’ve we’ve been doing it for quite a long time.

[00:01:18] Gary Fischer, PE: Wow, that’s really interesting work. So when did you get started? And how did you get started?

[00:01:21] Bob Snyder: I think when you grow up in a family business like I did, you start from the day you come out of the womb.

[00:01:29] Bob Snyder: So I bet you I started working when I was probably five years old for for Willie in the shop. And, you know, I was sorting fittings and you know, you’d go to work with dad on Saturdays because he put a couple extra hours in and that’s, how you learn the business. Yeah, it was it’s sort of the hard, way to learn.

[00:01:46] Bob Snyder: But, you know, you really learn the work early.

[00:01:49] Gary Fischer, PE: And you learn hands on.

[00:01:51] Bob Snyder: Hands on. I grew up in a family where we were very hands on. We always had boats and cars and it was always wake up Saturday morning and let’s go sweep the garage or let’s work. So work, the work itself was always, you know, ingrained really in us as kids.

[00:02:05] Gary Fischer, PE: So you grew up learning how to do things, if you will, the traditional way.

[00:02:07] Bob Snyder: Correct. I would say yes.

[00:02:10] Gary Fischer, PE: So how did you discover project production management? What was the impetus for that?

[00:02:18] Bob Snyder: Well, my journey’s been, it’s been pretty interesting growing up in a family business. So it really is only the last five or seven years that I ended up taking it over and becoming the CEO and president of the company and really, the primary owner.

[00:02:33] Bob Snyder: And you know, like most companies you evolve really based on old traditional tools and things like that. So really what I was finding was that we were, we actually just started losing money. on projects. You’re not losing money, but you weren’t making the profits. And I couldn’t figure out why our projects would not be making the money that we think they could make.

[00:02:54] Bob Snyder: The project managers, you know, they, my thought was always they had responsibility for the profit and loss on the projects and they would, their lack of they couldn’t predict the earnings from even like month to month and it just became this real weird. situation with profitability and I just, it’s like a puzzle I couldn’t quite figure out.

[00:03:17] Gary Fischer, PE: Well now that’s interesting because you’re the company that’s actually doing the work. The sub to the sub or whatever and you’re actually doing the work. And you’re having trouble with predictability.

[00:03:26] Bob Snyder: I’m struggling with it and when, I actually was in one of the project reviews which we have on a monthly basis.

[00:03:33] Bob Snyder: And I go to some of them and I was sitting there. And I was listening, and I started really keying on the questions, and the questions were really about the work. And they were asking a project manager, how long do you think it’s going to take to do this, or how is this piped? And I realized they didn’t know the answers.

[00:03:51] Bob Snyder: And what I all of a sudden realized is how can I have the person in charge of the P& L when they don’t know the work, they don’t know the engineering, because these young folks are not brought up in a work environment anymore. They’re brought up in an administrative environment. If you don’t know the work, you obviously can’t, you know, be in charge of production.

[00:04:15] Bob Snyder: So that really created this quandary.

[00:04:17] Gary Fischer, PE: So what do you mean by administrative environment?

[00:04:20] Bob Snyder: It was about you know, the construction managers, which we mostly work for. Just the sheer number of emails they get every day, asking them for RFIs, and you know, when is your bill going to be in, and really information about the projects.

[00:04:34] Bob Snyder: It’s just a constant beating on all of those things. None of them really are about producing faster, better, less time, etc.

[00:04:40] Gary Fischer, PE: Right, right. Wow

[00:04:42] Bob Snyder: Well, they’re all important.

[00:04:45] Gary Fischer, PE: Right, you gotta do that.

[00:04:49] Bob Snyder: You gotta do all that stuff, right? A lot of them, you know, they are responsible for a lot of the information that gets put into the production system and retrieve that information.

[00:04:54] Bob Snyder: They’re responsible for the client. But, you know, as far as actually producing, they really have just gotten away from the work and it’s very difficult.

[00:05:02] Gary Fischer, PE: So you got, became frustrated with your lack of predictability, and you started looking for answers, and how did you find your way to production management?

[00:05:11] Bob Snyder: A friend of mine introduced me to Todd, and we were talking about really it was more about software, maybe fabrication. And I started hearing about it a little bit, and, you know, like, I just started thinking a little more about production, and then manufacturing, which I’ve always been really interested in engineering and manufacturing, I’m an engineer.

[00:05:33] Bob Snyder: I just didn’t have the science behind it. When I started hearing, it just took a little bit, and I’m like, whoa, wait a minute. Now this could be a problem. You know, one of the things he said to me was, he’s like, you know, administration, you need to either automate or eliminate. And, because computers do a lot of that stuff, and what you need to do is create a production system and really focus on the work itself, and the work is either knowledge work or actual physical work.

[00:06:01] Gary Fischer, PE: Right.

[00:06:03] Bob Snyder: Really, just started learning and going on this journey, it was probably two and a half years ago now, and it’s a journey, because it’s, it is really, it’s not that it’s super complicated, it’s just so different from anything you’re ever taught growing up in the construction industry.

[00:06:18] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. Or practiced.

[00:06:19] Bob Snyder: Or practiced, for sure.

[00:06:20] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So now you’ve had some run time, or you’ve had some absorb time, and you’re getting an opportunity to really use this on an ongoing project that you’re responsible for. Tell us about this project.

[00:06:32] Bob Snyder: Yes, so the project is it’s a pharmaceutical project. It’s a major Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company.

[00:06:41] Bob Snyder: And it is their largest investment. It’s north of a billion dollars. And the timeline is really two years. And it is very, schedule intensive. So everything is about, you know, how do we bring the schedule up? What do we do to do that? It’s also happens to be we call it design assist. But we’re engaged, the engineering is not finished.

[00:07:02] Bob Snyder: So we’re actually engaged with the engineering firm. Who happens to also be the construction firm that we’re working for. In helping them with the design. So we’re, you know, we’re actually doing a lot of the the BIM work where you’re actually drawing the project, coordinating it kind of live with the engineer.

[00:07:21] Bob Snyder: So there’s a lot of really variability in the design itself, but we’re working with them. So I guess really what that says is we have a lot of influence over the product design in this particular case. And they’re, listening to us. So we’re really integral to the engineering piece.

[00:07:38] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. So how did you, how did your work change the product?

[00:07:40] Bob Snyder: So it’s, so we were awarded the underground piece of the project. It’s a pretty specialized underground system, you know, pharmaceutical. They’re really worried about containment of, the drainage. So these have a stainless steel welded system it’s really complex and it’s something like 5 million worth of work.

[00:08:01] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s all dual wall kind of wiring?

[00:08:03] Bob Snyder: All double wall, welded and the question right out of the bat from the construction manager was, oh, it’s still a planning session, well how many days you got? They, we had a number of like 130 days, 140 days to do this work in a traditional fashion which was, you know, you dig the ditch, you put the bedding in, you bring the pipe, you can prefabricate it, and you throw it in, you connect it together.

[00:08:28] Bob Snyder: So that’s really the way the job was designed. And, you know, the journey of production management and this whole thing, I was actively engaged in this particular project. And I just started thinking, how do I bring the time up? Because they were like, 130 days, how do we do that? So I just started thinking about the time, and really now, in terms of the levers, right?

[00:08:52] Bob Snyder: When you start to learn this stuff, you create a whole new vernacular. And I’m like, man, maybe we can really pull on the product design and the process design. And really influence this. So we started studying this, and I came up with the idea, why don’t we build the entire system on racks? And do not dig the hole, have the whole site be at a certain level, and we’ll construct the entire thing, re engineer the way we do it, we’ve never done this before, and build modules.

[00:09:22] Bob Snyder: And by doing that, we had, we ran a PSO working with, SPS.

[00:09:27] Gary Fischer, PE: PSO, describe that a little bit.

[00:09:29] Bob Snyder: Oh, Projects. It’s a Production System Optimization. It’s the first step in the design of a production system. And you’re really into you do a production, you do a map, you map the project, just like you would map a manufacturing, a production system.

[00:09:47] Bob Snyder: And what’s mapping, you know, it’s basically process mapping. You know, we’re going to make the weld, we’re going to make the joint, we’re going to install this. You have all those process steps. And you try to simulate the system using PSO and then actually study really through the lens of operation science and all the formulas you learn during the science and all of a sudden you’re looking at things like what’s the optimum WIP, right?

[00:10:11] Bob Snyder: What’s the optimum work in process? In this case, how many modules do we want delivered to the site on a certain day? How many do you want on the site at any one time? And you start to figure out that design where. You know, let’s, normally you might ship like tons of them. It’s like, no, we only want three.

[00:10:28] Bob Snyder: And when there’s two, deliver one. When there’s one, deliver two. Don’t deliver three, three, three, because you’re going to back up in WIP. And, you know, WIP is cycle time. It’s, just realize that, you know, you started looking at it through this just completely different lens of thinking.

[00:10:46] Gary Fischer, PE: And the model came all the way back through shop fabrication.

[00:10:49] Bob Snyder: Right, so it came all the way back from engineering, shop fabrication, and then installation. So we started running optimization studies and working with the team. And we ended up being able to bring the optimization into, like, 50 days of field time.

[00:11:06] Bob Snyder: From 140. 130 or 140. Down to 50. Through fabrication. Now, That required us to redesign, do the product design, the project engineering, all that stuff. So that, you know, and we had to start fabrication, you know, four months prior to delivering the first module. Right. And yeah, it was amazing that we could get to that.

[00:11:28] Bob Snyder: And we used really the, PSO, the project system, the production system optimization. We also then put it in control using Project Production Control. Yeah, Production Control. And we ran it pure. This was really the first project that we were really able to run this thing pure. And it just gave us the ability to see what was going on and predict what was going on.

[00:11:56] Bob Snyder: We knew that we were going to have a problem on Module 58 that the field, we were, the field was going to crash into the fabrication. And, three months, two months earlier with the system optimization, we knew that engineering was a little slow, but we didn’t believe it.

[00:12:14] Bob Snyder: But guess what happened? We crashed into it in module 52.

[00:12:17] Bob Snyder: So it’s like, oh my gosh, it actually does work, this stuff. So that’s the amazing part of this project. I think it’s, been a struggle, but the We’re making believers out of our own people. I think that’s the magic of this thing now for Binsky. It’s, now we have a real internal case study that says, hey, wait a minute, this works.

[00:12:38] Bob Snyder: The other thing is the owner really played with the schedule. The steel wind was going faster, so they want us to start earlier. So we had to figure out how the heck we could start earlier because that’s the variability. They were playing with the time. They were throwing all things at us. And unfortunately, because they changed that late in the game.

[00:12:58] Bob Snyder: It was really difficult to deal with it, and the variability, but because we were in control, because we understood the system, you know, we were able to make some changes, able to increase capacity, cost more money, but we are able to actually bring this thing in.

[00:13:11] Gary Fischer, PE: So the owner saw things happening faster in the field than they thought.

[00:13:17] Gary Fischer, PE: And they said they want to capitalize on it. So they put the pedal down even stronger.

[00:13:21] Bob Snyder: It’s start. It’s start earlier. Start earlier. What you learn is starting earlier doesn’t mean you finish earlier.

[00:13:26] Bob Snyder: And that concept is foreign to the administrative construction world. They have no idea what that even means.

[00:13:35] Bob Snyder: And what’s funny when you’re in the business, you know what that means because you feel it. You just don’t understand the science behind it. And that’s what revealed itself to us. I actually think we could have done it in 30 days. If we ran the system, all we would have had to do was start a month earlier on fabrication.

[00:13:53] Gary Fischer, PE: And believe that the engineering was going to be a problem. Isn’t that interesting? Yeah.

[00:13:58] Bob Snyder: It was it’s, you know, what does that mean? I mean, going from 130 to, if we get down to 35 days. That’s huge. And that actually does mean your, production rate is double.

[00:14:10] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:14:10] Bob Snyder: For the project, what, you know so, really this project is, I’m hoping gets everyone excited in Binsky to implement this because some of the nuances in our business, we’re really implementing this as a platform to Binsky & Snyder going forward.

[00:14:25] Bob Snyder: It’s not just one project. It’s all our projects.

[00:14:27] Gary Fischer, PE: So you’re taking it across the company.

[00:14:31] Bob Snyder: Across the company. And really. You know, creating one giant production system with little mini ones that talk and integrate together.

[00:14:35] Gary Fischer, PE: Flow through it.

[00:14:37] Bob Snyder: Flow through it.

[00:14:39] Gary Fischer, PE: To particular clients.

[00:14:40] Bob Snyder: Yeah. To all different clients.

[00:14:42] Gary Fischer, PE: So you’re making some interesting people changes to make that happen. Tell us about that.

[00:14:46] Bob Snyder: Well, the, I mean, it’s been a journey. It’s very difficult to implement these philosophies because everybody in the industry is so ingrained in this administrative way of building. They don’t, know any different.

[00:15:02] Bob Snyder: And even 30, you know, low, mid 30 project managers, when you try to teach this to them, it’s just really difficult. They just, they don’t understand or they’re afraid or they’re you know, what we’ve, really come down to is let’s build a whole new group of folks, you know, kind of next gen builders.

[00:15:19] Bob Snyder: We call it the Next Gen Builder Program. And actually bring them in and, actually train them from the ground up. So they only understand production thinking.

[00:15:28] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Bob Snyder: So I mean it’s, and we’ve seen some amazing things where where the kind of the spin up time for someone in our industry coming out of engineering school, it was a, it’s a long time to learn the work, or at least enough of the work to actually be able to talk to it and manage it.

[00:15:48] Bob Snyder: What we’re finding is when you take someone out of school. You put them in a role we call a project production coordinator. They’re actually, you know, they’re running the software, but really we’re asking them to be focused 100 percent on production, using the science, and what happens, and they’re talking to the foreman every day, what happens in like one year, they learn the work.

[00:16:08] Bob Snyder: And it’s amazing, I mean, the spin up time is miraculous. I think I can build project managers who understand the work within one or two years, compared to taking, you know, years and years.

[00:16:19] Bob Snyder: And they’re excited about it. It’s exciting to them. You know, learn all the parts and the pieces and the, stuff.

[00:16:24] Bob Snyder: So yeah, we’re really changing everything around this idea of how to become production focused.

[00:16:29] Gary Fischer, PE: So they’re running the production control meetings. Correct. Managing the software for the foreman. But they’re in that daily conversation about, okay, what are you going to do tomorrow? What didn’t get done? Why didn’t it get done?

[00:16:41] Gary Fischer, PE: And they’re learning. That is really interesting.

[00:16:43] Bob Snyder: I mean, we’re talking, you know, if you’ve, if, you know, we say you’re working on software, but the reality of it is, it’s all about commitment and reliability.

[00:16:49] Gary Fischer, PE: Sure.

[00:16:51] Bob Snyder: And what you find is even just studying the, what you get every day, right? You know, we call them red Xs.

[00:16:57] Bob Snyder: Red Xs are, they’re the things that didn’t get done that you said you were going to get done, right? And then we also study the things they did that they didn’t say they were going to do. And what you end up finding is a lot of the guys get everything done. And then they also get completed they get completed tasks, which means they’re buffering the rates.

[00:17:15] Bob Snyder: So we have to crank the rates down. I mean, I look at it. I like red X’s. I don’t want people to get things done. The other problem we have is they don’t get things done, but then they get a whole lot of uncompleted work done.

[00:17:25] Bob Snyder: So now you’re saying, wait a minute, you’re not planning, using this as a planning tool anymore.

[00:17:28] Bob Snyder: You’re just using it as a statusing tool and you’re just sandbagging us. So it’s really interesting on the daily level when you start looking at the metrics, then the reasons, right? Why did you get a red X? You know, I don’t have the engineering data. I don’t have this. I don’t have that. Why did you have that?

[00:17:41] Bob Snyder: And you just record all that information. But you actually just, you know what’s going on in your projects almost daily. It’s amazing.

[00:17:45] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

[00:17:48] Bob Snyder: Yeah. And I get the, me, I sit there and I just get the daily production reports on every single project. So I just get those every day. My, my evenings ends with me going through those.

[00:18:01] Bob Snyder: And I’ll pick up the phone and be like, Hey, what’s going on with all these red X’s? I mean, something’s the matter. We gotta tweak the engineering on this. Or, and you can almost like run your entire business just studying these reports. It’s incredible.

[00:18:09] Gary Fischer, PE: It allows you to help solve the right problems.

[00:18:10] Bob Snyder: Yeah

[00:18:12] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. So how, what are you seeing? Of course, you have interaction with other trades. How is this helping you or not helping you in the, in that interaction or the interplay with the trades around you? Or are you just completely isolated?

[00:18:27] Bob Snyder: We’re doing it ourselves. What we do is we put, we call them commitments.

[00:18:31] Bob Snyder: So what we do is we’re, trying to figure out how to do it first of all, but right now we’re doing is we’re creating commitment boxes. We’re doing two things. One, we’re putting our own commitments in and reporting that to the, owner or to the construction manager. Because they don’t understand this at all and it’s almost, it’s very painful to try to talk to it because they just, they won’t, they can’t get it because it’s hard.

[00:18:56] Bob Snyder: So what we end up doing is we give them a report every week that maybe there’s 10 milestones that they’re interested in and then you can see the deltas off of those on a weekly basis. We also put in constraints, we call them commitment constraints. So for instance, if I’ve got to put something on the wall, Well, I need the wall, but I’m not building the wall, so we’ll have a project constraint.

[00:19:19] Bob Snyder: That is assigned to the construction manager. So you get, you know, 20 of these things that we’re committing to which, is transparency and it’s dangerous a little bit. This is, for my people, hate it because like, wait a minute, we’re going to be transparent. We’re going to, you know, we’re going to get killed here, Bob’s going to kill us.

[00:19:37] Bob Snyder: But we also put these, you know, I’d say I want one third or less or one quarter of the commitments because we don’t want to be saying we can’t do anything because you must do your job.

[00:19:44] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:19:45] Bob Snyder: But they may see that if I don’t have the wall and then we actually tie them together. So we say, if the wall is not there, we can’t make our commitment.

[00:19:54] Bob Snyder: And as the wall slips, the commitment slips and you can see it in deltas. And and that’s been really helpful. But no we’re not really working with the other trades on this stuff. That’s kind of how we’re trying to integrate it, but it’s really difficult. I mean the, scheduling out there now is.

[00:20:13] Bob Snyder: Lash planner, pull planner, pull planning. I mean all these buzzwords. I don’t think anybody actually does them the way they were originally meant to be done. Right? You know, but like communicating what we’re doing with them is almost impossible. But it’s, you know, I mean this Merck project has 2,500 tasks on a 5 million job.

[00:20:38] Bob Snyder: Things like make a weld. And we’re all linking them together and to show them that information, it just blows their minds. They can’t wrap their heads around it.

[00:20:47] Gary Fischer, PE: So how are you doing on those commitments to the CM or the owner?

[00:20:53] Bob Snyder: I think we’re doing pretty good on them. We get beat up now and then.

[00:20:58] Bob Snyder: But the reality is, if the thing’s slipping, if it’s your fault, then you just gotta fix it.

[00:21:03] Bob Snyder: You can’t, hide from it. There’s no hiding from this. That’s the hard part, right? The work’s the work. It’s either done or not done. There’s no like, well, it’s done, but not, this is what it is.

[00:21:17] Gary Fischer, PE: Partial credit.

[00:21:17] Bob Snyder: It’s real. So I mean, really you have to really teach your your people to, we’re better off being completely transparent.

[00:21:27] Bob Snyder: It feels painful, but transparency is not a one way street. So if we’re completely transparent, they will have no choice. And then they really can’t say anything. So the projects we’re doing, these reports, they almost don’t bother us anymore. Because we’re just telling them what we’re doing.

[00:21:43] Gary Fischer, PE: So you’re developing, they’re developing some trust in you.

[00:21:44] Bob Snyder: They develop some trust.

[00:21:46] Gary Fischer, PE: That transparency creates trust. Which helps keep them off your back. And getting unwanted help.

[00:21:54] Bob Snyder: Yeah it’s, this is such a journey.

[00:21:58]  Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:21:58] Bob Snyder: In so many ways. But it’s exciting. You know, I think you know, our vision, we, I spent a lot of time actually with Todd and folks and, you know, we talked a lot about, you know, what do you want Bob out of this thing?

[00:22:13] Bob Snyder: And kind of the whole vision turned into, we want to change the way the world builds. And that’s our vision now. So my company vision is. Binsky, we’re going to change the way the world builds. That’s fantastic. And that’s how we want to address this.

[00:22:25] Gary Fischer, PE: At the PPI, we’re really excited about that.

[00:22:28] Bob Snyder: Yeah, that’s, super great.

[00:22:29] Bob Snyder: So, everything we do is really focused on that. And really, this is, this has truly been my mission. And I finally kind of found it. I found the tribe. I found the I found, I think I found the key. I just haven’t quite jiggled the lock enough to get it undone.

[00:22:45] Gary Fischer, PE: But isn’t it wonderful to know you’ve got the key finally in your hand to unlock The potential of what’s possible.

[00:22:52] Bob Snyder: It’s, it is completely a different way of thinking. I mean, it’s almost a different way of existing. Cause production, everything we make is a production system. Whether you go to the mall or you go to the Starbucks coffee place, you’re like, how’d they make the coffee?

[00:23:00] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:23:02] Bob Snyder: And you’re studying, you know, and I’ve had some really, nice opportunities to share some of this stuff with, you know, with the group at PPI and everybody.

[00:23:14] Bob Snyder: It’s been a super lot of fun but, it is challenging.

[00:23:17] Gary Fischer, PE: So where do you see yourself in five years? Where do you see the company in five years? Or pick a date.

[00:23:25] Bob Snyder: I think that, we’ve got another year of system implementation, because it is a little different. It’s, to do this as a company platform is different than doing it for a project or a piece of a project.

[00:23:40] Bob Snyder: Like the Merck was a pretty good example of it, but it was the kind of project that was very repetitive. And it was kind of, you know, it wasn’t giant and it was a defined thing with defined goals. So it was a good one to try to dive in on but not everything from that project applies to the bulk of the work we’re doing.

[00:23:58] Bob Snyder: So I think it’s, we got a lot of systems work still we’re working on, you know, how do we tie some of that into predictability and cost per costing and job costing and accounting because you really have to do that too at the same time. How do we integrate these technologies? And then, you know, how do you train the young folks to start really being excited about running things.

[00:24:17] Bob Snyder: So I think you’ve got about a year of process design. I think we’re finally there where we’re, okay, what does, we call it the Binsky production system. What does the Binsky production system actually look like?

[00:23:28] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:23:30] Bob Snyder: Because we can talk all we want about WIP and cycle times, but the reality is You gotta have a plan that’s transactional in nature to execute on.

[00:24:36] Bob Snyder: So I think we’re close to that. I think by the end of this year we’ll have that pretty good. And then I think it’s just training people and bringing them in. And you know, we’re doing some exciting stuff. We’ve got some, we have an internship this summer completely focused on production. And our idea is to, you know, get five or six folks, get them on projects, let them learning.

[00:24:56] Bob Snyder: And hopefully they’ll be excited about this. And then you’ll be able to, you know, hire them and bring them on. And our whole onboarding really is going to be focused on production. So any, person we hire is going to go through this idea of production first. And, you know, we’ve got this next gen builder thing we’re working on where everybody we hire, instead of putting them on a job as a project engineer or putting them estimating, they’re going to go into the production management department.

[00:25:22] Bob Snyder: They’re going to learn from the ground up and they’re going to take classes. And I think, you know, after that, then they can go do the other things, you know, it applies. They can go, if they like estimating better, if they like being a project manager, great. If they want to go to the fab shop or they want to stay in production management, great.

[00:25:35] Bob Snyder: But I think the foundation of the whole program still needs to be the work.

[00:25:40] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah, right.

[00:25:40] Bob Snyder: I mean, that’s the, it’s the. You know the, there’s so many instances on this journey, you know, when the, when you sit there in a meeting and you’re talking to your foreman and, you know, you see a project engineer from the owner or from the construction manager asking all these questions and he looks at me and he’s like, you know, I’ll tell you what, you want to get the job done?

[00:25:59] Bob Snyder: How about if you just take this hammer and like help me build this thing? Cause this is crazy, like what the heck? How about we just build the damn thing? Like you hear that stuff and it just resonates over and over. The there’s some, my foreman, one of the great things they say is, you know, the things, I’d rather be looking at it than for it, right?

[00:26:17] Bob Snyder: Well, what is that? That’s, WIP laying all over the place. And I say to him, I said, yeah, but you know, there’s one thing worse than that. It’s looking at it. And for it, because that’s what you guys do.

[00:26:29] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s exactly right. It’s all piled up there somewhere.

[00:26:30] Bob Snyder: Yeah, you can’t find it, so that’s exciting.

[00:26:34] Bob Snyder: But it’s just every minute of every day. Thinking a little differently. And transforming a business is, it’s really difficult.

[00:26:43] Gary Fischer, PE: So how are your foremen adapting to this? Do you find it an easier adaptation there with the foremen?

[00:26:50] Bob Snyder: Well, I have an advantage that we’re, so first we’re union trade.

[00:26:56] Bob Snyder: So we hire union pipe suppliers. And the leadership is very loyal typically to the owners of the business.

[00:27:08] Bob Snyder: So I have a lot of influence being so actively engaged. I mean, I’m the CEO, right? But I’m in the weeds on this stuff. That’s why, and that’s where I want to be. So I think there’s a lot of influence over those guys because if, you know, Junior, Bob Junior wants to do it, we better do it, right? Because he’s the guy who signs my paycheck.

[00:27:27] Gary Fischer, PE: Right.

[00:27:28] Bob Snyder: And they’re very tied to that.

[00:27:29] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:27:30] Bob Snyder: And very loyal to that, actually. That helps a lot. The problem is they don’t really want to plan their work. And be transparent about it because.

[00:27:40] Gary Fischer, PE: They like a buffer.

[00:27:43] Bob Snyder: They put a buffer. They got a buffer in their pocket all day long and we train them to be that way.

[00:27:48] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s their track record. If they don’t have a buffer, you get beat up and get hurt.

[00:27:52] Bob Snyder: It’s the, you know, in many ways, well, my purchase department is not going to buy the thing.

[00:27:56] Gary Fischer, PE: Right.

[00:27:58] Bob Snyder: They’re buffering for us too. For our own inability to deliver, right? And to support them properly as much as they buffer. So, next thing you know, they’re, their idea is let’s just beat everything all the time. And, you know, that goes completely against the idea of last responsible moment.

[00:28:13] Bob Snyder: I mean, I think that’s a really difficult thing for them to understand.

[00:28:16] Bob Snyder: It’s, like, I want to make it. It’s like, well, I’d rather you don’t make it, actually. I’d rather you don’t make it. And have something be inserted into our continuous improvement and let’s go try to make it a different way by pulling on one of the levers. I think that’s very hard. They don’t like the dailies when it comes to what are you going to do tomorrow?

[00:28:35] Bob Snyder: And we it’s, I think we’ve, it’s really difficult. And I think what we’ve, done a lot of that and it really shows up more like statusing. Like, what are you going to get done tomorrow? When are you going to be done? Not, what are you actually doing tomorrow? So we’re embarking on a program.

[00:28:54] Bob Snyder: We’re creating standard process, you know, we install hangers in set spools Welding together do some other stuff, right? That’s pretty much what we do. It could be a copper spool could be weldable so we’re actually going to that granularity where we’re batching the work by you know, and we’re starting to label every weld, which is, did you get?

[00:29:16] Bob Snyder: So what I want to know, I want to know, what welds are you going to get done tomorrow? Well, I don’t know, weld 47, weld 36. I don’t want I don’t want quantities because quantities lends itself towards the other side of things. You know, it’s like when you start talking about foot, feet, I’m like, we don’t install feet.

[00:29:31] Bob Snyder: We install spools. So we’re going to label the spools, we make them, and you’re going to tell me what 10 install. So when you do that’s when it opens up. And what you see is being able to actually drive your rates down. We’ve even done things like first run studies, which we don’t even know what a first run study is for crying out loud as a contractor.

[00:29:54] Bob Snyder: But, you know, the Merck job, we had to make some pretty complicated stainless steel piping. And I’m like, let’s do some samples. Let’s do some sample wells. Let’s time them. And how do we do it better? Well, what if we re sequence? Maybe we should cut this first. Maybe we should and we’re just pulling out all these levers.

[00:30:10] Bob Snyder: And really, that’s the amazing part. We were able to, you know, our rates were cutting 50 percent by just in the shop stuff, by doing it.

[00:30:20] Gary Fischer, PE: 50 percent

[00:30:22] Bob Snyder: Yeah.

[00:30:23] Gary Fischer, PE: Wow.

[00:30:24] Bob Snyder: Yeah. We cut, really our rates, what we originally thought were, and I think that’s the whole industry, it’s, yay we beat the labor, but what does that even mean?

[00:30:31] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:30:31] Bob Snyder: Like, it doesn’t, so what, and everybody’s all happy they beat the labor, but if you set the bar here, then you beat it, but there is no bottom, I think, and I think that’s something we’ve learned is, there really is no limit. It’s never ending. Continuous improvement is, they call it continuous improvement for a reason.

[00:30:50] Bob Snyder: It’s not, so yeah, you can really drive the rates down. And that’s exciting. I mean, I think the guys once they get it the fabrication guys on the job, they were excited. They started getting it and they wanted to beat their rates. And when you don’t, we’re not beating them up. We’re just asking them and then we’re asking how can we do better.

[00:31:09] Bob Snyder: So I think once that happens, but the field’s a little different.

[00:31:14] Gary Fischer, PE: So it takes time to build some trust with them.

[00:31:16] Bob Snyder: Oh, yeah.

[00:31:17] Gary Fischer, PE: Because bad things aren’t going to happen if they don’t get what they said they were going to get the next day.

[00:31:21] Bob Snyder: I mean, a red X to a foreman is, I lose my job.

[00:31:24] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah, right.

[00:31:25] Bob Snyder: Like, that’s what people forget.

[00:31:27] Bob Snyder: They’re people.

[00:31:29] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s a consequence of history.

[00:31:31] Bob Snyder: Yeah. If you don’t get that well done tomorrow, you’re gone. You know, but no one ever took the time to say, well but how do, how can we beat that or what’s the real problem? We do the, look at commitment reliability reports and study that now and we group things and we can tell, you know, how many times because they don’t have the piece of pipe there or they don’t have the fitting there.

[00:31:51] Bob Snyder: How many, you know, 50 percent of this stuff is their own fault, right? Why couldn’t you get that finished? So it’s, you know it’s, just a fascinating journey, all of this. And I think, but I think the end, like you said, I think we can build twice as fast.

[00:32:04] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:32:05] Bob Snyder: And I think we’re going to have to figure out how to work with owners more and, educate them so they understand what this really could look like.

[00:32:16] Bob Snyder: I think there’s a lot of controversy because the administrative world of construction management, this is, is goes against what their whole, their companies are built on. And it’s not that they’re, it’s just what it is. I mean, you know, how did they become more integrators? I think they really need to be looking at this as a really serious part of their delivery.

[00:32:40] Bob Snyder: And then how do they help the contractors with these things? And they can’t, you know, they want command and control, but it doesn’t really work that way.

[00:32:48] Gary Fischer, PE: No, I would hope that at some point we’ll have construction managers using PSO for the whole job site, integrating all those production systems together for the benefit of the overhaul project. I think really good things are going to happen when we get there.

[00:33:01] Bob Snyder: It feels like people are talking more about the production, you know, whether you believe the curve or not, the curve that shows construction, you know, lagging, you know, 10x behind manufacturing. It’s, we definitely lag behind.

[00:33:15] Gary Fischer, PE: No kidding

[00:33:16] Bob Snyder: The numbers are the numbers, but, and, you know.

[00:33:20] Gary Fischer, PE: Well, and it doesn’t feel any better either. I mean, you know it’s true.

[00:33:21] Bob Snyder: I think it’s harder to build today.

[00:33:25] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:33:25] Bob Snyder: I think it’s really hard to build today.

[00:33:27] Gary Fischer, PE: I think you’re right.

[00:33:30] Bob Snyder: I think the technology, it just makes bad stuff worse. Right? Like I always say, and I have a pretty significant technology background, and really I could have probably been doing that stuff as well.

[00:33:39] Bob Snyder: I was actually programming at like 10 years old. I love technology and I’ve always, but what we said is listen, if you can’t do it on a piece of paper. Then, computer’s not going to help you. It’s just going to make it bad faster. Bad process is bad process. You know, fix your process and then we can throw a little tech at it and make things happen that could never happen before.

[00:33:59] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah, let’s make it easier to do the wrong thing.

[00:34:03] Bob Snyder: That’s right.

[00:34:04] Gary Fischer, PE: We’re really good at that as an industry.

[00:34:06] Bob Snyder: It’s it’s been quite a journey. I think, like you said, I think adoption hopefully, and I think that maybe we’re not mechanical contractors someday we’re, production specialists and we’re, you know, we’re helping people kind of change the way they they built.

[00:34:22] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:34:23] Bob Snyder: And you know, we’re working with owners and trying to figure that out because we’re in a really unique position. I really do feel like we’re very much alone as a sub trade contract.

[00:34:28] Gary Fischer, PE: Oh, absolutely.

[00:34:29] Bob Snyder: Doing these things.

[00:34:32] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:34:35] Bob Snyder:  And and I had the opportunity to talk with some of my peers. Belong to some contracting associations and I was in a group about 15 mechanicals.

[00:34:45] Bob Snyder: You know, competitors, but not local competitors. And really it’s a technology thing. We’re all, so they’re innovative minds. So it’s a technology committee. We talk about tech and what’s going on with it. And, you know, how we bring in stuff. And we did, my son and I presented the Merck, or this project to them.

[00:35:02] Bob Snyder: And they were blown away. They were blown away. That we were doing this kind of stuff.

[00:35:09] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:35:10] Bob Snyder: And I’m hoping the tools get better. You know, production engineering as a thing, we don’t, you know, architectural BIM and that does not build for that. So we actually drew the job, this project, using Inventor, which is like SolidWorks.

[00:35:26] Bob Snyder: And then we’re translating SolidWorks and Inventor. How do we get that back into Revit? There is a lot of challenges when it comes to connectivity

[00:35:34] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:35:35] Bob Snyder: And how you do these things. But my thing is, you know, if Elon can, if he can land a rocket on its rear end, right, coming back to Earth, I think we can put some pipe in a little better.

[00:35:44] Gary Fischer, PE:  I think you’re right.

[00:35:46] Bob Snyder: I think we can figure this out.

[00:35:47] Gary Fischer, PE: Oh, wow, this is really exciting and really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and your thoughts with us. It’s an exciting journey and we’re here to help any way we can.

[00:35:57] Bob Snyder: Yeah, and I, do appreciate the support. I really feel very blessed to, be in this group of, you know, really exceptional individuals and, everyone’s so, smart and so excited.

[00:36:10] Bob Snyder: It’s very cool. So it’s, and I feel like you have a bunch of cheerleaders you know, it’s kind of us CEOs. It’s kind of tough to find cheerleaders, you know, you’re used to, you’re used to getting banged up all day long, but we get a little of that too in this world. But I think everyone’s really tugging hard for Binsky.

[00:36:25] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s great.

[00:36:26] Bob Snyder:  So thank you. Great. Thank you for this opportunity. Once I started learning about this, I was like, I got to figure this out, and I’m going to take a few folks to the PPI class, and we did that in Cal Poly and, really, that’s when I really got the hook.

[00:36:39] Gary Fischer, PE: Ah, so the class resonated with you.

[00:36:42] Bob Snyder: The class was it was just full of like, holy moly, what the heck, but I’m clueless. It was like, holy, like, what am I going to do about this thing? I’ve just opened up the Pandora’s box. I’m a bit of an incessant learner. And once I get hooked on something, this, you know, taking the PPI class, learning that seeing, you know, following PPI, listening to the stories of just these incredible.

[00:37:16] Bob Snyder: Individuals and for these massive companies doing these massive projects and just the exposure to all of that. It just fuels my fire to learn more and grow in this world. Yeah, we’re you know, we’re part of our growth program for the new folks is to, you know, you really lean on PPI heavily.

[00:37:36] Bob Snyder: And, you know, the education is great. That my understanding is great, but I think them learning that there’s this other group out there who are really, smart people studying these things. And it’s quite inspirational, so I think that’s a big part of it. You know, how do we inspire everybody else to get as excited as I get in this learning journey.

[00:37:57] Bob Snyder: I think one of the big issues with this whole production stuff is you really have to learn the science a little bit.

[00:38:07] Bob Snyder: And when you’re first exposed to the science, holy moly, it’s You know, you got James Choo throwing formulas at you, and he’s brilliant, and he’s amazing human, he’s the best, but when you start seeing these graphs on WIP and optimizing WIP and the formulas and the Little’s Law and all the stuff, it, basically your head’s gonna explode.

[00:38:29] Bob Snyder: So it’s really a learning journey. So I think, you know and the sooner we get folks in the game Not living in the administrative construction world, really focusing on the work. I think they will know to do it different. They will understand the science. They will, this will be the only way they build.

[00:38:47] Bob Snyder: So I think the you know, getting you know, some of the really getting the younger folks you know, are really new to our industry. It really should be the start of their career is learning how to build, you know.

[00:39:01] Gary Fischer, PE: Creating that comes up foundation, right outta the blocks.

[00:39:03] Bob Snyder: You gotta learn how to build.

[00:39:06] Bob Snyder: I mean, everyone complains about construction. How come no ones knows how to build anymore? How come? I mean, see, everyone complains about CM. You know, people don’t how to build anymore. Like, you know, and because we’re not well done. We’re not training the build.

[00:39:15] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:39:16] Bob Snyder: We’re training to do other things. We, the only place you learn to build anymore is really if you go through the traits.

[00:39:22] Bob Snyder: And that’s a very long time. I mean, it takes a long time and, it’s very narrow minded, right? It’s not, it’s about putting pipe in or it’s about this. It’s not about how we build. So yeah, I think it’s really important to create really want to create a next generation of really next generation of builders, not just at Binsky, but of the world and how do we do that?

[00:39:43] Bob Snyder: And I think, you know, PPI and these universities. It’s a challenge because most of the universities have construction management programs, and that is the place where you’re welcome to come. You know, when you go to a mechanical engineering department and talk about this, they’re like, yeah, we don’t need this.

[00:40:05] Bob Snyder: This is the construction stuff. Or when you know, you’re, if you go to a you know, maybe an industrial engineering type of curriculum, I think it applies, but they don’t want to hear about construction. They want to hear about how does Boeing do it? You know, how do we build them a factory floor?

[00:40:19] Bob Snyder: So I think the entree, the educational entree into it is complex and I think we’ve got to figure that out, honestly, I think we’ve got a lot of work to do.

[00:40:30] Gary Fischer, PE: So are more advanced, or experienced career folks just hopeless, or is there some hope there too?

[00:40:40] Bob Snyder: I don’t say they’re hopeless, I think they’re more helpless than hopeless.

[00:40:42] Bob Snyder: I think, they’ve been.

[00:40:44] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s good.

[00:40:46] Bob Snyder: They’re, just, they’re It’s very hard to ask people to transform themselves. And I think you can’t denounce. We’d like to down, I mean, I denounce the administrative side often because I want to create the construct of production to promote that. But administration is important still.

[00:41:05] Gary Fischer, PE: You still have to do it.

[00:41:09] Bob Snyder: You know you want to try to automate it. You want to take advantage of all the tools we have today with AI and we need to leverage all that to make it just make it easier because a lot of it’s very, I mean, a lot of it’s clerical in nature. Some of it isn’t.

[00:41:20] Bob Snyder: Some of it’s customer service and relationships and that’s still important. I mean, we can, I talk very much down on all of that today. But again, I’m trying to get, I’m trying to use shock therapy.

[00:41:31] Gary Fischer, PE: Right.

[00:41:32] Bob Snyder: To get my folks to start thinking that, guess what?

[00:41:35] Gary Fischer, PE: A shift in mindset.

[00:41:36] Bob Snyder: You’re not going to beat the labor on the project unless you do this.

[00:41:39] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:41:39] Bob Snyder: You know.

[00:41:41] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s not processing RFIs faster.

[00:41:43] Bob Snyder: It’s not processing RFIs faster. So but it’s still important. So you can’t go into these project managers who have been doing this their whole life and they’re getting 300 emails and telling them, okay, I want you to drop all that.

[00:41:55] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:41:55] Bob Snyder: And I want you to start focusing on production.

[00:41:57] Gary Fischer, PE: Right.

[00:41:57] Bob Snyder: They’re like, what? They, just, they can’t do it.  And, they’re getting beat up by the CM every day. Like, why don’t I have this? Why don’t I have that? I mean, it’s a constant hammer. You know it’s this, they are the squeaky wheel. We say that internally a lot now. I say, you know, it’s the people will go to the squeaky wheel.

[00:42:18] Bob Snyder: The key is to create the squeaky wheel where we want it. Just like the bottleneck, they say, right? Every productionist has a bottleneck. Put it where you want. You know, we gotta create our own internal squeaky wheels so that our people our folks will pay more attention to that, and we’ve got to give them the tools and the time to do that.

[00:42:42] Bob Snyder: So I would say that we need to help, we need to really help everybody on this journey. You know, it’s, and it, cause I, honestly, it’s very difficult. I’ve, it’s been two and a half years for me, and I finally feel like I’ll, I feel like I can hang out with you guys on this stuff now, but it’s taken two and a half years of getting yelled at.

[00:43:00] Gary Fischer, PE: Well, if it makes you feel better. I think it took me longer than two and a half years, I’m still hurting.

[00:43:06] Bob Snyder: Well, it is fascinating, right? You can always do something better.

[00:43:09] Gary Fischer, PE: It is. It is. It’s exciting stuff.

[00:43:11] Gary Fischer, PE: So if I’ve just heard about this, and I’m saying, wow, you’re doing some really weird things on this, in your work.

[00:43:18] Gary Fischer, PE: How do I learn more about this? Where do I go for help? What would you advise?

[00:43:23] Bob Snyder: So I tell everybody I talk to, I tell them what we’re doing, and I get like rolling blank stares and glazing over eyes, and I say, I’ll tell you what, here’s the map, there’s a free mapping tool on projectproduction.org, get on it, join it, it’s free, you can use the tool for free, and just start getting a little bit dirty when it comes to learning and hopefully some things will stick with you.

[00:43:53] Bob Snyder: There’s a ton of resources there. Yeah, it’s really the only place I think you can go to get any of this. You know, I would say that the other thing you do should read Todd’s book It’s it is just what the construction world is it’s. You know, I mean, I live the book every day of my life, you know, the book is written for me.

[00:44:19] Bob Snyder: And what we’re doing is we’re taking just all those theories and trying to create our own intentional Binsky production system off of all that stuff. You know, it’s entertaining, but you can, you know, it’s, it, the basis is all the same stuff. So I would say those are two places you need to go.

[00:44:36] Bob Snyder: And then and then I think, you know, you got to try it. Right. There’s a lot of concepts, right. It’s. You know, this idea of when you ask people to map processes, they map boxes. They map processes. Do this. Well, that’s not actually the way it works. Once you know that, it drives me crazy to see processes mapped that way.

[00:44:55] Bob Snyder: I want to see a Q box and I want to see an inventory stock. And  if you’re not going to know what that means necessarily here unless you’re in the manufacturing world. Because when you talk to manufacturing folks, They’re like, duh, of course you do it that way. You guys are in construction, we can’t figure you out.

[00:45:12] Bob Snyder: So yeah, I think I would say those two pieces of the puzzle, and then you just get a little dirty. You know, try to, I mean, it’s fun, you know, I map stupid stuff all day long. It’s fun, you know, how I’m gonna, I gotta, whatever, I gotta take a shower in the morning. I don’t wanna do it. Do I take the shower first, or do I do this first?

[00:45:28] Bob Snyder: I mean, you can, it’s a production system, everything is, right? I look through everything through that lens today. And and, but it’s you just got to get on the train and enjoy the ride. And I think you got to be really comfortable with just not knowing what you don’t know yet. Because it does build.

[00:45:49] Bob Snyder: It’s not something you don’t just read a book. You read a book, you pick up a little thing, then you got to go on a learning journey.

[00:45:55] Gary Fischer, PE: And you got to get your hands dirty.

[00:45:56] Bob Snyder: You got to get dirty. You have to, you know you, I’ve learned most of this stuff really by failure.

[00:46:04] Bob Snyder: And you know and, I would say there’s, I mean, a lot of the, when I first got on the journey, you know, every, I would be asking these questions and, I’d be getting yelled at, you know, Bob, this isn’t the way that works.

[00:46:18] Bob Snyder: You don’t get it. You don’t get it yet. And then all of a sudden a year goes by of getting yelled at about, you don’t get it. And all of a sudden you get it, and you’re like, damn, you know. But, I don’t think you would have gotten there unless you got yelled at and didn’t get it. So it’s just, you gotta be okay with that.

[00:46:32] Bob Snyder: Like that’s not easy for everybody. It’s not easy for me, but it, you know, you’re really It’s just, it really truly is a journey. It really is. And it’s a personal journey.

[00:46:43] Gary Fischer, PE: It is personal. So that’s good.

[00:46:46] Bob Snyder: Somewhat self serving, of course. Which everything is.

[00:46:49] Gary Fischer, PE: Sure.

[00:46:50] Bob Snyder: We want more people. Thinking this way because there are just so few of us thinking this way.

[00:46:55] Bob Snyder: So right now it is, you know, we need, you really need people, really owners, really, we really need owners thinking this way. We need owners thinking this way. We need those owners going to the construction managers and challenging them on production management. It was hilarious. I was at a, I had a, I was in one of the meetings.

[00:47:20] Bob Snyder: And one of the head guy for the owner, because it’s kind of collaborative on this project, you know, they started throwing out the term LRM, or Last Responsible Moment. I don’t think they had anything to do with what the hell it meant. But they heard from somewhere. And I think they heard it because they met with, SPS.

[00:47:40] Bob Snyder: Because they were asking about production management. So I think the more we get where people are saying last responsible moment, like what is last responsible moment? You know, it is the last responsible moment, but really it’s the elimination of float.

[00:47:52] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah, I think owners have to stop being okay with the normalized pain.

[00:48:00] Gary Fischer, PE: They need to start expecting more and different, but they don’t know where to go yet.

[00:48:06] Bob Snyder: Yes, and it’s risky for them, right? These companies are very administratively absolutely sensitive to risk.

[00:48:14] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s where they’ve been training for.

[00:48:16] Bob Snyder: So you know, it’s, they’re, you know, people’s jobs depend on these things, right?

[00:48:20] Bob Snyder: So, you don’t wanna be the guy who messes it up. So it’s very, it’s hard. And then you have lawyer, tons of lawyers and telling them things, and you gotta accounts, and you got, you have so many other people in the mix at the owner level. I’m sure that they feel alone. They may know all of this, but what are they going to do? Raise their hand.

[00:48:39] Bob Snyder: So I think it’s truly educating the owners as to what this is. I think the better, the more case studies we do. And I think you got to be owner case studies. I think owners have to come to the game and it would be great to do this with the owner here.

[00:48:55] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. Right.

[00:48:57] Bob Snyder: Cause owners make stuff. They know this they, actually understand the science way better than the construction world. And that’s how I approach it. I’m like, well, you guys make, whatever, this injectable drug. You know production better than I know it. You guys are making it all day long. He’s like, yeah, we do.

[00:49:18] Gary Fischer, PE: But they don’t carry it into the construction site either. It’s a real challenge. I think you’re right. When the owners really start driving this, things will change. But we’ve got to get their attention and they’ve got to see, different results are possible.

[00:49:33] Bob Snyder: Say what you want you know, this country is built on shock therapy at some level, so I think we’ve just got to be loud.

[00:49:41] Bob Snyder: If we’re not loud, as much as, you know, engineers aren’t necessarily loud, I think we need to be loud on this and we have to create a real following.

[00:49:49] Gary Fischer, PE: Yep.

[00:49:50] Bob Snyder: And, you know, you’ve got to go to all the schools. You’ve got to talk to all of the engineering departments. You’ve got to, You know, you got to look at trade organizations, like the Mechanical Contracts Association.

[00:49:59] Bob Snyder: We have no idea what’s going on there.

[00:50:02] Gary Fischer, PE: No, they don’t.

[00:50:03] Bob Snyder: And it’s a great organization, you know, and I’m happy to be on the board of it. And, you know, why aren’t we there talking to them?

[00:50:10] Gary Fischer, PE: You know, that’s right, we can keep taking.

[00:50:12] Bob Snyder: electrical contractors, mechanical contractors.

[00:50:14] Gary Fischer, PE:  We have an issue there. We’ve tried to break in there.

[00:50:16] Gary Fischer, PE: We can’t get in the door. Maybe you can help us get in the door.

[00:50:18] Bob Snyder: Well we got to figure out, what’s interesting was they, I can, they talked about us teaching a class at one of the small conferences and who would be the guy to teach it. So that’s something we should figure out.

[00:50:39] Gary Fischer, PE: Absolutely. We’d love to do that.

[00:50:40] Bob Snyder: I don’t, I mean, I think like it, like who does an hour or a couple hour talk? Is it? You know, we’ve got to find the right person because it’s, I’m not sure who the right person is, whether it’s James or whether it’s Roberto, I don’t, I’m not sure.

[00:50:54] Gary Fischer, PE: Or it could be me.

[00:50:55] Bob Snyder: It could be you. Maybe you should go and, talk and be the liaison and talk to the mechanical contractors. I have the in.

[00:51:02] Gary Fischer, PE: We’ll have the opportunity.

[00:51:03] Bob Snyder: I mean, I’m probably going to, I mean, I’ll probably be the present the whole damn thing.

[00:51:05] Gary Fischer, PE: Oh my goodness. We’ve got to take advantage of that.

[00:51:07] Bob Snyder: We should take advantage of that.

[00:51:09] Bob Snyder: But yeah, and electrical, NECA.

[00:51:10] Gary Fischer, PE: Sure

[00:51:11] Bob Snyder:  Right? Have you talked to those at all?

[00:51:12] Gary Fischer, PE: We’ve tried.

[00:51:13] Bob Snyder:  So I know.

[00:51:14] Gary Fischer, PE: We just get this wall.

[00:51:16] Bob Snyder:  Well, you have to remember, so.

[00:51:17] Gary Fischer, PE: We don’t have the contacts. It’s a contact business.

[00:51:19] Bob Snyder:  Well, it’s a money game. I mean, let’s be real. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s an organization as a business.

[00:51:24] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah.

[00:51:25] Bob Snyder: And an organization as a business needs financials to run on. I mean, the dues pay for 20 percent of the operation. The donations and the conferences, that pays for that, so yeah. And quite frankly, no one knows what the hell you’re talking about.

[00:51:38] Gary Fischer, PE: No, they don’t.

[00:51:39] Bob Snyder: They just don’t. So no, we should and I know this ELECTRI is the innovation piece of, NECA.

[00:51:51] Bob Snyder: And I know the, guy who runs.

[00:51:54] Gary Fischer, PE: Oh my gosh.

[00:51:56] Bob Snyder: I know the guy who runs this guy, Josh Bone’s, a tremendous friend of mine, and I’ve known him for years and he’s been on this tech journey with me. You know, we could we should.

[00:52:05] Gary Fischer, PE: Let’s collaborate.

[00:52:06] Bob Snyder: We should collaborate on those things.

[00:52:07] Gary Fischer, PE: Okay that will be fantastic.

[00:52:10] Bob Snyder: You know, but totally.

[00:52:11] Gary Fischer, PE: Good excellent. Wow. This ended up someplace I didn’t expect. That’s fantastic.

[00:52:15] Bob Snyder: If you hang out with me long enough, we’ll always end up places you don’t expect, good or bad.

[00:52:20] Gary Fischer, PE: Well, thank you for taking the time.

[00:52:21] Bob Snyder: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your generosity. I really means very much to me.

[00:52:25] Gary Fischer, PE: You bet.