179: ‘Analyzing AEC’, with Matt Wash and Konrad Sobon

179: ‘Analyzing AEC’, with Matt Wash and Konrad Sobon

[00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. I'm pleased to welcome Matt Wash and Konrad Sobon from Bimbeats back to the podcast. Though they've both appeared separately before, you'll find links to their previous episodes in the show notes today, they join me together to explore several key topics.

Their personal journeys and evolving roles within their company, Bimbeats, how firms handle challenges around communication, training, and accountability. The importance of understanding a company's digital footprint for decision making and transformation, and their insights on using data to boost productivity and increase business performance.

Real quick, before we get into today's conversation, do me a favor and if you're enjoying these episodes. Please subscribe to the show wherever you watch or listen, so YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That really does help people find the show, which [00:01:00] is important to me, so that I can keep finding great guests to interview. You can also support the mission here by becoming a paid member at TRXL.co.

Just click the join button in the lower right hand corner or the subscribe button at the top or the bottom of any page on the site. If you'd like to receive an email from me when new updates are published with all the links and other information as they come out, sign up for that by becoming either a free or paid member at TRXL.

And speaking of email and memberships, one of the perks of a paid membership is my Leadership Edge newsletter, in which I provide key insights for forward thinkers who are seeking innovation in AEC, but are short on time. They're designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in to the corresponding episodes if the ideas resonate.

Leadership Edge newsletters are only available to paid members of TRXL+, and you can become one at [00:02:00] TRXL.co. To get a taste of what's on offer, search for Leadership Edge on TRXL.co for previously published examples, this was a great conversation with Konrad and Matt and there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes if you'd like to go deeper. So be sure to check those out. They're in your podcast app if you're a paid member or if you're a free member, you can find them on the website.

And so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Konrad Sobon and Matt Wash.

​

Evan Troxel: Today I'm joined by Matt Wash and Sobon. So It's been a while since both of you have been on the podcast on different Occasions, never together like this for the first time. So you guys are both working at BIMbeats. Konrad has been at BIMbeats for a while.

Matt was at BIMbeats, went away from BIMbeats. He's back at BIMbeats as the CEO. And I think we'll hear a little bit of that story in a minute. [00:03:00] Konrad, you were one of the, I, I want to say you were like episode seven or something. I didn't actually go back and look, but that's just what my memory says. And so it's been a while since you've been on the show. Catch us up on, on what life has been like for the last few years. This podcast is four and a half years old, so it's been at least four years since we had that conversation.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah.

Thanks for having us. Um, last four and a half years. So this was right after we moved from New York. So a little bit after the pandemic, right? So maybe just kicked off. We're very, very much a startup at the time. Um, a lot of things have changed since then. I mean, for me, Probably the biggest thing has been, uh, just growing as a company and hiring people. I've never done this in the past. So out how to kind of switch from just, you know, head down and coding and working in that mode a little bit more to managing, uh, that's been a big. [00:04:00] Um, so I'm happy to, I'm happy to have Matt with me now, so help out with that a little bit more. But,

Evan Troxel: Balance

Konrad Sobon: um,

Evan Troxel: right?

Konrad Sobon: yeah, yeah, so, so we've, so we've grown a little bit. Um, you know, work wise, I still pretty much do, um, similar things that I've done 4 or 5 years ago. It's just, you know, A lot more of BIMBEAT, a little bit less on the consulting side of things with ArchiLab. Um, and you know, I got two daughters now, probably, um, four and a half years ago, I only have one, a little baby, but now I got two daughters and the other one just turned five.

So that's, uh, uh, those are interesting times. Um,

Evan Troxel: you extra busy

with all that.

Konrad Sobon: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I just, I mean, my wife and I recently looked at some old pictures when she was born and, I'm like laying on the couch with her and had a, I had a full head of hair, you know, I've, I've, uh, I've got myself up to the proceeding [00:05:00] uh, status. Um, and I definitely was not going gray at the time just yet. So that caught up to me pretty quick.

Evan Troxel: It happens to us all. And then there's those, those people who like to hide it, but not me. I just full, full silver streaks on this side of the, you can charge more. That's what I've, I've been told is that the more gray you have, the more you should be able to charge because it's, it's experience. It's

like right there.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah, the seasoned vet right now.

Evan Troxel: vet. Nice.

Konrad Sobon: it short because, uh, I look a little too old, maybe.

Evan Troxel: Nice. tell us kind of what has happened at BIMbeats from your, in, in your role over the last four and a half years since we talked last. Just, just in terms of maybe, maybe scale a little bit because I, that's one of the things I've always been so interested in with what you guys are doing specifically. and and so, like, historically, you started out by [00:06:00] providing You know, metrics into different applications on the computer. And, and so maybe just give us kind of a, a baseline for those people maybe who don't, aren't familiar with you at all. What, what BIMbeats is about and then how you've seen it change over the last four and a half years before we jump over to Matt.

Sorry, sorry Matt, I'm not, not trying to ignore you yet, but I think there's some, there's something here to just kind of set the table for this conversation.

Konrad Sobon: Sure, sure. So how about, how about I go back in time a little bit, jump into a time machine and, um, in my days as a BIM manager, that's really where the idea for BIMbies and, uh, kind of generally, some kind of data analytics platform, uh, came to my, uh, came to mind. So this were, these were my days of, you know, just. Regular BIM coordination, BIM management, jobs that I was doing, I think, with Grimshaw at the time. And we were a relatively small office, so I would have whatever, whatever projects were in the office, we're splitting that between [00:07:00] myself and my manager, Greg. And then, you know, just. Deadline after deadline.

You're working pretty much every Friday is a deadline. So, you know, you're running four or five, six projects at a time. and I was like, yeah, it's just, you know, it's too much. Like, I can't keep up with all of the different projects, all of the different models. How do you, how do you do that having to go into all of those different models?

And then, you know, at the time I didn't have much, um, What kind of programming skills to go off of and just build a platform per se. So we started off with Dynamo scripts, right? And that didn't scale too much, but then eventually over the years, um, build out some other tools. Um, when I worked at HOK, we spent a lot of time working. Again, with my manager, Greg, I've had a, I've had luck with Greg's. Um, so, you know, Greg Schleusner and I are working at something called mission control at the time. And, you know, that was a different spin and different approach of trying to pull data [00:08:00] automatically. So there's a BIM manager. You can kind of have a quick look into the models.

And at a time, the conversation was always, you know, You're kind of building the tools for yourself always. So the conversation was Revit, Revit, Revit, because as a BIM manager, that's what you're really interested in is, you know, but as the scale grew, um, and, you know, after, after HOK, uh, we started working on BIMBEADS with Adam and, know, the idea, the idea then kind of turned is like, you know, why don't we scale horizontally?

So it wasn't just about Revit and model health metrics, um, from. Revit files at a time, um, we started talking about pulling data from all sorts of other applications, right? And, you know, four and a half years ago, maybe, this was just Revit Dynamo and maybe Rhino Grasshopper at the time. then, um, We're probably up to, you know, a dozen different sources of data, uh, just recently pushed out, um, a new integration for [00:09:00] ArcGIS.

Um, obviously we do AutoCAD, Navisworks, um, all kinds of standalone applications that pull data from your computer about the hardware, about the processes that you're running on the computer, just, you know, a ton of different sources of data. Uh, so we kind of scaled that horizontally. So it's no longer just like a model, Health metrics, uh, platform, um, as, as it was originally, um, in order to aid managers, uh, right now it's more of a, you know, digital footprint for the company and you can use it for all kinds of different things.

Evan Troxel: And it really ends up telling a lot more of the story, right? Like, like, model health is not the entire story, right? And so you've got performance, like hardware performance, right? All kinds of additional insights that you're kind of pulling from to tell a broader story so that you can really understand, like, what's going on with the quote unquote health or maybe fitness of, The digital [00:10:00] of your company as you're working on delivering these projects.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah. Yeah. Matt, you want to jump in? Cause, um, so Matt before, uh, kind of assuming the role of a CEO, he actually worked on a, as a, on the client side of things. So he has a unique, um, perspective on, you know, the actual application and use cases, uh, for Bimbeats. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let him.

Evan Troxel: throw it over to Matt, who is definitely the CEO because he's wearing the uniform. He's got his Bimby's shirt on. he's doing his marketing really well today. So Matt, yeah, give it, give us an update on, you've also been on the show previously and. you were at Bimbeats at the time, you went away from Bimbeats, came back, I'd love for you to hear a little bit behind that, but maybe we start with where Konrad just led, which was, you were actually, like, in a firm, using this kind of stuff, and I think, you know, go ahead and jump off and

let's hear it, let's

hear about it.

Matt Wash: [00:11:00] Yeah, okay, I'll do a quick summary of what we spoke about last time. So this was when, when I first got involved with BIMbeats was, um, I'm a good friend of Adam Sheather. Adam lives in Brisbane. We talk about this kind of stuff all the time and I was explaining to him a problem that I had. I was a design technology leader of BVN Architects and our challenge was really understanding why Revit was crashing regularly.

and how we could get to the bottom of that. And I just kept saying, look, it was taking up so much of my time trying to analyze journal files and work out, was it the RAM? Was it the infrastructure? Was it the model? Was it the competency of the user? All of these different things. And he's, that's when he said, oh look, we're building this tool that will be basically able to solve all of those problems.

So I'm like, well, sweet. Let's just implement that. So, we worked on, I think we were the first client of, of BIMBEATS. Uh, and back then if, if you've ever read Eric Rees um, the lean startup, these guys definitely achieved pushing out that, um, that minimum viable product. Um, in that It, it, it was [00:12:00] aiming to solve one of the biggest problems we had within the office.

Um, were the dashboards any good? No, the dashboards were not good. Did we really know how we were passing the data and all the different index patterns? No, not really, but having Adam there and getting regular feedback, we constantly iterated on the product and we got it to a point where We were automating alerts so that when Revit was crashing, it was automatically sending a help desk ticket to our IT team, which then told them, was the RAM, you know, at capacity, was the hard drive at capacity?

What was the user doing prior to the crash? So all of the metrics that I was doing manually. was now being captured automatically. Obviously, we didn't solve every single crash. There was too many variables, but we did get to the bottom of a few key things that we were then able to action, make some changes, and then use BIMbeats to look at frequency of crashing, obviously, as the key metric has that come down.

But then we really started unpacking, well, what is the business impact of what we're doing in terms of how much time are we wasting [00:13:00] Opening files and saving files. They were the two real key metrics. And to start with, when we would present back to leadership, it was all around model health and a traffic light dashboard, but didn't mean anything in terms of commercial aspect of the business.

And it didn't really talk about competency profiling and skills gap analysis, which were the two real things that we needed to address. So I did that for a while at BVN. And then because I started unpacking a lot of these insights, Konrad and Adam Settler. You've probably got the most experience of this tool in the industry, and with the use of it, how about you come and join us and start developing it with us and talking to our clients and doing exactly what you've done at BVM, but now for everybody.

So then I started working with a company called ADG, engineers in Brisbane, who were a client of BIMbeats, and they said, we've had BIMbeats for a couple of years now. We know that it's pretty good. Providing all of this useful data, but we're really not understanding what we can do with it. We're really not getting the benefit out of it.

Do you know someone that could come [00:14:00] into the business and play that role of really trying to analyze what it, what it's doing and how we can get benefits for the bottom line of the business? But really to address their biggest problem, which was burnout and retention of staff. That was like, and it's an industry wide problem, but it was also one of their biggest challenges.

So I said, Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, I think we can probably solve this. It isn't going to happen overnight because this extends far beyond just the technology. Like, this is now talking about people and culture. This is talking about Like the three things that, ironically, this morning on my commute into work, I've just read Nate Miller's post, and if you haven't had a chance to read it, it is awesome.

It got posted on LinkedIn this morning. But he talks about three things. He talks about being smart, being healthy, and being fit. And the being smart bit is that you have the right tools within the businesses, you have your processes, you have your systems in place. Then you talk about health, and the health is all about the culture of the business.

And it's not relying just on a few individuals who are passionate about the technology. It's gotta be. The entire business supporting [00:15:00] this and then from fitness point of view, it's you've got to measure the success of this in order for it to have long term success. You've got to have those three components and the final piece, the fitness piece is the one thing that I think BIMbeats does really, really well that we can buy the software.

We can write the processes. And we can do the culture, which is the hard bit, but measuring the benefits to the business was the one thing that over the last two years, before I took the role as CEO, was how do I communicate this to the C suite within this organization, that, that those three things need to come together, but it's really about that measurable benefit at the end, in terms of people, so the health of the people and the health of the business.

So then it started looking, and none of this really was related to Revit, believe it or not. Because, because BIMbeats looks at every single process that's running on the machine in terms of software and web applications, what we actually started [00:16:00] with was, where are we spending our time across the entire business?

Let's look at where the effort is. And we found that 20%, we're an engineer, or we, I keep saying we, because I was only there a month ago, uh, an engineering consultancy that does civil, structural and construction services. And we found that we spent the entire business time in PDF markups. And we were like, there's got to be a better way to do PDF markups.

There must be ways that we can automate a lot of what we're doing here. So we then started drilling down in BIMbeats, like, what are we doing in Bluebeam? And we found out that we were doing slab reinforcement markups and wall elevation markups. And those two things were contributing to a significant amount of hours.

And in fact, in terms of total billable hours, we're 250 people. Bluebeam was costing 10 million dollars of billable time every year. And it's like great, Bluebeam is an awesome tool for doing digital markups, but what of those digital markups could we do differently that [00:17:00] doesn't mean an engineer is marking something up, giving it to a technician, the technician tracing that and then giving it back forwards, backwards and forwards.

So we looked at the slab reinforcement markup process and then we started chatting to people that were doing that process in terms of the engineer and the technician. And then we started revealing all of this duplication of effort and frustration around that process. So we got one of our developers, who was a previous, or is still a structural technician, who's been doing reinforcement detailing for 20 years.

He's learned how to code, so he knows the problem we're trying to solve. And he built a tool that exports the contextual background from Revit. into what we call SmartMark. The engineer comes into our SmartMark application and does a markup as they would do in Bluebeam. But because it's come from Revit, it's got the intelligence of the context of the slab.

And as you go to mark up that slab, it understands what type of bars you need to apply, where you need to lap the reinforcement, where you need to crank a bar, because it's got the context to Revit. [00:18:00] Then when the markup's finished by the engineer, it just gets sucked directly into Revit and it turns it into Revit componentry that is fully scheduled law reinforcement.

So we then started tracking the uptake of, well, okay, we now need to train everybody in the new application. So we've written 10 two minute tutorials that go on the intranet. Within BIMbeats, we can see who's using the application. We can see who's done the training. So, I think the most insightful part, and this probably comes back to the cultural piece, is we identified the problem.

We solved the problem with the software. But then the next point was, well, how do we integrate this and adopt this as business as usual? So we did, we did a national update to the entire business on Teams. And I had a 10 minute slot to talk about this process and why we were doing it, the metrics behind where we were spending time in Bluebeam and how we could save that time.

And I get 10 minutes of an hour slot of like a town hall for 250 people, and I'm probably about 20 minutes into this presentation. [00:19:00] So anyway, we deliver the, we deliver the message. We tell them that. On the intranet, this is where all of the tutorials are, this is where the application is, like, here's the expert, we created a Teams channel for feedback, so anything, bugs, whatever, here's where you provide the feedback.

And the uptake in the first month was almost non existent,

Evan Troxel: crickets,

Matt Wash: I'm like, Too weird. And I'm like, what's, what's, what have we done wrong here? We've identified the problem,

Evan Troxel: grail.

Matt Wash: And I'm like, there must be something we're doing wrong here. And I'm like, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to look in Bimbeats and look at that Teams meeting.

And because we get the title of the screen of the active window

Evan Troxel: What was

Matt Wash: that presentation,

Evan Troxel: time?

Matt Wash: we can see the, we can see the engagement. So, For the first two minutes of our town halls, we have up to about 160, 170 people of the 250 from the company. And then as the minutes go on, it drops off.

Evan Troxel: the window

that's [00:20:00]

Matt Wash: Everyone, everyone's got multiple monitors.

And then I go and check everybody's typically back in Revit, back in the structural analysis applications. Or anything but, and by the end of that meeting, 5 percent of people have actively engaged with that content from start to finish in terms of it being the active window. So that made us think about what's, what's our communication strategy here?

Like, what is that meeting about? What's the intention of that meeting? Is it to inform people? And it's, uh, if you listen in, great, you learn something, but if you don't, you, it's, it's okay. If we're trying to communicate a message in there that needs to change business behavior, that is going to affect an outcome, that platform is obviously not the right platform to do it.

And we've got to think of a different way of doing it, but we would like, we would never have known that if we didn't look at the data. There was anecdotal evidence that we thought that certain people would, you know, I do, I go off and do other things, but it was actually really insightful [00:21:00] to see that like 95 percent of people tune in to start with.

And then I obviously kind of tune out. As the presentation goes on.

So that was when it's like, okay, reinforce the message regularly and the BIMbeats dashboards were then looked at over time. So month by month, how many people are using the tool? How many people have done the training? And it's, it's taken longer than we thought it would.

It just showed that we've got to continuously reinforce that message and continuously measure it because if we assume that we've done all we need to do. Really, it's, it's got to be that continuous measuring and managing that process. It doesn't just happen. It really comes back, and I guess that comes back to the cultural piece as well.

But having our intranet and having BIMbeats capture who's using our intranet and what content on the intranet. That's been really insightful too, because we have one page Gems. And the one page gem is a summary of something that's really important and critical to the business. And that one page gem can be read in like two or three minutes.[00:22:00]

And the engagement with that content is great. Like, everybody reads the gem. When we record Lunch and Learns and put them on the intranet, Literally no one goes back and watches them. So like, now, so I guess my point of view in terms of BIMBEATS and what I was trying to do with the last two years is, as Konrad kind of alluded to, it's not a model health checker tool anymore.

Yes, it does all of that. But this is like this digital footprint of your organization and is measuring the success of your digital transformation. And that for me was when I went, Wow, like this tool is so powerful. And that was when I said, Hey, Konrad, I'm really keen to come back again. What do you think?

And that, and Adam had grown Autonomation, his consulting business from when I started, there were four of us and that consulting business is now up to 18 people and Adam's like, Oh, mate, please. Please come in and do it because I am just like exhausted. I, I, I just can't do both. So that was when I said, yeah, I'd love to come in and do that.

And then in the last, [00:23:00] so I've only been in the role since mid December and from mid December until now. I talked to all of our existing clients and everybody says the same thing. You don't do anything on social media. There's no presence online. When we talk about you, no one knows who you are. He's laughing.

Um, and then we, so I said, okay, well, we're going to get someone into help with marketing. And then she's come in and she's like, how have you grown to the size that you are with these clients with no marketing at all? And I just said, it's just word of mouth. Everything to date has been word of mouth.

We've done a couple of conference presentations, but like very, very little social media presence and such. And she's like, right, that's got to change. We've got to tell people what you guys are doing because I did, I did, I did tell her that and I told her I'm going back on it again tomorrow. And she was like, Oh, that's great.

When was the last time you did it? I was like, uh, 2022, I think. She's like, yeah, you probably need to tell people what you're doing. So that was, I mean, and we know that, right? And [00:24:00] it's great, like the fact that we have grown to probably, what, 60 clients now at Konrad?

And pretty much through word of mouth, which is great because obviously, you don't need to sell a product if someone's telling someone else how good it is.

Um, which is, which is amazing. Um, and big shout out to, um, Alex from Woods Bagot who actually did a presentation at AU this year on, um, Data metric tools or data capture tools for um, Revit. Um, and if you haven't seen it, I'd advise watching. It's a really good presentation that talks about all the different methods of capturing data.

Um, but yeah, we're relying on other people to do our marketing and sales for us, which, which is great, but. I think we want to extend our 60 clients to, to be a bit bigger than that. Um, and I think the other thing that we probably haven't touched on it. Well, Konrad did a little bit about the purpose of BIMbeats.

So I often like reflect on what's my purpose and what I want to do. And I, and I think it's stemmed from being that frustrated BIM manager, that frustrated [00:25:00] computational designer. And Konrad and I had a bit of a chat about this in the, like, when I first took on the role. And then we started unpacking, and Konrad can probably elaborate on this, about how Konrad used to be on the Dynamo forum asking, answering all of these questions, and building ArchieLab package, and giving it away for free.

And I'm like, There was no commercial gain for any of what Konrad was doing there. And he can, again, he can elaborate on this, but it was like the fulfillment of helping someone and someone else feeling like you were helping them was far greater than any financial gain that you could make. And that was the frustration that we were having within organizations was the matter how much effort we put in, we didn't feel like what we were doing was being recognized and rewarded for.

And I guess it's probably because we didn't have a tool to measure what we were doing. And that. message didn't get up to leadership about the benefits of those actions that we were doing. But I guess for me, I really want to give back through Bimbeats so that all of those frustrated BIM managers and computational [00:26:00] designers of the world do get recognized and rewarded, because we will be able to measure and the benefits that they're having for businesses, and also start looking at, they are the people that are typically the ones that are burning out and doing the longest hours, which is ironic, because they are the most efficient people within the business.

They are your 80 20. They are your 80 20, yet whenever I look at the wellness dashboard on any organization, typically the most overworked people are are the most efficient people and the ones that are really making a difference, but it hasn't been scaled across that business, but I'm going to hand back to Konrad because I've been talking for too long.

Maybe you want to elaborate a little bit more about why you created Archilab and Dynamo, the Dynamo forum.

Evan Troxel: Let's take a break from the conversation to tell you about Arcol, who is helping make this episode possible.

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My thanks to Arcol for supporting this episode of the podcast And now, let's get back to the conversation

Matt Wash: forum.

Konrad Sobon: Oh, the package? for me it was always, the learning, um, You know, like you were explaining, there's an [00:28:00] awesome sense of gratification. You can go on the forum and answer someone's question. That's part of it too, but you also get so much from it yourself. it's not, um, you know, back in the days I was working as a consultant, so it wasn't anything monetary, but, um, but, you know, someone asked a great question that you don't know the answer to.

You know, it's, you know, just finding out. Oftentimes, you know, I would just, like, come into the office in the morning, and I was still, you know, back in my Grimshaw days, and, um, I would come in early, and I'd just, you know, spend the first 30 minutes or so, uh, just looking for an interesting question on the forum to answer, right?

And that was, know, that was, like, something new to me. Uh, Tulare, it's like, you know, I don't know, when you wake up and you go out for a run or stretch or something else, just for me to stretch my brain a little bit in the morning.

Evan Troxel: like, it's like doing the crossword puzzle in the morning,

right? It's like,

Konrad Sobon: On your right, yeah, on your right at work, yeah, you read a book or you do a crossword [00:29:00] puzzle or whatever. for me, that was just, you know, like a little mental stretch or workout or whatever. Um, know, you learn something new and, um, and that at that time is, uh, a lot of, a lot of the crowd, the people that I was hanging out with, um, you know, people like Mustafa, David Vance, um, they were all super keen into open source software as well.

So that's, that's why ArchiLabs has always been, um, open source and available to this day.

Evan Troxel: I think back to kind of something that you both touched on, which is like you, BIMbeats exposes the problems, problems, plural, right? I mean, it's challenging. And I think we probably talked about this on both of our previous podcasts with each one of you, respectively, about of people. are scared to kind of even understand what the problems are because they think they're going to get in trouble, right?

And, and so we've always kind of couched [00:30:00] this in, no, we're looking for opportunities to improve. And if things need to be improved, like this exposes that, and now we can improve those things, right? Um, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, but I think a lot of times, and you both have alluded to this today, and, and I mean, I know we've had conversations about this as well, where just seeing that information is usually where people stop talking about this stuff, and, and because the doing it is the hard part, right?

It's like implementing new software, easy, getting people to do something differently. Very, very, very difficult. And Matt, you talked about communication and kind of always bringing it up till you're sick of bringing it up, probably beyond the point at which you're sick of bringing it up, but that is literally the only way things actually happen is if things are like at the broken record, right?

It's, they're just on repeat. think it's, it's interesting from a communication standpoint, something that I heard. Yeah. was that you basically have six minutes to [00:31:00] engage with people to get them to interact in an exchange for it to have a meaningful outcome. Otherwise, they do what you talked about, Matt, they click on something else, they pull out their phone, they're doing email, they're, because there's no engagement there.

And I think we can all look at, you know, social media or other online behavior. Like you said, Matt, even like I could look at myself and see how I, what I do. Right. And, and, and you were literally do what everybody else does. And we all know this. And yet we still have like this really terrible Microsoft Teams interface that we communicate over with bad cameras, with bad microphones, with bad lighting, with people stumbling through 1800 bullet points in a PowerPoint. Right? We don't change any of that stuff to actually engage people, and then we wonder why nobody wants to do anything, and it's because they're busy, and it's because they're distracted, and it's because of all of these things. I'm curious from, uh, like, like, number one, yeah, you guys make a [00:32:00] tool that really tells a story that you can then, Come up with strategies to overcome that.

And that's where the, it's like, it's like you did the work and now the work starts after you've done the work, right? Like that's when the actual work starts. And I'm curious from your standpoint, like, it sounds like you got some traction in your firm, Matt, but you guys touch 60 different companies. What's working for those companies? What are you hearing? Because it's like, yeah, you can keep coming up with ways to show. Where issues could be and maybe connecting those dots. It's like sync times and model health and computer hardware and all the, you know, internet connections and it's all these things. it's personal behavior, but like, how are people actually addressing these and getting positive outcomes because the bigger the firm, I, the harder it is, right? Just because of this stuff can be so available on an internet for somebody to just completely ignore, right? And it just gets lost in the, in the feed at some point.

So really curious, like, what [00:33:00] are you finding as ways that are actually making Firms are finding success trying to come up against these challenges, solve these problems.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah. Um,

Matt Wash: Whoa, that's a big question.

Konrad Sobon: I would, I'll tell,

Evan Troxel: be a handful of things.

Konrad Sobon: I would try,

to answer, although I was, I always, I always keep telling Matt, um, or not keep telling that. Like I, I, I've told Matt a few times and probably a couple of other people in the past that, you know, I'm in a, in a weird situation, um. Because, you know, working, working on a product and, um, then working with clients in the, in the support world, I only hear from people when they having, uh, some kind of trouble or something's not working.

So I have a,

I have a skewed perspective. if someone asks me, maybe this is like the worst software ever, cause that's literally what I get. I get, you know, I only get bugs and I only get issues, but. Um, that aside, um, every now and then, usually, usually in person, [00:34:00] uh, when we're like at a conference or an event like AU, mentioned Alex, so like, even this year when Alex did that presentation, he also came over to our booth, uh, we had a little stand booth thing at the, uh, at AU, um, you know, that's when you hear some, some of the stories and how people are actually, um, using the tools and how they work, how they work in. so, um, Couple of couple of different ways. I think there's that the people actually action or utilize this data and it's like. What Matt was trying with, what Matt was saying with ADG that there's, you know, you implemented some kind of solution and then you're trying to communicate to people and kind of ask them, or the other approach is you're just kind of forcing people into some kind of solution.

Like, you give them no choice, but to adapt to it.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Konrad Sobon: what that could look like. It's, um. Um, let's say like Adobe, I don't want to rain on Adobe, but Adobe, uh, the way the licensing software has been a hurdle for a lot of companies. [00:35:00] So this, this is a, this is a, this is a problem that comes up with, with majority, if not most of our, um, you know, most of our clients that we work with when it comes to BIM, it's like, what do we do about these rising costs of licensing for Adobe products? So there's a couple of different approaches that people usually take. So when we were at HOK, um, I remember we had the exact same problem, no BIMBIs at the time. So we send out questionnaires and ask people, it's like, hey, there's this new product by Affinity, um, called, uh, Design, Photo, and Publisher. Those are three competitors to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. And they're only 50 perpetual license, as opposed to 25 per user per month. So a massive cost difference, Functionality wise, they're very similar to each other. So at the time at HOK, I think we sent out a bunch of questionnaires, like, you know, Google Forms and ask people, Hey, how much do you use Photoshop?

And can we swap you over to an Affinity photo product? You know, everyone just, you know, [00:36:00] blanket tells you, you know, they write to, if they touch the questionnaire, they'll tell you they're using it every day. And, you know, they don't want you messing with their productivity. Standard answer.

Evan Troxel: yeah, right.

Konrad Sobon: It's like, don't touch me.

Right? So I see over the years, uh, You know, different companies take a different approach to this, right? So, we've seen the strategy where people just automatically disable someone's license. So they use BIMBY's data, right? To look at how much have you been using a given product. if you haven't been using your product for the last two, three weeks, whatever you set that metric to be, um, there is an automatic action that disables your license. Right. And then companies have been trying to, you know, uh, software center, uh, is one of, one of those solutions where they can use, uh, to kind of give you ability to download or install any other software as a replacement. Right. So, even though they pull in your license, they've given you an option to, uh, to replace that. So that's, uh, Kind [00:37:00] of, you know, they leave you no choice, right? You're like, you're not using the product. We're pulling your license and you swap and we're swapping you over. The other one is they pull in your license and they give you an option to get it back. So you can always, like if you're on a vacation, let's say it's like a false negative, you can get that license back, right? Or, um, they just switch you over to a different product altogether. There's no in between, right? So, so we've seen companies like, but there's Adobe issue. either kind of switch the low productivity or people with low usage of a given product to a competing product because they know they're not using it a whole lot. Um, so then, you know, like if you're opening Photoshop to resize images and change levels on an image, you can do that with, you know, Photo app or Paint for lack of a better product. can do it with Affinity as well. Like all of those functionalities still exist there. So if you're not using that product a whole lot, there's a cheap alternative. Um, and then you just leave alone. You know, your marketing [00:38:00] department, basically, right? Because they, the high users, and that's going to reflect in the data, like, you can easily spot someone who isn't, you know, publisher a lot, you know, that's your marketing person. So you usually just don't touch them. Um, and then, you know, everyone else just can switch over or, um, You know, you just switch the whole company and they don't have a choice of getting their Adobe license back.

You know, I've seen that happen as well. All right, so there's, you know, so you, like, like Matt was saying, you get a couple of options, right? Some people, you know, ask nicely and you kind of hope that they're going to switch over, go to Software Center, download the software. just automatically pull the license for them and, um, and force them to move over.

Um, so yeah,

different approaches.

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I

would say it's kind of, it's sometimes, it's

it literally is a

business decision. I think everything that you mentioned there, It says this is a business decision, but people are attached. At least they, they think they're attached to, and they might even [00:40:00] think that they're a power user, but they're just doing levels commands and moving layers around inside of Photoshop, right?

Like, like you said, you can do that in Affinity Photo, no problem. But there are a lot of people, I think, think that they're more attached to these things than they are. And the business actually has to make business decisions. I mean, when SketchUp changed their licensing, it was a big deal. Adobe. Autodesk, there's all these companies that have made this very expensive, you know, from a, a software purchasing standpoint or just subscript through subscription models and businesses have to deal with that in real time or it gets away from you.

I mean, you could just get to the point, I guess, where you won't pay the bill, but, but it's like, then, then you're in a real hard place because you have had no ramp up to using to give your staff an option to use something else. And now you feel like you're kind of a prisoner in the these You know, in these software packages because you, you literally can't have anybody use anything else because they don't know how to use [00:41:00] anything else and, and all that downtime costs way too much money. it's, it's really interesting that these are the things that BIM managers and IT managers have to deal with. Right? And I think one of the things that I wanted to go back to that you mentioned, Matt, was this 10 million in Bluebeam usage, right? Like, like time being spent in Bluebeam doing a lot of repetitive things that maybe don't need to be done so repetitively.

Maybe those can be automated. I'm just curious, like, what did you want to get that number to? Do you have a goal? Did you have a goal at ADG to get that number down to? Some percentage of that and, and then, and then like then, then you kind of extrapolate that naturally across different software packages in the company.

Right? It's like, well, you know there, there's a lot of reasons why Bimbeats really

helps businesses understand these kinds of issues.

Matt Wash: Yeah, our goal was 10 percent and it was obviously a nice number because we were at 10 million. Let's save a million bucks. Like, it was pretty easy. Um,

Evan Troxel: just just save 10%, not get down to [00:42:00] 10%

Matt Wash: just saving 10 percent is, is a million bucks. So nice, easy numbers that everyone can understand. And, and in six months time, when we've done a year worth of SmartMark, I'm going to be really interested to see what the total time and the knock on effect. So it will be how much reduction of time we're spending in Bluebeam, but then also the reduction in time in Revit, because that's obviously the reinforcement detailing.

example, that was the duplication of doing it in Bluebeam and doing it in Revit. So it's going to be a reduction in, in Revit as well. Um, but to Konrad's point around Adobe, two examples that I'll give on that. So every time we have a license renewal, I go into a BIMbeats dashboard that has every piece of software that we have that isn't a named user.

And we compare running time with active time. So you can see on BIMbeats, pieces of structural analysis software, of Strand 7, as an example. It's not used very regularly, but it's used by a wide group of people, and we've got to get that [00:43:00] number of licenses based on concurrent usage. So, what typically happens is that those users will open Strand 7 at 8 o'clock in the morning, leave it open until 5 o'clock at night.

So, in terms of our metric of, is it running on the machine, we have a and then right alongside it is how active it's been used.

Konrad Sobon: you know why they're doing that, right? They're kind of putting a hold on the license.

Evan Troxel: Right?

Konrad Sobon: If it's a floating

license solution, right? They just reserved the license. Like I remember when we used to have, you know, a couple of floating,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Konrad Sobon: couple of floating rider licenses. And all of a sudden we out and the emails start flying

through the company.

It's like, Hey, can someone give you a rider license?

Matt Wash: Exactly the same thing. So we have that in our intranet across every piece of software. So when someone does try and get into a piece of software that they can't get into, it just shows who's actively in the software and who's had the software open the longest, so that we can say, okay, this is probably someone that might be able to jump out of that software.

So there's two reasons for doing that. One is the psychological [00:44:00] impact of the frustration of not being able to get into the piece of software that we're trying to reduce that to. And the other one, just the saving of money every single month that the CFO is now like, I love BIMbeats because you are saving me money every single month on software licensing.

Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes when we are adopting a new piece of software and the traction is good, we're actually increasing, but we're increasing when we need to increase and we're reducing when we need to reduce. And it's based on the strategy of. Are we moving to a piece of software that we know is in the direction of the strategy of the business versus a piece of software that we're not?

So as an example, we decided that we were phasing out AutoCAD to move to Revit years and years ago. So we said, right, this is the date that we're going to do that handover. And from that day onwards, everybody that is a structural technician will do everything in Revit. And we gave a period of time where training was provided and everybody was up to speed.

But then at a certain date, to Konrad's point, we shut it off. And it's like, [00:45:00] now you're only in Revit, you're not in AutoCAD. And we have a number of engineers that would always go into AutoCAD to just have a look around the model, do a few markups, make a few measurements. And we said, right, BricsCAD, everything that you're doing, you can do in BricsCAD.

So we did this comparison of how much it was costing us in AutoCAD when they moved to named licenses. We looked at the flex token system and we ran this comparison and we have 78, 000. regular users of BricsCAD and we, I can't remember what the number was, but it was tens of thousands of dollars every year that we saved by making that switch from AutoCAD to BricsCAD.

But it did need the transition, it did need the training, it did need the

piece around if there's things that it's not doing that you were doing in AutoCAD, please let us know, but we feel that we can make that change. So, Again, it comes back to the cultural piece around, we didn't just tell people right from tomorrow, you've got to go and learn this, you know, there is a training job number or an innovation number that you can book time to that [00:46:00] you can learn how to use the new piece of software.

And I think from a financial standpoint, It's this, what is the long term objective of what we're trying to do? We can't look at this in the short term and we can't put it onto a project. So if you were on a project and your project manager says, hold on a minute, I know he's really competent in AutoCAD and now we're switching to BricsCAD, he's going to be charging to my project and my project's going to look bad.

So the structure of billing is also like very different. And I think just changing tact a little bit. But timesheets versus actual work is probably the thing that I touched on at the end of my tenure at ADG, where we were really

Konrad Sobon: Matt, hold on, hold on a second. Cause on that AutoCAD, uh, to BricsCAD story, I think you're leaving out a, uh, An important piece of information there, because this, this one touches on, um, this one touches on a piece of information that you can get by seeing, by [00:47:00] seeing actively who's using a certain software and measuring how much time the software is being used.

You can tailor your licensing strategy, right? AutoCAD didn't offer you floating licenses. BricsCAD did. part of, part of the reason you're switching over is because you have people jumping in. What you were saying is like they jump in to do a few markups for a few minutes and they're jumping off. The way flex tokens work is that you jumping in into that model for two minutes, that gives you a license for 24 hours.

You paying for 24 hours, even if you're using it for a couple of minutes. So the big chunk of savings here is just realizing how the software is actually being used. You have 78 users, but you could get away with, I think you were telling me 15 concurrent licenses for BricsCAD and you saved from, you know, I think you used to pay 90, 000 a year for your licensing of AutoCAD because it kills that 24 hour, like it gives you that token is 24 hours worth of time that people only use a fraction of it and the BricsCAD it went down to like 23.[00:48:00]

1, 000 a year because now you can float them and people use them only for a few minutes and they put them back into a pool. So just being able to realize how you actually use the software, even from just the perspective of, you know, how often or for how long of a period of time allows you to tailor your licensing, uh, decisions towards that.

And that goes with, you know, that goes for any other software out there. So like, you know, the Adobe story that I was telling, you know, that's, that's a story about how much you're using it. And then you can, you can, you know, you can be, you can safely transition people over to some other piece of software, leaving the high, uh, productivity people alone, so to speak, right?

So you don't get what you were worried about. You're like, oh, they're going to be billing all this extra time, uh, because now they're less productive. They're going to be billing into my project. They're going to look my project bad. no, we switch over people that are less productive anyway, because they're not using the software too much.

It's not going to be a big impact, but you can do other things around this. And I remember when we were at HOK and we were doing this [00:49:00] thing, um, you know, with manager Greg, I think at the time, they actually cut a deal with, uh, with Affinity, with Surf, going back to Adobe, that they, you know, we would switch over.

It's a big company, we'll switch them over, but you guys got to put someone on cold, you know, available.

All day, 24 seven, to support us. Right. So we're going to start

pooping, start transitioning people over to your software, you're going to help us with that. You know, going to get

yourself

a couple of thousand licenses from us.

Right.

Matt Wash: Yeah, no good point. And definitely when I looked at that dashboard in terms of the time that those BricsCAD users were spending in there, we'd color coded it from, you know, 10 minutes to 2 hours, 2 hours to 4 hours, 4 to 8, and then more than 8. Like, there was literally nothing more than 2 hours ever. So that 2 hours for the TokenFlex system, I think it worked out to like,

25 per hour per user.

It's like,

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Matt Wash: we can't, we can't afford to do that. So,

Evan Troxel: Right,

Konrad Sobon: And with other software, it's similar, similar story. Right. So like you mentioned Bluebeam, [00:50:00] right. There's an inherent assumption that working in Bluebeam from an engineering standpoint of view is actually being unproductive because we know what people are doing in Bluebeam. It's like, it's manual, like laborers work, um, that then gets to be redone again.

So you're doing some kind of markups and somebody else has to redo that work, in Revit or some other like altering tool, right? AutoCAD, whatever that is. Right. So. Inherently, you're assuming that that's being unproductive. You can actually measure that, right? So, like I said, some of our clients, uh, come back to us, and they're, you know, they're telling us a story where they're looking at what it is they actually, that people actually do. Do they do markups, or do they just, um, uh, do they just look at PDFs? Right, because, because now, you can open a PDF in a browser. software on any Windows machine, right? You don't even need Bluebeam to do that, So even when they do a markup that's, You know, [00:51:00] that's from an engineering standpoint of view, maybe unproductive, but from a software purchasing standpoint of view, Markups is actually what Bloomium is supposed to be used for.

And if they're in the studio session, that's actually great, right? So if they're using the software, how it's meant to be used, then that's not as bad as just looking at PDFs, right? So there's like gradations to how bad, how badly you can, you know, you need to switch people over or, you know,

retrieve licenses back or whatever.

Evan Troxel: right. One thing I want to go back to is this idea of how granular you guys can get. And you were just talking about it, Konrad. So, I mean, you're talking about using an app, you're talking about using a computer, whatever. specs are. You, you guys have visibility into that, but, but you, I, I think it, it makes sense to take a minute to talk about the depth at which you can actually see what's going on, because you both have talked about, okay, is the program just open on the machine?

Are they actually using it? All the way down to, [00:52:00] like, what are they doing in Bluebeam? So maybe you can give an idea of the spectrum of granularity that you're actually looking into on, on these machines

Konrad Sobon: Yeah, so it really depends on the application itself, right? So we have a couple of tools that generally at any software that's running on your computer. And like Matt mentioned, the, uh, the active window app that we have. So that can tell you, um, you know, what kind of software you're running on the computer and whether it's actively being used.

So how much time you're spending in it. To an extent, it can tell you, um, you know, what are you, what are you doing in it, uh, depending on, uh, like, you know, if it's a browser, we can kind of tell you which, uh, which products in the browser you, in the browser you're using, um, but it's not a whole lot of detail, right?

Like, you know, how much time you're spending at, you know, I don't know, ACC hub or something like that, right? But it's not going to be a whole lot of detail specifically of what you're doing inside of an ACC hub. That would require a specific integration, so we do have certain packages that we've been rated [00:53:00] with outside of Revit, obviously, so Bluebeam's one of them. and if that given software allows you to look into specifics of what people are doing in the application, Then we have that data available as well. So Bluebeam is one of those where you can see, um, you know, all of the actions, um, or transactions as they call them, um, that you execute in the software.

So, you know, for Bluebeam you can see, you know, every markup, every comment, every document that you, that you edit and modify, all the single actions, um, basically your mouse clicks in an application. Um, You know, we can do the same thing with things like AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, Grasshopper. So like all of the integrations that are very specific to a software, like if you go to our website and we have a list of like specific integrations, those are the ones that we can see a lot more detail, given that the application actually allows you to dig into it through an API integration or some kind of log file that we can parse all

of

those actions through.

Evan Troxel: [00:54:00] Nice.

Matt Wash: Sorry, just touching on that further with the Bluebeam example. So, in terms of the

granularity, we have VivaEngage within, and I keep saying we, ADG. So, a knowledge sharing community where we have channels set up to, if you've done something cool and you want to share it with someone, you put it into the community.

So, as an example, someone will say, Oh, I found this really cool tool in Bluebeam. to do legends or whatever it might be and they can type it. Hey, this is how you do this thing and it's saved me a heap of time. I used to do it like this and then people will like the comment or reply back, going, Oh, I didn't know about that.

That's really cool. But inside of BIMbeats, we can see, well, how many more people are now using that tool based on that community interaction and people sharing their knowledge. So I think that's probably one component that. We hadn't dived deep into until I started doing this at an organizational level.

It was, yes, we're capturing all of this data, but what are we going to do with it? So, if you know that legend is being captured in Bluebeam, ah, well, if [00:55:00] someone's just put in the community that they're using that feature, who else is using it? So then we can create a dashboard of, well, let's have a look with inside the business, who's taking advantages of all of these different features.

Like productivity gains. And okay, well, let's run a session on that because right now that comment that was made in the Viva Community channel is only being used by five people within the business. Let's do a little session on that. And what is it? So that insight from um, Active Window. Inside of Veeva communities, we'll then start looking at, well, who's engaging with the Veeva community?

What do we need to do to create more engagement inside of the community? Because we can see who's interacting with each of the channels within Veeva communities. Um, so that's really insightful. But I, I think the other one, just touching back on time sheet data because of the active window, essentially I do my time sheet at the end of the week using my active window to look at where I actually spent my time.

And I've got two examples from clients where one client came to me and said. Um, I'm using, uh, I've got my [00:56:00] timesheet data and it's showing that this person here is 90 percent billable. So they've billed to 90 percent of their time to this billable job. Whereas this person here is, is billing 50 percent of their time to this innovation job number.

And I need to increase their utilization. They need to be back on billable work. Like, can BIMbeats help me with that? And I'm like, well, yeah, absolutely. Because we can look at exactly what those two people are doing. And is this guy automating what he's doing or trying to automate something that would be Useful on a billable project and what it turned out was that the guy that was billing an entire day to billable work Wasn't actually spending that time on billable work and some of that time was spent surfing the net.

Now Obviously, BIMbeats is not a tool that our intent is not Big Brother to check up on people, but it's worth raising because the perception of the leader of that business was that the person that was booking to the billable work was the good member of staff, whereas what was happening was the other member of staff, when they weren't busy, were looking at ways to innovate and [00:57:00] looking at learning new tools.

and on their timesheet was recording exactly what they were doing versus someone who was a little bit more fictitious about what they did at the end of the week. I found it really insightful that the comment back from this project manager was, I want to get more people like this guy who's billing to my job, so I know I'm charging, rather than this guy who's wasting his time, well not wasting his time, but spending time on innovation.

And I was just like, wow, like, once you unpacked what was actually happening there, there's So much more to that story than what you saw in the timesheet.

Evan Troxel: truth.

Matt Wash: that, that was, that was one interesting one. And the other one was around, um, a computational design leader of a business. The job was to go and look at each of the different departments within the business and look at ways of automating their traditional workflows.

And he would come in and take a job on a project and bill the time that he spent to do that task. And project managers were coming back and saying, He's not billing enough hours to the job. For us to, [00:58:00] on charge to the client. So, like, if it takes you two hours, can you make sure you book what it would normally take you to do that task?

Because we're billing by the hour. And it was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like, this is crazy. You're almost saying, can you slow down? Because if you're doing these things more efficiently and more effectively. It's not looking good for us in our traditional way that we bill for the work that we, we, and I was just like, okay, there's two really interesting examples that I'd never, ever thought I would end up having to unpack through Bimbeats.

And like, obviously that then comes back to, you know, the whole charging model and, you know, are we billing on value versus billing on hours? So that's, that's a whole

Konrad Sobon: Yeah,

Matt Wash: complete new,

new topic, that one.

Konrad Sobon: it always makes me laugh when, when clients, I think you were telling me about the, I never even knew the software existed, the jiggle software

Matt Wash: Oh, yeah.

Konrad Sobon: So some, some people run that on, uh, on their computers

Matt Wash: I [00:59:00] think the int

Evan Troxel: a

Konrad Sobon: just to make themselves look alive.

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there's a way to game it, somebody will figure it

out, right? And [01:00:00] imagine the conversations going back to those people who are trying to do something innovative or actually tracking their time right, and like delivering this message to them and what it does to their morale, right?

It's like Like, there's that level of this too, right, that it ultimately gets down to, and then all of a sudden that person's looking for another job, right, you just took, like, the person who's actually doing the thing, Konrad's raising his hand, that was me, right, they're actually doing the right thing, for the right reasons, and, and they're getting punished for it, right, uh, it's, it's absolutely incredible, and people wonder why, you know, The top talent doesn't want to stick around in, in,

many cases, right?

It's like, well, right there, there you have it.

Matt Wash: Yeah, no, it you, you're spot on. And, and that's why

just before I left a DG, we, we now have the time sheet data with the Bimbeats active window data and that project manager or a project manager can look at what was billed versus what was actually [01:01:00] worked on. So it's very, very clear between the two, you know, what the time sheet says and what was actually done.

Evan Troxel: Konrad, do you want to tell your story? You raised your hand like you, I know you were just saying, yeah, yeah, that

Konrad Sobon: But this,

Evan Troxel: but

Konrad Sobon: yeah, I mean, it happens to a lot of people, right. I

Evan Troxel: yep.

Konrad Sobon: guess. The problem is with that billing model, right? I mean, that's just not sound like, I mean, I understand why managers would look at it this way, right? I mean, their project, the people that work on their projects need to bill for their projects, the full amount of hours that they allocated. Um, cause that's, you know, that's how you invoice the client and that's. That's how you get paid. So people like us that we're technically overhead or people like us that, you know, built to an overhead, you know, design technology project number, we're not always welcome. So it's hard to measure, um, it's hard to measure the increase in [01:02:00] productivity, you know, when you're working on something that's going to automate a task, right?

It's just, know, it's just one of those, uh, it's just one of those things that you just You know, it's helping, you just have to take to take the other person's word for it.

Yeah, and that, yeah, but I, I've definitely lived through that story

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Konrad Sobon: where you asked to build to a project, proper project number. um,

not some kind of research project number.

Evan Troxel: I think that this topic overall just really dovetails nicely with an episode that I did recently with an old colleague of mine around the idea of dedicated technology training in a firm. And you guys have mentioned the term a few times, digital footprint. it, it's like we're getting more and more to the point. where like that's the only footprint that we're actually measuring, right? Like it's, it's all digital all the time, all the tools. I mean, of course, there's the human resources side of things. And there's, there's all, there are other parts to a business, of [01:03:00] course, but so much of the business of AEC depends on the digital. Right? Like a hundred percent, And so, at some point, we don't call it digital footprint, we just call it footprint. Just like, I think at some point, you don't call it digital practice, you just call it practice, right? It's like, it's so obvious, I think, to people like you guys, who are working in this every single day, that like, this is how we do it, and it's the only way that we do it.

We're never going back to an older way of doing it, and this only progresses forward. So, dovetailing into this, Training idea. I'm just curious from your standpoint, how often are you guys, you know, because we talked about the struggle of implementation, and I'm curious from your standpoint with a view into many different firms. you could kind of give an overall health metric to the, firms that are out there that are actually are proactively taking it upon themselves to train their staff for new workflows, for [01:04:00] new ways of doing things, for getting rid of the problems that you are identifying with tools like BIMBEATS, where it's like, well, man, there's way better ways to do this to your, to the communities example that you were talking about, Matt, right?

Where it's like somebody posts a tip and then you can actually see. If people are, you know, first you get like kind of the thumbs up responses to the tip and then you get actual usage of, okay, there's a new way to do this. That was way better than I knew because a lot of times it's just people don't know what they don't know.

Right? So from your standpoint, kind of a window into different firms. Where would you kind of grade us on a scale, I don't know, A through F, let's just even say, or 1 to 10, of, of, training their staff so that they are progressing, so that they are developing professionally, but also raising the level

of

what's achievable in these businesses.

Matt Wash: I guess the short answer to that is that. We're 1 to 10 and A to F, and there is no [01:05:00] middle ground or there is no kind of happy medium. I think there are companies that are doing it really, really well, and I think there's companies that aren't addressing it at all. I think a lot of people think that having Bimbeats in solves all the problems, and that just by having it, all the problems go away, and that that training component isn't necessarily a problem.

as important as they thought it would be, or the additional work that's required. It, like, BIMbeats is not you put it into the system and everything magically improves. Like, it, it still needs that training component. Um, I would say that, For BIMBEATS, us partnering with organizations that provide that training is probably something that we should probably consider because that isn't something we do, and then if that training is effective, then BIMBEATS is a mechanism for measuring.

that effectiveness. So if companies are worried about the amount of time it takes or the investment in training, I guess there's the investment in software and new software, there's the investment in training, but then [01:06:00] it's that, well, measuring what was the effectiveness of the training, like, are we actually improving based on whatever that training is?

So if we take the example of in place families, you can go to the BIM Beast dashboard and say, right, these people are the most frequent. Uh, in place family users. These people are in the interiors team. They probably need some training with loadable families.

Evan Troxel: Matt. Get specific.

Matt Wash: It's not like, it's not like it's a true story.

This is,

Konrad Sobon: names.

Matt Wash: know,

this, this, this, yeah, like, so,

Evan Troxel: I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you, Konrad

Matt Wash: but

the, but the bit, the bit that we don't do is then have that automatic, well here's the training you need to do to improve on that thing and then come back to say, well okay, you're no longer doing in place families or the reduction of in place families has come down.

So I think we rely on the training component within SiteEach. And I think it comes back to looking at short term financial success versus long term health [01:07:00] of both your business and your bottom line. And I think a lot of people get scared by the upfront investment that's required because it isn't a quick fix and it does take time to embed that into the culture that this is about continuous learning organization, etc, etc.

I think a lot of people say that's what they do. But I think. a lot of the time it comes back to, it takes more than just capturing the software, providing the insight, the action, really comes back to training, um, for competency, uh, and increasing the skill set of the individual. I think to a point, um, Nerva, who was on your podcast a while back, said,

Evan Troxel: Mm

Matt Wash: um, the difference between innovation and evolving.

I think sometimes I possibly have made the mistake in, Continuously talking about innovation and people believing that that's a nice to have or only, you know, a small part of the business does this. And I think it needs to change to the language needs to be it's, well, this is evolving. This, this is an evolution of every role.

It is not a design technology groups job to do [01:08:00] this. This is the future of an architect. The future of an engineer is complementary digital skills. That's what it is. And, and it's not, we have an innovation team that does that and we have an architect to. is creative. We have an engineer who engineers. We have a technician that draws or models.

Like, I think those lines have got to blur, and they are blurring, um, particularly with the, the ability to adopt new technology and how much easier it is now than it, than it was before. So I think that's, that's really important, that training aspect, but in answer to your question, 1 to 10 and A to F, like it's, it's really across the entire board.

Konrad Sobon: So one more thing I want to expand on, um, a little bit when it comes to training, cause I remember again, back in my BIM manager days, I was responsible for, um, and I remember doing this regularly with, with staff in the office, uh, when we were training people on, you know, Revit is an example [01:09:00] at the time, right?

We were Just, you know, we'll grab four or five people that were on any given project, pick a topic for that day. know, keynoting today, or, you know, you mentioned in place family modeling and like good practice for family modeling, or parametric modeling, whatever the case was, right? And you put them in the training room and, you know, talking through a topic and then they go off. A couple of things that was, that was bothering me ever since then that was wrong with that image that kind of, you know, right now with BIMbies you can, you can vastly improve on, right? So first thing is, A, we're just blindly training everyone, right? People that are actually really good with, with Revit already knew, Those things, there was no need to waste their 30 minutes or an hour of their time by putting them through the same, same training session, right?

So, like you were saying, now you can see specifically, you can run through the entire and see who is making in place [01:10:00] families on a regular basis, right? Pick top 10 of those people in the organization, organize training for them specifically, right? And that's the difference. You're actually training where there is a need to be trained, right? then the other side of this is those people were now trained, you know, you know, when that training occurred, can track the progress from that point from that day forwards, they actually changing their behavior? If they're not.

Bring it back into the training session until it sticks,

Evan Troxel: off that license.

Konrad Sobon: kill or kill that license, but so, so it gives you to, you know, that upfront, you figuring out and you not, so it wasn't just like, I would run through separate specific topics that I had, but there were the same topics and with every team, I just kind of ran through the same thing over and over again. if in place families were never a problem? And I just kept training everyone on.

in place families. I would, I'd never even knew [01:11:00] if that's what they needed to be trained on.

Evan Troxel: measure something in order to come up with a strategy to address it. Right. It's

Konrad Sobon: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: have the ability to do. And I think something that

Matt, you said earlier was like, everybody read these gems. Right. And, and it's like, you gave it the special thing, this designation on the internet. And it was also probably just like a really short and to the point kind of a thing. And again, like, think about people's behavior, think about their attention span. And. I also think about the preciousness in which a lot of training material is created and it's like polished and it's edited so perfectly it doesn't have to be like that.

Like it literally, I think, in order to be effective just needs to be done fast. And, and, don't try to solve everybody's problem. Don't try to explain all of it. leave room for that engagement part that I talked about earlier. Ask questions afterward, ask follow ups, where do we, and then we can decide where we want to go next with this, but don't [01:12:00] be super precious about creating this content, but I do think you need to create.

Training material that lives somewhere so that people can look it up when they need it, because live training doesn't work all the time for everybody. It's not always the right place, not always the right time. And, and I think, you know, a lot of our business is like that. Like, we're just filing stuff away, waiting till the day that we use it, but it's still nice to have those resources. In addition to that, that maybe aren't so precious, but they're timely because they're there when I, I just need to look things up and figure out how to do things better. Or somebody posts about it and says, man, this worked for me. here was a quick screen recording, like. Run with this and just see what happens, but I think I think all of these things kind of lead to like it's it doesn't even sound like effective training, but it totally is effective training.

This is how people consume media these days, right? It's like the doom scrolling. It's just flipping through videos. And if you have the ability to do that in your organization with training, like that's a valuable thing for people to be filling their brains with when they're when they're

out looking [01:13:00] for. You know, trying to fill a little bit of time.

Matt Wash: Yeah. And, and I think with this podcast, it's going to be interesting if I talk to clients saying that we've done this podcast to then look to see who listened to it for the entirety and who listened to the first 10 minutes

Evan Troxel: Bimbeats analytics on the

podcast listeners. I love it.

Matt Wash: walked out after 10 minutes because the attention span was too short.

Evan Troxel: Impossible. You're way too engaging, you guys. Well, and, and back to that point, like, like delivering, like, this is very conversational. It's like, I'm not doing a monologue and there's no agenda to this podcast, right? We, we literally don't know what we're going to talk about next. I've said that many times on this podcast.

I don't know the next words that are coming out of my mouth and you probably don't either. And I think that alone makes it way more listenable because it's authentic. It's a conversation. And actually that now that reminds me something that you were talking about, Matt, and I think we can wrap up. With this was just this whole idea of accountability in the system, right?

It's like you, you identify the problem, you [01:14:00] produce a little bit of training, and then you watch and you see if the behavior is changing. And kind of going back to maybe, you know, when I was a BIMbeats customer at HMC, right, back in the early days of BIMbeats, and it was like, just getting the software is not enough.

Okay, now we, we identify these things and now we go proactively to people and we say, hey, I noticed that this isn't working for you. How can we help? Um, that to me, built, starts to build personal accountability because now that we've addressed it, now we're going to be checking in on it. Right? And in the organization, like, as a business, we're not a family, like, have accountability, and they're not a business, are not, like, my son is not responsible for doing business development and bringing in money every month, right? But there's accountability there. It definitely should apply in the business. Right? And so when it comes to like spending the money on the software, spending the time to do the [01:15:00] training, following up on that, making sure it's actually landing and working and we are getting better at doing what we do should be totally normal. And I think like that, it's just kind of a call to action to, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of people who work in these businesses who want to see accountability, but it's so hard to get that to actually happen. Um, and I just wanted to bring it up, see if you guys had any ideas around that, because I, I do think that you're building a platform that enables accountability, right?

I don't know how. That's actually working out. I'm sure it's working. Again, it's probably all across the spectrum, right? Uh, there's some that are really good at it and some that are really bad at it. But, that is a, it is something to, to really take notice of and, and, and learn how to use that leverage in the business

to make, so that things actually do get better over time.

Matt Wash: Yeah, I totally agree. And I'll go back to Nate's article that he published this morning, uh, where he talks about the accountability isn't just on the tech [01:16:00] people or the person that is responsible for innovation within a business. Like, that's not enough. And I think it's 84 or 86 percent of digital transformations fail.

And I think it comes back to that accountability where, yes, the accountability for the strategy sits with the tech people. The Chief Digital Officer. Executing that strategy is the accountability of everyone within the organization, and it has to be both bottom up and top down. And I think quite often the bit in the middle gets missed.

I think at kind of leadership level and C suite, you come up with what you think is a business strategy that aligns with your digital strategy, and everybody is in agreement with that. You have young, passionate people at an individual level who want to do it. But then the project directors and the national discipline leads who have all these other things that they have to worry about and, you know, but essentially all of this still comes back to commercial gain and commercial gain, whether that is retaining someone that hasn't left the business and the cost [01:17:00] of retaining them.

Like getting someone else in. If someone leaves for me, everything still comes back to a commercial benefit to the business, but it's, and, and this is probably a good, good, good way to finish. And this comes back to what we spoke about last time, Evan, about it's the health of the business and the health of the people.

And if you've got healthy people, you have a healthy business.

Evan Troxel: Well said. Conrad, any, any final thoughts when it comes to this? Thanks.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah. I mean, so you guys, you guys said a few times that, you know, you get the data, but it's up to you what you're going to do with this, right? So this transparency, um, cuts both ways, right? So there's, it's,

you can do positive things or you can do negative things with it. You know, and often, oftentimes in some of the examples that we've had with, uh, that I've seen with clients, some of the stories they tell us is, you know, people get used to it, right?

It's, you know, it might feel like, um, you know, it's a little, [01:18:00] I don't know, a little too much in the beginning, but I've had some clients tell us that, you know, they had this, uh, They had this workflow set up where IT was getting emailed with a list of computers that need to be updated because they're on the outdated version of some software or whatnot.

They were, and they were getting these automated emails from BIMbeats every, um, every week. And originally they would get. a little annoyed, a little pissed off in the beginning because it's like, hey, you just keep sending me this stuff. I know I have to do this, but, but that, you know, over time they got used to it, but it created that accountability that we just talked about, right?

It's like, yeah, you're not going to keep getting those emails if you actually get out there and, uh, you know, get those updates pushed out and, know, get used to it, right? So it's not, um, I'm actually only, uh, personally, I think that, um, You know, that you can, you can throw more responsibilities at people in there.

Um, that's a good thing. You know, they usually respond in a very positive way. so, [01:19:00] having, having that kind of data, having that kind of information that allows you to, expect and demand more, uh, from people is a good thing. That's a positive. I like to see that, you know, the companies that I worked at back in the days.

Um,

I'd be excited.

Evan Troxel: Agreed. And I, I think it, it, uh, obviously people want to show up. I, I mean, I shouldn't say obviously, but I think most people show up and they want to do a good job

Konrad Sobon: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Evan Troxel: how they can do their job better. And so kind of

going into those conversations with that attitude and just saying, Hey, like I noticed this and this is a struggle.

Yes. No. Like, give me some feedback. Tell me what you're, what, what this is like for you. Yeah. That's a great way to enter into these conversations, right? Give them the benefit of the doubt, of course. And I know a lot of people, there's definitely IT people out there. I mean, there's people You blamed the interior designer for making in place [01:20:00] family, so I'm blaming the IT people for the way they approach conversations sometimes.

Like, Konrad, you even talked about this with your role emerging and evolving through time. It's like you, you, you You had to deal with people in your role at BIMbeats, right? And it's like, Oh, how do I do this? Right? It's, it's not natural necessarily for people on the technology side to, for communication skills or for interpersonal skills or soft skills or however you maybe want to put it.

And there's, there's training out there for that too. You can learn those skills. And so I think just saying a few of those things out loud, it's like, let's just actually step back and remember, like, people do want to do a good job. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's all get better together kind of a thing.

And, and understand your purpose in this business. Like getting, getting back to this business use case that we're all on the same team pushing forward. I, all of those are kind of like regrounding kind of. You know, maybe cliches, but at the same time, like, I think it's worth saying those [01:21:00] because I think a lot of times some technology people lose sight of those things and they just go in guns blazing and they, they, you know, they're because they're fed up and, and they've keep having to deal with the same things over and over again, or they're only dealing with the crap, Konrad, right?

Like all I get are bug reports. All I get are the negatives. Um, and so like, let's just remember like people that is, talking about people we're talking about. People who in architecture generally are up for a challenge, like you were just saying, Konrad's like, man, I, you want to start every day with a little challenge, right?

And, and get your brain working. So all of those things, I'll get off my soapbox now, but I think those are all we're saying, you know, especially if you're in a leadership position, like to really instill in your team, who's going to be having these conversations with people as well. Like, treat, treat people with respect, treat people as people, and, and, and build accountability the right way.

right?

Not just the guns blazing kind of a way.

Konrad Sobon: Yeah, presenting these things as opportunities and, you know, [01:22:00] just being able to recognize them afterwards too. That's like an important part of it too. Like people will step up to a challenge, they'll try to do a good job. That's, that's, I don't know, that's like a default mode of operation for, you know, with the folks that I used to, um, work with.

And I believe that's, that's how most of the people are. Uh, but you have to be able to recognize them afterwards too. So,

Evan Troxel: Absolutely.

Konrad Sobon: so long as you're doing

that. They're going to be, they're going to be just, fine.

Matt Wash: I just, sorry, I just wanted to end on one thing just because it made me think about the hybrid work situation and flexible work of should we be in the office, should we be at home? And I don't have the answer to this, but I want to give a shout out to Havad, um, because Havad put me on to a book called Outcomes, Not Outputs.

And I think if we look at that, then using BIMbeat's data and anecdotal evidence as well, that measure on outcomes, don't measure on outputs. Like, because there are stories of [01:23:00] you're working from home. You're only doing six hours a day today. You're not doing the eight hours when you come in the office.

Who cares? What's the outcome? And I think we need to move forward looking at outcomes, not output. And it probably relates back to that booking two hours to the job rather than six hours because you did six hours worth of work. I think focusing on outcomes needs to be the way that we, we move forward. Um, and if you're judging hybrid working, judge on output.

Oh, sorry, Outcomes, not Output.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it goes right back, another dovetail into our previous conversation, Matt, right? Healthy people, healthy business, right? So, well, thank you both for taking the time to catch us up on what's been going on with Bimbeats, and it's been a wonderful conversation. I hope we can do it again in the future.

Let's not wait four and a half years, Konrad, till the next time. But, Matt, congrats on your new role. I hope you can do wonders with, uh, with scaling Bimbeats, and, uh, I wish you both the best. Thanks for

taking the time to [01:24:00] hang out with me​