How to Save $1M on Your Next Construction Project — Owner’s Rep, Cost Estimating & Design-Build | Terry Hussey, Vigilant Atlantic

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0:41Welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Very excited today to welcome our guest from Paradise, Newfoundland — Terry Hussey, CEO of Vigilant Atlantic. So, Atlantic Canada's one and only construction agency, and we'll get into exactly what that means, and the structure of the company, and sort of the vast service offering that Terry and the team have. But firstly, thanks for joining us, Terry. We've got a cold snap on the way here in Nova Scotia — pretty chilly. I think they're calling

1:18for minus 30, minus 35 at the wind chill here tomorrow. I'm assuming it might be a little bit colder up your way. Well, thank you for having me — it's a pleasure to be here. We have an interesting thing that happens at Vigilant because we've got an office in Dartmouth, and so whenever we're on a meeting with a team in the Dartmouth area, they'll say they're experiencing this type of weather and we will know it's 24 hours away from where we are. So you were cold, you had weather yesterday, so we're

1:44having that today. It's snowy, and then you'll get cold tonight and we'll be cold tomorrow. So it's really quite funny how consistent it is. The team in Dartmouth will say, "Yeah, we're experiencing — it's really nice today," and — well, maybe not when it's nice, because typically in Newfoundland we don't get the nice weather. But there's a 24-hour gap, so if it's cold there it'll be cold here in 24 hours. So you can check back, but I'm pretty sure that's in the forecast. That's great to hear. So, Terry, we usually

2:10start off with just some background, some context of our guests. I know you've got a long history of helping found Vigilant in 2012, prior to that some other things, and then your time at Memorial for your Bachelor of Engineering and your MBA. So maybe you could just run us through a little bit about your history and your journey in the industry. Sure, I'd love to. It is a long story and I'll attempt to make it a little briefer for the

2:39benefit of your listeners. I am, you know, a child of the '80s, so I grew up with the emergence of the personal computer in the late '80s and in the early '90s when the internet was coming around. As a teenager in the early '90s, I was one of those people in the bedroom on the internet, exploring the early, early days of the internet. But what it did was it got me quite good at computers, and so I became known as kind of the computer expert. And as

3:07high school came to an end and it was time to choose something to do at school, my father said, "Hey, you should do engineering — you're good at computers," and I said okay. And that was the extent of my evaluation as to why I wanted to do engineering. This becomes relevant later. But I did engineering because I was good at computers. So a couple of years into the degree, you got to choose your discipline, and electrical engineering was seen as the most difficult, so I

3:36said, "All right, I'll do that one." And that was the extent of my evaluation. Didn't think about what it meant to be a civil, or a mechanical, or a naval architectural engineer — electrical's the hardest, I'm going to do that. So around halfway through engineering, I realized I'm not really enjoying myself. Every work term I've had, I've walked out of there saying I'm not going to do this again. So as I went through every work term, I would just take it off the list — yeah, I'm not going to do that kind of

4:02work, not gonna do that kind of work. And then halfway through engineering, I took an elective — a business elective called Organizational Behavior. Now, amongst the business students, they will tell you OB, as it's known, is the most boring, notoriously boring, dry course in the faculty. People hate that course. Organizational Behavior — it's all about teams and culture and leadership and structuring companies. I walked in there as a term-five engineering student and the professor was like, "Let's talk about this thing that happened in the news. Here's

4:36this article from the internet and we're going to have a discussion about it." And I sat there with my notes, waiting for the professor to start writing on the chalkboard, because up until then, university to me was: you sit in a chair, the professor starts writing notes, and you start copying. 50 minutes later you get up, you shake your wrist, and at some point in the future you hope that you can review your notes and learn it. I thought that that's what university was — sit down in a class, write

5:00notes, learn afterwards, do your assignments, go to your labs. And that — discussion in a classroom — what was that? So I loved the course, I had a great time doing it, started to do more and more business electives. If I may, if I may jump in there, Terry — I think it's interesting the point you just made. I mean, when you said Organizational Behavior and you started mentioning culture and all that, I thought, well, that sounds awesome to me. I mean, some people

5:25might think it doesn't, but it's just the way that some of us learn compared to others. I mean, a lot of people can learn that way — it's crystallized knowledge and you're taking it in from a screen or a board and writing down notes and stuff — but then others, if they're engaged and they're experiencing something, even another layer to that would be like working on the tools, on the trades. People that learn more hands-on. So I just find it fascinating how so

5:51many different people learn in different ways. And understanding yourself and how you can learn — if you're engaged in something, as opposed to what you're mentioning earlier. Yeah. It was profoundly different, the mindset. And so I started doing more and more business electives and kind of was like, wow, this is amazing, I love this, this is so enjoyable to me. And it was interesting, because you've got to understand — this is the late '90s, the early 2000s. And they're in engineering, and I think engineering

6:17is still — in terms of engineering schools — brutally difficult and challenging. I do think that we've come a long way in terms of recognizing the impacts of stress and negative mental health on students, because back then the engineering faculty took it as a point of pride to try and make people fail out or drop out. Like, they would try and flush these people out of the system and they took it as a point of pride. Like, it was not

6:44healthy. And you could see it in the context that most people coped by drinking heavily during engineering school. And that's why engineering at Memorial had a notorious reputation as a party faculty. I mean, we graduated a lot of functioning alcoholics — 23 years old and they're basically alcoholics. And these are types of things that would not work now; they wouldn't be acceptable, because we've learned how dangerous it is. But at the time, engineering was a meat grinder — like, it was designed to make you suffer.

7:12And I didn't really enjoy it. I mean, I remember I wrote six exams in six days in term four of engineering. It was a summer semester. I was in such a fog I got in my car in my parents' driveway, put it in reverse, backed it into a car that was parked in the driveway, didn't even see it there. I was like, "Oh, I didn't even know that was there." They came out and were like, "That's okay, don't worry about it, we've got insurance," because I think they knew if they'd made

7:38a big deal of it, I would have just had a mental breakdown. Because that was just how on the edge engineering students were. But as I got through the program, one of my business elective professors said to me, "Have you ever thought about doing an MBA?" I looked at her dead in the face. I said, "I can't do an MBA — I'm doing an engineering undergrad." And she kind of just laughed and said, "That's how the MBA works —

8:02they take undergrads of any discipline. If you like business, you should consider it." And I — it was just like somebody had done that record scratch, you know, stop the music, and it was like — I didn't realize there was an option to pursue business postgraduate after an engineering degree. I wrote the GMAT, made the decision to do it right away after school, which came with disadvantages, because of course then I'm a heavily educated, not very experienced,

8:33recent graduate. Did my MBA on credit, full-time, racked up an enormous amount of debt doing it, because it was what I wanted to do. Nobody in my life thought it was a good idea. Everybody was like, "Why don't you just go work as an engineer?" And I was like, "I hate it. I don't want to go to work as an engineer — I'll be miserable." So I did my MBA and I loved it. Every course in that program was phenomenal. I loved every bit of it. I squeezed — go

9:01ahead. How do you feel — yeah? Because I want to stay on this and explore this a little bit. But I think we have lots of time. You know, I'm gonna make an assumption that you're maybe a lot more extroverted than some engineers. No — I'm not saying all; I don't want to put people in a box. But you know, we were talking earlier about learning in different styles. When you were engaged in the classroom instead of, you know, data-driven stuff, it was a

9:25whole new thing for you — loving the MBA. It's very collaborative, you're working with people. Even mental-health-wise, a lot of times you're using those different left and right sides of your brain — you're drilling into calculations and all this kind of stuff, and then when you're out talking to people it's a different thing. It can be really healthy to have a good balance. What do you think about the psychology behind that? Because, you know, just in the thread of

9:52what you were kind of just speaking about the last few minutes — for engineering students and how much of a grind it was — I'm not even sure what the question is I'm trying to ask. But I think it's a good point, in that most people who meet me would say, "Yeah, Terry is 100% extroverted, he's this guy, he's the leader of a company, he started his own business, he could talk to anybody," et cetera. Okay, let me jump in again, because what I was going to say was — I

10:18think a lot of people have this idea of what it means to be an engineer, or when I graduate from university, here's what it's going to be like to be an engineer. But I think a lot of what engineers are doing — working for general contracting firms, a construction agency — they're in leadership roles, they're dealing with people, and they're dealing with problems on a construction site. But it's always with people, it's always in conversations. You know, how are

10:42you handling conflict, how are you navigating this situation? Sure, you need to know the layered knowledge of an engineer — civil, electrical, whatever. But I guess what I was getting at is: how has it served you now, and now that you're in industry as a CEO? It's far different, maybe, than what a lot of engineering students think it's going to be — yeah — coming to university. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, like,

11:08engineering — in many ways it's an inch wide and a mile deep, so to speak. You become so knowledgeable in a particular subject area; you are seen as an expert. You can testify in court as an expert witness as an engineer of a particular discipline with sufficient experience. And that's a tremendously valuable body of knowledge and skill set. But what I learned in business — obviously I learned about a lot of different subjects, and the master's degree I did was very broad. You

11:41didn't specialize — you kind of got a little bit of everything. And that appealed to me. And I am, you know, fundamentally probably an extroverted person. But then the interesting thing is that I also have an introverted side — like, I don't need to be around people to be happy. I could sit in a room by myself and read a book for five hours and I'm delighted. I'm like that as well. I'm like that as well. And I'm glad you said that, because you know we can't

12:02put people in a box. We're somewhere on the continuum — one day I might be a little more introverted than the next and I don't really want to talk to anybody. That's all. Yeah. So I think, just based on my experience with work-term students — I mean, we see all types in our company — but they have got — and I think it's partially a credit to the younger generation — they're a little more well-rounded. It's less common for me to get

12:28an engineering student now who is just nose-down technical first. They're all fairly well-rounded, well-spoken, open-minded young professionals, which really speaks to, I think, the growth that society has had. The business degree has served me immensely well, but I think my fundamental — I guess a strength or success for me is that I've always been curious about people and I enjoy people. And I think it's what drew me to business, because I did electrical engineering and I didn't enjoy it from a

13:05fulfillment perspective. But what it did give me was a phenomenal understanding of how to solve problems. And the thing about electrical that we didn't realize at the time — that's now very in vogue — is that electrical engineering is very good at modeling things as systems. And that's become something that's very current; it's called systems thinking. It's an approach to modeling any kind of thing as a system. And what is a business if not a system — a bunch of different systems comprised of people? And I think it's become something that's

13:35informed my approach and my mindset as an entrepreneur — that a business is simply a system of people. And so if the people are what's making a process or a business work, then you'd better understand how people work, what motivates them, what you need to input to these people to get the outputs you desire. Because that's electrical engineering at its core — it's systems modeling, black-box thinking. But you can apply that to business. And it is something that a lot of very high-end

14:02management consulting firms and graduate business education focus on — this concept of systems thinking. And it was something that happened completely by accident. I wish I could take credit and say I designed it from the start, but I did electrical engineering because I was good at computers and it was the hardest, and then I didn't like it, and then I fell in love with business. And my background in electrical engineering has helped me every day of my career. It did two things: it taught me how to

14:29solve problems, and it taught me never to be afraid of something, because if I can get through six years of electrical engineering, then I can figure this out. And those two things have really been valuable to me as an entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is pretty scary. Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is one of the most interesting things about our team here doing this media platform — hearing different people's stories. And it's so interesting that the first step, the two prior to

14:53the MBA — you did your electrical engineering degree — and there's a thread that draws from there to what you're doing now. And it has nothing to do necessarily with the electrical trade or design, you know. And it's maybe what helped you just as much, or more — combine that exponentially with an MBA and you've got this systems thinking with dealing with people, putting together a team. I think it's a good segue into Vigilant Atlantic and your

15:21vision. Obviously, with your past experience and all your education — including what you just mentioned — to create the vision for Atlantic Canada's first construction agency. And maybe we can get into that — like, obviously there were problems that you had a passion to solve in the industry, whether you were involved with some projects that did not go well. Why didn't they go well? "I can't stand that this problem is here, I've got to do something about it." And the thing

15:49about your service is — it's vast. You're all the way downstream to preliminary design cost, you know, Class D estimates in the design phase, through B, C, and D, you know, helping tender, and then construction management and closeout and cost monitoring. Basically everything. Now, you don't do that with every client — I'm not going to try and squeeze it all in because you can explain it — to tell our listeners who will have a context of what it means. But I think it's really interesting to draw

16:16that thread between your unique background — from electrical engineering to an MBA — and then obviously way back then, that 2012 spark of Vigilant. So I'll let you kind of explain to our listeners — Vigilant Atlantic. I'll go back a tiny bit before that. To finish my MBA, I'm trying to start my career, I'm really good at computers. And I realized that the MBA straight after engineering — I come across in a certain way. You know,

16:52very ambitious, hard-charging, energetic, but perhaps a little bit too enthusiastic, and it's intimidating to a lot of employers at the time. So I got my first job working for essentially a British company that did training for software testing. That kind of got me into the IT sector because I had some expertise in it. And eventually I got a job working for a fairly large IT consulting firm based here in St. John's, doing business analysis and project management, which is what kind of got me

17:24into project management. And I did that for two and a half or three years. And it was a consulting company, right? And I was a good earner — I was fully billable, I was making this company a ton of money, the clients loved me. But I got to a point — there was one moment — where I was on a job working for a client on behalf of my employer. And I finished my work — like, it was 11 o'clock in the day, I was done. I've always been very

17:47fast at getting work done. My productivity has been a big strength, the big key to everything I've tried to do. And I called back to kind of home base and I'm like, "Hey, you know, I'm here at such and such, I've got all my work done, what do I do?" And they're like, "Well, you need to sit in that chair until five o'clock because they're paying us for you to be there for eight hours, and we want that money. So you need to sit there." I'm like, "Yeah, but I've got nothing to do —"

18:13they're like, "That doesn't matter." And I was just like, huh. That's when you knew you were an entrepreneur, I'm assuming. Not right away, but it was the beginnings of that. And so then shortly thereafter — again, right, top earner, I'm making this company a quarter million a year as a consultant — really, really good at my job, the clients love me. And it's time for an annual review, and it's like, "You know, we feel like you could be more of a corporate champion." And I'm like,

18:41"What the hell are you talking about? I'm one of your top earners. I want a raise and a title bump — I've earned it." And it kind of — you were a threat. I learned that my advancement at that company depended more upon how much my direct supervisor liked me personally than it did upon my performance. And that was the other kind of inspirational moment — it was like, okay, maybe I need to do this on my own. And there were things about working in

19:13the industry that I didn't like, right. I didn't like that "sit in a chair" attitude. I didn't like that profit-first

19:21mentality. I felt like the employees were essentially just treated as a mechanism to make the owners rich, right. You know, there were times where — I don't even think the owner of the company knew my name, right? And I was making this guy a quarter million dollars a year. Didn't know anything about me. And so I made the decision to start my own business in IT consulting. Again, no plan. Looking back on it — in 2010 when I started my first company, I

19:45was — it was madness. I had no idea what I was doing. I started my first company in February — actually, February 11th — so in like eight days it'll be my 13-year anniversary as an entrepreneur. My then-fiancee quit her job to go back to school full-time, and we got married that July. So that was an insane financial year for us. But I started this company — I had no plan, no business plan, no clients, no idea what I was going to do. I'm like, "I cannot let my

20:18life be dependent upon how much somebody else likes me. I'm gonna go my own way." Yeah. And so we started this company. That first year was brutal — I made 20 grand that first year, as a family. Like, my wife and I, we made twenty thousand bucks — and we were both working the year before, so that was rough. But then that second year, I started to get a few contracts. I actually had an opportunity come up through the summer that was like two full-time contracts at

20:43once. And I remember looking at my wife saying, "You're not going to see me for July and August." And she's like, "Look, if it's what you've got to do, it's what you've got to do — I'll support you." I worked 80-hour weeks for, I think, 16 weeks straight. But I made more money in three months than I had in the two years prior, because that was what it took to make it work. And both of the jobs were very

21:09successful. Now, I wouldn't recommend it — it was tough — but after two years of being in IT, this opportunity with Vigilant came about. And I helped two people found a company as project managers. And originally the vision was: I know how to start a company, I can help you guys out just to get it going, and you can do project management. Very quickly it became kind of this thing that was starting to gain momentum — maybe we should open an office, maybe we should

21:34hire some people — and it became my sole focus. So Vigilant was not something that was birthed out of "I recognized this is a problem, we're going to start a business." It was more so like: I'm going to start this and help you out, but then it became this freight train of momentum. Again, originally in owner's project management consulting, just in the Newfoundland market. But it was addressing a problem that existed where a lot of times owners wouldn't be able to put the

22:05effort necessary into the planning of a job, the active management of a job. They would hire a design consultant to do detailed design and then expect the design consultant to be project managers — and that's a different scope of work. And in our early years, as a project management consulting firm, I may have been a little harsh on the design consultants because I was trying to differentiate ourselves and make ourselves stand out. Now I think I understand, and we try to be more fair-minded — I think it was probably

22:31unreasonable of the owners to expect design consultants to do project management work: number one, without being paid; and number two, without being told that they're doing it, right. This is just common-sense stuff. But we addressed a gap in that market and started to grow. And man, it went — and you've got to remember, this is Newfoundland just after the oil boom. So from 2014 to 2020, pre-COVID, the economic climate here was brutal. Like, it wasn't up and down — it was down, down, down, heading down. And like, where

23:05is it going to stop? Nobody knows. But in that context, in that economic climate, I mean, we grew the company steadily year after year after year. We were at 17 staff in January of 2020, just before COVID hit. But we kind of hit what I'd call a structural limit in the size of the market — our opportunities for growth were limited. And we made the decision to expand to the Maritimes in January 2020. And March 3rd and 4th of 2020, I was in Halifax. I had

23:36a week of meetings with people starting this expansion. And two weeks later it was COVID. So that was kind of the first chapter for us as a project management consulting firm. And then COVID is a whole other journey, which we can dig into. But is there anything I kind of missed out there that you'd like me to touch on or expand on? No, that's a good overview, for sure. I mean, I think it's interesting the point you made about

24:00construction planning and preliminary stuff. And, you know, most of our audience is in the industry — industry professionals. For context, for anyone who's outside the industry or who's involved but not so much in the construction end, I like to just draw that thread of what it means to have things buttoned up, to have things done correctly downstream — pre-planning, cost estimating, accurate budgeting, thorough design, having the different scopes like project management governed correctly. And

24:31stuff for developers, for owners, for finance groups who want to see things get done but don't have maybe the intuition on the construction end. And just how bad it can be for contractors and subtrades on site when a year and a half or two years — or even more — before that, things just weren't done very vigilantly. We'll use that word. And I just started thinking about past projects I was involved in as a

24:59contractor — whether it be private stuff with a developer who might use a freelance designer and maybe a small CM kind of one-stop shop — for a $15 million building, maybe — and just cutting costs. But are you really cutting costs? Because your building took six months longer to build. You had another $500,000 in change orders, or a million. And so, obviously I'm speaking to the choir here, talking to you. But I just think that — to me, that's when I hear

25:28"construction agency" — those are the things you're set up to avoid, whether you're outsourcing the project management, or you can come in for almost any service at any point, really, from conception to turnover. Right? Yeah. And it's our service mix, our service offering, and our understanding of our value proposition that has evolved steadily over time. And we've gone through different phases of what we thought we were to the market. And one of the things that's contributed

26:02— and I won't skip ahead — but one of the things that's contributed to our evolution has been that feedback loop of understanding what we're selling, understanding how it's being received, how are things working from a business perspective, what are the clients saying. I mean, you're talking different markets now. So now we're talking, you know, the Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI market. In the last 18 to 24 months it's been madness — it's a super hot, overheated market. So what are the client needs in an overheated market? Who

26:33are the buyers of construction services? And this is something that's a really distinct point — I mean, this is a construction broadcast, and I think a lot of construction professionals lose sight of the fact that construction is a service industry. You cannot grow an economy with construction. Construction doesn't grow the economy — other sectors grow the economy, and construction facilitates the growth of every other sector. It's so fundamental to the success of an economy. And we lose sight of that, right? Sometimes we're like, "Oh, we're going to do all this

27:03construction." It's like, well, what is it for, right? So in the Halifax/Nova Scotia area, you've got all this population growth. Population growth will grow your economy, and construction has to service that growth across the whole spectrum — everything these people need, from getting around, to somewhere to live, to places to shop and eat, hospitals to take care of them when they're sick, elderly care. All of this stuff comes from construction. Construction literally is the fulcrum that enables the growth of every other sector. And I think that's

27:34something that, if we can understand it as construction industry professionals, it'll help us understand the difference we make. Because at Vigilant, we really focus on the fact that every project that comes to us matters. Be it: this is a business that's expanding, and if this project goes well we're going to accelerate their growth; or this is a community who's building a community center, and if this project goes well it's going to make that place nicer to live, it's going to make everybody who lives there feel better

28:00about where they live. And what an impact to have. We're going to revitalize this water and sewer project and it's going to go really, really well. And people think, "Oh, it's water and sewer — big deal, it's not that glamorous." But that project going as easily as it can — we're going to minimize the frustration to the people, we're going to make sure that infrastructure is ready for its next 20- or 30-year lifespan — it has an impact. And construction has a massive impact on

28:25society across all sectors. And I really think that if we can think about and talk about that more, people will understand and appreciate what construction brings to the table. Instead of — especially from the Newfoundland context — it's often just seen as jobs. "Oh, it's a thousand jobs." It's more than that. Yeah, each one has so much more than that — so much more depth. What it means for the economy, what it means for the culture, what it means for athletics and music and

28:50hospitals — there's just so many different layers to it. I love how you articulated that, for how we fit into society. If you drill down and talk to the men and women on a job site, or the people who design these buildings, and you get down to them and you say, "What do you love about your job?" — it's actually one of my favourite interview

29:14questions: asking them what they love about working in construction. And at their core — they're all these same little boys and girls who liked playing with the Tonka trucks in the sandbox. Yeah. And so much of our current industry, I feel we lose sight of that. Because it's all about profit — how much money are we making? But at the core are all the people who got into construction because they loved construction. They love building things. They love seeing it come together. They

29:42love seeing that structure come out of the ground. They love seeing the kids playing on the playground after it's done. That's the stuff that when they go home — you know, they're having a lemonade on the patio with a barbecue or something — and they're just feeling satisfied with a good week's work. That's the stuff that matters. They're not thinking about how much money they made. Nobody cares about that. That shouldn't be the focus, because that's not why any of us got

30:07into it to begin with. So I think that's just a fundamental issue that if we can focus more on what is this achieving — right, "Oh, it's a movie theater, big deal" — okay, but like, what does a movie theater mean to people? It's a place to go and forget about the stress of your life for two hours, to be entertained, to just turn it all off and watch some entertainment. And watch a story that impacts you in some way. Like, everything can be tied to something

30:31bigger. Yeah. I mean, I love where you're going with that. It makes me think of even the reason we kind of started our platform — to have voices heard and just the passion that's in the industry. To hear the stories of, you know, you're driving down with your uncle who works in cladding or whatever, and he's saying, "Yeah, I worked on that building," and every street there's a building he worked on — he's got a

30:54story. And even, I think, there are so many protocols on site for safety — pre-meetings, job site startup meetings. And what would be wrong with having a meeting where the owners and the reps come in and you remind the workers at least once in that year-long project — or two-year or three-year or six-month project — "Hey, this is what this building's going to mean to this community." See that building envelope you're

31:22putting up? There's a million people going to see that next year when they drive by. There's a hundred thousand tourists going to see it next year. There's going to be a live event going on right in this room where you're putting the floor down. And at least just trigger that psychology behind it — that you're contributing to something that's going to last. I mean, some people have that in the forefront of their thinking, but I think we could be reminded of it throughout projects, right.

31:45One of the things that I think stands us apart — I think it's a strength of ours — is our culture and our focus on respect and compassion amongst our team. And it's something that — you know what's funny? I tell this story sometimes, and I don't often think of it. But I remember my first day in engineering back in 1997. Going back. They pile us all into

32:13the lecture theater and we're all in there, and all of the faculty are lined along the front. They're all old, gray-bearded men, and there's like two women amongst the faculty. And I remember the associate dean at the time making a statement or a joke along the lines of — you know — "Make sure when you work at the companies in your jobs that you're nice to the secretaries, because these people

32:38are very important — they can get you the best pens." And everybody in the front laughed — it was a good joke, right? And I'm thinking in the back, "Really, guys?" Like — and there was this culture of arrogance that was kind of attempted to be bred into engineering students that I didn't recognize at the time for what it was — but it was a form of elitism. And as I went through my career, I've encountered people who did a university degree and had an arrogance or superiority because they

33:09did engineering or architecture, and somebody was just a technologist, or "so-and-so is just a tradesperson — you're just a tradesperson, what do you know?" And this simmering sense of disrespect and devaluing of somebody else's work. And the funny thing is, it's something that's just part of my values as a person and has informed my choices — that nobody's better than anybody else. Just because I did engineering doesn't mean that I'm better than the carpenter on that job site. We

33:39just made different choices and we came from different places, and it doesn't make me better or worse than anybody else — so long as I'm going to treat that person with respect and I hope that they'll treat me with respect. But there's such a fundamental disconnect sometimes in construction, where there's a lot of conflict created from the perceived value of different roles. Well — go ahead. No, please continue. But you see this on a lot of job sites, and tie it back to the thread of

34:07what we were just talking about — the importance of this building, this structure. What does it mean to the owner, to the community, to the society, the city that it's in? Everybody had a part to play — from the person who swung the hammer, who drove the backhoe, who raised the steel, who installed the sprinklers — the tradespeople who built this — to the designers who put it together, to the architects who conceived this beautiful structure using all their talents, to the people who came

34:36up with the way to manage the schedule and keep an eye on the costs, and the people who finance the job. They all applied their own talent and expertise to create this thing — thousands of inputs from hundreds of people — and at the end the result is this thing. And everybody's input had value. And I think we lose sight of that sometimes. I mean, we try not to, because it's really the heart of our respectful approach and fairness to everybody. But I really think it's something that should be talked about

35:05more in construction. Yeah. And this is a barrier to entry for a lot of people. There's a reason why there are fewer women in construction than any other sector — because that's something that's not inviting to female workers. Because it's disrespectful. I mean, it's a troublesome trend that I think is getting better, yes, but I don't want to sit here and pretend that we've fixed it, because we haven't. Oh yeah, no, we definitely have a long way to go. We need to get better at

35:32so many things. But I love the 30,000-foot view you just laid out there, because, you know, I see that too. I've seen that in the past. I've come at it from a different angle than you — I grew up working on job sites, then working my way into an office, estimating, project management on the contracting side. In blue-collar, heavy labour construction, I've had great experiences working with certain architects and engineers and project managers for general contractors,

36:03and their understanding of our problems and our needs and our manpower that we think we need — all that kind of stuff. And had awful experiences too. And I think there's an elitism probably in most fields where you're career-driven — as an engineer, as an architect. You've got so many different personalities. If you're in architecture, you know, you're artistic, right-brained, constantly — different way of thinking. You're not going to think the same way

36:35as the person who's filtered out organically as a guy working on concrete, who's going to work like he's going to hockey practice every day. But like you said, one of the most fascinating things — and I think it makes our industry different from most, maybe — there's a hole in the ground here downtown Halifax, and four years later all of a sudden there's a building there. There are human beings walking in and out of it for certain activities. It took

37:06thousands of people — from day one for the vision to come alive, and to be financed, and to be designed. And then you've got all these subtrades working under management and whatnot to have that building turned over. And there's so many levels of expertise in areas of, you know — and we want to get into talking about collaboration in the industry now. You mentioned how students nowadays — maybe Millennials or Gen Z, whatever the terms are, sometimes I forget — but away from that profit-first mentality, into

37:40— no, more like energy and collaboration. How that mentality can lead to everybody needing to win at this table. The consultants are making money, the generals are making money, the subs are making money — that's a project where you look back and say, like, that really went well. A lot of things have to happen for it to go that well. Plus the finance needs to be — it's just fascinating, there's so many moving parts. But definitely one of the

38:06most humbling things for me in talking to somebody different almost every week, whether it's a large GC that's multinational or it's a guy who just started a cladding company two years ago with 30 guys on the ground — he just got his first job over a million bucks and he's over the moon and he's making good money and he's working with his wife to start the business. There's so many different people with so many different layers, and that's what it takes. And we're different, but we need

38:32each other. And if we could just have that mentality — level of respect, empathy is a big thing. The three different types of empathy. You know, I can't put myself in the shoes of a structural engineer or somebody who's been an electrician for 30 years. But I'm around — I see what he's doing. It takes effort, right? It's assimilation and accommodation — Piaget's psychology of children and their development. If you can't assimilate something into your thinking, you've got to accommodate for it. And that takes

39:05effort. But if we put that effort in — man, there's a lot of problems that can be avoided. And I just love what you're getting into there, because that's what makes me love the industry. But at the same time, it's what makes me hate it some days, because it's tough. It's tough to work with people that are different types than you are. It's not something that we've solved, but I do think it can be really

39:42frustrating or disappointing to run into it in your day to day. And you can really see the impact on people, right — when they're on a job where it is conflict-driven, and instead of people trying to find a way to do things, they're finding reasons why they can't. And normally the reason why they can't do something is financial — it's going to cost me too much money. And that can create this negative feedback cycle of conflict and disrespect that ends in disaster

40:09where you're in court and everybody loses. Everybody knows a story, or has been involved in a job that's ended up in litigation, and it's a nightmare. It's a terrible, terrible thing. But it can be prevented if you have the right collaborative mindset and you try to be fair-minded, you try to be respectful. I don't know — I've learned too long now to say never or impossible — but I think it's got to be very difficult to have a construction project end in

40:36litigation if all the parties on the job are genuinely trying to be fair-minded and respectful. Yes, I mean, it seems like they're at opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Because the jobs that end up in litigation — it's because somebody wasn't being fair-minded, or somebody was being disrespected or perceived themselves to be disrespected. And it's so easy — so easy to prevent. And so when we're, as a project management firm or as a design engineering firm, talking to our clients and our owners, we really try to

41:06educate them on the importance of being respectful and being collaborative with the people who are going to help us achieve this project. Because we can't swing the hammers, we can't direct the steel, we're not going to drive the excavators and move the earth and do all of those things — that's not what we do. But the people who do it matter, and we have to treat them fairly or it's going to cost you more money in the long run. And that's a hard lesson for some owners. But

41:31the ones who get it — and they're the ones who get really, really good at this stuff — they have successful projects. And that just accelerates their growth, and it's a positive feedback loop in the best possible way. Yeah. I wonder if we could just step back for a minute here and talk a little bit about vision. And when you talked about starting that first tech company: "I didn't know what I was doing, but I got started anyway" — like a lot of entrepreneurs, we don't know exactly what

41:54we're doing, but at least we have the courage to take that first step. When Vigilant was first established in 2012 — you talked a little bit about the evolution and the growth since 2020 into Nova Scotia and other parts of Atlantic — now fully across Atlantic Canada. I think you even do, you know, some cost stuff in central Canada and throughout the western provinces too, perhaps. But where was I going with that? I kind of lost my train of thought. Kind of how I got to the vision.

42:19Yeah. So when you first started Vigilant — with most of your contracts, kind of outsourced construction management, where you would have project management professionals on staff that would say to the owner, "Hey, we'll take care of this, we'll look after the project" — were you doing cost estimating and monitoring, and the four pillars you mentioned plus prime consulting? Were you doing all that stuff at first, or was it predominantly like "here's an outsourced construction management company that

42:47will take care of your project management"? It evolved. So — it's funny, right? I look back on the past 11 years at Vigilant, and where we are now. I look at it and I say, "How did we not do this to begin with?" But you take for granted the experience and the benefit of that time where you learn, right? And you learn and adapt and you move forward. And so I think that's what I was getting at —

43:09like, sometimes you start, you have the idea, you have the vision — you don't have it fully — but because you started, then you get this feedback, and other people and the industry and the market will almost tell you who you are, as the years go. Exactly. And that's a good way of putting it — the market kind of told us who we needed to be. We started out — right up until before COVID, we were strictly a project management

43:31consulting company. Sometimes we would directly second a staff member to a large organization, but primarily we would just get a scope of work to manage a project on behalf of an owner, public or private. We would hire the designers, we would hire the contractors, and we would manage the job to finish. And that was your typical owner's project management scope. COVID hit and suddenly it was an absolute whirlwind of "Oh my God, how do we survive? What happens if

44:01they shut down construction? How do we deal with this?" You know, in January of 2020, we set a goal of doubling revenue for that year, and halfway through the year we were like, "What happens if we shut it all down and sell everything?" And as an entrepreneur, that's an insane whiplash — to go from that. I mean, there were times — six months after COVID — where I was sat here in this chair saying, "All right, if I stopped it all now

44:27and sold everything, how much money would be left for my partners and I, and how long could we survive with our families if the world continues to go sideways?" And that's a bit of a body blow, right? But things kept going — you just keep the team going, you try and encourage people, you just take it one day at a time. COVID happened and we had to evolve. Everything is on Zoom. What could we sell? Okay, well, project management is

44:54difficult to sell. What about costing? We have professional quantity surveyors on staff. We do cost monitoring and cost estimating for all of our existing project management clients as part of our project management scope. Why don't we start selling costing? So we started selling costing. And who outsources a great deal of cost estimating services? Architecture firms. Because architecture firms are very, very talented at the vision for a building — they're artists, truthfully. Our architects are artists in terms of what they come up with for a

45:25building and understanding all the technical details that go into making a building function. The form and function of a building is the domain of the architect, right? They are experts at it. And how humanity will interact with that space. Exactly. Yeah. And so they don't like to get into detailed cost estimates as costing professionals, because then the client gets angry with them when things don't work out. And so that's the old saying — you don't mention money, you don't mention costs to an

45:51architect. No, no. So we started selling cost estimating to Atlantic Canada. And then we said, "Well, if we're based in Newfoundland and we can do a cost estimate in New Brunswick, why can't we do one in Ontario?" So we started selling into the Ontario market with detailed cost estimates. Massive demand — downtown core Toronto — just an absolutely out-of-this-world demand for cost estimating. And the clients — architects specifically — primarily, architects are still our

46:20main client for cost estimating. Architects who outsource their clients' cost estimating needs to us. And massive demand in Ontario. The thing about Ontario is they love dealing with people from Atlantic Canada because they get that Atlantic Canada pricing. And then we said, "Hey, if we can do it in Ontario, why not western Canada?" So we started selling into British Columbia and Alberta. The demand in British Columbia is even higher than Ontario. And the British Columbia people love us because we're not from Ontario.

46:49So it's just a funny dynamic when you go nationwide. So that was costing — we started to stand up that vertical, we started to grow it. Can we drill into costing a little bit? Yeah, you want to keep going with what you were about to say? Well, I was just going to cover the other two services, but we can get to them. We're doing okay. Okay. Yeah. So drill into costing. Yeah. So when you say costing, you're talking about basically a BOQ — like

47:10bill of quantities — for a full build. The architecture might be at 75% design — they're coming to you for a Class D or C at that point. Can we talk a little bit about D, C, B, and A — those types of estimates? Cost estimate. So in a construction project, it's all about decisions, right? Somebody's going to spend a bunch of money to build a thing, and there's a reason for that. And it has to be at a certain price for them to be able to justify the

47:35debt that they need to service, for their operations, for whatever it is — be it a private company that's growing for profit, a not-for-profit, or a public organization or community. It has to hit a certain price point to get them what they need. And so you have to go through a certain process. You have an idea: "I have a need — I need X square feet of space and I've got this much money and it needs to do this thing." And so generally at some point you're going to

48:01talk to somebody — it can be an architect, it can be an engineer, it can be a project manager, it doesn't really matter. And they're going to say, "Okay, what do you want?" And they're going to start doing some very early-stage conceptual planning: "Well, roughly, a building of this size and this type is going to cost this much money." A good starting point is — somewhere along the way, you can do this really rough, napkin kind of

48:26square-foot cost. But it's a rough number. So if you can get to a point where you're proceeding through a conceptual design but haven't started detailed design — that's a really important inflection point. The difference between a concept design and a detailed design, where you're going to pay a design professional to go and do the design — that's a massive expense. Like, you're talking full assemblies, finished products, everything issued-for-construction drawings and specifications that a contractor can take and erect this thing

48:54out of. Literally, we're creating something off of paper — well, computers now — but still, I consider it paper blueprints. But in those early stages, before you make the decision to spend the money — and we try to represent owners — so the owner is going to go: let's say it's a $10 million structure and they're looking at like $800,000 to a million dollars in design fees. Before they spend that million dollars on design, it might make sense to make sure that they can get what they want for $10 million. So

49:19the designer does a little bit of work, concept design, and at that point you take your concept design, you hand it to a costing firm like us, and we will do a Class D estimate on it — which is an elemental cost estimate. Because concept design is very rough, right? You've got floor plans, elevations — that's pretty well it. There's not a lot of detail in there. Well, from that you're able to do a Class D cost estimate based on the standards of professional quantity surveying, and come

49:44up with a reasonable estimate of what this is going to cost, based on market conditions, labour rates, supply chains, what it takes to put this building together. And us, ironically, as a project management firm, we're able to put that expertise to bear when we're building a cost estimate, because we know what it takes. We've erected these structures. So it's not all rough numbers for us — we're able to apply our own expertise and insight to our estimates, which really, really helps our accuracy. But at the end of the day, you

50:12get a cost estimate. Class D is elemental costing based on, traditionally, concept design. And you give that to an owner that says, "This building will be, you know, $10.5 million, plus or minus $1.2 million." And so that gives them a range and allows them to say, "Okay, it's a little bit more than I thought, but I feel comfortable proceeding with design." And then they start designing. And then generally — A, B, C, D is just increasing accuracy and effort. But once

50:40they issue those 99%-for-review drawings, or issued-for-construction drawings, that's when that pre-tender estimate comes in. And that's the one that's your typical kind of go/no-go decision — we're going to go out. We're going to do a — you know, Class D or Class A? Typically it's Class B, because it's a little less labour-intensive. A Class A estimate is a full takeoff — we're counting every nail, every board, every cubic metre of concrete. So a Class A estimate — you're talking, like, that's within five percent

51:05one way or the other, hopefully. Not much different from what a contractor would do to bid it. Exactly. Yeah. It's the exact same kind of process. I remember growing up watching my father do takeoffs on the weekend for — I can relate to that, yeah. I can see it. And instead of blueprints on the table, there was no eating at the table from Saturday to Sunday because you'd get the blueprints Friday night and you had to have the estimate done Monday morning. But you would get that number to the owner, and now

51:29before they go to tender and sign contracts and go down that process with a contractor, they have some sense of what this project's going to cost. So from a business perspective — the business of doing construction projects, as the buyers of construction services — it just makes sense to have these checks before you start spending lots of money. It's a milestone, it's a checkpoint. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. A no-brainer. So that's cost estimating. The other side of cost estimating that's really important for us is cost monitoring — payment

51:57certification. Most of these projects require an owner to go out and leverage debt. So a bank will come and say, "I'll lend you your $10 million, you put in your 20% — or 10% or whatever it is." And they say, "Every month that you come to me looking for a progress draw from your contractor, saying the job is 6% done, I want 6% of the money" — the bank will say, "I want somebody independent of this process to verify it." And that's the work of a professional

52:23quantity surveyor. They go on site, they check the progress, they value the progress, and they report back to the bank. And that authorizes a progress draw on the loan, and away they go. And so we've had a lot of success with cost monitoring work. It's very demanding work, but it's something that's required on almost every job. If you finance a job in construction, the financial institution is going to want to cost monitor to mitigate their risks. Yeah. So it's not very often that any developer

52:49is getting through a project without that cost monitoring third party. I mean, there may be some situations, or on government public tenders or whatever. But if you're a private developer, you're cost monitoring, and it makes sense — even if you're the largest developer and you own your contractor-developer and your own engineering design team, sure, it's all integrated — it still makes sense for you to have somebody outside of your influence to make sure that things are going right. Because it'll protect you — protect the owner — from a situation where

53:18this is not as advanced as you think it is, and you're exposing yourself to some risk. And there's got to be some protocol for a lot of these large developers — certainly in Nova Scotia and HRM. You know, they've got integrated design teams and engineering firms, but I'm sure the bank has protocol where if there's a PQS under your payroll, "We need a third party — you've got to prove it." Generally, won't they

53:42— generally it just comes down to independence. Yeah. It's something very well established. Because a PQS is a professional — so if they feel comfortable stamping it, they can. But it's almost universally a third party. Yeah. And that's the costing service that adds tremendous value. So we stood that one up. We've always kind of had this advisory practice, which is our catch-all for if you need help with something that isn't a typical engagement — like a gap that you have, you need help with this procurement. We're gonna

54:13— we just did a job recently for the Government of Nova Scotia where they were standing up an internal design team and they wanted someone to help them through the 10-month process of: how do we create the processes to do design internally at government, how do we hire the staff and directors, and create the policies and processes to integrate with the rest of government? That's a complicated piece of work. You need some expertise, and the private sector has a lot of expertise on being efficient with design. So that's an example of a piece of work

54:40that's your typical management consulting engagement. You know, you've got an organization that's got a short-term need: "Hey, we're overloaded, we need someone to help us for two months until we get somebody in place. No problem." That's kind of our advisory role. And in the most recent evolution of us — and I think it was the final piece of that construction agency vision for us — it's really gained a lot of momentum in our minds since we've made the decision.

55:06We had always resisted directly doing prime consulting and engineering design work, even though we'd been licensed to practice engineering throughout our whole existence. We've had a permit to practice civil and structural engineering. On a lot of our project management jobs — especially for repeat clients — we would help them with the civil design. It just made sense, right, we can just do it ourselves. We weren't built as a design shop because that takes a certain kind of staff, but we would do it. And then we came to the realization

55:34— mostly from our work in the Nova Scotia region, in terms of how hot that market has been (recent interest rate cooling notwithstanding) — we would go to these clients. And we talked earlier about listening to what the market has to say. We would go to these clients and say, "Hey, we're Vigilant, we do project management." And they would say, "We do project management" — and project management is one of those things everybody thinks they can do it, right? And project management is a complex science and art. You remember

56:00earlier talking about engineers being maybe not so great at communication — project managers are expert communicators, they have to be. And they have to be able to identify and relate to other people and make them feel like they are being listened to and heard, so that when conflicts arise you can work through them. That's what a project manager does. They don't just look at Gantt charts and monitor budgets. Project managers get people to do what they're supposed to do and to get them to feel

56:26good about it. That's what a good project manager does. You could sum it up — maybe, I don't know if you agree — it's conflict management, you're managing conflict. I mean, that's 100% it. Yeah, massive part of the job. Yeah. And so we had resisted it for a long time, but the owners up there — the clients up there — were saying, "Hey, I've got a project manager. I don't need that. I've got Joe — he built a shed once, he can manage this job." And I'm serious, right. Like — yeah, oh yeah, "This guy drove a backhoe once,

56:54so he can manage his $10 million commercial building — no problem." Built-up — yeah. Oh my God, you're like, okay fine. And we're like, "Well, what about costing?" "No, no, the bank doesn't care. I'm not doing any of that — or I've got a guy." All right, cool. But what they would say to us was, "Well, can you stamp drawings?" And we would normally say, "Well, we could, but we don't really." And finally, you know, a little while ago, we said, "You know what, enough's

57:18enough." The market right now — in a hot market — they want someone to help, and we've got the ability to help. We've got tremendous expertise, especially in civil design, infrastructure design, site layouts, that kind of stuff. Where we could go and be the prime consultant on a job — even a building, no problem. We just need to sub out the sub-consultants. We know what it takes, we know how to do it, we've been doing it for all this time. And it's just — we've resisted it, resisted it, because we're like, "Ah, are we going to

57:44get into that game?" But now we've finally said, "You know what, we're going to do it. It's what the market wants. It's what the buyers have been asking us to do." And so we've said we're doing it. We are now fully offering design engineering services, prime consulting — it's primarily in civil, we can do some structural, and then we sub-consult, we build a team of consultants as necessary, and we prime the job. And the response in terms of the opportunities for us has

58:09been tremendous. It's like we set off some dynamite, because it was kind of a final impediment in terms of the projects we could help with. If you think about the market of construction projects as a pie, we were only carving out a slice — the projects of the owners that recognized they need project management help, knew they shouldn't do it themselves, and wanted us. We could find them at the right time when they were ready to do a job. That's

58:34the other variable, right — timing is almost a key sales variable for us. But we did that. And now it's basically every project that exists that we can help with. And I really feel like, in my mind, the concept of a construction agency — who it is I want — I want clients to call. And the value that we drive, as this fair-minded, collaborative approach to getting projects done, and understanding the context of what it means to the business, to the client, what it means to the community, how each piece of the

59:01puzzle — from the design firms, the sub-consultants, to the GC, to the subcontractors, to the tradespeople — how they all form this puzzle. I feel that our model is uniquely positioned to really, really add value to any construction project. And it has been very exciting since we kind of made that shift, adding and rounding out our primary services. And that's kind of what that construction agency concept is in a nutshell: whatever somebody needs, we can help. Yeah. And just to give some context here

59:32and draw some threads — is it often the case that — you mentioned, yeah, you're outsourcing cost estimating from architects throughout Atlantic Canada, also Ontario now, western provinces. For developers, you might be offering cost monitoring services throughout a project in the construction phase. And then there's other consultancy stuff going on throughout. So how important are repeat clients? And are there some situations where you're basically checking all the boxes of these services

60:01right from point A to Z — from preliminary right through to tendering, right through to construction and turnkey — you're turning over at substantial completion? Like, does that happen? Yeah, often. And those are ones you want to be repeat clients, right? Obviously. Honestly, we have clients who have used us for years and years and years. A good example is both the O'Neill Auto Group and Capital Auto Group in Newfoundland, where they used

60:26us for one project just as a little piece of work, and then it became a whole other project, and then a bigger project, and then another one. And for us, that full service of somebody picks up the phone and says, "Hey, I need this thing" — I need space, ultimately, right? I need space because my business is growing and I want this space to serve this function and I've got this much money. Can you help us? They call us and we can help them through that

60:49process in a way that's designed to help minimize their expense until they have to spend the money, right? You want to make sure that they're getting the building that they want. The building that they need is sometimes more than the building that they want, but nevertheless, at the price they can afford in the timeline that fits their need. It's a very complicated process. And there's something I always think about: everybody understands that when you've got a legal question, you'd

61:15better call a lawyer. But sometimes people think, "I've got a construction question — I don't really need to call a construction expert." Until they're ready for a design, a lot of times owners will call architects before they're ready to talk to the architect. And I know I have a lot of people in architecture who tell me they spend so much time backtracking with clients who haven't done any basic planning. They just say, "I want to put a building up," and they're like, "Okay, but what about this,

61:41this, and this?" "I don't know — don't you answer that question?" And these aren't things that architects are supposed to be doing, and they end up taking on this extra work. And it's just not fair to them. But if you have an owner who understands when to bring in an architect and sets that architect up for success by having their ducks in a row — "Here you go, you're the design professional, you've got that artistic lens, you understand how this building is going to flow" — let's give them the things they need to

62:07succeed. And then support them as they're designing the structure. And the same thing for the contractor: let's give that contractor the information they need to build this structure, and support them. Let's not set them up for failure by giving them a poor set of tender documents. Let's set them up for success. It's the owner's job to make that happen. But if the owner doesn't know construction, how can they do that? They need somebody to help them. And that's fundamentally what we do. And I think — obviously I think we

62:33do it well. Yeah. Well, I've got to draw some threads there, because you mentioned a couple of things earlier — one was productivity, and how you take a lot of pride in that, obviously, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO. I mean, that's a big thing. And I think — correct me if I'm wrong — a lot of your productivity probably comes from the ability to look at a situation, analyze it quickly, and say no very rapidly, so your energy doesn't get pulled in a certain direction. So you can

62:59move on quickly to something else. And just as you're talking, like, as a consultant — furthermore, not just as a consultant but as a construction agency, something that's probably more unique — with a lot of different scenarios coming at you and different types of contracts and different entry points into a project. You really got to understand — you mentioned your MBA, understanding people, wanting to learn about people. You really got to understand who you're talking to, what type of person they are, what's their position —

63:28are they an architect, are they an owner, are they a project manager? What's their incentive, what's their motive? Do they understand the different players involved? Because if you don't have that intuition or ability to navigate these different types of people and players, you're just going to have so much time wasted on things that are never going to come to fruition. Is that resonating with what I'm saying? 100%. Both from the time you say go and you kind of start the symphony of a

63:56construction project, but then all of the stuff leading up to that — in terms of helping that business owner through that very difficult process of: what do I need, what's possible, what's it going to take? And one of the main reasons people will give us money — because ultimately it's a business, right, people are giving us money for some purpose — is that these are business owners who are experts in their field. They understand what it takes to make their business successful — be it they're a developer, they're

64:21a car dealer, they're a real estate firm, they're in food and service, arts and culture — doesn't matter what it is. But they're experts in that, but they don't know how to do a construction project. And so the quicker they can get expert advice and assistance — and this doesn't have to be us, but they need somebody to help them — the ones that recognize that are the ones who can succeed. The ones who get in trouble are the ones who say, "I can do this myself." So now you've got your

64:48general manager of your facility also leading a construction project, and you can't do two of those things at once. Something's going to suffer. What ends up happening is that everything suffers. They're not doing their day-to-day job properly and they're not doing the construction management and construction planning job properly, because they don't know how. It's not something they're familiar with. And it just sets them up for failure. So picking up the phone and calling somebody like us — or somebody else, again, I'm not going to sit here

65:12and say "just call us, we're the only ones in town" — get some help. You'll save yourself millions of dollars. Every dollar you spend in early-stage planning, you'll save a hundred times that back in construction if you don't do it right. And they talk about, "Oh, it's $20,000 — it's a lot of money." It's like, man, it's better than $2 million, because that's what you're risking. And our owners — especially repeat clients — once they've been through this once, they never go away. Most of our clients

65:38stay with us indefinitely as long as they're doing work. And would you say — I mean, a lot of times that's what it takes — especially when you're not on the back end of the financing for construction — until they kind of go through a situation that doesn't go well and they learn. Absolutely. That's when it's really going to hit home and you feel it in your bones: "Okay, I'm not going to do that again." And sometimes you

65:58have to experience it before you can learn. Yeah. So I know that there are probably all kinds of interesting projects that you've worked on throughout Atlantic Canada — obviously a lot in Newfoundland from 2013 to 2020 as you grew and evolved there. One of the recent ones, and I think it's still ongoing, is the Majestic Theatre in St. John's. I'll let you give us a little bit of the rundown on that. It's over 100

66:25years old, it's a historic property, a renovation — it's going to be a really cool concert hall there in St. John's, Newfoundland, with approximately 350 seats. It sounds like a really neat job to work on, but obviously with its challenges. It's been — it's probably our current most memorable project, because it's something — it's this iconic heritage structure in downtown St. John's, right across from City Hall. Everybody knows this building. And a lot of people from, maybe, my parents' generation

66:53remember it when it was an active club and theater. But the vision of the current ownership group is to renovate the structure and create this revitalized arts and culture scene for theater and music and whatnot here. It's something we're so excited to be working on, but it's such a challenging project. The existing structure needed a lot of work, there are things they wanted to change, they need to make it

67:21accessible — you know, is it structurally sound? So many moving pieces. And to the owner's credit, the owner reached out to me before they did anything and said, "Can you help with this?" I said, "Yeah, let me put you in touch with my partner Grant — he's the guy who can help you through this." But through him and the people who have worked with us — the general contractors and the contractor we've got on that job — I won't list any names, but if anybody's interested they can reach out to me — it has been

67:46excellent. Great collaborative spirit — we're all working together to make this happen. The architect who's worked on that has just done some tremendous work. Everybody's excited by the project because they see what it can mean to a city that's, you know, economically not really doing all that great at times. And so it's something that can really have some meaning to a community. So that project's been extremely successful and exciting for us. If we're talking about some other memorable ones — or you can expand — I

68:15— no, I definitely want to hear about the other ones. For some reason I'm going to go off on a tangent here. What's the name of the Broadway show about the Newfoundland people in 9/11, when the planes stopped over? Is it Come From Away? Come From Away. So I don't know why, but for some reason it triggered a memory — a few years back I saw that show in Toronto. Amazing. And it just accentuated the Newfoundland people and obviously how accommodating they were of all the people on these planes,

68:40putting them up for weeks and stuff. But I don't know why I thought of that — just because of the theater concept and stuff like that. It just — you know, as I talk to you — it's definitely in line with my experience with people from Newfoundland. There's always such great personality. And that show — it'd be really cool if they ever did that show at the theater there when it opens. But yeah, so it's an exciting project, we can't wait to see it finished. A couple of other ones

69:05just quickly that have mattered to us. The Town of Mahone Bay — we did their fire hall, and we finished that maybe half a year ago. But the thing that really mattered to me on this was that these were the first people outside of Newfoundland that hired us as project managers. The first job we ever got off-island — in Nova Scotia. And we bid it. It was an open

69:29call for the municipality. The municipality did an open call, and they interviewed us. And we were very transparent in our bid. We said, "Look, we're based in Newfoundland, but we've got the ability to service this. Here's our plan, here's what it'll cost." And they took a chance on us. I mean, ultimately, they did — they took a chance on us because we're this Newfoundland-based company who'd never done work in Nova Scotia before. But the officials there have been just wonderful, so professional and kind.

69:55The fire chief there has been great. It's just been a fantastic project. And Mahone Bay is such a beautiful community — it's one of those iconic Nova Scotia communities in general. It's just been a pleasure to work on. So we're very proud of that project. And a lot of people think, "Oh, it's just a little fire hall." But you know what — that matters to a small town. Something we take pride in is being part of something, because sometimes the small projects have big

70:19impact. A few others — two major car dealerships that we finished here. One that I mentioned earlier: the O'Neill Auto Group. So they do the Nissan — we did multiple projects with them from 2014 on, and it culminated in their flagship dealership here in Mount Pearl. And seeing that relationship culminate in this capstone project was a great pleasure. So that picture's on our website. And then more recently than that was the Hyundai St. John's — this is Capital Auto Group. This is the largest

70:46Hyundai dealership in Canada. It is an amazing, state-of-the-art facility. Every time I walk in there I think, "This is the coolest building in St. John's." Just a tremendously exciting, technically advanced building. Just so cool to be a part of that project. It was enormous from a commercial construction perspective — this is as big as it gets for a dealership. And then the last one I'd mention, which is kind of a different one — in the City of Mount Pearl, we did a major water and sewer

71:16project, but we did it with the design-build methodology. We pitched the city engineer: "Let's do a design-build water and sewer project." It had never been done in Newfoundland and Labrador before. And he said, "You know what, let's do it." And we did two of them side by side — a bid-build project and a design-build project, same size and scope — large projects. And we did this one design-build. And the contractor, to their credit — they were like, "This is different, a design-build infrastructure project, but you

71:43know what, let's do it." They went and got a civil firm to partner with them, and it was a huge success. And it was such a cool thing to work on — trying something new. It was a year faster than the traditional model in terms of getting that infrastructure into the ground. Costs were consistent, but that schedule advantage was enormous. So that's a project we're really proud of. And so any of your listeners who are from municipalities dealing with

72:07infrastructure projects — there are times where a design-build project can be an enormous benefit for infrastructure projects. So that was something we were really proud of, because it was one of those things where we got a chance to innovate. And it's not always something you get to do. Yeah. And one of the great things about construction is just the variety — the different sorts of buildings and projects that you work on. Obviously, the four or five that you just mentioned — very, very lot of variety. There are so

72:30many different projects there. Terry, this has been amazing. It's awesome to be this close to your passion for the industry. Chatting with you has been a real pleasure. Loved hearing about your journey — Vigilant Atlantic. Everybody who hasn't heard of them, check them out. It's amazing to hear how the company came to life and all the great things that you folks have been doing. And yeah, we really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you very much — it's been a

72:56pleasure to be a guest on your show. I think it's a great thing you folks are doing. I think there are great things happening in construction, and sometimes we forget about how cool it is to be a part of it. And I think that just being open and honest about that — sometimes it's just cool to build these things and to be a part of these diverse teams that can do these amazing things. Sometimes we get caught up in all the negativity of trying to make money and

73:19trying to survive — profit, profit, profit — when I think the fun of those kids with the Tonka trucks is something we need to be remembering more often: why we got into this to begin with. Yeah. It's awesome to hear a CEO like yourself — an accomplished entrepreneur — talk about the importance of collaboration and where the industry's headed in that regard, and have that incentive. So again, thanks a lot, and cheers, Terry. We'll look forward to having this episode drop, and yeah,

73:43it's been a real treat. This episode is brought to you by Cook Insurance — your trusted insurance broker in Atlantic Canada for 50 years. Insurance is complex, and the Cook team focuses on delivering comprehensive solutions for your construction needs, including builder's risk, wrap-up liability, performance bonds, and project-specific construction. A Navacord partner since 2020, Cook is one of the largest construction brokers in Canada and offers national strength with a local touch. Whatever your insurance needs are, Cook has you covered. We would like to take this time to thank a long-

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