Built Environment Matters

North America's first B Corp Certified General Contractor, Advancing Collaboration and Innovation in Construction with Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) - Tim Coldwell, President, Chandos Construction

• Bryden Wood • Season 1 • Episode 21

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This episode Bryden Wood Head of Global Systems Jaimie Johnston MBE is joined by Tim Coldwell, President of Canada's Chandos Construction. Tim talks about being purpose-driven, 100% employee-owned, and the first and largest B Corp certified commercial general contractor in North America. In addition to recycling construction waste on 100% of projects, Chandos is also working to advance collaboration and innovation in the construction industry through Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). 

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Jaimie Johnston:

Hello again all, and welcome to this episode of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm your returning host Jaimie Johnston, and this episode I'm joined by Tim Coldwell from Chandos. Tim is a husband, dad and indigenous entrepreneur focused on leading by serving culture and the monetization of ideas. I think when I first met Tim, he described our organization and Chandos as a value-driven commercial organizations, which I thought was a fantastic summary. He serves as President of Chandos, an employee owned national technical builder that's leading change in the Canadian construction industry. Chandos is the first and largest B Corp certified commercial general contractor in North America. Under Tim's leadership Chandos has forged partnerships with social enterprises across Canada, focusing on employment of at-risk youth and those who are underrepresented in the construction industry. Tim's advisor to San Francisco's Center for Innovation in the Design and Construction Industry, CIDCI, and the past board chair of the Integrated Project Delivery Alliance, IPDA. He has been named a top 40 under 40 and was Alumnus of the Governor General's Canadian leadership conference. Welcome Tim.

Tim Coldwell:

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jaimie Johnston:

Thanks for joining. So yeah, that's an incredible CV. I know you absolutely live this stuff all day. We've spoken at length so perhaps we can kick off. So Chandos is, as I said, it's a company that's driven by a sense of purpose. So can we start there? Can you explain what the purpose is, where it comes from and how that ties in with your personal story and what drives you.

Tim Coldwell:

When the company was started and we were started in 1980, the two founders had this sense that the company would be here to support families. And it's this idea of being independent and supporting each other. So I would loosely call it solidarity. As we grew up over the years, that evolved to a more strong sense of corporate social responsibility. A few years ago we worked with Afdhel Aziz, who's probably the world's leading expert in brand purpose, and we articulated our brand framework. So our purpose statement is we exist to build a better world. Our vision is, we aspire to be the most innovative and collaborative contractor in North America by 2030. And then we've got four main values that I won't, you know, kind of dig into right now. And we've also got four missions and the missions are really how we live the purpose. And so we have a mission around being the world's largest B Corp certified contractor. A lot of that has to do with sustainability in our work. A lot of it has to do with DEI considerations in our workforce, and so there was a company mission around that. There is an industry mission where we advocate for things like inclusive hiring, hiring at-risk youth in the industry. There's a community mission where we advocate for things like community benefit agreements or social procurement mechanism to have a more inclusive supply chain. And then we've got a mission around the planet, which is certainly, I think the thing that we're known for is recycling construction waste on a hundred percent of our projects. So that kind of gives you a bit of the history, gives you a bit of a sense of what we're focused on. Maybe just pause there.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. So can you explain B Corp, for the benefit of people who haven't come across this before, and you're a hundred percent employee owned, which is particularly unusual in the industry, perhaps you can sort of expand on that a little bit.

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. Yeah. And you know what, I, I should also just a little bit on me personally, because I think it connects to our company and, and what we're focused on. So I self identify as an at risk youth. I was literally going to be in a cardboard box in the street if Chandos didn't give me an opportunity. And I was 17 turning 18. And I got a job at Chandos and I didn't have the best grades or the best experience, but I found a second family and a community in the construction industry. It's driven me over the years. So there's this kind of strong sense of a desire to, you know, use business as a force for good is I guess, a way of coming at it. But I have personally, also there's a whole kind of need for authenticity. There's too many people that run around and talk the talk and don't follow up with action. And that's what brought us to B Corp. Oh, and so B labs is a not-for-profit organization that was founded, oh man, it would have been in 2007 or eight or something like that. Jay Cohen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan were the co-founders of a company called AND1 Shoes, which was arguably the first socially responsible retailer in the US and, long story short, they had an opportunity to sell the business that they started and they went into it with eyes wide open. And wanted to preserve the ethical business operations that they'd developed. And it didn't happen. And so they felt that when they sold it to the private equity guys, that a lot of that using business as a force for good gets stripped away. And so they said to themselves, we've got a bunch of money in our jeans now, like what do we do? We could start another socially responsible business, but that's just one business. Why don't we develop a rating system and a mechanism for measuring that people actually walk the talk. And so B labs was formed out of that whole adventure. Some of the early B Corp's that were out there... Ben and Jerry's ice cream is a famous one. Patagonia is another very famous one. And really what it is is it's a third party audit of your business and how you operate your business. And it's a way to verify and certify that you actually walk the talk with regards to corporate social responsibility.

Jaimie Johnston:

It's incredible in this industry actually to have that kind of total focus on trying to do the right thing and not necessarily being driven by profits. I think you talk about sort of balancing people and profit. One of the things that really struck me when I was over there, firstly, that sense of family, like when we went for a meal, the kind of the banter and the discussion, it genuinely felt like being around a sort of family dinner table. It was good. It was good fun, actually. But also I hadn't quite understood, there was an awful lot of talk about this sort of respecting the indigenous populations and the lands and you know, where you were developing stuff. If you can explain that, because we don't have an equivalent here, but that I thought was fascinating. The sort of talk around that and how to engage when you talk about social procurement using this to kind of reach out to these communities, I thought that was really fascinating.

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. And you know, I'm a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, so I didn't grow up in community and I've been on a bit of a journey to get reconnected to my roots, you know, I'm studying my ancestors actually learning some of the language. So I'm not an expert, but what I would say, you know, the history of North America is colonizers came and started to expand out across the country and the indigenous people that were here got forced onto reservations, essentially. And that happened as the population grew and colonizers wanted more and more land. And in some instances, treaties were signed, promises were made. And in most instances, the promises haven't been kept. And what ended up happening is it created a segment of society that's reliant on the state to exist. They lost their traditional hunting and fishing grounds. They had no ability to really move forward on that basis and it created a lot of challenges. One of the other things that happened is in the early 19 hundreds, Johnny McDonald, Canada's first prime minister developed this plan around Indian residential schools. And it was this basically forcible removal of indigenous kids from these reservations and sending them to the residential schools often run by a church organizations, so the Catholics, the United church, the Anglicans a little bit. And so there was all sorts of intergenerational trauma that came from that. So imagine someone rolling up to a community and taking a four year old kid away, never to be seen again and thrown into these schools and often there is physical, sexual and mental abuse that went on there. And so that trauma of being separated from family happened at a very young age. And I don't know, one of the stats that's out there is something like. Children who experienced childhood trauma have a 80% greater likelihood than the general population to have challenges with substance abuse. And so those sorts of things have been hanging around in Canada for over a hundred years and what's happening right now is indigenous communities across the country are becoming self determined. They're forming their own governments that collaborate with the federal government, they're taking control back over their societies. And I think we're at this really interesting turning point in the country where indigenous peoples and non-indigenous will exist and co-exist the way it was always intended when the treaties were originally drafted.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, it was one of the touch points when we first spoke about it. We'd been looking at, you know, how do we employ ex Gurkas in our case and prisoners to build some of these components and you, I think penny dropped with you and going that's exactly what we're trying to do is trying to serve at least a couple of purposes by firstly creating opportunities for these communities to self determine, but also tackling some of these sort of bigger issues of them, the same problems everyone's facing around skills gap and productivity and aging demographic and things. So, yeah, it seemed like there was this fantastic coincidence of these things that are coming together. You want to expand a little bit on that? We talked a bit about it when I was there about some of these opportunities that you're now looking to actively design or construct towards these communities to try and sort of close that out with it?

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So one of the things that it connects directly to my personal story, the federal government in Canada tabled a bill called C3 44 a few years ago and I worked with Senator Omidvar on that bill, which was a bill that really incentivizes owners to use social procurement as selection criteria when hiring designers and contractors. So as an example, to put in an RFP for a hundred million dollar community infrastructure project, And 20% of the selection criteria is what social good can the design and construction consortium accomplish in the local community. And so that social good usually involves around careers, paths towards apprenticeships in the trades, hiring at-risk youth, hiring indigenous, creating economic benefits in the local community, purchasing locally in the community, those sorts of things and I think it's like one of the single greatest opportunities in the construction industry, you know, it connects directly to my story. But here's a crazy stat, Canada put out a report here what a year ago, there's one and a half million people working in the Canadian construction industry, population of 38 million people in the country. And the latest forecast has 700,000 about one and a half million retiring by the year 2030. That's like seven and a half years away. And when was the last time that you talked to a 13 year old kid who was excited about being a plumber or an electrician? We've got a serious challenge to address in terms of the Built Environment, how we're going to get this done. And then at the same time when 46, 50% or whatever the number is of the, of our trade basis, expected to retire. Demand for construction services is expected to double in the same period of time. So we've got a bit of a crisis on our hands over here.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. I mean it here as well. So I was at a conference yesterday, and someone was showing the series of graphs, one of which was the number of people in our construction industry. And over a long period, you can see these sort of peaks and troughs. So every economic cycle, a load of people disappear, but normally it builds up and then it exceeds. So over time it sort of trends upwards, and they were saying, you can see the dip in the sort of 2008, nine global crisis. This is the first time the number hasn't reached the same peak, it's topped out a bit and then covid and again, so it was the first time since I think, like world war one or something where billions of young men died. It's the first time we've had an industry that hasn't returned to its former level and actually, you know, you can start to see that dwindling. So, yeah, it's the thing that we've talked about on this podcast previously, if we don't find ways to bring more people in make this attractive, but it was, I found is interesting. One of the big themes that came out of the conference yesterday, obviously people talk about digital, they talked about tech, they talked about, you know, and MC and industrialization, but it was the people thing people kept returning to, going... None of it means anything if we don't have anyone to design and build our Built Environment.

Tim Coldwell:

One of the other things that I've been kind of focused on connecting the dots on, there's a professor at the University of Manitoba, his name is Vaclav Smeal, and he's one of Bill Gates' favorite authors. Gates has been very overt about how big of a fan he is with Smeal. And so he's known for a bunch of research that demonstrates that economies with a strong manufacturing base often perform better than those that don't. He's also known for making the observation that economies with a strong manufacturing base have societies that value trades people the same way they value doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants. And so there's this societal thing, but I think is going on where people for whatever reason, feel like they're a failure if they are in the trades or if they're in construction. And the reality is, is people in Canada who are in the trades make $25,000 more per year on average than the person with an undergraduate degree. So it makes absolutely no sense to me. I think the solution is actually to get to kids probably in elementary school and teach them that construction is not what they think it is it's not shovels and picks and hammers and wallowing in the mud. It's VDC, it's BIM it's leadership, it's technology, you know, the last kind of piece of that. It's like with the clean energy transition, a lot of people seem to think that the jobs that are being created millions and millions of jobs are going to be in the tech sector as if some app is going to solve it all. The majority of the clean jobs that are being created are in the construction trades. Somebody has to build wind firms and, and do this whole transition. So I think making that connection more over to folks I think is, uh, I think it's important.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah. That's definitely a thing that we, we we've talked about. So just wanna move on cause there's loads of things I want to talk to you about. One of the things, some of the early conversations we had, I mentioned in your CV that you were the Chair of the Integrated Project Delivery Alliance, so for those who haven't come across it, can you explain about IPD because again, one of the things we've been grappling with here is that were you to industrialize construction some of the blockers is actually how you procure it. So the frameworks, the contracts, the incentive incentivization doesn't necessarily stack up. And I didn't have much of experience of IPD, but when, once your team start explaining, oh, that's an incredibly well aligned to a lot of the things we're trying to do here is perhaps you can explain that a bit because it's fascinating stuff.

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. I think the best way to describe it is to say that you're in your project delivery. Think of it like a JV with 12 or 13 partners and the partners are not just two general contractors or two design firms, the partners... it's the general contractor, it's the architect, it's structural mechanical electrical consultants. It's the main structural traders, the mechanical electrical sub, it's the glazing sub, you group that group together and you usually get to about a dozen or so entities. And so they're all tied together, with a contract that's called the poly party contracts. So they all sign the same contract. So there's no like, primary, secondary, tertiary levels of contracting and essentially what happens is we separate, costs from profit and overhead is considered part of costs. And then we take the net profit that everyone wants to make on the project. You put it to the side and you pull it together in a pot, essentially. And if the job goes well and meets the client's conditions of satisfaction, Everybody makes a hundred percent profit. If the job goes sideways, for whatever reason, the costs associated with going sideways comes out of that profit pot until it goes to zero. But the fundamental commitment that an owner makes is that nobody will ever lose money on the job. And so your costs are always covered. And then on the other side of that adventure, if a job goes really well, usually half the savings goes to the benefit of the client. The other half, the savings is divided up amongst the project participants. Pro-rata the original contribution to the profit pot and there wasn't a lot of research on IPD. And so when we started doing this seven or eight years ago, we were part of a drug group that sponsored research. There's an whole 400 known IPD projects in North America, and there's about four or five of them where the profit pot went to zero. So it's a very stable delivery method. The incentivizations inside of it really drive best for project thinking and I don't think you would find any other delivery method has that kind of success ratio. It's a really powerful way of being, you know, I'd also say. It involves giving up control. So, you know, you're doing this collectively with a group of 10 or so other organizations and you can't just like, do whatever you want. You have to get people aligned, but what's best for the project. So a very different way of delivering infrastructure.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. The only thing, I was aware of, not saying it's the only one that we've done. The only, the only thing that I was aware of that was similar was Heathrow terminal five, where. BAA British Airports Authority as they were then took all the risk and said, I'll buy an insurance policy. I'll take all the risk. Don't even worry about it. So if anything goes wrong, don't spend time getting your audit trail in place, just work the problem. And because suddenly everyone was alleviated or absolved of the risk, it just enabled behaviors where everyone's working much more collaboratively. And of course the cost of the policy was a fraction of what it would have cost them to fight a legal cases and the overruns and all these things. So again, there's a sort of. Clear evidence that if you can resolve some of that. Yeah. It's like, you know, they never have to cash that cheque cause it never gets to zero, or rarely gets to zero they're all very, it rarely gets theory, but it's the, you know, the suddenly enables all these fantastic behaviors. So we've often run into this. I mean, we had this on the The Forge, the office that we were doing Forcing the superstructure to be very accurate, allowed everything else to happen very quickly. But the, the frame contractor had to work really hard to make that work. Normally they're going, why do I care? Normally the trades turn up. They do what they normally do, and it's completely fine. So IPD sort of incentivizes you to do a better job for the trades that follow because you're all in it together. And that I think is a. Yeah, massive step forward, isn't it? Yeah.

Tim Coldwell:

Well, there's a kind of a lean concept in there, right? Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard and those guys, if you want to get real intellectual, crack open some of their papers, but this idea of optimizing the entire system. So optimizing the job versus optimizing each scope of the job is a very powerful idea. Sometimes it makes more sense to have the frame sub do their scope of work in a sub optimal manner because the cost of that is way less than the savings that you get from all the other subs downstream. I think that's just what you described, but in most other, all other delivery methods, no, one's really paying attention to that. And then the last piece I'd say on this, I could use the only delivery method where the general contractor can pick up savings as a result of efficiencies in productivity from the trades. So we often are the ones that determine how effective the job site is. But in other delivery methods, the only savings we're going to pick up if the sub the site is super optimal for the trades is maybe general conditions, and you've got to get 15 other trades aligned to actually get the advantage of that. But in IPD, if we can help the electrician be 10% more effective. They reduce their labor costs by 10% and that flushes through to the benefit of the whole team. And we get a big chunk of it. So it's a very powerful incentive for contractors, particularly generals, to help the subs be effective.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, that again is a massively key point. So one of the things that we're seeing. In Canada, and US, and here is this idea that, you know, clients are driving this from the top. You've got sort of manufacturers are moving up into, up the value chain and that's sort of the role of the GC or tier one, potentially getting squashed in the middle. And there's people around the world, the customer and go, what is the new role? What's my new value proposition, but that really encourages you to become properly an integrator. So people use that term or bandy that around that term around, but I'm not sure they quite know what it means, but again, IPD sort of says, well, you become an integrator it's in your best interest to optimize logistics, make sure everyone's got their best working conditions, really make sure that, you know, balance between all these trades is working properly. So it's a potentially fantastic model for what is the new role of the GC in this sort of industrialized world.

Tim Coldwell:

And I'll just very quickly, I'll just give you a little story of the, um, you know, side, as I mentioned, there's like 10 or 12 other signatories to this contract. And so I'll just give an example of something that we usually sell, perform. So parapet, blocking and backing on up on the roof, you know, so we're doing the thing and, we've got eight or nine subcontractors that are there with us or trade partners as we call them in an IPD environment. And they're calling us out for executing our self perform work in our less than optimal manner. We were buying four by eight sheets of plywood and taking it off the back of the truck and putting it in the parking lot. Then dragging it up through stairwells and putting it on the roof and putting us tables on the roof and cutting it up on the roof. And our partners are like, what the hell are you guys doing? Like, there's a better way to do that. And you're blowing your brains out on labor and it's costing us. So how about we smarten up here? The beauty of IPD is you get everybody, everyone thinking about those sorts of things. Right. So it's pretty powerful.

Jaimie Johnston:

You wouldn't normally see that where at one trade sort of identifying opportunities rather than going, you know, there's a better way of doing that because yeah, it's, everyone's best interest. It's very, very good. Yeah. So we're very keen to talk more about that in future, but yeah, sort of moving on to industrialized construction, Modern Methods of Construction, sort of angle as IPD sort of lends itself to that more innovative approach. Can you describe the landscape as it is in Canada at the moment with regard to this sort of shift towards industrialized construction, it's obviously a sort of big global theme. Can you say what it looking like from your perspective? And what's the sort of capability, what are the things the things that, that people are investigating?

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. And you've got to keep in mind. The context in Canada is , it's a vast open country in 38 million people, right? So, a lot of empty, nothing. You can drive for 14 hours from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg and there's nothing. So, a lot of the modular world really exists around the energy industry. So mines, forestry, Fort McMurray oil sands, camps of 6,000 people in the middle of nowhere with temporary runways that are built and those sorts of things. So that's been kind of status quo. And so as this conversation about modern methods of construction devolved in Canada, we've seen the camp builders jump up and down and say, okay, we're going to be in the modular business. And, you know, the providing modules for hotels and those sorts of things, or affordable housing, We've never seen that be faster or cheaper and the industry widely accepts it's not faster or cheaper. and so that's been kind of dominating the landscape for the last kind of, when you talk about modern methods of construction. Call it decade there's four or five large modular builders. And then the thing that's been happening a little bit more recently, there's an absolute explosion with CLT. And so there's CLT buildings going up all over the place. I think that has catalyzed a bit of a conversation about multi trade prefab. But there is no part of the supply chain where you can say, I want to panelize interior wall assemblies and have mechanical electrical stuff put in the middle of them. You can't go and get that done in Canada. And so, the way to make that work is you've got to work with a design team and you've got to work with, partners, trade partners that you select. Let's say, we're going to do this together. And so that's why there's a perfect connection with IPD. You know, that's exactly what that whole delivery map is all about.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. We've been talking to you about platforms haven't we that was, one of our sort of key touch points that I thought was quite interesting. You had done quite a lot of research around this topic and just as we sort of responded to IPD, you responded to platforms when, ah, that's quite an interesting idea. So perhaps you can talk a little bit about that journey and how we're starting to try and bring these things together over there.

Tim Coldwell:

So for me, every time there's some sort of a structural system, you know, the new mouse trap in Canada, somebody thinks they're going to have a patent. And now it's a proprietary system and the designers get all up in arms because now you're locked into proprietary system and are we really getting value for money? And that's a challenge. So, things like load-bearing steel stud and girder slab, and those sorts of things have those challenges. But I'm really interested in, in platforming is it allows us to use the same trade base that we would usually be using. And it also does not require proprietary materials. We are going to be using the same materials that we would have been using anyways. And it's just about how it all goes together. And to me, the value add of a general contractor is how it all goes together. And really, you know, when you marry that up with IPD, this idea of integrating it and reaching way down in our supply chain and bring them up higher to have them collaborate with the designers. I think there's a ton of opportunity there. You know, and so we'd heard about the work that you guys are doing and we reached out because I think there's a perfect connection between, you know, your leadership on platforms and our leadership in Canada on IPD. Like there's 60 IPD projects that are known in Canada, we're doing 44 of them. So we've really pushing that in this market. And I think marrying these two, these two things together would be super powerful.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. I'd like to get your comment ,your colleague Markku made a comment about, or one of his big sort of takeaways, was that we'd thought through this sort of design process all the way through to the assembly on site, then that was the big missing link. Actually, normally the designers get to a certain point and go super optimized. It, you know, it's very well coordinated. It's compact. But they haven't necessarily thought through the secrets of how you put the thing together. And I thought that we sort of take that for granted a little bit, but Maarku was going, oh, this is what you're really doing is taking that thought process, right, the way through the temporary works, the install on sites. That's a bit different because you're joining up with the design into the construction phase and that's often, the missing link or the spark gap.

Tim Coldwell:

I totally agree with that, you know, in Canada designers, will get cross threaded with their professional liability insurance. If they start to have opinions about means and methods, but means, and methods are the thing that drives most of productivity when you start really getting into it. So the idea of having contractors and designers like really figuring out the most effective way to deal with means and methods on a project, I think is super powerful.

Jaimie Johnston:

So you just said that you're doing 44 of the 60 IPD projects, So Chandos. are clearly massively leading this space. Do you think that there's a big band wave that's following you? Do you think that number will increase that there'll be 150 and you'll be doing 50 of them because there'll be more people joining or are you a total outlier or are you bringing the industry with you, do you think, or are you just starting to differentiate yourselves and separate?

Tim Coldwell:

So. I think we're kind of kindred souls with Bryden Wood. When we started talking about your journey on platforming over 20 some years, you know, I was the board chair of the Integrated Project Delivery Alliance when we founded it. And we had this decision to make around IPD. Do we try to corner that and say the Chandos way of doing it is the only pure way and try to corner the market. And that doesn't work. You need more than one or two contractors doing it. And so what the idea actually was is the form of national not-for-profit. And frankly, we'd given away most of the knowhow that we developed around this, and frankly, a lot of the know-how that we have came from contractors in the United States. It's no real secrets. Um, but I think the real thing that separates us from our competitors is. The cultural alignment we have. Um, so, you know, there's from studying seven years ago, there was one or two IPD projects. There's 60 today in the country. I wouldn't be surprised in five years more like it's not going to go exponentially, I think there might be maybe a couple of hundred. IPD projects. I expect that we will continue to dominate that space. The reason I say that is that the number of contractors in Canada that actually compete with us and seek out IPD as a delivery method is more or less static. We've got three or four main competitors and they do great work, but I don't see a huge rush from other contractors to get into the math of it and it's perplexing. Why not? We see all sorts of benefits around it, but that is the state of the union right now.

Jaimie Johnston:

But there is a sort of standard forms, a contract, and, there's a lot of supporting material. I mean, again, the alignment with sort of what we've done. You've published a lot on this. You've put a load of supporting material. I think it brings us back to that sort of social value thing that you're not trying to run away with it. You're trying to bring the market. Actually, if I made the entire industry better than what more can I do from a social purpose point of view, that's the biggest lever I can pull. Isn't it to shift the industry, not just to become the best contractor in that space.

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. And one of the things that we've done, you know, our roots and our strength are in commercial buildings, right? And so we started doing IPD and high-performance commercial buildings. Our first IPD job was a 30,000 square foot, a net zero office building most normally a NetZero building in the world. At the time, I think there's one in Russia now, but anyways, so we kind of started with that, but then one of the other things that we've done is I'm really interested in the strategic concept of adjacencies. And so we took IPD into the civil world and we're doing flood remediation projects and wastewater treatment facilities in that space. Clients with complex projects, lab developers in particular started to hear about it. And so now we're doing one of the largest, actually the largest nuclear research facility in Canada, Chalk River. We've got Bird construction as a JV partner there. That's doing very well and then more recently we've taken, IPD into the indigenous space and there's this whole kind of feeling of 150 years of broken promises with indigenous communities. They have a whole bunch of infrastructure to build. We roll up and say, Hey, we're leaders in this delivery method. And the only way we get paid, all of our profit is if we keep our promises, there's a pretty powerful connection there that works quite well and so I think we're going to keep doing our thing and taking it into adjacent industries, but I don't think the delivery method is ever going to be more than say, 20% of the entire market. I just, I just don't see that happening.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, that's interesting. I like that term adjacencies actually. Cause again, we would sort of recognize that as trying to move things from, in our case, it's from sort of, pharmaceuticals into health care and then into data centers and moving things around. So yeah. Adjacencies I shall be using using that term. So there's loads more we can talk about, obviously we will, we will continue to talk. You and I have been talking quite a lot recently. I'm going to be spending more time out in North America. So, yeah, we'll wrap it up for now and, resume the conversation later on, but we always ask this it's an impossible question, but like, to sort of get a sense of where people's heads are at that if you have to sort of look 10 years in the future, can you see there being fundamental shifts? Mental picture is there's this. Wave. And we're a little tiny surfer and like the waves he's going to collapse on top of this, or we're going to surf away at a trouble and it's all going to be fantastic, but land on the beach and have cocktails, but where do you think, I mean, it feels like we're at a tipping point. What do you think is going to happen in the next 10 years? Do you agree that there's a sort of if we don't fix the next 10 years, we're in trouble sort of vibe or do you think we'll incrementally improve or will technology save us? What do you think are the big sort of trends that we're going to see?

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah. I'm a glass half full kind of guy by nature. So, I have a faith and hope and our ability to ride that wave and drink cocktails on the beach. It will require like one of the most fundamental shifts in ever in our industry. But I think the construction industry is up to it. We've got these huge challenges around labor. There's huge opportunity in our industry. We're so far behind other industries, so that the ability to really make quick, meaningful change is there, what has been lacking has been the will and the leadership to do it. But I think we're going to get squeezed into that. And I think people will be galvanized to do the right things.

Jaimie Johnston:

No, I agree. One of the things that I was reflecting on was, so we met over lockdown effectively. Didn't we? And I thought, well, something really interesting about... we were both talking at CIDCI events, and we identified what you were doing is going, that's really interesting. They're on something here and you thought the same about us and you go it's a fantastic, then that may be, could only have happened over lockdown where suddenly the sort of everyone was in the same sort of situation. But I thought it was brilliant that two completely disparate entities in completely different markets and different bits of the world could identify each other, spots some commonalities. Now, now we're talking on a regular basis. So that sort of connection. Yeah. It gives me great hope that we can find all the people like this and sort of join all these dots then. Yeah. That collectively we can, we can shift this, but no I'm also very a glass half full guy. So anyway, so we'll, we'll park it there. It was always fantastic to catch up with you. I'm sure we'll speak in very soon, but in the meantime, thanks ever so much for.

Tim Coldwell:

Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.

Jaimie Johnston:

So hopefully you found that as interesting as I did. Thanks for listening and please join us on the next episode of Built Environment Matters.

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Jaimie Johnston MBE

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