Too often software tries to change basic behaviors, and as a result it doesn't get used as much as is hoped. Fieldchat have resolved this by leveraging texting to connect GCs and trades on jobsites, seamlessly connecting different groups, companies and specialties together to capture more field information, faster and more easily. Torrey Glendenning and Steve Smith explain how, and how that is starting to make a real difference for customers.
https://www.fieldchat.com
[00:00:00] Hugh Seaton: Welcome to Constructed Futures, I'm Hugh Seaton. Today I'm here with Torrey Glendinning CEO and Steven Smith head of product for FieldChat. Guys welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:14] Torrey Glendinning: Thanks so much Hugh.
[00:00:15] Steve Smith: Thanks hugh glad to be here.
[00:00:18] Hugh Seaton: So Torrey, let's start with you talk to me about what FieldChat is so that we can sort of lay the groundwork for the rest of the conversation.
[00:00:25] Torrey Glendinning: Perfect. So Fieldchat is a field operations tool built for construction companies that does two things primarily. The first is consolidates all communication on a job site, into one place. And the second thing is allows you to collect all the information and project documentation that you can possibly need on your job site and have all of that sync with your project management systems like Procore.
And how that works is you create projects within FieldChat and communication projects within FieldChat. And you can invite people to those chats. And the best part about FieldChat is that you don't actually need to download an app or anything new. It all works through text messaging. And so it allows you to stay in contact with everyone on your job site, whether it's your team internally or subcontractors or anyone.
And then on the second part collecting documentation, like manpower reporting COVID assessments site, sign-ins all your permitting and have all that stuff sink into your daily logs and Procore and the documents folder and your Procore project, so all the data entry is done for you.
[00:01:27] Hugh Seaton: And I have a feeling that when you guys say when you're talking to a client or you're talking to a prospect and you start saying, yeah, it's based on texts, do you get smiles? Cause people are like, that's cool.
[00:01:40] Torrey Glendinning: Yeah. So I think the biggest feedback that we get when we show people that they can actually have a communication tool that works for them while basically not needing to train anyone on how to use it. It becomes a big selling factor because it's very easy to roll out. Like as an example, we've deployed FieldChat on job sites with 500 people on it in three days and everyone's up and running, using FieldChat and that's pretty uncommon when you're trying to get people from 40 different companies, all using the same tool. And so it just makes the whole onboarding process way, way simpler for them. And so yeah, they do smile.
[00:02:13] Hugh Seaton: Yeah. I mean, I was kind of being flippant there, but the idea that people on a job site are texting each other all the time anyway. That's why I was saying, I wonder if they're like, oh, that's nice. Because again, you're, you're asking them to do what they're doing anyway, but you're collecting data from it. Yeah.
[00:02:27] Torrey Glendinning: Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's cool.
[00:02:31] Hugh Seaton: Stephen, do you mind talking a little bit about how the text interfaces with say let's call it a call it a Procore?
[00:02:40] Steve Smith: Well, so to add somebody into FieldChat, you basically, all you need is their phone number. Or they can, they could walk up to a sign with a code on it and it will add them. And once, once they're added, they can, they can have access to all the different kinds of forms that are used on the job site.
And these can be things like orientation forms, manpower forms, COVID assessment forms QA forms, inspection form. And basically submit anything that they need in real time. And then they can also be added into channels.
And channels are just collections of people. There might be a safety channel, there might be a channel for each trade. There might be a quality channel. There might be one for all foremen and superintendents. And this is where kind of the ongoing communication can be. And it can be, it can be as, as, as simple as there's somebody trucks blocking the gate and it needs to be moved immediately.
Or it can be a safety issue. That's found that needs to be remedied immediately or coordination scheduling. And so this information is all getting captured into FieldChat, but then FieldChat knows how to transform it into the right things and push it into Procore. So if you've got somebody who fills in a a safety orientation form, that might need to do a couple of things in Procore, it might need to create a PDF document and store it in Procore with all the information about their emergency contact information. It may also need to create like a visitor entry in the in the daily log and Fieldchat knows how to collect that information and then push it to the right places in Procore.
[00:04:25] Hugh Seaton: And what's it look like to the user though?
So are they seeing a form? Are they getting a series of questions? What's it look like to this person who's gone and given you their phone number or they've used the poster you talked about, what does it look like to them?
[00:04:40] Steve Smith: It looks like text messages and then the forms, it's a link. So the link to the form, it may say, so you can set these, you can set these things up. So, so maybe it's something like a manpower form that has to be submitted every day or a toolbox talk that has to be submitted every week. The, the superintendent or the coordinator for, for the general contractor who quite often would set up those schedules, that the person would get a link when they need to submit.
And they click on that link. It takes them to a very simple form. You know, with, with a few questions that they fill in and then they submit them, they'll get a confirmation that it's done. They can also do this stuff through text messaging, but in a lot of cases it's a lot easier just to fill in a simple web form and answer the answer, the questions that way.
[00:05:27] Hugh Seaton: That's great. So you sidestep the need for them. I mean, you said this earlier, but that's how you do it, right. Is sidestepping the need for any downloads, any, any complication or basically having a text with somebody in this case, it's a machine. And then when they need something more than that, you give them a link and bang, they click on it, it sends them off to whatever they need to get done.
Very, very cool. And do you guys house the, the forms in Fieldchat? So once they're done, they click a button that goes right into the system.
[00:05:53] Steve Smith: Yeah, they, it goes right into the system, but then as quickly as possible FieldChat looks at, what's set up for that form to figure out where it needs to go.
Does it need to go to plan grid? Does it need to go to Procor? Does it does it need to go into the cloud somewhere? It, it knows how to deliver that form and it might need to go to multiple places. And then it takes care of making sure that that form gets delivered behind the scenes and you can actually see in Fieldchat, okay, we got the form at this time from this person, then it was turned around and delivered to these systems and we're done. It's all taken care of and everything's documented and squared away.
[00:06:35] Hugh Seaton: Love it. So Torrey, I'd love to ask now that we kind of know what the product does. What's the origin story. How did, how did your, how did you become Wolverine?
[00:06:45] Torrey Glendinning: So I, it's a great question. And actually, I think probably Steve's the best person to to answer that as kind of, he was there at the Genesis of this idea.
So Steve, if you want to want to tell how you got started in this.
[00:07:01] Steve Smith: Sure. So I actually both Torrey and I know a tech entrepreneur who we've worked with in the past, who also is a silent partner on a large specialty contracting company. And I was kind of in-between my previous startup, which which we had successfully exited from and was looking for the next thing to do and was basically offered the opportunity kind of, of a lifetime just to go into this large construction company, go to job sites and find a valuable problem to solve.
And so I spent a lot of time kind of asking people a lot of questions and following them around. And it seems so obvious, but what I was seeing was just an incredible amount of text messaging. And then people searching for messages, stuff getting lost in the phone. People making like very important commitments through text messages you know, people not being included in the conversation that needed to be included in the conversation.
And then the other thing that I saw, which was even more intriguing, is I saw, well, first of all, a proliferation of paper, like binders and binders and binders of, of documentation and 10 years ago, if I was going to make an investment in construction tech. Yeah. I would invest in iron mountain. Because all that stuff, it just ended up at the end of the project.
You know, they want it for, for documentation and legal purposes and they need it. They don't want to get rid of it, but it just sits in iron mountain. And so people are also taking pictures with their phones of the more important pieces of information that they needed to get to someone and send it as a, as a text message with a picture attached.
And then of course the person that received it, they're like struggling, trying to figure out how to get that image into their cloud file folder. Whatever it is so that they, they have that record. And I looked at it and just like, man, there is so much friction around how people communicate and kind of saw that it was all communication, but there's, there's like the spectrum of unstructured data, like, "Hey, this is unsafe it needs to be fixed right away picture." Or you know, here's the manpower report for Wednesday you know, unstructured and structured data all kinds of in this stream of real-time communication that helps people make the right decisions, get stuff done, and unblock any, any blockers that are happening on the job site.
[00:09:49] Hugh Seaton: So you guys are observing what people are really doing and you obviously realize, okay, hang on a minute. There's gotta be a way to use this. So once you had the inspiration or once you had the insight, what was the process then? Did you, I mean, it sounds like you had a, kind of a beta partner with this specialty contractor.
[00:10:09] Steve Smith: Yeah. I mean, the first thing it was that kind of came to mind is all right, well, why aren't people like using Microsoft teams or slack, or like there's, there's other there's products in the market that solve this and then kind of a light bulb was well, because they're all from different companies and they're using different devices. Some of them are on Android. Some of them are on apple that they've got different levels of tech proficiencies. Some of them are in laptops.
Trying to get them all to use one app? It's really hard. So the kind of the first insight was all right, so this has gotta be what they're doing already now. It's gotta be texting, but it's gotta be like, if you've ever tried to do a group chat on texting between an apple device and a an Android device, you learn pretty quickly that it's broken. Even in today's day and age, to do a group chat across those two platforms doesn't work. People get dropped that that the iOS people get the dreaded green message.
And there, I mean, because to some degree they're separate proprietary systems, it's deliberate that they don't work well together. So we envision this platform being something that would work with any device that the people running the project would have some degree of control over, or be able to delegate that control over, who's involved and who can send what.
Then we started building it and putting it on real job sites and just watching and observing and trying to make it better. And we started with. With the messaging stuff. And then, you know we saw more and more how people were like sending pictures of stuff and trying to send more structured information and then add it on the ability to, to collect this information through forms.
[00:11:57] Hugh Seaton: That's fantastic. And how long has this been? How long ago, how long have you guys been in market?
[00:12:00] Steve Smith: We've had early kind of private beta stuff in the market for gosh, at least three and a half years, but we really didn't kind of launch to market until what 18 months ago, Torrey. So we, we spent a lot of time trying to fine tune and get it right before we really turned on the marketing machine.
[00:12:19] Hugh Seaton: Yeah, that's great. Especially in this market. And what are some examples of, of things that you smoothed out that you discovered you needed to make better that are now smoother, better, faster, whatever.
[00:12:31] Steve Smith: Do you want to take this one Torrey?
[00:12:33] Torrey Glendinning: Sure. So I think one example of of this that actually is quite fits quite nicely into some of the things that we observed kind of early days, the kind of days that Steve was talking about was this idea of like actual paper forms floating around the job site that needed to end up in Procore. And like the first iteration of FieldChat was kind of the core messaging application, where you create channels and invite people to text and effectively you we'll let you facilitate group chats across any device like Steve was mentioning.
And something that we observed quite early on was that people would actually like take pictures of pieces of paper and like just send them into the channel. It's like all their documentation that they were filling out. They would take pieces of paper fill them out by hand on like the hood of their truck or something.
And then take a picture of it, send it in a FieldChat where then... and so we observed this happening over and over and over again. We kept calling these customers to ask like, well, why are you doing this? Like what, what's the, what's the purpose? And they say, well, the person's in the field and they need to submit this paperwork. I use FieldChat, I send it back to the person in the office who then exports it to a PDF, prints it out, sits there, and then types everything into Procore. And we when we heard that, we just said like, that's crazy that they're doing that. And so a lot of the functionality from a data capture perspective that we talked about earlier just came from what we saw happening in the product.
And people were doing these, these really strange things of like, it was this kind of flow or a series of events that ultimately all had to end up in either Pro-core or some project management system. And so we ended up building the tool that allowed them to do that all digitally and dramatically simplify that whole process and make administrating documentation on job sites, way simpler and effectively try to eliminate everyone filling out pieces of paper on their truck.
[00:14:33] Hugh Seaton: Wow. That's a big one. And I guess what you're getting at is people are used to just solving the problem of fastest, most direct way they can and filling it out and taking a picture seemed like the best, the best way at the time. And you're like, maybe we can do better.
[00:14:47] Torrey Glendinning: And it's not the fault of anyone on the job site, but like, these people are busy. They're like, if you're an, as everyone knows that you walk onto a job site, like things are happening pretty quickly. There's not a lot of like... superintendents, project managers don't have a lot of time just sitting back and observing what's going on and thinking about, well, how can we make this a lot better? They're like being pushed by deadlines. Like people are late, material's not showing up or it's broken. There's a million problems that go on on a job site every single day that they're just trying to firefight.
And so. You know, it we kind of tried to play that role a little bit.
[00:15:21] Hugh Seaton: And once you introduce something like this and do your best to answer this. Cause I, I don't, I I'd be surprised if you've got numbers behind it, but when you give somebody a new way of doing something like you just described, where instead of taking the picture and sending it back to the office, you can go straight into our system and solve it.
How do you find that the behavior change happens? The people say, oh my God, Or do they say totally and then kind of do it kind of don't and then over time it gets adopted.
[00:15:47] Torrey Glendinning: Well, what's, what's interesting about this. I mean, this particular example is that it actually caught on quite quickly with a bunch of our customers.
And you can see that in all the usage metrics and even just talking with them, it like quickly became the number one used feature in the app. Just collecting, like digitizing documentation and data entry for people in construction. And, you know you're hitting a sore spot when, when that's kind of the, the uptake in a new feature that you launch.
[00:16:19] Steve Smith: Yeah. And I'll I'll just add that, that kind of, as we started collecting this information and solving that kind of. Getting rid of the swivel chair somebody's getting it and then re-keying it in another system. Another interesting thing started to happen, and that is that you now start to get a real time picture of what's actually happening on the job site.
And so a couple of examples you know, customers have told us the safety inspector will show up and ask who's on the job site at this given point in time. And now, because you're collecting this information, you can say yeah these people are here. Here's when they arrived. It's, it's, it's all sitting there and they're, they're taking it, our customers are taking it beyond that, to things like roof access, for example, where every time somebody goes up on the roof, they need to fill in two fields that basically what are they doing when are they signing in have they reviewed the the safety procedures?
And then when they come back down, they fill in another form that just says I'm back. And so now in real time, who's on the roof. And so, more and more they're starting to rely on, on FieldChat as kind of this real time view of what's happening on the job site. And then they can go on and do things like okay, I see this unsafe condition that's happening on the job site, sure, I can you know, put it in a channel and FieldChat with a picture saying, okay, this needs to be remedied immediately, whatever it is, and unsafe condition, or somebody's doing something unsafe, but you can also say "all right, I also want to tag this as a safety observation in Procore. I want to tag it to these three people who are responsible for it. And not only now, are those people getting texted with the pictures and you're getting that information kind of streaming and captured in real time. It's also getting tracked in Pro-core or another project management system through to resolution.
So you've kind of got this real time close loop happening of, of activity on the job site, which is, I mean, and it's early innings for us, but it's super exciting.
[00:18:36] Hugh Seaton: You know that reminds me of some unrelated technologies that, that, that do that get to kind of an analogous place. And that is you know, I've done a little bit of talking about machine vision on the job site and how you're able to get orders of magnitude more data than you could with what it's replacing. And I think you're doing some of the same things, right? Where you've re removed enough friction that now you're, instead of getting one sort of hashed out a report at the end, or, I mean, look, people are professionals, they fulfill what they're supposed to fill, but nevertheless, it's at the end of the day, right. And they're ready to go home. But what you're saying is that you've, you've now reduced the friction so that people can do this on a much more regular basis on a much more if they see something they can get into it. Is that right?
[00:19:23] Steve Smith: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's really cool. We think about the possibilities, right?
Like, like you've got all these tools, all this equipment, all these people on the job site. And then, they're contributing information about what's happening. And this could be collected through so many different mediums of which FieldChat can, can play a role in, but this idea of a real time streaming feed of what's happening on the job site, across all these different mediums and ways that that data can be collected, like that feels right. Right. Like that makes sense as, as the future.
[00:19:58] Hugh Seaton: I think you're right. And I think what is exciting to me about what you're describing is there are passive systems that are taking data, whether it's machine vision or some other things, but humans are able to add context to what all that means.
And humans are able to report, this is what was going on. And it adds so much meaning to what any AI can provide. That I think it's a really exciting way to pull in the context that a human can provide is just without parallel. There's no reasonable expectation that that's not going to be true for the foreseeable future, that there is no nothing can provide the level of context that a human can if for no other reason than computers have no idea what the implications of things are, and a superintendent looks at something and says, well, this is going to cause a delay because of unforeseen implications, which is a big deal.
[00:20:52] Torrey Glendinning: That's entirely true. And like a really tactical example of what this ultimately might evolve into is even just in the form of like, understanding what happened on the job site, in how it contributes to production related metrics. And eventually like estimating, like we were talking with one of our partners who they run one of the largest construction companies in north America, and they were saying, well, the data that they get from the field when it comes to like real production metrics on how they're performing on a day-to-day basis is relatively poor. And sometimes just involved because people are doing stuff sometimes it's involves just people looking out the window and saying, yep, this is what's going on today. And relying on that information to then estimate projects and bid out on projects becomes challenging.
And so if you can dramatically increase the quality and quantity of information coming out of a jobsite. Even doing things like understanding what's going on, on the job site improves and making day-to-day decisions on the job site improves, but using that information to then better improve your process moving forward, whether it's, "I can more accurately estimate what it's going to cost me to do this job because I've had, I'm now collecting really great data on how we perform."
It, it, it allows you to really kind of profoundly transform how construction works.
[00:22:07] Hugh Seaton: I think that's a great point and you can, again, correlate some of what you're saying with other things that may or may not have caused productivity to be good, bad or indifferent. Right. And since you're seeing it in a much more granular level, you're able to actually do some of those correlations instead of saying, well, today was a bad day.
[00:22:26] Torrey Glendinning: Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:26] Steve Smith: I was just going to say, ultimately, Ultimately it's about removing friction, right? It's not, it's, it's not that people don't want to provide high quality production metric information it's that it's, it's painful to do so. And it distracts them from what they feel like is their core job, which is building stuff.
And to the extent that there are tools like FieldChat and other things that that can help eliminate that friction and enable this information flow it's, it's gonna, it's gonna open up a whole world of possibilities and unblock that flow of information that effectively is blocked today.
That's, that's kind of the core of the problem is that it's too hard to get the information. So people don't do it.
[00:23:13] Hugh Seaton: Yeah. I love that. And you can almost see a progression from the the first thing that you did was make the basics easier and doable and more reliable. And then as you've developed more and more, and as people get used to it more and more, you can see it extending into the future and capabilities we haven't thought of yet.
I mean, one of the, one of the interesting points that we've seen over the, over the course of technology going back decades is when you reduce the cost of something down below a certain point, it becomes different. A great example. There was a book on AI by, by a guy out of Toronto who said, look, when you made arithmetic effectively free, you had crazy things like digital photography, which is just ones and zeros being added at an insane scale.
And then he was talking about AI. He's like, if you can make prediction so, so cheap that it's effectively free. We don't know what it will do yet, but it will probably be impressive. And I think on a, on a more tactical scale is what you're saying is that if you can make worker and professional feedback and inputs, as seamless as, as you know, tapping a couple words out who knows where that extra data can go in terms of understanding the human side of it and understanding, you know what's really going on in job sites.
Super exciting stuff.
[00:24:29] Steve Smith: Yeah. It's pretty cool. And I think the, the other, the other element to it is, is closing the loop, right? All right. I've collected, I've collected this bit of data and have contributed to the, the information stream about what's happening on the job site, but then what happened to it in the end?
You know, if it was an issue, was it taken care of if, if if it was a bit of information about a side effect or a, a problem, was it dealt with. And trying to figure out again how to close the loop and in very easy, frictionless ways. I, I think is kind of something that we're trying to figure out right now.
[00:25:07] Hugh Seaton: Well, what have you seen happen so far? So I hear you it's early days, but what have you seen people do to close the loop or to to kind of add some impact to what you're giving them.
[00:25:20] Steve Smith: Well there's still manual followup, right? Like there's, there's still the, okay. Hey, did this get done?
Or what's the status of this, is it finished. And so if we can figure out how to break down and collect the information in more granular ways, but then also in a very easy way kind of confirm that it was done, when it was done. You know, that there were required action too. And make that as easy as a simple confirmation.
Yup. This was due today. Yep. It's done. But do it in a way that's very fluid and natural to that person's day-to-day workflow. I think that contributes even more because you know, what we see now is, in these project management systems, there's things like. You know punch lists and tasks and observations and all these different ways of, of tracking things and milestones.
And you make a commitment that this much will be done by such and such a date. But it's actually updating that information and collecting that information is super hard. So in a lot of cases, people don't use those tools because they're too hard. And to the extent that that we can really kind of tap into people's workflows on a one-to-one basis and then figure out how to kind of stream and update that information back.
I think, again, it will, will unlock a lot of stuff. Like there's a lot of features in construction management systems that when you talk to specialty or general contractors, they don't use. Like punch lists or, or like observations or tasks or because it's more effort than then it's worth to try to use those tools.
[00:27:04] Hugh Seaton: And isn't that one of the issues with building software for this market anyway, is that when people like you, they're saying, "you know, it'd be great as if you could also do this" and before you know it you've got absolute explosion of features. I mean, it sounds like the way you guys have gone to market, hopefully you're going to be a little immune to that.
You're still going to have to build out features, but it's not be quite so crazy as it, as it can be for some of the more app based approaches. Do you, do you find that you, you have to push back on, on feature creep or is it pretty under control? Cause it's so text-based?
[00:27:37] Torrey Glendinning: I think it all depends on how someone uses that feedback.
I think we count ourselves fortunate that we have a bunch of customers who say, "you know, we really love your product. We want to see you do this." And to a large extent, we use that information to kind of form our view of the world. Like building software for your customers is, is kind of doing that.
You do, you need to build things that they want and it needs to fit into like an overarching vision that's all aligned and works together and you're solving a coherent problem. So you don't end up solving 50 different problems partially. But to a huge extent, we use what our customers ask us for as a guiding beacon for what we should be building for them.
Steve, do you want to, you want to add onto that?
[00:28:17] Steve Smith: Yeah. For any, for any software company, it's, it's always tricky trying to find the right features to build. And obviously you, you get asked for zillion things. And really you're trying to connect the dots and try to figure out, okay, well, how does that line up with a larger vision of the problem that we're trying to solve?
And if we build X, how does it move the product forward for a bunch of people collectively? And not just the wishlist of that one customer and trying to do it and kind of a coherent, rational way that also isn't overwhelming users because, you know yeah. As you alluded to you, like you've got to build this stuff super, super simple.
Because you know, their, their day jobs is to be, or to be experts in construction, not to be software nerds like us.
[00:29:07] Hugh Seaton: Well, okay. Last thing is how can people find you?
[00:29:11] Torrey Glendinning: Great. So they can find us at FieldChat.com. And feel free to take a look at our website and what we do. And if you want to chat with us, there's a, there's a way to book a demo and check out FieldChat there.
[00:29:23] Hugh Seaton: Awesome. Thank you both for this. I've really learned a lot about the field and how you guys have made it simple. So thanks for the time and thanks for being on the podcast.
[00:29:30] Torrey Glendinning: Thanks a lot.
[00:29:31] Steve Smith: It was fun.