Turning Construction Administration Into Firm Intelligence with Tim Douglas | 702

0:00I think it's data that's a really untapped resource for firms to start looking at. Hello, Architect Nation. Welcome back. This is the place for you if you run an architectural design practice, landscape architectural practice, inter-design practice, or engineering firm. And if you've ever aspired to be the go-to firm in your market above all others, you know that firm that other firm owners secretly envy, the one that gets all the good projects and all the repeat clients? Well, if that's the case, you're going to love today's episode because today you'll discover the hidden value in your firm that you're wasting every single day guaranteed.

0:40The secrets that are hiding right in your RFIs, your submittals and your consultant responses that can make your drawings the best on the market. And how your past projects contain the key to future great projects and how to use this in your firm today. In today's episode, I sit down with Tim Douglas. He's the CEO and founder of Roundhouse Labs. It's a software company helping architecture firms turn overlooked construction administration information into your firm's superpower. Tim began life as an architect. Then he spent 25 years in technology working for Autodesk and then Procore. And now he's bringing that experience back to architects through Roundhouse Labs.

1:26As I mentioned, it's a software company that turns your CA data into understandable patterns so you can make better decisions and discover the hidden value inside your practice. You've built a practice that balances design, delivery, and client trust. But when it comes to taxes, your firm's structure might be quietly working against you. At Gilt, we specialize in helping architecture firms uncover hidden tax inefficiencies, from outdated ownership setups to missed expense opportunities and project-level tax traps. Even well-run studios can leave five figures on the table each year simply because their financial foundation hasn't evolved as the firm has.

2:07Gilt helps you design a smarter structure, one that turns your firm's growth into real savings and stronger take-home income. Gilt, tax strategy built for architects. Don't wait for next tax season. Schedule your complimentary consultation at joingelt.com. That's J-O-I-N-G-E-L-T.com to learn more and mention BOA when you sign up. Hey, Tim, welcome to the Business of Architecture podcast. Thanks, Enoch. It's a real pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Excellent. So you represent Roundhouse Labs. And tell us how you came to be CEO so our listeners can get an idea of your journey to become in the tech space that you've been in for a while and that you're in now.

2:51Yeah. So I started my journey in architecture at Cornell. So I studied architecture at Cornell. And when I graduated in 1990, I worked for Richard Meyer in New York for about seven years. Just had a great, great run there. Met a lot of great people that I'm still close with. and then moved out to San Francisco for an opportunity to work with Skidmore, Ongs & Merrill. One of the associates who'd moved out from New York told me it was a great firm to work for and it was a good opportunity to see something else on the other coast. But after completing a building in downtown San Francisco, 101 Second Street, it was a great project, great client, great GC, great team.

3:39The dot-com boom was happening. And as great as the project was, I always knew that technology could play a greater role in the way that we delivered buildings. And at the time, I jumped in with an early startup called Bidcom. And we were going to revolutionize project management from a desktop computer a decade before mobile. So I'm not sure how we really thought we were going to do that, but that was our vision. And then I spent, you know, the next 25 years basically in construction tech, starting the construction business line at Autodesk and then spending a few years at Procore leading their global strategic account team.

4:17It was just about a year ago that a buddy of mine, Stacy Scapano, who worked for me at Autodesk and had been advising the founders of Roundhouse, said that there was an opportunity to join this company and really take it to market. it. So Roundhouse was created within an architecture firm, 75-person firm in Atlanta, Praxis 3, by Craig James and Stuart Rahm, who are the principals of the firm and the founders of Roundhouse Labs. And so it's really just been in this year that Roundhouse was spun out as its own independent entity. About seven months ago, I stepped into the role of CEO to validate the product market fit to understand if this could work for firms beyond Praxis 3.

5:03And up to today, I've met with probably about 30 or so firms, understanding what the state of CA is today, and looking at, you know, how we can help change what CA is. I think really trying to restore control to architects during that critical part of the project delivery, and give them some insight that is really locked up in data. And today that data is very spread across local drives and emails and Procore. So bringing some structure and clarity to that data and delivering insights really our mission. What have been the challenges that you currently see that firms are dealing with as it relates to construction administration?

5:45Yeah, it's interesting, you know, coming back to architecture after 25 years and talking to these firms and seeing what's evolved as the state of CA today, quite honestly, it's not much better than it was in 1990 when we were, you know, having to deal with rolled up fax paper RFIs and submittals that poured in overnight. They're digital now, but the way that, you know, the workflows are managed in a very ad hoc and fragmented way. One of the key kind of culprits of it is, you know, general contractors have really standardized on Procore. And talking to these firms, in any of these firms, it's somewhere between 75 % and 95 % of all RFIs and submittals come out of Procore.

6:35Procore is a fantastic platform for general contractors. It gives them exactly what they need to run their work. but it's not what architects need to manage their side of the process. And so I think that what we've been able to do is help people think differently about what it would be like if you didn't have to log into Procore, if you didn't have to chase consultants and engineers via email and track all of this in a spreadsheet. There's really an easier way and a better way to do it than the currently kind of bespoke and fragmented practices. and what is the alternative what are the benefits of using something like what roundhouse labs offers yeah well it's interesting when i am was introduced to the the company and the technology um one thing that i found really interesting out of the gate was so much ac technology has is found kind of founded on a project-based view and sure the projects are foundational.

7:41But the structure by which you look at data is across your firm. And so one of the things that I saw with Roundhouse that was really compelling was the way the data is structured is really structured in the way that architects work, organize their teams, and it provides visibility at the firm level, at the studio level, at the client level, and at the project level. And by structuring the data that way, you can really take different snapshots into the data to understand what's happening across the firm. If you're a principal, what's happening within your studio, if you're a studio head, what's happening with a specific client, or of course, what is happening with a project.

8:22And what's been really interesting with that data structure and with Roundhouse being deployed by Praxis 3 for a decade is we have this incredible data set to understand patterns. And I think that this is the real opportunity for firms who are getting started today. Even on a simple project, we can begin to gain insights into relationships between the people on the projects, the timelines to respond to elements, the scopes of work that are more problematic than others. So by looking at this data across multiple dimensions, I think firms are really able to unlock some insights that can really help them better operate on the front end in terms of their documentation or practices so that they aren't chasing issues on the back end.

9:09And to be able to do so from one single source of truth for the architect, kind of built for the architect by some architects. Okay. Can you give me some example of what specifically that might look like? Yeah. So one of the things that we've started deploying are what we're calling CAI portals. So we're leveraging agents on top of the data that we can export from the platform to understand, in the case of Praxis 3, over 10 years, there were 21 ,000 RFIs and 30 ,000 submittals. So across all of those projects and all the RFIs and submittals, we can see what were the scopes of work that were most problematic in automotive versus retail versus mixed use.

9:57And so envelope issues in automotive tend to trend higher than envelope issues in retail for some reason. And so being able to understand that, then get to the root cause, what's causing these issues? And while the tool itself does a great job of logging all of this transaction data, the state of when an RFI or submittal comes in, who it needs to be routed to, the timeline you have to respond, and kind of that red, yellow, green kind of view of where things stand. And it's truly the data within these RFIs and submittals, the questions that are asked, the answers that are given, who's responding, what role do they have, what CSI division does it impact?

10:42So having all of that data underneath the platform really gives us a really good idea in terms of understanding what's performing and what's not performing. I was recently meeting with a firm and what they brought up that we hadn't explored but just built a portal to look into it is what these issues by certain studio types, if you will, may mean in terms of the fee structure that you apply on one type of work or another. The other is looking at the resource loading and being able to see, you know, who might be struggling in the firm, whose turnaround times are lagging, who's overrun because the number of RFIs are being asked to manage is just untenable.

11:27So it really can have an impact on things that you wouldn't necessarily think like, oh, understanding my RFIs and submittals, I could better understand how I should be charging for what types of work or who in the firm is performing well and underutilized or overutilized. So it's really been interesting and eye-opening us to be able to see and expose these trends that go far beyond getting answers, questions answered in your RFIs and reviewing these submittals, but really in a much larger sense, how the business of the firm is being managed and how it could be better managed to drive greater profitability and better resource utilization.

12:08do you have an example that you can think of that where this has happened where you can walk me specifically with you like they discovered with x project you don't need to name the project but we discovered that this was a recurring theme or maybe over these course of projects or perhaps give me a hypothetical scenario so we can see how firm owners can understand how they would leverage something like this yeah so you know in in the case of praxis three there there is a project type that is facing, you know, tended to have a greater density of RFIs on penetration issues. And so as a result of looking at the massive data around penetrations within that specific water penetration issues within that specific typology, the firm looked at how they were documenting penetrations across their portfolio and looked at historically how they'd been doing it and then took proactive action to say, hey, now we know why these things are coming up.

13:12What's being asked? How we're answering it on a recurring basis at a higher volume than we are other scopes of work? Let's take what we've learned, what's been pointed out here, and reimagine how we document these things, how we specify aspects of the work related to penetrations in this type of project. And so with these models now, it is offering risk mitigation opportunities. So for one firm that just got up and running recently, we're simply looking at the data within one project. But even within that one project and the spike in RFIs and looking at the resources available who show up in the RFIs and submittals in that project, it's suggested that you may want to take this one resource in the project who's underutilized and reallocate him to submit a review for the next week.

14:05So really being able to take proactive action based on these insights to, again, load balance and address issues proactively rather than letting things pile up and get worse than they are today. Yeah, the main thing that I'm getting here from you, Tim, is the power of the data. Yes. So all the data that runs through a practice, I remember back in the day when LinkedIn was purchased for whatever billions of dollars. I may be exaggerating, but these astronomical sums. And as someone not in the tech space, I was curious about what drove that value. And my understanding is that there's two things.

14:48There's number one is the user base. So companies will come and they pay for a ready-made user base because that takes time, energy, and money to build up users. And then number two, it's the data. The data behind that. For instance, LinkedIn, everything everyone's posting gives you a pulse on what's happening in the business world that can then be mined, and that's where a lot of the value is. It seems like the same thing would be true for architecture and design firms. A thousand percent. I was meeting with a firm in New York a couple weeks ago, and what they were curious about, they were like, wow, this is pretty interesting.

15:24We could take legacy data sets for projects that are completed, ingest the data from Procore, all the RFIs and submittals from a project, and begin to establish baselines for different types of work that we pursue. But what they also asked about was, well, what do you think about how we would leverage this data, perhaps anonymized across firms and the types of trending we may be able to see as a cohort of firms who opt in. Of course, our clients' data is their data. It's not our data. But if they were interested in seeing trends beyond and outside of their own firms, I think the data that we're collecting offers a very interesting starting point to do some benchmarking on CA that's never been done before.

16:14Yeah. What would you say would be the top three benefits that a firm would get from having, using something like Roundhouse as opposed to using spreadsheets or whatever system they're currently using? Yeah, I think the way that we look at our platform is, we really haven't talked about, is the means by which you create this data set and this baseline of data. And that's by driving much more productive CA practices. So streamlining those workflows, having RFIs and submittals simply flow from Procore into Roundhouse, taking away all that time, that wasted time of logging into Procore for this RFI or that submittal.

16:56Based on a study that we ran with Praxis 3, we think that CA consumes about 27 % capacity of an architecture firm. And a lot of that is just uploading and downloading, tracking and spreadsheets, emailing engineers and consultants, recompiling information and pushing it back to Procore. So on the front end, there's tremendous productivity advantages that can be gained by putting this into a platform rather than across a bunch of, you know, disconnected tools. So on the productivity, and of course, the more you use it, the more data you're collecting, which is giving you a better base of data to understand the trends across your business.

17:35So it's the productivity and then it's the intelligence on the back end to help understand those trends baseline again by client, by studio, across the firm. And then ultimately, leveraging those insights to drive better practices at the front end to reduce the number of those things that crop up, you know, at that critical moment between design intent and construction execution that today kind of operates as a chasm. Yeah, give me an example. What do you mean by what's that chasm? Well, I think it's interesting. Like I said, general contractors got Procore. Autodesk and Procore don't speak to one another.

18:17I think that Autodesk is kind of the domain of design, if you will, and Procore is the domain of the general contractor and construction execution. These platforms today don't talk to each other. So we think that there is a need to build bridges for this data to flow. And that's what we're doing with the CA bridges that we're building so that we can be that connective glue between design intent and construction execution and two platforms that don't talk to each other today. Beautiful. And what have been some of the challenges that this is a young company? Yep. So you're coming in as CEO. what are some of the when you look at growing a startup that we could learn what are some lessons that you've learned in business that we could apply to the world of design and architecture running a practice yeah i think i i think it's focus um focus has always been one of the the things that i learned early in my career and while there's lots of other interesting things that can be done.

19:19And in fact, there are other things that Roundhouse can solve for. Focusing specifically on CA, getting very, very deep in CA, understanding the process, the implications, the current state, the desired state, but getting really, really deep and a broad range of perspectives on that one thing that you're going to solve and understand that that focus is going to drive the execution against all the aspects of the business in terms of your outbound and outreach to the folks you want to chat with. Make sure you're talking to the right person who CA matters to. Once you're a customer, how do we best support the teams that are working through CA every single day within an architecture practice?

20:08So it's really bringing that focus and limited resources to that tip of the spear, so to speak, and then to gain the opportunity, to earn the opportunity with our clients as we grow to tackle other things. One of the opportunities that's been raised by a number of firms we've talked to, they're like, well, what about field reports? Those seem to be like the third leg of the CA stool. I was like, that's interesting. We should think about that. But let's get a bunch of firms saying we should think about that as something to do together, rather than us sitting here and thinking that we know what we should do next, and then bringing that into that focus.

20:51Really powerful. Yeah, I love. One thing I often like to share with the clients who we work with on a consulting basis is what Warren Buffett says about the importance of resource allocation. Yes. And that one of the CEO's primary roles is resource allocation, aka figuring out with limited resources, what do we focus on? Correct. What's going to give us the biggest return? What's given an asymmetrical return for the input? No, I think that's absolutely true. It's what I do every day sitting in this office is how do we get the most out of, you know, the limited resources we have as a young company today and how we deploy our resources and then how we engage with our customers who are getting on this journey with us.

21:40Beautiful. Well, thank you, Tim. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about Roundhouse, about, you know, how can people find out more about this software? Yeah, so you could go to roundhouselabs.com is our website, learn a little bit more about the platform there, feel free to email me. It's tdouglas at roundhouselabs.com. We're really looking to get pilots up and running with as many customers as we can right now, just so that we can learn, but also deliver some returns. And so we are offering these 60-day trials to firms who are getting started so that they can generate 60 days of data that then we can begin exposing the types of trends and the types of intelligence that will only get bigger and, you know, with higher fidelity as that data set grows.

22:33And so finding those early partners to work with us is where we are on our journey. And we're having a lot of great conversations today and look forward to talking to more architects over the coming months and years. What is the ideal size firm for your beta groups? I'm not sure if that's what you call them, but for your early adopters. It's interesting. I'd say we're starting with firms of at least 50 employees. Seems to be kind of about the baseline where it resonates. But we are talking to some very large global design firms as well who are looking at piloting, starting in a certain location, starting in a certain studio.

23:13So we know based on the work at Praxis 3, they've delivered 3 ,000 projects through the platform over the past decade so that we know that this platform can scale to support volume. But that's how we think firms are going to get started, piloting, proving success, and adding projects and studios as that success and that understanding and that insight accrues. and before we bounce out here i did have another question that uh that came up based upon something you said said you're using agents right now layered on top of the software can you tell me more about what role what are agents and what role they have in the software yeah i would say that right now um we're doing some experimentation um leveraging clod um kind of created what i would call a principal agent to take a look at this data and think about this data and what you would want to understand if you could understand everything that sits below, you know, within these projects.

24:20And so it's been really interesting. We've been deploying these portals. We're calling them the CAI portals to our early clients, even just based on one project. When you say portal, what does that mean? It's just a website that they can go to to see what the signal is coming from the RFIs and submittals in their project. Interestingly, some of these clients, while they're just getting certain projects up and running and are very early, are also reaching out to their general contractors on completed work to connect Roundhouse with Procore to bring in data from historic projects. So they can begin building their data platform, if you will, across different project typologies, which then they can start to see what the trends were in the prior work.

25:13So as they begin to develop signal in the new work, they'll know what signal to be looking for because our agents are able to expose that from the underlying RFI and submittal data. And what do you mean when you say signal, Tim? It's, you know, if you look at the data set, your eyes glaze over. But if we can very concisely color code and highlight specific pieces of information that are going to help you reconsider how you're operating today or expose something to you that makes you think differently about how you are documenting something or drawing something, that signal is what we want to surface.

25:56You know, humans are not very good at parsing these tremendous data sets. One of the great things about CA is it's a high-frequency environment. You know, there's hundreds, thousands of RFIs and submittals on any given project. It's an excellent opportunity to unleash agents against this massive data to develop insight into performance of your engineers and consultants. the turnaround times for different scopes of work, the resource load across your studio. These are the signals that in today's world with bespoke email-based, spreadsheet-based CA, you simply can't get a handle on it. And, you know, take that signal and make improvements in how you operate to drive that, you know, greater profitability and greater project success.

26:50And what do you think about the idea that architecture firms or the opportunity that architecture firms can start looking at their practices as storehouses of data, meaning that there's a value that's being untapped in every architect's practice? No, I think that that's true. And I think that, you know, it's interesting when you think about the last 15, 25 years, you know, I've spent a lot of that time focused on solutions to help general contractors in the way that they manage the execution of the work. Most of the investment, I think, in the architectural landscape over this past same period has all been going into kind of the model and the asset and gaining insight into, you know, how we can pack more data into the models to get more insight out of it.

27:47And I think that that's happened to varying degrees of success. But I think that kind of, you know, looking at the business of architecture, like there's kind of unsexy transactional level information flows like CA that really need to be managed to drive that type of performance in the business. I'm all for getting more helpful, useful data in and out of the model to drive better insights, to drive better cost estimates, things like that. Critically important. But there are, I would say, unsexy parts of project delivery. CA sits right at the heart of that. And I think it's data that's really an untapped resource for firms to start looking at.

28:35beautiful well thank you tim for coming on with us and again tell us the website domain that that our users can our listeners can go to to find out more about your product yeah www.roundhouselabs.com all right thank you tim thank you i really enjoyed the conversation and that is a wrap and here's today's smart practice tooltip if you've ever been frustrated because you feel like you're drowning in spreadsheets when you should be designing masterpieces? Well, here's the thing. We found that the average firm owner is wasting up to 20 to 30 hours every single month on admin tasks that could be delegated with the right system.

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30:33Gilt, tax strategy built for architects. Don't wait for next tax season. Schedule your complimentary consultation at joingelt.com. That's J-O-I-N-G-E-L-T.com to learn more and mention BOA when you sign up. Now, today's episode of the Business of Architecture show, of course, is sponsored by SmartPractice. It's our proprietary solution, copy and paste that you can plug right into your architecture firm to be able to liberate you as a firm owner so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of your architecture. Here's the thing. Free advice can get you started, but if you want real transformation, then it requires custom tailored advice.

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31:52Carpe diem.