As we weather the highest economic inflation since the 1980s amidst continued construction demand across many sectors, everyone is now faced with the question, "how do we handle cost escalation from contract to project completion?"

Specialty contractors are feeling deeply exposed as they produce estimates today with prices that may be completely irrelevant tomorrow. Owners, of course, want price certainty in a totally uncertain market. Companies caught on the wrong side of this issue are risking devastating losses, and some companies are considering bowing out of the market right now rather than gamble on what seems like losing odds.

Michael Wagner, a construction attorney at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, joins The Huddle to talk about how contracts can protect everyone involved so we can move forward with confidence and keep America building.

Transcript:

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00:00
Speaker 1
We need to get back to work. And work is one of the ways that we contribute to this country. That we grow our gdp, we grow our tax base, we contribute to each other effectively. We help finance our national security, our homeland security, our infrastructure. I had key employees that really wanted to be leaders in the company, but.

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00:19
Speaker 2
They didn't want to have any ownership responsibility that way.

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00:23
Speaker 1
So I just had to start researching out and figuring out, well, how do.

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00:27
Speaker 2
I market my company?

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00:28
Speaker 1
Go to your local school board for one hour twice this year. And if you can have even just 10 or 15 employers show up and do that at the same school board every single month, there's two contractors filling out a little card to give your 30 seconds at the podium that says, I need your help and we have great jobs. Eventually they will hear you. But if everyone just did two hours a year, that's how we change this. Stacy, how you doing this morning?

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00:51
Speaker 3
I'm doing great.

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00:52
Speaker 2
She loves it. I ask the question every time, she's.

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00:55
Speaker 1
Like, I'm fine, dude, just a little much. And I say to that owner, I said, see, you're not willing to invest in yourself. You're not going to invest in yourself. You're going to invest in companies you have no control over, whereas your company you control. And you don't have the confidence to pour the money into that. When things are busy and they're looking for their GC friends to sit down and negotiate a project on a GC.

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01:21
Speaker 2
And a fee and they're more excited.

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01:22
Speaker 1
About building the project and then all of a sudden the model, the market swings and now the developer market is going to go out and they're going to hard bid the same project to two or three different PCs. And that's where it starts going down. It's morning huddle time. Good morning. Chad Prinke here with Stacy Holzinger and our guest, Michael Wagner. Stacy, how are you today?

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01:53
Speaker 3
I'm doing great. I had a great Easter with my family. We went to Holland Ridge Farm and it's the biggest flower picking farm, I think in the US it was all tulips. There was like 8 million flowers. It was really cool experience, really cool thing. Yeah.

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02:12
Speaker 1
Did you have happy kids picking flowers?

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02:14
Speaker 3
Yes. And the weather was beautiful.

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02:18
Speaker 1
That's, that's the dream that's living. That's wonderful. Where were you that the weather was beautiful?

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02:23
Speaker 3
Well, I think it was called Cream Ridge, New Jersey. So that day was beautiful.

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02:28
Speaker 1
But, Saturday was the day.

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02:30
Speaker 2
Yes.

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02:32
Speaker 1
Yeah, because Sunday got cold, man. I was like, we did a whole outdoor thing with my family, and I was wearing, like, a scarf, you know, that's. And it takes.

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02:42
Speaker 3
Winter is never ending, for sure.

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02:45
Speaker 1
Michael, how are you today?

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02:47
Speaker 2
Good. Chad, how are you doing?

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02:48
Speaker 1
Doing real good. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Absolutely. Welcome this morning. So how was your Easter?

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02:54
Speaker 2
It was good. Yeah. Had the Easter egg hunt with my two and a half year old, so that was fun.

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03:00
Speaker 1
That is fun. Yeah. They're. They're like, amazed at the simplest hiding spaces at that. It's kind of like me. I'm about. About the same, so. All right, well, good. So today we have a pretty exciting topic, at least for me and the people that I hang out with, which is we're going to be talking about, you know, real fair and sustainable solutions to escalation. And right now in the construction industry and depending on. When you're listening to this, it's pretty much, you know, always relevant to some extent, but right now, in particular, materials escalation is just through the roof. And it's on everybody's mind. Everybody's worried about it. And so bringing in Mike, who is a construction attorney for Safe Worth and Shaw. Did I say that right? Safe Worth or.

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03:51
Speaker 2
Yes, Seifarth Shaw.

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03:53
Speaker 1
Seifarth, but he's a construction attorney based in Washington, D.C. represents general contractors, subcontractors and developers. So he's got a really multifaceted view of what's going on, the solutions that are being come up to resolve this, some of which Mike is actually employing himself and thought that this would be a really valuable conversation for our audience. So as always, guys, engage. Make sure that you're asking your questions, that you share your comments. If you're watching us live here, we want to make sure that we're capitalizing on the fact that you're here and get some of your questions answered. Stacy will bring you back with around 10 minutes to go to bring some of those things to the front, while right now Mike and I dive into the conversation.

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04:45
Speaker 3
All right, see you guys in a bit.

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04:47
Speaker 1
See you soon. Thanks. So. So, Mike, first off, just give us a little bit more background on yourself. So I, I described what you do and who you do it for. Anything else you'd give us to kind of help. Help us to see who you are and what your background is?

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05:06
Speaker 2
Sure, yeah. So I'm a, as you said, construction and government contracts attorney here at SEIFARTH Shaw in D.C. been practicing about 10 years now. You know, prior to my career as an attorney, you know, I worked for a general contractor in the D.C. area. I did that in law school and then a year after I graduated from law school. But I've grown up around the construction industry. My dad was an electrical contractor in the D.C. area as well, so grew up helping him in the summers, moved in the office, did project management, accounting. So our conversations at the dinner table were about the projects you were working on and the change orders he was working on at a time. So just been around it my whole life.

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05:54
Speaker 1
Really. That. Yeah. You. No question, you've been around it your whole life.

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05:58
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's.

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05:59
Speaker 1
I. My construction story. And some of the audience has heard this. My construction story is I was a laborer for my brother who owns a construction company. I was a laborer for my brother from the time I was 15 to the time I was 23. And I started to like, I gathered a whole bunch of skills. But note I said a laborer for that entire time. I, I got precisely as good as a first year apprentice in like several different categories.

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06:27
Speaker 2
Right.

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06:28
Speaker 1
Just enough to know I wasn't cut out for it. So. So yeah, runs. Runs in the family as well. I can, I can relate. So. Okay, here we are as we're recording this. It is April 19, 2022. We are in the midst of the highest levels of inflation that we've seen since the 80s. Economy wide and specifically in the building industry. We're experiencing a very acute intense and we have been actually for several years now. Price escalation, volatile price, your cost market for materials. How did we get to this level of inflation and price escalation?

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07:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think, you know, I will say that, you know, inflation and escalation has been around. You know, I think here though, it's a heightened awareness that we're looking at and really COVID 19 and the pandemic brought a perfect storm which has created this pricing volatility. You have labor issues, restrictions, supply chain problems, you have a downturn in manufacturing, and then transportation and logistical problems. All of that's come together at one point, at one time, which has really created that perfect storm. And that's why we're seeing the volatility in the market.

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07:59
Speaker 1
Yeah, it is a perfect storm. It seems like no matter what topic you talk about in that list, there's a damn good reason contributing to why we are where we are. And that by itself would be challenge enough, but when you start stacking things, it's. It's really. You created this perfect storm. I do wonder though. And, and you don't. If you don't have a comment on this, it's okay, I'll just. This is just my own crazy theory, but I do wonder to what extent organizations are capitalizing on the market conditions and the plethora of reasonable excuses for high prices to go ahead and jack their prices up and create excess profits. Because I'm seeing the feedback from the market in terms of profitability in 2020 and 2021 particularly, were wildly profitable years for a lot of organizations.

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09:02
Speaker 1
So profits didn't suffer, prices went up, and somehow the market stomached that price, you know, Escalation.

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09:11
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely don't have an insight to what the manufacturers are doing. You know, if they are experiencing these problems, it seems that many of them are, or whether, you know, they are taking advantage of new market conditions.

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09:24
Speaker 1
Maybe a little column A and a little column B. I mean, it could.

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09:27
Speaker 2
Be a little bit both.

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09:28
Speaker 1
Right. I'm not gonna suggest that everybody's making stuff up. I don't think that's occurring. But I do think that I'm not hearing of anybody that is complaining about losing money on that side of the aisle. And in fact, I'm hearing some very opposite stories. So at any rate, you. One of the things that's funny you said price escalation, it's been around, you know, this has been happening for quite some time. Why haven't we been talking about price escalation and contracts on any mass scale? Because I will tell you that the conversation I'm having over and over with my contractor clients, particularly trade contractor clients and members of our peer groups, which give us a really good insight as to what's going on in the industry.

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10:16
Speaker 1
They're regularly saying, is anybody able to secure some sort of, you know, safety net for cost escalation and contracts? And that if I had a, you know, a graph for how frequently that came up from over the past 12 months, it's. It peaked probably two or maybe two or three months ago, where it started to be, you know, the dominant discussion in our peer groups. How are you dealing with cost escalation? Why hasn't it been at the forefront until recently? I mean, obviously it's worse than it has been, but what did it used to, what does it normally look like?

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11:01
Speaker 2
Yeah, so, I mean, you're always going to have, in certain instances, I think, people building price escalation into their contracts in some way. You know, when I was looking at this topic, one thing I found interesting is that a lot of the form documents that we use, you know, such as the AIA or American Institute of Architects form documents. They do not have price escalation qualities. And the only one that I was able to find actually before this was Consensus Docs 200.1, which is actually an amendment to deal with price escalation in a construction contract. So I think it is just the heightened awareness at this point. I mean, like you said, it has been around. Tariffs cause price escalation all the time.

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11:50
Speaker 2
For example, when there was a change from, to the Biden administration, the current administration, November 24, 2021, we had a double on the tariff, an increase on the tariff for lumber coming out of Canada. So that was, you know, that's not necessarily caused by the pandemic, but it was caused by a government agency raising the tariff on that.

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12:16
Speaker 1
I did not realize that.

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12:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, correct. So, you know, those types of actions are always going to be taking place. But again, I think I go back to the heightened awareness with the pandemic.

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12:31
Speaker 1
So, so, but what you just said about the fact that standard industry documents, whether it's aia, which is probably ubiquitous. Right. When it comes to construction docs, contracts don't have escalation addressed in any of them. So no wonder this is something everybody is, you know, discussing is how do you deal with this? Because there actually hasn't been a standard for dealing with this up until now. I guess that the method for dealing with this up until now has been suck it up and absorb the risk. Raise your prices at the time of bid if you think prices are going to be higher. Lower them if you think prices are going to be lower. And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And I think that's kind of been the norm. But what should we be doing about our current circumstances?

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13:21
Speaker 1
What do we do about price escalation now?

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13:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, so I think what you were just describing was the undisclosed contingency that without the standard form clauses or custom clauses for price escalation, contractors are putting contingencies that they're not disclosing to the owner or the upstream entity.

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13:41
Speaker 1
Also known as just raising your prices.

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13:43
Speaker 2
Yes, correct. So that doesn't bring much transparency into pricing. And at that point, the owner is really not getting an accurate price. They don't know what exactly is going on there, what the actual price of the materials or equipment that are being incorporated into the project. So you know what we've been coming up with, there's a number of things and you can be very creative in your approach. The first is to sit down with the owner or the Subcontractor, sitting down with the contractor and coming up with, you know, a disclosed contingency, we're going to set aside money ahead of time to deal with this risk that prices are going to go up. And so that is one way to sit down and negotiate is to set, you know, set the dollar value.

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14:32
Speaker 2
It does have its downside, because what if you don't cover the price escalation? So you've got to kind of come up with a fair number and. And there's got to be some dialogue and transparency into the. The costs.

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14:47
Speaker 1
Yep. And you're using this term transparency, and I want to call that to people's attention because if there's another comment that we get from our subcontractor, peer groups or roundtables, it is that there's generally nervousness about transparency. This thought that I don't really want people knowing my costs. I really don't want to open my books. But where does the transparency need to flow? Does it need to flow from the specialty contractor through the general contractor, all the way up to the owner? You know, how would you recommend that transparency flows and then also make the case for transparency?

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15:31
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think it has to go start from the bottom up. The suppliers who are actually sending in this equipment or pricing the equipment and materials, they have to, of course, provide it to the sub, and the sub needs to pass it up to the general contractor and ultimately to the owner. And I think the case for transparency is that in many instances, number one, the owner could ultimately find out, if they really wanted to, by doing math or calling around to the supply houses to figure out what the actual cost of these materials are running on a day. Right.

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16:10
Speaker 1
It's not as if it's a secret.

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16:12
Speaker 2
Yes. Yeah. So they could ultimately, if they really wanted to figure out what the markup is on top of those materials. The other thing is, I think the construction business, it's all about partnership. You all have to be working together, pulling in the same direction to make a project successful. And to the extent that transparency in the cost, you can do that and share that and everybody is winning, I guess would be the term. That's what ultimately you want. And then the third for the case of transparency is many of these contracts, such as a cost plus with the gmp, they're going to have audit rights or you're going to have to demonstrate your costs anyways.

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17:00
Speaker 2
So, yeah, the owner is going to be able to go in and look at the books or look at the invoices, look at the ledgers and figure out exactly what that cost is.

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17:14
Speaker 1
So the analogy that I would use here, thinking about what you're describing, is it depends one's mindset. If you are a home run hitter and you're focused on swinging for the fences, you'll hit some home runs. Yeah, but home run hitters, as any good baseball fan knows, home run hitters tend to also strike out a decent amount. Their averages tend to be a little like we had the Mark McGuire hitting.219 with 55 home runs, you know, kind of thing. It's, it's either a home run or a strikeout, and there's really not a whole heck of a lot in between. If that's your mentality, if that's where you're coming from, you're probably not even really interested in having this conversation about price escalation, right? Cost escalation and contracts. You're probably saying, look, I'm here, I'm making bets. I don't want the transparency.

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18:03
Speaker 1
I'm looking to find ways to win. And I think I'm smarter than the market. I think I can read what's coming down the line, and I'm comfortable with that risk. I'm a home run hitter. That's, that's kind of my mentality. If you'd rather get on base, then you're, then you probably, you know, if you have that mentality where, you know, a single, a walk, you're double here and there. If that's your mentality, then you're probably not going to be feeling nearly as uncomfortable about the idea of transparency, because when you open your books, you're not. You're, you're going to be feeling comfortable about showing the profits that you're making because that you think they're reasonable, you think they're fair, you know, that different type of stuff. So I'm not, then, seriously, I'm really not judging between the two.

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18:55
Speaker 1
But I do think that home run hitters do some interesting things to the overall market. And it's probably the reason that owners are hesitant to, you know, offer contingency clauses and go down this road because there's usually somebody willing to gamble.

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19:17
Speaker 2
And it really does come down to your risk profile. Are you going to be the person who's going to increase their, your, their price, you know, put a large markup in it, or do you want to try to negotiate things out and see where it ends up? You know, it's all about balancing the risk. If you have a high risk profile or a low risk Profile. There's multiple ways to approach it.

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19:38
Speaker 1
So, so what do you see going back to. So, so let's say that we're tailoring the rest of this discussion really around the person that's just trying to get on base, the person that's trying to make a reasonable profit doesn't want to get killed in the market. And I do know these folks, man. I, I, I know trade contractors right now that are like finishing up work that they priced in 2020. They're getting no help and they're losing money on every project that they priced in 2020. They're bringing it home right now. And what they're really looking for is for just somebody to, you know, help to cushion the next ones. They're not, they're not looking to swing hard the other way or hit home runs. They just need to get on base for those people.

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20:25
Speaker 1
When you're, when you get into contract negotiations themselves, what advice would you have if you were trying to approach this topic of establishing material escalation clause?

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20:39
Speaker 2
Yeah, so I think you need to request a sit down request, you know, sit down and negotiate with who? With whoever you're contracting with. So for example, the subcontractors need to sit with the general contractors and general contractors need to sit with the owners and let them know what's going out there with the pricing that we're seeing, what's increasing, you know, what's going down where the market is at the time of contracting. And that's going to kind of guide your conversation on what can be done. You know, I think the first step would be to talk about the contingency and then, you know, I think the second step is to go for a price escalation clause. And there's multiple ways that you can approach the price escalation clause.

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21:27
Speaker 2
You know, you can set it based on, you know, a percentage increase or you can, you know, set it based on time or a combination of both, which would be a temporal approach. So when I'm talking about percentage increase, you know, what the contract provision could say, you know, the contractor is going to own the price increase up to 10% and then from there the owner is going to carry the burden. So, so it's a risk sharing scenario.

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21:54
Speaker 1
Based on the percentage and there's an expectation that I'm going to have to demonstrate, I'm going to have to prove that my cost went up, that is going to be able to be audited.

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22:05
Speaker 2
Correct.

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22:06
Speaker 1
Therefore they're going to be able to See what my hard cost on my materials were for that.

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22:11
Speaker 2
Yeah. And that's where the transparency comes in. You're going to have to provide those invoices.

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22:16
Speaker 1
Yep. And on the flip side of that, it seems to me, you know, nobody can have it all one way. So. So is there. Is there a. A feature in this escalation discussion where if the materials cost goes down by 10%, then the. There's a savings that gets split up? Like, is that, you know, how does that work?

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22:43
Speaker 2
That's. Yeah, you can be as creative as you want. There could be, you know, if it's going to be an increase, you know, that's to the benefit of the contractor in a way, but also there could be a benefit to the owner of the pricing going down. And you can build that into the contract that if there's a savings, you know, there could be an adjustment based on the pricing going down.

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23:07
Speaker 1
Excellent. Got it. Okay, good. So that's a really tangible action item. So again, I keep focusing on the. On the specialty contractors because I think they're the ones that they shoulder the burden of buying the materials. So that for the most part, obviously, you know, there are exceptions to that for that group. How would you respond to the person that says, I asked the GC if they'd be willing to sit down. They said, no can do.

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23:34
Speaker 2
I really think you need to push for it and go, you know, go back to the table as many times.

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23:39
Speaker 1
As possible as possible because have I contracted yet? Is this all. This is all prior to me going to contract?

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23:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, right.

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23:47
Speaker 1
This is all prior to me going to the contract. So. So again, if I'm going to challenge, I'm going to push back on that and just. And sort of say, if I'm a subcon. If I'm a, you know, specialty contractor, I'm saying, well, they're gonna. My competition's willing to do it. They're gonna say, you know, fine, give it to me. I'll handle it. So. So I'm running this kind of risk, you know, again, I'll put it back in your court. How would you respond to that?

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24:10
Speaker 2
I mean, what I would say is, you are not going to get the accurate pricing is the fact, you know, okay, if you want to do it that way, I'm going to put in a large contingency that's not going to be disclosed to you, and that's not good for anyone involved, including the owner who is building this project or, you know, providing the financing.

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24:30
Speaker 1
And I think that's the big message that we're sending across is that you have two choices here. Choice number one is that you deal in a world where you're getting artificially inflated prices to cover, you know, material increases that everybody's got to protect against. And if. And if you want to buy that way, fine. You don't know what the actual prices are, and your priority is just cost certainty. I don't want to pay a penny more than what I said I was going to pay up front. That's one approach that you can take if you're the buyer. The second approach that you can take is I actually just. I just want to pay what is. What is reasonable and fair inside the current parameters of the market so that if costs do go up, I'm comfortable moving up with that number.

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25:15
Speaker 1
But I think if I were a buyer, the only way I'd be willing to do that is if costs went down. I got to participate in that as well.

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25:22
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah, I. I think that's. That's right. And that. That is striking a nice balance. It's, you know. You know, if the pricing goes up, yes, we'll give you enough. A certain adjustment after a certain period of time or a certain percentage, but also, we're looking for the benefit of the pricing going down.

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25:38
Speaker 1
All right. Awesome. I cannot freaking believe that we're as far along in this show as we are already. We're getting close to the end here, and I want to make sure that Stacy has a chance to pass along some of the questions we've got.

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25:53
Speaker 2
Okay.

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25:55
Speaker 3
So do you have any clients now, any success stories that you can share of how they resolve this?

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26:02
Speaker 2
Sure, yeah. Yeah. I won't names, but, you know, we've seen a lot of contingencies that have been successful. Disclose contingencies. We've seen a lot of price escalation clauses. One thing I'm specifically thinking about was a specific material. What we did on the escalation was it was a temporal approach based on time. And what it says is the contractor will take the first six months. They're buying that in their price. After that, then the owner will participate in providing a price increase for the material or escalation. And what we also put in there was basically, if the contractor, however, delays the project, then they do not get the price escalation. So that was. That was a give and take there. It was a fair. You know, you're not entitled to the price increase if you delay the project because you're putting yourself into the.

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27:13
Speaker 2
The time period in which prices are going up.

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27:16
Speaker 1
So, so I think, make sure I understand what's happening there. I, what I think you're saying is the contractor said, look, I know what this material is going to cost for the next six months, so I'm on it for the next six months. Or, you know, roughly, I know what it's going to cost for the next six months. So I'm willing to take that risk because my price represents what it would take over the next six months. If we're done six months from now, great, we're good. But if we're, if we go into month nine, the next three months, if the material cost is higher than what I bid it at, you're going to need to cover the balance of that.

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27:51
Speaker 1
And then the owner's pushback or, you know, a counterbalance to that is simply to say, fine, but if the reason that we're on month nine is because you didn't have the manpower to get to where we needed to get to, then it's going to shift back to you. My, my only question here is, was that between, was that a specialty contractor?

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28:12
Speaker 2
So that was an owner, general contractor relationship.

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28:15
Speaker 1
Okay, got it. They were the prime. Correct on that project. Okay, got it. I was just going to say, you know, the only thing that could get dicey is, okay, what if the GC owns the delay in that kind of deal and the, in the specialty contractor had cut that deal. So does the risk now shift to the GC or they now write the check or how does that work?

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28:36
Speaker 2
So you're saying between the g. If this relationship was between the GC and the sub. Is that right?

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28:43
Speaker 1
That's right. Yeah. Because, but in a, in a GMP cost plus type of contract where, you know, ultimately that's the owner's money, you know, kind of thing, how would that work?

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28:58
Speaker 2
Yeah, so I think that's right. I mean, what you would have is you would need to flow that provision down to the subcontractor as well. So if, you know, say the general contractor flowed that provision that he had with the owner down, the subcontractor would equally be responsible for complying with that provision and the delays. So then it kind of the battle becomes between the sub and the general contractor in that instance.

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29:29
Speaker 1
What percentage of projects do you think are going out right now? Obviously, I think it depends on the market segment big time. Right. I think, I think wood frame residential is getting much, much fewer of these kinds of contract escalation clauses than maybe infrastructure kind of project. But what's your gut feel for what percentage of contracts are going out right now with some sort of materials escalation built in?

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29:57
Speaker 2
I think most, I would say the majority.

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30:00
Speaker 1
Wow.

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30:03
Speaker 2
You know, I. Going to infrastructure. I did see material escalation on concrete. So it is present and I think given the volatility in the market, people are willing to negotiate at this point.

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30:19
Speaker 1
So what I'm really hearing you say is this is not an unreasonable ask for anybody in the chain. This is not an unreasonable conversation. And to your point, when I said, hey, if somebody says no can do, you're like, yep, push double down. Because it is not unreasonable for you to be asking about this and trying to have the conversation.

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30:39
Speaker 2
I, I don't think so. And I'll go back to that partnership working together for the project.

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30:47
Speaker 1
Right. At the end of the day, do we want, when nobody wants to hurt each other coming in toward the end, maybe some people will start feeling like they want to hurt each other, which is a whole other topic for a whole other show. But you know, at that upfront stage, you know, building contracts that right out of the gate, you know, put us at odds. It's a huge mistake.

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31:07
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, you always want to, you know, you want to protect yourself in a contract, but also, you know, there should be some type of risk sharing.

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31:19
Speaker 1
Awesome. Stacy, time for one more.

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31:24
Speaker 3
So how can we handle escalation depending on the contract type?

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31:31
Speaker 2
So escalation depending on the contract price type. I think it's always going to be, you're going to always have the same options on, I would say on a cost plus, you're probably going to have more options. And that's where you know, you're going to get into more of the contingencies and allowance. You could even use allowance to cover the price escalation. But I mean, most contracts you're going to be able to build in a price escalation clause, you know, force majeure clause, sunset provisions, delay clauses. You could even go with an early release of materials or a direct buy where the owner's purchasing the materials early on and storing them. And then you have your phase construction that you could use as well. So I think regardless of whether the contract type, you're always going to have those types of provisions available to you.

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32:28
Speaker 1
Awesome. Awesome. All right, great. We are up on time and I, I know for sure that if we had folks watching this who were, you know, whether they're regardless, specialty contractor, general contractor, owner, developer, there are real takeaways that I think you provided and really appreciate that. Mike, you're a smart guy and if I needed a construction attorney, I would definitely turn to you. Despite the fact that you're a CAPS fan.

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33:02
Speaker 2
No, no. Very good.

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33:09
Speaker 1
Mike. Any final words before we wrap up and Stacy and I just kind of walk through what's going on next week.

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33:16
Speaker 2
You know, just if I can answer any further questions, you know, I can give my contact information and people are welcome to reach out.

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33:24
Speaker 1
Absolutely. Yeah. Here, here. I, I actually, I don't know how useful this is, but look Mike, up on LinkedIn, it's Michael E. Wagner on LinkedIn. Michael E. Wagner Jr. That is on LinkedIn. He's accessible there. Very responsive. I noticed. And if you know Michael, any other way that you'd have people contact you, would you have him start here?

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33:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, I start there. Also, My email is me wagnercifer.com and I'm at 202-828-5392.

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33:57
Speaker 1
Awesome. Thanks. Appreciate it. Mike. Thank you so much for being here. Stacy, let's talk a little bit about what's going on next week.

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34:04
Speaker 3
Okay, so we have Molly Cape from M Tech joining us and Maury Peterson from Rebuilding Together Montgomery. And we're going to talk about community service and how that helps our partnerships with GC subs and how we can use the materials and our resources just to help our local communities and build relationships.

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34:29
Speaker 1
Awesome. Great discussion. I think so much of the discussions that I have with my clients right now revolve around employee retention, engagement, happiness, things along those lines. It is not a natural connection for a lot of people to think about how they can involve their company and community service, how that might actually help with employee engagement retention. But it absolutely does and I look forward to digging into that with that and more with Maury and Molly. So that'll be a cool kind of group discussion next week. So thank you, Stacy, for all of your help in making sure that we have fantastic guests every week and that our guest question or sorry, our viewers questions get a chance to get answered. Anything to say before we wrap up?

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35:22
Speaker 3
Nope. I hope everyone has a great rest of the week and I hope you join us Tuesday. We'll send out an email hopefully sometime tomorrow just to let you know a recap of this episode and then who's on next week.

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35:38
Speaker 1
Excellent. Yeah, make sure that you register in advance. And hey, if you don't want to be trying to follow LinkedIn and you know, check, check our posts to find out when the next show is and get registered. Just shoot Stacy an email with your email and she will get you on our weekly list. That is the easiest possible way to make sure that you stay plugged into this and that you don't miss an episode that you want to miss. So. Or sorry, that you don't want to miss. I'll talk to, I'll talk to you guys all later. Thanks so much, Stacy. Have a good one. Audience.

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36:14
Speaker 3
See you guys.

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36:15
Speaker 1
Yeah, Bye. Bye.

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