Everything’s Real, Everything Matters, and Everyone Knows It w/ Quadrant Concrete CFO Joseph Graziano

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. First of all, apologies for our silence over the past couple of weeks. A valued member of our team, producer Luke, was out of commission, and his touch is essential to the standards we'd like to hold ourselves to here. The show must go on. Well, yeah, but we don't go anywhere without our rock, our Luke. The good news is, he's back, which means we're back, and more good news is that Justin and I have continued recording during this hiatus, so we've got a few episodes already stacked up in the pipeline. We'll be back to our normal weekly cadence starting now. In today's episode, we're taking a short break from our exploration of the AI frontier and coming back to good old terra firma, solid ground. And I mean that in two ways. One way that I mean solid ground is that we're going to be talking about the guaranteed, no ambiguity, tremendous ROI of getting a firm and agile grasp on your business's data with the help of Power BI.

(00:00:56): While AI is going to absorb a lot of attention and spend in the near future, if you're not already at a point of Power BI maturity, well, Power BI models and dashboards are still very much the single highest ROI investment you can be making today. And as we've mentioned on prior episodes, those same Power BI investments also happen to be one of the single best investments you can make to prepare yourself for AI.

(00:01:24): Now, the other way in which we're talking about solid ground here is that today's guest is Joseph Graziano, CFO of Quadrant Concrete, a true mid-market company with a few hundred employees, the majority of which are out in the real world every day, hands-on pouring concrete. And to push that solid ground metaphor to the limit, most of that concrete they're pouring is the foundation for houses and buildings. Literally Quadrant Concrete takes solid ground and makes it more solid, solid enough that you can put entire buildings on top of it.

(00:01:59): So, Joe doesn't work in the tech sector. He works in a 100% real-world business, about as grounded in reality as it gets. And one of my favorite things I've learned over the past 15 years since leaving the Microsoft bubble is that the ROI on data is actually often even greater in such industries than it is in most high-tech segments. And so, it's no surprise that these sorts of gritty industries are probably our favorite places to work. And prepping for this recording, I asked myself why we like these industries so much. And the answer was not just that the ROI is there, that didn't quite capture the whole thing. But then I landed on a short, snappy summary, which is this, in industries like construction, manufacturing, distribution, agriculture, everything is real, everything matters, and everyone knows it. It's that combination of the three that makes it such a satisfying work experience.

(00:02:51): It's not just the industry, but the cultures that are necessary in those industries, and the kinds of people those industries attract and develop. Straight to the point. Pretense is rare. The scoreboard doesn't lie. If something leads to improvement, the chances of it being embraced are high, and the chances of it running afoul of politics are low. It makes for a lower friction, more focused mindset. The perfect match for the Microsoft platform, the perfect match for our low overhead Fossett-first methodology here at P3, and frankly, the perfect match for what gets our people out of bed in the morning. Everything's real, everything matters, and everyone knows it, so let's get into it.

Speaker 2 (00:03:34): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?

Speaker 3 (00:03:38): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to P3Adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive. Down to earth conversations about data, tech, and biz impact.

Rob Collie (00:04:08): Welcome to the show. Joseph Graziano, how are you this fine day?

Joseph Graziano (00:04:12): I'm doing well, gentlemen. How are you?

Rob Collie (00:04:14): Great. We've already backstage been talking about your very authentic office environment, Quadrant Concrete.

Joseph Graziano (00:04:21): Yes, sir.

Rob Collie (00:04:22): What's your official job title there?

Joseph Graziano (00:04:24): Official job title here is CFO. We are a relatively small, family-based company, currently about 260 employees overall, so of course, title is CFO, but companies like this, we don't hold a lot of weight on the titles. Everyone does a lot of different things. We all wear multiple hats. It's a pretty collaborative team environment here.

Rob Collie (00:04:46): Companies of your size, very often the CFO, and I'm not saying this is true in your situation, but in our experience many times the CFO is oftentimes acting CIO at times as well. A lot of times technical questions come to you, because that's where the spreadsheets live, that's where the accounting systems live. Is that true or not true in your environment?

Joseph Graziano (00:05:04): That's exactly why we're even talking. I'm the one that develop all the reports, and the scheduling, the project management, databases and things that we do. And over many, many years I've looked for ways to tie everything together better. And Power BI is a solution I've been using for a number of years now that's been working really well. Everything from the databases, the reporting to our cell phone plans, our GPS tractors on our vehicles, chatting systems, be it from Slack or now we're currently as Teams, so it's very much a combined position between the CFO side and then the technology side of the business. And then we have, his name's Arturo, he's our director of IT. He does an excellent job.

Justin Mannhardt (00:05:44): Interesting, Rob, I think there's almost like two variants of CFOs that I've found in mid-market companies. One is like Joseph, he's a lot of things, a lot of technical things, a lot of operational things, the finance things. You could parachute what Joseph is doing into a much larger company and it's like seven people's jobs. And then the other variation is you could take Joseph and put him in a bigger company and they would just call him controller or something, right? It's just when you're in those mid-market companies, you wear a lot of hats. You do a lot of different things and like you're saying, especially family-based business, you got to do a lot.

Rob Collie (00:06:21): One of the things I've observed as well is mid-market companies are big enough to have all of the basic problems that an enterprise would have. You have the same systems complexity as the same operational complexity, or at least a fractional amount thereof. But you don't have the same number of people. The percentage of the problems that you have is higher relative to an enterprise than the percentage of the people that you have. The ratio is out of balance relative to an enterprise. I think that cuts both ways in terms of advantage, disadvantage. You do gain a lot sometimes from just having the simplicity of a small team, as opposed to the inertia of, if there's seven people doing the things that you're doing today, is that going to be faster or slower? I think the mid-market is the place where the most progress can be made. You have just enough resources and just enough complexity that getting ahold of your data is worth it. While at the same time you don't have the inertia that an enterprise has, and so it does lead to a bit of a frazzled day, doesn't it?

Joseph Graziano (00:07:19): It can at times. I have a lot of fun with it, because we're able just to try stuff. It works, great. If not, we just move on to the next thing and don't have to worry about the infrastructure as much, because it's relatively easy to adjust compared to larger firms. And it's just really fun when you find something that works and it takes off. That's what gets me excited to come to work is figuring those types of things out and you realize that yeah, most of your projects aren't really going to even hit, but when they do, it works out really well and it's very fun.

Rob Collie (00:07:47): As a concrete company Quadrant is a concrete installation, like the construction side of it?

Joseph Graziano (00:07:54): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:07:54): Do you do any of the manufacturing of the concrete? You use suppliers like, in Florida I'm familiar with Rinker, that's one of the big concrete manufacturers and suppliers. I'm assuming that Rinker still exists, unless it's been bought and conglomerated, but I was very familiar with Rinker as a kid.

Joseph Graziano (00:08:10): Rinker was a big supplier out here. And they're no longer in California. It sounds like they're still in Florida. They got bought out by another company that you might have heard of, Cemex, which is a huge, multinational company out of, they're based out of Mexico, but they're the biggest ready-mix supplier in the world. And to your original question, yes, we don't manufacture any of our own concrete. We order it from suppliers like Rinker, Cemex, many, many others. And we're primarily doing the installation of the concrete. About 75% of our current work is working for large home builders.

(00:08:41): We do the concrete for tract home subdivisions and then a lot of other regional builders. That's actually the majority of our work is working for regional builders here in California. We do all the foundations, the driveways, the walkways, all the associated concrete that goes around the outside of the foundation. Typical tract home subdivision, let's say is typically around 100 homes or so. So, we'll be there for about 18 months building out the tract, usually in batches of three to five homes at a time. And they're usually released out on a monthly basis. Our geographic area here is in central California. The Central Valley, you can think of from Bakersfield is about far south as we go and just south of Sacramento. Our main office is right in the middle of that.

Rob Collie (00:09:24): It's a large geographical area to address.

Joseph Graziano (00:09:27): It is.

Rob Collie (00:09:28): With a physical company, like you physically have to be in all those places.

Joseph Graziano (00:09:32): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:09:32): You don't remote work.

Justin Mannhardt (00:09:34): Can you remote pour the foundation for my house?

Joseph Graziano (00:09:37): I've got to logistically every day figure out how to not only get the materials there, we got to get the concrete on site from all these different vendors that they're delivering an expiring product. So, we got 90 minutes to get that product on the ground. And on a typical concrete pour, let's say we're doing two houses at a time, we're going to have roughly 20, 25 people on that one particular pour that day. Normal times we're doing up to about 200 homes a month. We also do pretty large commercial type work, warehouses, grocery stores and professional buildings, strip malls, agricultural, industrial, so on the tract home side it's like having a manufacturing plant that's popping up in all different parts of the country, and you're needing the setup shop and be efficient and make it work. That's the challenge in what we do.

Rob Collie (00:10:22): On site portable manufacturing.

Joseph Graziano (00:10:25): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:10:26): Like you say, with materials that expire, it's sitting there even in the concrete truck, it's sitting there trying to cure in the truck.

Joseph Graziano (00:10:34): As we're talking today, it's 100 degrees outside where I'm at. Normally in the wintertime, yeah, 90 minutes is kind of reasonable, but right now with this weather outside, we got closer to 60 minutes before that concrete gets too hot to use.

Rob Collie (00:10:47): So, you install concrete everywhere. Why is data important? From an outsider perspective, you wouldn't necessarily expect you to have a high ROI on getting your hands around data. Someone listening to this might be asking themselves that question. We know of course that there's plenty of places, but just give us a little bit of an overview of where and how and why data and having your data under control and able to use it. Where's the ROI in that for an organization like yours?

Joseph Graziano (00:11:16): On our variable costs there's two line items that account for about 80% of our total variable costs. That's labor and concrete like we were just talking about. Being slightly off on our estimates to the positive or to the negative, are the two primary drivers of whether you're going to be profitable or not. So, those two line items, as managers putting specific attention on those, making sure that those are meeting what we are budgeting and planning out. And each of those line items have variability. Of course, everybody knows labor, all the different complexity that goes along with labor, staffing and total number of people, job sites and things like that. When it gets complex, when you're spread out over a large geography like we are, it's a little bit different than having a manufacturing plant. And we know that that plant every day can hold 75 employees and you just schedule 75 employees every day to run the plant.

(00:12:08): We have different stages of work, different phases, and like I said, we're scattered geographically, so the only way you're going to get your arms around that, if you try to do that with a notebook, pen and paper, or even a spreadsheet, there's no way you'll ever stay in control of what's happening. You very, very quickly lose control.

(00:12:25): And secondarily, again with the concrete, the same thing. We need to dispatch this concrete to say 50 different sites on a given day with different suppliers that each supplier might have different dispatch centers and you got to make sure that the right quantity of concrete and at the right time is getting there every single day. And if you're off by a very, very minor fraction, it ends up resulting in huge, huge costs. So, we're analyzing things like, how long does it take for the concrete to get to the job site? How long is it on the job site for? When we order something, how long is it before the suppliers are actually delivering them to the job site?

(00:13:03): And we're trying to factor in all these items when we're making purchase decisions. Because we'll get quotes from four or five different say suppliers and we know that supplier A comes in at $100, supplier B comes in and say at $110, but when you factor in let's say historical delay costs and things like that, that supplier that's quoting $100 might actually truly cost you $120 per unit concrete. And those minor, minor differences allow you to succeed in this industry. It's very minor changes account for huge variance and whether you're successful or not.

(00:13:40): Operating here in California, there's a lot of regulatory items, especially with labor as far as timekeeping and record keeping and making sure not only are your timekeeping accurate for when employees are punching in and out at the beginning and the end of shift, but also when they're punching in and out for lunch breaks. There's a bunch of rules behind all of that here and you've got to make sure you've got your documentation, your data organized so that you're able to be in compliance with the regulations. Also, call it resources board compliance, all of our equipment and stuff, there's a lot of database warehousing that we have to do to make sure that we're compliant with different compliance agencies just so we can operate our equipment legally and correctly. And all that has to do with our internal data structure and how we broadcast it out to all these different entities that need our data, be it our customers, our suppliers, our employees, department of labor, resources board, hazardous material, agencies, all that is a daily interaction with our data and the outside world. So, that's why it's important, I believe.

Justin Mannhardt (00:14:43): I always find it so fascinating, data and analytics unfairly gets associated with cutting edge stuff and space travel and manufacturing airplanes and being complex machines, but in the race to make a buck, I'm sure that your industry is just as competitive as any other industry. Information is a superpower. Where can we get more efficient? How can we make sure we have the right staff on site? How can we optimize which supplier to use and when? That is a superpower in what is seemingly sort of a blue collar hard work kind of a world, but it matters. It matters so much.

Rob Collie (00:15:19): In fact, even more so, efficiency with your data in many ways matters more in these real-world gritty industries than it does in the high-tech world. So, take Microsoft for example, my former employer, do you know what the profit margin is on Microsoft software? It gets ridiculous.

Justin Mannhardt (00:15:39): You need three digits.

Rob Collie (00:15:41): I mean, they don't even manufacture CDs and DVDs or boxes or manuals anymore. They have zero cogs in terms of software delivery, and even the R&D cost, even though those employees are expensive still, it's almost like a rounding error on the profit margin percentage that Microsoft makes on the software. We used to sit around and go, "I think I'm personally responsible for this many millions of dollars of profit this year." If you just divide it out, it's insane. I was not being paid anything resembling that number.

(00:16:14): I was thinking about this this morning. We love, love, love, love, we P3, we love working with companies that work, we call them the gritty industries. We use the word gritty, we use it as a compliment. It's a positive thing. In industries like yours, first of all, everything is real. Labor, that's real people. The concrete is real, everything is real. Everything's got a cost, everything is in the real world, and as a result, everything matters. Microsoft can be a little sloppy. It doesn't matter if a person works a few hours too many or they hired three engineers too many for this project. Again, it doesn't matter really.

(00:16:53): So, everything's real, everything matters. And then the last part is that everyone knows it. In order to be successful in an industry like yours, you have to know those first two things. You have to live them every day. And that makes you just a wonderful partner for us. All the bullshit, all of the fluffy and frilly stuff, it's already been set aside before we even show up. And that's how we like to work. You might think of us as sort of a tech company or a high-tech company in some ways. We love, we prefer even working in industries like construction, manufacturing, mining, agriculture because of this, because of that honesty and clarity and the leverage, if you're off by a little bit, it can cost you a lot.

Joseph Graziano (00:17:38): The other thing too is, things are so tight. We're a commoditized industry, so everything is very, very tight. And using your data to be able to make decisions as the environment is changing has been so important, especially since the last, let's say starting at COVID. I keep telling everybody that I work with here is like, "Man, I just can't wait for another just to have a normal year, like a pre-COVID normal year where everything's predictable." And I feel like since beginning of 2020 to now in 2025 is just things are changing so quickly every month. And to have a little bit of insight into the future to make decisions today that really impact what happens tomorrow and puts you in a good position for tomorrow, whatever the market's doing, taking an upturn or downturn, that's in my opinion, the true power in harnessing your data and then being able to receive new data, interpret it, and then put it to work. That's been what allowed us to get through some crazy years here.

(00:18:37): Actually, in 2020, right when everything was locked down. We were doing a project with P3 back then and your consultant at the time, we were halfway through the jumpstart, we were all just staring at our phone and everything was shutting down. Airports were shutting down and your consultant back then, he was from Georgia, I believe, and we're like, "Okay, we got to try to make sure we get him home." And we're thinking about cutting it short and all that. And he ended up being able to make it home. I remember that very next week everything shut down, everything. From that jumpstart was kind of a little foreshadowing of just what's happened the last number of years, and I don't see it changing anytime in the near future. That's, in my opinion, the true value.

(00:19:19): And then working with P3, the cool part is I've got an abstract idea or abstract problem in my brain that I don't even really haven't put fully to paper, but when I go over with Jake, our current consultant, and he's like, "All right, well, let's build it." And he just builds it out today and it's something that I'm thinking, I've been chewing on for six months, and, "Oh, we can do this, we do this." I'm trying to figure out the best approach and he just builds it out and it's there. And yeah, there's always some iteration on development you got to do, that's with anything. But it's there and it's useful. That's what's awesome is cutting down that lead time from getting an abstract idea to actually something usable is hugely valuable for us.

Justin Mannhardt (00:19:59): It's great to hear that, Joseph, because it's the way this category of work should happen. I think the problem with abstract ideas is they are so abstract. We think there's something there. We think there's a use case. We think we could do something important with it, but like you're describing your own thought process, you can't quite pin it down. And so when you can have a partner like Jake say, "Here's what my abstract idea is," and he just says, "Well, let's just go build it." The value there is now the abstract has become tangible. Even if the first tangible thing is a complete whiff, the odds that you're going to go, "But if we did this, I think the momentum," and yeah, you're right, there's iteration, but just to put the paint on the wall, build something fast, that's the secret sauce.

Joseph Graziano (00:20:46): I live in all these databases, and I have, sometimes it's unhealthy emotional relationships with some of them, so I've got a project I got to go. It's like, "Ooh, I got to go to that table and I got to connect it to this. I don't even want to think about how to do that." Honestly, there's internal friction when I'm thinking about it. And then bringing somebody in like Jake saying, "Oh, what about if you just use this table with that table, and that messy relationship, we'll just create a bridge table and it makes it really easy." And it's like, "Okay, well I've been dabbling with Power BI now for a lot of years and I've never really used bridge tables." I heard him talked about, but never really put them into practice. And now we built one, and, "Oh, okay, that makes sense and that cut out 60 hours worth of work." That's nice that he moves the emotional part of it.

Rob Collie (00:21:33): For a data consulting firm we try to get the project done as effectively and as quickly as we can for you. That's one of our competitive advantages. In fact, it's like our number one competitive advantages. Is that we don't drag you through the mud. That problem that you just identified created a bridge table and avoided 60 hours of backend work. Most of our competitors would take you through the 60 hours of backend work, because who's going to pass up 60 hours of billable work? We never ask our consultants to do that. Honestly, if we wanted to do work that way, we need to hire a different team.

Justin Mannhardt (00:22:04): They'd revolt.

Rob Collie (00:22:05): Yeah, our team would not want to work that way. They came here because they want to deliver the wins as fast as they can in the most efficient way possible. Our competitors are like the other example, the stationary factory. As long as you have scheduled 75 people a day, we have to go everywhere and then move fast and they have the same high volume of moving parts to keep our business working effectively. Every time I hear a story back from a client that we've worked with about us, first of all, taking the idea that you've got abstract in your head and making it real so that it can be critiqued and refined in a short period of time, love it. Avoiding backend plumbing work with sort of a clever scrappy economizing approach to things. When I hear those things back from a client, it's just so validating. Even as you were saying that, I was just like, "Oh, it's just beaming over here."

Justin Mannhardt (00:22:59): Jake, if you're listening, good job.

Rob Collie (00:23:01): Heck yeah, Jake, way to personify the brand there, Jake.

Justin Mannhardt (00:23:06): When you were describing the importance of data in an industry like yours, at some point in that you described the importance of having information in an ever-changing environment so that you can think about the future. And just hearing that, I know you've gone through a process to get to that point. Because so many companies are just trying to understand what's already happened. So, they say things like, "We're trying to understand what changes in regulations or changes in job scheduling or whatever." What's some examples of some of the things you worked on early on to get some of the momentum going at Quadrant, and what are some of the things you're working on now?

Joseph Graziano (00:23:44): In 2020, for example, and when COVID took over is we had different regulations in almost every county that we worked in. And we had to create a database for that. And probably take the most conservative approach in every county and make sure we're compliant, easier than it sounds. So, we took a pretty serious approach on that. And currently this year in 2025 we're dealing with spontaneous regulatory environment with the federal government, with tariffs. Things are changing on a dime between interest rates, tariffs. Our primary imports, like I said, are I mentioned earlier, ready mix. The primary ingredient in ready mix is cement. And cement here in California, majority is imported. We have some local manufacturing here, but the majority is imported from different countries, some coming from Taiwan, some from Vietnam, some from China. Our lumber comes from, most of it comes from Canada. Our steel, most of it comes from Mexico, we're casting out what price changes are going to do in the next 60 days and what that means to pricing and us being able to communicate to our customers is extremely important.

Rob Collie (00:24:54): Oh yeah, I would assume you're doing almost like fixed bid work, right?

Joseph Graziano (00:24:57): You got exactly right, so we're kind of locked in for the most part. Most of our contracts are, we're locked in for like a year. There is some allowance to make some adjustments, but it's very, very difficult when that does happen. So yeah, how much inventory do we buy to get us through the next 60 days or whatever, and we're focusing a lot on that.

(00:25:16): The other, I'd say honestly, the most important one for us is just mapping out cash flow. That's really the most important thing that we're doing is, okay, what are we going to be doing the next 30, 60 days in terms of cash flow? We have our labor demands, what type of equipment are we going to be procuring? Meeting that payroll demand every week and still making sure that you're covering the other costs as well as investing into other solutions. That's probably the most challenging part of the forecasting. And that's what we focus on and part of the most recent project that we did with Jake that was part of it is forecasting no cash flow. I use that every day. Being able to know where we are in a cash position in two weeks, three weeks, 30 days is a huge advantage. Compared to my peers I'm able to be a lot more dialed in on the decisions that we make today based on what's going to happen in a month.

Rob Collie (00:26:10): Even something as fundamental as cash flow. We have seen it over and over and over again. I won't get very specific here, but we had a client, a very large operation in a previously high-margin industry. And COVID turned it from a high-margin industry into a low-margin industry basically overnight. And suddenly this company, this international conglomerate made up of dozens and dozens of other companies subsidiaries that they'd acquired via M&A over the years. For the first time ever they needed to have an all up cashflow dashboard across all of the subsidiaries that rolled up to the CEO. They had never needed such a thing. "A high-margin business, we're just making money. If we're in business, we're making money." And suddenly the realities changed overnight and you wouldn't expect that they never had such a thing. Each individual subsidiary had their own little cashflow thing, which may or may not have been accurate, may or may not have been real time. But it was incredibly disjoint and someone sitting here on this podcast, the third person here, Justin.

Justin Mannhardt (00:27:14): Oh, no.

Rob Collie (00:27:14): Yeah.

Justin Mannhardt (00:27:15): Oh, that project?

Rob Collie (00:27:16): He did this, he built this for the CEO in short order, and it was amazing. Even in the middle of this crisis the CEO stopped and took the time to tell Justin, "You have the best job in the world."

Joseph Graziano (00:27:34): Yeah.

Justin Mannhardt (00:27:34): Now Jake has the best job in the world, I think.

Rob Collie (00:27:36): That's right.

Justin Mannhardt (00:27:37): I remember that project, and I love it when I hear leaders describe their relationship with their reporting tools as something that is very operational and routine. When you said, "I'm using these things every single day," it's a part of how you work now. Now it's a part of how they work. Crisis caused the need, but now you can know very detailed, nuanced things about what's happening in your organization. And when those things get operationalized, everybody wins. I think sometimes when we talk about analytics, we're looking for, because we overuse this word insights. We're looking for some magic idea or something that's going to propel us to some new category. And it fits with what you guys do out in the real world, showing up every day, going through the same reviews and all the checks and balances to keep the business running and on track.

Joseph Graziano (00:28:32): In my experience, I've worked with people from larger companies that worked here, industry peers, and they don't know what's happening, and everything's a surprise. And being able to plan what's happening just reduces so much stress out of the system. In my world, that's such a huge benefit, "This, this, and this are happening because of this, this, and this." And you take the emotions out of it, and it's not because someone's not trying hard enough or someone's not doing a good job or whatever. These things are happening and you've got to make a decision like you're flipping a light switch. You want the light on in the room, you turn on the light switch.

(00:29:08): Having that clarity brings so much peace. In my market, my size companies is just people aren't aware of what their cashflow is, what their turnover on their ARs are and what's actually owed to them and what's still owed to their suppliers. The world that I live in, we're all tradespeople. We're not big financial institutions that got all this pedigree on processing financials. What I'm finding is that if I'm able to bring everybody, let's say in my organization up to 20, 30% on just the basic understandings of cashflow, ARs, retentions and standby time with our supplier and how big of an impact is, these little variables, if I can highlight them and make them digestible, that's what also brings a lot of value is that having the whole team being able to execute on the same plan.

Rob Collie (00:29:54): I've been in this business now for a very long time, 20 years. Let's go out to 2005. I've really been in the BI industry for a solid two decades. And something you said in there was kind of the first time I had my attention drawn to something. It's not often that something happens to me for the first time in this space. You mentioned that clarity that you have from your dashboards, from your reports allows you to make decisions dispassionately, just react to the reality of what's going on.

(00:30:24): And you're very subtle about this, but I want to magnify it. When you don't have that clarity, when something goes wrong and you don't have clarity about why, there's just a natural gravity towards friction at that moment. The blame game just immediately starts. You end up with these other narratives that fill the void of what happened. And they may or may not be correct, very often not, and they tend to place responsibility somewhere that may or may not be appropriate, and the person that's having that responsibility placed on them might know that it's not appropriate. Now you're damaging business relationships in a way that you need those people. I've never thought about how much clarity helps us avoid damaging valuable business relationships with each other. I've never really connected those dots so clearly, and I'm really grateful that you pointed that out.

Justin Mannhardt (00:31:16): That's great. When Joseph was talking about his experience, I mean, we have our own dashboards and tools we use to run our business.

Joseph Graziano (00:31:26): Probably got one or two.

Justin Mannhardt (00:31:27): Yeah, we got one or two. Not unlike yourself, Joseph, so I'm always sort of obsessed with how our work forecast looks. And so, when it goes up or down, I always know exactly what went up or down and why down in the detail. I know who and what client was involved. If you can see the world where I don't have that, the forecast went down, and as a leader I'm frustrated, because it understates, I'm going out to the team, "Hey, our forecast is, what are we going to do?" But if I know it's so much easier to go right to the source of the situation and get the right people involved and decide what to do. Versus finding out what's going on. If you're not in that state where when things go up and down in your business, whether it's cash flow, production schedules, supplier forecasts, whatever it is, if you don't have a good handle on that and there's a lot of emotion going on, maybe that's a data problem.

Joseph Graziano (00:32:22): You guys can probably tell by talking to me. I'm not wired that way to be screaming and yelling all day long. It exhausts me to do that. So, when I've got, let's say a dashboard that's telling me, "Hey, this supplier is constantly costing you an extra 37 minutes a day." Well, instead of calling the supplier and yelling at them and doing this and that, I just present the data to them, say, "Look, this is what's happening and it's causing me to make a business decision that I got to do this, and this is why." It either gets better or doesn't, but usually it gets better and we get on the same page. And I ask them, because they have the same type of metrics on us, and I always ask for those types of metrics. "I want to be your best customer, I want you to be my best supplier, but I want to be your best customer and work together in that regard."

(00:33:06): But we do it in a way that's structured and makes sense. One of the first very impactful dashboards that we built was actually a safety dashboard. We talk a little bit about when you're not able to see what is happening it gets emotional or there's friction. And that's how injuries are. It's a very emotional thing when they do happen. Because they can affect someone permanently and they can take someone that is otherwise healthy, potentially could be limited in a way that they live going forward in the future. So, as a company it's our responsibility to create the systems and the structures to mitigate those as much as possible. We have a very physical and demanding job. There's a lot of variables and it's challenging, but that is why we at the very beginning spent so much time on trying to figure that out and figure out if there's any kind of pattern or anything that we can take from it to help protect our employees and also to help perform better with our vendors.

Rob Collie (00:34:09): It's not just about the emotional component, right? There's also a financial incentive as well to keeping people safe.

Joseph Graziano (00:34:17): Absolutely. Our risk as a company is defined by our insurers and the actuary tables and our actual performance. That's what our premiums and things are priced as. And as I explained earlier, our two biggest variable costs that we have on our income statement is our labor and our concrete. So, the insurance associated with labor is a huge factor in the cost [inaudible 00:34:42] as a company.

Rob Collie (00:34:43): I can imagine.

Joseph Graziano (00:34:44): Say back in 2016, 2017 we're coming out of the last big recession. We were really big, got kind of small again and then we're growing and we're going from 150 employees to 200 to 300. We're having to do a lot of hiring. I remember about 2017, 2018, again, I got blindsided with the workers' compensation quote. I got a quote and it basically doubled. My workers' compensation for the amount of payroll we do, for that to double is a huge problem. Of course, I was a little broadsided by it and said, "Okay, well we got to, they're obviously seeing something that is not driving the quote to be more competitive." Luckily we had every single one of our injuries on a table going back to 2001. Honestly, that was one of my first Power BI dashboards that I put to work was actually that safety dashboard.

(00:35:37): That table brought in all the injuries, categorized everything, injury types, and then I linked that to the employee table. I'm bringing in higher dates, terminated dates, tied it to a calendar table. This is all very simple stuff, tied it to a calendar table, so now I'm seeing, okay, all my injuries over time and by day of the week, by employee age, meaning based on what date they were hired, when the injury happened. And put all that together and we got a little safety team going. Like I said, being nimble is kind of fun. I just put two, three people on, "Hey, this is our job. We're going to look at this dashboard, we're going to drive it down."

(00:36:13): Long, long story short, I basically narrowed it down to three things. Tenure, new hires was our biggest exposure, which is kind of obvious. Another driving factor was day of the week. Mondays and Fridays tended to have injuries for numerous reasons. The third one that I could find was very simple, work site cleanliness we should call it. So, making sure that when they're, wherever they're walking to and from, they have clear path of travel. And we really focused on training that. Within the next year we got our insurance workers' compensation back to what we were the year before. We've been keeping that same system going. I just closed the deal three months ago where I'm literally at a quarter of what it was back then. I reduced it 75% over six, seven years, without having the data. These injuries just pop up every week and you're, "Oh, another injury." And emotionally it's like, "How do we stop this?" And of course, we showcase this to every single insurer that comes in, what our whole system is. Addressing the new hires. We put them on a buddy system and their hands basically being held for three months.

(00:37:21): We produced our own safety videos with our own guys and showing exactly what we do and how to do our work safely for new hires, specifically. Really focused on training the path of travel stuff. And then the Mondays and Fridays, we really focus on hydration on Mondays and Fridays. That's something that's helped. We would go out with electrolytes and things like that. Sometimes people occasionally have a big weekend and they're a little dehydrated on Monday and that's what happens. But we kind of put all these things together and then we got a very robust post-injury meeting with all the supervisors and everybody and do root cause analysis.

(00:37:56): Anyways, this whole system, Power BI is the main driver in it. We advertise that to these insurers. And I remember a year where we were almost not getting anybody that wanted to quote our account and now it's like I have three or four of them going back and forth and they keep getting lower each time, and it's been really cool. And when we're talking about simple metrics, that dashboard is very simple, nothing complicated about, it's three tables. It's the injury table, the employee table, and a calendar table and just some very simple visuals that everybody understands and some slicers that can slice by employee age or tenure and injury types, and that's it. It's been, dollar for dollar that's probably been the single dashboard that's made the most money out of everything for a single-use scenario. The other ongoing dashboard, so they're making money every day, but for a single purpose scenario that one was unbelievable.

Rob Collie (00:38:47): So, we need to cue some very uplifting emotional music and have a voiceover actor come in and say, "Data, keeping people safe."

Joseph Graziano (00:38:59): Morgan Freeman [inaudible 00:39:00].

Rob Collie (00:39:00): Yeah, exactly. We'll just temporarily ignore the fact this is also incredibly profitable, keeping people safe more efficiently right.

Joseph Graziano (00:39:08): On the people side it's been great. Everyone's very happy with the system. Even when injuries do happen, we're not yelling, screaming, writing people up, disciplining, that. We literally get in a room and we try to figure it out and we compare it to previous injuries, and very constructive. It's been collaborative. Whereas safety programs I've tried in the past before Power BI, we had Mr. Police Officer, the safety guy going out there writing people up for not wearing a vest or a hard hat, and was doing absolutely nothing to improve our safety culture. This was used as a tool, and yeah, there are less injuries every year and that's a huge positive for everybody.

Rob Collie (00:39:44): We have a saying here at the company that even has its own emoji. We call it the intersection of good human and good business. It's a Venn diagram and we aim for the intersection of the two, right? And when you do it right you get both. This is like a screamingly perfect example of that. You're keeping people safer. People don't like getting injured.

Justin Mannhardt (00:40:03): Nobody wants to get hurt at work.

Rob Collie (00:40:04): Not only is it a risk to them getting injured, the actual physical personal harm, if they get injured, they're losing their capacity. I know that they get workers' comp and all of that.

Joseph Graziano (00:40:14): It's never the same.

Rob Collie (00:40:15): No, it's not as good as being employed. And some sort of injury that causes you a lifelong problem, it's going to be awful. So, squarely good human keeping people safer, while at the same time it helps your bottom line tremendously as well. It's a perfect example of that principle. I love that kind of stuff. I've been dying to tell you that in the summers in college, for two summers I was a laborer. The construction of Disney's All Star Resort in Orlando, Florida.

Joseph Graziano (00:40:44): Oh my gosh. In the summer in Florida?

Rob Collie (00:40:46): Part of the safety requirements is you have to wear jeans, but the dirt out there is like this fine, fine, fine silt, so it's like walking on a beach in construction boots and all this gear. And I did two jobs out there. I did slab on grade and I did safety crew. These were the two things I did. And what was the safety crew mostly about? It was mostly about putting up temporary safety cabling, safety rails before and after the concrete crews poured the walls for each new floor. Have you ever seen tunnel forms?

Joseph Graziano (00:41:21): Tunnel forms? I'm not sure.

Rob Collie (00:41:23): So, it's really bananas. The company I was working for, I know we're off-topic, but come on, where can we talk about concrete for a moment? I have a real rich history with concrete.

Joseph Graziano (00:41:34): If you did it for two summers in Florida, you are legit, Rob.

Justin Mannhardt (00:41:38): You're legit, Rob. Rob, you're legit.

Rob Collie (00:41:40): Younger me. Yeah, I mean, I was that new guy that showed up that didn't know thing one. The tunnel forms are amazing. Basically, they're like a crane lifted metal tunnels that allow you to pour the walls of each hotel cell and the foundation for the next floor at the same time. Talk about manufacturing in place. The mold, the injection mold for the building, these metal forms that they put in place and bolt together and then pour everything all at once and then heat it overnight with these smudge pots. And then pull them out and do the next, literally every single day another 20 hotel rooms were poured every single day.

(00:42:26): And I'm following behind them where I'm removing the safety cabling so they can pull their forms out and putting it back up and everything. And yet, that company was self-insured and they made more money on safety than they did on the margin of what Disney was paying them to build the buildings. This was the general contractor, big GC. It was a Centex subsidiary at the time. I've got one other concrete story for you just for a second.

Justin Mannhardt (00:42:51): Rob's got concrete roots.

Rob Collie (00:42:52): I got some concrete in my family. Let's say you were going to put in a basketball goal in your driveway. Okay. How much concrete would you use for the base?

Joseph Graziano (00:43:02): For just a hoop?

Rob Collie (00:43:03): The base of the pole. I got to tell you in advance that my dad being a construction guy, we had this solid, steel, square utility pole that was originally meant to be like a lighting pole.

Joseph Graziano (00:43:16): So, you probably put a hole in the ground, probably 18 inches diameter, maybe couple-

Rob Collie (00:43:21): 18 inches in diameter. Yeah, maybe the answer is one cubic yard of concrete. We got delivered for free because my dad was influential. A little bit of low-grade bribery going on here.

Joseph Graziano (00:43:34): And if you're getting it from the ready mix supplier, they're not going to really deliver less than a single yard. Probably more expensive to get rid of it than just make a big hole for it.

Rob Collie (00:43:43): That's right. So, the Rinker truck backed up in our driveway, and then not only that, we also filled the metal pole itself with concrete. So, this neighborhood where this pole is installed can absorb a direct ICBM hit from Russia and everything will be gone. But that basketball goal will still be there. It's absolutely impervious.

Joseph Graziano (00:44:11): At least you always have basketball.

Justin Mannhardt (00:44:12): My only experience with concrete involves mixing it by hand to help a buddy pour some stairs.

Rob Collie (00:44:16): Oh yeah. I mean-

Joseph Graziano (00:44:17): That's the worst too.

Rob Collie (00:44:20): That's not fun either. No, I've done a little bit of that, not much. As a youngster I didn't really see the economics of it quite so clearly, but I re-experienced that stuff from time to time now and go, "Oh, okay, right." Our foreman was thinking about margin all the time. It's so funny. I didn't know that I had the data gene yet. I hadn't had my collision with Excel. I hadn't discovered that I liked this stuff. I had no idea, I was a computer science student in college, but that's just an abstract thing to me. But behind the scenes there were, it's like I want to go back and I want to shake that kid, that version of me and say, "What are you doing? Ask them for the spreadsheet. There's a spreadsheet behind what this foreman is telling you right now and you're not seeing it." Even now, I can totally see it. So, your safety story in particular.

Joseph Graziano (00:45:07): And I'm still learning and developing, and why I think that one was so effective is that we have so much creative license on these dashboards to make the visuals look however you want them to. That's my goal for the team is to bring visuals that matter.

(00:45:23): Because I can easily do a spreadsheet or dashboard or whatever that's just full of just minutiae numbers. It could technically work, but that one worked particularly well was it had visuals, and actually I usually don't spend all this time like Jake did to make everything look pretty, put the conditional formatting and all that kind of stuff, but I did on this one. I could tell that's why it was a lot of usage. And that's my goal going forward is, especially we've migrated a lot more stuff to the ServiceNow. Everything is pretty much on the ServiceNow, but we're able to view it through our tablets or our phones or. One of the main things I'm trying to do is make sure that I don't have 50 different tabs on a dashboard and try to make it two or three and then each visual, make it very digestible and usable and actionable.

Justin Mannhardt (00:46:07): It's what makes it stick. I think the safety is a good example. It's something that you care about, but it's also something that all the people care about. Safety is a great example, but when you're describing publishing your reports and dashboards to the service, so you can distribute mobile versions to phones or tablets, you're giving it to the employees or to the people or your suppliers like you were describing earlier, you have to provide the data. And they're using it too. It's one thing for you to sit in your office behind your computer screen and looking at everything, but when the people have it and they can make a better decision, you got 200 and some people working in this complex logistical puzzle every single day. It's the total of all their actions that makes it all work, and so when they can see what everybody else can see, you can get a better sense of teamwork. You get a lot less bad decisions being made, so kudos to you, man.

Rob Collie (00:46:57): I have a cluster of questions. It's more like this amorphous blob. You'll see how everything kind of interrelates. One thing that was like music to my ears is you said relative to your peers, your capabilities now with data. You can vaguely tell what peers of yours at other companies are doing and not doing. You have some sense of that. There's a sense that you're in a leadership position in terms of that race. Your capabilities, your company's capabilities and how instrumented you are is a bit of an outlier in the positive sense. Do you agree with that? I'm getting that sense from you and I think you've even kind said it, but I just wanted to tease it out.

Joseph Graziano (00:47:35): Can I go back a little bit to where we kind of even started a lot of this stuff, just a little bit more history on our company. We were-

Rob Collie (00:47:43): Please.

Joseph Graziano (00:47:43): ... a family concrete company. We've been doing this since 1983. I went to college, I did the civil engineering track, was working, doing bridge engineering and stuff. This was around 2010. I wasn't working for the family company and I was communicating all the time with the family and saying, "Hey, how's it going?" They're telling me how tough it is, how tough it is, and there's some challenges. I was actually at the time also going for a master's program and I ended up making my capstone project with the family company as masters in business, so I did a strategic audit of the company. So, I started diving into it and I was like, "Holy smokes, there's some serious problems here." At the time I was doing infrastructure projects for the state, so residential housing market, I wasn't paying that much attention to it. I was doing a bunch of state funded work at the time.

(00:48:30): There was a bunch of state money flowing around federal money flowing around every river. There's plenty of work doing that, but I didn't realize we were in the recession, the housing recession. Started looking at it, did that project. Long story short, we decided to come back. The market had drastically changed, and we as a company were still trying to be this big behemoth concrete contract. We were one of the biggest concrete contractors in California at the time. We had over 700 employees before we had the last housing recession. And we were like, "Okay, it's going to come back. It's going to come back. And we got to make sure we're ready, for when it comes back, we're ready. We're still big, we've got all these big systems in place." We got to bid the work to make sure we get it, so we're bidding stuff at variable costs only, pretending like overhead didn't exist. And I was seeing that the little bit of financial reporting I was able to do at that time and I realized these reports that I'm looking at quarterly or yearly, it's not good enough, is not. Monthly is not good enough.

(00:49:26): Back then the accounting software was primarily Microsoft Access-based and we had access to all the backend tables, so I started learning Microsoft Access and doing queries and connecting tables and doing all this stuff back in 2010. And this was cool, and then I'd make these queries and then export them to Excel and then try to do all these other additional transformations in Excel, and very time-consuming, but it kind of worked. That recession happened to us. We weren't in the driver's seat, we were just going along for the ride. In the meantime, we basically just, we survived it is kind of what we did. In the meantime, I learned a little bit about this data stuff and we were able to make some decisions on some of that reporting, but very time-consuming.

(00:50:03): And at the same time I was doing all this analysis stuff, but we also had to keep the company going. I had to chase our accounts receivable back then during the recession, none of your customers wanted to pay you. I mentioned CashWell, you can tell I'm kind of scarred by it, but trying to figure out how to survive every week was the number one priority. It was a huge challenge. So, we survived, but we slowly started coming out of it and as we started growing again, that's really when I started looking. It's like, "There's got to be a better way to handle this data than doing all these queries and exporting into Excel and all this work that I'm doing to make it happen." I said, "There's got to be a better way." So, that's when we kind of found Tableau. Yeah, I remember downloaded demo. I was like, "Man, this could work. This is pretty cool."

(00:50:44): Then I remember seeing the monthly service subscription back then, I don't know what it was, a few hundred bucks, and I was like, "We don't have budget to do that. I better just move on. I don't have budget to spend a few hundred bucks on that." So, around the same time found Power BI and I was like, "Oh, it's free." I dived into that and without knowing anything about it opened it up and imported some data and made a quick dashboard. I was like, lights just went on. And then it's been growing on that side of it ever since, and that was 2016, 2017.

(00:51:11): As far as us as a company compared to our peers, I have a lived experience that has brought us to this point where we understand how important this stuff is, because those early 2010 days, very challenging. I guess, I'm operating on not having to do that again, realizing this economy that we're in right now, we have no idea where it's going to go and nobody knows it, up, down, but we are going to be prepared for whichever direction it goes. We're going to be able to make the correct decisions for us as a company, no matter what the market does. We're framing it completely different than we did back then where we're just going along for the ride. We got to make sure we just survive it.

Rob Collie (00:51:49): We talk a lot here internally at the company about internal locus of control. There are external factors. At any level of detail of business, whether you're talking macroeconomic all the way down to the particular minutia of an individual project there are external factors beyond your control. And it's easy to feel like, "It either happens to me or it doesn't." But having a sense of driver's seat responsibility, even in the face of things you can't control, that's an important balance to have. And having a handle on what's going on. Data is a way to essentially see everything. Everything that's going on, every input, every activity, everything. When done right data is a way to have this sort of supervision. That's like you just sort of seeing almost like a God would see everything that's happening. And that is a necessary ingredient. It's a precursor to having that ability to drive.

(00:52:46): It's a bumpy landscape, and we don't know what's over the next rise, but we do have our hands on the steering wheel, as opposed to just like, "Okay, I hope this next one's not so bumpy." The difference is, it couldn't be larger. Between those two mindsets. And hearing you describe the before and after, gosh, so visceral, and mirrors this thing that we try to talk about quite a bit internally. I want to get your reaction. This is where that cluster of questions comes in, we get your reaction to a few different, let's call them misconceptions that I hear pretty frequently. One of them, a lot of companies describe themselves as more primitive than average with their relationship to data. Because everyone only knows their own sins and they don't really know the rest of the industry, and a lot of people think that they're behind when they're not.

(00:53:33): I think people probably are behind relative to an organization like yours. The place that you're at today, you should be very proud of. Not just what you've got today for measurement, but also the cultural change that you've executed so that everyone's sort of expecting to be able to instrument the next thing. That's a big mental shift. It's not like today's dashboards are it, there's tomorrow's, and everyone's expecting that. But the two misconceptions that I hear a lot are number one, this sort of sophistication, this sort of insight and control and visibility is really only available to bigger companies. That's a leftover from yesteryear. It was true before things like Power BI. That's true. This was only an enterprise thing. And by the way, even enterprises never really got there. It was so expensive that even they never got there. It was certainly expensive enough and time-consuming enough to price out an organization like yours.

(00:54:27): That hasn't been true for a long time now, but I think the misconception remains. And then the other misconception I want to get your reaction to both of these is this idea that we're not ready for it. Someone sitting on the starting line who hasn't started down this road that you've been on for a while, will have this belief that their systems are too primitive to even get started. That they would need to do a bunch of prep work, a bunch of infrastructure work, a bunch of plumbing work before they could even get started, so they just get paralyzed by that. How do you feel about those two, because we do run into that quite a bit?

Joseph Graziano (00:54:58): I'd say to the first one, I think a smaller company, especially with the tools that are available now, and like we said at the very beginning of this conversation, the tools that are available now, they're so democratized. Anybody can go and download them right now for free, compared to a large organization that has a bunch of infrastructure, it's a lot easier to get started now as a smaller company. And secondarily, it doesn't really matter what the data is. It could be a notepad thing that gets converted to PDF. It doesn't really matter. A lot of times when I'm building out a new dashboard, instead of building a SQL database or any of this, I just create an Excel sheet and we start tracking something on an Excel sheet and then we hook up to it. And okay, this is useful, this is useful, and we got a lot of entries.

(00:55:43): Let's phase two figure out how to start collecting the data more efficiently. But phase one, let's just test and see if it's even worth observing. And if it's worth observing, even if it's a little bit of extra work up front. Yeah, you do that for a short period of time, but that's not the long-term endgame. Eventually, if it is that important, you'll figure out a way to streamline it. We do that in a lot of different ways. Power Apps, Google forms, Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases. The tools are limitless and they really don't ... Importance to any of us really just acting as a cup. Is the cup working? If it's working, then that's really all that matters. I think it's easier right now to be smaller and to start going down this road. You might not have a big data science team behind you, but if you're inclined to do it, you know how to run a spreadsheet, do some simple spreadsheet stuff. You can get into this.

Rob Collie (00:56:31): You're a little bit exceptional as an individual as well, and I want to call that out. You were willing to engage with these tools at a level of depth yourself before even hiring us to help you. Imagine a CFO at another concrete firm is listening to this and he or she might think, "I don't think I've quite got the knack for it that sounds like that Joseph does." Even then the startup costs here are just so low. One of the themes that's been running through this. Doesn't matter what your data sources are, you don't need to be elitist, you don't need to have some clean room, positive air pressure environment.

Joseph Graziano (00:57:10): Even if you did, there's really no way of getting that unicorn data source. It just doesn't exist.

Rob Collie (00:57:16): The real world is chaotic, and it just refuses to fit into that clean room. Even if you had the time and energy to build it's just not going to work. I completely agree, and the software doesn't cost much. With a mid-market company, how many different seats do you really need for Power BI?

Joseph Graziano (00:57:32): Nine or something.

Rob Collie (00:57:33): Yeah, see, it's like rounds to free.

Joseph Graziano (00:57:38): What's more expensive is figuring out what the cost actually is for Microsoft. They make that pretty complicated.

Rob Collie (00:57:44): Deliberately. We wouldn't want you to buy anything. It's like going into a restaurant and they're saying, "Here, crack this code, our menu is written in this cipher."

Justin Mannhardt (00:57:54): Let's see, Joseph, what we need to do is sit down and understand what your average consumption of RVUs is going to be over the next 90 days, and then we use this formula. And oh, are you going to want Power Apps with that? Because if you want Power Apps with that, it's a completely different hamburger.

Rob Collie (00:58:09): Microsoft would help you, but then they'd say, "Oh, nine seats, oh, forget about it. We're not going to talk to you."

Joseph Graziano (00:58:14): I almost sent Arturo, our IT director. I almost sent him down to San Diego. They had a whole seminar on that. We didn't end up doing it, but it was almost worth going. I was like, "If you go to the seminar, I'll go play golf or something." But we didn't end up doing it, but it's been interesting trying to figure that stuff out. Way more complicated than connecting a couple tables.

Justin Mannhardt (00:58:33): I used to say one of my superpowers was understanding the cloud pricing calculator.

Rob Collie (00:58:40): I have another kind of hopping around random question. How is data collected in the field? It really sounds like the number of stories that you were telling that I was sitting there going like, "Okay, so there has to be information coming back from these job sites." What does that look like?

Joseph Graziano (00:58:55): It's constantly evolving, so our punch software, we have mobile punching for employees, punching in and out of work. So, aside from the time stuff, we are migrating more and more to Power Apps. A lot of our questionnaire type data that we got to do for vehicle inspections, site inspection, quality control inspections, we used to do on paper. We've been using more and more Power Apps. Because we've got to do a lot of document stuff, so we're still using standard shared drives like OneDrive or Dropbox for a few things, but the employee interaction would direct data from the field is, when it needs to happen it's mostly coming from Power Apps right now. And then internally we're actually still using a lot of Microsoft access front ends to capture data.

Rob Collie (00:59:38): Hey, whatever works, right? Like you said, this is a cup. Is it working as a cup? I'm trying to imagine, are we talking superintendents in the field, foremen in the field with Power Apps? Like logging things like the concrete just arrived. How granular does it get? I'm just trying to visualize the job site.

Joseph Graziano (00:59:56): As far as the concrete, we actually have a full-time dedicated person. That's all they do, we call them our dispatcher. They order and get the concrete delivered to every job and they live in a database and that's what they live in all day long.

Rob Collie (01:00:08): They live in a database, look around, all they see are tables and everything.

Joseph Graziano (01:00:11): That's it. That's all they see.

Rob Collie (01:00:12): It's like Tron.

Joseph Graziano (01:00:16): With concrete trucks just floating in the sky everywhere. That's what he's working on on a daily basis. Equipment inspections and things like that, that's down to the foreman level, so you're probably thinking, "Okay, total number of people." For us, that's about 75 people that are foreman level, and they're dealing vehicle inspections. Quality control type stuff, we've got about eight people that do these quality control forms. Another one, I know it's still a little bit rudimentary, but we're working on transitioning it to maybe some kind of Power Automate workflow is we encourage everybody that's on the job site that has a company phone every day to take pictures, safety picture, and it gets channeled into a teams channel.

Justin Mannhardt (01:00:59): A Teams team.

Joseph Graziano (01:01:00): A Teams team, and we have somebody internally that's migrating those pictures into a database, so we're able to look at all our safety pictures from a database structure and start flagging things. We've kind of use it as strategic meetings, just seeing what's actually happening on site and safety based on actual images of the job sites, doing more and more stuff with Teams. There's that safety one, there's HR. We have a scheduling one where supervisors where the report personal days off for employees and vacation and things like that. That's all being funneled through Teams channels right now.

Justin Mannhardt (01:01:33): What's cool about it is, Joseph, I'm sure is aware there's some really just amazing all-encompassing software package out there that's just tailor-made for someone in construction that has all the bells and whistles and the pictures and everything. And Joseph's like, "Nah, we'd do it ourselves. We'll throw a power app at this problem. No problem."

Joseph Graziano (01:01:56): I like having that access to the root data. And a lot of these companies, they have APIs, and I haven't had a lot of luck on making those things work as easily as this does. So, as long as we're collecting the data, then we can make the front end whatever we want with a lot of different tools.

Rob Collie (01:02:13): I know that those other software packages cost more, but hear me out, they also suck more.

Justin Mannhardt (01:02:22): This is Rob's best sales pitch.

Rob Collie (01:02:27): We're talking our own books here a little bit, but if you have the wherewithal to navigate this on your own, as you do, and even if you don't, if you have a partner like us who is committed to this thrifty approach, this just what matters approach. You can get your own solution to these sorts of problems at a much more affordable price point, and it's just better. Because it literally is tailored to your needs. You think about all the effort they put into those software packages, a lot of it is put into places that you don't need. It's some other customer that requested it, but the things that you need, they don't have time to get to. They're not going to build that in there for you. Even if they were willing to do it, the effort of talking to them and explaining to them and everything is just exhausting. Even if it was free, you still wouldn't be able to pull it off.

Joseph Graziano (01:03:12): It would still cost more.

Rob Collie (01:03:13): Yeah, I'm a big believer, obviously, voted with my feet, bet my career on this that assembling your own line of business management, certain line of business systems are fine. It's the all up suites that try to manage your whole operation, that's where things start to break down.

Joseph Graziano (01:03:31): Exactly, I agree.

Rob Collie (01:03:33): Middleware that you control, lightweight middleware like Power BI and Power Apps and Power Automate. You control with the help of a partner like us. I mean, it's just so much nimbler and so much more precise over and over and over again. This is another one of those themes. I'm really glad you brought that up, Justin, hadn't even occurred to me.

Justin Mannhardt (01:03:51): Yeah, I mean, and I would wager that Joseph has realized, "Oh, we could turn our vehicle inspection paper form into a Power App." I don't know, whatever was first. The first time you do it and you put that in the hands of foremen or the superintendents, they go, "Oh, hey, what about this other thing? Could we also put that on my phone? That'd be a lot easier for me." And then the ideas flow and the momentum and the buy-in and it all just accelerates and you realize, "Wait, we can do these things ourselves?" I'm sure there's a lot of people that before this stuff started happening at your company they just assumed it wasn't possible or it was out of reach or you didn't have the budget or the technical wherewithal to do some of these things. Now they see it and it's good.

Joseph Graziano (01:04:30): Well, and that's part of the communication with them. Whenever we ask them to try or do something new, we've got to always emphasize that it's to make their job better, to make it easier, to be more productive, and if it doesn't work, we abandon it, and move on. Sometimes there's why we're doing something that maybe not even directly related to them, but at least communicate, "Hey, we've got to collect this because of this." What we're asking you to do is we don't want it to be any worse than what you're doing right now. We want it to be better and if it works, great. If not, we'll continue working on it and always open communication with them. And if they need something, we try to always provide it and try not to dictate how this stuff is used. They need to see the benefit in it.

Rob Collie (01:05:10): You're a why company. You're a company that wants people to ask why, wants to answer the why. We're not so different, you and I, as Austin Powers or any bond villain used to say, right? Yeah, we make a point of that as well internally. People should ask why people should push back on things, but we also have a duty to explain why.

Joseph Graziano (01:05:30): Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:05:31): And we meet in the middle in that way. Well, Joe, thank you so much.

Justin Mannhardt (01:05:36): Yeah, man, seriously.

Rob Collie (01:05:37): Spending two hours of your time with us like this, we're super grateful for it.

Joseph Graziano (01:05:41): Well, like I said, it goes way back working with your company, really since I bought your book, Rob, going back to 2016, so it's been some time and I've gained so much from the knowledge you guys have put out there. And this helps at all, I'm happy to be there. Thank you.

Rob Collie (01:05:54): Much appreciated, and we love that we've been on that journey with you. And what an amazing journey it is. You should be really, really proud of where you're at. It's a hell of an achievement, not easily won.

Joseph Graziano (01:06:05): It's a fun ride though.

Speaker 3 (01:06:06): Thanks for listening to The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to P3 Adaptive.com, have a data day.