BuiltForward: The Future of Construction

Show Notes

Mike Kanaby has spent decades in construction, from working in the field to leading a $1.5 billion operation at Johnson Controls. Today, as Managing Partner at Profitability Works, he helps trade contractors improve their processes, strengthen operations, and scale more effectively.

We get into:

• Why contractors often hit operational growing pains around $20–30 million in revenue
• How small breakdowns in exe...

In This Episode

• 00:00 – Meet Chuck Fenske of Carleton McKenna
• 02:30 – From the family construction business to investment banking
• 05:30 – Labor shortages and the aging construction workforce
• 08:30 – Why private equity is investing in construction
• 11:00 – What motivates contractor owners to sell
• 14:00 – Preparing for a sale and maximizing valuation
• 16:00 – What makes one contractor wor...

In this episode of BuiltForward, I sit down with Chuck Mazzanti, who leads the construction practice at Christensen Group, a 100% employee-owned insurance and risk management firm. Chuck is also the founder of the Construction ESOP Collective.

We explore why construction companies are particularly well-suited to employee ownership, how Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) work, and how they compare with private equity and other su...

Show Notes

There's been a lot of investment in construction technology over the past decade, but how much has really changed?

Eldar Sadikov, co-founder and CEO of Field Materials, believes we're still in the early days. While many expect the construction software market to consolidate, Eldar thinks there's room for many more large, successful companies to emerge.

Field Materials uses AI to automate the administrative work inv...

Micah Rodman is the CEO and co-founder of Kojo, a procurement, warehouse management, and finance platform built for trade contractors.

Kojo started with a simple observation: trade contractors were still spending enormous amounts of time moving information manually between the field, purchasing teams, and accounting systems. The founders spent months visiting job sites, talking with contractors, and watching how materials actually m...

Brendan Hermalyn is the founder and CEO of Thalo Labs, which builds connected technology that helps commercial HVAC contractors monitor equipment, diagnose problems, and identify potential failures before they happen.

In this episode, Jason and Brendan discuss how technology could transform HVAC from a reactive service business into a predictive one — and what that could mean for technician productivity, contractor margins, eq...

Rob Spencer has spent more than 27 years inside construction companies, working his way from warehouse laborer to CIO and Chief Administrative Officer. He now runs BuiltTech Strategy Group, advising contractors on technology strategy, systems, AI and digital transformation.

In this conversation, we dig into how contractors should think about build vs. buy, why app fatigue is becoming a problem, where bespoke AI fits alongside establ...

Ben Price joins Jason to explain how WND Ventures - the venture arm of DPR Construction - connects startups with one of the country’s largest general contractors. WND helps emerging technology companies test their products on active DPR projects and may invest when those pilots demonstrate real value.

Ben breaks down how DPR evaluates new tools, balances internally developed technology with off-the-shelf solutions, and moves s...

Gregg Schoppman is a Partner at FMI and leads the firm’s Operations practice, working with contractors to improve productivity, profitability, and operational performance.

In this episode, we dig into how contractors actually improve their businesses, why process change is so difficult, how knowledge and judgment get transferred across organizations, and where technology and AI fit.

In this episode:

00:00 — Introduction

Professor Jerry Kane has spent more than a decade studying digital transformation and how organizations adapt to new technology. In this episode, we explore what AI transformation actually looks like inside an organization - and why Jerry believes the technology itself may be the easy part.

We discuss:

• Why AI transformation is fundamentally a people, workflow, and organizational challenge

• Why waiting for AI technology to stabil...

Matt Pincus is Owner of Pincus Elevator, a family-owned elevator contractor founded by his father in 1953.

In this episode, Matt takes us inside the day-to-day realities of running a specialty contracting business. His biggest constraint is skilled labor: elevator mechanics take years to develop, experienced people are difficult to hire, and simply adding headcount isn't an easy answer.

That makes productivity increasingly importan...

BuiltForward host Jason Jacobs interviews Furman Haynes, co-founder and CEO of WorkHero, an “AI back office” for the smallest HVAC contractors - often one- to three-truck shops.

WorkHero takes 10–20 hours per week of admin like invoicing, permits, heat pump rebates, and other paperwork off contractors’ plates, using software plus expert office managers working inside the tools they already use, including Ser...

The innovation team is not the buyer.

The project is.

Kevin Halter has spent about 15 years figuring out how technology actually gets bought and adopted in construction. He led sales at PlanGrid as the company grew from roughly $5 million to $120 million in revenue before Autodesk acquired it for about $875 million, then spent six years helping combine those acquisitions into what became Autodesk Construction Cloud.

In this episode...

Construction has more bankruptcies than any other sector. Almost none of them are about bad building.

Guy Saxelby is the co-founder and CEO of Earlytrade, a marketplace that lets subcontractors get paid early on invoices that have already been approved. The sub names a discount, the general contractor pays out of its own idle cash and earns a return on money that was sitting in a money market fund, and no lender sits in the middle....

Ed Smith ran Wayfair's Canada business to nearly a billion dollars in revenue. Then he spent a year installing heat pumps - and learned firsthand why there's no such thing as a nationwide home-retrofit contractor: the equipment is not the system. The system is what a good contractor custom-manufactures on site, home by home.

Ed is co-founder and co-CEO of Amply Energy, a software company helping residential HVAC contractors size, d...

BuiltForward explores how AI, technology, and leadership are reshaping construction—and the broader physical economy. Host Jason Jacobs, an entrepreneur and investor, learns in public through conversations with the operators, founders, and leaders driving that transformation. Together they dig into how these organizations continuously adapt as technology evolves, what is actually working on the ground, and where the biggest o...