Built by Builders, For Builders: The ConCntric Story
This blog post is a Q&A with Steve about ConCntric’s team’s expertise and how their industry knowledge helped build a much-needed platform for the industry.
We sat down with Steve Dell’Orto, Founder and CEO of ConCntric, to talk about the concept of ‘Built by Builders, For Builders’ and what it means to him. This blog post is a Q&A with Steve about ConCntric’s team’s expertise and how their industry knowledge helped build a much-needed platform for the industry.
How does ConCntric transform preconstruction management as industry veterans in the field?
Having an extensive background in preconstruction gave me the toolbox I needed to move forward and create preconstruction management software. Many different facets of planning a project, whether it’s cost, time, logistics, contract, insurance strategies, operational communication, or presenting information to the team, all play a major role in preconstruction. For many years I was a trusted advisor to my clients and would show teams how to position a project to be on time and follow a determined budget. Having decades of experience at the table as well as thousands of projects, gives my team and I a very unique insight into preconstruction patterns, variations and workflows involved in the preconstruction phase.
We know for a fact that there are 30 to 40 workflows being done in preconstruction at any given time. These are often discrete efforts that teams are tasked with or use to plan the job thoroughly in order to achieve the project objectives. They keep themselves accountable for anything to do with the cost, the budget, and bringing the project to a positive conclusion. I say this because I think there’s a misconception that preconstruction is a low-priority effort that merely consists of estimating and bidding. These things do not equate to the broader definition of preconstruction. We have firsthand experience by the thousands in all of these facets, and we are giving the industry its first comprehensive, dedicated preconstruction management platform that is based on modern software technologies and other applications. As an intelligent platform, ConCntric structures your data and helps companies build a foundation upon which their preconstruction can take advantage of a modern operating system.
Why is it so important when building software for the construction industry to have builders involved in the creation?
When building software for a specific industry, the last thing you want to do is bring in a team with no experience or expertise in that industry. As important as it is to bring in people from the field you are building for, you also need people who can build B2B, SaaS, high-grade data secure software. What we’ve seen be unsuccessful in the industry is software or technology people who come into the industry without having that domain expertise and essentially building software problems. Ideally, you want to have a good mix of both areas of expertise, and that’s what we’ve done well at ConCntric. We’ve built a team with the best-in-class B2B, SaaS, platform-grade software developers, UX UI designers, and data scientists with the domain expertise that we have in construction, particularly in the preconstruction phase. We’ve been very successful, and our customers, as well as the marketplace at large, recognize the need to use technology to solve their problems. When evaluating software, they consider whether they need a point solution for one of the 30 or 40 workflows or if they prefer a single platform that allows them to handle all their preconstruction work in one place. Our platform creates a standard of best practices and that’s how we know that what we are building really matters.
At first, many people look at our software as just that, software, but the minute they recognize the makeup of the team, the leadership of the company and the vision and the background that we have in the industry as builders, it makes all the difference in the world. We’ve walked miles in their shoes and have deep experience in the very thing they want to elevate within their company, so it makes sense that we are the ones helping them solve their problems. Look at it this way, you wouldn’t want to buy shoes from somebody who’s never manufactured shoes. They may fit your feet, but they probably will not fit or perform well. The same goes for software. I’ve had too many experiences where, as a general contractor, working with a team on the project management operational side of the business, they bring in software that ADDS work, and that’s when you can tell it’s made from the outside of the industry. It becomes clear that the technologists do not know the application, the use case, the business case, how people are interacting, or how they are going to save people time. Those solutions create more work for the employee, not less.
At ConCntric, our mission is not to produce anything to add people’s hours. We need to take a substantial amount of work off their plate and free them up to do what they do best. A lot of what is being done today can be somewhat automated or certainly streamlined to enable preconstruction professionals to keep things moving forward in a much more reliable way.
Are there any nuances that you can speak to as someone who comes from the industry? How does that affect how you build ConCntric?
Let me give you an example: We spoke with a prospective customer recently, and they were considering ConCntric and wanted to learn about the advantages of a platform vs. a point solution that provides only one workflow. We started the discussion by first talking about what is involved in preconstruction. I think, at first blush, maybe the initial thought was estimating and bid management. As we talked more and more, we really started to align around the fact that there are dozens more facets of preconstruction than just those two things. As we dug into the finer points of things like the buyout process, how they are scoping the work, and how they’re keeping track of the workflows, they realized just how complicated these processes can be if you’ve never done them before. But considering they have done them before, they know how much the overall success depends on how these complicated workflows are managed. So who better to actually build a platform and really develop those systems and solve the big gaping holes that aren’t being addressed or tracked whatsoever? Fundamentally, projects that aren’t using a comprehensive platform to manage workflows are lacking visibility at a multi-project, corporate level, sacrificing data, and entering dangerous territory in this day and age.
How does ConCntric plan to raise preconstruction excellence?
In my 26 years of doing preconstruction and living in it day in and day out, I reached a point where no solution existed that could help me manage the entire preconstruction process. And so we created ConCntric, the first comprehensive preconstruction management platform. Ultimately, I reached a point where I just couldn’t keep doing it the way that the industry is forced to do it because of the lack of structure and technology. I saw how successful projects could be, and I’ve experienced preconstruction done really well, always including good processes, talented people, and collaboration. I always found successful projects included the use of historical information, lessons learned and data to the greatest extent possible. It takes an extraordinary effort with A+ players and a little bit of luck to have a team with team chemistry, including the owner and the architect, where there is true trust. Realistically, I knew that that is not scalable at all across the hundreds and thousands of projects that come in at any given time.
Knowing that there wasn’t a solution, knowing there wasn’t a solution and how critically important preconstruction is to success, and also experiencing how painful it currently is, is what drove me to create ConCntric. The people who don’t have those great “top of the mountain” experiences like I had need to start using ConCntric, because I know, without a shadow of a doubt, how much better project outcomes can be. We introduce and augment the talent with technology and harness the power of the data for them to do better things more efficiently and, quite honestly, more accurately. We know what kind of an impact can be made and exactly what needs to be addressed in our industry from a preconstruction, planning and design perspective.