This is the lane we’re going to play in. We’re going to go test the market here and be willing to be wrong. But to say like, hey, we’re going to give this a shot for a couple of months and see if it moves the needle. There’s never a perfect answer. You don’t ever have the right data until you’re a very, very mature company. And even then, you should always be iterating. You should always be changing the way that you go after and try to find your customers.
What is up everyone? And thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Bricks and Bytes podcast, your go-to for all things construction and property technology.

In today’s episode, we speak with Nick Decker of Ignite. Nick started his career in construction as an estimator and has since worked his way through sales and marketing roles at various construction start-ups and established companies. In Nick’s episode, we dive deep into go-to-market strategies in construction tech, including getting the channels and messaging right, the key KPIs and metrics to track, and how construction tech company strategy may develop through maturity. Please check us out on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcast from. And please leave us a review. This helps us get more amazing guests to give you guys the best and most informative content on technology in the built world. Shout out to our sponsor, Beta. If you want to connect with some of the biggest players in the construction tech world, including tier one building contractors, construction tech companies, investors and advisors, check them out by visiting www.the-beter.com. You are listening to Bricks and Bytes podcast, where we take you on a journey in construction, technology, and business. 

All right, let’s get this episode started. So Nick, your background is heavily focused on construction. So you went from being an estimator and a typical construction or traditional construction role, should I say, to more of a marketing and sales focused role. So more business development. Can you tell us some of the key lessons you’ve learned from working in a number of companies at a high level? 

Transitioning industries and frankly being the new guy in the room, there are a couple of pieces of general best practices that I’ve learned. And then some pieces around construction, I suppose. You know, when you jump into a new industry, don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions. You’re not going to be the smartest person in the room. People love helping. So lean on your colleagues, lean on people who have experience and domain expertise. And so asking dumb questions seems like a simple thing, but people oftentimes can be afraid of sounding silly, particularly when they’re new in an industry or new in a job. But I definitely lean into that. That’s a big principle of mine. And then the other piece that… the dumbest question. Oh, that’s it. I’m only kidding. You can carry on. One of the big ones, I think, is people use acronyms all the time. 

And you’ll be sitting in a meeting, they’ll be like, what does ARR stand for? And you’re sitting there, kind of back in your brain, like, you know, wait a second. Eventually, that becomes second nature. You use the shorthand of acronyms and stuff like that, like everyone else. But the first time you’re sitting there, you’re like, hold on, I’m going to stop the meeting to ask, you know, what was that acronym that everyone else knows about? Yeah. So I think that’s a pretty common thing that you don’t think about when you’ve been in an industry for a long time. 

The other thing I would say is to take notes as you go. I tend to use a principle of fresh eyes. Everyone who’s new to a team, I ask them to take notes during your first week, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days of, “Hey, what doesn’t make sense at this phase of your time here? Why ask the ‘why do we do it this way?'” You kind of get in a groove when you’ve been with the company for six months, a year, three years, ten years, and you never really get the chance to have the fresh eyes of like, “Hey, we’ve just kind of always done it this way. Why do we do this?” And so I like being that new guy in certain instances and saying, “Hey, this might be a silly question, but why do we market ourselves in this way? Why do we position ourselves in this format?” Everyone that’s new to the team should have the opportunity to ask those questions and bring those things up as they onboard. And you’d be amazed at the response of like, “Oh, I’ve never thought about that. We’ve always done it that way and it’s always been natural.” This shows a high-level strategic thinking that you probably have because not everyone is asking these questions. 

But so, in terms of moving from engineer estimator, why did you do that? What made you do that? What was that? I love working in construction. I’m a fifth-generation construction. It’s in my blood. I grew up with a hard hat and steel toe boots on. And so, being that that’s always been the case. “Hey, you know, I came out of school and I went straight into construction and I told people I went to school to push dirt. Like that’s kind of what civil engineering is.” And I’ve always loved that. So you are a civil engineer or like a quantity surveyor? Both, I guess. Uh, so I started out in quantity survey specific to, but my degree, if you will, is civil engineering. Okay. But it’s, I found that I could put in 60 or 80 hours a week on my work and make it the best it could be, but it only could be amplified by my bandwidth and my domain that I worked on in a project. Whereas utilising technology and implementing a broader solution is something that amplifies my leverage, if you will, or my ability to scale myself to the rest of the team. If I can implement one solution to a team of 20 people, 100 people, and they all start saving 15 minutes, an hour a week, those types of things, all of a sudden my job is scalable. And technology allows me to do that. And that’s what I fell in love with early on in my career is like I’d consider myself an Excel junkie. All these macros and things in Excel, and that’s how it started. 

And now it’s much deeper than that, but that’s kind of the passion of like, I want to make my job easier, but I also want to make my team’s job easier, make them more productive and allow them to do what they want to do out in the field and get rid of the day-to-day, I run reports and those types of things. So, basically, the automation. Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. Nice. Cool. So, moving on swiftly, we had a good chat about go-to-market strategy for technology companies in general, but we’d like to hone in, obviously, on construction more, given that that’s the nature of our podcast. So, how would a startup go about determining their go-to-market strategy? 

Not everyone understands truly what go-to-market is or it can kind of be under a couple of different umbrellas. But at a high level, what I see go-to-market as, is the awkward phase between we’ve built a product and we’ve sold a product. And that sounds kind of silly. But like, it’s, you know, you have this hypothesis and you go build a solution that you think solves a very real problem. But you don’t really understand how to best get that solution in front of the right people at the right moment in time. And that moment in time piece is, I think, often overlooked because if you don’t provide a solution, say I’m renovating my house, for example, if I don’t find the app or the solution to go find contractors or whatever that solution may be, at that moment in time that I’m looking for it, then I’m never going to use it and it will just pass me by and that customer is now gone. There’s really only kind of a single moment at which this is the critical, urgent problem that they need to solve. You need to catch them at that exact moment in time. 

And so there are kind of a couple of different dimensions that go into that, but at a high level, you need to understand where do those people exist? Where do they look for information? Where are they searching for solutions? What do they call it? Because oftentimes, a particular solution can have four or five different names. It’s document management. It’s a good fit. I know it comes up quite a bit. Exactly. The messaging piece is tough to really kind of find the search terms or what have you. But then you also need to understand who the buyer is and where the value is. And I think those aren’t always necessarily the same thing. And I’ll give you an example. 

So the construction world is very centric focused on projects. We’re unique in that space where every other industry is kind of a going concern. They don’t really change project to project, if you will. So you need to identify, am I providing value to just this individual project, or am I providing value to the entire company and their entire portfolio of projects that they work under? I think that’s a tough distinction as well. You want every startup wants to sell into the entire company, but you may not be ready for enterprise-level deals. You may not be ready to scale across 100 projects. Go bite off one project. Go sell to one project manager, operations, if you will. 

And so you really kind of need to know where your niche is. And you need to have some conviction to say, like, this is the lane we’re going to play in. We’re going to go test the market here and be willing to be wrong. To say, like, hey, we’re going to give this a shot for a couple of months and see if it moves the needle. There’s never a perfect answer. You don’t ever have the right data until you’re a very, very mature company. And even then, you should be iterating. You should always be changing the way you go after and try and find your customers. So very much a lot of testing, hypothesis creation, testing the hypothesis and then iterating and going through that loop as much as you can. 

Yeah, that testing process and formalising hypotheses to say like, this is what we think, let’s test it for a defined time period, whether one month, three months, however long, and then be willing to change that. The issue is that a particularly early-stage startup has limited resources to one, facilitate those test cycles and two, to test multiple things at once. So you really do have to kind of laser focus, pick your battles. And with that, it’s never going to be perfect, right? And so that’s, I think, something that you have to kind of understand what you’re trying to solve. And I think this goes also to people that understand the industry and have lived it might have a little bit more insights than people who are outside the industry trying to solve something. I think that’s another big thing in construction tech right now is: do you really understand the user? Have you sat in that seat before? 

That’s what I wanted to ask. So who is doing the work? Is it product managers, product engineers, or is it more like a founder CEO who probably has very good inside knowledge of the problem that they are solving? What are your thoughts? 

Yeah, so I think it has to come from early on, it has to come from the founder. They have to have a conviction to say, this is the problem I’m solving. This is really the lane that we’re going to work in, some people call it a beachhead, if you will, as a crossover mechanism. And I think that is, it can get really noisy if you start listening to your early customers or your prospects, and they give you feedback and you can go a million different ways, it gets really distracting. And so having that founder vision to say, like, no, let’s put the blinders on, let’s go after this. I really, I really truly believe in the direction that we need to head. And that customer noise can, you can always come back to it at a later date when the really cool feature that they were asking for, that may do something for that one particular power user, put it on the shelf, you know, revisit it every three months, every six months and say like, does this make sense at this moment in time, but really kind of keep that laser focus. 

And that again, that comes from the founder. So it sounds like the key question is at what point they should hand it over to professional people. Yeah. Someone with a degree or a certificate. Exactly. That’s a tough problem to solve. The other thing I would say is once you get to that phase, oftentimes it has to be data-driven. There’s this principle in every company that you have to back up a strategic decision with data. I’m a big proponent of like, if your gut is saying, we need to go forward and do this and the data doesn’t really support it, in our marketing or what have you. Trust your instincts. Not everyone can say that. Not every project manager or product manager can say, I want to trust my instincts and I’m going to bank the entire company on this direction. But I think if a founder says that, it definitely goes a lot further. 

I think there’s certainly a handover period at Series A or what have you to take a step back and you bring in the professionals. But that doesn’t happen overnight. And the more the owner or the founder can have their fingers in the actual activity of designing the product and figuring out what problem they’re going to solve, the better off you’re going to be. Now, that’s not universal. You do need a founder or a visionary that understands who they’re solving for. And that’s where, again, I’m a little biased here, coming from industry, but the founding stories of people who have created and scaled construction technologies to date have typically been from industry. I think it’s a really powerful metric, if you will. 

When you think about that, is it not always the case? Because I was thinking about it the other way. Are there any examples of people who went into other industries and kind of disrupted them? Obviously, Elon Musk, but we all know that, right? That’s what Nick was going to say. So he kind of just ruined the answer. I think there’s always going to be the counter-example. But I would say it’s so easy for someone outside the industry to say, well, construction’s a mess. I’m going to start and tear it down from the top down. And you see examples like Katerra. I don’t know if you guys are familiar, but it was a prefab construction company that just wanted to throw a bunch of money at the industry to redo all of construction. But the premise isn’t wrong. It’s the fact that there are so many moving pieces that you need to intimately understand. And if you make the assumptions that like, oh, I can solve those down the road, that may not actually be true. And there’s so much inertia and there are so many moving pieces in construction that it’s really tough to translate that to someone who may not necessarily have lived and breathed the intricacies of construction. 

Yeah, it’s very tough. We’ve actually had a couple of people on recently who are not from the construction industry but have come from other backgrounds, and they are involved in or around well-rounded people because they tend to have like, if you look at typical startup programmes like Entrepreneur First and things like that, they come from things like that. 

So these are just people who are super skilled and can go into any industry and think, “Right, I’m going to solve a big problem in there,” because speaking to them, they really understand their product and how it translates to the industry as well, which is like, “Wow, I’ve been in the industry for X amount of time and I don’t think I knew that.” It’s like coming in and removing all assumptions, right? Like, you know, I’m the new guy in the room, ask why, take notes as your thinking evolves, as you live in the room more often, this will become second nature. And so, having fresh eyes is awesome. I’m very much a proponent of removing the assumptions, I guess, is the way to boil it down. 

Sure. I just wanted to ask a bit more about the go-to-market strategy and how one would choose a channel to focus on. Is this like a traditional marketing campaign where you’re like, “We’re going to really focus on LinkedIn or something else?” Obviously, B2B so LinkedIn is always hot, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, Nick. 

Yeah. I mean, it certainly depends. B2B, LinkedIn is great. If you’re consumer-based, the App Store is a really good channel. You need to put your best foot forward there. Product Hunt is always interesting in a general sense for SaaS businesses. There’s also the aspect of construction being a handshake business. You kind of need to get in front of people physically. Cool events are great. It’s easy to get buried at a physical event like an association or a Digital Construction Week, for example, but that’s really powerful. When you can stand in front of someone and share that human side of it, you’re more likely to land, although it’s less scalable and all those things. So you really have to balance that. 

I would say, in general, I’m a big proponent of in-person and meeting people where they’re at, particularly as there’s a hunger for that right now post-COVID to really make the human connection and trust your vendors, trust who you’re buying your solutions from. And so, I think that if I were to give pointers right now, definitely double down or look at the event landscape as a channel that you may have put on the back burner in the last few years. Makes sense. Cool. Thanks. 

You can also get into their brains if they subscribe to the Bricks and Bytes podcast. I’ve heard of this really interesting podcast that I think you should check out. It’s called Bricks and Bytes. Exactly. It’s a great channel. Okay. Let’s move on to the Ignite. 

So tell us about Egnyte. What do you guys do and what do you want to solve in construction? Egnyte is a document management solution. It’s a file server that they happened to put in the cloud 15 years ago when the company was founded, during the really early days of the internet when internet speeds weren’t that great. Downloading a PDF actually took a while. But at that point in time, no one had really looked at it. There were a couple of solutions that were coming from a consumer standpoint, like Box or Dropbox, but no one had really looked at an enterprise-grade file server that functions just like it used to, but without the need for a VPN or this kind of tech stack of having servers in the closet down the hall. That’s where Egnyte got started. 

What they kind of fell into, frankly, was construction because they were solving a unique problem around getting files out on a job site. So at the time and even today, on remote job sites, getting access to your files is critical, but if you’re reliant on a mobile phone connection, a hotspot or what have you, to download your BIM files or upload your laser scans, those types of things. And so, Egnyte found a solution a while back around caching the files and a hybrid architecture, basically having a tiny little file server on a job site trailer. And that snowballed into construction being far and away the largest industry for Egnyte. It’s fantastic and it’s been a really fun run. 

But now, Egnyte is heavily focused on productising and solving unique problems for the construction industry. We feel that we’re really the only document solution or cloud provider that has a unique value proposition for construction, with a roadmap and product that’s dedicated to the unique file types and unique workflows at an end-user level for construction and not just selling into IT, if you will, like Dropbox, Google and other things. 

Yeah, I mean, we’ve hired a whole bunch of people, myself included, from the industry to really dedicate the roadmap for where construction is today and where it’s headed. We’ve got to back it up and those types of things, but it’s a really interesting time in construction because people don’t want hardware; they don’t want a physical server on a job site or anything like that. 

Who is the customer? Is it small businesses with up to 5 or 10 people or rather 1,000 people, general contractors, this kind of thing? I would say it’s anyone and everyone who certainly has a need for accessing their files. That said, there’s definitely a lot of attention from general contractors as far as sub-industry. In addition to that, as far as size, mid-market is really interesting. Egnyte is so easy to administer for IT teams; a mid-market firm might not have an army of IT managers to deploy super custom solutions, but they can take Egnyte off the shelf and deploy it over a weekend, actually. 

And we have a lot of people who do that. That’s for small and mid-market firms. So now we have some multinational companies who are reliant on Egnyte and have deployed it globally. There’s only so many of those firms, if you will. The typical user of Egnyte is just anyone who is essentially working remotely, i.e. on the job site, as opposed to a head office somewhere where their main server might be. 

Yeah, what’s nice about deploying Egnyte is that it can work for the quantity surveyors in the office; it can work for the superintendents out in the field. Oftentimes, those two need to speak the same language on the same file. All you have to do is share a link one way or the other. It’s ubiquitous; we typically see that it gets deployed across an organisation. So, talking about go-to-market, this is typically an organisational purchase as opposed to a project-centric purchase. We’re just buying for a single project. This is typically more of an infrastructure-type purchase. 

Yeah, sure. And you guys, Egnyte is obviously a huge company. So we have a question about where you guys are on a journey, but is there something that’s happened which is maybe the catalyst for you guys having a bit more of an experience? Is the UK construction market or is it just part of an organic growth strategy? 

I think it’s certainly an organic piece that we have proven out what we’re solving for construction and our dedication to the industry in the US and North America. Now the UK is a natural extension of that. There are a lot of parallels to how the market works here now. There are some unique aspects that we need to certainly understand. We’ve had some conversations around this to make sure that we’re ready, that we’re solving the right problems and that we localise how we’re talking about ourselves to the market here. But we have a sizable footprint in general within the UK across all of our industries, but construction is definitely our next vertical that we’re accelerating. 

Sure, awesome. Alright, cool. So, Nick, what’s your view on customer success? This is a point that comes up and Mike and I have a little bit of a debate about this: falling in love with your customer. What’s your view? I know the answer is probably always going to be yes because you won’t have customers listening to this, but hey. 

I will balance that out. Yes, you absolutely need to dedicate yourself to the customer. I see a lot of construction tech companies fall down at the end of the sale. You’ve convinced a customer that you’re going to solve their problem, and as soon as they swipe their credit card, if you will, the company walks away. That’s certainly not my premise or my company’s premise; construction needs some hand-holding to make sure that technology is rolled out properly. And so customer success is a very important part of this. I will say that, for example, roadmap creation – taking customer feedback and building it into the product – needs to be done with a filter involved. 

So customers can be pretty demanding and have a laser focus for their specific needs, which may not align with the vision for the whole company. And so you need to be able to say no, we’re going to put that on the shelf for right now, and here’s why. Instead, we think that this is more valuable and be able to justify that to the customers. So that’s more of a product management conversation, but I do think it marries to the expectations that are set in customer success. So I do think that, again, it’s a matter of making sure that you are diligent with rolling things out, that you implement them properly, and don’t just leave a project team hanging and say like, hey, go use this. They’re not going to pick up and use the technology because they’re already too busy as it is. 

Nice and diplomatic answer. Balanced. That’s right. I was going to ask another question on customer success, actually. Yeah, but now let’s skip it because I would like to go on to something a little bit more interesting from a selfish perspective and then be on to do with KPIs and metrics in sales, having been involved with marketing and also sales. So what’s your best advice? 

Numbers are good. Certainly, track the obvious in B2B, for example, how much pipeline are we creating? What’s the speed of your opportunities from open to close? What’s your percentage that reaches close? So what’s your throughput at each stage? Those types of things are kind of table stakes. Every modern CRM should help you to quantify and be able to report on those. 

I think you can take this a step further, and this actually relates to customer success: what’s the adoption rate? So after implementation, how fast do people get on and actually utilise? I like to be able to draw a line to where’s the break-even point for someone who’s adopting the software. So are they now more valuable than they were before they adopted the software? There’s usually a dip in some form of productivity because they have to learn the software and those types of things. That’s something that I also like to measure is back into it because that should be an indication of how things were sold and if we messaged this correctly. You know, is the customer experience after purchase as smooth as possible, those types of things? 

So I like to look post-sale as well as the pre-sale and the typical funnel-type metrics, if you will. The other thing I would say is certainly measure as much as possible where these opportunities are coming from. Because this is, you know, we talked about testing and iterating on how you go to market. You need to really understand which channel is the most productive. 

You may have a general marketing channel where you’re placing ads on LinkedIn and it gets a bunch of people in the door, but the close rates for those may not be very high. And so that’s versus events where it’s really expensive for every single lead that you get in and you may not have a large number, but the close rate may be really, really high because of human interaction and those types of things. So I definitely, you know, I’m a huge fan of experimentation and measuring as quickly as possible. 

Yeah, and how do you go about, just from Ignite’s perspective? I mean, maybe you don’t have the answer, I don’t know, but you’ve got customer acquisition costs because there are so many things people can be involved with these days. Like channels we just mentioned, LinkedIn, in-person events, etc. Is there a basic way of simplifying that metric? 

There’s no silver bullet. It’s certainly something where you want to maximise the contract value, like, you know, how big is the contract and then how much did it cost to land that contract and what’s the lifetime value. These are, I talked about acronyms at the start of this conversation. You know, there’s LTVs and CAC and so on and so forth. But I think where the rubber meets the road here is how repeatable is this? So you may land every single company with a thousand-plus general contractor, but you only sell a tiny little sliver into each one of them. And there’s only so many people in that market that are a thousand-plus seat organisation; you really need to measure what’s the most repeatable. And so I think, you know, from Ignite’s perspective, there’s almost an endless number of construction companies in the mid-market that need to solve the problem of file access. Like, that’s a very ripe opportunity for us. And, you know, a million different ways to go about getting to that user base. 

Okay, so I just wanted to touch on the risk management in terms of cyber attacks. Obviously, the software is storage software, mainly. So how do you go about it and what are your thoughts? 

So Ignite has this whole layer around security and storage that is really important to a lot of our customers because construction is so schedule-driven. If something goes haywire in construction, it can be as simple as someone accidentally deleting a whole bunch of files. Like they drag and drop a folder inside of a folder or they accidentally click delete and all of a sudden, you know, no one on the job site can get to their drawings. That’s a bad day for everyone. 

And so Ignite has this kind of automated backup and snapshot capabilities and so on and so forth that we’ve found to be so important for a schedule-driven industry like construction. But we also found in researching some of the data of the industry is that construction companies are twice as likely to get hit by ransomware and that blew my mind. Construction companies often say, “Hey, we don’t have anything that’s super sensitive. We’re not like healthcare or pharmaceuticals where people want to attack us to get sensitive data.” But there’s so many devices. So you think about this, what we call the surface area of construction: everyone has at least two devices, probably three or four devices that all access the apps and things. They have a new system for every single project they’re on. They’re probably in a dozen different systems and software that house critical data. And then you have, frankly, an ageing workforce who isn’t tech-savvy, and they’re more likely to click the suspicious link in an email and those types of things. 

“Exactly. And all of a sudden, that snowball effect makes it a really ripe industry for attackers to focus on and so construction being twice as likely to get hit by ransomware is a really sobering statistic.” 

“Yeah, that’s crazy. I’ve never heard that. Such a great stat, never heard that before and it just seems so relevant and true as well because if you’re a ransomware attacker and you’ve got, you’re gonna target construction companies because they’re so desperate if they lose their documents. They’re always against the clock, right? Like you said, schedule-driven, like every day their documents is like however many thousands of pounds that they’re losing. So ransomware just sounds like a high ticket industry to target.” 

“It absolutely is. And the growth of that, it’s unfortunate to talk about the growth of ransomware. It has, I forget the exact statistic, but like quadrupled in the last three years. It’s wild. The amount of investment that’s going into ransomware attacks and a lot of it’s focused at mid-market companies who don’t really have defences today. So that’s part of what we’re hoping to solve for is educate the industry on why they need to take cybersecurity seriously. And for example, cyber insurance, the premiums have more than doubled or tripled in the last year. You go to a renewal and you’re paying twice or three times as much as you were the year before for cyber insurance. The reason for it.” 

“Yeah. Okay, so just back to Ignite for a second. So you, working on, well, you have software which provides storage for construction companies. What do you mean by construction? Do you mean designers, engineers, architects also, or we’re talking about contractors, actually? The whole life cycle.” 

And that’s actually one of the things that we feel is unique about Ignite: it’s not just between breaking ground and handover. It’s actually pre-construction and all the way upstream to proposal writing and those types of things, and then all the way downstream after the project’s over with. You think about a golden thread and holding onto your data for retention policies and those types of things, that often gets overlooked. Like people just, the project’s over, let’s hide it somewhere in a closet. You need to be able to prove that you’ve retained it. You need to be able to release that data for certain legal purposes or what have you. All of that’s also a requirement. And so every phase of construction adds more data and you need to be able to have a consistent place where you know who has access to what at which phase of the construction project. What that means from a designer versus construction standpoint is that they need their files in their system and to be able to own their data but also share out just the portions that they care about. So whether that’s shared links or you’re inviting people into a restricted kind of collaboration folder or what have you. 

All right, cool. So before we move to off-topic. Just one really quick thing and maybe your most, your top-rated or your favourite tip for anyone trying to implement any construction tech solution. 

Yeah, I’ll take us on a little bit of a tangent here. When I landed in Heathrow this morning, actually, it went through my mind of like, how do you route someone from the plane door all the way through customs? And it’s, I speak English, all the signs are in English. And so like, I can follow the path. But imagine someone who doesn’t speak software, logging into a new solution, and they don’t know the acronyms, they don’t know where the menu button is, or what the three lines in the corner are, the settings and those types of things. Hamburger menu. Yeah, but it’s super intended, or hamburger menu, click the hamburger menu. You nailed it, exactly. So I think that we make this assumption, being in software our whole lives, that everyone knows what the hamburger menu is. That’s not necessarily the case. I didn’t know. I seriously broke. So when you’re doing implementation, really think about the user experience from start to finish. It’s really, really, really important because you only get one shot. Like if that superintendent logs in and they say, this is 30 seconds longer to do than it was last time when I did it on paper, I’m not logging in again. It is, it’s a really… Useless. Yes, exactly. Oh, absolutely. They’ll toss it out and then they’ll require their project engineer to do it for them. Like I know a whole bunch of project engineers that are doing their superintendents reporting or whatever it is because the super refuses to access the right information in the right way. 

Makes sense. Yeah, no, good tip. Thanks. Off topic, then. Yeah. So apart from work and family, where do you spend your time on? I’m a big sports guy. I love all number of different sports. At the time of recording this, I’m into the World Cup right now. Oh, sorry about that. You have to have some fun, but England had a good 3-0. I think in addition to that, I’ve got a young family with two kids at home that keep me quite busy. I like to do woodworking as much as I can. That’s my weekend hobby, spending a couple of hours in the garage, making a desk or a shelf or, you know, just something to take my mind off things in an easy fashion. Yeah. Cool. 

How many times have you been to the UK? Is it your first time for you? This is probably time number five. Oh, okay. So you’re kind of used to it. Yeah. To a certain extent, it’s usually I fly in and I stay in London the whole time. So I’d like to venture out and see the rest of the country as we’re spending more time over here that certainly will be the case. 

What happens to the British lifestyle to look to an American looking from the outside in? In general, I love it. I don’t like how early it gets dark here. So, you know, 3.30 or 4.00 p.m. and it’s getting dark already. That’s, you know, that hurts a little bit. The British winter. How is it in Boston then? Well, yeah, so it’s not a whole lot different. Where my house is, I’m on the far west end of my time zone. So it stays a little bit lighter. Considerably you look at a map. We’re actually considerably further south where I’m at, so we get probably another hour of daylight. Yeah, so that makes a difference. I can actually get off work and, you know, there’s still a little bit of sun. It’s sunset. Yeah, that’s cool. 

Yeah, it’s tough for us here like three, I say three days dark and like, you know, I do an evening and it makes the World Cup even worse because you can’t bother to go out and watch any games. You’re just like, oh, it’s too cold. It’s yeah, I’m gonna stay at a warm house. That’s right. Yeah. Coming back from Poland this weekend, last weekend it was 3.37 when the sun was gone. Obviously, there was no sun because it was cloudy, but 3.37, crazy. Wow. That’s wild. That’s not a lot of daylight. What time did it get light there? Around 7.38. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like 5, 6, 7, 8 hours of sunlight roughly. Not great. Not great. 

All right. Cool. Nick, well, it’s been a pleasure having you on. So can you tell us where people can find out more about you? Yeah. So you can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Nick Decker, definitely check out Ignite.com. We have a section around our construction offering as well. Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Oh, and Martin, enjoyed this chat here. Well, thank you very much. Great, thank you, Nick. 

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Bricks and Bites podcast. If you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe, and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. We really appreciate it, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.