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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
If the Owner Doesn’t Care, You’re Dead.
In this episode of KP Unpacked, the number one podcast in AEC, KP Reddy and Jeff Echols go full throttle on the one thing most AEC startups get completely wrong: ignoring the owner.
You’re selling to GCs. You’re marketing to architects. But if the owner doesn’t see the value, you’re just noise in the vendor stack. KP unpacks the real reason BIM didn’t deliver, why most conferences are a year behind, and how smart startups are turning owners into their secret sales weapon.
🔹 Why your value prop must include the owner — or you’re toast
🔹 The Intel Inside playbook (and what startups can steal from it)
🔹 Why most AEC tech still hasn’t delivered on its promise
🔹 How to turn a project requirement into a marketing weapon
🔹 Conferences, echo chambers, and the lost art of original thinking
🔹 The LinkedIn "like" trap and career-limiting behavior
👀 Plus: A callout to every AEC founder — are you building something that adds value… or just more noise?
💡 This episode might sting a little — especially if your startup is stuck in sales limbo.
🎉 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!
Hey, welcome back to KP Unpacked. This is where the biggest ideas in AEC, ai and innovation they all collide in one podcast. It's powered by KP ReadyCo and this is where we break down the trends, the technology, the discussions and the strategies that are shaping the built environment and beyond. My name is Jeff Eccles. I head up the Mastermind and Incubator programs here at KP Ready Co, and in this version, I'm actually joined by KP Ready.
Speaker 2:Or the AI version thereof.
Speaker 1:I am joined by a deep fake that we call KP.
Speaker 2:It's the rare situation where the AI is actually more interesting than the actual person.
Speaker 1:Well, you said that, not me. We joke about it, but I've been recording so many different versions of this podcast. I've been, I've been interviewing our, our research team, and then Frank Lazaro, um, our AI advisor, and I we uh, typically there's a little inside baseball, but Frank and I typically record a couple of episodes a week and record episodes with our mastermind members and speakers, and so it's almost it feels like it's almost become rare that you and I sit down and record anymore, even though we do every week.
Speaker 2:so it's just a lot of, uh, a lot of episodes in between no, I mean, that's what makes us the number one podcast in the ac space your mom, my mom, frank's mom, the moms of all everybody on our research team.
Speaker 1:This is the number one aec podcast amongst moms in america yeah, you know it's funny.
Speaker 2:you say that right? I see this pattern on linkedin that I find fascinating is that a ceo of a 2500 person company will post something and gets like 100 reactions and I'm like, do their employees not know that that's career limiting behavior, that there's? I mean you have 2500 employees and like 100 react to a CEO's post.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm like didn't anyone not get the memo? Like social media flattery is the best form of flattery. Like I find it fascinating. Can anyone not get the memo? Social media flattery is the best form of flattery. I find it fascinating. I track when you guys don't like my stuff or comment on my stuff. I have a little list.
Speaker 1:I know it irritates you when I give you the thumbs down.
Speaker 2:That would be awesome. All right, it would be more fun if you guys started trolling me. That would actually be more fun than just like liked it this is awesome yeah, just like troll me.
Speaker 1:So here I I'm going to create an ai agent that that creates troll comments. It's all it's going to do is troll your linkedin post. That's what I'm going to do.
Speaker 2:Okay, don't you wonder these. Is there anyone on these companies teams or the CEO? I mean, ceos are full of ego, right, like do they look at who reacted and who didn't?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, I wonder, it's just like you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you and I are are very plugged in on LinkedIn. Obviously I mean, yeah, I think you and I are are very plugged in on LinkedIn. Obviously. I mean, we come here every week to to unpack one of your LinkedIn posts and you're posting several times a day, um, and we also know, right, we, we know that there's there's this confirmation bias and there's this bubble and, even though you know so and so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so may be connections on LinkedIn, are they actually on LinkedIn? We have these kind of conversations and it's not just LinkedIn that we talk about that, um, x, x percent of them are not even on linkedin, and then another y percent or whatever. I'm running out of letters all of a sudden um, they're not actually active yeah and so they're.
Speaker 2:You know there's, there's some nuances, I suppose yeah, I had someone tell me one time like I was like hey, like are you on linkedin and they're, this is they said I'm not looking for a job, why would I be active on LinkedIn? People only get active on LinkedIn when they're getting ready to look for a job. And we live in such a bubble.
Speaker 2:You and I do where we think of it as more of a communications platform than a recruiting platform, but I think a lot of people still, you know, look at it that way.
Speaker 1:They do. I mean it's, you know, it's the, it's the 2007 attitude, it's the 2007 LinkedIn attitude. But it's also not lost to me that in the, in the industry that we serve at the AEC industry, often slow to adopt.
Speaker 1:You know, we talk about that all the time and we'll probably touch on that a little bit here today in this episode but slow to adopt a lot of things.
Speaker 1:You know I was I don't know how long it's been now. 10 years ago, 12 years ago I was talking about using social media for marketing, business development, for architecture firms, and at some point I sort of got tired of it. I'm like you know, when I started talking about it it was maybe a little bit early in social media overall, but it was way early for social media and AEC. And then, a few years later, I've moved on. Right, I'm tired of talking about it and I started getting requests to do talks that I had been doing for years and I remember saying this from stage I was keynoting a national conference and I was just for whatever reason know, I was tired or I was hungry or whatever my filters turned off and one of the first things I saw this in the recording. One of the first things I said was I cannot believe you paid me to come up here to talk about this it's 2016 or whatever it was, 2018.
Speaker 1:Maybe I cannot believe that you paid me in this year to come up here and talk about this because I thought I thought this was old news and that's that bubble right that we live in, that we exist in. Is it old news? Yeah, it is old news. Is it old news for everybody? No, maybe not. Maybe old news isn't the right term. Maybe it's just that there are laggards, but the reality is that there are plenty of people that do back to your point, that do think about it, going to start looking for a job. All of a sudden, they start reacting to my LinkedIn post.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden they start people that I have not talked to in three to four years.
Speaker 2:They start liking my stuff, they start commenting and then, of course, within 30 days, I get a message hey, you know, I've been really really about reevaluating where I'm at and I think I'm going to start the process of looking right, yeah, uh, do you have five minutes? And I'm like, yeah, sure you know. And so I get on a call with like yeah, you know, I'm gonna start looking, you know, and I'm like okay, like like I like I didn't know right, it's predictable, yeah pretty predictable yeah the second comment you made right, which I think is interesting, and I'm not, um, you know, in private I throw lots of people under the bus publicly.
Speaker 2:Uh, I'm a little bit more nuanced, you know. Read into it, but I'm watching all these conferences in aec tech. There was just one out here in california where I live, like there was just one here a couple weeks ago but they're all over.
Speaker 2:They're all over, right, all these conferences, and I'm seeing something really interesting, which is even the conversations happening at these conferences that are supposed to be like these new hot take things. Yeah, they're off by like a year and a half at least at least right and when I'm fairly. And these are tech conferences. This isn't aia the alphabet soup, okay, all right sure innovation, tech, whatever and um.
Speaker 2:And what I'm realizing is, I think I mean I I've talked to you about this I'm probably gonna do four speaking gigs or five speaking gigs this year. Last year I did like 40.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you've cut way back.
Speaker 2:this year I've cut way back because I'm too busy. I'm too busy doing stuff, building stuff and, quite honestly, I'm kind of tired of sharing. I really am Right. It's like oh, wow, like no one does anything with it.
Speaker 1:I was really right. It's like oh, wow, like no one does anything with it, why am I out here? I mean, I get paid. Yeah, that's part of the point, yeah.
Speaker 2:I get paid, but which doesn't hurt anything. But I think this idea of like I'm out here talking about stuff and nobody's listening and what they want to hear is what everyone's talking about, all these other conferences and what they want to hear is what everyone's talking about all these other conferences.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, it's an echo chamber, yeah, yeah. And so I think I just feel like my observation has been, and I've talked to several people that have been on the circuit and they're kind of saying the same thing, Like man, like it's just, it's a bunch of people talking about the same stuff from five years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talking about the same stuff from five years ago. Yeah, well, I mean it's. I don't think it's any secret that event organizers are often looking around going, okay, well, you know, who did they have and who did they have and who did they have and who was a draw, and and things like that, and and so I it's. There's a lot, there's lots of different examples that we could come up with of this, right, but it's sort of that race to mediocrity. You know, if we're just sort of comparing notes oh they had them, let's get them Then that's where you're going to be, versus actually thinking creatively, thinking critically and seeing maybe what's a little bit controversial, or you know, you know what's? Who are the actual practitioners?
Speaker 2:I think it's partly that right. I mean, I look we have our five events this year, so I'll be speaking at those five. But even at our events I'm not really speaking. I'm just trying to get people to open up and we kind of joke around it's KP's group therapy. I was trying to get people to open up and we kind of joke around it's KP's group therapy. I was trying to get people to say things that they're thinking, which is a problem. Enough people in our industry will not say what they're thinking. Like I think I had a post earlier this week about, you know, I talked to all these 500 CEOs and they're quote unquote investing heavily in innovation and then they're telling me, like I don't think we're going to be here in five years, yeah, but they're not telling their employees that. They can't tell their employees like hey, by the way, we're not going to be here in five years, right?
Speaker 1:By the way, you ought to get on LinkedIn and start liking and commenting.
Speaker 2:Update your LinkedIn profile? No, and so I think it's interesting. I'm just getting. I'm just finding that I would rather talk to smaller groups of people and then simply ask the question. They're like oh, that's a great idea, kp. I'm like good, what the fuck are you gonna do about it? I just gave you a great idea. Now what don't tell me. Like, oh, you're gonna study it. And like I don't have time, like I'm learning that.
Speaker 2:Um, there's people that will pay you for your time there's not a lack of those people right but I just want to spend time with people that want to pay me for my time, so to speak, and aren't going to do anything with it yeah yeah, well, even yeah, even just on, like the, the human level, whether you're a parent or a friend or whatever, the role is that you're playing.
Speaker 1:It's frustrating. That's the I always. My mom's voice is in the back of my head, right, it's like if you don't have anything nice to say, you don't say anything at all. It's the nicest way I could say it is. It can be really frustrating when you try to help someone that won't help themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that happens a lot, right, like you said, when you go out and speak and so on. But you brought up something a minute ago about our events. Right, the five that we'll have this year, they're giant. Well, they're not giant, they're. They're. They're conversations, right, these? These are not speaking events. This is not where you come and you hear a bunch of speakers. You know you sit there and you listen.
Speaker 1:Whatever these, these are five conversations that are having and they really reflect the way that our mastermind groups work, or mastermind groups run Right. They're conversations amongst the most innovative in the AEC industry. So if that's something you want to get in on, you should. You should come to these events.
Speaker 2:Right, but they're also doers. They're not talkers. Yeah yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think the talkers don't show back up to our events no, they don't because they realize, just showing up and being a talking head, blah, blah, blah, where we have got? We have people you know, at our events are like hey, did you check out grok 3.0? I did this and I did that, I wrote. And all of a sudden you realize like, oh, these people are not powerpoint people. Yeah, these are github people, these are people that are doing things, trying things you know, not just like. Oh, innovation. Let me tell you about innovation curves. No one cares about your innovation curve, yeah, or whatever, like any of that stuff.
Speaker 2:So anyway, we, we digress, so we do we're here to unpack this is.
Speaker 1:This is my. I didn't even get to say this yet. This is my weekly opportunity to say hey, KP, what were you thinking when you posted that on LinkedIn? That's why we come here to unpack one of the posts that KP puts up on LinkedIn every week. If you're not following him, you should go right now over to LinkedIn. That's L-I-N-K-E-D-I-Ncom. It's not just a job search place, LinkedIncom, and search KP, the letter K, the letter P ready, R-E-D-D-Y. You won't be able to connect with him. I'm assuming you're still full, You're still maxed out on your connections. But you can follow KP.
Speaker 1:He posts two or three times a day and his posts are inspired by conversations that he's having, presentations, that he's giving advisory work, that he's doing research that's going on inside KP, ReadyCo and other places. And this is my opportunity every week to say, okay, what was the inspiration for that thing that you posted the other day? And so we're going to do that today. We're going to unpack something that KP wrote about AEC technology companies. So, per the way that we usually do this, I'm going to read it and then KP and I are going to talk about it. It goes like this Ultimately, an AEC technology company should have an owner value proposition.
Speaker 1:Why, If your value proposition is only valuable to the AEC firm, they have to fit you into their current budgets. If they can leverage your technology to sell the owner, then you could possibly create revenue for the AEC firm, but as a minimum, your spend gets reimbursed by the owner. Why don't startups do this? It's a lot of work to build marketing for an indirect customer. Owners are diverse. There's a good bit to unpack there. So where do we start? First of all, why? What was happening? What conversation was going on? What inspired you to post this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think I've mentioned it before. Last year, I decided um, my, you know, my first book from 2011 was BIM for owners and developers, and my big hypothesis back then was that BIM was going to transform. Uh, the most impacted by BIM would be owners and developers. I was 100% wrong. 100% wrong. How many?
Speaker 1:times do authors come on to this podcast and say I was 100% wrong?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to take my book, run it through AI and have it create the counterfactual book.
Speaker 1:And it'll be right.
Speaker 2:It'll be right, I'm rewriting history. That's awesome. So the general thinking was I'm talking to these owners and they're like look, we saw no benefit from them, zero, nothing. In fact, it could be that buildings have taken longer to build, the quality is lower and they've costed more because of them. Sorry, autodesk, it turns out the value has not been to the end stakeholder. It may be, the value has been to the vendors, which is AC. We are all vendors. That's why we respond to RFPs, that's why we go through procurement, because we are a vendor. We're no different than Dunder Mifflin in many ways, so we are a commodity vendor that serves an owner. So if we look at that and we say, well, all this technology, all these tools have really helped the vendors become more efficient, the vendors to get the value and there hasn't really been a pass through to the owner, then there's no demand pull through right, and so what happens is we have construction tech companies that are doing a really good job of tracking problems okay I'm going to track the punch lists.
Speaker 2:I'm going to try. You know, I'm going to review contracts, right, I mean, that's not value, that's like perfunctory. Right, we're not changing the process, the owner is not. How does the owner benefit from ai reviewing a construction contract? Right, not good, right, um, and so long, long. What happens is a lot of these companies just kind of peter out. They're just not going to get anywhere because there is no traction from the owner saying I demand this. We have one portfolio company that's doing a fantastic job with this, where the owners are finding out about their product and saying why is the GC buying this? We should be hiring you because we're getting a ton of value, and then when the project ends, the contractor's walking off with our data. We want to own the data.
Speaker 1:This is our data.
Speaker 2:This is high value for us, right and so. But I also understand why, right. So why do companies? Why do startups do this? Because they can get a list. Here's all the GCs. So really, the GCs and the design teams become kind of a channel to market, because if I go talk to a general contractor, they have 100 projects going on. Right, if I go talk to an general contractor, they have 100 projects going on. If I go talk to an owner, they might have three. If you go talk to Georgia Tech, how many construction projects do they have going on on the campus right now? Three, four.
Speaker 1:Not counting bathroom renovations.
Speaker 2:I'm going to spend all this energy to build a relationship with the university to get one project. Or I go to a gc that has 100 active projects and I have access to 100 projects, so sure, the go-to-market scaling makes 100 percent uh sense. However, if you can arm your if it's a general contractor or designer, engineer, whatever with a value prop to their end customer, now they're actually creating value. Now they might even be able to charge the owner for this. Like, if you think about it, why don't GCs charge owners for BIM?
Speaker 1:There's no value prop for the owner.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like oh, you're using a tool that you know. I remember being in meetings early days at BIM where you know architects would try to charge owners for BIM and some of them were successful at it much like they used to charge for CAD time.
Speaker 2:Right Charge for CAD time right, yep, they try to do that. And so when they would tell the owner smart owners, right, smart owners? Um, they would say like so, you're going to use bim to deliver a higher quality project faster. Like why am I like you're already in that way? Are you not delivering a quality product? If you deliver it faster, don't you benefit? Right, like so here's.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing, though it hasn't been delivered faster no, it hasn't so this is a different episode, but I'll take the. I'll take the other side of that. The bim, cad and bim haven't created value for the design side either. No, that's a different episode that's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's the bim is dead 2 episode. We already have a bim is dead 1 episode. Yeah, bim is dead 2 episode, um, so anyway. So I think, um, if you could actually so I think, for a startup there, right, it's, it's, it's a lot, right, I mean, I've run startups so I get I'm very empathetic towards startups being focused and all that. But I do think at some point for the longevity, to build a brand with owners, to build a value prop for owners where they can, actually they'll ask for it.
Speaker 2:Right ask for it. Right, I used to sit on the technology advisory board for Intel and I learned a lot about Intel through that process and this was back in the day. You know Intel inside and I learned a lot about it where I was like, hey, nobody buys Intel.
Speaker 2:You and I as a consumer, we don't buy Back in the day right, we bought to the day right. We bought a dell computer, we bought a gateway, we you know, and and intel's whole thing is like. Well, we want you to make sure you buy the one with intel chips in it, not the amd chips so if you remember those, those old dell commercials on tv at the end of it, there'd be like a ding ding, ding and a little with the Intel logo would come on Exactly.
Speaker 2:And that was their market. And so what I learned from Intel was even though you may not be serving the end customer directly they're not buying from you directly you should be influencing and marketing to them in a brand awareness way so that people ask, because you know, back then when we walked into CompUSA to buy a computer listen up, kids, there's a thing called CompUSA and we went into the store to buy a computer.
Speaker 1:I think I just stepped out of the Wayback Machine.
Speaker 2:So we'd go to CompUSA and we'd get our box of Windows 95 disks.
Speaker 1:How old are you, my God?
Speaker 2:Younger than you. That's the good news. You'd go get your Windows 95 disks out of the box and you'd go to the computer and you'd have this. You'd be like which Pentium.
Speaker 1:Pentium 2? What size were those disks?
Speaker 2:Five and a half inch floppies. This is okay. I don't know how old you are, but a little older than you. Punch card, jeff, so I think so anyway. So you'd ask for a Pentium you know if they showed you right if they showed you two pcs amd.
Speaker 2:I don't know those guys, they don't have a cool you know like, so you know, so you literally bought intel. Um, so I think there is a strategy for startups to try to build good brand awareness with owners and sometimes it's simple things, right. So if you're delivering to a GC that your in-state deliverables that they give to the owner, maybe it's, you know like, we have a company, green Badger, that does lead reporting. They sell to general contractors, right, but hopefully, if they're listening, hopefully all the reports that the GCs get that they're turning into the owners are powered by Green Badger.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right. Insist on that branding on the reporting and the output that ends up at the owners, because then they start seeing that and the owner goes like Green Badger. Then the next GC shows up and it doesn't say powered by Green Badger.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You guys not using Green Badger? I heard they're the standard. They're the de facto standard for lead reporting. What are you using a spreadsheet? That's insane.
Speaker 1:How do I know?
Speaker 2:How do I know it's quality? How do I know it reports quality? I think there are subtle and interesting things that startups can do to generate brand awareness with owners, that startups can do to generate brand awareness with owners. So the owners start to ask their vendors, the aec firms right by name, like oh, aren't you using this?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, I and as I'm listening to you say this, I mean I agree with all of it. And as I listen to you say this, I think you know, in a way, this is, this is very, this is a very meta conversation, and not like meta meta, but meta um, because I mean we're talking about aec techs, we're talking about startups, we're talking about that value proposition for the owner. And and then, kicking back and forth, that did, did bim create any value for the owner? You say no, I say bim didn't create any value for the owner. You say no, I say BIM didn't create any value for the design side, for the vendor side either.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the things that may be the elephant in the room that may be on the vendor side that a lot of people are overlooking, which is becoming more and more dangerous every day, is what's the value prop that the vendor's creating? Right, this, this, this conversation, is about the AEC tech firm, about the startup. But if we, if we zoom out right, we'd better start having conversations, um with our owners. Maybe we should create something called like an integrated owners forum or something, but we, we need to start understanding value propositions for the owners across the board.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no 100. So I think, um, I think when you look at you know the owner's perspectives, I think, because you know they they be build one building a year or whatnot. It's hard and I think I have a general rule right when you're hiring someone anyone accountants, branding, consultant you know we just went through a big rebrand and I'm not going to plug the firm because I paid them a lot of money so I shouldn't have it. They want to give me a kickback and discount my stuff. I'll plug them, but no, right now you just got paid guys, the sponsor or something, but they did a fantastic job. So I think when you hire anyone to do anything, there's two vectors. You're looking at Capacity and competence right you're looking at capacity and competence right.
Speaker 1:So I would say why is jet, why does?
Speaker 2:jeff. Why do I hire jeff? It's probably both. You're very comp, you're more competent as a podcast host than I am. Okay, um, and I don't have time. Right, I don't have time to get good at it, I may not even have to. I mean, you have to wrangle me for this one hour a week. You got to wrangle me down, right? We, you know, mr, reschedule two minutes before we're supposed to be on air. I mean like right. So if you look at competence and capacity as the two vectors of hiring anything, right, why do you hire an accountant? I don't have either. Right, why do I? Was talking to an owner the other day. I was like this man, this guy, he really understands how to design and build a building.
Speaker 2:So I kind of asked the question. I was like why don't you just do it, bring it in house? He's like oh, man, cause, then when we're really busy with the building I won't have enough people, because I can't hire that many people.
Speaker 2:And then, when we're not designing buildings, what do I do with all these people? So I'm building a billion dollar facility, I ramp up an internal AE team, which he could. He has the capabilities to manage a team, so what? I'm going to hire 50 people and they're really busy drawing it for a year or two and then they're done and then during that year, I don't I can't hire a hundred. I probably maybe need a hundred people drawing and not 50.
Speaker 2:So it's the ebbs and flows of of capacity right, sure, sure and then sometimes it's competency right, sometimes just your competency, like I don't know how to do that and for a lot of owners they're CFO types. They have no. They have no either capacity or competency. So I think, if you look at, those are the two vectors. I am now starting to see owners that are saying you know what, I can hire the competency, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how to manage capacity. And KP introduced me to these AI tools that are allowing me to do things with less capacity and sometimes less competency. I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to self-perform my design. I'm going to self-perform my construction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah Well, I mean, you already see a lot of these and for decades you've seen a lot of these owners that have a facilities team or a construction team, you know whatever they call it, and they're the ones that end up interfacing with the vendor side, right with the design side. So it seems like they're only half a step from that and have historically been half a step from what you're describing. And yeah, if you're on the design side, outside of the owner environment, then that might be a threat that you pay attention to.
Speaker 2:But I do think startups, from a longevity perspective, back to the original post, I think you actually you're the AC firm, whether it's design or construction or whatnot. They are not going to be able to frame the value prop to the owner nearly as well as you can and you should think of them as a co-marketing partner to drive that message and behavior to the owners. You know the worst thing that you know. On one hand you're like, oh, I'm working with this contractor and they're paying us a lot of money for our product and we're there, we're their little secret, we're their little special weapon. I'm like that's, that's good and bad.
Speaker 2:Right, the bad news is the owner doesn't know who you are right the good news is the owner you know the contractor's seeing a lot of value and doesn't want to share right like we have talked about it before. Like if you find a great babysitter, never share that with your friends because they'll always pay a dollar more right right.
Speaker 1:Also, if you are the on the startup side, it's your responsibility to to give that GC or whoever. It is the story to tell. And if you want to fly under the radar, what's the story? There's still a story to be told. If you want to be front and center, it's a different story. You call them, you need to be through through your branding, through your, your customer experience, through all of those things. You need to be giving them the story to tell. You don't want to leave it to chance.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:So you know, I think the example of Green Badger is a good one, right, and that's more of a maybe an explicit example like hey, put it in the template that gets printed out, that ends up on, you know, joe's desk, or whatever example. But also, you know, what do you want to to accompany?
Speaker 1:that you know well you know here's, here's a report and what's the screen badge? Well, you know they're. They're the industry standard, like what you said earlier. Right, you want them to tell that story, but you're going to have to teach them to tell that story in some way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's it's. It's also interesting, right In the current construct of how we design and build buildings. You know, how are you getting? It's amazing how many startups I talk to that don't understand the specification system. They don't understand division one. I don't like. How do? If you want to be truly part of the project, right, if you want to be of impact, you need to be part of the specifications. You need to be part of division one. You need like and they're like what are you even talking about KP? We're just selling software. I'm like or no, or the owner is like part of the project requirements. You're written in into it. And you know, I'll tell you back in the day.
Speaker 2:Bim days Autodesk did a fantastic job with this. Bim days Autodesk did a fantastic job with this. They had BIM requirements documents and they went to GSA and they went to US Army Corps of Engineers. They went to all these big owners and said BIM is the new standard. Just like you wouldn't let your architecture firm fax you drawings, make them email you pdfs, these days you're not gonna let you know we're not. You're not gonna let them use cad anymore. They have to use bim and they spent millions upon millions to create. You know the gsa bim standard and their theory. It was a smart strategy. The theory was if you get the largest owners in the world standardizing on a technology and then creating a requirements document as part of the procurement process, then everybody has to follow suit. It's just how it is.
Speaker 1:It'll trickle down.
Speaker 2:Right and I think, yes, autodesk did that by flying a bunch of people around and doing a bunch of stuff. It was very expensive. But look, I think with the right game plan and branding strategy for a startup, I think you can do the same thing. But I think you also have to beyond the execution and marketing around it. I think if you're starting a startup tomorrow to sell to GCs, to sell to architects, whatever, you have to be designing it in a way to thinking about how the owner benefits, how the owner or developer benefits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, if you're not thinking about it and mapping it out what that value stack looks like, I don't think you'll make it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean. That brings it, of course, full circle, back to the original post that we've been talking about and that's it right. The storytelling, the template, the requirements, all of that. That's part of the process, certainly, but it's got to start with what is the value proposition to the owner? Again, it's not efficiency on the vendor side, that's not a value prop to the owner. This is part of my argument. Again, we'll do this as a separate episode at some point. But that promise of efficiency that came with CAD, autocad, that came with Revit, bim, I don't believe has been realized, because the quote-unquote capability drove this movement to add more and more into the project. I don't think it sped the timeline up at all, I don't think it made anything in terms of deliverable, I don't think it made anything more efficient and I and I also believe it it drove more, more litigation and and the things that the whole industry down. So we can debate that on another episode. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No, look, I think that would be a great conversation to have because, look, I've never seen a user community of a software write an open letter to the ceo of a software company. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen a bunch of cmos writing an open letter to salesforce with their grievances. Only autodesk has attracted an open letter from leaders of an entire industry. Yeah, to complain, right and that's to. That's just fascinating. It's just a fascinating thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is, and if you keep your ear to the ground, you have conversations throughout the industry with these users, as you call them. I mean, there's plenty of disgruntledness, if that's even a word, and not without reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was talking to our founder the other day about this stuff and I said look, you should aspire to have such a large customer base that's spending so much money with you that they write an open letter. That's winning it's like. I told someone one time for me, winning is the Department of Justice shows up because I'm monopolizing a market.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:That's a great reason to get that phone call Like, oh, I am dominating a market, I've gotten on your radar. Okay, that's winning too.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and you think about that letter and the names, the firms that were represented on that letter, the signatories, right, and you go how many billions of dollars does that? Or maybe even more? I mean, it might be up into the trillions. How much does that represent? It's a lot.
Speaker 2:Can I tell you something else besides that? From a business operations perspective, that is a sheer failure from a large company to have the appropriate customer management processes in place. How do you let your entire I mean a large number of your customer base that it escalates to a point that that's how they have to express themselves, like why weren't these conversations happening ahead of time? Being put around closed doors? So either they did and they were being obtuse and just like well, we don't care what our customers say, we're going to charge them whatever we're going to do whatever, which you know that's a failure too. But my sense is more that the right people were not having the right conversations with these leaders and they never engaged. I've always found that if you give a customer a platform and a voice to share with you and do something about it, they're not going to go out in the public space and complain about you.
Speaker 2:They're more likely to go into a public space and complain because they haven't been heard, they don't feel like they've been hurt. That's why they do that, and so I think that's really it's a customer relationship breakdown by a very large company. By the way, if you guys Google this or whatever, it's old news. It's what? Two years old now right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's about two years.
Speaker 2:So we're behind the times, but I do think it's that if you're not creating value. By the way, those same people would not have complained if the end customers were like we can't, like, of course, you're using revit, like it's the best, like we depend, you know we'll pay you more. There's value right when customers are complaining about the cost escalation of your product. That says a lot about the value you're creating is being created for that customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and their complaint was the cost escalation, with negligible value creation with any sort of improvement in the product, et cetera. And I think, having some insight into that particular example. I think it started with your first point and ended with your second point. It was both of those it was the obtuse and communication.
Speaker 2:So you're right, I mean that that's a case study um, yeah, so general rule startups spend time with your customer and spend just as much time with your customer's customer yeah absolutely, you'll never go wrong exactly the post that we have been unpacking.
Speaker 1:it's from KP Ready on LinkedIn. It says ultimately, an AEC technology company should have an owner value proposition, and that's not necessarily your customers, the owner, the building owner, the client of the architecture engineering construction firm. Ultimately, an AEC technology company should have an owner value proposition. Why, If your value proposition is only valuable to the AEC firm, they have to fit you into their current budgets. If they can leverage your technology to sell the owner, then you could possibly create revenue for the AEC firm, but as a minimum, your spend gets reimbursed by the owner. Why don't startups do this? It's a lot of work to build marketing for an indirect customer. Owners are diverse. So KP and I have been unpacking this. As we do this, every week, we take a look at one of the things he's posted in the past week.
Speaker 2:So if you're not following, KP on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:You're in the dark. I'm sorry, that's just it, right? You don't have any idea what's coming. You don't have any idea what we're talking about. You're having to go create an account. It's LinkedIn, l-i-n-k-e-d-i-ncom, and then you go and you find K-P-R-E-D-D-Y and follow him, because he's posted several times a day with great insights on all sides.
Speaker 1:Right Today, we're talking about startups, but in the way that they serve not only AEC firms but also owners. So we've gone full circle here in, basically, the built environment economy. So follow him. Follow him on LinkedIn, you won't be disappointed. And then come back here next week and we will unpack another of his posts. So thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:As always, in the show notes, our production crew will pull links to the things that are important, things that need links, that we talked about. So just go down into the show notes, find those links and you can go find this article that we're talking about, et cetera, or this letter that we've been talking about, and also, especially if you're watching this on YouTube. I guess this is really the easiest, maybe the only place you can do this, but anytime you watch or listen to one of these and you have questions or comments or a recommendation for something in the future, just drop in the comments. We love to hear that kind of stuff and maybe it will shape a future post from KP ready himself. We'll see. We'll see. There's a. There's a lottery system. I don't know how it works. I know I.
Speaker 2:Two years in a row, I did not get banana ball tickets, so I don't know how it works.
Speaker 1:I know two years in a row I did not get banana ball tickets, so I don't know how lotteries work. Kp, thanks for joining me. As always Been a great conversation and look forward to doing it again next week.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks, jeff, good seeing you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and everybody that's out there. Thanks for listening, thanks for making this the number one show amongst moms in the AEC community, and we'll see you again next week.