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How Will the EU–UK Trade Agreement Reshape Construction in Britain?
0 Playsin 4 hours
Join Jason and Carlos for episode 90 of The Off Site podcast as they explore three industry topics:
⚡ Germany's Largest Offshore Wind Farm**: Examining a massive 960-megawatt project in the German North Sea and what it means to work on entirely privately-funded infrastructure versus government-backed projects.
🇬🇧 UK-EU Trade Deal Reset**: Breaking down the new trade agreement's potential impact on construction costs, material imports, and workforce mobility across British building sites.
💼 Construction vs Sales Background Hiring**: Discussing the ongoing debate around whether construction tech companies should prioritise industry experience or traditional sales expertise when building their teams.
Key Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
04:05 - German Wind Project
13:20 - UK-EU Trade Deal
24:05 - Industry Hiring Discussion
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Transcript
Brexit's Impact on UK Economy
00:00:00
Speaker
I have a conspiracy theory here. So yeah, you mentioned material costs in the UK from... There's a lot of goods on projects in the UK. The UK is a relatively small market.
00:00:11
Speaker
Many of the goods that are delivered on projects come from... 60%. Yeah, it's massive. yeah it's yeah Germany is massive. The Netherlands is massive. Spain is massive. Yeah.
00:00:23
Speaker
And it's not just the cost, but it was taking like six weeks to get through customs. Yeah. um So it's speed as well. Also, used tactic the whole time as well, right? Make that as high friction as possible. Yeah.
00:00:35
Speaker
Because they're the big market. Like it's a it's anyway, it's such a stupid idea in the first
Celebrating Podcast Milestone
00:00:40
Speaker
place. but Especially when you think about defense. It's like, it's like, it's like if the US introduced their tariffs, instead of like the US s introducing the tariffs on that island of penguins,
00:00:50
Speaker
that island of penguins introduced the tariff on the us you have no language yeah they'll be calling any day now
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome back to the Offsite Podcast, episode 9090. We're 10 away from the big 100. Will we make it? I am Jason Lansini, joined once again in studio live by Carlos Cavallo.
00:01:22
Speaker
Carlos, how you, sir? Very well, thanks. How are you Good see Very good. We are about to take a victory lap and cue the celebration and applause. This is this is the weakest victory lap of Lex ever. We spotted that the guys over at Bricks and Byte talked on a recent episode about the...
Tech Giants Scale Back
00:01:43
Speaker
potential data center bubble and something that we uh i don't know called as a fucking way stronger word um we talked about a a month or two or so ago i don't think we invented the idea i think the world was largely attuned to this being a risk but let's play the clips built around this massive growing space and demand.
00:02:05
Speaker
And the market got its a little bit of a wobble in the last few weeks where there were rumors that Microsoft was delaying or shelving plans for different data center projects around the world.
00:02:19
Speaker
And recently it's been officially validated that is it in is indeed pulling back some of its planned projects. In addition, Microsoft and Amazon are both scaling back data center projects amid signs of slower AI-driven demand growth. However, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son remains under turn, ramping up internal resources to accelerate Stargate's rollout despite the delays and is a 20 to 30-person team currently working on the project to secure capital and move it forward.
00:02:51
Speaker
Cool. Was that strong and compelling? Was that good to start the episode? oh It's ah that is a weak flex. Victory lap for sure. You got to take the wins when and you can get them. yeah We're like Michael Berry from ah the the big short, right? I watched that other day. Got the glass eye. Yeah. Yeah.
00:03:10
Speaker
Good movie. Wait, how we like him? He predicted the market. market The crash in I'm just focusing the glass eye. Yeah, ours is equally as strong.
00:03:22
Speaker
Which of us, if we were portrayed in a movie, would be played by Cush and Bale? Neither of us. I don't think any of us, any of his characters.
Germany's Offshore Wind Farm
00:03:32
Speaker
All this week we're talking Germany's largest offshore wind farm project is one of the first to be entirely privately funded, leading, I guess, to an interesting discussion about as a manager, project engineer, someone working on ah on a construction project, is it better, easier, harder to work on private or state funded projects?
00:03:50
Speaker
Next, we're going to dive into this freshly inked trade deal between the UK and the EU. And then finally, we'll take a look at what the community is saying with a post talking about hiring from the construction industry is most effective.
00:04:04
Speaker
Seconded from me, right? All right. Let's take a look at this offshore wind farm in Germany developed by Ian B. Wehr. is under construction in the german north sea for those that don't know it's about 80 to 90 k's off ah northwest of borkum and 110 kilometers west of helgoland sorry there's a two did that help anyone i know exactly what you're talking about all sorry mate can we have conversation about how we're locating places for people for along oh these he's a big fan of germany so that probably makes sense him
00:04:40
Speaker
I can't triangulate that. If you gave me that, i wouldn't you could give me a globe, I'd spit it and I would be none the wiser. So anyway, it'll have a total capacity of 960 megawatts, which is enough to supply 1.1 million households.
00:04:54
Speaker
That's the level of detail we like, which makes it Germany's largest offshore wind project. Notably, the project is being built without state subsidy, subsidies so it is an entirely private-funded project.
00:05:05
Speaker
Well, let's maybe talk a bit about the project and then we can dive into. I've got some thoughts about whether I'd want to work on a private project or or ah government funded. But yeah, is this a project you're aware of? This is the location of the world that you track tightly?
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, there's a whole bunch of within that region. So I guess ah for more context, just go east from Newcastle. That's a bit of North Sea we're talking about. Newcastle in the United Kingdom, right? Yeah.
00:05:32
Speaker
yeah Newcastle on the central coast of Australia. Yeah, obviously it's a good spot for wind. It's like it's pretty savage conditions. um You're never going to have idle turbines. There are some mega schemes around the area. So Elizabeth Island is one of the schemes we mentioned recently where they're building an island just to pull the power being generated from these wind farms. yeah everything being connected back to coast um so that connects Denmark Germany and the UK together yep so yeah loads in the region it makes loads of sense um it must be quite a cool project to work on as an engineer um but the private element is quite interesting I think I under appreciated
00:06:15
Speaker
the differences that you could see with private or public client effectively, because I thought immediately my mind went black and white. Well, the contract's the contract. Who cares who's above it?
00:06:26
Speaker
yeah Why would you do that in different ways? But yeah, there's a few areas that I think are worth discussing from the actual finance side of things. Contract, obviously red tape, and then maybe your ability to innovate.
Public vs Private Project Funding
00:06:39
Speaker
You'd imagine those areas do swing or change quite a lot depending on whether you're working with a private customer or not. So I guess first with funding, i think you've done private projects. Is there a sense of could the money stop?
00:06:51
Speaker
Is that a real thing on a private project? Because with a public scheme, you know the government will just keep bankrolling it unless it's a full Armageddon type situation. Yeah, I think from my experience, I'm working on ah for context. The first few projects I worked on as a young engineer were privately funded projects, things like gas plants.
00:07:11
Speaker
ah We get the benefit of talking to people on projects in all different circumstances. And I'm reflecting on a bunch of conversations with with ah folks running projects that are for uh private clients my experience is that the dollars are watched much more tight profit and loss tight tightly yeah especially if it's a revenue generating asset which for a private client it almost always is i can't think of many projects where it isn't a revenue generating infrastructure it's quite a loose return someone's made some sort of assessment yeah about community community benefits and stuff if it's a government
00:07:45
Speaker
thing, there's usually like quite ah the business case drags in all sorts of theoretical. Yeah. Whereas this is money back to the grid. Are we making more than it cost? Yeah. If it's energy or whatever the case may be, it could be a toll road, for example, and opening the toll road is is immediately revenue generating.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah. the value of time is really closely monitored and the ah ROI on the project itself. yeah Usually that means that the, and usually these projects have some amount of debt, some large amount of debt actually yeah in, in getting them developed because the project is usually a large capital cost that has to get paid back or amortized.
00:08:19
Speaker
Someone's invested. Yeah. Yeah. And so that means that there's no endless supply of money um that you can get from taxpayers or get issuing government bonds. And so the money to build the project is usually the money roughly to build the project, yep which then tends towards the projects being let the the contracts being let as hard dollar contracts.
00:08:39
Speaker
You're usually not getting 3000 change orders. yeah Yeah, just get on with it. Yeah. Get this thing finished because a day costs us some amount of money yeah on the back end. um And so ah as the contractor, I think the things that you get more of is yeah ideas to save time.
00:09:00
Speaker
valued a lot more, not to use the word frivolous, but like when you're chancing your arm on claims and stuff, you'll normally get pied off pretty quick. Yeah. And yeah, you won't they won't hesitate to go litigious on ye on things that could cause costs to increase.
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah. yeah And with that, I think from a contractual point of view, big public projects, it's a contract everyone recognizes and probably systems that help make it really easy to manage that contract.
00:09:27
Speaker
private, you're probably going in a bit blind on a contract you've never seen before with probably a pretty small team that won't be that helpful um other than rejecting claims that they don't think are fair. And yeah yeah, I think that varies by the industry. I'm sure private clients use the same of those public ones from time to time. but they least yeah mean By region or whatever. But yeah, at least in my experience, they were contracts written for those projects and for those clients. And there'll normally be a clause somewhere that's in and on any topic. There'll be a clause somewhere in a document somewhere that's to the advantage of the client that just says, get on and build the thing, at least in my experience.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yep. In terms of innovation, do you think like public, they like to spend money on innovation, but there's also like mandates and legacy systems and all the stuff that comes with it. You mean like funding for innovation? Yeah. oh There's none of that. Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's probably none of it coming
Innovation in Private Projects
00:10:20
Speaker
from the client, but you're probably pitching to your leader by saying we will actually save this money if we buy this system. Yeah. It's probably the way it goes. Yeah. It's definitely not like, I don't know. Can we try out this piece of software? The innovation is like,
00:10:35
Speaker
ah we need to build this wall if we try this novel approach we could build it 20 quicker or something yeah yeah actually that we did exactly that on a on a private project but yeah usually it starts from a problem rather than i don't know a broad call for innovation that you might see on government jobs which again are like they might have this part of their business case which is can we bring the industry forward or you know these kind of like loosey-goosey objectives yeah So I think it is it fair to less red tape, more freedom. So probably an environment for high performers, but not for.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's not like working in business versus government anyway. yeah Yeah, exactly. If you can make money and deliver a product that is quality. Yeah, I think that's that's dead that's what gets rewarded. Yeah.
00:11:21
Speaker
And you might even see things like real monetary upside for early delivery. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. yeah Yeah. There'll be more avenues you can take to get there. Yeah. the yeah the world The rule set is probably not so tight. Now, just returning back to the opening segment where we described the in high detail the this project, I went through to one of the links that was put in the research doc here, and there's a lovely graphic which just shows in a very rotating form the size and scale of this project.
00:11:51
Speaker
which is probably where where I should have started. Did you know that this wind project in the German North Sea has a rotor diameter of 236 meters? Shit, that's big.
00:12:04
Speaker
That's massive. That's a lot bigger than the we mentioned two weeks ago, and we thought that was the biggest. That was like 150 or something like that, yeah. And then the Baltic 1 and Baltic 2 wind farms are 93 and 120, respectively.
00:12:17
Speaker
respectively And this is yeah approximately double um the size of that. yeah That's the sort of... And that it's in 40 meter deep water. Yeah.
00:12:28
Speaker
Which actually probably isn't that deep relative to where some of them are. I think we talked about ones recently. Was it Empire that was... It must be a very cool project to work on, but... It's not for the faint hearted, is it?
00:12:40
Speaker
The North Sea is rough. Well, I flew in from Germany last night and it was we were flying over the, what I imagine must have been the North Sea because it was a north of Germany. Was it the German North Sea? Yeah, I actually think if i recall the location, it was approximately 85 to 90 kilometers northwest of Boertham and 100 kilometers west of Nogola.
UK-EU Trade Deal Post-Brexit
00:12:58
Speaker
As we know over, I did note how many wind turbines are in the the ocean there. It's pretty impressive. yeah and um ah obviously the turbines and i think they have like a 25 year design life something like that you'd assume that the foundations they're putting in have a longer design life so you can just switch out the top i'm hoping i'd imagine cool uh moving on this week and well this week would have been the week that we' we're recording it uh and when this episode goes live it will be some weeks ago so we'll swap that out
00:13:32
Speaker
This week, the UK and EU reached a significant new trade agreement designed to reset relations and reduce many of the barriers that have emerged after Brexit. We should have intro'd this section as as ah as the UK and EU hit undo on Brexit.
00:13:45
Speaker
Yeah. The deal aims to support British businesses, cut red tape and open up access to the EU market and potentially add nearly nine billion pounds to the UK economy by 2040.
00:13:56
Speaker
Undoing the damage previously done is the bit that's ah unwritten there. As a UK resident and citizen and London Carlos, what do you think about... um undoing your beloved brexit beloved um yeah it's a step back in the right direction that we should never have ventured from uh saying like a step back from the wrong direction is a step in the right direction i was just trying to make it really clear that it was the wrong in the first place no yeah i think people got that loud and clear uh but unfortunately your previously recorded opinions will stand as well yeah also unfortunately i'm not even and in the majority in that line of thinking but uh
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah, so it's it's very fresh news. So a lot of the information that we're seeing is speculative to an extent. But thinking through some of the wins for construction um based off of this deal that's been made, well, we're going to be free from tariffs on... um imported construction materials so that you would expect an immediate saving to projects.
00:14:56
Speaker
The increase in construction materials, I think there was a report on HS2 alone that it's quite a significant increase to cost across the scheme. So um if we can get rid of that, an immediate saving.
00:15:07
Speaker
There are going to be more relaxed rules again for getting young workers over. So um ah think this stat was something like 10% of our workforce in construction pre-Brexit was from Europe.
00:15:20
Speaker
That cut down dramatically um after Brexit, which means we can ramp back up again. So we shouldn't see as short labor supply. Hopefully, if we can actually convince people to come back.
00:15:31
Speaker
There is an element of we have to um go back under some EU laws and regulations. but from what we've seen i don't think we've detached from a lot of the ways that construction operates in terms of safety and others i'm at least my observation from afar is that the the eu regulations have just had their logo changed yeah Yeah.
00:15:53
Speaker
So um there's kind of a low, there's not much of an ask to go back in. So it's these reversible direct savings should hit yeah pretty quickly. um So, um yeah, it's kind of, it's hard to pick or point out any negatives from this in terms of construction.
00:16:12
Speaker
So um just before we go further into the construction thing, I remember when I was living here in the UK when the Brexit happened. Yeah, there's a big deal about fishing.
00:16:22
Speaker
Did they sort out what happened with the fishing? ah Fishing, we've ah reopened waters to the EU for 12 years as part of the deal. it's a legit undo of Brexit, right?
00:16:34
Speaker
ah Yeah, that was the one that people got the most upset about. but And the blue passports. Uh, yeah. Oh, we can now go back to the old e-passport desks. we were in the other queue. That tactic from your work, didn't it? Yeah. That was the direct consequence. Shots fired. Yeah.
00:16:56
Speaker
So that's actually a huge win. um Not so much for construction. i have a conspiracy theory here. So, yeah, you mentioned like yeah material costs in the UK from there's a lot of goods on projects in the UK.
00:17:09
Speaker
The UK is a relatively small market. Many of the goods that delivered on projects come from 60%. Yeah, it's massive. yeah it's yeah Germany is massive. The Netherlands is massive. Spain is massive.
00:17:23
Speaker
And it's not just the cost, but it was taking like six weeks to get through customs. Yeah. um So it's speed as well. Also, you use tactic the whole time as well, right? Make that as high friction as possible. Yeah.
00:17:35
Speaker
Because they're the big market. Like it's a it's anyway, it's such a stupid idea in the first place. yeah but Especially when you think about defense. It's like it's like it's like if the U.S. s introduced their tariffs.
00:17:46
Speaker
Instead of like the U.S. introducing the tariffs on that island of penguins, that island of penguins introduced the tariff on the US. but You have no leverage, sir. Yeah, they'll be calling any day now.
00:18:01
Speaker
So, um yeah, so you mentioned the the material costs and you mentioned the labor shortage driving the the cost of labor on on, you know, nation building projects in UK.
00:18:16
Speaker
ah similarly we've talked or it may be in a related topic we talked recently in previous weeks about how sections of high speed 2 seemed like they were least we've heard rumors of paused on the go slow waiting yep uh for some period of time now this would require alignment between branches of government
00:18:38
Speaker
Do reckon there was any chance that this was a strategic delay until this was changed and then they can kind of wait until the market reopens and then get all the contractors to re
HS2 Project and EU Funding
00:18:50
Speaker
rebid and maybe drop the price of things?
00:18:53
Speaker
Oh, it's a big enough scheme that you could influence. It's a massive amount of money for the UK government. It's, you know, it's a big amount of money. That's the type of thing that you'd be so conscious that that report gets leaked, that suddenly it's ah something that's much bigger than the cost of construction being meddled with by construction.
00:19:12
Speaker
It's bit of a difficult spot to be in. I don't imagine it's all for construction, but if you were the government, if if you were the, maybe I'm saying, I don't think that the changes were driven from construction. you mean the pre-pause? I'm thinking about HS2. Here's a heads up. and This might happen. This might happen. Then pause. Then go back to your contractors and say, based on these new regulations, price again.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, because if they haven't if they're not free issuing materials or have any clauses around the cost materials, then you need a a reason to reprice and you need the reprice to happen after the news.
00:19:47
Speaker
because otherwise you're pricing it with the information you have at the time, which is. Yeah, we've seen a lot of rumors and and and news in the market of like ah London terminus of HS2 being kind of kicked down there the road and delays.
00:20:02
Speaker
And there's a lot of architectural finishes, glass, bla bla blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, escalators. All those things are from Europe. Yeah. The other thing is with like with that HST as example.
00:20:13
Speaker
So you've got um we've gone through in the past. There's the 10T network of red across Europe. by The big plan. ah yeah big yeah plan um And then there's that. If you look at that map recently, UK just goes gray.
00:20:28
Speaker
So it kind of connects Ireland and that's about it. Right. If this is a longer term partnership that is deepening, that if that reopens, you get funding from the EU to help complete rail network. It's almost like i should be one j you should make one big market. it Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker
That's a good idea. And then on top of that, there's also, um so if we looked through the Ukraine crisis, the cost of energy in the UK went crazy and it was fine in Europe.
00:20:57
Speaker
But we're now almost part I don't know if fine, but yeah, maybe not as bad. The Germans would have something to say. I now need to represent the Germans that I'm living there.
00:21:08
Speaker
They would also say it went up quite a lot there. Yeah, but like ours was substantial, but now in theory... There's what's substantial too. Yeah, ah where we're selfish. Everyone will it was substantial for everyone.
00:21:22
Speaker
But now it's almost a joint sort of grid efficiency. You should get. We should be able to buy energy cheaper yeah rather than exporting energy. It's within the market. So
Post-Brexit Market Strategies
00:21:30
Speaker
yeah. yeah It goes back to market leverage, right? The bigger the market, the more leverage you have. And so, you know in a world where you have like a China as a big market, a US, you know, maybe they try to squeeze in Canada in there.
00:21:45
Speaker
I think there's a lot of argument that they try to bring kind of like not Mexico joining the US, but like if they get that brings that. whatever that what was the name USMCA that yeah Mexico, US Canada agree. That's like a market.
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah. The UK needs to. It's almost like everyone that voted Brexit didn't have a background in economics.
00:22:08
Speaker
ah That was Carlos thinking. Yeah. So, ah no. um Yeah, positive. It'll be great to actually see what these schemes come out and say because this won't go under the radar.
00:22:21
Speaker
You would expect a serious saving that HS2 If everything we've just said is actually saving or maybe behind the scenes, there's a giant ah cost. A softening of cost escalation. Yeah, yeah because yeah you don't know what's really behind the scenes. And you know the reason they're pausing a bunch of these things probably is because of massive cost thats so escalation. yeah and funding so i think i think hoping for a reduction might be um wishful thinking but uh and then a reduction you can finish you can finish the nearly forecast exercise that no one's actually because that's the one that no one's seen yeah yeah but yeah i think i think in general it's a super positive move that and then i don't know that the u.s agreement that was announced a few weeks ago makes much of a difference to the construction industry but this eu one definitely does
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure how many how much construction material we pull from the US. Yeah, very little, I think. I've not looked at the data, but anecdotally, I don't think very much. Yeah, well, I did see the sweet potatoes I ate last night were from America, which blows my mind that it can be efficient to grow.
00:23:26
Speaker
sweet potato america yeah that's fly them here it's probably not they're probably stupidly expensive they should be coming from europe yeah yeah that's true you're probably having to get your sweet potatoes how bougie are these sweet potatoes yours they're special
00:23:41
Speaker
Was that an Uber Eats job? You sent someone on the plane? No, they were raw potatoes ready to cook from America. Anyway, he's trying to push their chlorinated beef on us. So that's the next battle because they like wash their beef in chlorine and EU doesn't accept that.
00:23:56
Speaker
But he's trying to make us accept that. So it's coming to a little near you. Anyway, off target. Moving on. ah Final topic. So yeah um for this week's look at what's happening in on LinkedIn, what were something we saw a conversation on LinkedIn about, which is something we think about a lot and probably interesting for those from construction listening, which is this idea of like why sales hires can fail in construction tech.
Transitioning from Construction to Tech
00:24:23
Speaker
which was a post around how to better hire for sales and construction. But I think um one of the takeaways ah that was discussed was like, there is a strong argument for let's call it like hire the buyer or hire from construction rather than hiring from sales.
00:24:41
Speaker
ah You and I literally got off a, couple of interviews this morning doing exactly that. So I think we're probably preaching to the choir. But how would you think about um this idea of in roles, maybe if we generalize a little bit and think about why folks from construction are uniquely equipped to sell to or support inside of tech companies selling into construction?
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's interesting because you can obviously you could there's strong arguments on both sides because for anyone that you hire, there's going to be an element of onboarding in an area they know nothing about and an area they know ah reasonable amount. and Yeah, exactly. The playback, you hire someone from sales, they might not know the detail of your workflow or part of the product, the thing that you sell.
00:25:35
Speaker
So they don't know. In other words, they don't know construction. Yeah, exactly. On the flip side, you hire some of for construction. They know deeply about the construction thing that you solve, but might know jack shit about sales. Exactly.
00:25:46
Speaker
um But if you think about construction, it's not like other industries where you can, like someone's going to buy something from seeing an advert or there's no quick wins. It's not this numbers game that if I call a thousand people, 10 them are going to buy it.
00:25:59
Speaker
Mm-hmm. It is a relationship game. It's about connecting with people. It's about having this mutual disgust and love for the industry that you can actually have a conversation around what construction is really like, understand their problems and not feel like you're from a sales background. So 99% of our job is not closing deals.
00:26:20
Speaker
It's developing an understanding and building a relationship to get to the point where they just want to buy the thing that you have, not because you've flashy sold them something. and hoping that they'll buy. You can see why half of our cause is us just shooting some shit with someone because we've been there. We understand what they're talking about.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah, this is like super timely because we literally we had this conversation on an interview not more than two hours ago. ah And um we talked about it literally in our company offsite a week ago. What's, I guess, unique about the construction industry is that the people that are delivering projects, so thinking really about, yeah, on the ground delivering projects,
00:27:02
Speaker
are faced with this unique circumstance where they're on a project where it's a collection of all these companies that come together to deliver this thing, then they disband. So they don't have... There's a lot of misaligned incentives that happen on projects.
00:27:16
Speaker
between companies and also within a team. Like the safety team may not be incentivized to deliver the project as quick as possible. They're incentivized to deliver as safely as possible. get all this kind of like misaligned incentives.
00:27:27
Speaker
ye The subbie wants to make money, but you want them to get the work done quickly, all that stuff. And so the people trying to run the project are always faced with the their counterparts or their the people that they're trying to deliver this thing with.
00:27:41
Speaker
always being a little bit not on their side and so getting something done is just a lot of house of cards it's a it's a lot of hard work you kind of have everything you've got to fight to get everything to line up and it only takes one thing not to be ready for the work not to start so you kind of need like everything being a green light because one red light stops the whole show And so that creates this environment, at least in in my view, that on a project, you are absolutely craving someone that's a genuine partner that actually wants to help you because they're so rare.
00:28:13
Speaker
a software vendor or technology vendor who is genuinely trying to help a customer um has a unique opportunity to have people in their team that know that person's world that are helping first that could be like that trusted partner. Yet so many of them hire the, I don't know, ex-HubSpot or Salesforce sales rep that's in there slinging them a few buzzwords,
00:28:41
Speaker
trying to close a ah ah deal, go for some drinks and then fly away. And that's just, this industry is a like a show me industry. it The word spreads, good and bad. And so you need people that are gonna dive in and solve problems for a customer.
00:28:57
Speaker
not someone that can ah crush the best demo you've ever seen. And the other benefit with specifically hiring from construction is there's a match in the pace setting.
00:29:10
Speaker
You can imagine some industries going to sales. Suddenly feels like you're doing ten times more work than you did before. Construction is already an industry where you're grinding out long hours and doing volume. And all we're doing is matching the pace that they're doing.
00:29:22
Speaker
and doing that at scale. So there isn't that sudden lift where you're like, oh shit, this is demanding because we're used to it. For people from construction, it's like a really awesome opportunity. Obviously, I'm talking my own book here, but like you can ah take a skill set that you have developed over a long period of time in how to deliver projects.
00:29:42
Speaker
You can take that and apply it where you can work with instead of one project for two years where you have to stay there and learn through the whole project, you can work with 100 projects or 50 projects, depending on the scale of the solution that you're you're the company you're working for.
00:29:57
Speaker
And you could see them be successful, unsuccessful over a long period of time. You get like this crash course in project delivery. um You can take your skill set. You can get that insight. You get this benefit of not having, you get this like flexible working arrangement. You also are now in control of your own destiny. you don't have to wait till the next project to ask for a pay rise. You can go and you're in control. You can make whatever money you can make.
00:30:19
Speaker
and you can you can honestly you make a boatload more money than you would have made ah staying in in the industry so yeah yeah it's not for everyone it's definitely for people that are really hungry self-motivated but it's i think um for people that want to make the change i think it's a wildly positive thing and people should think deeply about it there's lots of open rails at apex at the moment Right. so I think we have run out of time.
00:30:50
Speaker
um So thank you very much, everyone, for listening to today's show. If you did enjoy enjoy the episode, please do think about liking the video or following us on your chosen podcast platform.
00:31:01
Speaker
We really appreciate your support and we'll see you all next week. Bye-bye.