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KP Unpacked
KP Unpacked explores the biggest ideas in AEC, AI, and innovation—unpacking the trends, technology, discussions, and strategies shaping the built environment and beyond.
KP Unpacked
Why GCs Don’t Do Anything (And How AI Might Change That)
In this episode of KP Unpacked, KP Reddy takes on one of his most explosive LinkedIn posts: Why do so few general contractors self-perform anything? And if their answer is "risk"—what does that really mean?
The AEC industry loves tradition, but KP isn't buying the excuses. He and Jeff dive into:
🔹 The myth of risk management—are GCs actually mitigating risk or just passing the buck?
🔹 Why owners are questioning what they're really paying for
🔹 How AI and robotics could make self-performing the new norm
🔹 The missing feedback loop between design, construction, and building product manufacturers
🔹 Quantum computing, Roombas, and why the “way we’ve always done it” is a dead-end
Plus, a sneak peek at the Mastermind Atlanta event in May—where these conversations get even spicier.
🎉 Special Offer for KP Unpacked Listeners: Get 55% off your ticket to the 9th Annual AEC Summit on October 29th at the Diverge Innovation Center in Phoenix! Click the link below and use promo code UNPACKED55 at checkout.
Don't miss this opportunity to connect with top minds in AEC and beyond. Tickets are limited—act fast!
All right, welcome back to KP Unpacked. This is my opportunity every week to ask KP Reddy, founder and CEO of KP Reddy Co. And also the founder of Shadow Ventures. Hey, kp, when you posted that on LinkedIn, what were you thinking about? I say that every week. It's a little bit of tongue in cheek, but this is my opportunity to ask KP what was the inspiration behind this thing that you posted on LinkedIn? If you're not following KP on LinkedIn, you should be. Just go to KP the letter K, the letter P and then ready R-E-D-D-Y.
Speaker 1:He posts a couple times, three times a day, about his insights, the things he's heard, the things he's learned, conversations he's had around designing, building, developing, owning, operating in the built environment, and all of his posts are thought-provoking and insightful, having to do with the AEC world and beyond, sometimes investing, sometimes startups, like I said earlier, sometimes designing or building, as we're going to talk about today, and often owning and operating. So I am joined, as always, by KP Reddy. Hi, kp, hey, what's going on, jeff? A lot of podcasts recording today. Yeah, so if I get quiet at some point, my voice has left the building. We'll see how it goes.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, if you're a great podcast host, you're talking less and you're letting your guests talk more.
Speaker 1:This is true. That's my strategy, right here I'm just telling you.
Speaker 1:Get ready everybody. This is going to be KP ready, the post that we selected today. It's funny, we were talking before we hit record and you posted this. So, for a little little inside baseball for everybody, kp and I, before we get started recording and all these sessions like, okay, we look at what he's posted, we look at the engagement, you know what's what's hitting, what's not. You know what are people commenting on, what are they not? And then, of course, we select a couple of episodes to record, and one of the episodes that KP pointed out before we hit record today was hey, let's talk about this one and I'm going to read it to you here in a minute. But, as we're recording this on February 21st 2025. So you know, february 21st 2025. So you know, if you're listening to this year from now, dial it back a little bit. You posted this about 24 hours ago and it's blowing up. I mean, I think that's. I think that's the technical term for what's happening is blowing up.
Speaker 2:That's what the kids say.
Speaker 1:That's what the kids say. Yeah, those kids. Um, lots of comments, lots of reactions to this, and this is one of the shortest posts that you've had in a long time. Not that most of your posts are very long, but this is literally three sentences long. So I'm going to read it and then we'll unpack it. We started unpacking it a little bit before I hit record, um, but this is. I think this is going to be pretty interesting. So here's how it goes. I hear lots of answers to this question and I have my own ideas. Why do so few GCs self-perform anything? If your answer is risk, please be specific. That's it. That's the whole post. So where did this come from? What? What conversation? Um, what were you hearing? What were you doing that brought this to mind? And, and that specific question, why does so few GCs self-perform anything?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there were two things that came up. One, um, you know we've been I've been working on this owner's initiative, which there should be some news coming out soon about how we're doing that. But I think late last year I said, hey, I'm just gonna spend time with owners and talk to a lot of owners.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Because ultimately, they pay all our bills. Right. They're paying for this podcast in some way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Some roundabout way some roundabout way, right?
Speaker 2:So we're not spending enough time with these owners, let's spend more time with these owners. And um, you know what I what I've been hearing from owners is hey, we hire these general contractors. They don't do anything like they're not. They're not laying brick, they're not tying rebar, they don't perform anything. And they are there to help us manage risk and manage the project. However, there's like a change order, right? We're paying for all the change orders.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So are they really managing risk? Like none of these folks are going out of business because they didn't manage risk. Well, it's more a rationalization. They maybe push down the risk to the subcontractor which, if it was their own, self-performed, they can't do that right. Like they can point to the drywall guys and say, drywall guys screwed this up. Like we're going to squash them down for you, owner. Or they're passing the change on to the customer, right, the owner's paying for it. So I'm like, are they managing risk? I guess that's managing risk, but it also feels like it's passing the buck around, right? It's like just don't charge me for anything, right? So that was one area of thinking.
Speaker 2:And then I've got in my mind like every day I think about this. Right, we all think about certain things. I'm a nerd, I think about things. Right, we all think about certain things. I'm a nerd, I think about things you know, probably less interesting, but it hit me the other day that if AI is going to design buildings, are they designing buildings with the means and methods of humans in mind, or are they designing with the means and methods of what the robots are capable of? In other words, you know, like one of my poor cozokibo that doesn't know. Of course I'm plugging them because I'm an investor. So big surprise. But they do automated drywall finishing and painting.
Speaker 2:And if I ask them like, hey, what percentage of projects are designed in a way that the robot can't paint and finish the entire space, they're like well, you know, there's always a percentage that like well, if you get feedback to the designers and said, hey, like, move this wall out a little bit, move this in a little bit so that it's optimized for the robot to do a hundred percent of the project, wouldn't that be better? And they're like you know, actually we have a tool where we can upload the drawings and we can decide what areas the robot can do, which areas they can. I'm like but are you giving it back to the designers to say redesign it? And they're like no, we're not doing, like we're not there yet. I'm like okay, that's fair.
Speaker 2:So then I started thinking, taking from that, so if we have AI designing buildings so that robots can build them, if I'm a GC, if the risk is in managing resources, scalability, all these things that we got out of that post, which I suggest you talk to some of these people that posted, they said look, look, you know it's a different skill set, it's a this and that. But if they can buy a robot, which GCs do have big balance sheets to manage the risk instead of subbing it out, can they just buy the drywall robot? Can they just buy the robot that can um structurally frame a building? Can they buy a robot that lays the flooring? And if they can just buy the robot, then the scale of um of capacity goes away. The risk of quality actually maybe goes away.
Speaker 2:The risk of schedule maybe goes away. So what kind of ding ding ding in my head was if AI designs buildings so that robots can build them, if the GC is going to start self-performing everything, that's because they're going to buy more robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's super interesting. And, as you're talking about that, I also wonder you know how many people understand. So my background? You know, while KP's background is civil engineering, my background is architecture, and neither one of us does either of those anymore. But how many people realize, like, if you are an architect who's really thinking about the constructability of of your building and I can, I can remember specific examples of this like, hey, we can't do that because the framer can't actually get in there and swing a hammer, or we can't actually fit a nailer in that space to get that nailed. You know what, you know fastened, something like that, and I mean, that's, that's real world stuff, right? So what you're talking about is a different version of that.
Speaker 1:Um, now, of course, before we hit record, one of my, one of my questions, you know sort of playing devil's advocate was okay, well, why don't we design the robots that are optimized to a certain to a certain size or something like that? But you know, we've got building material, modules and things like that. But I think, you know, I think what you're saying is really intriguing and one of the most common responses, I think, at least as I look at my screen here, and I don't know how the comments are sorted here on my screen, but one of the most common comments was well, it's a different business model. And I read that and I was like, hey, I think that might've been the point of the question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think so. Here's part of what's like fascinating about all this right. Um, I don't know the actual dimensions. What are the? Do you know the dimensions of a sheet of drywall?
Speaker 1:sheet of drywall um eight by four, four by four by eight.
Speaker 2:Sheet of drywall so every architect designing should stick to that stand. Like the room sizes are only in those increments for zero waste right, which would be ideal but instead it's like the you know the hot dog issue.
Speaker 2:There's like six hot dogs but eight buns yes, same thing it's like that, right, like we're going to design a building, so there's leftover drywall, so there's leftover carpet.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because, as I was like, of course people text me and people DM me about this stuff, right. And then they're like, well, what you're talking about is very complicated, and literally the next day or that day, microsoft talks about quantum computing and with that, you know, like their their breakthroughs, the 17 year breakthrough that they've had on quantum computing. And the first thing is, I do a deep dive on that and I'm like, oh my gosh, like so if you're saying like we have to rationalize what the owner wants in terms of a building and the ability to optimize the construction to get to a zero waste environment, oh, that's too complicated. And I'm like, no, no, we just have, we have quantum computing coming. It's not that complicated, right?
Speaker 2:Quantum computing can run these, run these scenarios for us. And so, anyway, I think it's, it's interesting, like this post, especially like we got more comments than we got reactions, which is always fun. But I think we have to start thinking about this stuff and, and you know, do architects ever design buildings and not think about the means and methods?
Speaker 1:yes, all the time yeah, all the time well, the, you know.
Speaker 1:One of the ironies I think of of what you're talking about is and again for those that don't know, I I do still teach some in both undergraduate and graduate, so I have an idea of what students are being taught. At some point when you're in school, you are taught about the modules of construction, like studs laid out at 16 inches on center wood framing perhaps, or maybe 24 depending, and then, of course, the, the four-way sheet of drywall, etc. All your nominal dimensions, etc. Etc. And you're you're taught to think in that way and and I think we talked about this on a past episode when I, when I did my internship about 120 years ago, the two there were, there were three partners in this firm. Two of them were the architecture partners and one was interior design partner.
Speaker 1:The two architecture partners to me, of course, I was what like 22 years old or something like that. To me, these dudes were old. Yeah, these are the old guys, but these guys had Mies van der Rohe as a professor when they were in school. They were old, they're really old, but what they brought to it, what they brought to their practice, and and they're so they went to iit in chicago and there's this infamous project that you do at iit. They still do it. I saw, saw somebody, uh, the other day on instagram or something, um, a student had posted they still do this project.
Speaker 1:I think they refer to it as the brick project, but they design some building. Whatever the program is of the building, they design it as brick and they have to figure out every tiny little module, including the mortar, joints and everything else, and they have to document the whole thing. And it's part of that is the process, or the, the, the motion of understanding the modules. So the students should be learning this, do they probably? Do they carry it into the profession? Maybe are buildings designed with that in mind, maybe not. Yeah, but I think, to get to what you're talking about, we, we have to right we, we have to. If, if you you're talking about, we have to right, we have to. If you're going to reduce waste, you have to figure out how to reduce waste, and part of that is the modules that you construct with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a lot of people on there like I started a robotics company we were doing it's called software automation. We were doing robots for the apparel industry. It was my first exposure to robotics. This is 13, 14 years ago now and I learned about this whole process called DFM and it was like design, it's a phase in manufacturing. It's called design for manufacturing and so we're building these prototype robots like custom prototype robots, right. And then we go to a contract manufacturer that's going to manufacture hundreds of these right to scale us, right, and we paid these guys. They came in, even if they're going to manufacture it. They come in, you pay them a ton of money and their engineers say look, this railing that you built for this robot to run on, um, it's 10 feet, it's 10 feet long and that's a custom size. I can get you a nine foot one for a third of the price.
Speaker 1:Right, so let's redesign it for the nine foot rail.
Speaker 2:Oh, this motor you're using it's actually overkill for what you're doing and I guess for your prototype you wanted something overkill because you were unsure, and I guess for your prototype you wanted something overkill because you were unsure. So now we're going to scale it down and that's going to save you 50% off on the cost of that motor. And they went through piece by piece by piece and took this custom Frankenstein machine that we built that worked and said here's all the SKUs that are available, the nuts I mean down to the nuts and bolts, right?
Speaker 2:Because we're seeing some weird sized bolt that it turns out, if we had chosen a different one, it's like half off, because it's a highly produced SKU, right? So they go through and do all this stuff and, by the way, this is what Apple goes through when they deal with Foxconn to manufacture their phones. They go through this DFM process and I found it absolutely fascinating because they took a robot that the custom one that we built cost us a million dollars. They got it down to 50 grand.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And all the parts were readily available, right, all the parts were like, hey, we've got. So if one of your robots breaks in the field, we can drop ship that replacement part, because we keep them in inventory, not just for you but for the other hundred companies we support. We keep them in inventory and we just drop ship them right to the right to the site. And it was really fascinating and I thought you know we try to do that a little bit, but it's almost like too late, right?
Speaker 1:It's too late In construction, you mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, why not have like a conceptual drawing and whatever BIM whatever the hell you know, bim is dead, look at that podcast. But and you go to the owner and say, hey, here's conceptually what we want, and now I'm going to send it out for constructability and it might mean that the walls move around a little bit. It might mean, you know, it's optimizing for the availability of pieces and parts and for means and methods and everything doesn't have to be custom. Right, like it's custom, like oh, we're getting this custom window because the architect, the fancy architect, decided this is the window I want. Well, there's one that's like three inches shorter, that's like a tenth of the price, and that green that you're so like enamored with, there's an off green of that. That's half price. Yeah, and if I'm the owner, I'm like I don't care about the green is green maybe.
Speaker 1:Like I'm not, I'm not overly worried about it yeah, one of the things I think that's really interesting about the, the example that you just used, that, that custom. You know, the know the first robot, the, the prototype, right. When you're building that prototype, the point is not how much it costs, right, it's, it's how do we build it so that it does what we want it to do, it gets the job done, et cetera, et cetera. And then and then we go through the process then of of optimizing everything cost and operation and everything else. So we start thinking about this in terms of scale. You know, okay, we built one. You know, we used that nut that was laying there on the or that bolt that was laying there on the workbench, because it was laying right there and it fit in the hole or whatever it was. And now they figured out that we can get, we can use a different bolt just as effectively for half the price, or something like that. So if we translate that to construction, if, if you're thinking about, if you're an owner that builds lots, of, lots of buildings and I worked for a firm years and years and years ago and we did.
Speaker 1:It was a strange firm, we did everything we did. I worked on the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and then we did distribution centers for, like, albertsons and Safeway Foods and things like that. So, tilt up concrete versus custom everything right In a museum of contemporary art, but if you're the Alberbertsons or the, you know the whatever that build lots of buildings, this makes total sense. Oh yeah, we want you to optimize everything. How do our trucks get in and out? What are the bays? Like? Um, you know our sites, the, the land that we buy and we develop and all those things.
Speaker 1:And and we might think like that, like how do I optimize this? Which makes total sense, and what you're saying in terms of construction, we have to think about it in terms of a systems approach, and it's not just this one time that we're going to build, it's every time that we're going to build. And you know, maybe on the other end of the spectrum, a custom home or something like that, that's a very different animal. But still, in the building materials world there's no translation from tilt-up concrete panel to wood stud. But in the building materials world, there's tons of overlap there where we especially if you're a contractor too it's like how am I going to build these things? Why am I not thinking about optimizing?
Speaker 2:Well, so think about this right. We're talking about construction. Now track it over to operations.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right Cleaning and maintaining and managing. It's so funny. I sold one of my houses the other couple of months ago and the one thing I just hated about this house I loved everything about the house. You're not supposed to change your air filters every six months.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I called the company out to come do it Because the way the builder built it it was like you had no room for error. You had to sit there and almost put a crowbar in there to pull out the tray, to reply and I'm like, and you're in the attic and this was in atlanta, so of course, when are you doing this in this summer? So it's 2000 degrees up in the attic and I'm trying to like change this out and can't see and everything else I'm like this is insane, right.
Speaker 2:And so think about that.
Speaker 2:Every six months I was getting tortured by this air conditioning system, to the point I just told these guys like I'll pay you a hundred dollars, you just come do it for me, right?
Speaker 2:And so think about how many times in a utility closet in a boiler room there's some handle that's just like awkwardly put there, and so there's all these intricacies about not just how do you build it, but how do you maintain it and the lack of clearance we give. You know, if you really want it optimized, you know they had, like in a warehouse they had those machines that automatically drive back and forth to clean the concrete, right, that wash the concrete a little suction thing. You see them in airports and stuff. Should it be optimized for two widths? So you're driving up once and back and you're done, because if it was two and a half, then all of a sudden I gotta go like that's three, right. So you start thinking about even operating this thing and the auto. I mean, if we think, if we have these roombas in our houses, are we not going to have industrialized cleaning bots?
Speaker 2:right right right, I mean, I saw this great demo this is 10 years ago a caterpillar, a fully automated grading equipment, greater it dropped. Dropped the grading plan and it runs. But, guess what? It can't grade everything, because if the civil engineer didn't design it a certain way, they were like nooks and crannies. It couldn't get into Right. How important were those nooks and crannies?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know one thing that I was going to say. That came to mind as you're explaining that. But now I became a little conflicted there for a minute, because you're talking about hey, we're going to design this or we're going to optimize it, so the, the cleaning machine, makes two passes, once up, once down, and obviously you know that there's, there's an oversimplification in the example, right, there's okay, well, that's, we're going to design this for the cleaning, but what about the forklift that's stocking the, the upper things, and what about the, the exiting requirements for, for fire code and all those things? But but your other point about the quantum computing which isn't necessary for this example, but all this stuff is, is figureoutable. It's not that hard to figure that out. Once we understand all the things that need to go in there the cleaning, the stocking, the exiting, whatever the things are Then we can come to some number, and one of them is going to be the control number.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, by the way, if you solve for this and you go, you can go back to the forklift company. Hey guys, make your forks a little bit wider, like. I mean, if you start to build, like what the pattern of the, if you take a systems driven approach? Right, that, this is all.
Speaker 2:I think I posted another post that said hey, we're moving from means to methods, to orchestration and agents, right, this is like a massive symphony of sorts that we're trying to put together, right? And I think if you look at quantum and I don't even know if you need quantum I'm just really hyped about it because Satya is hyped about it.
Speaker 2:I get hyped about anything Satya Nadella is hyped about. But you start thinking about all this stuff, right, and then you go back to the building product manufacturers and so that's like the second wave. I'm building right, so I've been talking to all the owners. I've been deliberately not been talking to AEC because I just don't think they're mission aligned to solve the bigger problem. They're too busy building time and delivering change orders. They're just too much in it for me to pull them out of that mindset. So now I'm talking to building product manufacturers and I ask the simple question how often do you get feedback on how to improve your product? And they're like hardly ever to none.
Speaker 2:Nobody ever comes to us and says hey, you know that light picture you designed. If you did it this way, it would be easier for me to install. If you did it that way, it would provide enough lighting that I could reduce the number of canned lights when I'm designing it, right? So you start going down that that that way, about every you know, of course, we all know like the number of skews in a building are wild, right, it's doors and hinges and doorknobs and hvac. I mean there's so many skews, right, and I think it's fascinating. If you take this dfm approach um, which, ethan, you know, producer ethan, you might want to put some notes in there about dfm, since you know, maybe our, our listeners don't know much about it. You can put something in the show notes about design for manufacturing. But if you take a DFM approach, there's a constant feedback loop to the conveyor system, people to the automated welding to the CN.
Speaker 2:There's a constant feedback loop and I feel like we have no feedback loop to the manufacturers. Feedback loop and I feel like we have no feedback loop to the manufacturers. In fact, I was in a situation with an owner, a large grocery store chain, and every one of the stores was having a problem with a specific piece of equipment and it was funny, they didn't even complain to corporate. They were selling the equipment on eBay and buying a different manufacturer that they liked better and corporate didn't even know this was going on. But it was like this underlying thing. It's like well, guys, why didn't you let corporate know that this piece of equipment is not working for you? I don't know, I'm just, I'm trying to run a store man.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to get stuff done and one of the other stores. I was talking to him and he had the same problem. He was like well, how'd you solve it? He's like this. I was like so there was no like feedback loop. To corporate I was the feedback loop, which is wild. And also to the manufacturer to say, hey, we're this big grocery store chain, we've standardized on this skew. We're getting some feedback from our store managers for x, y and z. Have you guys heard like are you doing anything about it?
Speaker 2:zero feedback so I think, when we start thinking about that, the feedback that can be provided by the design community and the construction community and the operations people, the building product manufacturers. I feel like we can solve so many like optimization problems. Think about, like you know, you're an HVAC company or Lennox or Oda Carrier, whoever hey, we design in these three tonnages or these four tonnages. Well then it turns out like I'm designing and it's like, hey, it turns out I'm always having to over over buy the tonnage for my cooling systems because, that's all that's available.
Speaker 2:Everything else is too undersized.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe there's a middle size that you know. Maybe I need an eight and a half. I'm not an eight, I'm not a nine, I need an eight and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that feedback loop is critical and I I completely agree with you. I mean, I the number of times that I ran into this and on the design side, where it's like, why is it this? This was always a frustrations that. Why? Why am I again with, with modularity in mind, right?
Speaker 1:And trying to reduce waste and things like that. Why? Why does the design of this particular elevation of this building or something like that, why is it being driven by the size of this one material, doesn't make any sense at all. Right, it doesn't have anything to do with with any of these other things, except that that's the size that that material comes in. That's just, you know, really superfluous example. But I think your point of of the feedback loop being constant, being continual and through all the players, I think that's what's going to be required for this business model, if you will, this idea that you're talking about. Otherwise, it starts to fall apart pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:No, and think about too like back to the DFM example when this contract manufacturer said hey, I have all these parts standardized on backlog and I've got inventory. If you ever need a spare like, we can ship one as fast as FedEx can get it to you, we can get it to you.
Speaker 2:Think about that in buildings, right, things break. That's just the nature of physics. Right Things break. Oh, it turns out we bought this product and spares aren't available. You know what I mean? It's just like this thinking around the long-term viability and waste and all that around buildings. I think we can learn a lot from that DFM process. Yeah, dfm process, yeah, and I think owners are open to it. You know, I think the when I talk to owners, they kind of get bullied by their design teams. It's very, it's a very strange dynamic. I'm paying you and I'm asking for x and you're like well, x won't work. Sorry, like uh, but I'm the customer right, like this, like the customer, the customer right, like this, like the customer, the customer is right doesn't seem to apply.
Speaker 1:The customer is right. What? Well, yeah, I mean, there is, there is a, an expertise that they're paying for. However, what is that expertise? Is it on DFM? No, it's. It's not likely on on DFM, but I think you know, as we look, as we look at the future, and again, I think you know, there there are, there are nuances available here. Certainly, behind behind the scenes, we're getting ready to, uh, to host a sustainability um what?
Speaker 1:do we call it sustainability forum um, on the way to launching a new mastermind group which is really going to be focused on resilience. These are the types of things we're going to have to to think about. You know, how do we actually? What's the actual life cycle cost? What's the what's the process of designing, building and operating? Because it is, I think.
Speaker 2:I think there is a a missing link there, often between the design, design and build and operating uh, communities, if you will yeah, look, I think, um, there's just so much you know, and I think that's why you know, like you know, we're all getting together next week in Phoenix. I'm really looking forward to, like you know, starting to talk about these topics. You know, I think, argue about these topics, you know, I have this thing that I really believe that, like someone says well, it's the way we've always done it.
Speaker 2:Yeah my five year old, my inner five year old comes out, but why?
Speaker 1:But why?
Speaker 2:You know, and to the point of frustration, right, someone might throw something at me at that point, but I think these are the conversations we have to have. I mean just this whole idea of like people jumping on a stage and talking about whatever bullshit they want to talk about is just not, that's not collaborative right, that's just like spewing stuff. So I think we've, really, if I think, if we're all committed to doing better which is where it starts right, commitment and passion is where it starts we're like the smartest industry in the world.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's where you used the term, or you evoked the term a minute ago, which I continue to contend is the most dangerous term we have in our society, because this is the way we've always done it. Yeah, you're, we are supposed to be the ultimate problem solvers. This is the way we've always done. It doesn't enter into that, into that realm, but yet we evoke that term all the time. You know that we use that product, or we use, we make it that size or we you know whatever it is, um yeah, imagine if you went to your doctor and you said, hey, I have a fever.
Speaker 2:And they're like, oh, I'm gonna throw some leeches on you this is why we've always done it I'm out oh, you have a headache. You want me to go get the drill I'm gonna drill into your skull because this is the way we've always done it, yeah, always done it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, be careful when you say that Careful what you ask for.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think this is um, I do. This is obviously. It's a fascinating topic it's. It has generated a lot of reaction on, on and again. It's one of the one of the shortest posts that you've had, probably ever. I mean, it's only three sentences long, so it's got to be right up there. But I think it really strikes at the heart of the evolution that we're seeing in the built environment, the AEC world, and the way that we design and we build and the materials go into it, the way that we develop them and and own and operate in the built environment.
Speaker 1:So let me, as we get ready here to wrap it up, let me read this post one more time and then again, if you're not following KP on LinkedIn, you should be. Just look for KP, the letters K and P and then ready, r, e, d, d, y, you can follow him. You won't probably won't be able to connect with him because he's usually capped out at LinkedIn's maximum number there. But follow KP or more more posts about what's happening in the built environment, and you'll find gems like this it says.
Speaker 1:I hear lots of answers to this question and I have my own ideas. Why do so few GCs self-perform anything. If your answer is risk, please be specific. So go find that post when you listen to this at some point in the future at least from when we're now, when we're recording go find this post and type your answer into the comments and let's see you know. Join. Join the conversation. Join dozens of other people that are reacting and commenting on this particular post. This is really interesting. I'm sure we'll revisit some version of this conversation again before too long because, like I said, I think it's one that's going to be on our radar a lot in the near future.
Speaker 2:And I think, Jeff, this is the reason why we're the number one podcast in the built environment.
Speaker 1:It certainly is.
Speaker 2:We talk about the real, real.
Speaker 1:The real. Real, not, because this is the way we've always done it.
Speaker 2:No, number one again Still.
Speaker 1:Alright, I am joined today as usual by KP Ready. He's the CEO and founder of KP Ready Co. And also the founder of Shadow Ventures, as KP said, I guess by the time you hear this I didn't think about this as I said it, but producer Ethan is not going to have this one published before we head to Phoenix for our next one day mastermind event, but we will be in Atlanta in Q2 for our one-day mastermind event in May, so keep an eye out for info on that. I know tickets are already going for that event and we have other offerings out there, obviously.
Speaker 2:I will tell you the May event is going to blow up there's a lot of stuff we're working on. Um, I think that, um, yeah, I think it's just it's going to be. I think may is going to be one of those ones where we actually have to tell people like, hey, we don't have room right, which is which is usually just a marketing ploy by the events team, um, but this time it might actually because I'm just.
Speaker 2:I think there were so many people that couldn't make it to phoenix and are automatically signing up for atlanta, right, and of course, I've spent so much of my life in atlanta, there's also like a good following there as well.
Speaker 1:So right producer, ethan will have a link in the show notes for the ticket link for the event in Atlanta.
Speaker 1:Let me, as we're talking here, I'll just tell you what the date's going to be. It's May 20th, tuesday, may 20th, in Atlanta. It'll be an all day. It's our one day mastermind event, our Q2 one day mastermind event, coming up in Atlanta, may 20th 2025. So, looking at show notes or registration link for that event, kp, as always, thanks for joining me today and for all of you that are out there listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us again. Follow KP on LinkedIn. Go over and find this post. I hear lots of answers to this question. Have my own ideas. Why do so few gc's self-perform anything? Go find that post.
Speaker 2:Put in the comments why you don't self-perform anything, or why you think gc's don't, or why you think they should be interesting to get your take on that and if you have, if you have a really good answer, ethan or jeff might pick it and have you on a podcast to what we call it the uh troll kp unpacked for edition, where you get other people to come in and talk about my posts. So you might be one of the special ones that get picked, that's right we're uh, we're starting a troll k club.
Speaker 1:You can join. There'll be a link in the show notes. All right, thanks everybody. We'll be back again next week with another episode of KP Unpacked. Thanks, kp.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks, jeff.