How to start a Tech Business in Construction

Ciaran Brennan
The reason we said we’d do this is because we all sort of come from a position of being in construction. Not to say that we got peed-off with construction, but maybe just seeing things in a different way and wanted to try something different.

Sarah, starting with you: where did your construction career begin?

Sarah Crawley
Probably from quite a young age. My dad had his own fit-out contracting business. So I guess I was always around construction. I then after university almost fell into it by accident, and then worked for a series of companies, fell into kind of healthcare refurbishments, particularly over a number of years, and then went to Mace and ended up, despite not having a degree in mechanical or electrical engineering, ended up specialising in mechanical & electrical healthcare fit out refurbishments.

Niall Brennan
Quite specific!

Sarah Crawley
I did that for a number of years. I really enjoyed it. I loved working on site. I loved site teams. But the technology was really bad and really poor, and most of it was kind of top down.

Ciaran Brennan
Was that at you from the start? Literally early on in the career, you were sort of seeing things in a different way, that things should be better? Was that itching at you? That there could be an easier way to do things?

Sarah Crawley
I’ve been coding from a really young age. I did Computer Science, and I’ve always wanted to do things kind of differently. When I entered it, I was really shocked by doing even a basic pivot table for a manager.

Sarah Crawley
And they were like, “Oh my God, you’re an Excel guru!”, and I’m like, no, this isn’t really complicated stuff. And then one of the systems that we were using, we were often drawing straws for who would have to do the data input. And it was super clunky. They would take ten minutes to load.

And sometimes a lot of the software felt like we were keeping other people in jobs and it just didn’t benefit us. So I just got really frustrated, and I was like, “I think there’s a better way of doing this, and I think there’s a massive opportunity here.”

Ciaran Brennan
What about you, John? Where did it all kick off for you? How long are you here? How long are you in London?

John Ryan
I suppose the usual answer is too long. I’ve been here 17 years nearly, I think, at this point?

Ciaran Brennan
So your construction career kicked off in Ireland first? Frame that up. What is it that you qualified in? And then how did you sort of progress through the construction ladder, if you want to put it that way?

John Ryan
So I was kind of always good, technically, with things, taking things apart. I wasn’t very good at putting them back together again, so I had to go and get an engineering degree to figure that bit out. I was a bit thick.

So I got that and ended up in a job here in London, working on the underground, mostly in trains. So rolling stock is where my background is. And then by accident, I annoyed the Head of Engineering, and I was giving him grief of how I want something more challenging. I wanted more meat. I want to have something cool.

And he goes, talk to Cahan and just get off my back. So I went down, talked to Cahan. Cahan had his big project. Cahan left a couple of months later. I ended up going from mechanical engineer, fixing trains to Googling “What is Unistrut?”, and trying to figure out construction basics.

And because the project went in a certain direction, I ended up with quite a senior position on the design team. And I liked the fun of it, I liked the excitement of it. Everything was going wrong, but we were in the middle of delivery, in the middle of a construction site, where nothing is drawn, nothing is designed.

And it was just very exciting. I kind of got stuck into it. Then I started thinking, “This is for me.”

I learned a lot in that project. And then with the projects after that I got better and I realised, actually, I’m liking this Excel thing. And every time I’m building something to bring data together into one place, I could structure it and then see where I am and what’s my hit list and my critical action item list, which the Americans brought in.

And I was always using Excel to bring data together and structure it. I was kind of going, why am I manually doing this every single time? Why do we have five tractors for engineering documentation, deliverables? Why do we have four of this one? Why are the commercial team not speaking the same language as the scheduling team and so on?

So it’s kind of like continually, the first thing in our job was always to get the IT in place, whether that’s getting the wifi working, getting a router in, or getting spreadsheets and somewhere we’re going to put all our data was always the first thing that if I got that right, I at least knew where the project was going and we could be successful.

Ciaran Brennan
So there’s a trend on that side of the table that they probably were looking at technology, and maybe it was inevitable that you might end up in technology. [To Niall Brennan] You were different. You probably got dragged in a little bit.

Niall Brennan
I got dragged into it initially, yeah. So my background was carpentry. And then I suppose the usual is that you get dragged into business – you end up kind of decent at your trade and you get dragged into business.

Ciaran Brennan
Accidental business. Accidental business from the trade, isn’t it?

Niall Brennan
You get good at your trade and then all of a sudden somebody asks you, would you do that big job? And you go, I might do it. Yeah, I might do it. You get dragged into that. So I kind of ran a couple of jobs as a foreman and then bit of project management, maybe had a first go of business then with a carpentry contractor or being a carpentry contractor.

So all of a sudden gone up to 25 carpenters or something like that. That was the introduction into the big sites. And then I had to have an email. Hotmail.co.uk was my first thing. I had a phone, I had email that would come in. That was it. Excel followed, but I loved Excel too.

Niall Brennan
I absolutely loved Excel.

I had to have everything in it. And that was my first introduction to technology. I couldn’t find a switch on a computer, but when I did find it, the first thing I found was Excel.

Ciaran Brennan
I’m trying to frame this up in a way, because the idea of we’re all sitting around here today is that we’ve all come from backgrounds in construction and we’ve all ended up in technology, essentially. And there’s tonnes of people out there that are looking at something now, probably listening to this and saying, “That’s shit. That’s not the way that should be done. And I’ve got a better idea.”

I’d love to be able to frame that up and sort of give people insights into what it’s actually like to go on there and say, right, actually the idea is one thing, but now I’m going to try and execute against it.

Sarah, what’s one piece of advice even that you could think of to someone, maybe, that has an idea of a better way to do something, and then it just wants to know, where do I go from here?

John Ryan
Should we put a health warning up at this point?

Ciaran Brennan
Yeah. By the way, anything that comes out now in the next 20 minutes comes with a caveat. That’s your own health risk.

Sarah Crawley
I think my general observation from it was that it’s a lot harder than I think I thought it was going to be. In all honesty, I think when you look at these things–

Ciaran Brennan
Where did you start? So, first of all, let me go back a step – and sorry for interrupting you – but I think we better frame up. Give us SymTerra. What is SymTerra? What does it do? Tell us about SymTerra.

Sarah Crawley
First of all, it’s a communication platform from site for the whole supply chain to communicate. So it often gets like with site teams, they call it like, oh, “It’s replaced WhatsApp for construction”, and that’s how they refer to it. Investors refer to it as like “Slack for construction”, which is probably a better analogy, but with much more complex permissions to reflect the construction supply chain.

But what I love about that is that if you go to someone in construction, you’re like, oh, it’s like Slack for construction. They’re like, “What’s Slack?” So it just doesn’t work.

So that’s what it is. How it originated is we built an MVP basically. And I think the real catalyst of change for us especially, the real boost, was we got into Google for Startups and that was like the first introduction.

Ciaran Brennan
And were you still on site at this stage or had you made a leap?

Sarah Crawley
No. We had made the MVP on site and we were happy and it was being used. And then my project came to an end at Mace and I made a choice, like, I can either keep complaining about these things or I can give it a go.

So construction, whilst it’s the second largest industry globally, is a small world. So I left Mace on very good terms, knowing full well I might need to ask for my job back. My project came to an end. I told them what I wanted to do, they were supportive of it and off I went.

And then it was kind of a real intense period of enlightenment and there was a lot of soul searching and wondering and a lot of false starts. And then the biggest change was getting into Google for Startups and being in an environment with other people who were doing it and just being a sponge and just learning as much as possible.

Ciaran Brennan
That was construction tech, sorry, tech across multiple industries. Were you involved at that stage, John?

John Ryan
I was still working on Tideway Super Sewer here in London, so I was heading up 3 of the 24 sites and I was kind of sitting on the sideline at this point helping out bits and pieces, but we very much had to go off and earn a living anyway somehow. And luckily we were in a good position to go off and be able to do that at that point.

And Sarah was able to go off, do the R&D, the research. And what she achieved with Google for Startups was amazing. And at that point then is kind of going, actually, this is a proper viable business. Our gut feeling is actually the right feeling to have.

Ciaran Brennan
We had a similar experience where we went into an accelerator, a local based accelerator based out of Dublin, called the NDRC National Digital Research Centre. And that opened our eyes up really, didn’t it? You remember how they told us about how to go after the problem?

Niall Brennan
Yeah, I do. It was hard because we had an idea, I suppose it was loose at best. It wasn’t what it is now. It was pretty loose at the time.

We were looking at the smaller tradesmen and myself and Ciaran were coming from Australia at the time, back to Ireland, and we kind of had seen that technology was a little bit more accepted there, a lot more people were using accounting software, that kind of thing.

And it was a tell for us to say, okay, that’s what happened there. There’s a good chance that that might happen here. Maybe we should have a go at this because it’s not quite ready here yet. There’s opportunity, it looks like, to develop some.

We started off with the smaller tradesman, if you like, maybe up to five staff. We knew him well, we wore him, so that’s a good place to start. And we went into that environment as well. And it’s an eye opener. It really was an eye opener. And they just said, go after a problem. Go out and ask people, “How do you feel about this problem?”

Or trying to – what do they call it, the Mom test or something? If you remember the Mom test, the Mom test was don’t ask your Mom. What is it?

Sarah Crawley
If you have to explain it, if your Mum can’t understand it, and don’t ask your Mum. There’s nothing like Mum.

Niall Brennan
Never ask. You have to ask in a roundabout way, what do you think about this? Or trying to extract the problem from people. So trying to get them to actually say the problem without you prompting them what the problem was.

So when we went out, we were hearing stuff like problems with labour, we can’t find labour, stuff like that, problems with getting paid. At the time, that was a big thing for smaller contractors. We couldn’t get paid on time. So that’s initially the problem we went after, but it was a real eye opener, sitting beside other businesses that were thinking the same way.

Ciaran Brennan
What did Google do for you? When you look back there and you say, that was a game changer for us, it opened our eyes up. It probably was a foundation or a springboard even, to get you after SymTerra. What happened back then that you look back on fondly there?

Sarah Crawley
I think being surrounded by people that are so driven, and everybody is trying to hack their way through things, and they’re very open about that mentality.

They’re not sure how to do it, but there’s lots of other people with little bits of information and everyone’s very willing to share it. So I think the main thing for me that it did is it gave us a huge kind of boost as well as kind of an inner confidence to get after this. Just give it a go.

They never ever said anything like JFDI. But it was just like, it was very much that mentality of just being like, build, put out, get feedback, iterate and go again.

Niall Brennan
There was a secretive stage, I guess, because it was for me that this is the best idea in the world. This is the best idea. Nobody should know about this idea. I’m going to tell nobody about it. I certainly had that for a while. And you just really have to lose that because that will just work totally against you. If you don’t tell everybody what you’re doing and shout from the rooftops constantly, then you’ll get nowhere. So I certainly had to get over that.

Ciaran Brennan
What people don’t understand as well about this, and you’ve literally just gone through this phase as well, is that the idea is one thing – that means fuck all. Let’s be honest, right? Execution is the game, right? How you actually execute against the idea is all that matters. But in the middle of that there, you’re going to have to raise a shitload of capital to actually do anything about that. But do people understand you’ve gone through that?

What’s that like? What’s actually thinking, okay, we’ve got an idea. The idea has legs. Now we actually need probably a lot more money than anticipated at the start to actually do anything about this. What did that look like, and where did you go even to get help on that?

John Ryan
I think there’s kind of at that point where the idea is there, and you’ve got nothing except the idea. You’ve got two choices. You bootstrap it yourself and build a product out yourself and just go for it, which is what we did.

Or you go out to the market and you start building the nicest, shiniest PowerPoint presentation and start winning business to get that pre-seed funding in place. I have an idea. I’ve proven the MVP of like the design bits and pieces. Here’s my market research, my TAM, my total addressable market. And then I start raising.

And my full time job then will just be to raise against my idea. Now, we went out with bootstrap because, let’s be honest, we didn’t really know a VC. Couldn’t name one, I think, never mind what we’ve got at the moment. So we bootstrapped. We earned money through consultancy, other means, and built a team up.

We met a very good developer within the Google environment, which is great. We’ve built a team kind of coming forward from that. There’s some great people you met that were going “You should use this tech stack, that one”, that big argument and other solutions and bits and pieces.

Sarah Crawley
I think we’re kind of like looking back on – it’s quite embarrassing now, but I didn’t even know that venture capitalist funding was an available option. When you come from a construction kind of background, I didn’t even know it was something. And people were raising just off of an idea, I was like “How?” It was totally alien to me. I didn’t even know that was possible until I was in that world. I was like, oh, you can literally just go out with ten slides an idea, jazz hands it get funding to then build out on that idea.

John Ryan
It doesn’t make sense that we could just go to somebody and going, I’ve got this great idea for a shopping mall, which is somebody who goes shops and it’s going to be amazing and I don’t have to put my hand in my pocket and I can make it get a billion dollars in and I can build a shopping mall idea in somewhere like Westfields and Stratford.

We’re not from that. We’re from build a business and go to the bank and get a loan and maybe expand further. A normal kind of business background is where we’re from.

Ciaran Brennan
Did you find it difficult to communicate with investors coming from construction and most of the investors are coming from maybe a technology background, for example. Did you find there was a difficulty there in trying to communicate what you were trying to do?

Sarah Crawley
We pissed away probably easily six months of time and it felt like we were just like screaming into the wind. Some of the time we’re like banging our head against a wall. It actually took two VCs to take us aside to be like, right, we’re going to need to start skinning this out differently. You’re doing it all wrong and you don’t know what you don’t know. And I think there’s another thing as well that Google started to observe and they start shoving you in on pitches.

So you start to observe other people pitching. And actually when you see other people do it, you’re like, oh, things begin to slot into place. But otherwise, even if you’re Google and it’s like, oh, this is like a really good slide deck, how you skin that up into a format that works for you and how much of it is around that presentation and delivery.

But we really struggle to communicate even in simple things like what you put in slides. And if you think around when you go to a bank with a business plan, what that looks like and that’s how I started with that sort of business plan.

And then you take that into a pitch deck for a venture capitalist, it’s like a 180.

Ciaran Brennan
And it’s so important. That’s one of the things that if someone was asking me the same question, I’d recommend doing something like that. Get into an early stage accelerator, because you might know everything about construction. You’ve got a great construction career, you’ve got understanding of the product, you’ve got that pretty much nailed down. Probably even an idea of how you might build it.

But the idea of actually going out and having to raise the capital and then build a tech team and all the different pieces that go with getting into tech, you know nothing about that. So to me, it makes sense to do that and try and get onto accelerator and understand. I remember my first pitches…

Niall Brennan
I found a step before that very interesting – speaking to early customers. That stage – it was on that accelerator as well – you’re literally forced out. And it was just really trying to find that big enough problem to solve. I thought that was a massive step, realising we had that early stage idea that the man, call him “The Man in the Van”, could be bigger than that.

And we got pushed out there, literally standing with a clipboard and talking to these people. We know them well, but asking them about the problem. And we kind of put them fancy PowerPoints together and said, what do you think of this idea? And the answer was, they didn’t care. And that took a while because your dreams were shattered. That great idea they didn’t tell anyone about was shit. And we had to really change our thinking, which was hard. We literally had the business idea in our hands going, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?

Ciaran Brennan
Remember a mate of mine at the time telling me, you’ve done more pivots than the ballroom dancer. Because it was like that.

And I don’t look at that as a negative. I look back on that now and I say, that was the right thing to do. What are you going to do? Keep going with your shit idea, because that was your original idea and you want to stick by it. No. The more feedback we were taking on, the more educated we were getting about the market, the customer, and we were making changes.

Niall Brennan
There was this feeling there then that we evolved the ideas. Maybe it’s not that level of customer, maybe they’re bigger companies, and what’s their problem? You start talking to a few, but I think you’ll know, when you hit them with the idea, maybe as it evolves you’ll know when you talk to them.

Ciaran Brennan
Did you have that aha moment where you said, yeah, got this, I know I’m on to something now. Can you pinpoint a moment in time where you said, “This is worth giving up the career”?

John Ryan
Yeah. I think the work that Sarah did was fantastic with Google startups. I think that kind of really kind of cemented that.

The thing that we’d always been complaining about and the issues we’d always had – it’s actually a real problem. It’s not just in our heads, it’s not just because we like spreadsheets and so on and other people just get on with it.

Projects will continue on without either of our products. They have done for now, they will do in the future for those customers who don’t want to come on board with us. They’re still going to deliver, and they can still deliver great projects, but the industry is not data centric and that’s been, I suppose, a bit of a kick for any of us. Of kind of going, “I don’t care mate”, instead of going, “but you should”.

The aha moment I think came from last year. We got lucky, we got some really nice customers on board that kind of believe in it. And we had Liverpool Street Blockade, so it could be from rail environments, a rail project, and a bunch of old fellas off the tools, not tech, don’t care, can just about work something and they’re not going to go near turning on a computer.

And these guys adopted the system immediately and they just ran with it and they went really hard. They were doing an update on this product every twelve minutes – the norm is every 4 hours. So we just had this adoption, we had this feed of information, we had things going right, things going wrong, progressing, people jumping in. We had 50 or 60 managers from three or four different companies looking at SymTerra app to see what’s happening on my job right now. This is the most critical app on my phone. And that was, I think for us, that really cemented for me.

Sarah Crawley
Yeah. Seeing the app being used and I think even to a point where once, where one client said we now have so much data coming in from the site, we don’t know what to do with it. And that was great. We’ve solved one part, but it’s created kind of a new problem.

We’re at a stage where we are still trying to really nail product market fit.

And I heard recently someone say that it should feel like you’re rolling downhill and that’s what product market fit will feel like. We are still evolving and we haven’t got to that feeling yet. I think we still are sometimes pushing uphill. And it’s really important still to get things around outbound sales. There’s nothing quite like that to tell you like good honest feedback.

Ciaran Brennan
Where it’s short, ‘straight between the eye’ feedback!

And I love that about it, and as well as where you fit into it. So you know how you were saying around where you play and where you add that value I think is also something that you are in an early stage startup trying to figure out and you think and you have a hunch on it.

But then I remember thinking like once we built the product, because we come from construction, once we’d built the product, I thought that would be like the hardest part.

And you finish that thinking “If you build it they will come” and then you do it and they don’t and you realise, the hardest part is actually what comes after. And then you’re then refining continuously, iterating on how we are going to win more on this.

Niall Brennan
We certainly believed that that was the case, that we would build this application and that’s it, then it’s done and then off we go. And then we just build the next thing and then that would just happen.

Ciaran Brennan
We actually thought the time we’d build it, they’ll fly in, and then we’ll have to think about the UK, German market’s going to come probably in year two, year three.

Niall Brennan
We had no technology whatsoever between the two of us other than Excel at the time. So we had a sharp learning curve of what that meant to even maintain something like this or even build it. We’re still learning that how difficult these things are to build, even if it’s just a simple application. There’s so much!

Ciaran Brennan
One thing we’re talking about there is if we bring it back into what the topic of conversation is, which is about things that I would do differently if I look back on it. I don’t know what your experience was.

We went external with saying we’ll use agencies and stuff like that to try and get the MVP together and maybe go to market. And that was a mistake and that wasn’t like that was for us. That was not going to work for us yet. And companies have been successful, I should say that companies have been successful doing that model for us.

When we were going through the early idea stage and getting the product into people’s hands and trying to get feedback, it felt like for us, if we didn’t have the technology beside us, then we couldn’t make changes, we couldn’t iterate, we couldn’t give the customers back what they’re actually asking for. So I think Dermot made a big, big impact on that.

Niall Brennan
We failed. We went with that model initially saying, well, we can do this. The accelerator that we’re on at the time had even said quietly over a beer, I don’t think we should be taking people like you on. And he didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. He said, you have no tech. You’re going to struggle. I just know.

Ciaran Brennan
Because in the world we come from, you just get subbies in, don’t we? That’s our world.

Niall Brennan
If you tell them what to build, they’ll build it, because that’s your experience so far. And it failed. We left it in their hands, saying, he’s a capable subcontractor, if you like.

And when we got it back, it wasn’t what we expected. And then we expected iteration because it wasn’t what we expected and we didn’t get it. We didn’t get it.

So we had to, if you want to call it another pivot of thinking, rather than to go away from outsourced, then to bring it in-source. And we got lucky then that we just found the right person at the right time that was in a similar mindset that was able to do it from then. But even then, we were still learning that, okay, how long will it take you to fix this, y’know? Six weeks?How’s that sound?

We’re still fixing this years later!

Ciaran Brennan
I often struggle with that. It’ll be interesting, getting your opinion on this.

We understand our customers so well because we actually are the customer, right? Essentially. And when customers give us feedback, I always call Niall “The Bridge.” Niall is the bridge between the customer and the technology.

And I often think, would we actually able to do it without that understanding? There’s a language, right, that construction talk. There’s a language that technology talk. Put two of them in the same room. I think they’re going to struggle to figure each other out until. Unless there’s that bridge.

When customers tell you, I need this particular problem solved, and this is how I want to see it. How do you communicate that back to technology to end it up in a product.

John Ryan
So I think that’s kind of where I’ve landed extremely well in past projects, is that I was that communicator between the team and the IT department and what’s our needs, and then the suppliers and the IT and the software companies going, look, this how we can best get around it and how can we optimise it that everybody has the least amount of work to do for as quick as possible and so on.

And I think that our clients, I’m guessing like yours, really appreciate that we come from industry, that we’re going, can we have it this way? And going, you can have it any way you want, but that’s the worst way to do it.

Let’s have a chat. And what is your actual root cause and what is your problem that you’re trying to solve? And how do you solve this issue with, instead of doing a 90 question form, can we make a better one? Can we make it easier for teams on the ground? Can you actually get the information you want at the other end? And I think that handholding is needed. And we’ve definitely noticed that the industry might have a lot of tech, but they’re not data savvy.

We need a report. We need this information. We need this data. What’s it for? Don’t know. Just want it all. And I think we’re going to start seeing maybe next year, they’re going to see starting a change of people moving into a data centric thing of what’s good data look like, what do we need, what’s the value for it?

And I think we’re starting to do a lot of education with our clients who are coming on board and going, this is good practise. This will make your guys on the grounds lives easier. This will get more information in, this will give you more visibility out. And that’s where the value add, I think, is coming from.I

Sarah Crawley
thought I interpreted your question more around how do you translate to them, your clients and all feedback or potential customers to a development team? Is that correct?

John Ryan
Yeah. I just wandered off topic. I don’t talk tech at all. Like, in that sense, the fact that in construction, gravity has not changed since I was in school. I learned about physics and Python and everything else is updated every five minutes and it just drives you nuts. There we go.

Sarah Crawley
If our developers are listening to this, I feel like they can leave comments on how much they feel about it, but I think one of the things that we did do earlier on, and I do think it’s important to do it is to try and understand, like your tech stack, why things work, how data moves through the system. I think that’s crucial because I think if you get it wrong, it can be very bad.

And you will as a business scales, you will have to go back to revisit it. But I think it’s appreciated by them around understanding how the database works, your tech stack, and how the information flows in the system architecture. And I don’t think sometimes enough people do that. And yes, it takes time, but when they’re trying to explain something to you, you’re like, okay, I get this kind of a lot more.

Niall Brennan
I totally agree. So I ended up in that by default, that when we brought them in, we just had no money or no tech. So I said, actually I’ll help. We had no product to sell at that point. So I said, look, can I help? Can I do anything? So I started YouTube was the best thing in the world.

It’s just the best thing in the world. You can learn anything about anything. So I started learning, can I help on the front end or know front end of the website? Can I do anything? And I started diving into it, but that’s where I learned about what a database is. What does that mean? How does that happen? How hard is it? My God, this is really hard.

And now that little bit of six months of time has really stood to me now because now I understand how it works. I have some clue of how it works and I think that’s really important.

John Ryan
Number one lesson, if you’re going to go into tech startup, understand your startup stack.

Niall Brennan
You don’t have to do it yourself. But having some concept of what it means, even if it’s something you do on the side a couple of hours in the evening trying to make something, I think it’ll really stand to you.

Ciaran Brennan
How open are your potential customers to technology when you speak to them? Do you have to replace current technology or is it a case that it’s 90% of the time we’re up against WhatsApp and now we have a better construction version of WhatsApp or Slack, whatever it might be. How open are they to the change?

John Ryan
I think they’re open to it when they’ve got a problem. I think when they realise that they’ve got a problem that WhatsApp is not the solution or Excel is not the solution, or lots of Dropbox folders is not the solution, that they’re kind of going, we’re struggling here to keep on top of and the admin has gotten well beyond what we can actually manage with our existing. And there’s nothing wrong with using Dropbox and Excel. I highly recommend it for people. Start out with very small businesses. It’s a great solution. You’ve got an audit trail and if you’re on top of quality you’ll be pretty much compliant with most things. Get health and safety right. You’ve got a good solid business there. If you care about quality, audit trail and safety.

You’d be that kind of company that I would hire as a subcontractor. But if you’ve gotten too big and you’re realising that that smaller solution just isn’t fit for purpose anymore or your incumbent legacy system is just not meeting the needs of the business right now in the industry because everybody’s moved the data to WhatsApp instead of using this incumbent system.

John Ryan
They’re our customers, they’re the people that are open a bit more to it.

Sarah Crawley
I think what surprised me is I thought the larger contractors would be much more open to it, but they’re not. It’s not true. I think a lot of mid to senior management is open but they have incredibly bloated, heavy tech stacks where data lives in proprietary systems. It’s not portable, it’s locked, you can’t get in. They’re just like, “No”, the IT department. And that surprised me with some of the larger contractors where I would say with the middle, the SMEs I think are much more open to it.

Niall Brennan
Yeah, there’s a lot of legacy systems though. You have the Dropbox, Excel guys. They’re the ones we come across the most that are starting to change into they might have, for us it’s accounting software, they might have some. What surprised me was there’s a lot of legacy old desktop software and these guys are paying guys to come in and maintain servers and they don’t even know what a server is. I don’t know what a server is. I don’t know what it does.

Ciaran Brennan
That blows my mind.

Niall Brennan
It’s amazing to me that they’ve inherited old systems and they’re stuck with these old systems. But I think it’s starting to register that there are alternatives to how hard that is and trying to make things easy on yourself. Excel is great, but it’s hard to maintain when it gets out of hand.

Ciaran Brennan
It was like Covid. I remember talking to a customer during Covid, and they were saying that they work on an, on-prem accounting software. They were locked out of their offices during covid, therefore they couldn’t access the finances. I was like, what? In this day and age, your finances are essentially locked up in an on-prem server?

Sarah Crawley
Yeah, I would only say it’s not in the cloud. I’m like, what? I think that’s really surprised me in the sense of how the larger contractors are much more because you can’t get through the IT department. It’s like, no, this is it. This is what we use and we’re sticking with it. And you’ve seen a lot of project teams and site teams complain about that software.

At Mace, I used to whinge every Friday at the end of the month for the reporting. One of the software packages we had, I was like, it literally takes 16 minutes to open and each box we had to tick in was like a few minutes just for that, you click and then it would be like a 60-second delay and then it would select the box and you’re like, time is money!

Ciaran Brennan
Where do you feel the industry is at? We hear digital adoption, digital transformation, they’re the buzzwords that are around the moment. We don’t see it. We feel at our end of the market, and I say our end of the market, we just deal with the customers that are 50 staff, maybe 200 staff probably maximum, that’s where we play and we still feel that we’re very early. How do you feel the industry is positioned, let’s say, for digital transformation?

John Ryan
So I come from megaprojects, so we’ve got hundreds of millions to spend and splash around on stuff. We have innovation managers and we’ve got spot the robot dog from Boston Dynamics all over the place. And drones.

Sarah Crawley
I didn’t know you had one!

John Ryan
The thing is, they’re all in the storage cupboard. Because the young fellow we hired or the young girl that came on the grad scheme has now gone and nobody can work the dog anymore.

And the drones were nice and we took a video and then we didn’t use it again because we just use that video for planning and it looks nice to explain to residents where we’re going to dig things and do things and put railway, et cetera, and then we put it away.

And it’s nice and it’s shiny and it’s like that toy you get for Christmas. You have it on Christmas Day and the batteries run out on Stevens’s Day or Boxing Day since we’re in UK – and you don’t get new batteries and it just sits there on the shelf. You don’t use it again because it just was nice, it was cool, it was exciting, but it never lasted.

And I think we’re seeing a lot of that fancy, shiny stuff in the big, big projects that’s showing off they can do, the what ifs, the big kind of dream stuff because we can afford, I mean we can put 50 to 100 grand on something and not even miss it.

And that’s great because we can really showcase the best of offsite manufacturing, digital twins, drone technology, robotics, everything. And there is going to be a future for a lot of this and 3d printing.

But we then don’t use a lot of that afterwards because the value add is missing. So once it looks like the big, big projects have got this and everybody’s being left behind, I don’t think that’s the case. I think it is getting the basics right in the industry and building a solid foundation on which to build. That’s going to be more of the learning.

And I think as we go into recession, the fancy stuff that just isn’t adding value to the project team isn’t making us work faster or safer. That’s going to start disappearing off and whatever’s left is going to be the solid technology that’s going to be coming forward for the next decade.

Sarah Crawley
But I think to anyone listening, I think especially if you’re going to speak to VCs, what you definitely need VCs are always one of the core questions they ask is “Why now?”

So if you’re listening and you are going to go speak to a venture capitalist, I highly recommend going to look at what the papers McKinsey puts out about construction, which talks about what you were saying, Ciaran, around now, it’s prime pickings right now for construction. And I think that should definitely be said kind of to them. I think in reality, honestly, I would say our experience is probably quite similar to yours.

I think what we’re seeing is the younger generation kind of coming through in particular people within their 30s and early 40s, they do want to do something. It’s expected. They’ve grown up now with smartphones are the norm.

And we say like, oh, they’re not somehow tech literate. No, they are. They know how to use tech, they know how to do online banking, all of these different things. So I think they’re not accepting it as much anymore. But I think at the very top in summer, there is still this mentality of like, well, we’ve been doing it this way for 20 years.

And the other thing that we sometimes see with some of the larger contractors is they don’t have. It requires probably a team of a dozen people to make the decision and that really elongates things down that really slow and then that can also.

But time and time again, my favourite one recently is someone within this probably like a tier two contractor has been saying we can just use SharePoint for communication on site. And it’s like, but that’s not what SharePoint does. And there’s this real disconnect between. And the project team are communicating, well, this doesn’t work for us and they’re just not tolerating it anymore.

Ciaran Brennan
There is that education piece and that probably has to go back to the apprenticeship model. There’s no point in bringing the apprentice on, putting it in their hands, bringing in trades or engineers, whatever it might be, and forgetting about technology as well. And then they end up in these roles.

And by the way, we use this tech and this tech and this tech and you don’t know about that. So then another learning curve for you. If we’re going to do it, do it right. Bring it back to the apprenticeship model as well. Introduce tech early. That’d be my take on it.

What’s the plan with SymTerra as you’re sitting here today? It’s going well. It’s been successful to date. What’s the overarching vision for SymTerra?

When you sit in your rocking chair, when it’s all said and done, what has success looked like?

Sarah Crawley
I think the hope is we have built a kick ass product that is widely used. The team that we have created is phenomenal and they go on to kind of greater things. And they have also adopted the culture that we currently have now and they have spread. That has scaled well and that company culture has been maintained.

I think the team is probably the best part of the whole experience, kind of for me. And I think I would definitely like to work less hours. I think you live and breathe it and I think I would like to kind of move more, kind of away from that. And ultimately I’d like to have a little house in Buretz that I can have one like that I can escape to and have my nice cheap wine, have a good surf and have a house in, I think in West Cork near one of my favourite surf spots and I can come in and out.

And I think then ultimately, being an angel investor. I think angel investors, it looks like a lovely life and you can enjoy the startup without, but you’re not in the muck and bullets.

That would be my ultimate dream. And yes, implicitly within that, we’ve sold.

Ciaran Brennan
So you’d look to exit at some point?

Sarah Crawley
Well, we’ve got on the VC Merry-Go-Round, so I think when you get on it, it’s inevitable that you sell.

John Ryan
The decision’s there once you have got on. And we’ve been very lucky to get some fantastic investors in the VC land. That is implicit, that they want an exit at some point. And I think that’s the kind of decision that you, at the very beginning you’re making. If I’m going the VC route, I’m going to have to leave the business at some point and it’s either merger, acquisition, liquidation, if it doesn’t go well, or you go to IPO and you’re on the stock market ringing the bell at the Nasdaq.

That’s the kind of level of once you make the decision, you are making the decision to accelerate a business and grow something fantastic. But there’s going to be people who are looking for an exit at the end of the day, and you have to acknowledge that and be aware of you are building a business now to go forward and scale rapidly.

Niall Brennan
I think the level of work involved in building it will probably force you to think about exit as well. There’s a lot of work goes in, a lot of hours go into it. No more than anybody else, but still it’s fairly intense.

Ciaran Brennan
You’ve got your ambitions. Don’t you want to see it scale into a fair few regions?

Niall Brennan
I think we happened just to come across a problem that hasn’t been totally solved yet, so we’re sort of different. You were talking about the dog and that kind of thing, so we’re selling into the smaller type businesses. It doesn’t have dogs or it doesn’t have drones, it doesn’t need them, but they still have a need for software, in my opinion.

So they are starting to like, as you said, younger people are starting to adopt it. I think the problem we have is just a common one – am I making money.

So I think it goes into a few countries. So I’d like to see it go into a few regions first before I say goodbye to it. Yeah, definitely. There’s so much more to do.

Ciaran Brennan
Where can people learn more about SymTerra or even reach out to yourselves.

Sarah Crawley
LinkedIn is probably one of the best bets. So Sarah Crawley. Sarah with a h. Crawley, like creepy Crawley. And that’s probably the best place to kind of reach me. I’m not massively into social media, but yeah, so I would say LinkedIn would definitely be the best place to reach out and learn a bit more. And I’m always happy to speak around my experience raising money – could talk about that a lot. And yeah, that’s the best way to find me.

Ciaran Brennan
Do you guys offer free demos and stuff on the product? We do, yeah.

John Ryan
symetrra You can sign up there for a demo. We can be in touch and go showcase it. Part of demo. We’re always kind of interested in seeing what you’re using, how you’re doing it, and sometimes it is very much a bit of advice to the team and get them on their merry way to even set them up for success. We do want to give back to the industry as much as we can. So even that part is learning about both sides.

Ciaran Brennan
Are you guys still at the underdog demos? Yeah, I love them as well. Can’t let it go.

John Ryan
I’m very interested in seeing what’s wrong, what’s going on, what’s the gospel in the industry, what’s happening, what’s going on, where are things going, what’s moving, what do you see?

Niall Brennan
Have we fixed it?

Sarah Crawley
Have we fixed their problem? And I think you should be there for those conversations too, to get that feedback in.

Niall Brennan
I still do every single training. I can’t see that changing for a long, long time.