Building a Cladding Company From Scratch: Estimating, Crew Culture, and Knowing When to Say No — Jimmy Lorway, Anvil Construction

0:00We are excited to be announcing our newest presenter sponsor, Payzant Building Products. Payzant Building Products has been providing contractors and builders with the supplies necessary to complete their jobs since 1964. They've built a reputation on honest, helpful, and quality service, serving the HRM for the last 58 years — now with seven locations in the HRM and one in New Brunswick. We look forward to having Payzant Building Products on the podcast in the near future. All right, welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Today we have with us Jimmy Lorway with Anvil

0:37Construction. Jimmy is a graduate from NSCC Architectural Technology — yep, in 2012. Jimmy became an estimator for a commercial real estate developer and spent some time working for a general contractor in the city. Also, Jimmy ended up taking a contract with the military — he has been a reservist since the age of — and since 2021 when he started Anvil Construction, pursuing cladding as a cladding contractor full-time. So it's been about a year and a half since then.

1:19About a year and a half. Yep. How are things going? Busy — really busy. Really? Yeah. Glad to take that leap of faith, get out there, do my own thing, and sink my teeth into it and just kind of see where we can take this company. It is a big leap, isn't it? And what — tell us a little bit about what went into that. You know, you have experience working in real estate, you've got eight years there since 2012 when you graduated from the

1:44Ivany Campus at NSCC. And after eight years of — you know, you worked with RCS, worked with some different real estate groups and stuff like that. Yeah, so I came out of NSCC, did a work term at Dora Construction, worked there for a little bit, ended up going over to RCS — at RCS for, I think, about three years or so. Ended up going over to Armour Group because real estate was always kind of an interest of mine, something I wanted to get into, and so I figured, okay,

2:10here's my foot in the door. I went in as a property manager — well, I ended up going over as an estimator for them because they had their construction division. So working for them, I figured it'd be a good way to be kind of adjacent to real estate and learn through osmosis, kind of thing. Yeah. I worked over there for a little while — a very different pace. I was probably over my head. I was young and ambitious. So after a while I was like, yeah, I don't think I can maintain

2:36this for the rest of my life, kind of thing. Ended up taking a break — I was a reservist since I was about the age of 16. I'm out now — you know, for about three years. But I took a contract with the military to kind of just relax for a little bit and rethink what I want to do. Yeah. What did that entail with the military? So I was a combat engineer. Basically, you know, building stuff or you know, destroying

3:03stuff. Anything from using hand tools, hydraulic tools, building small little bridges on the trails. So we built a bunch of bridges in the Baddeck Trail Society up in Cape Breton. Nice. But also using explosives — so that was kind of cool. Excellent! Oh, it was tons of fun. But yeah, so just went and worked with them for about a year. I got up to the rank of sergeant. I ended up having a kid during that year. At that point in

3:28time I had the opportunity to kind of get a full three-year contract — didn't pan out. So I was like, okay, well what am I going to do next? Like, I can continue with the military, do that full-time, or get back into construction. So I took a couple of interviews, ended up going with a company called Tidal Coast Construction, where again I worked as an estimator. And then over time, you know, the responsibility started getting bigger and bigger. It all kind of

3:55started when the owner, who was doing the project management, and the lead installer — who's actually my lead installer today — they went on a trip down to Florida and said, "Hey Jimmy, you're gonna run the guys for the next week. You know, don't mess it up." So okay, ended up doing that for the week. They came back and it was like, well, the ship's still on the right path, nothing has crumbled, so why don't you just keep doing it? Yeah, okay. So eventually that kind of panned into

4:22doing more project management than running the guys day-to-day, to getting more involved with the business, kind of thing. So by the end of it, like, I wasn't running the company A to Z, but I definitely had my hands in the pot, kind of thing, helping move things along. So I got a lot of experience from there — learning how to run and operate a small business, not to the full extent, but getting a pretty good idea. Yeah. So in

4:44January of '21 I decided, you know, it was time to make that leap of faith. Jumped off and did my own thing — Anvil as a result of that. So yeah, a couple of guys came over with me. Started with seven back in January, give or take, grew up to — I think 22 guys at one point. That was pretty interesting. It was probably too fast, and it was actually too fast. So many different projects — with 22 guys, just a couple of 10-man crews on a couple of different

5:13jobs, or too many projects. At the time I thought, okay, I have so many guys, I have so many projects — why don't I spread the love around and try to service all those projects at once, instead of dedicating them all to one project, getting that project done, and moving on to the next one? I thought I was keeping everyone happy by having people on the same site. No. I should have upset one client, or at least tried to explain it to them,

5:40saying that it's a schedule thing. "I'm sorry, I'd love to be there right now but I need to focus on this one so I can get to your project and properly service you." Yeah. So, lesson learned. But also, growing up to 22 guys at one point in time — we hired some guys and we kept them on because we had all this work going on, and we probably should have let some of them go

6:00earlier. Lesson learned. So now we're down to, I think, 12 installers and a couple of wood framers as well. It's a great size — happy to be at that size and continue at that size. And this time around, we'll probably add one or two guys a quarter, just because we don't want to overtax our lead guys with training new people. Yeah. So, with what you were saying — you know, you should have let a couple of people go.

6:33Do you mean you had, you know, kind of an emotional tie? You didn't want to let them go because you didn't have quite enough work? Or was it — no, it was more or less we had too much work and we needed guys to service the work, but we knew that it wasn't the right culture fit. Or, you know, they didn't do the work to the same quality that we wanted it done at. But because we were so desperate for the manpower and to get

6:59through all these projects, we kept them on, only to find out it probably would have been in our best interest to let them go a bit earlier. Some of them self-selected — they said, "Yeah, this isn't for me," and they moved on. And some of them were just — I'd say — "Sorry, this isn't working out." Yeah. The reason I asked that is because, you know, you chose to start a cladding company. There were probably a few different scopes you were thinking about, that you were involved with

7:24in your journey. Like, you mentioned Armour Group and those other companies that you worked with. Was it cladding for a reason? Is that your kind of favorite part of the building to work on? It's more engaging because it's architectural finish, and you kind of look back — at Tidal Coast, cladding was always a big thing that we did. We usually had one or two big anchor projects. So we did the Clayton Park

7:50Campus for Shanx, we did the Truro Campus for Shannon — so those were major jobs. Yeah. We were tearing off old fibre and putting on new Cape Cod, which is like 200 squares per building, kind of thing, or per project. And we had some other really nice ones as well. That's where I kind of sank my teeth into cladding. I knew that there was a fairly complex substructure, so the barrier to entry knowledge-wise is a little bit higher. Yes. So it kind of weeds out some of the other cladding

8:17companies. Like, we won't touch vinyl, just because there's too many people with, you know, an operator in the truck with a set of pump jacks that will do it. They might not have the same safety program we have, the same quality control that we have. They're probably going around, doing the labour only, and they're just — put the wood strapping on over the Tyvek and there you go. Exactly. So for that reason, it's like we can't compete cost-wise, and most people don't want to pay what you

8:42know, what we would charge. Yeah. So we just stay away from vinyl, but anything other than vinyl we're more than happy to get our hands on and sink into. Yeah. I think interior — I think that's one of the things maybe people outside that scope of work aren't — not that they're not aware of it, but maybe don't appreciate enough — the work that goes into all these different cladding and panel types and the different substructures that go with it. It's similar to glazing — like, you can't just go and start pricing glazing.

9:10There's an immense amount of specs and different variables. It's too easy to miss, and the risk is too high. Like, I think, you know, rain screen, terra cotta, or like a phenolic panel where you have like a bear-claw clip glued onto the back — if there are hidden fasteners, concealed fasteners, it's like eight bucks more a square foot just to buy the material to accomplish that, plus the labour's twice as much because you have to take it off. So you've got to line up everything. You've

9:37got to cut it a certain way. I think phenolic is cut in a pretty simple fashion, but then the panel size — do you have to cut it on site? Is it all prefab? And that's just one type of cladding. There's all these different rain screen systems. So it's a lot of spec reading, heavy on the estimating, easy to miss a layer — a rail system instead of just a Z-girt and a T-clip, or whatever.

10:03But there's a lot going on there. Absolutely. And I mean, just even looking at the wall assemblies in the plans or in the specs — it's like, okay, even if you're just looking at exposed fastener corrugated siding: is it going vertical, is it going horizontal? What's the strapping behind it? It has to go perpendicular to it — but what is the architect showing? Are they showing it properly? Do you need to have two layers of strapping because he wants to

10:28put it vertically with horizontal strapping, so you have the vertical strapping behind it? There's just so many different components to it. So you have to think, okay, literally layer by layer — how does this get attached, how does that get attached, how does that get attached, how's this going together? And going from plan to plan based on the architects — they might have the same finished product, but everything behind it can be entirely different. Yeah. So you might look at one set of plans and it's like, okay,

10:53the labour to install this is like eight bucks a square foot. But you look at this project over here and even though the finished product is the exact same thing, it's like, okay, that might be 15 bucks a square foot, because it's everything that's behind it that you don't see. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And the thing is, especially on a lot of the public tenders, or whether you're doing private — a lot of developers are getting pretty creative with the

11:16different types of cladding they're using. There's certain things that come into fashion — now I know you're doing Tempio at a couple of different jobs right now. And then there's fibre cement, there's terra cotta, there's ceramic, there's phenolic — there's like a hundred different brands. And a lot of times you'll see one type of cladding on this major job that you're pursuing, you might do it, it takes a year, and you never use it again — some of those products. And then you hear from, you know, higher up or something like,

11:39"Well, how could you miss this? How could you miss that?" You know, even the architects — a lot of times they're leaving it up to the subcontractor to fill in the gaps. And it makes it tough to bid these envelope scopes on some of these major jobs, because it's so easy to miss — if nobody, or if in the preliminary stages, if the substructure and the insulation and the girt system doesn't line up — is there a

12:06rail system and the clips and all that kind of stuff — you really have to know. You can't rely just on what's spec'd and what's drawn. You have to know if it's going to work or not as a subcontractor. Yeah. If you don't have really good product knowledge — yeah. The product knowledge — it's almost 90% of the estimating. Like, I mean, you can plug something into Bluebeam, do a takeoff, get your linear feet of corners and J-trims and window flashings and all that

12:31kind of stuff, bending and stuff. But if it's a high-end product and it costs — you know, 20 bucks, and it's going to be 50 bucks a square foot sometimes to supply and install — and you don't know that product or haven't used it, it's risky. Oh yeah. And even the guys that have been doing cladding for years — you know, if they're putting on a lot of Mak Metal right now, they're getting used to that, and it's going quicker. And

12:54it's probably not that easy of a product to use, right? This linear metal siding that's popular right now. But if all of a sudden they've got to go work with a panel system they haven't used before, the labour's going to be slower. And you can't even rely on a journeyman who's been a cladder in a sheet metal union or in a non-unionized labour force to really say, "Yeah, I know exactly how that's going to go." You need to have a really solid lead guy

13:21on site. So Randy is our lead guy, and he's absolutely phenomenal. He was a mason for, I think, about 18 years. I've been working with him for the past six or seven years now, doing cladding. I think he's been doing something a little bit longer than that. Just the amount of time and effort he puts into a project at the very front of it — like, we'll get on a job site and we'll start working, just kind of plugging away, doing a lot of the easy

13:44stuff. And he's just on site troubleshooting. It could take a week, it could take two weeks, it could take a month. But once all that troubleshooting is done and he's done figuring out how everything meets and goes together, he's off to the races. Oh yeah. Like, you don't even need to tell him what to do — he's got it figured out. He's going. Yeah. Like, he's in production mode. Yeah. I think that person's so important, especially in that trade. Well,

14:07in every trade, it is. And for them to be communicating to estimators too — I think when I think of cladding and all the substructure and the systems, you want to be keeping a database. If you used this product two years ago, what happened? How was it? How was the cutting? Did that blade work? Like, you'd have a whole — write an essay, yeah. The notes are pretty critical. Yeah. And having that database — once you get a couple of

14:31years under your belt as an envelope cladding contractor, it's like — if any of these products come up, our risk is not high because we know so much more now. Yeah. We know to do a return, it costs this much, or so many guys, so many hours for so many feet, kind of thing. Yeah. And the first time we did a Tempio project, we didn't know that, right? So we looked at it — okay, like, everything is so many dollars per square

14:54foot. And we started doing it, and we're on a nice big straight wall and we're flying along — yeah, this is awesome, we're making so much money! Then you start doing these tiny little returns, and then it's like, okay, that's why we made so much money there, because we were way low on these tiny little eight-inch returns. It takes just as long to return the windows — it takes even more time. Like, it's nuts. We found, like, doing the balcony edge — two guys, a full day, for those two little returns

15:21per floor. Yeah. It's like, okay, those two guys in a day could have done like half of that facade, hanging the tile. Yeah, yeah. I think especially with cladding too — a lot of times if the drawings aren't really well done and someone doesn't have a Revit model to take and plug into a material order, a lot of times you're looking down at a topographical view of a roof plan just to see if the building jogs in a couple of feet here and there. And there's like two

15:44thousand more square feet of cladding, plus like three times the labour, because it's going to take you just as long to run up those pillars with all that. And yeah — you're right. A lot of times, even the balcony — sometimes you're not even sure: does the cladding return to the window four feet on both sides, and the soffit? Or is it something else? Or where are the — are they protruding out of the wall?

16:09Sometimes it's not that clear. And all these things can cost just as much as doing a whole elevation of one side of a 10,000-square-foot building. Or if you're doing an eyebrow up a building and you can't access it the same way you access the rest of the wall, so you've got a couple of guys and a giant lift and it's a slog. Yeah. So if you can balance out that really slow stuff with the good juicy production work, everything's great. Yeah. But assuming you went

16:32into it not understanding or realizing how much extra time it took to do this — once you learn those things, you can account for that. So in the event that you get all the juicy production stuff done and you have to go back and do all this fiddly stuff, you're not then being like, "Okay guys, you better hurry up." Because once you start putting pressure on the guys and they start feeling it — they're worried, like, okay, we've got

16:58to make money on this, we've got to go faster — then quality starts going down. Yeah, yeah. And you don't have much room to sacrifice quality when it comes to cladding. Right? No. That's not something you can hide. Yeah. I mean, it's not building a piano, but — you know, especially when you're working with high-density phenolic — the lines matter. Yeah. And the material — if a panel costs a thousand bucks a square foot, it's kind of frustrating when you

17:23waste one. I mean, you do have a waste factor. Yeah. High-density panels are like four by ten, but they're $450–$500 a piece. Yeah, you mess one up and it hurts. Yeah. So how's it been with using the Tempio product at West 22 — West 22 is one of the jobs you're working on right now? Like, just tell us a little bit about how that's going. Is that the first time using that product specifically, or

17:51— so it's the second large project we've done with Tempio. Yeah. The Boss — yeah, so we did at Boss Plaza — they're using Tempio over there. And we did a couple of small, tiny projects before. So yeah, I mean, that's where Randy's at, and this is kind of his home base, and he's over there just killing it. Yeah. Like, the first little while it was pretty slow going, because again, we're just putting on the clips, putting on the insulation, doing all the small stuff that doesn't need the crazy detailed

18:17layout for that kind of stuff. But he was just going around looking at the different facades, going through the plans, trying to troubleshoot everything. And then after a while, I know we were all standing there being like, "Okay, we've been here for about three weeks and there's nothing really down here." But you look at the walls — okay, there are a lot of clips done here. And I'm not going to go into panic mode just yet. Yeah. And the site super's probably saying the same thing, but he

18:40doesn't realize that that's what takes the time. Then all of a sudden a week later all the panels are on that section — and it's like, and that's just it. And, you know, having the CAD background I was able to, you know, create the elevations, do the layout, make sure everything was going to work out — like, we're not going to end up with a sliver of a tile here. Yeah. So once Randy was confident and he could get all

19:00those measurements and make sure that the layouts were good to go, he said, "Okay, it's go time," and he just started putting tile up and it started going really fast. That's great to hear. Any other products that you've been using that you really like to use, that you hope to see again? Or are there any that have been specifically frustrating? Like, is fibre cement one that you find really frustrating? How hard it is to cut fibre cement lap siding — I'm not a huge

19:25fan of it. It's just brittle — if you carry it wrong, if you look at it the wrong way, it's going to break. High-density fibre cement panels — so like, there's Equitone Tectiva, the Cool Panel, a couple of other ones — I do enjoy working with them. Yeah, they're just like phenolic. They're just as tedious in the setup and the prep work, kind of stuff. The cutting of the fibre cement is a bit more interesting because you've got to have a good fan, you've got

19:55a good shop vac, guys need to mask up, make sure they're not breathing in all the dust. Phenolic is a bit easier to work with — again, it's another great product. We're doing an exposed fastener aluminum composite panel over at Boss Plaza — again, pretty similar install to the phenolic and that kind of stuff. And that's just kind of where we like being. Did you ever — do you guys ever think about, or are you thinking about — you hear about a lot of

20:22companies that kind of backward-integrate and start to make their own ACM panels and set up a shop and go to site with the laser setup or the survey gear, get the measurements, and have pre-cut stuff off-site. Is that something you're thinking of? I looked into it two to three years ago, and when I looked into it, if you weren't going to do it like — making ACM panels across like the eastern seaboard, it

20:51didn't make a whole lot of sense. The volume has to be at a certain level — yeah. Like, if you're going to make a separate company out of it and really dive into that, great. But if you're only going to do it to service the projects you're doing, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. So, I mean, down the road is it something that I might do? Is it something I'm looking at doing in the next year or two? No. So your labour force —

21:15anywhere from 12 to 22 guys, give or take, every three months it kind of goes up and down — but are these guys, like, what background are a lot of them coming from? Do they have extensive cladding experience specifically with building envelope? Are they carpenters, metal workers, or what? What's the background? I think — and I haven't checked this stat in a while — but about a month ago it was about 50%, but it's probably more like 60 to 70% now — our guys are actually from

21:42India. So they came over to Canada, they picked up a carpentry job somewhere — anywhere from BC to Ontario, some came directly to Nova Scotia. They've been doing siding for a year, maybe two years. Some of them haven't done siding at all. So we just picked up a couple of guys that had a bit of siding experience and they turned out awesome. They are smart, fast workers, hard workers, loyal. They have an awesome work ethic and they want to learn. Yeah. So we picked up a couple of guys

22:12who had never done the style of siding we've done before. How's the language barrier? Is it — not at all, they're great. Yeah, yeah. Because in India, one of the languages they teach in school is English, so all of them speak English to some extent. Are they ICI members? I couldn't tell you. Yeah. But yeah, they're all awesome — they all speak really good English. Yeah, there's an accent and sometimes it's a bit hard if there's a bunch of background noise or whatever, but for the most part it's great. Written

22:39English awesome, spoken English awesome. Yeah, that's great. Picked up a bunch of those guys. You see a lot of that now — a lot of immigration in the trades. Yeah. Especially in the HRM area, trying to find a skilled worker these days is next to impossible. So what we've kind of figured out is, okay, let's find the right kind of person — somebody with a strong attitude, a strong work ethic, somebody who wants to learn. Let's pick them up and, you know, we have a system where they

23:06come on and there are daily goals. It's like, okay, you have three months to prove to us — at the rate that we pay you — that you can hit these daily goals consistently. If you can hit them consistently, we're more than happy to keep you on, kind of thing. Yeah. If you can do better than the daily goals, then we can pay more money. Yeah. So are you measuring data on site? Obviously I assume you're measuring like labour — is it like how many panels of this type of panel per day, per

23:29two-man pair? Because they're working in pairs, most of these guys — you're keeping track of that and logging that with your foreman every day? Yep. It might not always be something super official, like they got so many square feet or whatever. But what I've gone and done is broken it down to — okay, well, we need to have so many square feet of this, whether it's putting on clips or insulation or bars. But the guys aren't at the end of the

23:52day going to pull out a tape measure and say, "Okay, I'm so many feet this way, so many feet that way" — plus it's a small area, they don't want to calculate the math of how many square feet they've done. But if I can break it down to, okay, you need to get on 500 square feet, which equates to so many pieces of insulation, yeah — and then, okay, they put on seven bundles of insulation today. Was that a good day or no? Like, they know.

24:12I find that the gasketed T-clips — for thermal barrier, like, if you're applying those to concrete as opposed to structural steel stud, you've got to pre-drill holes and anchor it. It takes probably two or three times as long to put those clips on. You might get 50 a day with the other ones, but yep. And I mean, depending on how you're fastening them too — are you pre-drilling them, or pre-drilling them and then putting them on with Tapcons? Yeah. Because if you are, you're

24:36going to break the Tapcons — you're only going to get 50% of your screws to work. Whereas if you can drill them and put them in with a wedge anchor system, it's so much faster. Yeah. And you'd think usually those are what's spec'd, but then again sometimes they're not. I guess a lot of times it'll call for a Tapcon. Yeah. But you just have to know from experience — okay, that's not going to work, we're going to do this. And then you run it by whoever the developer is or the GC

25:01and say, "Here's where we're actually going to do it, and here's a document that tells you that my wedge anchor beats your Tapcon." Right. It's part of your business model to stay in the private realm and continue to build relationships with developers. With how busy things are, and obviously with all the work that's coming up, and you see some of the preliminary drawings — you know there's going to be cladding stuff to bid on for the next — and these are massive jobs. There's all kinds of mid-sized jobs too. But you're staying

25:22away from public tenders for now? For now we're staying away from public tenders. There's just so much work going on. I mean, if you read all Nova Scotia — any given day there's something about a development. Yeah. Like, I'm reading a lot about Bridgewater, reading a lot about Truro, reading non-stop about Halifax. I can't foresee us going outside of Halifax or the immediate surrounding area for a couple of years. I mean, unless I want to get really ambitious, which I don't, really, at this point. Well, I

25:50think — and that's one of the things that we talked about before our episode here — you know, just some of the topics that are on your mind. And growth is great, and that's kind of the unwritten rule. I think if you're not growing as a business it's hard to be at a standstill and maintain — you're either growing a little bit or you're maybe shrinking back. But in these busy times that we're in, it's like

26:15the ability to say no sometimes is your best — and it is a skill. I think, you know, and

26:26it's hard to — you want to take that leap and you want to do projects if you can. It's exciting. But with all the work that's out there, it's almost a full-time job as a business owner in any contracting scope just to know what's happening, stay engaged in the market, and pick out — okay, out of these ten, these two fit, we should bid them. We might be a little high here, but better to be high. And then you're picking maybe five more, and then it's a full-time job

26:58just to be at the front of the wave, I think. Right. Oh yeah. I mean, any tender that comes in, my wife and I will sit down — or my wife's our estimator — we'll sit down, we'll look at the project, we'll look at the elevations. Does this look like a project that we would like? Okay, if it's a project we would like, our first question to whoever sends us the project is, "What's your schedule?" And if your schedule works with ours, then great,

27:24we'll bid on it. I think that should be everyone's first question. Any good contractor — that's the first thing they're thinking about. Like, what's your expectation? Yeah. How many men are we going to need here, starting in September? You want to bid everything, you want to get everything, but the reality is if you win everything and get everything, you're not going to be able to service everyone — so you're just going to upset a bunch of people. So I find it's better to know when to

27:48say no. Or even, a lot of times I'll get a call out of the blue and they're like, "Hey, we got this really cool project, we really need cladding, we don't have anyone lined up — can you come meet with me on site?" And again, what's your schedule? And if the schedule works, great, I'll meet with you on site. Otherwise it's like, "Hey, I'd love to help you — I can't, but here's a list of guys that I know that might be able to help you out." I'm happy to share

28:10their contact info, yeah. And I hope it works out. Yeah. Otherwise, again, I'm going to commit to a project, I'm going to stretch my guys too thin, they're all going to get mad at me, the client's going to get mad at me — I have no interest in being there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're doing some pretty major jobs here in the last year — Boss Plaza and West 22, these are 20–30,000-square-foot cladding projects. But you're going to get asked to

28:35do — like, you mentioned, someone reached out on Richmond Yards and some different things. You'll be approached for a bid, because every developer, every project, every tender — you know, if we can get an extra bidder on this scope who's a legitimate contractor, it's always great to have another number. But it was The Mills — The Mills, yeah, yeah. So, you're going to be having those opportunities and it's exciting. You think, well, maybe we're going to take that

29:02project. Yeah, I absolutely love it — just a bit too soon. Not comfortable enough to take on the risk. It's outside of our scope at this point in time. In a couple of years it's something we might be able to take on. I hope so. Yeah. But at this point in time I would be doing a disservice to it. Yeah, yeah. It's like, whenever the scouts get that player up to the NHL from the minors just one year too early and it ruins his whole career. It's like,

29:27just — you know — I think it's good to have that prudence and wait. As a contractor, it's good, it's refreshing to hear somebody talk like that. Because a lot of people — meaning well, like, good on you — but it's great to, you know, I mean, it's great to sit in an office and look at a giant project and be like, "Oh yeah, we can do that guys, that looks great, we'll make so much money." And then the guys on site are like, you know, my comfort zone

29:50is from one floor to like six floors, or one floor to eight floors. I don't want to go up 20 floors — I've never done it and I don't want to do it. Yeah. Plus your men have to be comfortable — not just with, you know, renting swing staging for six months of the project that costs an extra hundred grand. It's like, are your men comfortable working at those heights? Some are, some aren't. The labour's certainly slower — how much slower? Half? Yeah. I mean, is it — what if

30:15you're on the 20th floor? You're probably three times as slow as you are on the second floor. Yeah. You're on the 20th floor in swing staging and it's like, "Oh, my battery's dead — all the way down, guys, see you at 2 in the morning." Yeah. No thank you. Yeah, yeah. I know. Tell us a little bit about your time at NSCC. You know, there's lots of students that tune in and listen, and taking Architectural Technology at NSCC — maybe just tell us about what that was like.

30:43You know, there are lots of students that tune in and listen. Yeah. NSCC was such a great experience — awesome campus. We went to the Waterfront Campus. I actually have my mom to thank, so thank you, Mom. I took a bit of time off after high school, just kind of floated around, working with the military. Eventually she said, "Jimmy, you need to take this Holland College career quiz to figure out what you're going to do with your life," kind of thing. Right? I was like, okay,

31:07Mom, I'll do it. So anyway, she always thought I'd be really good at drafting and design or whatever. Sure enough, five of the eight things that the Holland College quiz suggested had to do with drafting. So, okay, I'll look into it. So I was going to sign up for the actual full-on drafting course — they were full. Then the next best thing was the AET program, the Architectural Engineering Technology program, where it was half drafting and the other half was building sciences. So it

31:36kind of gave you a pretty good background on everything. Then there was our sister class, the Construction Management Technology program. So yeah, it was a two-year program. A lot of work, a lot of homework — just spending time at NSCC learning about residential and commercial drafting and design, building sciences, estimating. There's a bit of structural engineering in there. So it's really good for getting you exposed to a lot of different aspects of construction. And because of that, as you know, it's where

32:10I'm at today. I actually took a co-op with Dora Construction, where it was supposed to be split 50/50 — working underneath an architect and doing estimating. It just so happened that estimating was the first half of the work term I did. And estimating was actually my least favourite class when I was at NSCC — that's why your wife does the estimating! Yeah, well — it turns out I actually loved it. But you didn't like the class? I didn't like the class, just because it

32:37was just the way it was taught, maybe. It was a great teacher, it was just — okay, you know, measure this with an architectural scale, measure that with an architectural scale, do the calculations and you figure out the cost of something. It didn't seem exciting, right? But then when I got into estimating over at Dora, it's like, okay, this is entirely different. This whole project is a bit of a puzzle and each subcontractor is a different part of the puzzle — you've got to put it together to figure out the price. It was like, wow,

33:03this is way different! Yeah. So I ended up doing estimating for the first half of my work term. And when there was about half a week left — okay, we're going to start getting you ready to transition towards working with the architect. And I said, "Can I actually stay here?" They kind of looked at me like, "Uh — yeah, you can." So then I became an estimator. And I think that's interesting that you brought that up, because I've done a lot of estimating

33:29myself, personally, with different scopes. Yeah, you're right. Like, sometimes if you're not relating it — just the task work, the bland work of, "Okay, what's the scale, what's the assembly, here's the specs, here's the material, let's get the material price, what's the labour: linear foot, square foot, square meter, whatever, whatever" — point count. But if you're looking at it with the full vision, and then you have knowledge and experience on the job site — which a lot of guys who work for big contracting, high-volume

33:59companies — like drywall or cladding — the best estimator is someone who's worked for ten years on the tools, because they can look at details and they just know. They have that intuition. If you don't have that, you're looking at data — or you're looking at, you know, on the more serious end, it's like RSMeans, and here's the data. But that doesn't always work. I mean, it does sometimes — it's good for certain things — but it definitely doesn't work for a lot of things. If you can be a project coordinator or

34:26junior project manager while you're also doing the estimating, that's really where you learn a lot. Like, I knew a lot about the square-foot prices of so many different kinds of things, but it wasn't until I actually got involved in project coordination and project management — watching all these trades on site, doing daily site visits, and seeing how stuff goes together. Like, on paper is one thing — everything works on paper. But when the electrician pulls you aside, he has the plans in his hands, and he's like,

34:54"Okay, Jimmy, this isn't going to work for XYZ and we need to make a decision — what are we going to do?" So you have to problem-solve with the electrician, and he's teaching you a bit of his scope, and you kind of learn through osmosis of just being around these guys and seeing how it all goes together. It's pretty powerful. It's pretty amazing how quickly you learn. Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. And I like your comment

35:16earlier about just how — you were saying, when you're into estimating, you didn't necessarily like it right away, you didn't think you did, and then all of a sudden you're working with Dora as an estimator there on your co-op, and it's like, "Oh, this is like a puzzle — I'm putting all these pieces together and there's like a right number I'm supposed to come up with." Like, you know, there's going to be something high, there's going to be something a little

35:36low, and somewhere in the middle, right? And even in some jurisdictions when it's bid that way — because they don't want it, you know, because something is a little off — and that's exactly what they do every time. It's part of the protocol, it's part of the legislation: throw the high number away, take the low number, or take something in the middle. But there's so much to it. Yeah. And that's the exhilarating part of estimating. Like, I think a lot of people listen and think, "How could you — how

36:02could you make drafting or estimating sound fun?" But it's more about having the vision to see — like, this isn't done yet, doesn't exist — and you're envisioning it all being done, and you're putting a number on it. It's like you're telling a story, and you're putting all the — I think your analogy's better — it's like putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah. And the really cool thing too is when you drive around after it's done, you're driving with your friend or whoever and it's like, "I did that.

36:27I did that." Yeah. That's my place. And it's so satisfying when you do price a job, you pursue it, you're engaged in the process — you're maybe a month out from tender closing, or if you're working with a private developer, you're saying, "I really think you should use this product because it has the same look, it's an alternate, but it's going to work better. There's a certain code or whatever that's just going to make it more suitable, but it's going to give you

36:54the same result." And the architect agrees, or where the lead time is four weeks versus 16 weeks — where is it coming from? Cost — you can save cost. "Hey, you know, we allowed this much, but this material is about half the cost and it's a good product. Check it out, see if —" And then everybody wins, because you had the product knowledge. Yeah. And that takes so much time. And think about value engineering from a

37:21university campus or something, when it's tendered that way — where it's not necessarily the low bidder there either. It's who's engaged from the start, who knows the materials, who can tell us what to do. It's kind of working backwards from a lump sum, because it's like, what subcontractor really has the knowledge to do this? We're going to find out, because it's whoever's talking to us the most — and who's still talking to us at the end, because the other ones are going to fall off because they're just not going to be able to

37:45answer those questions. Yeah. The product knowledge and the experience and the know-how of how everything goes is just absolutely critical. Like — I think the first complex siding job that we did was 349 Herron Cove Road. What was that product? So that was Equitone Tectiva — a high-density fibre cement panel. I think there were like seven or eight steps before you actually put the panel on. It was all exposed fastener — like an open facade kind of system.

38:15Absolutely gorgeous. But if you look at the pattern of the product on that building, it's not just straightforward lines — it's like two or three different widths, and the horizontal lines were really nice, but the vertical lines didn't line up. So it was a bit complex. So yeah, the first time Randy did one of those systems was on that project. And for a while he was pulling his hair out. Like, "Randy, listen — we know it's going to

38:42take a little while to figure out. Yeah, we're here to support you. I'm in it with you — let's do it." It was back in, I think, 2017. And yeah, we got through it, and the building looks phenomenal now. Well, that's the other thing too — if you have a really good estimator or a PM who also does estimating, they can catch that before. If they have the experience and the knowledge, they can bump that labour up 40 or 50 thousand dollars

39:05because they know it's going to take two months longer than a lot of people might think. Yeah. And because they did that, they just saved three months of somebody not sleeping at night, because he said, "This is going to take a long time." And they see out that — they're envisioning the production three months, six months out. But they've talked to the estimators like, "No, I knew that, we've got lots allowed for this." And then they go through it. And then all of a sudden it's like — it's when you don't

39:27allow enough, then the stress is twice as much. Because you're like, I wish we had — that race against time. Yeah. Because I estimated it and I knew it was going to be — but you are that estimator now. I am the guy now, which is great, I love it. I wasn't then. But I mean, it was still a healthy project. We bid it thinking, okay, there's a lot of money in this. And we still made money — we just didn't make

39:52as much as we thought. But when we stood back and looked, it's like, yeah, we were low on this, but we still came out on top. Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. I love talking about that. And even the other side of estimating — like, the pursuit side of, you know, when the tenders come out or you're working with a private developer. Like, you can think of estimating as taking all the data and then combining material and labour and all your ingredients — your

40:21markups and everything, adding your equipment and PM fees and whatever. But sometimes it's about the pursuit. And the more material knowledge, the more knowledge of the scope you have — if you're engaged in that process, well, a lot of times it's that person who pursues the scope and cares about the building and the cost and has the vision. And those are the skills of an estimator. And obviously communication is key. Like, a lot of estimators think, "Oh, I

40:52might be somewhat introverted" — or it doesn't mean you are, you could be extroverted too — but you're sitting in an office and you're doing your thing. But hey, if you've got an addendum and you don't know what it means, you've got to pick up the phone. The more you're talking to the PMs on the sites and going to the sites, I think estimators need to communicate more with the site — get the data back, talk about what you allowed for this — all

41:17that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. And having the relations with the supplier — so that if you're looking at something in the plans and it's not quite making sense, you can reach out to the supplier and say, "Hey, this is what I'm looking at — I don't understand why it looks this way. Can you explain why it's drawn that way?" And sometimes the supplier goes, "It's not drawn right — it should be this way." You know, it doesn't happen all the time, but it's not entirely uncommon either.

41:45It's right about 90 to 95% of the way, but you make this one small change and you're like, "Oh, okay — yeah, that makes so much sense." No, yeah. Or having the relations with the installers — so, like, you call up Randy: "Hey Randy, I'm looking at this project. Swing by the office, let's take a look at it." And you might have a schedule in your head: okay, this is a five-month project

42:09for six guys. And he sits down, looks at it and goes, "Yeah, it's three months." You're like, oh. Yeah, I can get it done in about three months. So then all of a sudden your price comes down and you're going to be more competitive on the job. Right? Immediately you're thinking, okay, if it's five months for another company, maybe still — but I've got a better PM so I'm going to take it down into the mid-range. And that's a good bid, because I'm making more than

42:31I would at the low number, but less — because of the advantages I have in-house, the assets I have, the experience we have. You know, a lot of companies will take on a big-volume job, and they know no one else is bidding because it's too big for them. They might only be competing with maybe just one or two others — usually three at least. But if they've got the crews and they've been around for 20 years and they own that local area — and then they'll have travel

42:55accommodations — the variables that people are taking into perspective on the bidding are vast. Like, you know, I don't think you'd maybe think of estimating that way, but you're taking human variables, you're taking material, you're taking lead times, you're taking all kinds of things — maybe you have a new piece of equipment that's going to eliminate two guys. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Any time you can use a clamp instead of a hand, use the clamp. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't have any measure

43:26of production, I mean, then you're just using whatever data's there in front of you. Where did it come from? Is it a North American standard? Is it somebody who did — he's been working here for ten years. Did you Google it? We've all done that. Okay, every day. Yeah. No, the — our guys are great. I mean, we started implementing our new system where we're tracking how many pieces per day, roughly, kind of thing. And it's just creating that database for us, so

43:54that when we go and do the next project it's going to be that much better, that much sharper. Or we're going to know — okay, the market rate is so many dollars per square foot. One of the mistakes we've made in the past is: okay, the market rate is — let's say it's 15 bucks a square foot. Well, we're putting like eight or ten dollars on the finished product and we're kind of doing the rest — you know, seven dollars on all the prep work.

44:19Well, that's the wrong way to do it. All the work is actually in the prep work, not in the finished product. So if you're only going to go and do the clips and the insulation and the bars and you're not going to put on the finished product — because the finished product might not even be on site yet — well, then you're doing all this work and you're not making margin. It makes it hard to survive. So then you start putting on these panels and you think you're a god.

44:41Yeah. It's like, okay, next time we do this project — you reverse the roles, you're breaking apart those layers of the process. Yeah. It's one layer after the other. Yeah, each component in that assembly is worth so many dollars per square foot. Have you had issues with getting high-end material to site and not having a place to put it, having to store it elsewhere? No? Not yet — we've been pretty fortunate. Any damage? Any damage within the freight?

45:06I think we've actually been pretty good. I mean, the tiles — we've had a couple of cracked tiles, but it's been a super small percentage. And is it from the shipping or from bombing it around the site a couple of times with a telehandler? Yeah. But overall — and you own it once it leaves the dockyard, right? I mean, it's — you own it once it's in transit pretty much, I think. Yeah. We've been pretty fortunate. I mean, two of our clients, we've been in

45:32labour only, but still — we treat the material as if it's our own. Yeah. I didn't know we were going to get so much into estimating, but it got me off on that tangent there. I'm pretty passionate about that. You're only as good as your estimating — you know, you have to have that good machine operating all the time to keep — even looking out for your business two years down the road and picking the right jobs and pursuing them. Yeah. And if

45:59your schedule is absolutely full and you're not bidding stuff for the immediate future — okay, what else is coming out? What can I help with for budgets for clients? Start getting my foot in the door. What products can I start looking up? What's the new trend? What's coming down the pipe? Kind of thing. Just trying to stay on top of both products and projects, so that — okay, I'm not estimating anything right now, but I'm still being productive with my time. Yeah.

46:29Yeah, 100%. I kind of lost my train of thought after we got into estimating there — I could talk about it all day. I still really do enjoy it. I'm still involved in it to an extent. But like, all the horsepower — well, both you and your wife are both drafting backgrounds? Yep. So I mean, and I was an estimator for a GC and then a real estate developer and then a subcontractor for ten-plus years, and then the wife — she most recently was at McCarthy's

47:00Roofing as their estimator. Before that she was at Ridgeback as a PM — for a general contractor. So again, her background is largely estimating, on top of the drafting. It's something we both enjoy doing — she's just better at it. Right? Yeah. So how much does the drafting help with specifically having a cladding company? I'm sure that comes in handy a lot, just for drawings and layout and communicating with your site guys, your supervisors and stuff. It can be pretty handy.

47:32Especially when you're working with a Tempio tile and you want to lay it out so that you don't end up with a tiny little three-inch sliver on one edge if you start at one side. You know, if you can start in the middle of the wall and it works out perfectly on both sides — awesome. Or if you don't have that luxury and you have to start on one side, and you don't want to do a bunch of math because it's, you know, three or four hundred feet long on that wall, yeah.

47:53You're centering the panels in the middle of the wall, whatever — trying to have it even. Yeah. So just having that capability of, "Okay, Randy, get me a bunch of measurements and then I'll add it all up and see if it works," kind of thing. It always does, which — that's a huge asset on that side of things. For smaller projects, we can do shop drawings. I've done those in-house. Even sometimes we have a client who's doing a little two-to-three

48:18day job, but they're not exactly sure what they want to do or how they want to orient it. Okay, well, I can draft up that one elevation for you, do up a quick design, send it off to you — it just helps a client see, "Okay, like, that actually does look really good. Let's go with that." Any advice — you see a lot of family businesses in construction, I think. A lot of family businesses in Atlantic Canada in general, but especially in the construction industry. Any advice for

48:43a couple — you've got four kids and you've taken that leap. Any advice for other people that are in the same situation, thinking about getting something started between the two of them while they're raising kids? There's no time like the present. No time like the present. Yeah. It's been a journey. Have there been late nights? Yeah, sure, 100%. Has it been stressful at times? Just being conscious of where your time goes — your business is almost like another child,

49:13and it needs attention. But your family needs attention just as much. So trying to balance your time — like, at five o'clock if you can shut off your phone until all the kids are in bed and just focus on spending time with them. I'm not the best at doing that. It's something I am more conscious of and I'm trying to work at getting better on. And just explaining to the guys that you work with: "Listen, if you don't have to, don't call me between five and seven — that's when

49:40I'm having dinner, I'm going through the bedtime routine." And again, I'm not perfect — I still do it from time to time. But every once in a while I'll just focus on the present and spend time with the family. I like what you mentioned there, because I've told people that too: "Look, if you don't have to, don't call me on Sundays, don't call me on weekends, and after five if possible." Yeah. But to have that conversation — it's almost

50:06just setting expectations, like any good boss or any good leader would. And sometimes you just have to tell them: "Look, I don't work on Sundays." So I'll still take a phone call from time to time. Yeah. Most of them — clients included — they like their weekends just as much as I like my weekends. Yeah, exactly. So I try not to bother them on weekends, they try not to bother me on weekends. If something

50:31pops up, something pops up — call me. But if you don't have to, if it's something that can wait until Monday, shoot me an email. Yeah. I might see it Saturday or Sunday, I might see it late at night, but I might not necessarily respond to it — it's fine to wait till Monday morning to respond. Exactly. I'll let my phone build up all weekend and then Monday I'll just get up, have a coffee, and just start responding. I could have spent all weekend looking

50:53at my phone if I wanted to. Exactly. Yeah. Just to backtrack into estimating — you were mentioning something there about talking to the suppliers, reaching out to them, getting the product info, the lead times, and different info. And whether sometimes you know, they're great in the sales role, and sometimes it's a new product they don't know much about it. And then you're talking to the architect and you're dealing with how it was drawn and this and that. And then you're talking to

51:20a PM at a general contracting firm to put an addendum through an RFI or something. And I think a lot of estimators, if they're listening right now, would think — yeah, I go through that every week, and my boss doesn't understand that it's not as simple as just, "Here's the addendum, just put it in — how much does it cost, mark it up, what do you mean?" You've got to talk to like four

51:46or five different points of contact, you've got to get info. These are big dollars, and a lot of times nobody really knows what's going on. I mean, no offense, but a lot of times — how can an architect — I mean, architecture firms will build catalogs out of stuff they like to see, right? But if it's something new, they don't necessarily know how it's going to respond when it gets to a scope transition with the lighting or with this or that,

52:14or what do we do here? And they might be taking a substructure from one assembly and putting a new finished product on it. You know, it's half generic and it's half — yeah, it's cut and paste from a couple of different things. And then once you really dig into it, it might not be compatible. And yeah, I get it — everyone's busy, everyone's got stuff to do. You're trying to find efficiencies, and that's one of the ways of finding efficiencies. And hopefully you just have

52:35a good sub-trade that knows, "Okay, that doesn't work — here's our suggestion" or "Use this product," kind of thing. I know one of the things that my wife has found frustrating with going through all the assemblies and the specs and everything for cladding is that nothing is ever the same. No, it never is — never the same. Whereas in roofing, you have so many layers, and yeah, there's different products, but they all do roughly the same thing. Whereas in cladding, there's just so many

53:02different variables and combinations. And it's like — is the insulation four inches here, but then eight inches out here? We need double Z-girt and we don't know why. Like, why is it eight inches? Or you've got four-inch insulation but it's two layers of two-inch and they're staggered. And yeah, there's just an infinite combination of things that you can do. Yeah. It's like — she's building all these assemblies in the database of our system — we use PlanSwift. Where if you do the square

53:28footage you can kind of drag and drop that assembly. And it's really cool that we're building all this stuff, but you'll never get to use it again. Yeah, you have to modify it. Yeah. And that's not the same when it comes to — you know, just stepping back from the vapour barrier into the exterior envelope and it's structural steel and dense glass and then the interiors and ceiling suspension and stuff. A lot of times you can build five or ten different assemblies for each one and they are the same, and it could be

53:56used — on the bottom four feet you might have to change like one component of that assembly, yeah. Recreate the entire assembly — two-hour job with three layers, or maybe a mineral bed or a different kind of Roxul insulation or fibreglass or whatever. But between, you know, five or ten different ones — but with cladding, it could be a hundred, because there are that many more parts in the substructure. Yeah. And I mean, if you look at steel lap siding — how many types of steel lap

54:25siding are there? And are they all installed the same? Do they all have the same reveals? There are a lot of similarities, a lot of differences as well. Is there a vapour barrier? Like, working with the WRB — usually that's where your scope starts. Do you — like, 3M? We've been using a lot of 3M lately. Yeah, we're a pretty big fan of that. I think it's mostly because of the UV rating — it has, I believe, a six-month UV rating, where a lot of the other ones

54:49have three months for that exposure time. Yeah. For the — I think some of them are kind of bumping theirs up to be more competitive. And honestly, it really depends on who the client is and what they want to use on their building. Because I mean, I can make the recommendation: "This one will perform exactly the same, it's a little bit cheaper." But maybe they're comfortable using this brand, or they have a relationship with the supplier of that brand, so they're okay spending a little bit more.

55:18Yeah, it's really just personal preference for each different client. What would you say — a year and a half in, what's been the most satisfying? It's been a year and a half? Or a couple of years? A couple of years. So Anvil's actually been around since August of 2018. Oh wow, okay — I thought it was 2021. January 2021 is when we went off and did our own thing. But before that, we operated as the labour side of Tidal Coast. Okay. So it was, you know,

55:45kind of part of Tidal Coast. But January 2021 is when we broke off and said, "Okay, no — we're a cladding company now." Yeah, yeah. So when you look back — what was it? What surprised you? What's the biggest challenge? How happy are you that you took that chance, took that risk? Super happy. The future's looking pretty bright. Super excited with all the work that's going on. Some of the biggest challenges were doing a project and thinking that we had

56:17some really good quality guys doing the beginning of the project — wrapping it and getting it weather tight. It was in the summer and there wasn't a lick of rain. And then all of a sudden it rained a lot, only to find out the guys that we put on that project, which we thought were really good, didn't do a bang-up job. So — there are actually two projects that I'm super proud of at the moment, and even though that project went entirely sideways, it's probably the one I'm most proud of

56:45at the moment. Yeah, things went sideways, it wasn't a good project, clients obviously weren't very happy. It was early stages of construction, so the inside got wet, but it wasn't like there was drywall or anything like that. We went good for it — we redid all the flashings, we redid all the tie-back, all the flashing tape. And now the building doesn't leak. I'm assuming you took a loss to make sure it was right? Oh, it was a big loss — yeah. It was a big kick in the teeth.

57:14But I saved my record. And the client — I don't think he hates me. I know there was a point in time where he did. Big lesson learned. But yeah, I'm absolutely proud of that project — for Anvil standing beside the work, going good for it, and finishing the project. Like, I told the client: "Listen, I know it's not a good situation. I'm not walking away. I am going to finish this project for you." He said,

57:39"Jimmy, I'm really happy to hear that." And then we did — the other project I'm super happy about right now is West 22. The guys are doing a phenomenal job on the quality over there. Yeah. I mean, there were a couple of challenges on that one just starting out, figuring it out. If anyone's listening in a few weeks when this drops, and you're driving on Mumford Road, you'll see West 22 and you'll see Jimmy's work — is it the second floor, the fifth floor, the first two floors? Yeah, yeah,

58:08but it's about 30 feet tall, so it's the base section around the podium. Yeah. And the quality that the guys are doing out there is just really good. Yeah. I've seen some photos and those are some pretty clean lines. I heard some comments that this is about as clean as it gets, with the symmetrical lines and all the paneling. Yep. I think the guys over at XL are happy with the work that's being done over there. And I know the supplier is quite happy

58:33with the work that's going on over there. And — who's the supplier, do you want to mention his name? Yeah, Craig Peacock over at Peacock Facade & Floor. Yeah. He's well known and he supplies a lot of people with a lot of these. Anywhere I walk downtown Halifax, I'm like, "Oh, there's some Tempio tile, there's some Tempio tile right there." Yeah. Too bad I didn't get into it a couple of years prior. Yeah, it's great to hear. Yeah. Thanks. I know we could talk all day, but I know

58:56— also know that you have a wife and four kids at home and it's a beautiful day here. You can look out and see the boardwalk and it's a beautiful day, so I don't want to keep you any longer. And, you know, this has been great. We get all kinds of different guests on the show, be it from architects and engineering firms to general contractors and developers and subcontractors and companies of all

59:18sizes. And everybody plays a role, and it's just great to hear your story about taking the risk and having the courage to start this new company, Anvil Construction, and to see where it's gone today — and all the lessons learned. It's inspiring. And I just want to thank you for coming on. I hope people enjoy hearing about it and chatting about being nerds and talking about estimating and cladding and everything else. That's really appreciated. No, it's

59:45been a blast — thanks for having me. We would like to take this time to thank a long-time sponsor of our media, FCA Surety. The brokers at FCA Surety are experts in all surety bonding categories and provide unparalleled service during the bonding process. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Be sure to follow us on any podcast platform you use. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Atlantic Construction Podcast. Be sure to send us a comment or review — we'd love to engage with you.