How to 2X Your Output – Without the Burnout

Episode Summary

In this episode, Rob chats with Peter Morandi, CEO of Eastman Cooke, a company renowned for building award-winning construction projects through innovation and leadership. Peter shares how he’s transformed the traditionally manual construction industry by integrating remote professionals into nearly every department, from estimating to project management. He dives into the systems, culture, and mindset that allowed Eastman Cooke to double its annual estimates, improve client satisfaction, and reduce costly errors.

Key Takeaway

Remote professionals aren't just support—they’re strategic assets. With the right tools, systems, and mindset, even traditionally "boots-on-the-ground" industries like construction can benefit from offshore talent and dramatically improve efficiency, accuracy, and client relationships.

Questions I ask Peter

2:15   How do you get your team to buy into new systems, automation, and more productive ways of working? 

3:37  How did you build buy-in for your ECA Work Smart system across the company?

6:26  What impact has having an assistant made on your personal productivity and leadership?

8:26  How do remote professionals support critical functions like estimating and project management?

11:49  What measurable results have you seen from adding remote assistants across departments?

19:06  How did your team adapt to working with offshore professionals?

 

More About Peter Morandi:  

• Check out Eastman Cooke.

• Connect with Peter on LinkedIn.

 

More About Rob Levin  & WorkBetterNow: 

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Episode Transcript

Peter Morandi (00:00):
Just to give you an example, from 2023 to 2024, we doubled the number of estimates that we were able to provide. That's huge, we were just going at a breakneck pace that could not have happened if we didn't have support to help out.

Rob Levin (00:01):
Today on the show, I'm joined by Peter Morandi, CEO of Eastman Cooke. Peter's a builder at heart who turned his passion for construction into a business known for innovation, collaboration, and hands-on leadership. Through the ECA Work Smart system, he's delivered award-winning projects for clients like NYU Langone and Mercedes-Benz.
I'm gonna do my best. Let's see if I can throw one of those into one of the questions.
Most of 'em are competitive, so putting that framework around there supports what I call our infrastructure, and our infrastructure is the ECA Work Smart system; it's our platform that we've made and built for estimating, it's our field operations, it's the whole thing. So once we frame it around that and throw in some of our core values, like we hire the best and brightest in the industry and teach 'em the ECA way.

Peter Morandi (00:04):
Yeah. You know, part of what makes it work is a little bit of a contagion. It's that there's always this feeling like if you're not doing it the same way, you're not part of the club, you're not part of the group, and it does get called out. Very often I say to everyone, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done; so, not only we're going through the process, but also what we're doing is we're measuring that, we're developed KPIs, we put things in place where there's accountability and I don't think that anyone in the company wants to be the person who's not living up to that expectation that we put out there.
You know, we're entrepreneurs, that's one thing that we absolutely say it's part of our core values, is that we want to give our clients an opportunity to do what they do best and leave the construction to us, and at the same time, I remind everyone in the company all the time that we are entrepreneurs.
One of the things that we do is that all of our remote professionals do all the scheduling for that, so they have access to everyone's calendar and can see where it fits in, and they put it on my calendar as well, as "following". So I can just look at that without even having a KPI, without even having any tracking mechanism; I can see that those processes are being followed because I see them all over my calendar, and once they're there, I always say all the time, if it's not on the calendar, it's not gonna happen.
Okay, no problem. Once that connection was made, once we went through the interview process and found the right person; and, lemme tell you that little story about how we found Sandra. When we were doing the interviews, one of the things I always ask is, tell me a little something about your personal life. What do you like to do in your free time? For example. And most of the answers are pretty generic, I like to spend time with my dog and my family. Sandra answered the question with, "I make miniatures."
And that was the selling point, that was the one that I knew was gonna make sure that everything was taken care of with such great detail. And from that point forward, it has been, it became it, in the start of this, my partner and I shared an assistant, and it relatively quickly, we figured out that the things that we could have our assistants working on with us, we couldn't have just one that we split, we had to have two. I had to have my own remote professional because I just found the efficiency that came out of it, so great.
Yeah, absolutely. You are right, I'm out in the field a lot, that's part of our business. We're out putting literally and figuratively putting bricks on top of bricks all the time, the technology in construction hasn't changed that much; we brought some things in that have helped us do it, but at the end of the day, it's craft workers doing their craft, putting up a building that's gonna last the test of time.
It's not just a reporting mechanism, it's an action mechanism. So, I'm staying on top of this stuff, so much better than ever; if someone's making an introduction, they want a response right away, if I don't get my emails for a day or two, because I've been running around in the field, it's disrespectful, frankly.
So when it comes to my schedule, it's not just booking appointments on my calendar, or events on my calendar. What I get attached to that is a profile on who I'm going to speak to, it's the LinkedIn profile, their website, something, an interesting fact that I can bring up, oh, hey you, oh, you went to Syracuse? Oh, that's great, you're an orange man. You know, and it breaks the ice. It has something that we can find in common.
It's not just me. We have several remote professionals across the company; in estimating, I talked about that risk mitigation a little bit, yeah, so 85% of our work is subcontracted, so having proposals come in is critical, so those follow-up calls, remote professional takes care of them.
Project manager. Yeah, those are the guys in the office that run the projects from the office, and partially from the field, the administrative work that gets done; every product that we use, every brick, every piece of sheet rock, every piece of HVAC equipment all has to be submitted to the engineer for approval.
What has the impact been? You mentioned that they're doing things that sometimes get missed, et cetera, but what has the impact been, let's say, the estimating department on having an assistant there, and you know, obviously taking some of the workload that is important, but not necessarily of the highest value, like tapping into the estimator's unique abilities, so, can you tell us a little bit about the impact that having an assistant has made? Because this is a trend that we're seeing, you were one of the companies, the first companies that I think got on this saying, Hey, all right, an assistant's been great for me.
What did one subcontractor have versus another? What was their inclusions, exclusions? What was their scope of work? Without that, it's really difficult to understand what the value of a trade is. If we compare two or three and they're about the same numbers, it seems like that's the market price.
So, I believe it. And who knows what was included, and not included in that, because they don't have the right drawings. Just taking the highlighter and putting it there and saying yes, that's correct, and if it's wrong, the assistant goes and calls back the subcontractor and says, you're bidding the wrong set of drawings.

Rob Levin (00:17):
Can you go into a little bit more detail on what has the impact been on the estimators in the department? In other words, now they don't have to do this work. What has the impact been in the fact that they don't have to do that work? They can now do what? Or what is the impact? Have you seen more bids getting accepted or are you able to have faster cycle time? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
It also allows our estimators to do what they do best, which is figure out the plans, understand where the gaps are. How are we servicing our client the best by giving them the right value on a project, taking that information and feeding enough to our project management and our field staff to get a schedule built, understanding all the requirements that are in RFP, the efficiency that's provided there, it does help us increase the numbers of estimates we can get out a year, but the accuracy has gone up.
That's very powerful. When I think about the construction industry, to me, it's a very boots-on-the-ground type of industry. How has your team adapted to bringing in, remote, in your case, offshore talent?
And I was alluding to before, all of our assistants have access to all of our systems so they can see what we do, but also, they're part of that process. It's not just a pass an email from one person to another person, it's be able to see where you can put those into our system, where the critical parts of that entry are there.

Peter Morandi (00:21):
Take for instance those trainings in our systems, it's a huge return when we're able to show one of our assistants how something works, and how important's what the meaningfulness of it is, how that works our business into a new project, or managing that project, or making sure that we start it strong, and we finish it strong and then it really becomes, all of our assistants are like part of the culture here.
So, in addition to training them, which it sounds like you did an incredible job, and I give you a lot of credit for that because a lot of companies underestimate how powerful just making that investment in training can be. Was there anything else that you did to get the people in the office that have been working together for some time used to working with people through a screen as opposed to going to the cubicle or the office down the hall?
Peter, first of all, you've shared some really great information around the power of having an assistant, as the owner has been, as well as departmental assistants. Anything else that you want to leave our audience with?
Peter, where can people find out more about you as well as Eastman Cooke?
Thanks for listening. The Great Talent Great Business Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now. Don't forget to review. Subscribe and download the worksheet for this episode at the link below. If you'd like to connect with us, you can find us on LinkedIn at Great Talent, great business, or visit great talent podcast.com.