054 - Building the Future: How AI is Reinventing Pre-Construction with Steve Dell’Orto, CEO, Concntric

Steve Dell'Orto: We have bear hugged AI. I mean, I'm not talking about embracing it. We have bear hugged it. It's a big part of what we're doing. And we challenge each other every day, every week, like, hey, how do we solve this using AI? Instead of putting a system together that's far less efficient or even hiring people, let's be smart about how do we manage that end of the business. Because generally, the smaller you can be, the more agile you're going to be.

Chris Fanchi: That spark of innovation, it's just waiting for the perfect combination of tools and talent to bring it to life. Welcome to Pitch Build Scale. I'm your host, Chris Fanchi, a recovering startup founder, veteran SaaS marketer turned dev tech enthusiast and growth specialist. Each episode we connect with the builders, the visionaries and the problem solvers who are redefining what's possible with today's technology and pioneering the websites, apps and software products of tomorrow. These are the conversations that transform how we build, how we sell, and how we scale technology businesses in a world where the tech evolves by the minute, ready to stay ahead of the curve, this is Pitch Build Scale. Hello and welcome to today's episode. For those of you just joining the podcast, we're Big North Marketing and we specialize in helping dev shops and SaaS companies scale their revenue. So if you want to learn how to take your SaaS or dev business to the next level, make sure to stick around. And if you're interested in a free growth consultation, just drop us the word growth in the dms. We're really excited to have today's guest. Steve Del Orto spent 26 years leading multibillion dollar construction projects from Salesforce Tower to the Golden State Warriors New arena. Before founding Concentric, the industry's first holistic preconstruction platform that unites data, workflows and people into a single source of truth. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Dell'Orto: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Fanchi: So I always like to start with my guest's origin story. What first drew you into technology and then specifically construction tech?

Steve Dell'Orto: Well, uh, you know, I was a builder for 26 years building the projects. You rattled off smaller projects. It wasn't just about the big projects, so a, uh, wide array. And I just found that the, one of the big fundamental problems common to all was the time and energy it took to do the planning phase of the project and how underserved it was, uh, how analog it, you know, remains to be for the most part, for the vast majority of the industry. And I just got to a Point where I couldn't, I could not imagine continuing to do it that same way for the remainder of my career or whatever, 20 years. And rather than just complain about it for 20 years, I decided to go do something about it. And always been very entrepreneurial and figured out I could figure out how to build a company that builds software in the same way that I was building and growing a construction, uh, company that built buildings. And so I set out to do just that.

Chris Fanchi: So was technology always something you had an interest in, or was it just where it got to the point where you were so fed up with dealing with what you already had in place that you just had to figure it out on the tech side?

Steve Dell'Orto: No, I think everybody would laugh that knows me if I were to try to say that I was like so focused on technology. Uh, always have been very systems minded. I really hate having to repeat and do the same thing over and over and over. And so if I could figure out how to do it once and that point forward, it's rather automatic. Um, I have always been geared that way. But I found technology to be the solution that was needed for the pain that I had identified in this, um, you know, the project delivery, you know, the delivery of these construction projects, you know, it was all about data. And to get good data, you know, I knew it had to be properly structured and contextualized. I knew that much. And then how do you do that in a very dependable way? You know, I could see all the patterns after 26 years across all these projects, the 30 to 40 different things that people are doing to plan a job, some really big and complicated and some are just really small, maybe nothing more than a checklist and it's rudimentary form. But if you could pull all that together, because they were all very interrelated. Doing something over here wasn't like mutually exclusive to the thing that you're doing over there. So by tying it all together, I just knew first it would take technology to do that. And with the output being the data, there was enormous potential to solve this problem in a big, big way.

Chris Fanchi: So talk a little bit more about that transition and going from construction management into the tech side of things. What was the when, when did that happen? What was the technology like at the time? And how rough was that transition?

Steve Dell'Orto: You know, when I set out to do this, somebody told me that, hey, building a company that builds software is not too dissimilar to what you do when you have to, um, set out the vision, at least for how a project can Be, you know, needs to be planned, how it needs to be built and how do you hire and build the right teams to go execute on that plan. And so, um, that was rather comforting. Um, it was a good friend of mine who is not in construction but is very, very versed in the whole startup and technology ecosystem. And so he was very, he was right. You know, he was like, you didn't know how to do the structural engineering for the Salesforce Tower any more than, you know, how to write code. We, we see the final result. So it, it really wasn't daunting and I think what motivated me so much to do it was just how acute the pain is. And this is not just one widget or solved with one point solution. This is literally developing what is otherwise, uh, an operating system that services the entire pre construction process and not just for one stakeholder, but there's three principal stakeholders in this at an entity level involved in planning a job and bringing it to life. And I wanted to solve something that was benefiting all of them and bringing them together. So we had collaboration and convergence rather than, you know, uh, something that causes people to collaborate or cooperate less. You know, construction is very much a team sport and you know, if you approach it the right way, the team will accomplish amazing things. And if you don't really foster a team effort, those are the projects that you read about in the papers that have terrible consequences. And so it was important for me to not just solve something with software and just have it count things. It really needed to bring people together and make this process way more predictable for everybody because they have so much at stake. And in the analog state, we were not even scratching the surface of what needs to be done in order to make these projects successful. And you're talking about a $21 trillion global industry. Uh, you know, there's a lot of money at stake and there's a lot of consequence of uh, what doesn't get built and how that affects society and just people's everyday lives?

Chris Fanchi: Yeah, absolutely. Was there a specific project or moment when you decided that you were going to leave successful career in construction management and take this on? Because it was just too much of an opportunity or too much of a pain in the butt for you to let it slide?

Steve Dell'Orto: No, I think this, no, I think it was probably just the number of flights and travel I was doing. Just, you know, keeping up with the $2 billion organization we created on the west coast. And just seeing every one of those trips more and more was becoming about solving problems or Rushing to get with those critical stakeholders at the most senior levels and triage a situation it wasn't, you know, those are all rather negative experiences. And you just go, hang on, there's something amiss here. This is, you know, you have an occasional brush fire here and there, but you know, this is starting to grow into just like all consuming wildfire status. Not for us and our company specifically at the time, but you could just read about it and see it in the industry. And everybody had just gotten so focused on how to optimize the outcomes while you're in construction, trying to solve things during the construction phase. And they're completely missing the point that the very problems they're all trying to solve actually manifested themselves in the planning phase. From the standpoint of maybe we didn't go deep enough to plan the work, maybe we just didn't have the right information at our fingertips. We can't even learn from our past projects because that data is just not in a state or in any sort of system that it could generate something that could guide me on today's project. Why can't we leverage the past to inform the present and even go further and forecast the future? And so I got excited about that. And this is going, you know, back five or six years. I mean, look at where AI is today. And back then it was an abbreviation and there was some, you know, some concepts. Everybody was really talking more about machine learning. And so the idea of having the structured data, digitized, workflows that are carefully built and complementary to one another and all that interactiveness, you can pull all that together, there's going to be some massive yield coming out of this in terms of people, you know, saving people's time, you know, making things more fail safe from a risk perspective or, you know, financial loss perspective or you name it, it only gets better. And so, you know, I just really set out to go solve it with all of those things in mind.

Chris Fanchi: So paint us a picture of what concentric looks like today. How long have you been running in the current form that you're in? What's your team size? Who are, who are you serving most actively?

Steve Dell'Orto: So in no particular order, we have 30, uh, people in our company. An amazing team. I mean, like I said, construction, building buildings is a team sport. Uh, same holds true for software and building a successful company. So we've got an amazing team of the very best and brightest and we've been at it for roughly three years. Uh, the first year and a half really was in stealth because I had some Working prototypes that I had had gotten some, you know, early beta customer input on. But we really, before we did anything with it, we really needed to introduce it to the market when it was a commercial, you know, quality platform, security, permission controls, more than just kind of an mvp. Uh, uh, but you know, we, we rolled out successfully an entire module and a half which solved two or three of the 40 workflows. But it was so well received because people were able to see instantly this is not a point solution, you know, addressing like a single widget. This is more than that. And they could appreciate the interactions and how complimentary doing something over here yielded better outcomes and results from the other element of this. And they could start to see where we were going with this vision for a platform and operating system. Um, you know, what it looks like today in three years. People compliment us all the time because they have gotten in early, maybe on a couple of other software and maybe the construction phase. Not much exists in precon, which is unfortunate. It's a great opportunity for us, but it's unfortunate that that's the state of our industry. But their experiences juxtaposed against the speed at which we're moving. I mean they've even put numbers on it. People that are in the know, they're like, you guys are producing four or five times faster than what we see any other, you know, software company produce. At least in this broader construction tech space. I attribute that to the fact that we have that domain expertise internally. And while we never come to a customer and say, hey, the cake is fully baked, I hope you like it, they're very involved in the process. But we don't have to sit there and think about and learn what are the ingredients to make this cake. We, we know them, you know, after almost 30 years practicing this, you know, it. But involving the customer to make it better or get different angles and perception, uh, perspectives on how it could work, how it should work, has been instrumental. So our customers are huge partners with us in this process and that just, you know, just makes the best of the best and that's what we represent.

Chris Fanchi: So what do your customers look like? What size are the organizations that you're working with?

Steve Dell'Orto: The pre construction process that you go through to design a project, budget a project. I mean, let's face it, you can't build a building, you can't uh, build a highway, you can't do any of the physical construction without a design and some form of a budget. And you can't do it with the people that are ultimately the Builders, the contractors, so that all that input schedule and everything, every project has one of those. So pre construction is very universal. It is the foundation upon which everything is built. Now from a size and scale perspective, it is also very common, you know, whether it's a $1 million project that a, uh, $50 million a year company is building or a billion dollar project that, you know, like I was building, uh, as part of a multi billion dollar organization, the precon process is generally the same M. What we've built is something that intentionally is designed to serve the small size customer, you know, at that scale in the same way, with the same value and the same ease of use as, you know, the larger companies and larger projects, you know, need and require. And we've been very successful in that we have fairly numbers of customers in each of those three categories. Small, medium, large. We call them T shirt sizes. So those T shirt sizes, we have equal representation and they're getting tremendous value out of it. And their perspectives, uh, all matter and carry a lot of weight and influence with what we.

Chris Fanchi: So how have you seen adoption when you're bringing technology, pretty advanced technology into an industry that's, that's not particularly technologically advanced in that regard? Are you seeing it be embraced right out of the gate? Are you seeing pushback? Are you seeing it be embraced at the beginning of an engagement, but then the rollout takes a lot longer because of the tech side?

Steve Dell'Orto: Yeah, I mean from a technology perspective, while the industry hasn't generated and built and maybe widely adopted, uh, SaaS software, I mean, you're talking about extremely like savvy, technologically savvy people. They're absolute pros with Excel. So we're not talking about graduating people from calculators, pen and paper here. We're talking about some very capable, smart people. So what you have to give them is something that doesn't require them to make significant change from the way they've been doing things, but to give them a much more powerful tool is again both familiar but additive in that without adding time. In fact, one of our slogans is make less work, not more. How do we help them eliminate the manual redundant entry and the stuff that they know is an absolute waste of their time? Automate that stuff and free them up to do the higher power stuff and give them the tools that can do that. And so the key for the adoption, it's not easy, but it's not because they have to be taught or trained. And that's hard because they're making this big leap onto our Platform or any form of technology. It's simply, it's gone a lot easier for us because our UX UI design intentionally has been designed to keep it simple, don't overcomplicate things and you know, work really simple as hard. So work at that because you got to take the existing workflow and not be so wildly different. But eliminate the steps like every click or whatever. Don't overdo it, just keep it simple and automate as much as you can so they're getting the same output or better. And we're not perfect. And I, uh, will always strive to do better and better and better, but we're really damn good. And we have gotten a lot of compliments with how intuitive our platform is, the design, how clean and uncluttered and simple to use it is. And that helps adoption because the training hill to climb is not that hard. Um, and so yeah, that's something we work at every, every day. But we're really focused on having our customers that time to value ratio find immediate value right out of the gate with as little effort as possible. And for the most part I think everybody does. Mm.

Chris Fanchi: So what role is AI playing in the company? Uh, both within your actual software, but also within your organization?

Steve Dell'Orto: You know, we have like bear hugged AI. I mean, I'm not talking about embracing it, we have bear hugged it. It's a big part of what we're doing and we, I challenge, you know, we challenge each other every day, every week. Like, hey, but how do we solve this using AI instead of putting a system together that's a little bit, um, far less efficient or even hiring people? You know, this is, you know, let's be smart about how do we manage that end of the business because generally the smaller you can be, the more agile you're going to be in the agility for what we've done and the speed to deliver is, you know, key to our success. So we've embraced AI from that standpoint. Um, AI, you know, we're rolling out in the next week or two, so this is like a sneak preview. But our entire agentic AI layer of our platform is about to roll out. Because I know that what is taking companies, a 10 person squad to do the volume of work that they have in pre con, they can now get pretty good at almost or pretty close to doing it with five people because we're automating stuff just through good smart workflows and eliminating the redundant entry. But with Amplify, I think in the next 18 to 24 months they might be able to do it with one or two people. So that's a game changer because our industry doesn't have the people in quantity or experience to handle the work that they have today. The demand for all things built is increasing as population increases and as we have to replace trillions of dollars of infrastructure. It's a massive problem because we're losing, we will have lost 40% of our workforce by the end of this decade. And that's a net, that's a net figure because we're not bringing them in at the rate that they're retiring or leaving the industry. So everybody's in search for a force multiplier. So our agentic solution is just that. And it's built on top of these very carefully built proprietary workflows that are generating that very structured bespoke data for pre con in our industry. And then you got an agentic solution that can do it within a, uh, customer's tenancy and be able to protect that and preserve that as their important proprietary information. You know, it's a winner.

Chris Fanchi: So AI replacing human jobs is obviously a hot topic these days. You're talking about AI being able to do a lot of the jobs that these human workers are currently doing. Do you see it within the, this industry as really a necessity? And it sounds like that's kind of how you see it, is that they, they need that because there's this shortage of, um, of human capital. Is, is that why you look at it?

Steve Dell'Orto: We're not displacing people by any stretch, you know, and AI, I think I can speak for our industry. When you have, like, when you have potentially millions of people in terms of a shortfall of the labor you need, what else are you going to do? And so if AI can help you get more out of the talent that you have without burning them out and grinding them into dust, you know, why wouldn't you use it? So the notion that AI is going to actually replace and take jobs in construction is really ludicrous. This is really going to help you as a force multiplier. Our AI agent is called Amplify. It's there to amplify the value, the horsepower, the capability and the capacity of the human by freeing them up from doing all of, you know, the 80% of the stuff that they're doing that is just busy work.

Chris Fanchi: So what is, what part of your product are your users most excited to see? Is it the, uh, is it the cost certainty or is it getting a deeper look into where the machinations of their pre Construction processes.

Steve Dell'Orto: I mean, in terms of what they like, every customer's got a different focus. And it also is like at what point in time they are in a given project, how they react with the workflow within our platform. But what is so cool is once they get into it, and again, they've been looking at Excel spreadsheets and just the limitations that has. And they see what's possible with significantly less effort. But with output and the way of communicating visually, I mean, it's a game changer. And they're measuring that in different ways. One, they already know that we're massively reducing the people hours it takes to get their various tasks done. But we have customers who are also measuring, they're using our platform as part of their value proposition to the clients when they're trying to win work. How do they represent themselves as being providing, uh, a certainty of outcome better than the other competitors. How is the experience different? And they're showcasing, you know, their service around concentric and they're winning projects, improving their win rate by 20 to 30% already after just using it for a year. So there's different things that they are, uh, recognizing in terms of the value and the excitement that they get. And they also see the potential, you know, once they're into it, they recognize, hey, this is being developed and built by builders that have walked in my shoes. They get it and it's very apparent. And then their thinking cap goes on. Oh, well, now that I see what's possible, can we make it do this or could you build that? Or I've got these other pain points over here. Is that on your roadmap? And we were like, it's all on the roadmap. Anything that falls in this jurisdiction of Pre Con is 100% on the roadmap. Um, documented. It's there because 30 years in the business, you know, what are all the facets, you know, how they all come together, plot it out and start tackling it, you know, one day at a time.

Chris Fanchi: That's what is AI. Does AI have a role in your software development process?

Steve Dell'Orto: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, when you can. So we're very customer centric. So sitting down and engaging with the customer during that development process, you know, what used to be, um, hey, let's have a meeting. We've got a couple of wireframes that we took two days to develop. And we want your reaction to this and move things around. We can do that. And you know, there's two or three different software that we use to, to generate within Minutes, you know, the UI from a prototype perspective say, well, what about this good idea? How about that? You know, it's better than, oh, we'll schedule a meeting next week and we'll show you the next iteration. So we can move even faster than what we already do to get to a place where the customer goes, yes, that's amazing. That's how it could and should be solved. And then they can see it and visualize it and then you can, with code, you can, at a proof of concept level, turn something around that now kind of works. Is that going to be your production code? We're getting there, but we are taking weeks and months out of process, or even just days and delivering faster and ideating, uh, with our customers just in a much more rapid fashion for them. That's good because we don't want to take all their time. We don't want to be a burden. They love the process because they get involved and they have ideas and experiences. They've just never been able to do anything with it. So I like to spend that time. But these people are already overworked. I mean, they're operating at 140% capacity and we're trying to solve that. We're not trying to compound it by having to interview them. How do you do? I mean, that's what outsiders have to do into our industry. They don't realize that to build anybody, not without the level of experience we have coming from the outside, because they've heard a construction, the trillion, uh, dollar industry and we heard there's problems. We're just going to write a bunch of code and solve their problems. You know, they got to sit there and take in a lot of time from the customer to even learn Construction 101, uh, to then turn around and build a product that at best is going to be mediocre because they just don't have the background.

Chris Fanchi: And that's really where you have your moat, right? Because the speed of software development, it makes it very difficult for the technology itself to prevent competitors from coming in and taking market share. But if you have that knowledge and that expertise, that's where you can really build up your strength, right?

Steve Dell'Orto: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Fanchi: So looking ahead, say 12 months from now, what is a, uh, big win that you're chasing? What does the product look like? What kind of market share are you hoping to achieve?

Steve Dell'Orto: I wish I had an answer to that question because things, if the last 12 or 18 months have demonstrated anything to us, it's just things are changing at such a rapid pace. More m than they ever have. But being the first AI platform for pre construction, I mean, it's a game changer. We're the first to do it, we're the only people doing it. And so in the next 12 months, I'm just excited to see how everybody sees, you know, the unlock. How does it unlock capacity and bandwidth to do more? How does it unlock a new way of thinking or at least measuring success or anticipating issues when it, when you're thinking about the planning, it's just that aha, uh, uh, moment that people are already having that are using it and you know, in, in the specific customer case, but more broadly speaking, as more and more people get into it, um, it's going to be, it's going to be pretty amazing.

Chris Fanchi: So what would you say is the single biggest bottleneck that's, that's holding you back right now or slowing you down,

Steve Dell'Orto: you know, as fast as we want to move? You know, I'm impatient. I think any contractor has a sense of urgency that is part of their DNA that makes them successful in the building business. That's never going to get kind of taken out of me. So, um, I'm conditioned to just set out a date, work the plan, hit the date or beat it and get on to the next one and the next one after that. So that just breeds a level of impatience. The bottleneck is I would love to do everything and build Rome in a day, but, uh, you know, you have resource constraints. You know, our team is only so big, you've got to pace this. But therein also is something that we're really good at with the domain expertise that we have, not just in the construction space, but in the B2B SaaS and AI spaces. We have a very seasoned team that, you know, uh, have the experience to know how to prioritize and then from a domain expertise, knowing the critical adjacencies of building and addressing this facet of precon sequentially because it relates and will inform and make this other facet better and stronger. So we can constantly. We're always looking for the one plus one equals three kind of equation in the way we're stitching this together. It's not as simple as you just start with this and you go in a linear fashion because pre construction is very nonlinear. Uh, you know, all these facets, you're doing it in different times throughout the life of a project and iterating and repeating and it's not like I do this, then I do this, then I do this and I'm done. And so we're very mindful of that. Because if you stitch it together the right way, that's the way the experience works, that's the way the user's going to use it, and that's the context of the data that you need to be developing and building within that structured data. And that's where anybody from the outside will completely miss and never get that. That just takes years or decades of experience to kind of understand that chessboard.

Chris Fanchi: So it sounds like your customer relationships are very hands on right now. Is that something that you envision remaining the case indefinitely, or is it the goal eventually to move to the point where onboarding or customer management comes more automated and just becomes easier to bring more clients on faster?

Steve Dell'Orto: You know, that's a good question. You know, the relationships that we have are incredibly important to us. I don't see intentionally trying to get away from that. Um, you know, if our customers, you know, get to a point where their proficiency using every aspect of our platform is such that they don't need to be talking to us as frequently and that's their choice, great. You know, we're here to meet the customer where they are. But with a platform that we continuously enrich with enhanced features and enhancements to those enhancements or brand new modules, you know, there's constantly introducing them to new things. I mean, we're rolling, we're rolling out new stuff almost daily, but certainly on a two week cycle. And so we're constantly wanting to make sure that our customers are aware of it if they need any help understanding it. But again, you know, the secret to our success has been the ui, the UX UI design being so, I mean, we strive to be like, you know, the iPhone, you know, part of the story. I witnessed it firsthand with my oldest child, you know, when the iPad came out. I mean, at 18 months old, she was just swiping and getting and finding the picture she wanted to look at. Uh, we want to design our platform to be as close to that as we can get. So we don't want to be a burden to have to train people and take their time. But the interactions that we have with our customers are more about just exploring what we've just rolled out so they're aware. And also the feedback sessions that we get of the new ideas. So we never want to abandon that.

Chris Fanchi: But yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, that makes sense. So I'll let you out of here on this one. So hypothetically, if you had a magic wand and could fix one thing or change one thing in the Business right now that's either holding you back or slowing you down.

Steve Dell'Orto: What would that one thing be besides, like, unlimited resources? Um, you know, it's. Well, you know what it is? It's we have this wonderful platform, we've got a wonderful team, we have a wonderful story, and we're on such an important mission in a massive industry. And we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions globally, of companies that could and should be using our platform. So how do we connect all of that and how do we connect us to all of that? How do we bring that together? That, to me, is like the bottleneck. The constraint is just how do we meet all of these companies, how do we educate them, and how do they become aware of us? Um, if I could solve that, that would be awesome because, you know, again, uh, I believe in our team, I believe in our product as a platform. I believe in our innovation and all the things that we're doing, leading the way in AI. I believe in our industry. I wouldn't have left my executive post building projects to go and do this if I didn't feel like it was for a bigger, higher purpose, solving things at an industry level. Um, but the thing to solve is how do we get through, cut through this gap, because for every day that goes by, people continue to toil with this inefficiency and ineffective way of communicating and doing things on something like our platform is available. So how do we bring. How do we bring our world and their world together? Yeah, if you have a wand for that, Chris,

Chris Fanchi: we'll talk. So, Steve, this was fantastic. Where can our listeners follow your work and learn more about Concentric?

Steve Dell'Orto: You go to our website. Um, and the spelling is C-O-N C-N-T-R-I C.com. you can look me up on LinkedIn. I love to connect with everybody. So, Steve Delorto, um, and, uh, yeah, just reach out to us. Any one of our team will walk you through what we're all about, and we'd love to have the opportunity to connect.

Chris Fanchi: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you to everyone for listening today. Please be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and as always, keep pitching, keep building, and keep scaling.

Steve Dell'Orto: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Fanchi: Thanks for listening to this episode of Pitch Build Scale. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast provider so you never miss an episode, and we'll see you next time.