March 27, 2025 • 38 mins
Sustainability in construction is no longer optional. It’s a business imperative. Large corporations and government agencies demand low-impact materials, pushing manufacturers and suppliers to adapt.
However, the complexity of sustainability standards, scattered data, and inconsistent reporting slow adoption.
Kathleen Egan, CEO of Ecomedes, appeared on the Predictable Revenue Podcast to share insights on how businesses can turn this complexity into a competitive advantage. The takeaway? When industries drown in fragmented data, those who simplify the process gain a massive edge.
Highlights include: Saving People Time equals Saving People Money (08:13), Your Best Customers Might Be Who You Least Expect (09:21), Solving Your Own Issue Might Become a Source of Income (13:52), Where Early Customers Usually Come From (18:47), And more…
Stay updated with our podcast and the latest insights in Outbound Sales and Go-to-Market Strategies!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
What's it called? There's some like epic little town where there's like a great surf community on Vancouver Island Collin Stewart (00:00):
to Kathleen Egan
Tell me about the history or the origin story of the name. Kathleen Egan (01:00):
Yeah, so it's a riff on Archimedes who is a Greek mathematician and he pioneered. Lots of different math. But one of his most known things is the lever. Which became a catapult, and he was actually in the latest Indiana Jones movie. So maybe more people are familiar with him now. Archimedes for the physical lever and edes for a sustainability lever. And what we're trying to do is take the demand signal. That lots of different buyers of building products have from high tech companies like Google to banks like JP Morgan who want to have more healthy less impact on their building when they build buildings or do remodels. And that demand signal when they look for materials that have less impact helps. The manufacturers improve the quality of their materials to meet that need. And then with more availability in the market, more buyers could
(02:00):
now access sustainable building materials. So the sustainability is a broad term for us, and it covers everything from what you would expect, like carbon energy and water consumption, but also the impact on humans. Human health toxins are really bad for humans. And if you're in a building that's built with toxins, there's off-gassing. And of course, the good folks who work in the factories that make the building products are highly exposed to it, the installers. It also includes waste circularity. And there's a bunch of differentframeworks on how to divvy up all those impacts, which is a complexity that we're seeking to make easier. Collin Stewart: Interesting. I spent a short period in my life in the welding space selling welding equipment. And so I remember going into these places and thinking, coming out, just breathing differently. 'cause all the fumes and everything that was in there was wild. And most of the folks, they would spend their whole life in this factory. Kathleen Egan: An interesting component of, again, the broad term sustainability is
labor. And, there is still slave labor making, building products on this planet. So how do you make your building. Product supply chain transparent enough. So it's a very broad term. Any, anything that's bad for ecosystems and humans we'd like to remove because we have a lot of people on the planet. It's growing every day and they all spend most of their time in buildings. Collin Stewart (03:00):
Fair enough. So just before we get into the regularly scheduled programming, I'm super curious about who are you, who is it you're selling to? Is it, I don't imagine this is a consumer play where you're trying to sell to me the homeowner or? Kathleen Egan
(04:00):
like lead. LEED. And that's a, a building rating system that counts each material and how sustainable it is toward the credits to the building. So it's a very complex B2B transaction where manufacturers sell through distributors and reps, they sell into a project team. Who is hired by the building owner. And so we're trying to help all those people do this efficiently and not let the complexity of the data be a tax that pro prohibits them frommoving forward. Most of our revenue comes from the sellers. The manufacturers, but we do work with a couple of very large buyers such as the Department of Energy in the United States, and the government of Canada is one of our customers because Canada has a framework to take all of the sustainability, elements that they're putting into legislation and eat their own dog food and make their building sustainable too. Collin Stewart: Very cool. I didn't
realize the government of Canada was doing something quite like that. I live in Vancouver and everything is green here. The flag may as well be green. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. I want I'm curious, where did the idea come from? 'cause I don't think this doesn't sound like something you're just walking along the street going I wish these building materials were more sustainable. Yeah. So there's gotta be a good story here, Kathleen Egan (05:00):
right? My business partner Paul. He was a sustainability consultant working on buildings like banks and higher ed and the southeast part of the United States. And every time he did a project, he's had to start a new Excel spreadsheet and start going and getting the data, calling manufacturers hunting and pecking through their websites. 'cause each one's different. And assembling that data so that they could ultimately submit it to the US Green Building Council, who gives out the lead emblems, right? And so he started just building his own little database in Excel to reduce the rework. And that evolved into something more sophisticated. He had a few leading
manufacturers as customers. When I met him and I joined him to help turn it into more of a repeatable SaaS product and we're up to over a hundred brands. On the manufacturer side, our database actually has 10,000 brands. Because we pull in data from all the brands, not just our customers, but our customers have grade A data, and a bunch of features that helps their reps and their distributors go to market. Collin Stewart (06:00):
And so are you pulling in like the MSDS material data safety sheets and kind of things like that? Do the, build the specifications that kind of stuff? If Kathleen Egan
(07:00):
are the key data sources. Once a manufacturers a customer, we also take any additional first party data that would include data sheets, BIM objects, any, anything they wanna put out there. A lot of those elements they already have on their own websites. And then we compliment their website with a sustainability specific deep dive that cannot just display all the information apples to apples show the source. You have a freshness date, right? Full attribution, but then it can also perform. The compliance logic. Sodoes this product get me lead credits? It depends on what kind of building it is and the zip code of the building and the location of the manufacturer who made the product. And so that is, has been the work of lead consultants, which my business partner was one. Now it's automated, so it could take weeks to say, okay, I have a flooring schedule with, let's call it 20 or 30 different products, right? Collin Stewart: Different. Kathleen Egan: Rooms, adhesives, the mat, et cetera. And a consultant will have to do
that without eeds, and it could take quite a while, and it rings up a hefty bill. Our product does it instantaneously and puts it in the exact format the US Green Building Council needs. And so you just, can go through it much faster. Collin Stewart (08:00):
I was trying to think through what's the revenue model like? How are you saving people money, making people more money? But if you're saving somebody from having to ma like manually put together all of those sheets, it's if you haven't, if you're listening and you're not familiar, it is an absolute ton of work just digging through spec sheets and finding the right things. I have some baggage in the space, but we don't need to go into that today. Kathleen Egan
to an important client. And how does that faster cycle time, accelerate deals and maybe grow? Grow the size of deals, that's harder to measure. But the time savings, we've gotten very good at measuring. And when we look at our a RR, which is roughly two and a half million we save about 28 million a year in time savings. So we're, we're hitting that 10 x and it's growing all the time. Collin Stewart (09:00):
You're just really killing the consultants in all their revenue? Kathleen Egan
people who are gonna thrive in a healthy environment. Another hotspot is oncology. Imagine you're building a cancer treatment center, right? Do you wanna put, I Collin Stewart (10:00):
shouldn't laugh at that, but Yes. I, it's funny. Kathleen Egan
each building has its own priorities. And so we're trying to let that not be the reason to not become really sustainable. Collin Stewart (11:00):
I love it. And so you had this amazing resource in Paul who had been doing the work. What was your validation process like? Did you just say, Hey, Paul's done this a million times, so this is what we're gonna build. Did you go and look and find other consultants? What did that look like? Kathleen Egan
(12:00):
quantitative research going out to market. And we have about 50,000 users per month across our platform. So we have aggregated databases like. product@equal.com. That's like our meta catalog, but then we also customize it for each customer. So somebody like Miller Noel who ha owns eight brands, it's just their eight brands, so their reps can give those links out without sending a database with competitive. Products that are in that database. Across that we have a lot offolks, so we try features and can get a quick response because of the volume. Yeah. And then we also survey through our tool, less, less uptake on that. 'cause somebody, some people just close the window, but nonetheless they, we get a signal there. So we do try to have as many signals as possible. Yeah. Personally, 'cause there's so many stakeholders. This is a, the decision making unit for a product is a complex, dynamic structure. Different for every material, different
for every building almost. Collin Stewart (13:00):
And talk to me about like the, that decision to say, Hey, we're gonna build this into software. Before you built anything, did you go and talk to anybody or was it just the two of you saying, Hey, we're gonna automate this? Kathleen Egan
(14:00):
but, drywall, flooring, furnishing the. The, that the products themselves don't change that much, whereas the certifications are very dynamic. And the third parties throw this big curve ball in the in the program, which is they often assign their own numbers. So we're not dealing with something that has like a stock keeping unit or a UPC like consumer packaged goods have. Right? Everybody can identify the same tube of toothpaste with the same number. Our products. Like the chair I'm sittingin here it, it is called something different by each certifier that tests the chair. So they assign it like, Collin Stewart: great Kathleen Egan: chair comes in. This is my fifth chair of the day. I'm gonna call it chair five, right? So that testing, and it also could include multiple chairs with different colorways, different bases. So it can be a collection. Or it might be below the stock keeping unit where this color has a different dye, so I have to test these two products separately. So
(15:00):
the managing of that information into a single record, that gives you a comprehensive view. Is pretty involved. And that is part of our secret sauce. So that as the architect, you don't have to deal with it at all. You can look it up in one place and if you wanna get into the source documents, they're all indexed. And put there. But where we've been moving is a, is actually a away from the detail and trying to roll it up more because we have this early adopter segment, which my, my co-founder Paul wasone of them. But they're a very small part of the market. I say, I call them PhDs in material sustainability, and they are deep in it, but there's a couple hundred of them in the country, not a great market. So we're now going into that next early adopter and majority market. And they don't speak the hieroglyphics of building product toxicity and sustainability and Collin Stewart: Right. Kathleen Egan: So it has to be in the language of English and that's where we're moving, is to make this ever more
accessible to a larger group of people. I. Collin Stewart (16:00):
I love that I can just, yeah, there's so much that you could do if you have all of that data underneath it. In terms of like calculating, in terms of automating and making the reporting easy in terms of making the scoring. Yeah, it's really interesting. Kathleen Egan
Kathleen Egan (17:00):
He had a handful of customers. He, he had one customer on the buyer's side, which was the US federal government. And three or four manufacturers. Collin Stewart
(18:00):
disposal and they have values on their website about waste, sustainability, carbon, what have you, and they'd like to reflect those values. There's a whole good, really interesting movement around sustainable procurement, which is more, the building's now built and it's been remodeled and you're in operations and maintenance mode. So it's the cleaners and light bulbs and laptops for new people who start. And so you're buying, your spend is a big. Lever. But reflecting the values in that spend has been hard because of the lack of data availability.So we're trying to unlock that in every phase of a building from the original ground up, construction, remodel, tenant improvement, all the way through to operations and maintenance. Collin Stewart: Cool. I love it. I've got, after the show, remind me, I've got somebody I want to a ask a question about. Okay. So first customers came from Paul's network. Then you got involved and you got this handful. Was your first insight, Hey, let's just go after these manufacturers. Like, talk to me about where the next customers, 'cause I'm always
curious, like most founders. Early customers come from that network. Yes. The people that you reach out to, you interview people, especially if you're a practitioner in the space. I'm super curious about where the next ones came from. Kathleen Egan (19:00):
Yeah, we've tried a lot of things that worked and a lot of things that didn't work. What we. We've probably tried it all. What we have found over the years is that it's gonna sound obvious, but the people with the most acute problem are the fastest to close and Right. Wow. So never Collin Stewart
(20:00):
20 who aren't yet customers based on what we call a pain index, right? So their pain index is basically how many complex products they have, how many different elements of sustainability and third party data are they trying to manage. That's a product. And then the whole thing gets raised to the power of how complex their go to market is. And it's usually at least a three tier distribution network with a dealer or a distributor or installer. Many times they have outside reps. They usually haveone rep selling to the architect, one rep selling to the owner, and they're trying to like sandwich it in that way. So the more complexity in that go to market, and a lot of them were. Relying on some internal, amazing person who was like the Paul at each of the manufacturers. Sometimes you call it, call her Becky. There's a wonderful woman, Becky, who is this guru at Herman Miller. And she just had a cue of questions that never stopped coming from reps trying to answer questions. Customers
calling directly, architects and designers looking for data. They send her these massive spreadsheets like, Hey, fill in this spreadsheet. For my project. And so she's gotta go pick through each product catalog and fill it in. Yeah. And Collin Stewart (21:00):
poor Becky, that sucks. We Kathleen Egan
(22:00):
websites for these manufacturers, like they're not into e-commerce yet, right? They've got, their websites are. Loaded with data, videos, the story of the Aron chair, et cetera. They've got beach plastic, recycled beach plastic in the base of one. Like here's the river it came from. So yeah, it's really rich storytelling. But if you wanna know the lead credits, you had to go talk to Becky. So now Becky has, a digital tool that can go out there and scaleinfinitely broader and track everything. So they get leads, they get digital customer engagement they get demand signals on product level, on a product attribute level. Yeah. And they even get projects. So an example, JP Morgan's building a big building in New York. It's gonna be the greenest building in New York. It's every. Certification and across our whole network, we've got over 85 projects that somebody on the JP Morgan project the gc, the designer the
(23:00):
architect put products together to evaluate them. And so now the manufacturer gets to see that, and they didn't used to even see it because their dealer was the one dealing with the JP Morgan project team. So the more we grow, the more, access, the manufacturers get to that kind of richness, which if you work in e-commerce, you think isn't it obvious? Don't they just get that, from their website. But they don't because the reps are out there with samples and donuts and, trying to get into the architect's office and they don't. Track that. Even the trade shows, they lovetrade shows, being getting the hands on product and building relationships. Collin Stewart: Even Kathleen Egan: with the scanner, and the badge. Like, think about how much you pay at a trade show to scan a bunch of badges, constantly scanning everyone's badge, who comes to their eco portal now and that is rich information that could be used throughout the organization. Collin Stewart: That's incredible. Yeah. Have you ever seen the tool, let me Google that for you. It's where somebody asks you a dumb question and you go to, let me Google that for you. And then you type in
the query that they could have typed into Google, and then you send them, it gives you a link, and they click on this link and it shows the computer typing in the query into Google for you, and then it hits enter and it's like, here's the search page. You need to do that for Becky. Kathleen Egan (24:00):
But she could push it out to her team. Yeah, a Collin Stewart
(25:00):
let's educate them. Let's bring this to them. They were coming to it. And so then it's like, okay, this isn't just sustainability, this is about commerce. And it is materially affecting how their deals happen. 'cause reps, they're not gonna use it for their health. They're only gonna use the tool if it helps them sell chairs, sell dry wells, sell electronics, that was one great moment. Another was we have electronics customer Hewlett Packard, and we did this for their US division. And itwas mostly for a customer support team who was like a big version of Becky answering questions for the field. And we hadn't really trained outside of that team, so we had about 35 highly dedicated users. Collin Stewart: Yeah, when Kathleen Egan: we went international. We started getting the reps from these other countries that maybe didn't have the same kind of customer support. And again, that showed like three x growth very rapidly by just adding the international component. So when we've
seen some kind of non-linear growth in usage. That is when we say, okay, this has got legs. We're not having to bring it to people and keep reminding them. It is like they're seeking it out. Collin Stewart (26:00):
I love that. What comes next? You've got some, fairly significant revenue it sounds like. There's definitely a proof point of there's something here. What do you see coming next? Kathleen Egan
aspect of it and what we have seen is there's no, I don't have a hard data point on it, but. Products that come from overseas, and I would consider you guys overseas 'cause it's the same continent, but overseas from Asia typically have much less transparency, right? So if you wanna have transparency on toxins, water, whatever it is, the product that's from here Collin Stewart (27:00):
usually Kathleen Egan
(28:00):
everything as frugally as possible. But testing some AI outbound marketing and learning engines who could really focus on that. Small valuable account list through LinkedIn, through email, through, the usual suspects. But try to rely on intelligent agents instead of having to hire a bunch of marketing people and some have worked better than others, and the ones that didn't work, we, put it in the lessons learned and do the retro on it, and then move on to the next one. So that we see is a big area as wellas using AI ourselves, Collin Stewart: yeah, we Kathleen Egan: did. You mentioned. You must have really interesting ways to display the data. One thing that we do for our customers who want to is just take all the data we have on a product and use AI to write a sustainable product summary. Because their marketing team hand writes a product summary. But it talks about all the dimensions of a product and sometimes barely mentions sustainability or it just says it's sustainable, which is very mean. Totally.
Collin Stewart (29:00):
Thank you for being specific, Kathleen Egan
(30:00):
changes over time. And the most usually the most sustainable a building ever is when it's still a watercolor painting. The reality sets in. And so we'd like to be able to track that throughout the lifecycle. Cool. With visibility to everybody to collaborate on it. And then after that, just like we could turn Becky's part of Becky's le less fun part of her job into an agent, right? We'd like that to become natural language interface. 'cause even though we've converted it, step one intoEnglish it's not all the way there, of course, to use ent interfaces, turn that into a more of a conversation. And then once that agent is working well for that role, you can imagine an agent for the architect who has different needs than the designer. And then the agents can all work together so that the team members can stop having to deal with admin and data and. Aggregation and reconciliation and do like the thing that their job is supposed to do, which is design a beautiful building,
design beautiful interiors. If you're the gc, it's to aggregate this all up and to serve the client. Get them back to the fun part of their jobs. Collin Stewart (31:00):
Totally give me an agent where the salesperson could say, does this qualify? I need this to be lead four. And the agent goes, yep. Thumbs up. And you're like, cool. That's all I needed to know. Like, write me the description that goes in this proposal. Here's the proposal, and there it is. Kathleen Egan
(32:00):
time with it. I'd love if we could just spend a couple minutes there. Yeah. I'm a I'm a big fan of, agents are really good at writing. LLMs are really amazing at writing. LLMs are not amazing at I would say looking at a big database and saying, who are the best potential customers? Especially if you say, make this decision for me. And so I'm a big fan of like using AI to. Personalize kind of the part of the initial touch within a fairly strict framework, but where I see AI engagements go off therails is when you say, Hey, ai, make these decisions for me. Yeah. And I found the best thing you can do is to use AI alongside of the sort of traditional tools to give yourself the ability to target accounts that you wouldn't have. So like I, I actually wrote down in the show notes here, I'm like, Hey, here's a play you could run is, you said you value, you wanna sell to companies that value sustainability or sustainable procurement. You could go use a tool like Clay and then go get a list of all the
manufacturers that you have in your database and then go see if any of them mention sustainability. Or sustainable procurement or go grab their public reports or go grab their sustainability reports and something like that. It creates, you're using AI to give yourself, to create a new lever. Lever, which, yeah, that Kathleen Egan (33:00):
would be really interesting. Today we get back a list and that list is a mixture, right? Yeah. One thing that AI hasn't been good at yet is telling is this manufacturer, residential, or commercial right. Really? 'cause the product's the same. Am I selling plumbing products? Because most brands sell both to some degree, right? Yeah. So do they have a big business selling to commercial or are they primarily residential with a few commercial thrown in? And our target would be the ones that are primarily commercial or they're big enough that the commercial part is still a big business. And that is something we're still doing manually. How much do they care about sustainability? We have some
(34:00):
metrics in our database about how many products and how many certifications. But, and we use that to put our targeting list out there, but then when the leads come in, we have to cross reference it. I'd like that to be neater. And then the last element is the people. These are big companies with Matrix, organizations. And so you could look up on LinkedIn and see who they are. But I would like the AI to do that and score the person. It's saving us a ton of time and things like, take this emaillist and look up their company, look up their website. Tell me what kind of company it is. Give me all the ones that you're 90% certain are a manufacturer and it does great up to there. And then is it commercial or residential? Not yet. Yeah. Not yet. Yet in that. So it is a human who has to come in and do that, but now I'm starting with a pretty. High hit rate versus just the world. Collin Stewart: I suspect you could automate all of that. But here's the problem is the problem with like a
(35:00):
lot of AI outbound systems is they say, give me a list of your best customers. And then it go, goes and uses like nearest neighbor or, a bunch of different algorithms to say, okay, let's go find, let's build a lookalike audience. Yep. And these lookalike audiences. In my opinion, a bit of a crapshoot because you don't know what variables went into scoring this. Like how much data do you have? Do you know, as an AI agent or as the AI system and however it's designed, do you know that I only care about residential versus commercial? Do that they have to care about sustainability? Or are you just gonna go and lookat this company and say, okay, these companies. Match this profile. Here's a generic profile based on what's available in because they're Kathleen Egan: both in Grand Rapids, Michigan or something. Totally. Collin Stewart: They both are a manufacturer, so you get a bunch of other manufacturers and you're like that's kind of garbage, and this isn't a fault of ai, it's not a fault of that. AI can't do it. I'm sure eventually we'll get to the point where AI can do it, but it's just the level of complexity that you need to have a really well targeted. AI driven campaign. They, you can't just say, okay, go and find all
these creative little ideas in a generic AI database or tool. And that's my biggest problem with a lot of these tools. They say, oh, we can do all this stuff and then you imagine AI doing this and it doesn't do any of that. And if you are an AI company and you are doing this, come email me and I will change my opinion. I'll update this video and I'll post a, I'm an idiot, right? Kathleen Egan (36:00):
But pretty, it still work. Yeah. And except for your work starts a little bit further down the funnel and with a little bit richer content. But you still gotta pick it up there. You still gotta prospect. We, we do have a partner who's doing prospecting on our best leads. And, we were doing that not that long ago, writing our own HubSpot sequences and, trying to optimize that like without a marketing team. That was really painful. So I do feel like it's each little pain point is slowly getting replaced with great tools and some of it is just. Popping into chat GBT and doing it yourself and we used to have an assistant looking up things and doing the enrichment. Now we just send it through chat, GBT and enriches it
like that with a very high accuracy. It's Collin Stewart (37:00):
yeah. Kathleen Egan
to Kathleen Egan
Tell me about the history or the origin story of the name. Kathleen Egan (01:00):
Yeah, so it's a riff on Archimedes who is a Greek mathematician and he pioneered. Lots of different math. But one of his most known things is the lever. Which became a catapult, and he was actually in the latest Indiana Jones movie. So maybe more people are familiar with him now. Archimedes for the physical lever and edes for a sustainability lever. And what we're trying to do is take the demand signal. That lots of different buyers of building products have from high tech companies like Google to banks like JP Morgan who want to have more healthy less impact on their building when they build buildings or do remodels. And that demand signal when they look for materials that have less impact helps. The manufacturers improve the quality of their materials to meet that need. And then with more availability in the market, more buyers could
(02:00):
now access sustainable building materials. So the sustainability is a broad term for us, and it covers everything from what you would expect, like carbon energy and water consumption, but also the impact on humans. Human health toxins are really bad for humans. And if you're in a building that's built with toxins, there's off-gassing. And of course, the good folks who work in the factories that make the building products are highly exposed to it, the installers. It also includes waste circularity. And there's a bunch of differentframeworks on how to divvy up all those impacts, which is a complexity that we're seeking to make easier. Collin Stewart: Interesting. I spent a short period in my life in the welding space selling welding equipment. And so I remember going into these places and thinking, coming out, just breathing differently. 'cause all the fumes and everything that was in there was wild. And most of the folks, they would spend their whole life in this factory. Kathleen Egan: An interesting component of, again, the broad term sustainability is
labor. And, there is still slave labor making, building products on this planet. So how do you make your building. Product supply chain transparent enough. So it's a very broad term. Any, anything that's bad for ecosystems and humans we'd like to remove because we have a lot of people on the planet. It's growing every day and they all spend most of their time in buildings. Collin Stewart (03:00):
Fair enough. So just before we get into the regularly scheduled programming, I'm super curious about who are you, who is it you're selling to? Is it, I don't imagine this is a consumer play where you're trying to sell to me the homeowner or? Kathleen Egan
(04:00):
like lead. LEED. And that's a, a building rating system that counts each material and how sustainable it is toward the credits to the building. So it's a very complex B2B transaction where manufacturers sell through distributors and reps, they sell into a project team. Who is hired by the building owner. And so we're trying to help all those people do this efficiently and not let the complexity of the data be a tax that pro prohibits them frommoving forward. Most of our revenue comes from the sellers. The manufacturers, but we do work with a couple of very large buyers such as the Department of Energy in the United States, and the government of Canada is one of our customers because Canada has a framework to take all of the sustainability, elements that they're putting into legislation and eat their own dog food and make their building sustainable too. Collin Stewart: Very cool. I didn't
realize the government of Canada was doing something quite like that. I live in Vancouver and everything is green here. The flag may as well be green. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. I want I'm curious, where did the idea come from? 'cause I don't think this doesn't sound like something you're just walking along the street going I wish these building materials were more sustainable. Yeah. So there's gotta be a good story here, Kathleen Egan (05:00):
right? My business partner Paul. He was a sustainability consultant working on buildings like banks and higher ed and the southeast part of the United States. And every time he did a project, he's had to start a new Excel spreadsheet and start going and getting the data, calling manufacturers hunting and pecking through their websites. 'cause each one's different. And assembling that data so that they could ultimately submit it to the US Green Building Council, who gives out the lead emblems, right? And so he started just building his own little database in Excel to reduce the rework. And that evolved into something more sophisticated. He had a few leading
manufacturers as customers. When I met him and I joined him to help turn it into more of a repeatable SaaS product and we're up to over a hundred brands. On the manufacturer side, our database actually has 10,000 brands. Because we pull in data from all the brands, not just our customers, but our customers have grade A data, and a bunch of features that helps their reps and their distributors go to market. Collin Stewart (06:00):
And so are you pulling in like the MSDS material data safety sheets and kind of things like that? Do the, build the specifications that kind of stuff? If Kathleen Egan
(07:00):
are the key data sources. Once a manufacturers a customer, we also take any additional first party data that would include data sheets, BIM objects, any, anything they wanna put out there. A lot of those elements they already have on their own websites. And then we compliment their website with a sustainability specific deep dive that cannot just display all the information apples to apples show the source. You have a freshness date, right? Full attribution, but then it can also perform. The compliance logic. Sodoes this product get me lead credits? It depends on what kind of building it is and the zip code of the building and the location of the manufacturer who made the product. And so that is, has been the work of lead consultants, which my business partner was one. Now it's automated, so it could take weeks to say, okay, I have a flooring schedule with, let's call it 20 or 30 different products, right? Collin Stewart: Different. Kathleen Egan: Rooms, adhesives, the mat, et cetera. And a consultant will have to do
that without eeds, and it could take quite a while, and it rings up a hefty bill. Our product does it instantaneously and puts it in the exact format the US Green Building Council needs. And so you just, can go through it much faster. Collin Stewart (08:00):
I was trying to think through what's the revenue model like? How are you saving people money, making people more money? But if you're saving somebody from having to ma like manually put together all of those sheets, it's if you haven't, if you're listening and you're not familiar, it is an absolute ton of work just digging through spec sheets and finding the right things. I have some baggage in the space, but we don't need to go into that today. Kathleen Egan
to an important client. And how does that faster cycle time, accelerate deals and maybe grow? Grow the size of deals, that's harder to measure. But the time savings, we've gotten very good at measuring. And when we look at our a RR, which is roughly two and a half million we save about 28 million a year in time savings. So we're, we're hitting that 10 x and it's growing all the time. Collin Stewart (09:00):
You're just really killing the consultants in all their revenue? Kathleen Egan
people who are gonna thrive in a healthy environment. Another hotspot is oncology. Imagine you're building a cancer treatment center, right? Do you wanna put, I Collin Stewart (10:00):
shouldn't laugh at that, but Yes. I, it's funny. Kathleen Egan
each building has its own priorities. And so we're trying to let that not be the reason to not become really sustainable. Collin Stewart (11:00):
I love it. And so you had this amazing resource in Paul who had been doing the work. What was your validation process like? Did you just say, Hey, Paul's done this a million times, so this is what we're gonna build. Did you go and look and find other consultants? What did that look like? Kathleen Egan
(12:00):
quantitative research going out to market. And we have about 50,000 users per month across our platform. So we have aggregated databases like. product@equal.com. That's like our meta catalog, but then we also customize it for each customer. So somebody like Miller Noel who ha owns eight brands, it's just their eight brands, so their reps can give those links out without sending a database with competitive. Products that are in that database. Across that we have a lot offolks, so we try features and can get a quick response because of the volume. Yeah. And then we also survey through our tool, less, less uptake on that. 'cause somebody, some people just close the window, but nonetheless they, we get a signal there. So we do try to have as many signals as possible. Yeah. Personally, 'cause there's so many stakeholders. This is a, the decision making unit for a product is a complex, dynamic structure. Different for every material, different
for every building almost. Collin Stewart (13:00):
And talk to me about like the, that decision to say, Hey, we're gonna build this into software. Before you built anything, did you go and talk to anybody or was it just the two of you saying, Hey, we're gonna automate this? Kathleen Egan
(14:00):
but, drywall, flooring, furnishing the. The, that the products themselves don't change that much, whereas the certifications are very dynamic. And the third parties throw this big curve ball in the in the program, which is they often assign their own numbers. So we're not dealing with something that has like a stock keeping unit or a UPC like consumer packaged goods have. Right? Everybody can identify the same tube of toothpaste with the same number. Our products. Like the chair I'm sittingin here it, it is called something different by each certifier that tests the chair. So they assign it like, Collin Stewart: great Kathleen Egan: chair comes in. This is my fifth chair of the day. I'm gonna call it chair five, right? So that testing, and it also could include multiple chairs with different colorways, different bases. So it can be a collection. Or it might be below the stock keeping unit where this color has a different dye, so I have to test these two products separately. So
(15:00):
the managing of that information into a single record, that gives you a comprehensive view. Is pretty involved. And that is part of our secret sauce. So that as the architect, you don't have to deal with it at all. You can look it up in one place and if you wanna get into the source documents, they're all indexed. And put there. But where we've been moving is a, is actually a away from the detail and trying to roll it up more because we have this early adopter segment, which my, my co-founder Paul wasone of them. But they're a very small part of the market. I say, I call them PhDs in material sustainability, and they are deep in it, but there's a couple hundred of them in the country, not a great market. So we're now going into that next early adopter and majority market. And they don't speak the hieroglyphics of building product toxicity and sustainability and Collin Stewart: Right. Kathleen Egan: So it has to be in the language of English and that's where we're moving, is to make this ever more
accessible to a larger group of people. I. Collin Stewart (16:00):
I love that I can just, yeah, there's so much that you could do if you have all of that data underneath it. In terms of like calculating, in terms of automating and making the reporting easy in terms of making the scoring. Yeah, it's really interesting. Kathleen Egan
Kathleen Egan (17:00):
He had a handful of customers. He, he had one customer on the buyer's side, which was the US federal government. And three or four manufacturers. Collin Stewart
(18:00):
disposal and they have values on their website about waste, sustainability, carbon, what have you, and they'd like to reflect those values. There's a whole good, really interesting movement around sustainable procurement, which is more, the building's now built and it's been remodeled and you're in operations and maintenance mode. So it's the cleaners and light bulbs and laptops for new people who start. And so you're buying, your spend is a big. Lever. But reflecting the values in that spend has been hard because of the lack of data availability.So we're trying to unlock that in every phase of a building from the original ground up, construction, remodel, tenant improvement, all the way through to operations and maintenance. Collin Stewart: Cool. I love it. I've got, after the show, remind me, I've got somebody I want to a ask a question about. Okay. So first customers came from Paul's network. Then you got involved and you got this handful. Was your first insight, Hey, let's just go after these manufacturers. Like, talk to me about where the next customers, 'cause I'm always
curious, like most founders. Early customers come from that network. Yes. The people that you reach out to, you interview people, especially if you're a practitioner in the space. I'm super curious about where the next ones came from. Kathleen Egan (19:00):
Yeah, we've tried a lot of things that worked and a lot of things that didn't work. What we. We've probably tried it all. What we have found over the years is that it's gonna sound obvious, but the people with the most acute problem are the fastest to close and Right. Wow. So never Collin Stewart
(20:00):
20 who aren't yet customers based on what we call a pain index, right? So their pain index is basically how many complex products they have, how many different elements of sustainability and third party data are they trying to manage. That's a product. And then the whole thing gets raised to the power of how complex their go to market is. And it's usually at least a three tier distribution network with a dealer or a distributor or installer. Many times they have outside reps. They usually haveone rep selling to the architect, one rep selling to the owner, and they're trying to like sandwich it in that way. So the more complexity in that go to market, and a lot of them were. Relying on some internal, amazing person who was like the Paul at each of the manufacturers. Sometimes you call it, call her Becky. There's a wonderful woman, Becky, who is this guru at Herman Miller. And she just had a cue of questions that never stopped coming from reps trying to answer questions. Customers
calling directly, architects and designers looking for data. They send her these massive spreadsheets like, Hey, fill in this spreadsheet. For my project. And so she's gotta go pick through each product catalog and fill it in. Yeah. And Collin Stewart (21:00):
poor Becky, that sucks. We Kathleen Egan
(22:00):
websites for these manufacturers, like they're not into e-commerce yet, right? They've got, their websites are. Loaded with data, videos, the story of the Aron chair, et cetera. They've got beach plastic, recycled beach plastic in the base of one. Like here's the river it came from. So yeah, it's really rich storytelling. But if you wanna know the lead credits, you had to go talk to Becky. So now Becky has, a digital tool that can go out there and scaleinfinitely broader and track everything. So they get leads, they get digital customer engagement they get demand signals on product level, on a product attribute level. Yeah. And they even get projects. So an example, JP Morgan's building a big building in New York. It's gonna be the greenest building in New York. It's every. Certification and across our whole network, we've got over 85 projects that somebody on the JP Morgan project the gc, the designer the
(23:00):
architect put products together to evaluate them. And so now the manufacturer gets to see that, and they didn't used to even see it because their dealer was the one dealing with the JP Morgan project team. So the more we grow, the more, access, the manufacturers get to that kind of richness, which if you work in e-commerce, you think isn't it obvious? Don't they just get that, from their website. But they don't because the reps are out there with samples and donuts and, trying to get into the architect's office and they don't. Track that. Even the trade shows, they lovetrade shows, being getting the hands on product and building relationships. Collin Stewart: Even Kathleen Egan: with the scanner, and the badge. Like, think about how much you pay at a trade show to scan a bunch of badges, constantly scanning everyone's badge, who comes to their eco portal now and that is rich information that could be used throughout the organization. Collin Stewart: That's incredible. Yeah. Have you ever seen the tool, let me Google that for you. It's where somebody asks you a dumb question and you go to, let me Google that for you. And then you type in
the query that they could have typed into Google, and then you send them, it gives you a link, and they click on this link and it shows the computer typing in the query into Google for you, and then it hits enter and it's like, here's the search page. You need to do that for Becky. Kathleen Egan (24:00):
But she could push it out to her team. Yeah, a Collin Stewart
(25:00):
let's educate them. Let's bring this to them. They were coming to it. And so then it's like, okay, this isn't just sustainability, this is about commerce. And it is materially affecting how their deals happen. 'cause reps, they're not gonna use it for their health. They're only gonna use the tool if it helps them sell chairs, sell dry wells, sell electronics, that was one great moment. Another was we have electronics customer Hewlett Packard, and we did this for their US division. And itwas mostly for a customer support team who was like a big version of Becky answering questions for the field. And we hadn't really trained outside of that team, so we had about 35 highly dedicated users. Collin Stewart: Yeah, when Kathleen Egan: we went international. We started getting the reps from these other countries that maybe didn't have the same kind of customer support. And again, that showed like three x growth very rapidly by just adding the international component. So when we've
seen some kind of non-linear growth in usage. That is when we say, okay, this has got legs. We're not having to bring it to people and keep reminding them. It is like they're seeking it out. Collin Stewart (26:00):
I love that. What comes next? You've got some, fairly significant revenue it sounds like. There's definitely a proof point of there's something here. What do you see coming next? Kathleen Egan
aspect of it and what we have seen is there's no, I don't have a hard data point on it, but. Products that come from overseas, and I would consider you guys overseas 'cause it's the same continent, but overseas from Asia typically have much less transparency, right? So if you wanna have transparency on toxins, water, whatever it is, the product that's from here Collin Stewart (27:00):
usually Kathleen Egan
(28:00):
everything as frugally as possible. But testing some AI outbound marketing and learning engines who could really focus on that. Small valuable account list through LinkedIn, through email, through, the usual suspects. But try to rely on intelligent agents instead of having to hire a bunch of marketing people and some have worked better than others, and the ones that didn't work, we, put it in the lessons learned and do the retro on it, and then move on to the next one. So that we see is a big area as wellas using AI ourselves, Collin Stewart: yeah, we Kathleen Egan: did. You mentioned. You must have really interesting ways to display the data. One thing that we do for our customers who want to is just take all the data we have on a product and use AI to write a sustainable product summary. Because their marketing team hand writes a product summary. But it talks about all the dimensions of a product and sometimes barely mentions sustainability or it just says it's sustainable, which is very mean. Totally.
Collin Stewart (29:00):
Thank you for being specific, Kathleen Egan
(30:00):
changes over time. And the most usually the most sustainable a building ever is when it's still a watercolor painting. The reality sets in. And so we'd like to be able to track that throughout the lifecycle. Cool. With visibility to everybody to collaborate on it. And then after that, just like we could turn Becky's part of Becky's le less fun part of her job into an agent, right? We'd like that to become natural language interface. 'cause even though we've converted it, step one intoEnglish it's not all the way there, of course, to use ent interfaces, turn that into a more of a conversation. And then once that agent is working well for that role, you can imagine an agent for the architect who has different needs than the designer. And then the agents can all work together so that the team members can stop having to deal with admin and data and. Aggregation and reconciliation and do like the thing that their job is supposed to do, which is design a beautiful building,
design beautiful interiors. If you're the gc, it's to aggregate this all up and to serve the client. Get them back to the fun part of their jobs. Collin Stewart (31:00):
Totally give me an agent where the salesperson could say, does this qualify? I need this to be lead four. And the agent goes, yep. Thumbs up. And you're like, cool. That's all I needed to know. Like, write me the description that goes in this proposal. Here's the proposal, and there it is. Kathleen Egan
(32:00):
time with it. I'd love if we could just spend a couple minutes there. Yeah. I'm a I'm a big fan of, agents are really good at writing. LLMs are really amazing at writing. LLMs are not amazing at I would say looking at a big database and saying, who are the best potential customers? Especially if you say, make this decision for me. And so I'm a big fan of like using AI to. Personalize kind of the part of the initial touch within a fairly strict framework, but where I see AI engagements go off therails is when you say, Hey, ai, make these decisions for me. Yeah. And I found the best thing you can do is to use AI alongside of the sort of traditional tools to give yourself the ability to target accounts that you wouldn't have. So like I, I actually wrote down in the show notes here, I'm like, Hey, here's a play you could run is, you said you value, you wanna sell to companies that value sustainability or sustainable procurement. You could go use a tool like Clay and then go get a list of all the
manufacturers that you have in your database and then go see if any of them mention sustainability. Or sustainable procurement or go grab their public reports or go grab their sustainability reports and something like that. It creates, you're using AI to give yourself, to create a new lever. Lever, which, yeah, that Kathleen Egan (33:00):
would be really interesting. Today we get back a list and that list is a mixture, right? Yeah. One thing that AI hasn't been good at yet is telling is this manufacturer, residential, or commercial right. Really? 'cause the product's the same. Am I selling plumbing products? Because most brands sell both to some degree, right? Yeah. So do they have a big business selling to commercial or are they primarily residential with a few commercial thrown in? And our target would be the ones that are primarily commercial or they're big enough that the commercial part is still a big business. And that is something we're still doing manually. How much do they care about sustainability? We have some
(34:00):
metrics in our database about how many products and how many certifications. But, and we use that to put our targeting list out there, but then when the leads come in, we have to cross reference it. I'd like that to be neater. And then the last element is the people. These are big companies with Matrix, organizations. And so you could look up on LinkedIn and see who they are. But I would like the AI to do that and score the person. It's saving us a ton of time and things like, take this emaillist and look up their company, look up their website. Tell me what kind of company it is. Give me all the ones that you're 90% certain are a manufacturer and it does great up to there. And then is it commercial or residential? Not yet. Yeah. Not yet. Yet in that. So it is a human who has to come in and do that, but now I'm starting with a pretty. High hit rate versus just the world. Collin Stewart: I suspect you could automate all of that. But here's the problem is the problem with like a
(35:00):
lot of AI outbound systems is they say, give me a list of your best customers. And then it go, goes and uses like nearest neighbor or, a bunch of different algorithms to say, okay, let's go find, let's build a lookalike audience. Yep. And these lookalike audiences. In my opinion, a bit of a crapshoot because you don't know what variables went into scoring this. Like how much data do you have? Do you know, as an AI agent or as the AI system and however it's designed, do you know that I only care about residential versus commercial? Do that they have to care about sustainability? Or are you just gonna go and lookat this company and say, okay, these companies. Match this profile. Here's a generic profile based on what's available in because they're Kathleen Egan: both in Grand Rapids, Michigan or something. Totally. Collin Stewart: They both are a manufacturer, so you get a bunch of other manufacturers and you're like that's kind of garbage, and this isn't a fault of ai, it's not a fault of that. AI can't do it. I'm sure eventually we'll get to the point where AI can do it, but it's just the level of complexity that you need to have a really well targeted. AI driven campaign. They, you can't just say, okay, go and find all
these creative little ideas in a generic AI database or tool. And that's my biggest problem with a lot of these tools. They say, oh, we can do all this stuff and then you imagine AI doing this and it doesn't do any of that. And if you are an AI company and you are doing this, come email me and I will change my opinion. I'll update this video and I'll post a, I'm an idiot, right? Kathleen Egan (36:00):
But pretty, it still work. Yeah. And except for your work starts a little bit further down the funnel and with a little bit richer content. But you still gotta pick it up there. You still gotta prospect. We, we do have a partner who's doing prospecting on our best leads. And, we were doing that not that long ago, writing our own HubSpot sequences and, trying to optimize that like without a marketing team. That was really painful. So I do feel like it's each little pain point is slowly getting replaced with great tools and some of it is just. Popping into chat GBT and doing it yourself and we used to have an assistant looking up things and doing the enrichment. Now we just send it through chat, GBT and enriches it
like that with a very high accuracy. It's Collin Stewart (37:00):
yeah. Kathleen Egan
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