Gareth McGlynn: Bob Kovacs. Welcome to the Preconstruction Podcast.
Bob Kovacs: Hey. Thanks for having me, Gareth.
Gareth: Good. Just wanted to quickly jump on. I know we've been kind of liking and commenting and promoting the same stuff on LinkedIn for the last couple of months. I wanted to jump on and I kind of sent you a message and I said it's worth jumping on the podcast to talk about this specific topic. And the topic we want to talk about is the skilled labor shortage. Now, we want to get some background on that as well. So the best place to start is probably can you give us a quick bio of yourself, Bob?
Bob: Yeah, well, I grew up in New Jersey, I went to New Jersey Institute of Technology. Shortly after graduating, I moved out to Las Vegas so I was out there for about five years doing residential and light commercial construction, went back to New Jersey in 2000. I worked for Turner Construction under Robert Thrall. There, I started out in the project management side and then we did preconstruction starting around 2003. So, it took about 20 years on the precon side. In 2007, I moved down to Atlanta, spent 12 years with Skanska, short time with Gilbane, and I've been over here at Evans General Contractors as their Vice President for Preconstruction since last June.
Gareth: Brilliant. I love it. It's a perfect background, when you consider your operations at the beginning, coming over, and then moving out of the dark side into the light.
Bob: Yeah, like I like to think of it that way too. But I will say, as you look through all the people you've worked with over the years, and you know, the people who usually did the best on the preonstruction side, were people who had some level of operations background just because it's, it's easy to see what's on the paper, it's knowing what's not drawn or what's [indiscernible] have to happen in the field to be able to fill all those gaps and putting the rest of this together for a [indiscernible].
Gareth: Brilliant. Yeah, I love it. And listen, that I don't think that's going to change. I have got the idea that with the BIM models and stuff, it's gonna get a little bit easier to train people to understand the constructability of a project. But no, you cannot kind of-- you can't replace the feet on the boots on the ground. So that's, that's good. That's a good bio. I mean, we talked about it briefly before about the skilled labor shortage. In your view, Bob, what is-- what can we do-- well, first of all, we'll start with the issue. What do you think the issue is and why has it become such a problem? I think it's always been a problem, but it's becoming more of a problem, considering the capacity deficit and the amount of buildings, schools, hospitals, warehouses, office blocks that we've got to build over the next two decades.
Bob: Well, I think it started probably back in the 70s and 80s, when, you know, being a tradesperson became a dirty word. Everybody had to go to college, and that was coming from your teachers, your guidance counselor, from your parents, you know. A lot of it was, I mean like, my father worked in the trades for 30 some odd years and he wanted, you know, they say, “Well, I want you to do better than than I did, you know, so I want you to go to college. I want you to learn, you know, a skill, you know, and not have to, you know, work with your hands every day.” And it's like, well, first of all, I don't think that it's not a dirty thing to do. It's not an unskilled thing. There’s a lot of skill required to do a lot of the stuff that we do out in the field. And, there's nothing wrong with it. You know, I think part of the challenge is, you know, a lot of the guidance counselor's at the school, you know, they're pushing kids to go to college, because that's what their base [indiscernible]. It’s what they're graded on. You look at schools online, and what are they-- what are they showing you for statistics, you know? What percentage of the kids graduate and what percentage of them go to college? They're not showing what percentage of them are gainfully employed, after they get out of school. It's how many kids went to college, but they lose track of how many of them never finished college. It's always just about how many we send on.
Gareth: Yeah, absolutely.
Bob: So, probably the past four or five years, it seems like there's been a little bit of a shift there that people are starting to realize that college is not the only alternative. I'm seeing schools around here that 10, 15 years ago were tearing out their wood shops and their metal shops, and putting in more computer labs and robotics labs and stuff are now going back the opposite way. I mean, I'm involved with one of the local high schools here that started a construction program about three years ago. They had one 15 years ago, and it kind of just fell by the wayside. And now, they can't offer enough periods of carpentry because there's so many kids that want to get into it. So it started to turn around, but it still needs a lot of support from a lot of people to to address the issue.
Gareth: Absolutely. And I mean, from my own experience, if you think about it in 2006 when I was going to school, it was all about IT. Literally, the guidance counselors, that's all they talked about. I don't know many people but I would love to know the statistics of whatever someone studies, do they go on to actually do that because when I left high school, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. So my parents just advised me in the games counselor said, “Well, everyone's heading towards IT. Just do go and do IT.” Now, I was an engineering degree with an IT but I knew within the second year in college that I didn't want it. This is this just wasn't for me. It just wasn't-- it didn't suit my personality and the characteristics. And I think I would love to know, if the games counselors would do that. They would look at someone's personality, because a lot of us don't know what we want to do at that age. Look at the personality, look at where their passion lies. What do they like doing? Do they like sitting and playing with Lego and bolting things? Well surely they should be put towards construction in some way or the trades? And that's, I think that's where it starts. You know, I think that's, that's where obviously, we'll go into more detail of what we can do, but I think that'd be a good starting point.
Bob: I agree. I agree. I mean, I think that the challenges, they probably are identifying that but in the past, I think they weren't focusing on those kids. They were, “Oh, yeah. These are the kids that, you know, just just set them down to the shop class and let them do something. But you know, let's focus on these, you know, these kids that are going to go and get their master's degrees and their doctorates. And now because again, that helps our, you know, helps our scores and helps our rankings.” I think there's more of an emphasis now on, you know, making sure that everybody graduates with an opportunity to have a good livelihood. And it's a good thing. It's hopefully going to help us as time goes on.
Gareth: Yeah. Well, I mean, basically, what you’re describing as well, they're not tearing out the labs and the computer labs, but they're bringing back the workshops and the metal shops, which is-- which is good. Another thing that I think that at that level, just at that level of high school and guidance counselors, they need to understand what construction is now, because what construction was 10 or 15 years is completely different now. We talk about people going to start to study IT will talk about data. I know you were involved with Skanska, obviously, we had Steve Stouthamer and Will Senner on. What they're doing with preconstruction data now mean they see now within preconstruction team, and I'm seeing it all over the US, there's actually data analysts in there now, looking at the data, setting it up for the precon team and the estimating team. So the VDC, the BIM, there’s so much now that's going to be the future of construction. It's in every other sector. Financial services, retail, ecommerce, all these guys now should really be considering construction, because if they do like IT in there, they don't want to go and wear a hard hat and get their hands dirty on site, that there are so much too many more options.
Bob: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, they're-- the whole game, the VDC thing, is something that started halfway through my career. I've never really dug into it [indiscernible]. I'm not hopping into a model and driving around in it, and you know, figure it out, you know, clash detection and all that. But there are people that can do it far better than me and I'm amazed by what they can do with it. We looked at a project about a year ago that was an existing courthouse that was being expanded. We went out and met one of our VDC folks out there on the site on a Saturday morning with laser scanning the outside of the building, and found that there was about a four and a half inch discrepancy between what the drawings were showing as far as where the interface between the old and the new was going to be and what was reality. If we hadn't done that, we would have ordered a bunch of steel, set foundations and everything, and whatever they came together would have been a pretty wide butt joints between the old precast and new precast. So it's the stuff that just didn't exist, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. That is really making life a lot easier for the folks out in the field.
Gareth: Brilliant. I mean 20 years in preconstruction and then operations before that, what excites you most and next thing on this topic of preconstruction technology? What excites you most about preconstruction technology? What do you see from your time at Skanska, Gilbane, and now at Evans, what do you see as a game changer and just gets you up in the morning?
Bob: Precon, in general, I get excited about because I tend to get bored really easily and being out in the field on projects that might be nine months a year, 18 months long, and once you get through those first couple months, and kind of figure it out and get the project moving, it was time to move on to something else. I didn't want to be there for the other the other year or so getting the job done. So at least in precon, you get to turn through projects a little quicker. I mean, even a long preconstruction process of some of the stuff we do now is is six months. Most of them, you know, are in and out of our department in a month or so. But from a technology standpoint, I think part of the reason we can get through them in that time frame is because of the stuff we have available to us whether that's, you know, onscreen takeoff, computerized estimating, you know, BIM and VDC. You know, a lot of our projects don't necessarily have a model to work with. So we're still doing what, at one point yeah, well, I'm gonna call it old school but if 10 years ago, it was new technology, they use an on screen takeoff the work with digital plans as opposed to, you know, scales and highlighters and adding everything up, but there's always something new. That's the cool thing. There's always something, again, some new technology that we can get into, and use it to our advantage on getting this projects through the process and getting them estimated and priced accurately and getting it out to the field to be able to build correctly.
Gareth: Brilliant. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what it's all about. Expedite as much as possible. But you mentioned there the six months in precon. I think that's what really separates precon from operations. The precon people just love coming in and they do not know what they expect from a day-to-day or week-to-week because every project is different. Obviously, you don't know whether you're going to win the project or lose a project. You're always learning because I mean, if you won every project that you bid, you wouldn't be learning very much.
Bob: No and [indiscernible] we get to see so many projects, too, you know. Let’s say if you're on a job, and you're on it for two years, I mean, that's two years of your life, but you're spending on that one particular project. You’d rather you're seeing a lot while you're there, you're seeing the ins and outs in daily details. But I mean, in the nine months that I've been here, I mean, it's coming back out this next couple of weeks, but it's an addition to a nuclear submarine assembly facility, a tire manufacturing plant, a copper smelting facility, a lot of industrial warehouse space, medical office buildings, freezer coolers or doing a million square foot freezer cooler project up in Pennsylvania. So from day to day, I mean, it's something new every day. It's not, you know, it's not that same thing for two years.
Gareth: Yeah, I love it.
Bob: Yeah. It makes every day.
Gareth: Exactly gets a blood going. And listen, that's what it's about.
Bob: Mm-hmm.
Gareth: In relation to the future and we'll stay on what you're betting on that right now. In relation to the industries, Evans are going after, it's quite diverse. What do you see coming through the, the bids and coming through the architects and the clients?
Bob: I mean, we're still seeing just a huge, huge amount of warehouse and logistics space, especially our Savannah office down near the port. I mean, you can't put your distribution space up fast enough down there. And it's not 200,000 square feet at a time, it's a million and a half square foot, you know, on a clip because there's just so much stuff coming in. Because of all the e-commerce and everything coming from overseas, and kind of shifting from a just-in-time to a just-in-case type of, you know, warehousing strategy, because everybody saw the supply chain shortages over the past year or so. Now, it's not a matter of well, you know, I needed in three months, let me order -- I need two of them, I’ll order two. Now, it's I need it in three months but let me order six of them so that the next time I need to have them, I don't have to wait, you know, a year for them while they float around in the ocean. So it's that much more storage space, that's a big one. The same thing on the cold storage stuff, there's just been an incredible amount of freezer cooler work coming out. And then the last one is manufacturing, especially with all of the stuff that's going on in Ukraine and around the world right now, and this big push that's been going on for the past several years to try and bring more manufacturing back here to the US as opposed to relying on other countries to build our stuff for us. We've seen just an incredible amount of manufacturing work, ranging from small light assembly projects to huge massive projects that really blow up a lot of industries out here that we get we rely on public countries for. So those are probably the three big things.
Gareth: Yeah, and I love-- I get excited when I hear that as well because there's nothing better than getting people to build things locally. They can just walk down the street and [indiscernible] the next state and see how it's been built, what the nuances, how it can be improved, R&D, so much easier. And with that comes back to what we were talking about here, you know, skilled labor shortage because if we're bringing all of those stuff back into manufacturing in the US, that means we're now competing with the manufacturing industry for people. So let's take construction, and in a way went through the kind of the problems. Let's talk about how we can we can get this up because they know that Evans and yourself as their pioneer and a big voice within this. What's the best way to get people and get people into skilled labor in the construction?
Bob: There's so many different ways to do it. I mean, the first thing is to make sure that people understand that it's not a, you know, a dead-end career or it's a, you know, career of last resort. I mean, there's guys that are out in the field right now, you know, framers and welders and structural steel erectors and all, that are making more money than the kids who went to school for four years and you know, $100,000 into debt to get a degree. So it's not a bad career. It's not a-- it's a career you can make a really good living out on. I think getting people to understand that is probably the first hurdle. But then beyond that, it's giving them places to go and get that kind of training. And as you and I were talking earlier, you know that there's a certain bit of, you know, it's somebody else's problem, you know. I don't have to train these guys. I just need trained people or, you know, I don't want to train people and then have them leave and go to work from my competitor. Well, everybody thinks like that nobody's going to train them. I mean, for example, here at Evans, we don't hire, you know, we don't have carpenters, and welders or such on staff. So it's easy-- it would be easy for us to say, well, you know, let somebody else deal with that situation. But if my concrete company, there's subcontractors and my steel erectors, everybody else can't get people, it affects me and our company, and it affects our owners. So it is our problem. It's not somebody else's problem to fix. So it comes down to the providing support wherever you can, promoting the industry, wherever you can. I mean, I'm one of the construction trade advisory boards for one of the local high schools. They started a new program about three years ago. And like everything else in the public schools, now they're short on funds. So we help them. We got some tools donated, we got materials donated to basically set the program up for the first year, and keep them running when they didn't have funds from the school district. And now, you know, that first year, I think they had two periods of the week or a day of construction trades with maybe 60 students. Now they're to the point where they run four or five classes. They have over 200 students in the program, and that's one of six high schools in the county, and the intent is to hopefully, grow that and you know, expand it to the other schools as well. So it wasn't a big monetary commitment. It wasn't a huge time commitment. It was just getting involved and showing that, you know, there's people out there that care about what's going on are willing to support trade programs like that.
Gareth: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Kudos to yourself and Evans as well for being that voice. And I think you're right. I mean, I agree with you that it literally is everybody's problem. So if you think about the numbers of people within construction over the years, imagine if they just started talking about it, was more vocal about it to their nephews, their sons, their daughters, their nieces, their aunts, or uncles. And it's not a case of always the young people, people who are in mid level careers, same age as myself 39-40, that maybe just want to kind of want to challenge something different. They're still in their current job. It will not take them long to get up to speed and learn a new trade or a new skill. So think it really is, if everyone literally touched two or three people within their circle, and just told them about construction, we're not talking about forcing people into this game. We're telling them about how great it is, how wonderful it is, how satisfying it is, and how much money they can actually earn on top of on top of everything else.
Bob: Great and you're right. It's not just about the kids coming out of high school. There's a welding school, not too far from me, that started about 10 years ago, and they were running maybe one class a day with 10 or 12 students. It is all they have room for. About four years ago, they grew into a space of about four times to the space of the first space that they were in. They now run a morning, afternoon, and evening programs. And before we even walk in and say ,“Hey, I'm here, I want to join this program”, it was a 14-week program to get all your welding certifications for either pipe or for structural steel. And it used to be that you could walk in and you know, today's March 15, you could probably start April 1. Now, if you came in on March 15, the first available slot is probably August. So there's that many people going and a lot of them, you know, you walk through that class, it's not a bunch of kids who just graduated high school in May. It's, you know, there's some some adults who, like you said, have said,”You know what, I'm tired of IT or, you know, retail, or whatever I've been doing and I want to do work on my hands and enjoy myself and you know, make a good living.” And you get to [indiscernible] folks from, you know, 15 to 50 and they're getting getting their certifications to learn how to weld.
Gareth: Absolutely. And the other thing is, well, I mean, just because they're welders, they start as welders, it doesn't mean they're going to go finish as welders. They could go in as a welder, they could come up as a supervisor, and they could go into a superintendent. Before you know it, they're moving on to mechanical electrical piping, like they could literally just keep growing, keep growing. The opportunities are endless.
Bob: You know, our Senior Vice President of field operations, he started as a welder fabricator. And then he was working as an erection crew foreman. That's where we first met him. He was working for one of our steel erection companies and he's been with us about nine years now. He's now responsible for 100 to 120, you know, field staff between superintendents, assistant supers and such. So, you're right, I mean, go out there. You learn the trade, be out in the trade, learn how to work with people and how people work under you as people that you're supervising, and then, you can eventually grow to the point where you're not, like I say out there, you're slogging it out every day with a welding rod.
Gareth: Absolutely. And then like a lot of the skills can be taught. I mean, one thing that I'm seeing more and more, and I only look after preconstruction, obviously, so I don't get access to these people, but the one thing is see the soft skills in people. People underestimate the skills that they have. They don't-- they think that it's almost just a confidence booster. They think that they can’t do something, whereas anybody can do-- you can do whatever you want. But as long as you have those soft skills, those compassion, that tenacity, grit, you can basically do whatever you want.
Bob: And it’s like say if you don't have those soft skills, or you don't want to do you know, you don't want to interact with people, you know, so there's plenty of opportunity to go out there and just like go to work every day and make a good living. But those are very important as far as you're trying to advance your career, if that's, you know, if that's your goal. In fact, I taught over at [indiscernible] Tech for a couple years in their carpentry program, and it was-- they didn't have a specific class for that kind of stuff. But there were a bunch of core competencies that they wanted the students to learn that you kind of integrated into every class. So while they were, you know, in a framing class, for example, you know, they still had to come up and talk to you and kind of give it a little brief presentation about what it was they were trying to do. And you have them work in, you know, in pairs opposed to everybody working by themselves, so they can learn teamwork and things. So it because that's all, you know, you're only gonna go so far, if you're the-- you can't work with people or, you know, function with other folks [indiscernible] jobs on a daily basis. So you've got to teach those skills as well.
Gareth: Brilliant. Absolutely. Couldn't agree. And so Bob, can I just summarize now what-- I mean, we get-- there could be anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people end up listening to this, Is there any message you would like to get out there? And obviously, it's called the Preconstruction Podcast, and we all have a responsibility, as you say, what would the message be?
Bob: Again, it's, you know, look out there and see how you can help encourage people to get into the trades, how you can support them, whether that's a local high school, you know, the Skills USA competitions that go on around the country and I have judged at the National Georgia State Championships for about the past eight years in their teamwork competition. And now the national competition is coming to Atlanta for the next 10 years. So I'll be judging the national level in June. It's eight hours of time for you to go volunteer one day, a year to go and you know, see 2030 upcoming, you know, plumbers, carpenters. They are drafting classes or you can watch your-- you had desires or, you know, whatever. Just being there, you know. How many of the instructors of [indiscernible] and say,”Thank you for coming out and taking the time to, you know, to judge this because, you know, the students see that somebody is interested in what they're doing.”
Gareth: Yeah.
Bob: So again, it's not a huge time commitment. It's not a huge monetary commitment. And it's everybody's problem. So even if you thought, well, I'm looking for estimators I gotta go find estimators. Now. You got to help, you know, find people to actually build what it is that you're estimating.
Gareth: Absolutely. You're 100% right, because we rely so much on our subcontractors and our skilled labor. I mean, without them, we're nothing really and we can't service our clients. So I couldn't agree more. Bob Kovacs, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for everything you're doing as well. Obviously, you're judging, you're mentoring, you're bringing people into the industry. So thanks for that.
Bob: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.
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