Operate Lean, Win Big: How top builders are positioning for strength in any market

Jordan Wojtowecz (00:00): Looks like we are live for our webinar today. Thank you everybody for attending. Today's topic, as it shows on the slide, is "Operating Lean and Winning Big: How Top Builders Are Positioning for Strength in Any Market." So we've got a couple of folks on—myself, Joel, Dan. Dan will run through some introductions. I did first want to let y'all know that if you have questions as we're going through the webinar today, you can ask them in the chat. We do hope to get to some of them at the end, but if we don't quite get to them and we run out of time, we do have the ability to see who has asked the questions, and we will get to you in an email or a call after this webinar.

Joel LeBlanc (00:50): Thanks, Jordan. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar on operating lean and winning big. I'm Joel LeBlanc, Chief Operating Officer here at TraceAir. I come from a 30-year background in operations and practicing lean as an approach to running an operation. And I look forward to talking to you all today about how we can win big and operate lean.

Jordan Wojtowecz (01:27): Perfect, thanks Joel. And I'm Jordan Wojtowecz. I am a senior account executive here at TraceAir and also a sales manager based in the San Antonio, Texas area. Really excited for this opportunity to have Dan chat with us today. I've been with TraceAir since 2021 and have known Dan ever since. So thanks, Dan. I will pass it over to you and have you introduce yourself.

Dan Galasso (01:55): Yeah, I'm Daniel Galasso. I'm the Vice President of Land Acquisition & Development for TriPoint here in Colorado. I've been using TraceAir for, I think, since at least '21. We've used it on a number of different projects, and so far, so good.

Jordan Wojtowecz (02:11): Excellent.

Joel LeBlanc (02:12): Great, thanks Dan. Now let's start with what's real right now. You know, how has the pressure changed in how you're expected to lead and deliver results in your organization?

Dan Galasso (02:25): As everybody knows, orders are kind of down right now, so we're working hard, and that's coming with price pressures. So we're working hard to reduce costs, to improve margins, and so with that comes all the different things between talking to our trades and also with our people. So there's been changes with people... Our team has gotten smaller by a few, so my team is just about half of what it was a year ago this time.

Joel LeBlanc (03:03): Yeah, so when you think about that, when resources are getting tight, you know, those small missteps really have big ripple effects. How have you seen margin get lost, and what are you doing to build more discipline into your operation to ensure that margin leakage doesn't occur?

Dan Galasso (03:22): We've tried to stay disciplined the entire time, but the focus becomes greater on making sure that you're monitoring everything that's going in. You know, you're monitoring your invoices closer, you're monitoring any kind of changes closer. We've always really tried hard to keep that under control, but now we have less people to do it with, so we have to start looking to different tools to help us do more with less.

Jordan Wojtowecz (03:55): Mm-hmm. Dan, just a follow-up question on that. You mentioned you're having to monitor invoices a little bit more closely. Can you tell us a little bit about how TraceAir is helping you specifically for invoices and the billing side of things?

Dan Galasso (04:11): Yeah, so, you know, typically we try to get on-site to make sure we're measuring where the, you know, how much pipe has been installed, keeping an eye on how far we've gotten on grading, all of those kind of things. Inevitably though, an invoice comes through, and you're sitting there looking at the invoice... My project manager has definitely been out verifying everything in the field, but I may have not been out recently enough to review. And so a lot of times, I'll pull up TraceAir, and it's really easy to get into TraceAir, see where I was a month ago, where I'm at today. On our active land development projects, we currently have a flight done once a week. And so I can easily pull up four weeks back, look at the date of the invoice, pull up what happened in that time period from that invoice moving forward. I can measure how much dirt was roughly moved... It's a little bit tougher on the dirt front than it is on the wet utility front, but you can easily measure from week to week how much was installed and what kind of quantities were installed. We use it all the way through to the end of the project for that purpose.

Jordan Wojtowecz (05:29): Perfect. So for you, it's really a couple of things, is what I'm hearing. The documentation is key, right? If you don't have a way of documenting the site work, then it's going to be a lot harder to either show when something did or did not occur. And you're using that currently with your team now, right? And I know it's always a priority to try to make it out to your sites, but you're limited on the time you have when you get out there, and it's also hard to exactly quantify what is there in a stockpile or how much was moved. So definitely appreciate you sharing some insight there. Going on to our next question... I know you've got several communities going on in your division there in Denver—some are probably in acquisition vertical, and then you've got some in the actual earthwork stage. So how are you staying in control without being pulled into every detail, and tell us about how TraceAir helps with that visibility?

Dan Galasso (06:35): Yeah, so I have three project managers right now. Two of them are more field-based, one is more office-based. My two field project managers are in the field at least three days a week on the sites. I try to get out to sites once a week, but two weeks can pass without me getting to a site. The nice thing with TraceAir is I do have that scan that comes in every week, so I can fall back on that. A lot of times, our project managers will come back, and I'll be having a conversation with them about what's going on on the site. Rather than just explaining, it's really easy to pull up TraceAir, open it up, look at it, walk through—yep, right there, you can see what's happening. "That's last week, this is this week, you can see where they've done what they've done." And so that's how we really use it to stay in control. Like I said, our project managers tell me where they're at, I look at it and go, "Oh yeah, that's exactly where you're at," or "Well, I don't think you're quite as far along as that." And so we use it that way to stay in control and keep our contractors honest, so to speak, right?

Jordan Wojtowecz (08:04): Mm-hmm. So in terms of the dirt movement and seeing where you're at, right, you could be thinking, "Yeah, I think I'm about 70 to 75% complete," but then when you come into TraceAir and look at your most recent scan, you might run a tool such as the Cut/Fill Balance tool... which I'll show you guys real quick. I know you love that one along with the Cross Section tool. The thing about TraceAir, when Dan has his projects flown, we're also taking into consideration his CAD file—his design grade. So this is really key: photos certainly tell a story, but with our tools, he's actually able to go in and say, "All right, I'm heavy about 35,000 cubic yards." And so does that really line up with other answers in the field or what we were thinking? And then if not, we can take this and have a collaborative, honest conversation and come up with a game plan to potentially get us back on schedule. So this is just a snippet of one of the many tools that Dan currently uses for that aspect.

Dan Galasso (09:12): As you know, it's sometimes hard to nail down the shrink or the swell that you're going to get out of a project, especially on some larger projects. You start getting into a 600,000-yard or million-yard job, and you start looking at what you think that soil is going to do from a shrink/swell standpoint. It can be difficult to figure that out with your engineer and your geotech. The great thing about this is you can monitor that in almost real-time if you're getting scans every week. We've gone back and monitored that, and we provide that information to our consultants, and we can almost redesign the grade on the site on the fly. We try to leave ourselves some flexibility in open space areas where we can either mine some more dirt out or place some dirt to give us a little room in the balance.

Jordan Wojtowecz (10:12): Sure. Yeah, that's a great point, Dan. The shrink and swell factors that you're going to have to be dealing with vary depending on where your site is going to be. So if you know those factors and factor it into your measurements, you can actually put in your percentage factors into TraceAir, and it will give you a little bit more of a fine-tuned answer with those. But I want to move on to our next question here, Joel.

Joel LeBlanc (10:41): So Dan, you talked about running lean in terms of headcount, with fewer people and more work to spread around. How do you see that you could scale responsibly without burning out your team or stretching things too thin to where you're becoming ineffective?

Dan Galasso (11:07): Again, we know that on our larger active sites right now, we get a scan every Monday or Tuesday. So I've scheduled my meetings on Mondays because I know my project manager can be in the office on Monday, and by Tuesday morning he has a scan so he can see what happened on Monday if he needs to. And then he plans his on-site days later in the week—Wednesday, Thursday, or Thursday, Friday. We're able to get eyes on the site a couple times a week that way, where this site I'm talking about is at least 45 minutes from our office. To get up there and back, you burn a couple hours out of your day in just windshield time. So it's really nice to be able to do this, and that way he can be here in the office getting office work done on Monday and Tuesday, and he has a scan coming in so he can see if what was promised by the contractor on Thursday or Friday is getting done. That's just another way to leverage this into fewer people.

Joel LeBlanc (12:25): Great, thanks Dan. Jordan, turn it to you.

Jordan Wojtowecz (12:30): So added costs and delays, Dan—tell us about where those usually sneak in, and then what's helping you keep control and momentum across your projects?

Dan Galasso (12:44): Cost is funny... costs sneak in all over the place, but one of the big places they sneak in is handoffs from one contractor to the next. Typically, we have our graders go in and do a really good job getting everything to grade. We have surveyors checking, we have grade certs that show that everything was to grade. But there's always a gap in timing between when you had your grade cert done versus when your wet utility person started. When you get through grading, the site looks picture perfect, and then your wet utility guys get in there, and it looks like a bombing range again with piles everywhere. Ideally, when your wet utility guys leave, they leave it in a condition where you're at least plus or minus two-tenths—that's what our contract has with them. So we'll get in there, and a lot of times we'll find where we're off by more than plus or minus two-tenths. It's always somebody else's fault: "Oh, it wasn't us! That was like that when we got there." And so it's really easy to go into TraceAir and go, "Okay, you started on this day. Here's the scan from a week before... You can use the cross-section tool and pull it up: we were on grade when you started. So it's your responsibility per your contract to go back and fix that."

That's one place costs sneak in. We just had that recently—I was talking to one of my project managers, and our wet utility contractor said, "It wasn't us, I promise." They have access to TraceAir... That's one of my favorite things about TraceAir: it's really easy for me to share access to a project with my contractor, consultants, municipalities, anybody who has an interest in looking at the progress. In this case, he said, "Go look at it yourself." Here's the date you guys started, go pull the scan, run a cross-section or cut/fill. You can see it was on grade. And that was the end of the argument. They didn't argue any further, got a blade, went back in, and cleaned the grade up. To us, that was probably $20,000 or $30,000 in savings on a decent-sized project.

Jordan Wojtowecz (15:42): Yeah! Let's talk a little bit about the handoffs. Whether it's "We're finished with development, handing it off to the vertical side," or "We're finished with grading, it's time for utilities." You mentioned such a great point about being able to see all the dates, go back in time, and use TraceAir with all your trade partners as that single source of truth. It prevents conversations from dragging out into disputes or finger-pointing. Having documentation here is crucial. When handing off to the vertical side, you have the documentation to show, "Here's how we left it, we're within two-tenths where we need to be with our grades."

And while I'm in here, I want to show the audience the Lot Viewer tool. When talking about the handoff to vertical or verifying things are within tolerance, this is crucial—seeing the breakdown of cut and fill on a per-lot basis as well as spot elevations. You can see if you're at 0.2 ft, which is good for as-built criteria, or if some are half a foot or a foot above/below. This allows clients to do rework before equipment leaves, because bringing equipment back on-site is extremely expensive. We want our customers to be proactive versus reactive.

Now, Joel, looking ahead as the market rebounds, what are you doing now to position your team for speed and strength?

Dan Galasso (18:47): When things pick back up, we're going to have to get started with the same people we have right now. We're not going to be able to ramp up that fast and hire another project manager right away. As we look at new projects, that's where we start looking at using TraceAir outside of development—on the acquisition side as well. We can get out there and do a scan on a site—even if a site has a lot of vegetation, there's the ability to do a LiDAR scan on a site to find where your grade is at. I'm sure everybody has had a project where the engineer designed the site, only checked the grade in a couple spots, and then you get on-site and find out the grade doesn't match up with the perimeter. With one LiDAR scan during entitlements, you get accurate results to provide to your consultant, avoiding missed topo that traditional survey methods might miss or take weeks to do.

Also, tools like Lot Viewer are great when evaluating finished lot deals—knowing if you'll have too much dirt or not enough dirt.

Jordan Wojtowecz (21:38): That's perfect. To clarify for everybody here, regular Gold or Platinum scans are performed once grading has started to compare against design grade. When you're in due diligence or acquisition with heavy vegetation, that's when we use LiDAR technology. LiDAR data plugs right into the software so clients have an interactive deliverable. It ensures you know true original ground topo from the very beginning. TraceAir is built to be a collaborative platform for contractors, engineers, and developers to work together.

For leaders still relying on traditional tools or field updates, what would you tell them about the impact of using TraceAir across projects?

Dan Galasso (24:21): The impact is tremendous. It's in the documentation and being able to see what happened in detail. TraceAir is my favorite tool. You can look back at the history. I'll share a story: our Customer Care Manager had a homeowner claim water was running across their sidewalk the entire time since purchase. Because TraceAir is collaborative, I sent him a link, he spent an hour tracking weekly scans back against weather reports, and proved water only ran across during actual storm events.

We're constantly finding uses across construction, customer care, and land—throughout the entire community lifecycle. Even our National VP of Ops uses our scans to check in on site progress. Beyond that, the panoramic 360-degree view tools are great for executive presentations or marketing without paying for extra photography.

Joel LeBlanc (27:48): What's one piece of advice you would give for operating lean right now?

Dan Galasso (27:59): It's always budget and schedule that keep you up at night. My advice: use every tool you can. Technology's impact is growing every day, and embracing tech tools is the only way to continuously do more with less.

Jordan Wojtowecz (28:40): Perfect. To answer a quick question from the chat: "Is it an added cost to have contractors or trade partners on the platform?" The answer is no—TraceAir provides unlimited access/users to foster collaboration.

To summarize TraceAir: we are a site intelligence software company. Our processing turnaround time for photogrammetry/earthwork scans is 24 hours, and LiDAR processing is about 72 hours (3 business days).

Thank you Dan for sharing your experience, and thank you to our audience. Please reach out to info@traceair.net if you'd like to schedule a 1-on-1 demo!