Marco Gallo has built fine-dining restaurants on frozen rivers and inside a historic Arctic fort — nine times over seven years. None of them made money. That was the whole idea.
Most general contractors measure a project's success in margin. Marco Gallo, co-founder of Winnipeg-based 0812 Building Solutions, measures some of them in something else: the phone calls that come after. For the past seven years, 0812 has been the construction partner behind RAW:almond — a pop-up fine-dining event that erects a temporary structure on the frozen junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in Winnipeg, opens for a twenty-day season serving five-course meals, then disappears. World-class chefs fly in from around the world. The structure is purpose-built, then dismantled. The project does not turn a profit for the builder.
That is, by design, completely fine.
Gallo, who came to contracting through an architecture background, has built nine of these structures: seven in Winnipeg, one in Gimli, and one at Prince of Wales Fort National Historic Site in Churchill, Manitoba — a Parks Canada-managed 18th-century Hudson's Bay Company stone fort at the mouth of the Churchill River, accessible only by air. He spoke about all of it on episode 59 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast.
What extreme cold actually does to your tools
The Churchill build is the episode's centrepiece, and the logistics detail alone is worth the listen. The crew landed in wind chill conditions of minus 62°C. That number is not a typo.
At minus 25 to 30°C, before you even reach Churchill's extremes, tools begin to fail in specific, predictable ways. "air powered tools we start to get condensation and those just fault out on you... battery life expectancy is horrible" — those are Gallo's words. You can bring tools back to operating temperature in a heated break space, but you need the heated space, and you need extra tools cycling through it — because at any given moment, some fraction of your kit will be out of commission.
This is a solvable problem, but only if you plan for it before you leave the city. You cannot call a tool supplier in Churchill. There is no hardware store. There is no road. You flew in.
Prefabricate everything, then ship spares
Gallo's response to the remoteness of Churchill — and to the inherent unpredictability of building a novel temporary structure in conditions nobody has a playbook for — is aggressive prefabrication paired with deliberate redundancy. The guiding principle is simple: assume some things will fail in transit, not fit when they arrive, or break on site. Build that assumption into the manifest.
"let's ship three of those we only need one let's ship five of those we only need two" — that is the component strategy, stated plainly. Parts travel by sea can when possible; the site trailer is a tundra buggy. A bear guard does daily sweeps of the job site. These are not metaphors. Churchill has polar bears.
The Churchill build itself was an A-frame laminated beam structure clad in thick poly — designed to let diners watch the Northern Lights through the walls. The diffuse light the translucent cladding created inside turned out to be an unplanned visual effect that became part of the experience. That kind of discovery happens only when the structure is designed loosely enough to surprise you — and when the builder is genuinely curious about what the materials will do.
Design for disassembly before you design anything else
Because these structures come down after twenty days, how they come apart is as important as how they go up. The pipe-and-clamp scaffolding system 0812 uses for the RAW:almond structures is not sacrificed at the end of the season. "pipe and clamp scaffolding can just go back to a job site and be used for stucco or low-rise buildings throughout the year" — Gallo's point exactly. The kitchen module — spray-foam insulated panels — is stored and reused from year to year. Only the elements that genuinely can't travel get left behind.
This discipline starts before anything is built. "can this be recycled, can it be taken down and reused or repurposed — those conversations happen early on" — that is the design constraint that determines the material spec. Reuse is not an afterthought added in close-out; it is the first question asked in design.
The practical effect is lower cost on every subsequent iteration. By the time 0812 had built seven Winnipeg editions of RAW:almond, most of the major components had been refined, tested, and partially amortized across seasons. The learning compounds.
Open-book pricing when the scope is genuinely unknown
A temporary structure for a design competition pop-up restaurant, built on a frozen river, in a configuration that changes year to year based on a new architectural concept each season — you cannot hard-quote that job. The scope is by definition fluid. An attempt to lock a price early would either leave the client exposed to change orders on every decision, or leave the contractor eating overruns on a project with zero margin to begin with.
Gallo's answer is to not pretend otherwise. "quoting them would be an absolute nightmare... we usually just do it on a cost scenario, everything's open book" — that is how he describes the RAW:almond relationship. Cost-plus open-book works here because both parties understand what the job actually is: a collaborative build with unknown variables, where trust and transparency are the operating model. Neither side is trying to win a negotiation against the other.
This pricing structure also reflects something about the relationship. Seven years and nine builds is not a transactional relationship. It is a partnership, and a hard-quoted contract would have been structurally hostile to it from the start.
The project that doesn't make money — and why you take it anyway
Gallo is candid about the economics. "these are the projects that don't make money... good for PR, good for referrals, sculptural but also marketing" — Gallo's own accounting of the tradeoff. The team donates time. The revenue from the actual work, at cost, barely covers materials. The business case is not in the job itself — it is in what the job produces.
For 0812, what it produces is portfolio credibility that regular residential and commercial work cannot generate alone. A fine-dining restaurant erected on a frozen river, by an architecture-background GC who cares about how the translucent cladding changes the interior light, is a different kind of story than a condo renovation. It attracts clients who want a builder who thinks architecturally. It signals to potential hires what kind of work the company does. It generates exactly the kind of coverage and conversation that turns up when a prospective client searches for a contractor before calling.
Gallo's architecture background also shapes the pipeline. "when an architect has a really great idea but has no idea how it's going to stand... we get the call for those" — that is the referral pipeline. Architects and designers refer the builds that are structurally ambitious and visually driven — the ones a standard GC might turn down as too experimental — to the contractor they know can execute them. The unusual project is the recruitment tool, the referral engine, and the portfolio builder, simultaneously.
The RAW:almond relationship is the most visible expression of that strategy, but it is not an anomaly. It is the deliberate proof-of-concept that attracts the rest of the work.
The companies behind the episode
0812 Building Solutions Inc. is a design-led commercial and residential general contracting and project management firm based in Winnipeg, working with architects, designers, and developers from the earliest project stages. The firm's architecture-background approach draws design-led and structurally ambitious mandates across both residential and commercial work. Find them on Instagram and Facebook.
ConstructionClock is the construction time-tracking software that co-produced the Against the Clock episode series. It uses GPS geofencing to automatically clock crews in and out of job sites, tracking labour hours and costs and exporting to payroll.
Guest: Marco Gallo, Co-founder & Principal, 0812 Building Solutions Inc. Featured on Episode 59 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: RAW:almond and Prince of Wales Fort National Historic Site.