Build better with Kahua

Welcome to the Articonstruction, the podcast dedicated to helping you grow your business. Together we'll explore the world of construction with some of the best minds of the industry. Your host, Devantilly, a micro-impleancer and sometimes disruptor, will take you on a journey that will lead your business to the next level. What's up, Articonstruction Tribe, Devantilly here and I'm so excited to bring one of those connections as we're all out there searching for those people that can bring our superpowers to life in construction. And I'm super excited to have one stepping up to the plate today of the main message I don't convey to you, tribe is that how do we figure out how to align these superpowers in construction and figure out how to have these deeper conversations past the LinkedIn promises. With that being said, shout out to LinkedIn because that's how this started today and so many cool conversations getting started, but here on the Articonstruction Master Facilitators community, how do we bake those deeper? And how does this benefit you is that we really want to expand those conversations in construction with the Articonstruction Master Facilitators who lived it. And today we get to have that conversation with AJ Waters. We don't know this name, check it out, there's so many cool things going from his podcast and all the stuff that we're going to talk about today. So let's figure out on his podcast. Let's bring the engineers and the MFers together to build better building smarter, which we talk about on all these different fireside chats and talk about real life stories on how construction it's hard. But as AJ and I in the pre-interviews, that's where we really we were we were aligning our superpowers to say, you know what, it's worth it. And that's the people that are all coming together to figure out. So we're going to learn about the Kahua platform that he is the brain evangelist for and talk through that of people who are living it and people who are making this work. And so my perspective is just this tribe. I want to say some what ifs and then we're going to branch those out with this conversation with AJ. So listening to his different blogs and podcasts in the past. These are kind of some what ifs that he talked about that I'm excited to bring to the table and have us think about. What if you could rebuild your software dream house with experts who sold their original dream house? What if you could pull all the old drawings from the archives like AJ's house that he got his plans and he said, what if I didn't have that? I didn't have nothing. So what if you could pull all the old drawings from the archives and know what they mean in addition to AI just putting a bunch of garbage back to you? What if you could get into everyone's superpower who have actually lived construction and then reverse engineer or figure out how to guide each other whether you're two days or 20 years in the industry to work together. So that's what I'm telling us all to think about as we go on this journey together. We're not going to solve all this because there is no silver bullet for construction tech and in construction. But you know how you do that? You learn about one person's story at a time you have as much fun as possible along the way. And that's just what we're going to do with AJ waters today. What's your favorite beverage? Well, I'm a pretty simple guy. So it's a Roy Rogers in what I've found is depending on where you're at in the country, you may not know what that is, but a Roy Rogers is just a cocoa or Pepsi with grenadine in it. So cherry for flavoring. That's my go to. And I think sometimes you have to be like Shirley Temple with Coke maybe, right? And it depends on which version they've heard of different places, right? Well, it's funny because you know, I. I have lost counter the amount of times I've been I've been handed an Arnold Palmer and I'm like, no, this is not what I hate to. This is not what I meant. So yeah, it gets interesting when you order one. So I tend to just stick to water most times to keep it less confusing. And I think like I grew up in North to South North and South Dakota and it was like the in thing of the boys had the Roy Rogers and the girls had the Shirley Temple. And it's been interesting like coming out to Colorado like now it's just all of them having, you know, the grenadine in the spread or now it's just these different concoctions. But it was like in the Midwest, it was like such a thing and it just stuck at all ages. That's interesting. But I haven't heard the when you said Roy Rogers, I said, I knew exactly what he's talking about, but I haven't heard that one in a while. So that's cool. What is the favorite place you've traveled? This one's hard for me because I've been to a lot of cool places. But if I were to pick like the one that I tend to go back to the most, I love the Phoenix area, the Scottsdale area. And Arizona, I'm a big fan of escaping the winners of Nebraska. And so that's that's one of my favorite places to go and just get away. Oh man, yours next week. It's a it's one of my bucket list items is shout out to Josh, the founder of branded bills hats and we're doing a bunch of operations with them. That I'm going to be with him next week at the waste management open on the 16th stadium hole with his wife and my wife and a bunch of us that it's as a golf guy. It's the first time taking my wife to a professional golf event and doing that very thing going in the day before to get out of the cold, which we finally finally hit the the snow here in Colorado. And so I totally agree with you on growing up in North and South Dakota. It's it's chilling and it just stays that way for a while. Yep. And hit me up after my favorite burger place in the whole world is in Scottsdale. So I'll let you know. All right, there we go. We'll leave that for the secrets of coming to meeting in the master facilitators community because that's how we can't learn everything in one time. We're going to come together. But today is all about AJ's story and then we'll get into Kahua. But what do you like to do outside of the construction silos? We're going to talk about breaking down today that we passionately call the art of construction. So my number one hobby is Lego and if anybody catches a short clip of this or a video, you'll notice that pretty quickly behind me. I've even got one in progress. But Lego is the thing that I stick to the most outside of that is watching our kids. So our kids are in all of their hobbies and interests, right? Their activities and following them around is one of the number one things that I do love it. Well, it's honored to have you here. AJ Waters. What is your story that led you to being the chief evangelist at Kahua? So it's a it's kind of a crazy story because I started out as an engineer. I went to work at Keywit right out of school. I had a couple of internships there and I was just doing my thing. Crunching numbers in a corner right. And in technology was starting to shift around us. It was the mid 2000s. And I was handed the one license that we had to an on screen takeoff software because I was the new kid out of college and they were like, hey, will you check this out and see if it's any good. And then tell us whether we should get more. And I looked at the digitizer sitting beside me and then I looked at this PDF markup where I could color on boxes and to do all the math for me. I was like, yeah, of course, this is better. It's not really a hard question to answer. And so that kind of jumped me into leading a software within our within our company. So when Keywit went through a massive overhaul of all their digital systems, I volunteered for that project. Most people got violent told I actually raised my hand and said, hey, I want to be a part of that. It was right around when the iPhone came out, we're starting to really see the the ramp up in technology shifting. And from there, it just it just kept moving key with spun spun out technology subsidiary. I went and worked for them. Google called it one point and asked me to come help them implement a construction technology. So that was fun. And then now I've landed here at Kahoo and an evangelist. I think is the right word for it because really it's it's about spreading the good news of of construction tech. And that's that's what we do. But but at the same time, like I've I've lived through a lot of these transformations now in the last 15, 20 years and stepped on a lot of landmines. So it's about helping others not do that same thing, right? I absolutely love that tee up and that's why I was so excited of like the excitement, but also the landmines of I raised my hand to say I may be a little bit I talked at the first hundred episodes regularly about crusty contractor who didn't want to change right. And sometimes I'm finding myself looking in the mirror saying, Devon, stop being so crusty about this stuff, right? Like how it's so bad and never going to change. And you know, just your attitude and the people you've surround yourself is route. It's just around positivity and moving this thing forward. And I think that's a key part of if you're going to have those roles of the evangelist of listening to all the crustiness out there and turning those. Founds upside down, if you will. And that's what I really want to talk about today and the platform that you represent. So I want to start off of like you don't know what you don't know and boy you're jade by what you think you know of almost 400 podcasts I've done. I've heard your name several times and I've heard Kuhu and I was your. just way off of what Kahua was and how it's partners that we like to use the words proven partners all coming together that we're gonna talk about today. But first we got to learn the groundwork. What is Kahua or Hawaiian for platform, which really I enjoyed when I learned that key part as a construction project management software? - Yeah, so great question. Kahua is just that a construction project management platform we like to lean into that platform name because it's a true platform versus like software as a service. Kahua is a platform that you build on top of. Think of iOS or Android. Those are platforms that apps are built on top of. Kahua works in that way with a low code, no code platform development kit. So when you implement Kahua as a software, the software conforms to you and the way that you do business, instead of you and your employees or your tradespeople having to conform to the way the software says the business needs to be run. And so that's issues with that though. Every software in the box just works, right? - Oh yeah, that one size fits all. It's never a big anyone. Going back to some branded bills are some of my favorite hats too, right? But I can't buy the Flexfit. The Flexfit never fit me because I need the snapbacks because one size fits all just doesn't ever work for me. - Thanks for that shout out. I'm excited to send this to the branded bills team 'cause I'll try to figure out how to constructify in 2026 with the Art of Construction Master Facilitators of just saying, you know what? Let's stop just sitting in our own silos and duking it out. Let's bring some close perspectives into this and go have as much fun as possible. And that's what we're doing in and out of these fireside chats to really meet up to say, how do these platforms really come together? Because, you know, there's a lot of big platforms out there that in my opinion are really struggling in stifling the industry. And you gotta be careful about this disruption and positivity moving all this stuff forward that you and I have lived, you know, dating ourselves of like we're kind of in the, we're turning the corner to be on the later part than the earlier part of this thing after we've spent all these years of me and supply chain working for others or for myself from the big to the small to owning the different companies. So getting the subs in the product to the keywits of the world, to then the brand of valengilists coming together. But talk a little bit more just kind of the, how Kahul was formulated. I listened, you know, I've watched videos and listened to other podcasts of, that's at the beginning where I said, what if you could sell the house and start over? So talk through kind of the origin story of Kahul and how we got here today. And really like when you say a platform, give us some of the snapshots of what that means. - Yeah, so our founders actually founded one of the first internet construction platforms that was ever the first internet construction platform that came out, Constructware. And they built that platform up, had a pretty good user base, sold it to Autodesk, it became a part of the Autodesk family. And one of the things that they realized is their request list, the whole, the roadmap, it's on the roadmap, grew into the thousands very, very quickly. And they couldn't get through the requests as fast as they wanted to, plus that meant, you know, every one of those requests meant they were responsible for innovating for their customers, right? The provider was the only one that could do the innovation. You talked about stifling the industry. So when they kind of wrapped up their time that they served at Autodesk, they set back out and they said, "All right, here's everything we learned with our first dream house that we built, Constructware. Let's go back and let's rebuild it in a way that actually can, morph, can innovate, can grow for users." And so they founded Kahul, they spent five years developing before they ever released it, they were researching, they were getting it right, making sure that that platform concept would work. And then Kahul came back out as a, again, a construction project management platform that does run out of the box, just like any of the other platforms that you're familiar with, but instead of you calling us up and saying, "Hey, we wish you could do this." We have a set of partners, we have a low-code, no-code development kit. You can ride an app, you can extend one of our apps, our partners can write you an app. And we don't pretend that we know everything there is to know about how you do your business. You know you better than we do. So here are the tools for you to innovate and to grow and to evolve. - I absolutely love that. And that's why I was so excited to have you as the brand evangelist talk about Kahul because we talk all about how do we do system-built construction with our proven partners. And the world proven is a sticky word in a good way. And we talk all about these words of what do you really mean by these words and construction? And what we believe in what we mean in the art of construction is proven is just aligning with people who have done it before. And not saying they're right or wrong, but they have to be lifelong learners to break through the ceiling. That's why I called myself out as being a little bit too crusty sometimes, and you just have to open yourself up a little bit. And that's why I was so excited of what we're building with the art of construction master facilitators and Kahul to be a platform to help with that. Now we're gonna unpack this on this conversation today because the part that when you spend the time in these silos, i.e. Devon and Supply Chain selling to contractors or the contract that the builders are buying the windows in this AECO world. It takes a lot of light bulb moments to be like, "Oh shit, if I spend all the time as an architect and never get out in the field and connect the field to the office, you miss the key handoff," which is the "E," the engineer. And the word engineer is this really important handoff. And you better have some engineers that really like that stuff 'cause I don't, and I'm a big picture guy. But then there's the AECO. And so all these words that we don't know what they mean of we always talk about running between the raindrops. And it's the engineers and the operators, doing with these crazy visionary owners of the architect i.e. the name on the plans and the contractor holding the bag with the legal systems of trying to execute the shit sandwich that they're giving. And it's these special superheroes running between the raindrops that we're gonna talk about today. But first back to, you have to have a process before you put the people into that process. So the question I want you to talk about AJA is, how does the Kahua to Kahua collaboration work inside and outside of your platforms based on getting the MFers leading with all the engineers to actually make this thing happen? - Yeah, so this one's actually, it's a really interesting question for me because I spent an entire year being the man in the middle, between software, if you will. So when you think about the industry today, right? If I have a platform and you have a platform and we're working together and we're collaborating on a project, either I have to log into your system to access all of the information that we're working on together or you have to log into mine. One of the two of us is losing in that situation. We're losing data, we're losing visibility, we're losing transparency. And when I say I had to, I operated as a year, for a whole year as the API between two systems where the owner had one system, we at Kahua had another, when an RFI came in through our system, I had to go to the owner's system and punch it in, get it logged, then wait for the response and when the response came from the owner, I'd come back to Kahua's system and I'd punch it in and get it logged, right? And so I was doing this back and forth between systems and that's what collaboration looks like on the typical project between the owner that architect the engineer, the contractor. - And I want to jump in and say, like these days are long and the years can be short as what you talked about. This was a few days ago of now as we're recording this January 27th of 2026. I was a couple weeks ago in a round table, a special round table with the very company you just talked about and many other companies like that in the construction progress coalition, talking about the nightmare of now of these stackable things, you better know where your data is going in and out of this AI world, right? So, Falshtrack a few years of like you actually know how this stuff works, like you know how the sausage is made, which is a tough part of this whole thing. Now we're trying to figure out and we're going to talk more about that later of like getting the right proven partners of what ecosystems do you build on for your source of truth as I've done six podcasts with the tribbles of the world that it's really good to say it in the marketing world, but to execute it is a whole nother conversation of back to the conversation of just getting real of a lot of these really cool innovations get bought and stored. I've seen that so many times. So I really want to put some context to just say, what you really need to do is back to getting relationships and trust because if you're just a data monger, what do you really have then? And there's a lot of that going around, right? - Right, and so one of the things that Kahua set out to do with the Kahua to Kahua collaboration, right? Is that allows that data transfer? If you're in your domain of Kahua and you write an RFI, it comes to my domain of Kahua as the owner. It's the only platform out there that can do that. Now, other platforms are talking about it being on the roadmap. Remember going back to the roadmap thing, like they're trying to connect domains. But if you remember, construction platforms were specifically designed to be silos. Projects are built in silos. They are so that the data architecture, the engineers are not into being the visionaries because you put those to an arum. I'm a visionary owner. I get in room with an engineer. We struggle to get shit done when we're together. So you have to have a Kahua in the middle to collaborate. And if there's anything you've heard on this conversation, this is what I wanted to pause and have this kind of deeper dive from within about, this is what makes Kahua super special is these collaborations of sharing your intellectual property because in where you look, it's the data scrub of all of this stuff. How do you figure that out? But you better figure out how to own your data and have a partner that can help you with that. - Exactly. More importantly than just being able to work together. Like you hit it on the head a little bit. - With it just saying, I own it. I don't know shit that may be. - Yeah, that's the key part. And that's where AJYI reached out to you to say, okay, Art of Construction doesn't have a AOC to AOC data collaboration. We have a community, right? And at the end of the day, it's people first, but really you have to have a process and then put the right people in the right seats. - Exactly, yeah. And that it comes down to giving the user the easiest form of input and the easiest form of retrieval, right? Because if we offer up a new form to the field and it gives them, it takes them twice as long to fill out as the old one, that's where adoption comes to die when it comes to technology, right? And so we've got to give them something that's as easy to input as possible. And on the flip side, for leadership, it's got to be as easy to retrieve as possible, right? And so if they've got to go do 10,000 steps to go get the right look or feel or data that they're trying to figure out and manually pull that all back together, that's when they go back to Excel and you get a bunch of broken formulas and a lot of mistakes, right? And so that's at the end of the day to your point, Devon, it's about the people and making access and collaboration and everything else so much easier than we've done in the past because we built the Golden Walls to keep people out of our projects and our systems and that backfired, right? - And looking when you start unpacking how we got here, it's quite obvious that you can't give everybody the master key, you got to figure out how you're siloing out this data, but now that's the problem. So then we're gonna talk a lot about how it's not linear and that's why the AOC tribe is a circle and everything we talk about is the customer care will on this circle because the comment you said that really resonates with me is connecting the field to the office and we're always giving shit to the field and making it harder for them to do it. When they're on their breaks, they're on their iPhone and it just works and then we give them all this shit and then we're saying they don't care, they don't want to do it. There's bad training, the mental health, all the stuff. Put yourself in their shoes, like go out in the field for a while and that's what we're spending the time of like mapping out different certifications and trainings with different partners because we actually have to meet the people doing the stuff with their hands 'cause they're really the superheroes of construction in my opinion, if you're really gonna turn a digital build into physical build, which is why we do this in the first place. So we talk a lot about the internal and external customer journey with the result being the system built through and partners connecting these handoffs and the tool is the customer care will. So on your website, you know, Kahool has these different circles of planning, design, procurement, construction operations and all these different, there's the outer circle and I'm a big color code guy, but then there's all these people in different colors and it's interesting when I really took some time, I just sat before this podcast and said how does Devon interpret their customer care will? Because they're looking at like, well, why is it all orange of all and then there's just one red person in there and then there's all these little circles and always infographics that you have to be inside the Kahool attempt to understand the intent of this infographic and by the way, this is a fireside chat podcast, you're not seeing this infographic, I'm just talking about it, right? And at the end of the day, why I said this? 'Cause you learn and think about it differently, right? And so can you talk about how the customer journey internally and externally works with Kahoola knowing that the industry is trying to corner you to where you're only as good as your last project? - Yeah, well, the interesting thing about the customer care and how you have the, they look, they're people, but the Kahoola case kind of holding hands around the wheel because every one of those stakeholders is a key to the project being successful, but only one of them is you. And so you have to understand that you are part of a bigger collection of people that are gonna make this project successful. It's not anyone stakeholder that wins or loses the job, it's all of us together and it's going back to the concept of the team. If you think back to some of the best projects you've ever worked on, right? Probably one of the first things that you'll remember is how much of a team you felt like. It wasn't us versus them, it wasn't combative, right? It wasn't a change order nightmare. You were a team and you were all working together rowing the boat in the same direction, trying to get that project done. And that's what we talk about here when we look at this customer care wheel and those people essentially holding hands around the circle is we're in this together and with that team mindset, with the mindset of everyone being connected on a singular platform working in conjunction with one another, that's how we get to a successful project. - Yeah, and here's just that part of like the circles all coming together of you and I here today to say, you have to build a proven process or your way of doing business, but you have to have the right collaborators going in and out of that master process, right? - 100%. - That's where a lot of people are like, why should I get involved more than just listening to the podcast and move on and go into my business? And I said the reason is is 'cause I'm a leader of the tribe that actually runs a business and lives this stuff. And in the master facilitator's community, that's where we're trying to get the different boxes to all come together into a circle. 'Cause you have to have boxes of what's in it for me. Because at the end of the day, if you don't do that, they're just gonna get burned out and go somewhere else because if it's purely a paycheck, construction is impossible to keep people engaged if it's just for the paycheck. So you have to do it for more and you have to have these circles coming together. And that's what AJ and I, this podcast is the kindling for hopeful many conversations and aligning different podcasts and things together. So that's what we're working on doing here. And the part I just have to make sure everybody recognizes, we've been getting a lot of VC companies reach out to us that are looking for this silver bullet. And what they all wanna do is they wanna use the tribal knowledge of the art of construction, just gonna make a bunch of money. And how they'll do that is to say, here's our linear way of how it's all gonna go and just forget all this, you know, we've done this in tech and we've done this in this industry and it all works great. And just show me the linear way and we're gonna go take this tool and just automate all this stuff. Well, I am very disruptive in this world and I hope AJ you can appreciate where I'm coming from to say construction is not linear. But for some reason we continue to try and that's really the why I reached out to you to step up and give a sheer take on that because I think you've been talking a lot about that on the social media circles on how we can get the superpowers to come together because it's just not a linear thing, what's your take? - Yeah, we build plans and we build schedules and we, everything is linear when we put it down on paper, and I've always thought this interesting when it comes to schedules because you're exactly right, construction isn't linear. It's chaos. It's organized chaos on a job site And there's. there is never anything linear about it. You never go from one end of a schedule bar to the other straight through. And so we sit here and we like to plan like everything's gonna be perfect. We estimate like everything's gonna be perfect. Is it one of my biggest pet peeves is we go look at our past costs to build out an estimate. And we look at our five best projects and we take an average of their production and think we're gonna hit it. What about this upcoming project makes you think it's gonna be as good as your five best? Like you're trying to build the perfect project. We're never gonna build a perfect project. It's gonna be organized chaos. It's gonna be moving pieces. And that's again where we kinda get back to the whole thing and we can't be out of the box. We can't be one size because it's never the same thing. Every project we build is a totally different build. Unless you're building spec homes, which nothing against spec homes, it's just their puzzle pieces, right? You just put the puzzle together. But any other project of magnitude from a hospital to a school to a bridge, like these things are one of a kind, never been done before, probably not gonna be done again projects. It's there is nothing linear about the way that we build work. So now that we pointed out quite frankly, the obvious that the MFers are listening, how do we solve this? And this is the part that I've spent almost 400 podcasts trying to bring what we call the master facilitators coming together. And our tagline is we try to say we're not the MFers that you think of in construction. And that makes me think of Scott Averitt of, of running and show 377 titled Your Project Simplified. The reason I reached out is 'cause we are building a platform with Microsoft Engine Tools with the rest of the master facilitators. And I've been talking with a lot of them in the industry around that. And that's just what running does, right? And so you can go listen to that podcast of like, you're crazy in this world to just start from scratch. You kind of need to look at Microsoft and Google and figure out how you run between the raindrops or use parallels like you talked about of iOS and Android and figure out your applications within the tools people are using, right? And so as I raised my hand and say, it finally clicked for me. And that's really I think my calling and my passion as a lifelong learner and leader of the Art of Construction Master Facilitators. It finally clicked after two pre-interviews. And AJ, no one ever says, man, Devin, you put a lot of work into thinking about how this comes together when people go through the process of being on the Art of Construction. And we'll talk about your platforms next. But before we do that, it was like, oh, it finally clicked because Scott's marketing team was like, yeah, you really should get involved with Kahua. Well, shame on me for not like really doing the research on Kahua, but I'm a people first guy, right? And so it was Scott to this person to AJ. And finally, when I actually looked at what Kahua was, I was like, oh shit, that's what they mean when they said, you should really be part of Kahua enabling innovation. And I was totally lost while they were talking about that because they were like from a podcast, Scott did a wonderful job and they're like, hey, well, it's next. And he's like, well, you should really get involved Kahua. And I never did. I got involved with AJ that brought me back to Kahua, which I think is really authentic for me and others listening to this. Because when I was on your website, I was like, going through it all and it was like, okay, I really like why I really like where this Kahua is going. First AJ, as their brand of evangelist, kudos to you for the work you're doing of having me reach out to you. And then you were on it like, heck, I think you and I officially met in LinkedIn days ago and here we are recording this stuff. And that's what I think, if you get leaders that really want to move the needle, you got to move fast, right? And you and I have been moving fast making this happen. And then when I on your website, the thing that I was so enthralled about, I was like, oh, wait, you have a partner program. I was like, okay, how does this work? And I scroll down and I see running. And I finally got it. And that's what I always say seven times for the first time in this crazy world of construction. For me, I hope Scott and his marketing listened to this and be like, oh, Devon finally got what I was saying. And maybe I'm only getting what Devon was saying. And maybe AJ is going to help connect this through the Kahooa platform. So without that being said, it's just basically saying, you don't have enough time or money to be connected with everybody, but the connections you make, you better figure out how to put them together and add mutual value. That's what I see Kahooa doing with their partner program. Can you talk about how that works? Yeah, and running is a great partner of ours. Like you said, they build technology on top of platforms for the construction industry and Kahooa is one of the platforms that they built some technology on top of. So they built a number of apps for our system that weren't necessarily there. And again, going back to kind of the iOS analogy, right? The iPhone runs out of the box. It does what a phone is supposed to do. Kahooa is the same way. It does what a project management system is supposed to do. But maybe you don't like the mail app that comes on the phone. You prefer Outlook or you prefer Gmail, right? You don't like our RFI app. You can write a different one. Or Apple never wrote the Southwester, the United app, right? They provided a way for those companies to write their own apps. Running steps in, we didn't write a scheduling app. Running wrote one for us. And there's a scheduling application that integrates Primavera P6 into the Kahooa platform that running wrote, right? So that's how our proven partner platform works. Just like you would see on the app store on your phone. And I love that parallel, but on the flip side, I'm sure people that don't know construction are listening this and saying, well, why don't we just make a construction iOS? And the reality is that will never happen because if you got to meet the people, the businesses, and most importantly, the municipalities where they are. And it's way too fragmented for that that you're not going to be able to municipalize like Apple and Google did. That this is not going to happen. Now, we do have to learn from that to run between the raindrops is really what I'm hearing of what Kahooa is doing with his partners like running, of actually giving a true way for them to monetize from within construction of the Kahooa being the, it's like your superpower analogy. It's like they're one of the avengers of the comic thing all the way behind it. I'm just saying, okay, one superpower is not going to take everybody out. We have to build a put all that together and that's back to Scott. That's why if you look over back and listen to that podcast, you're going to learn Scott's story and why he is passionate about running and why running is involved in the Kahooa innovation meetup and why they do that. But back to the kindling of the very beginning of how you and I got here. And this is why we do podcasts. And this is why there's so many podcasts out there is because at the end of the day, how do Devon and AJ stand out as brand ambassadors, evangelists, leaders of the tribe, whatever title you want to say is that we're really passionate about sharing these stories. And that's really what, you know, AJ on the pre-nervy, you really talked through of the hard part of running multiple stories and running between the raindrops of the platform of Kahooa. You got a tricky balance there, right? And a good way because you're passionate and you've done such a great job representing the Kahooa brand and talking about how you can build differently. But as the engineer inside of you really wants to come out and move fast as you and I are talking about, how do you figure this out, right? And so as we're recording this today, on my email inbox, as a subscriber and we'll put links to the show notes, the engineered life is launched, right? And you know, we're gonna move this to the top of the chain. I'm not sure when it all comes out of these global and timeless fireside chats. But so you've launched a podcast, you've been very involved in blogs and podcasts. What is that all about and why? - Yeah, great question. So for a little over a year, I had a blog running. And one of the main reasons I had the blog running is, you know, I had stuff that I wanted to say that I had learned over the years, right? Places where I had been wrong and people had corrected me, places, you know, lessons that had been learned the hard way. And those sorts of things, I thought it would be helpful to get out and down on paper. But after a year of doing that, I really got sick of talking at people. I wanted to talk with people, right? Like going back to the whole, it's about the people. And so I just didn't want to keep spewing content out there at a bunch of people. I wanted to sit down and engage and expand the conversation which you brought up earlier. And so that was the whole idea behind going to the podcast is now we're bringing in real people who have real unique talents to the construction industry. But hey, by the way, these superpowers that we're highlighting on the podcast, They're not like flight or. invisibility or you know laser beam eyes right those aren't the kinds of superpowers we're talking about the things that only one person ever has we're talking about superpowers that You could practically take away one or two tips and tomorrow have a better experience on your job site like these are things that These people have honed to perfection and it become kind of known for but at the same time they're learned skills Things that you can employ and make your job site better and then With just enough of that Happening around the industry the whole industry starts to level up and get better right so that that was the idea is Is I was I was sick of just talking at people with lessons I had learned let's go out and let's get with people Let's get in the trenches. Let's get into their lessons and let's amplify those as much as we possibly can and He is why we talked through and you know as two things are enough of time and money right and so one of the struggles that we you talked about you know Pushing out content people listening and just moving on and so we're aging and I are super excited that we're you know AJ's signed up and is in the art of construction master facilitator community and At the end of the day you have to figure out like I've chosen to say the podcast Always has and always will be whoever I interview and this is a podcast for AJ That hope that Kahua is proud of because he's representing them so well, but it's not sponsored by Kahua And there's a key delineation of the master facilitators and the platformed and companies that we represent So AJ and Devon have a program where anybody that AJ is going to be interviewing on the engineered life We're going to be giving them access and working with them as leaders in the art of construction master facilitators community and the reason why I'm grateful that AJ and I are going to be doing that is because we don't want this to be a one-way conversation And so we don't want to push out these podcasts and they just end we want to have a place where you can really go deeper and Actually have it recorded in a place that's not just your LinkedIn or email feed And that's what we built in the art of construction master facilitator. So I'm super excited to announce going forward We're going to be giving access to everybody that is a superpower on the engineered life And inside of the platform of the art of construction master facilitators bringing those superpowers together Because that's why how he started this it's not the Devon Tilly podcast It's the art of construction. It's blending the different artists superpowers and the construction superpowers coming together that are not What you think of outside of construction. So I'm super excited for this journey to continue to build up And how do we eat this elephant one bite at a time? We'll make sure to put links to the show notes and AJ just give us of your two different podcasts you're involved in Build different and engineered life will put links to those in the show notes to check those out But why would you listen to one or both of those? Oh great question. So build different We launched last year at Kahua and the whole point Of build different was take to Again amplify the messages that were important to construction. So we try not to say Kahua on that podcast at all Except in the title build different sponsored by Kahua Because the the goal is to get out into the topic. So we we hit on AI last year we hit on women in construction last year We hit on mental health last year. We we hit on gender generational differences And the different generations that are on a job site today So those are the the kinds of topics that build different tackles are the things the the broad topics that you as As as an individual or dealing with in the construction industry. That's that's its focus the engineering focus goes Goes specifically at one Individuals unique skill set that that maybe you as an individual uniquely could take away from and utilize to get better So it's it's more of a the goal is more of a one-on-one type conversation coaching and in and and walking through things Whereas build difference more of a here's where the industry is at large and how it can we collaboratively and together build the a different industry a better industry and so that That that would be like the the differentiator the separator between the two That and really the the cool thing is Build different comes out once a month Engine herd comes out once a week they come out on the same day Of of the week Uh and in engine herd does not release the week that build different does so essentially You just listen to both of them on the same cadence and you won't you won't miss anything Wow doing a lot of great work and that's That's a guy that releases podcasts closing down 400 that's a lot of work and we commend you for all that and honored to collaborate with you As we work on closing this conversation out and meeting everyone up in the art of construction master facilitators community This podcast is dedicated to the builders and affiliates to connect the right Construction technologies and products to the right handshakes These closing questions on figuring out how we can grow our business and what the future looks like I'm super excited for a j's answers to close this thing out a j What is your crystal ball for the future when it comes to technology and construction? Well, I think my my crystal ball for the future would be that we we truly break down the silos In construction with technology. We've always said that we want to break down the silos through technology But when you when you look at the technology itself What you'll see is we've just amplified the silos not broken them down We've just made them deeper the walls higher the the chasms More difficult to cross and uh and what I see the future of construct construction technology being what what really moves the needle or you know Everybody likes to say game changing tech what really changes the game with construction technology is when we truly Remove the silos and we connect the industry through the through the technology not make them Stronger because our platforms are are walled off from one another Love it love it man and honor to have you and Called auction is stay in touch with where a j and devon and all the master facilitators that you can come meet up With the community these are the people that kahoo is enabling Innovation and that's this meetup this fall that uh reach out to learn more about as the as we're trying to manage and run between all these different summits conferences meetups Zoom calls Whatever to try to be at the right place as lifelong learners and that's what we're guiding you on the art of construction So we'll make sure to stay in touch with all those different parts and hopefully as I always say my goal of all these fireside chats And all the different coming out of the covid world is still to meet up with people in person right and get together and make stuff happen right So as we close this out What is the one thing you want to leave our builders and affiliates to think about to go out there and crush it and grow their business So one of the things I I brought it up on social yesterday. I say it a lot um We have to have the courage To innovate when it comes to construction where we're so afraid to fail because failure is punished At every level when it comes to construction But the the quickest way To find a new idea or innovation is to fail fast like you've you've got to test you've got to fail you've got to iterate So we need to have the courage To step out on a limb and the permission from leadership to do so So that failure is not catastrophic for me as an individual at my company but to test ideas in in in innovations quickly so that we can truly see what's going to move the needle and what's not and instead of just taking the safe approach of sticking with Well, we've always done it this way. So let's just do that I love it a jay one and honor thank you for sharing your story I hope to meet up and You know whether it's playing wanch golf or at at your innovation place at the end of the day You have to learn by doing and that's what we're doing here with the art of constructors builders and affiliates And we're all honored to be affiliated with the kahua and shout out to scott and the running team that kind of got me going with all this stuff And I'm excited for all these people to listen to this and circle back of taking Devons connections and a jays connections and put them together In the Hawaiian as they call it kahua Thank you so much for stepping up and sharing your story have as much fun as possible out there try crush it