BIM is critical to most construction workflows - as expectations for quality BIM work continue to grow, companies like BIM Designs help owners and contractors to handle the work. Mark Oden shares how his team have built a world class, union-centric BIM detailing crew.
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:00] Welcome to constructed futures. I'm Hugh Seaton. Today I'm here with mark Oden, CEO of BIMDesigns. Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Mark Oden: [00:00:10] Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it and everything that you do.
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:14] Awesome. Thanks for that. So I want to start with what BIMDesigns does cause I love what you guys do and I love your approach.
So let's hear a little bit about how you go about doing what you.
Mark Oden: [00:00:23] Yeah, thank you so much. First and foremost , we're a company full of union trained journeymen that do detailing at the tradesman level. So the plumbing pipe fitting sheet metal, fire protection, electrical. And we build virtual models down to an eighth of an inch accuracy so that it's,constructable, scalable and, prefabricated there's many benefits of using them.
So I'm very excited about the team, what we've created. We've grown the company from its infancy in 2016 when it first started, to 60 strong today. And we've had most of that growth in the last three years.
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:55] So there's a bunch of great stuff in what you just said, and I want to unpack some of it.
You talked about... let's start with constructability. So you mentioned that you're modeling down to, I believe you said an eighth of an inch. Talk a little bit about how you guys approach that.
Mark Oden: [00:01:11] Yeah, absolutely. We work very closely and partner closely with the general contractor and the architect and the engineer.
And we consume the construction documents and design documents that are, two dimensional documents and our specialists, detailers, they are very experienced and trained, detailers. They take the models, they can visualize in their head, exactly where the pipe needs to go, or the sheet metal needs to go.
And they visualize it inside of applications like AutoCAD.
Hugh Seaton: [00:01:38] And actually you said something there that really speaks to another question or another point is there's a lot of people that know how to use Revit, there's a lot of people that know how to model something, but you really made a decision to go for the best trained people that understand how things come together.
And the fact that you have union training, contractors and detailers is amazing. How did you guys get to that? Is that, does that the original kind of idea, or did you arrive at, at that level? Cause obviously finding people, paying for them and all that, it's a real commitment.
Mark Oden: [00:02:12] I absolutely agree with you.
And I'm so honored to be working with the union. Every single journeyman spends five years of training through an apprenticeship. I'm working very closely with other, other apprentices and other journeymen to graduate and turn out and to become a journeyman with all those years of field experience.
So I'm very honored to work with the union, they work very hard to train and build top talent, and to ensure constructable designs. The concept did start from the original founder. he's a third generation union plumber. So when he found out that detailing was a specialty that he could bring to the market.
He did start the company and and so it was originally founded as a union company. And we've since expanded it to 22 different unions around the country that we can recruit out as, and we're constantly growing the number of parnterships.
Hugh Seaton: [00:02:57] That's fantastic. Without singling anyone out. What are a couple of examples of the unions?
I mean, you're going to single people out, but without excluding anybody, I don't ask you to recite 22, but what are some good examples of unions that you find you draw from?
Mark Oden: [00:03:11] Absolutely. We have great partnerships with all of them around the country. Every single business manager and business agent are great supporters of our efforts.
They understand the importance of detailing and training very good talent. And they partner with us to help build the training and help educate journeymen that are working in the field and bring them into a detailing capacity. Whether that be a lead in career journeyman that's been working construction for his entire career.
His knees are hurting now and he wants to have a little bit more work behind the computer or it's a younger generation journeymen that grew up with computers and is very savvy at both constructing and also designing. We have a very strong partnership with UA 469 out of Arizona, the business manager Aaron Butler there has been tremendous in helping our growth and understanding both the pain points of the industry and balancing that with the needs of the employees and the detailers. So really commend and acknowledge Aaron for all the hard work that he's doing. And that is only one of the unions that we work with.
All 22 we've we've had so much support with.
Hugh Seaton: [00:04:09] That's fantastic. Yeah, I've, I've actually had some really great, kind of just a good relationship with UA 597 in Chicago. They've got this training facility there that's insane. So I can see how really you draw value from the investments and commitment that they have.
And I love the idea that,someone who's been in the industry for a while and maybe doesn't want to necessarily climb stairs quite so much, or for whatever reason is interested in transitioning to almost more of a consulting or a BIM detailing. I love it that you're providing that opportunity for folks that have really, we talked about paying your dues.
Mark Oden: [00:04:47] Absolutely. And I'm very excited about UA 597 too there. I'm look forward to meeting them later this summer and they've actually sent recruits out of their training center to apply for our company. So, I think that, you know, they understand the need for great companies like ours.
And bringing a great culture to their union members. So, I really appreciate the Chicago union as well.
Hugh Seaton: [00:05:05] Yeah. In today's world of skills shortages, and the time and effort it takes to get somebody as good as you're talking about is it's really cool that there's more than one direction someone can go.
a friend of mine, Mike Zivanovic has gone back and forth between working at contractors and then working a little bit more in the detailing and training and so on. So a really nice tight connection.
Mark Oden: [00:05:28] Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's the thing is there is a shortage and there's a tremendous need for for detailers and also a new program that UA 469 recently launched, which is called the VDC tech program.
So it's an ability to join the union and become a member of the union as a VDC tech, someone who's very good at using the computer and can partner with the journeymen and can partner, to build something that's constructive. So it's kind of like a pseudo apprenticeship or a new classification that's introduced, into 469. It's very innovative, very modern.
And it's a great opportunity for anyone that's, thinking about, joining the union and joining a high-tech classification. I'm very excited about this new VDC tech program and the innovation of UA 469.
Hugh Seaton: [00:06:10] Very smart. Very cool. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. Who, who normally hires you?
What kind of company. Normally engages BIM Designs.
Mark Oden: [00:06:19] Great question. we have many different potential clients. It could start from the owner actually. The owner could want to, you know, could understand what BIM is and want to save 30 to 40% directly. Other options to hire us would be the the general contractor or the individual sub contractor.
The owner could hire us to represent them overall and to run the entire BIM process within the project, the general contractor could hire us to run coordination. Because we have the field experience and the project management experience, we can operate at the coordination level and the project manager level for the general contractor. And we can operate at the subcontractor level so we can work for the individual trades subcontractors to execute on the models that they've been contracted to.
So we have a very unique ability to work on the entire vertical stack.
Hugh Seaton: [00:07:04] And let's talk a little bit about why would it, you kinda hinted at this, let's go for this kind of three buckets you just talked about. Why would an owner hire you? Like what, what's the problem that you guys are solving?
Mark Oden: [00:07:16] So very similar to how an owner might hire a construction manager. They want to know someone they want to know and trust that somebody is able to manage the entire process and save them money along the way. Understanding the BIM process is very vital in the pre-construction phase. So there's a lot of, there's a tremendous amount of changes that could happen during construction.
And if you introduce BIM into the pre-construction phase, you can actually take care of a majority of those change orders that may show up on the job site. Any conflicts, clashes, aesthetic changes, structural changes. All of those can be found in a virtual environment. So it would benefit the owner directly because they wouldn't have to have such a complicated change order process or a very complicated RFI, request for information, process, job starting, job stopping, all of those challenges that might impact the owner that they don't have direct control over.
Because it's so many layers downstream. If they can visually see what the model looks like upfront and communicate what those, what their optimum outcome is before even concrete was poured, they themselves will be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially.
Hugh Seaton: [00:08:20] That's amazing. So I'm assuming not every owner is ready for that, are you finding that they, the owners that think to do this are pretty sophisticated in one way or another.
Mark Oden: [00:08:31] What we're finding is, to the owner level, the level of visibility of BIM is not quite there. And the, the potential, so savings is not quite there.
AutoCAD performed the study that showed that performing the process of BIM end to end in the perfect sense could save an owner anywhere between 30 to 40% of the project. And I think once you start to explain that to an owner developer they start to become very interested in what the BIM process is and how they can end up saving money on that process and you know, it does have to be executed as best as possible. And it does take a lot of collaboration, a lot of partnership across all of the trades and all of the contractors. But I have seen it done very well and we specialize in doing it very well.
Hugh Seaton: [00:09:08] I love that. That's great. I mean the more visibility and control without needing to hire legions of people, obviously they're going to get better outcomes. Let me ask the same question of general contractors. So what is a general contractor hiring you for?
Mark Oden: [00:09:24] A general contractor may have either a labor shortage within their organization to run coordination or to detail, or they may need to support a subcontractor who's committed to performing a scope of work that also is facing a labor shortage.
So a general contractor would approach us to help them fill a gap potentially, or they might approach us at the very beginning of a project and say, you know, we've got this multi-million dollar project it's across all the different trades. Could you come in and be our single point of contact across all of the trades?
Hugh Seaton: [00:09:54] I love that. I think when we were talking kind of prior to the recording, you said something I loved. You want to make sure that no contractor says no to a job because they have a kind of a detailer shortage.
I like that as a way of thinking about it, right? Is that there may be other reasons that a job isn't right for them, but one reason you want to take off the table is not it isn't going to be because they don't have enough BIM detailers.
Mark Oden: [00:10:19] That's absolutely true. And I appreciate you so much for bringing that up.
Yeah. We have spoken with subcontractors and general contractors that have actually had to turn down work because they weren't able to perform the duties of detailing, because of the labor shortage that exists. And so we do exist to help fill that gap for them.
And on the general contractor side, they also need a very strong project management backend running the pre-construction process. And that project manager could and should have a lot of knowledge related to the BIM modeling process and all of the changes that could happen. And it is even better if they have that field experience so they can relate to all of the potential field challenges. So that's typically called coordination that cycle of pre-construction and so we both partner with general contractors that already provide coordination as a service, and we can actually operate and perform those duties for the general contractor as well.
Hugh Seaton: [00:11:07] That's great. And again, I'm assuming that some of the reasons somebody, a general contractor or a subcontractor says I'm going to go to BIM designs is because without, before they even meet you, they know that the level of constructability that they're going to be receiving is very high because of who you choose to employ and having the partnerships you have.
Mark Oden: [00:11:31] Absolutely Hugh. And that's actually the most important element of being able to save that 30 to 40% to the owner. Is it has to be constructable in the end. Not only do you want it to be visual and to be able to look at it visually, but it needs to be constructable. You need to be able to understand all of the parts and pieces that you're ordering in advance for the bill of materials.
You need to be able to send very explicit shop drawings and spool sets to the prefab shop for prefabrication. And then once you get it to the job site, they need to be able to follow the instructions and install it according to instructions. Otherwise, inefficiencies will show up.
So the most important element of executing on BIM is constructability in the end.
Hugh Seaton: [00:12:08] Well, that's what it's there for. I mean, you can get lost in the, in the tool and how cool it looks and all the plugins and this and that. But at the end of the day, you're pulling a building out of the ground. That's the only thing that ultimately matters. Right?
Mark Oden: [00:12:20] Couldn't agree more hugh.
Hugh Seaton: [00:12:22] So I want to take a kind of a left turn here and ask a little bit about plugins and tools that are out there. I mean, I've spoken to a number of people on the podcast and elsewhere about some of the tools that are being innovated. It's just a lot of innovation in the kind of Revit ecosystem.
A lot of it not actually coming from Autodesk, although, you know, God bless them, they're doing some good stuff too, but there's a lot of tools that are emerging and are making things automated or faster or easier to do or easier to make sure you've done it right. How do you guys view those tools generally?
And we can get as specific as you want. How have you found that that's, over the course of the last couple of years, changing how you do what you do?
Mark Oden: [00:13:05] Yeah. Thank you so much for the question. We do find that Autodesk is doing an amazing job building a platform,building a software platform that allows others to integrate with them and to extend and extrapolate on top of what they've already built.
And we have built a strong relationship with Autodesk and we're very proud and happy to work with them. On the toolset side, we find ourselves to be very innovative. I myself come from the Silicon valley space, having worked 10 years in Cisco systems and other startups and small companies in the Silicon valley space.
So I bring that innovative concept and high emotional intelligence to the, to the construction space and very excited about what we're offering to the market. We've looked at tools like BIM tracks and Rivizto, we've also had a strong partnership with Applied Software and eVolve MEP.
eVolveMEP does a lot of automation, when it comes to, Revit and many plugins like that will accelerate our ability to perform our job as quickly and efficiently as possible and accurately as possible. And we are directly able to pass those savings along to our end clients.
So we do find ourselves adopting and adapting many types of tools and processes internally.
Hugh Seaton: [00:14:10] Yeah. I love that. And I ask again, because as I say, I've seen the amount of innovation that's it seems to be going on in the BIM space when it comes to these tools, but it's just a lot of great stuff popping up. I know that the eVolve folks pretty well, they're doing some awesome things.
And you mentioned some other brands like Revizto that are also doing some, just some great stuff.Let's talk a little bit about what you mentioned a moment ago, the kind of heritage that you bring. So the company started the best possible way, right? It was, it was a tradesman who said, wow, we can bring the quality and sense of constructability that I have into the BIM world.
But then you join also as someone who brings all of the wealth of understanding and kind of frameworks that come from software and come from. Delivering things in a kind of an agile software way. Talk to me a little bit about what you've, how that's kind of affected how you manage the company and how you guys go to market.
Mark Oden: [00:15:07] Well, first and foremost, I feel so honored.And I feel like I grew up on the shoulders of giants, to be honest with you. Both in the technology space and the construction space. I, I learned from so many great people, great managers, great mentors, from my many years, working at Cisco and working in Silicon valley.
And just being with that level of energy is so exciting. And so just fills me with energy. And we went through, Cisco itself invested hundreds of millions of dollars into an incubated startup that I had the chance to work for. And with that, they trained us an agile and we all became an extremely efficiently run agile organization within that incubated startup.
And I just, I brought a lot of the lessons I learned from Cisco and a lot of the observations I learned from that organization. I bring that into this organization. Really understanding the importance of building relationships, the importance of managing projects, the importance of communication, documentation and respecting and following processes.
I just, I feel so fortunate to have gone through that experience and so fortunate to bring that to this company and help this company scale and grow. That's one big topic in Silicon valley is scale and growth, and I was able to witness that and I was able to live through it. And in many different facets, again, working for a large corporation and also working, for and advising small companies that were just hitting market traction.
So bringing all of that experience years of experience into scaling this company.
Hugh Seaton: [00:16:28] I love that. I got to ask you a specific agile question. And that is one of the things I've always liked about agile is the idea that you're bringing people software early and often. Now you're not building software per se, but, you know, I spent a lot of years in the advertising world where you had a similar issue and that is that professionals would go off for six weeks or however long and kind of iterate their way away from the brief point one and point two, the brief often didn't really know how you'd execute it, so it wasn't as accurate as it could have been. And there's real value in, kind of iterating the brief while you're beginning to develop your solution to it because you learn things along the way. I've always loved that about agile and I think when you're thinking about delivering plans for a building or, you know, BIM models and all that, I would imagine that there's value in that too.
Do you find that you brought some of that agile, you know, show them early, show them often, sensibility does that work with customers?
Mark Oden: [00:17:25] It does work. It does work. Absolutely. We have weekly fly-throughs with our clients. That's in addition to the coordination meetings that we run or that we participate in.
So in those weekly fly throughs that's the iterative approach where we get to show them the work that we've accomplished for the week, get their feedback, any quality issues, any code issues that, anybody finds. We do those fly throughs. And that's the sort of iterative product deliverable that we provide.
We also perform daily stand-ups with our team. So every day the team will speak to what they're blocked by what they're working on and what they worked on yesterday. So we bring all these elements of agile into the process and we're still learning and we're still growing and we're still integrating it as tightly as we can, but I'm very excited to, you know, it's a living growing process and, it's fun to go through
Hugh Seaton: [00:18:08] Yeah I'll bet. And I, you know, I love the fact that someone on your team gets to send a calendar invite that has fly over in it or fly through. Excuse me. How cool is that? Like I'm inviting you to fly through.
Mark Oden: [00:18:19] Yeah. And they are a lot of fun to perform. We've actually also invested in the Oculus VR headset as well. Yeah. Yeah. So we've done some some development in there to optimize how do we move a model over to the Oculus? And, so the fly through is a lot more fun when you have those VR headset on and you have the controllers in your hands.
Hugh Seaton: [00:18:37] I spent a lot of time in the VR space prior to where I am now actually was at a VR company in New York. Do you mind my asking, how do you guys, so you guys using unity Reflekt or do you do something else.
Mark Oden: [00:18:49] We do use unity. Yeah, absolutely. Yep, we use unity, but we've also found ways to manage the, the Revit element as well and transport it or export it directly from AutoCAD over to Oculus.
But we find that performance wise, if we go through unity Reflekt, we ended up with a little bit slightly better performance.
Hugh Seaton: [00:19:06] Yeah. I mean they were trying to optimize for exactly that. That's cool. Yeah. I love the idea of somebody walking through their building, even if it's still only in a kind of design phase, but you just access a different way of thinking about what what's being built and what you're doing there. And then you would, if it's looking at it through a window. Very cool.
Mark Oden: [00:19:28] That's right. With the VR headset, it's lifelike, right? So you're walking through or you're flying through and you see the doors might be too small or the windows might be too big or, you know, the shade, you know, the way that the sun is hitting the window, you can even get to that level of you know of interest or depth, for energy efficiency, for example. So there's all sorts of practical use cases. A common one that I like to speak to is imagine building a hospital, and investing, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into building a hospital.
And when it's built the doctor, you know, doctor puts on his lab coat and he walks into the surgery center and he realizes the gurney isn't gonna fit through the door or turn the angle into the hallway for whatever construction reason. It costs a lot more to fix that problem once it's constructed, than if you found that in virtual reality, flying through that space.
Hugh Seaton: [00:20:14] Yeah, I actually, I've heard a number of general contractors talk about how it's actually, especially hospitals, but not only entertainment as well. In some other areas where they'll build, their VDC teams will sometimes build a VR model so that they can ensure two things.
One is it so the owner can ensure it feels and looks the way they want. It's a little more relevant to entertainment, but often they'll actually construct models. like physical mock-ups of certain things before they really build them, which is enormously expensive and wasteful. So you're you're it's interesting that you're seeing that as well, but I know that that is one of the things that, that some of the bigger GCs do.
Very cool. Yeah. Sorry. I said you got me with VR.
Mark Oden: [00:21:02] Yeah. Yeah. I I'm super excited about it too. And that's one of the value propositions of BIM, because if you focus, you know, on BIM, not just for the prefabrication or the pre-construction component to it, but you focus on it for the VR and the augmented reality component, then you introduce all new sets of technologies and workflows that add on top of the value that you would otherwise be getting from BIM. And we find that porting it over for example, through unity or AutoCAD is not as, you know, not very difficult. It takes a little bit of prep work. It takes a little, a little bit of understanding on how to just make that export work, but once you do it, it's very easy in it. And the integration is almost seamless.
Hugh Seaton: [00:21:38] Very cool. So I want to shift gears one more time and talk a little bit about some experiences you've had working with clients. So we talked before about some of the problems you solve. And one of them is, you know, BIM being really constructable and other one is just manpower and labor.
Talk to me a little bit about some examples of what you guys have done out in the marketplace and, you know, it's hard sometimes to put a quantitative number of some products and some, some services that's easy. This is one of those that it's not so easy. That's all right. What, what have you, what have you gotten out there and kind of, what kind of problems you find you're solving?
Mark Oden: [00:22:16] Yeah. We've worked on nearly a hundred projects, I'm so excited to announce that we've worked on almost a hundred at this point. And so we've actually spread across the entire spectrum of industries. We've worked on commercial, semiconductor, hospitals, as we mentioned, casinos.
We've worked on a lot of high tech operations with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, for example a lot of building complexes. So it's incredible the depth and the breadth of our team and we have different specialists for the different industries at this point. So I'm just so excited about the entire team's experiences and they bring to the table and they cross train each other and they teach each other every single day, even though we're a fully remote company, we've found a method and a culture for communicating and collaborating and teaching each other.
Hugh Seaton: [00:22:55] What's an example of a specialization that you've kind of evolved? I mean, by that I'm assuming you mean we've got two or three or four or five people that are really good at data centers or they're really good at, at big entertainments or, or whatever.
What are some examples of specializations that you guys are finding that you have.
Mark Oden: [00:23:13] Yes, absolutely. So we do work with each of our detailers to specialize them and train them in specific verticals. So that when we get projects that are related to each vertical we placed them into that vertical accordingly.
In addition, we have subject matter experts, these are subject matter experts for Revit, for example, or for AutoCAD, or database management or QA QC. Those are four verticals and four pillars that we strongly invest in. And so our, our subject matter experts focus on those areas. Not only do they know the trade, not only do they know the application, not only do they know how to execute, but they go above and beyond that and they know how to troubleshoot.
They know how to integrate. They know how to optimize. They know how to train, they know how to teach. It's just incredible what what our guys can do. And, and the level of depth that they can go. So we will typically have these subject matter experts support all the different jobs and all the different detailers. A big component of, of having our guys be happy is helping them feel supported .
So we give them the tools they need and the resources they need to get their job done.
Hugh Seaton: [00:24:09] That's an interesting point. I just want to talk about is I've heard a couple of times now, more on the contractor side, where some of the decision to adopt technology is that it, again, in a environment where there was a lot of options and there's a shortage of skilled labor.
People will go where they feel like they've got certain kinds of support. Now, again, in a contractor that's often just, you know, a solid adoption of technology and you know, you're surrounding people with, with tools that they need. But I wonder if sometimes also, you know, what you're talking about is almost a level above that, right?
Where, where they're walking into a situation where. It isn't just, you know, a good project management software, but it's actually a whole like ecosystem of technical support and training and so on. Is that, are you finding that that helps you you know, with recruiting and retention of talent, obviously I mean.
Mark Oden: [00:25:02] Yeah. So we do find that with the culture we've created talent does find us and we find talent as well. We do have a BIM Designs has a non-solicitation policy. So for active clients that we work with we, we don't solicit talent that would otherwise work with, or work for them.
And we ask the same of them. At the same time though, we build a culture that as we continue to expand and grow talent is naturally attracted to us and we're excited to grow the ranks in that way. And the level of support that we bring is, is you're correct, it's an ecosystem.
So it's a, it's a system that it, you know, it starts from the computer. It starts from the application, starts from the level of support that we're bringing them on the IT side, the level of support that we bring them on the subject matter experts side. Everything we can do to help help our detailers detail is, is what we're after.
I personally, you know, tell my team and I live this true every day is that I worked for them and I serve the team.
Hugh Seaton: [00:25:53] I love that. That's great. And I think you're seeing more of that sensibility coming into the construction industry in a way that maybe was less true in the past. So mark, talk to me kind of to bring this home.
What should people know about the BIM process and kind of a BIM execution plan? Like at the highest level of abstraction, almost the highest level. What should, what do you wish people knew more about when it comes to using BIM to build their buildings?
Mark Oden: [00:26:21] I believe it's so important that we understand and respect that the entire BIM process, if executed accordingly can save so much money.
And it, it takes the collaboration and the partnership of, of every single entity along the way to ensure that that process is executed so well. I truly believe that that it, that it can be, and we're demonstrating that every day. And it's so important that, that the execution plan is, is tightened up as buttoned up and is understood and respected by all parties.
I think it all comes down to communication and documentation, and if we can if we can all work together and collaborate together and, and find a common language to speak and partner, I trust that that in the end we will... we'll serve the owners and help them save money so that we can work for them again and continue to build and construct great things.
Hugh Seaton: [00:27:06] Fantastic. I learned a lot about how you do what you do and kind of the importance of well-executed BIM, Mark thank you for the time.
Mark Oden: [00:27:14] Thank you so much.