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Invoice for construction work for Production

[Music] i want you all to take a second take a second to come up with the first two or three words that come to mind when you hear this term general contractor now maybe you associate it with someone you know maybe it's a prior experience or maybe more recently you put it towards a the popular contractor tv shows on cable tv got your words good now keep them to yourself i want you to keep them to yourself because more than likely some of them were negative and i know that because a while back i sent out an anonymous survey asking just this question and these are a few of the responses i received so if you haven't already guessed i'm a general contractor more specifically i work in commercial construction and throughout my career i've learned that this term contractor is looked at pretty negatively now some of the responses i just showed i'm not going to touch those are for another talk but i do want to touch on my favorite one antiquated or old-fashioned now i'll admit there's a portion of this industry that is stuck saying but that's the way we've always done it and we'll get back to them but first the confession i have to confess something that's got to stay between us friends in here i'm not only a contractor i'm also an architect and if you know anything about our industry contractors and architects don't always get along there's a metaphor somewhere about cats and dogs or something like that so please keep it here because it would make me very unpopular back at the office but to understand why an architect would want to live in a contractor's world we have to go way back in time all the way to 2014. now you laugh but i'm a millennial that's a long time ago i'm supposed to have had like 10 or 12 jobs and two sabbaticals since then so anyway this is an actual picture of me i'm at a traditional architecture firm and i'm roughly a year from what i thought was the holy grail something i had worked toward my entire life i was going to become a licensed architect and of course i was going to change the world until an opportunity for career change came up that c word we talked about contractor after some contemplation i decided i was going to quit i talked to my current employer i talked to my wife did all the things necessary to make a clean break except for one one that would prove to be the hardest yet i had to tell my mom hey mom guess what i said per usual when i have some ideas she said or she showed some concern and she said no michael you can't move back home we've already turned your bedroom into an airbnb and i said come on mom i'm not moving back home it's way worse i'm becoming a contractor i thought she was going to cry all that time all that money all that education wasted and you're gonna go swing a hammer you'll never be the next franklin wright [Laughter] my mom's an insurance she's not an architect now what i didn't know was this was the first time i would describe what i call the best kept secret in construction something i've talked about no less than a thousand times since i had gotten a taste of what us architects call the dark side and i was hooked i didn't care about being my favorite architect franklin wright so why the change let's take a look at the history of innovation and construction as told by michael disclaimer i made this up if you can't tell by the fact that it goes from 2 million bc to just yesterday and i show it jokingly but it's nearly accurate of course there have been incremental changes throughout time but you see this term bim driving the curve of innovation bim is proving to be the biggest disrupter that anyone in the current architecture engineering or construction industry has ever seen now i know you're saying what is bim bim is an acronym for building information modeling and now you're saying what the hell is building information modeling bim is 3d modeling technology it's the technology that allows us to virtually build visualize coordinate and troubleshoot an entire building far before we ever put a shovel in the ground there's a cliche you've all heard measure twice cut once think of bim as that for an entire building project we start with a baseline model on top of that baseline we iterate and we search for problems and we do it again and again and again until we've eliminated as many problems as possible this gives us a high level of confidence that what we've modeled will be installed in the field correctly only then do we build buildings are getting continuously more complex and at the same time demands on budget and schedule are getting higher by utilizing bim we can continuously improve with the goal of less rework less waste and higher efficiency after all one study shows that 53.4 million tons of waste per year are attributed to construction and that doesn't include demolition shouldn't we do our best to reduce that but bim is only the beginning one of the hardest parts for our clients is truly understanding their building based on 2d drawings these are traditional 2d building elevations before the expectation was that given these floor plan and the occasional 3d rendering you'd really understand what you're getting now we're visual learners i think that's a little unrealistic but how do we solve it one answer lies in video game technology utilizing this technology we can provide walk throughs fly throughs and near real time we can provide photo real renderings allowing you to truly understand your building as it evolves but let's take a step further if you're one of the few the brave who are willing to forget about looking cool you'll put on the vr headset virtual reality has become so accessible that we can walk you through your building while we simultaneously coordinate the work that will go into place again the goal is to allow you to feel your building to truly understand it and make any necessary changes virtually skipping the cost and inefficiency of making them physically so let's do a quick recap bim takes the digital into the physical virtual reality and other enhanced visualization techniques allow you to truly understand the product that you're getting at the end but what about taking the physical into the digital in the past i could go out to a job site take literally hundreds of dimensions come back to the office only to realize that i don't have the one i need that's the same picture me back at the traditional firm and i don't use the word shucks the word i use rhymes with shucks [Laughter] today we use reality capture tools to eliminate those laborious dimensions and instead scan millions of digital points and pull them into the model this model has every dimension i could ever want and that can prove invaluable for projects such as this one a fire station built in 1902 with little original documentation but we aren't only using reality capture to verify we can also document today we can provide you with a model that sees behind walls so you're aware forever no more old decaying as-built drawings sitting in your basement and no more accidentally slamming through a plumbing pipe during your next renovation so i don't know about you but i think all this is pretty cool but what does the future hold i recently read an article that said we are entering the golden age of construction and i believe that wholeheartedly i think we're just beginning our industry is experimenting with advanced construction technologies from modular to prefabrication to 3d printing entire structures we're using augmented reality wearables and drones and we're utilizing our data to make quicker and better informed decisions so to those in the industry who say but that's the way we've always done it i promise you this is better than the old way we can build better waste less do it more efficiently and do it all at the higher demands of today's construction environment i call this the best kept secret in construction because i bet prior to us talking you weren't aware of the technology that we're using in construction i bet you associated it only with our friends architects and engineers but i hope i'm showing you that the line between us is blurring each and every day so let's go back to those responses i hope that after seeing this the tune has changed instead of old-fashioned how about interesting how about innovative how about awesome i like awesome it's simple and at the end of the day what we're doing is awesome the built environment is pretty awesome my hope is that you value contractors in the same light that you value our counterparts architects and engineers we get to apply technology to an industry that each and every one of us experience each and every day we are changing the way your built environment is delivered so i only ask one thing the next time you go to build or better yet the next time you or your son or your daughter are thinking about entering our industry don't settle for that old-fashioned contractor ask for an awesome one thank you you