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I used to build houses. I was pretty good at it, believe it or not. My formative years in the military were squeezed in between years of building, managing and struggling in the construction industry. It’s a hard life, but the pay can be great and there is something to be said about building a physical thing that will be around for a long time. Craftsmanship is a unique trait, and the trades are where some of the most amazing things get built. Perhaps it may be common knowledge that the trades are notoriously averse to the tides of technology, perhaps not. I would argue that for being such a large sector of small businesses, there is a problem with the adoption of technology. According to the Small Business Administration, greater that 10% of all small to medium sized businesses are in the construction sector. Even more astounding is that about 99.9% of all construction companies are considered small to medium sized businesses. So, being conservative with our math, if about 45% of SMBs make up the GDP of the United States, we can assume about 4-5% of GDP comes from this uniquely small construction sector. This is not trivial. ...

Your BIM Models Are a Ticking Time Bomb I was talking with a small engineering firm a while back about a project that went sideways. It wasn’t a big, dramatic failure. It was subtle. A set of plans sent to a fabricator had a few critical dimensions that were off by just enough to cause a massive headache on-site. The change wasn’t caught in the shop drawings, and the result was thousands of dollars in rework and a client who was, to put it mildly, not thrilled. ...

Who Has the Keys to Your Kingdom? An employee quits on a Friday. On Monday, you find out your main client list has been deleted from the company Dropbox. Who did it? You have no idea, because five different people all use the same admin@ login. This isn’t a hypothetical. For small businesses, this kind of chaos is frighteningly common. We often operate on trust, giving everyone the keys to everything because it’s “easier.” This isn’t just lazy; it’s a massive, self-inflicted wound waiting to happen. ...

About a year ago I had a friend call me with a minor concern. They worked for a reputable general contractor that worked with some very high-end clients. Incredibly wealthy is what that means. They were wondering how an email could appear to have come from one of the managers of the company requesting payment from a client. This piqued my interest. Honestly I had a hard time wrapping my head around the circumstances, as the timeline was not explained well. I will attempt to do a better job explaining it below: ...