Chips Off the Old Block

Fun new podcast episode is up! The latest From the Fabricator features two individuals whose fathers were in the business and they have applied the lessons learned from them to make significant strides in their own careers.

I start with Brady Nails of MT Contracting in Montana. Extensive conversation that had a ton of interesting nuggets, including training and recruitment, along with insight on AI in the industry. Then Mike DeFrank joined me. Mike just landed at Country Glass in Dallas, and it was great to get his perspective on various aspects of the business, including business development in a softer market and working in all aspects of our space. Two really talented individuals who will be players in our space for a long time —and who knows, maybe their kids will follow in their footsteps too! Thank you, as always, for checking it out. I appreciate it!

Watch on Youtube or listen here, as well as wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Elsewhere…

Recent data

I made my prediction on the ABI and said it would be 45.6. I wasn’t too far off, as it clocked in at 46.8 – so I was almost there. Knew it would be down, though, but happy it wasn’t as low as my prediction. There was some decent news: Inquiries had their best month since last October and have now had two months in a row. That perking up is a positive, and while it’ll take a bit to affect our market, it’s still excellent to see. 

Also this week, Dodge released “construction starts” and non-residential had a 39% jump- Hotels/motels had a nice month, and that’s a segment that had been flagging for a while, and education had a good past 30 days as well. However, temper some of that enthusiasm, as the majority of the overall gain was for manufacturing locations and data centers. Analysts still have concerns about economic instability, pricing, and policy issues. So the beat goes on….

Coldplay scandal

You, I am sure, have seen the Coldplay concert “kiss cam” that caught a CEO and his HR person in a terrible spot… well, their crisis management team is working hard, and this reply they had online is pretty brilliant.

Summer Q&A series

Last this week… Time to check out what’s cooking on the aluminum side of our world in my Summer Q&A series. I was lucky to get Chris Schultz of Kawneer. What’s interesting here is that everyone I have talked to so far in this series, I knew and had relationships with. This time with Chris, it was the first extended conversation of any kind, so it was nice to get to know him. He is a talented and sharp person.  Really impressive.

MAX: Okay, Chris, thank you so much for doing this summer Q&A. My first question for you is, how's it going? How's life? I know the industry is always an adventure. You hanging in there?

CHRIS: It's going pretty well. It's been a very busy year for us at Kawneer.  We've had basically five years of new product development projects coming to fruition over the last 12 months. So, we've been really busy getting products out to the market, some new products, which is really exciting to close that side of development. But it's also a huge challenge. Now we're into the promotion and marketing and meeting with customers to make sure that they understand these products so the work doesn't stop just because we finished some of our R&D of these new products.

MAX: No doubt. So, speaking of the new products, I assume some of them are probably the hot things you've got going on. What's trending on the streets in Kawneer world?

CHRIS: On the curtain wall side we've launched 1600 UT SS, which is our ultra thermal screw spline system. It’s a semi-unitized system so you can build ladders for faster construction, it has high thermal performance, and we packed a ton of features into the new platform. So that's a huge product launch for us that was years in the making that is now out on the market.

On the storefront side, we've got a new hurricane impact storefront, and that's IR 521, which we've been launching in phases over the last 9 months as we receive Florida product approval. That's another brand new platform with a ton of features, installation capabilities, and certified testing requirements. That has been keeping us very busy, but we're excited to begin pushing that out into the marketplace.

And then on the window side, we’re soon adding to our OptiQ platform with an Offset Fixed Projected window. Visually, it mimics a single hung window, but the lower lite projects instead of slides. And I know our Window product team is really excited about that one and going to meet with developers and school districts to promote that product. So really everyone across our product management team has a different project that they get to go and not only launch this year, but then go out and promote to customers and architects.

MAX: I love it. And I give you credit, that's a lot of balls in the air. Congrats on that. Last question. I'm very curious if you have an opinion or not on artificial intelligence (AI). It's starting to seem like it's growing a little more in our industry, but I'm curious with you, especially as you've just mentioned, having been through all these new product launches and with so much going on, what are your thoughts on AI and our world?

CHRIS: So from a personal standpoint, just working in our industry, I think there's huge potential in a product development marketing standpoint. Just aggregating a lot of information, building things like product requirements for our engineers, building briefs for our marketing team. So basically, as a product manager, I can put a lot of thoughts down on paper and have AI as an assistant to kind of enhance my work, deliver documents to different teams that are more organized or more succinct and can sort of send them off with all the relevant information for a certain project. So that's a personal use case. How we can we take the first steps to utilizing AI in our industry? Unfortunately, in building materials, we're a little slower than the technology industry. So I think it's still to be seen how it will be integrated and adapted to our specific industry, how it might be used to projects or be fed really specific data about different product lines to help with designs, estimates and takeoffs.

I think there's unbelievable potential there. Just not sure exactly how long it will take for that to come to us.  I think it is coming as the tools are being developed, but for now they're being used to enhance individual’s jobs as sort of an assistant. It'll be interesting to see how it's adapted to be more useful industry-wide.

 MAX: Appreciate that and that and makes a lot of sense. Keep up the good work. You’ve got a lot going on. This summer is probably flying by for you.

CHRIS: Yes, I know. I feel like summer's already over, but we're in the thick of it for sure.

MAX: Wonderful. Keep it all going and thank you so much for doing this.