S.3 Ep.29 TMH Digital Marketplace Michael Wisnefski
For most Americans, shopping online has become the norm for so many items in their lives. I mean, can you even remember what shopping was like before Amazon? As consumers, we have the ability to check pricing across platforms, read reviews, and buy the best available options with a click. Could we be seeing the same consumer experience developing in the construction industry?
Michael Wisnefski is working to foster the evolution of commerce in commodity raw materials. His company, MaterialsXchange is a digital marketplace for lumber.
During this show, we discuss the impacts of this kind of shopping experience on the construction industry. Who is for it, who is against it, and why? Join us as we reimagine the future marketplace for raw materials and beyond.
Transcript:
00:00
Speaker 1
All right, it's morning huddle time. Good morning. I'm not saying it works. I wish you God speed, Godspeed with all of that. I think that's really nice. You know, I'm not sure what kind.
00:11
Speaker 2
Of success you're gonna have with that.
00:12
Speaker 1
Today because the world, my friend, has changed. Right. A lot of American construction workers, they have different needs.
00:20
Speaker 2
They have completely different needs.
00:22
Speaker 3
These awards have a huge, like, criteria that you have to fill out. And they usually have a community service or community, the, you know, the most productive with a high performance value. And, you know, sometimes it's 11 o' clock at night.
00:40
Speaker 1
Funny, isn't? Yeah, not for me.
00:43
Speaker 3
Not for me.
00:44
Speaker 1
At 11 o' clock, I am guaranteed to be snoring.
00:47
Speaker 3
So, so.
00:58
Speaker 1
Good morning. It's morning huddle time here with Stacy Holzinger. I'm Chad Prinke with our guest, Mike Wisnevsky. How's everybody this morning?
01:07
Speaker 2
Very good, Doing good. Bushy tailed.
01:10
Speaker 3
Yeah.
01:11
Speaker 1
Sweet behind, right?
01:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's 8 o' clock here.
01:16
Speaker 1
8Am that's too early. Now. We used to do, we used to do the huddle at 8, Stacy, remember that?
01:22
Speaker 3
Yeah. But then we had some people, luckily, that joined us on the west coast and they said, we want to come on live, but too early for us. It's still early for them.
01:33
Speaker 1
It is still early for the West Coasters. But I, do I, you know, more people are toughing it out on the west coast joining us live, which is cool. So, so Mike Wisniewski is joining us from Materials Exchange. It is an online marketplace for raw materials. He's going to tell us a lot more about that, Mike. Tell us just a little bit about where you are in the world and your business. Just give us a, I guess, you know, 32nd overview.
02:02
Speaker 2
Well, I'm in downtown Chicago and yeah.
02:05
Speaker 1
I actually have a picture. I'm going to overlay this while you talk. Yeah, go ahead.
02:08
Speaker 2
And what we've created here is a, a digital marketplace that has the look and feel and functionality of a financial marketplace or a financial exchange. The important factor there is it allows for price discovery. And as everyone knows, I would assume lumber and material prices can be very volatile. And, you know, the idea of volatility prior to what we experienced for the last two years was substantial. And then the last two years have obviously, you know, blown the lid off this and shown what's really possible.
02:46
Speaker 1
Yeah.
02:47
Speaker 2
So, yeah, it's really important in my opinion, to have a medium or a Platform where the, you know, people, the users, the people in the market can get together and figure out what's going on. What's. What are the prices today, man?
03:04
Speaker 1
And, and, you know, it's always been this way to some extent. What you've alluded to. Price has always changed a little bit day to day, but. But a little bit, you know, is nothing compared to what we've been experiencing with price fluctuations day to day over the past couple of years in particular, probably the past, well, I guess depends on the market that you're in. But, you know, throw inflation on top of COVID and we got a whole. Got a whole storm right with price wise. And so in that picture, were seeing that this is the view from your office, right? This is Michigan, huh?
03:36
Speaker 2
We're looking east. We're in the Chicago Board of Trade building, the iconic birth. Birthplace of the futures markets.
03:43
Speaker 1
Awesome.
03:44
Speaker 2
So this is looking east. And I think the fun part of this picture is if you look on the right side, that beige building that has all the skinny little windows. Yeah. Most people don't realize that's a federal prison and it's in downtown Chicago. I mean, we are. The Sears Tower is just behind us. So, yeah, this is the beautiful view I get every morning. I look out at the lake, and then I glance over and I remember to always walk the righteous path.
04:13
Speaker 1
Yeah, no doubt. You got a constant sort of reminder that, you know, do the right thing. Do the right thing.
04:20
Speaker 2
Exactly. That's great.
04:22
Speaker 1
That's awesome. All right, well, good. So we've got a lot to talk about. I want to dig into sort of why you're doing what you're doing, and, you know, how that whole experience has gone. Stacy, I'm guessing there's going to be a fair amount of conversation, you know, on the chat. Please keep that fired up, and I will bring you back here with 5, 10 minutes left, something along those lines, and we'll hear from the audience.
04:45
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, sounds good.
04:47
Speaker 1
Sounds good. All right. So, Mike, paint a picture of just, you know, you start talking about, you know, creating this digital marketplace, a place to connect buyers and sellers, a place where people can be more informed. Paint a picture a little bit of, I don't know, 10 years from now or 15 years. I don't know how long it is in the future, but the future of the materials procurement for our audience, which is mostly construction companies, what does materials procurement look like in. In your picture of the future?
05:23
Speaker 2
It is going to be much more scientific, a lot less art form. When you Just consider all of the technology that is coming into our industry which is badly needed. You know, there's a bunch of statistics out there that show construction is the production of how they say the construction output is down.
05:47
Speaker 1
Sure.
05:47
Speaker 2
Compared to 100 years ago. It's taking us longer to do stuff while every other industry has utilized innovation and has they get more done with less. So anyway, the technology coming into the market or to this industry is nothing short of remarkable. But to operate properly it needs data and it needs good data and clean data and easy to access data and most important, it needs it digitally. So that's the science behind the game, if you would. It's about connectivity and collaboration. Let's just say if you went over to the big three car makers, you know, I guarantee you that they are integrated into their suppliers and their supply chain is fully visible and they know what's going on.
06:43
Speaker 1
Yep.
06:45
Speaker 2
Now you look at our supply chain and you have zero visibility into your suppliers, inventories, pricing, you know, it's really crazy. There's very little collaboration.
07:00
Speaker 1
So. So yeah, I remember a couple of different, there were a couple of different moments in my life that I stored along these lines. I remember an interview I was listening to, I think it was 2007 on the radio and I was driving up the road and somebody was talking about the very first. And I don't think they were calling it a smartphone, I think they were calling it a camera phone at that time and. Right. And I was driving up the road and they were talking about this camera phone. And the person said, you know, what do you paint the picture of the future of cell phones? What's the future of cell phones going to look like? And the person who was being interviewed said, you know, I think we're talking about more than the future of cell phones.
07:44
Speaker 1
I think we're talking about the future of cameras, I think we're talking about the future of video, I think we're talking about the future of maybe even computers. And they're like laughing and they're talking about like how crazy that would be and how this powerful thing in your pocket may very well turn out to be like your go to device for most life items, you know, and they were like, imagine, you know, talking to friends on video on your phone, imagine banking on your phone and things along those lines. I remember that interview back in 2007 or so, it just like burned into my brain as, you know, as, you know, time went on, I went, damn, you know, that was really spot on. And then I remember one other conversation. I was talking to a buddy of mine who, it was so funny.
08:29
Speaker 1
Right out of college, he went and he became like a store manager at Blockbuster. And I was like, I said to him, I was like, that doesn't seem like a long term gig. And he was so upset with me. It was like it was 2005 or 2006, something like that. And he was like, I don't know, man. He goes, I think people are always going to walk in, they're going to want to always shop around and get advice from somebody. And you know, obviously the market has changed. So when I start thinking about the future of materials procurement in construction, right. And I start, you know, painting this picture. Are we going to point and click for everything? Is that, is that what we're going to do?
09:04
Speaker 2
No, actually the answer is no, we're not.
09:06
Speaker 1
Okay, so what's it, how's it going to work?
09:08
Speaker 2
The system is going to do it for us.
09:10
Speaker 1
Oh, weird. Okay, now you're freaking me out. Talk about it.
09:13
Speaker 2
Okay, so here's the. If you don't know the term BIM building Information Modeling, that is going to change everything.
09:22
Speaker 1
So, so we really embrace bim. Everything gets built in this model and then the model automatically talks to the marketplace.
09:29
Speaker 2
Yeah.
09:30
Speaker 1
Yeah.
09:31
Speaker 2
Okay. You're, you're in a meeting with all the trades around building this building and in the center or you know, everyone's looking at the same screen and they're looking at a, the blueprint, if you would, which is a bim.
09:44
Speaker 1
Yep.
09:44
Speaker 2
And they go, okay, here's what's going to happen. We are going to move this wall from here over here and we're going to add a bathroom. Yep. And everyone in today goes, oh, now I gotta reorder.
10:00
Speaker 1
Right.
10:01
Speaker 2
The system will be connected up to your management system and your planning and all of that. And it will go, oh, click, order those new things.
10:13
Speaker 1
Cool.
10:14
Speaker 2
And it'll reschedule it. Everything will be done by the system, by the art. It's really, it's artificial intelligence is what it turns out to be.
10:24
Speaker 1
And will I be, will I be plugged into like my preferred supplier or will they be just one Amazon? Will it automatically shop for me? What do you envision there?
10:35
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. It'll, you'll look into your suppliers and you'll see in their inventories and you know when their next available truck is. Cool.
10:45
Speaker 1
So, so maybe I can plug in my preferences. What's more important? Delivery time, price?
10:51
Speaker 2
Actually, you won't have to. The system will do all of this.
10:55
Speaker 1
All right, so because the system's so.
10:59
Speaker 2
Much smarter and as you slide the wall around, everything's going to be changing, you know, okay, now you need more two by fours. Nope, now you need less two by fours. Now you need more two by six. So like the system can think so much faster obviously than any human, any group of humans can.
11:16
Speaker 1
Yeah, there's going to need to be obviously oversight on that. But you know, this goes to one of the things that I've told my children already, which is like, you know, if there's one thing to go to school for folks, it's robotics. And like just, you know, just be somebody that can handle, that can work with the future workforce that may be largely robotic or, you know, artificial intelligence driven behind that.
11:40
Speaker 2
The next term, CLT or mass timber.
11:44
Speaker 1
Yep, sure.
11:45
Speaker 2
That is absolutely going to change our industry.
11:49
Speaker 1
Yeah. Talk about that from your perspective. Why is that going to change our industry?
11:54
Speaker 2
Well, two ways. First, it consumes an immense amount of forest products.
12:00
Speaker 1
Yep.
12:02
Speaker 2
As it replaces concrete and steel, it's going to, number one, change the way we build. It's going to change who is important from a supply side in the market. You know, your preferred vendor. If they're slinging two by fours today and they decide we're sticking with two by fours instead of going to mass timber, they're probably going to have a hard go of it. It's going to change the trades in the field and how they build and you know, their roles.
12:36
Speaker 1
There's the first mass timber project is actually being built right now in Baltimore. What's the status of that in Chicago? Do you have a sense of what that's like in your world?
12:44
Speaker 2
Yeah, Chicago is a couple buildings. I was just up in Milwaukee, the tallest residential, the tallest mass timber building in the United States. This ascent in downtown Milwaukee is.
12:56
Speaker 1
Do you know how tall it is?
12:58
Speaker 2
26 stories, I believe.
12:59
Speaker 1
Oh my, that's awesome.
13:01
Speaker 2
And these, here's the other thing is everybody wants to say, well, you got it's all wood or it's all concrete and steel. And the reality is as you mix them and you put the best possible material in the best roll for a building, it. That works out really well. And you know, mass timber right now at its price point only makes sense above five stories, five or six stories. But as they figure out a cheaper way to produce it and use it's going to come down like the Midwest has a massive issue with bricklayers.
13:42
Speaker 1
Okay.
13:42
Speaker 2
There just aren't enough masons. And you know, you look at many of these, the houses in Chicago, they have concrete block walls. They're going to replace those with mass timber and these houses are going to go up so much faster. So they're like, I haven't teased the whole thing out, especially from how much fiber, how much wood it actually consumes. So it's going to be really interesting.
14:11
Speaker 1
Yeah, I see the supplies end of that being a critical question. I'm positive there's a bunch of work being done on that right now. I'm not privy, but okay. So we see this materials procurement world where BIM and the machine surrounding all of that tells us what we need, helps us to see where we should be getting it from, and essentially is our decision making tool, human oversight, to double check and make sure all that makes sense. But the AI kind of does it for us. We're envisioning that sort of future world. Why are you doing this? What motivated you to get involved in leading this kind of change?
14:57
Speaker 2
So I've always been a bit of a problem solver and kind of swimming upstream, going a little bit against the current. And the term that always has driven me nuts since I was young was oh, you have to pay your dues or this is the way we've always done it and you just have to learn.
15:15
Speaker 1
Right.
15:17
Speaker 2
When I first got in the business, I looked and there were these people that were making a bunch of money that weren't really that bright and really weren't studying or working their craft, if you would, and they were making money just because they had the relationship.
15:32
Speaker 1
Right, Sure.
15:32
Speaker 2
I said, there's just got to be a better way to do this. And I became so frustrated with the lumber and building materials industry that I left and I went into the financial trading world. And at that time the financial trading world was just embracing this digital idea, you know, of trading online. And my, you know, I was actually sitting in Chicago and trading futures market in Europe, the URX Exchange. And we would click the mouse and it would take like one second for the signal to go all the way over to Frankfurt and come back.
16:07
Speaker 1
Sure.
16:08
Speaker 2
And it just blew me away by the way, that, oh my gosh, it happens in a second now, you know, we're in milliseconds, like that 1 second time frame wouldn't work. So I ended up coming back into the lumber industry and I walked into the lumber futures pit in 2009, which at that time was all open outcry, just, you Know, guys standing around yelling back and forth at each other and you know, don't let it get lost. That I said, guys, because here's how that industry, that business worked. You had to be very aggressive. It helped if you were big, it helped if you were tall and you had a booming voice. And that's. It was a great system. Don't get me wrong.
16:51
Speaker 2
Absent of technology, the amount of trading that was being done in the trading pits of Chicago was nothing short of remarkable. But now you overlay the fact that we have technology that we can do these transactions more efficiently, more accurately, have more transparency into them, make the markets more fair. So I walk into the lumber pit with a computer, these all these guys laugh at me and they're like, oh, what's this guy gonna do? In the first five minutes I made $1,000 because there was a digital market alongside the pit market that they were ignoring. Yeah, it was almost like if all the booksellers in the world said, oh, there's that Amazon thing, we're just going to ignore it's going to go away. And I walked in and I was arbitraging between the booksellers and Amazon.
17:41
Speaker 2
Anyway, 18 months later, 95% of the volume had gone on to the screen, the digital market and the guys in the pit were standing around doing nothing.
17:52
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's the way it works.
17:54
Speaker 2
What I want to circle back to though is the comment about there were guys in the pit. Here's where the opportunity lied then. I was an outsider and I came in and I went from totally outside to being one of the biggest traders in the lumber market, especially in the options market. My neighbor is a traitor. Now if this neighbor of mine was a traitor in 1995, that person would have been, you know, probably about 30 years old, about 6 foot 4 with a booming voice and probably an athletic background. Anyway, she is a about 5 foot nothing Korean girl with a master's in physics and getting a PhD in something. So the, everything's been turned on its head right now. That opportunity for her to, you know, apply what she knows, which is utilizing technology to make a system more efficient.
18:57
Speaker 1
And, and the market now values a different set of trades. Right. Characteristics.
19:01
Speaker 2
And she trades soybean options. Yep, kind of. You would never expect.
19:08
Speaker 1
That's awesome.
19:10
Speaker 2
The cool thing is it doesn't mean that a 6 foot 4, athletic background person could still be trading soybean options.
19:18
Speaker 3
Right.
19:19
Speaker 1
It's, you got to have the ability to add value. You know, to that space. And so, so, man, there's so many questions I have. What kind of headwinds have you faced trying to get. Is there anybody who doesn't want this to be successful? I mean, other than your competitors, Is there anybody who doesn't want this to be successful?
19:37
Speaker 2
Well, who is our competitor is the question. Right.
19:39
Speaker 1
Okay, talk about that.
19:42
Speaker 2
Yeah. The wholesale. There's a, a big segment of the wholesale community that has zero interest in this. Now. In this last run up, these wholesalers made so much money. I mean, obscene. Like I know people that made well over a million dollars just quickly buying and selling over the phone.
20:04
Speaker 1
Yeah.
20:04
Speaker 2
Or email, whatever. Just being in the mix of it taking on very little risk. They want everything to stay. Nobody wants change. Change is a four letter word, man. You stay away from change. Right. Because if you've built something up, just you want to milk it Right. As long as you can. The, the forward thinking people really like it honestly that the. As the market has shifted, as the market was going screaming higher and there was very. Getting your hands on materials was difficult.
20:44
Speaker 1
Yeah.
20:44
Speaker 2
The people coming to us were those whose current vendors were no longer able to support them. So they were looking for something different. Builders, a lot of turnkey framers, panel manufacturers, trust manufacturers. The, the ingenuity of the crafty people out there who are really building the buildings. They were coming to us, the actual distributors and those people in the supply chain, they really weren't so keen on it. Like they were going, you know, I, we see that you're going to disrupt our business.
21:20
Speaker 1
Yep.
21:21
Speaker 2
And the guys and the ends, they had already been disrupted. Like they weren't getting their material. They're like, look, we throw in the towel, we'll look for anything. Now what's interesting is the sellers, the supply side are coming back to us and are open to discussing using our platform.
21:39
Speaker 1
Why, why do you think that is?
21:41
Speaker 2
Because it's not as easy to sell. You know, they, those guys walked in every morning and they had, you know, a pile of wood to sell and by 9am it was gone.
21:50
Speaker 1
Right. Because their customers are shifting.
21:53
Speaker 2
Well, the market was so strong that they didn't need help selling.
21:56
Speaker 1
Sure. Right. There was, there was so much demand. But do you see the customer shifting to a more online experience? Right.
22:04
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, this show is a perfect example of what's shifting. And it is, it's about transparency and it's about information people. Now since we have our phones and we have this connectivity and this ability to communicate over long stretches instantaneously. They want real time data. So the information that gets, you know, talked about on your show, they very easily could rely on their sales rep to come out to the job site or whatever and say, oh, let me tell you about this new thing.
22:37
Speaker 3
Right.
22:39
Speaker 2
But they don't. That messes with their day. This works out so much better for people.
22:44
Speaker 1
Right. This is either live or recorded. People can catch it up on their own time. They can fast forward to the parts that they really want to listen to. Right? Yeah.
22:51
Speaker 2
It's putting the control back into the user's hands.
22:55
Speaker 1
Well, and I think that's ultimately the way every market has gone, isn't it?
23:00
Speaker 2
Right.
23:00
Speaker 1
Like every, every cons, every market will find a way, the consumer will find a way to push progress toward more transparency, more affordability, more quality. The consumer tries to find ways to do that. And I think anybody who tries to stand in the way of that, anybody in industry, if you're, you know, again, if you're Blockbuster and you're saying, nope, we're keeping all the stores, everybody loves walking in, that's just ignoring progress.
23:35
Speaker 2
It is, but it's the innovators in the industry who bring a product and show it to the consumer and the consumer says, oh, that's kind of cool. Like what cracks me up. People are like self driving cars, for instance. Oh my God, never. I, I like to hold the wheel well, Are you kidding me? Do you know how nice it would be? So my family has a vacation house in way northern Wisconsin. It takes six hours to get there. Can you imagine? If you say I'm going to the lake house, how are you getting there? Well, I'm gonna plug it in the car, the destination, and I'm gonna go get in the car in my pajamas at nine o' clock tonight and I'm going to wake up at, you know, 6 o' clock in the morning at the cabin.
24:16
Speaker 2
Totally sign me up for that. Right? Yeah.
24:21
Speaker 1
And again, I think for every, you know, one person who says, I like the feel of the steering wheel and I really like, you know, that's what they're okay. But that's not, I would say there's probably 20 others that would rather wake up at the cabin. I mean that's, you know, that's the deal. So it's not that these marketplaces go away altogether either.
24:42
Speaker 2
Right.
24:42
Speaker 1
It's just that they, it's just that the consumer shifts.
24:45
Speaker 2
Sure. Look at Uber and taxis, like, right. Were we as consumers saying I'm done with this taxis. I want to be able to order it on my phone. No, you have no idea. Like you were just used to downtown Chicago. You walk out and you wave your arm and a car pulls up. That's pretty easy. Why do you, what else do you need? Well, oh, wait a minute. I can sit at my, the table and order the car and pick which kind of car I want. Oh, that's kind of cool. I'll do that instead. Oh, and then they're going to tell me when they're here, right?
25:13
Speaker 1
And I know the price in advance and I can see my rough arrival time. And I can see, right, if I.
25:20
Speaker 2
Leave something in the car, I know who did it or know whose car like it and what cracks me up. That's such a good example. The taxi industry was in the best possible position to have pulled off that.
25:34
Speaker 1
Oh my God, they had all the drivers. Are you kidding me? It was crazy.
25:37
Speaker 2
Let's flip to the current building material supply chain. Who in this supply chain is better positioned to bring a digital solution and make the lives of their customers more easy?
25:50
Speaker 1
I would say the people with all the customers.
25:53
Speaker 2
Right? But you know what? They're not. And they don't want to because they want everybody to be reliant on the archaic systems they have in place. Because if I'm so crappy as a supplier and they're so crappy, I just have to be less crappy than them and just get my talons into you. And once we're locked in, you know, you can't go anywhere else.
26:20
Speaker 1
Man, I any again. I think you can play this out in any capital market. You can even play it out in, you know, societal change, all those different types of things. Once the world is moving down the progress line, it's, it's a bad idea to try to, you know, ignore it, fight it, disagree with it. It would be much wiser to start to, you know, figure out ways and you know, my God, one of, if not the most powerful company in the world has literally given us the playbook with Amazon. This is how we want to buy, fill in we right with anybody. We all want to be able to shop easily, quickly, and surround ourselves with the information.
27:07
Speaker 2
Here's the study that I've just basically finished and I'm working on my solution. This last market we had very volatile, In a volatile market, as the consumer of the product, let's say the builder, you know what they need? They need longer term, guaranteed pricing. They need more security. What happened 90 day pricing went to.
27:30
Speaker 1
30 day, they lost all that. I mean it went to 11 day. Yeah.
27:34
Speaker 2
It went the absolute opposite direction.
27:36
Speaker 1
Yeah.
27:37
Speaker 2
So, oh, you have a problem. Here's my solution. You're more screwed.
27:41
Speaker 1
Yeah.
27:42
Speaker 2
And now it's not all the blame, by the way, on the material supplier. As an industry, we need to remember the prison in the background and actually do the right thing and we need to have solid contracts. If I go, look, I want to buy from you for 120 day pricing. Okay. That's a deal. Like you're not walking away from that.
28:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
28:06
Speaker 2
And his customers not walking away. So like we need to get rock solid agreements and it's out. See the crazy thing is it's out there. You can get this long term pricing, it's just a matter of getting the agreements. But this is a perfect example of where someone is going to come up with the solution that the industry really needs, which is, you know, good product, the right product, the right time, the right price held inside of a commodity market. That's not easy, but it's possible. But we have to work together on this. We have to have good contracts, we have to have good information and we have to think differently. You got to think outside the box.
28:50
Speaker 1
Well, you're, we're operating in a very interesting world and I, I can't even imagine the, I mean you're a relatively young company. Would you say four years, three and a half, something like that?
29:01
Speaker 2
Three. It's just over three years from the first code being typed in the computer.
29:05
Speaker 1
I mean, what a wild ride.
29:08
Speaker 2
Yeah. If someone would have said, what do you think? Let's do a startup in the middle of a pandemic.
29:14
Speaker 1
Yeah.
29:15
Speaker 2
Or you know, we're gonna have a pandemic, then we're going to have a, the wildest volatility you've ever had. Yep. And oh, just for icing on the cake, then we're going to throw inflation and the fastest rate rises you've seen in, you know, 50 years and.
29:32
Speaker 1
Go, yeah, sign up.
29:35
Speaker 2
But the ironic thing is it's those outside forces that really pull the covers back on how inefficient and how broken the system is.
29:45
Speaker 1
It does.
29:46
Speaker 2
Without those outside forces, you're like, you know, the car still work and don't lift the hood, the car's still working.
29:52
Speaker 1
Well, keep doing what you're doing, man. I think that's pretty, I think it's pretty aggressive to. I love people who are trying to do something dramatically different. You clearly are and it's working. So, Stacy, what do we have from the audience?
30:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, let me check. I don't see any new questions, but I was just thinking as you were talking, so you talked about the digital marketplace and building information modeling. What are your thoughts on. So you haven't huge mechanical room and you have all these, you know, equipment will, though, where will there be like ticklers that say, you know, we're coming up on 30 years of this equipment now you should replace it or will there be if like a system breaks down? Do you work with that on? It's time to testing buildings. Yeah. Existing.
30:52
Speaker 2
You're talking a building that was built using bim, right? Yes, it. Oh my God. Bim's the beautiful. The best solution for this. Think about your house today. You look at the wall. Wouldn't you love to know what's behind that wall if. If you had a digital print of that and you can go so far, there's technology today where they will take an image of the job site every day or every few hours and you can literally see what was behind that wall as it was being built.
31:24
Speaker 1
Yeah.
31:24
Speaker 2
So, yeah, the BIM idea with all the information about the building in one spot. Yeah. You can have a tickler and all of a sudden the light pops up. It's been 10 years since you replaced your water heater. You should consider, you know, checking and.
31:41
Speaker 1
Automatically connect you to. Here's, you know, three different models that you might want to consider and they're being carried by these four different retailers. And this is a new.
31:50
Speaker 2
System you could put in. It's a tankless water heater and it's going to do this. There was one. Someone made a comment about hard to imagine CLT and residential light frame construction. I don't disagree with the comment utilizing the CLT we know today. But what if the CLT was a honeycomb CLT or if it was a little bit lighter or like, this is where you really need to think outside the box. Do you know why we build with two by fours and two by sixes in the United States?
32:22
Speaker 1
Because we always have.
32:23
Speaker 2
Because that's what they make, right? Exactly.
32:26
Speaker 1
Right.
32:27
Speaker 2
If when you pull out your kid's drawer of Legos, what are you going to build? Something with the blocks that are there? Yeah, change the blocks.
32:36
Speaker 1
Yeah.
32:37
Speaker 2
So I think the one. I don't want to just say clt. I'd like to say mass timber more and just off site construction, new concepts of how to build. And I think it's really, it's a blend. It's using CLT, where it makes sense and then regular, you know, stick frame around the outside. The, the challenge the industry has is that there's probably no one contractor or no one company that knows how to do all of it at one, you know, in one building. All the different type of construction methods.
33:15
Speaker 1
Katera was opposed to.
33:17
Speaker 3
I'd love to meet that.
33:18
Speaker 2
Katera was an amazing idea.
33:22
Speaker 1
Yeah.
33:23
Speaker 2
And look, Katera was onto something. And by the way, the assets of Katera have been bought by some really bright people that are going to take it to the next level. Yeah. Look, does everyone love their file sharing and you know how much music that they don't have to have CDs they like? You know, you can go on Amazon Music or Spotify.
33:47
Speaker 3
Yeah.
33:47
Speaker 1
Probably 90% of people strongly prefer that to the old CD days.
33:51
Speaker 2
And it all started with Napster.
33:54
Speaker 1
Yeah.
33:54
Speaker 2
And guess what? Napster failed horribly. We work. I think we work is a genius idea. They just basically failed horribly, but they are the ones that are going to plow the street for the idea of, you know, shared space.
34:12
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think that's right. I think at the, I think at the end of the day we'll think of what Katera tried to do as a, as a positive step, maybe, you know, an overstep, but a positive step.
34:24
Speaker 2
Right. They definitely brought a new set of, a new way to look at the problem. Yeah.
34:31
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think that's right. Oh, good. Stacy. Mike, anything else? Stacy, you seeing anything else you want to surface?
34:40
Speaker 3
I don't see anything, but I don't know if my LinkedIn is freezing because it's all good. Yeah, sorry.
34:46
Speaker 1
Mike, anything else on your mind before we wrap?
34:50
Speaker 2
I mean, I just. Kudos to you guys for doing this. Information is power and what I really love is the fact that you're putting it out there and, you know, allowing companies like mine to come on here and talk about what we're doing. But the people who are watching this now live and they're going to watch the replay, those are the people that are going to move this industry forward. So, you know, kudos to you guys. Kudos to the people listening here. Let's, let's make construction great again.
35:23
Speaker 1
Right? Hey, thank you so much. We really appreciate you being on again. I think you're doing a hard thing. You're challenging norms and overall, I think, you know, the, the trend toward transparency is progress and I really look forward to watching. I'll be I'll be for sure keeping up, keeping my eye on your company and, and looking for the success stories as things come out and leading change. So. And where would people find out more if they wanted to learn more about you?
35:54
Speaker 2
Materialsexchange.com you know, if you look it up, it's here's the store. This way. No, there is no Eon Exchange.
36:03
Speaker 1
It's Materials exchange.
36:05
Speaker 2
Yep.
36:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
36:06
Speaker 2
And look. So this is kind of interesting. In our logo, the bottom of the X is filled in and if anyone remembers from their chemistry class, delta means change.
36:16
Speaker 1
See, look at that.
36:18
Speaker 2
Huh?
36:19
Speaker 1
So it's the details, Mike, the hidden logo. Well done, sir. All right, cool. Thank you so much, Stacy. We have a few housekeeping items. Mike, we'll see you again soon. Thank you, Stacy. Let's, let's talk a little bit about next week. So next week we have someone coming on from the Maryland center for Construction Education and Innovation, the MCC E I. A lot of letters, but they. So we have Jennifer Sproul joining us. Do you know Jennifer?
36:52
Speaker 3
I do. I've worked with Jennifer. She's, you know, fierce in this industry with leading the way in education and volunteered this past year out in Baltimore. We were doing a bunch of stuff with middle school kids to get them interested in the industry and learn about estimating cool.
37:13
Speaker 1
We need estimators, my Lord, Please make them good at estimating good. So, so we have Jennifer joining. What she's going to be coming on to talk about is solving the workforce puzzle. So from her perspective on this, you.
37:29
Speaker 2
Know.
37:32
Speaker 1
Workforce development starting at the very youngest ages at just as you know, Stacy was talking about creating interest in the youth and things along those lines. She's going to talk about what the MCC EI is doing. She's going to talk about what employers are doing and hopefully what each of us can do to contribute to the industry. So I'll be looking forward to that conversation. Stacy, do you have our marketing minute, our marketing tip for the week?
38:03
Speaker 3
I do. It's super simple and a change since our conversation today. But when you're thinking about your stilto marketing tip of the week, Mike was just talking about how he left the lumber industry and went to the finance industry and then came back. I think we have to use that in a lot of different ways, but with our marketing too. So stop looking at your competition on what to do, but look outside the industry, especially since other industries are so advanced and see what they're doing marketing wise and bring that information back to your company and use those ideas.
38:37
Speaker 1
I love it. I think it's a great idea. Get outside the get outside the bubble a little bit looking at what other construction companies are doing. Maybe take a look at what another business to business enterprise is doing or yeah right. Take a look at finance. Take a look at accounting. Take a look at tech. Yeah, I think that's great advice. Hard to translate some of those lessons back into your world but if you can figure out how to do it, you'll be doing something nobody else is doing.
39:03
Speaker 3
Correct.
39:03
Speaker 1
Thanks Steel.
39:05
Speaker 3
That's strong.
39:06
Speaker 1
All right good. We're gonna wrap it up. I, I have nothing else. Stacy, anything else on your end?
39:11
Speaker 3
That's all.
39:12
Speaker 1
I've got a new little wrap up jingle. I look forward to pressing play on. See you next week. Audience will see you next week. Thanks so much for checking in and joining us for the huddle.
39:24
Speaker 3
See y.
