C.R. Herro, Executive Vice President of Bettr Homes, and Mike Mancini, President of SoDella Construction, join Nick Brown, energy consultant and President of Build Smart, to discuss cutting-edge building technologies that provide a better quality of life for people and the environment.
C.R. talks about how ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) considerations have affected various stakeholders in the industry. Mike shares information about his company. “We focused our business around panaleziation, offsite manufacturing, prefabrication, and alternative building materials. Those four things allowed us to build buildings with less men on site and have a need that’s much less than the typical home builder for the supply chain to support us.” Mike explains the importance of adapting to changes in the supply chain and labor market in order to move the industry forward.
“We’ve ignored the skilled labor shortage for a long time, hoping that it would fix itself, and instead these guys have innovated how they do their business to address those challenges in that core section of the actual building of the home, which is refreshing to me,” Nick says and talks about the challenges the industry is facing, such as factory-built offshore competition. C.R. discusses how innovation can lead to fundamental changes in how companies approach the building process, giving Germany and Japan as examples.
Mike discusses how innovations in the building industry can generate a workforce with a different set of skills that can differentiate them in the market. “We are able to do that at scale, because the learning curve is shorter … There are three qualifications to work on our crew: you have to be able to count, you have to be able to use a screw gun, and you have to have a wingspan over 48 inches, so you can pick up a panel. That’s it,” Mike says.
C.R. discusses the advantage of having a repeatable manufacturing process with automation and precision tools that can create efficiencies, value, and durability in the market. MIke shares some of the innovative building materials and techniques his company uses to eliminate steps in the building process and meet the three core challenges: labor force, supply chain, and quality assurance. “This is how we do it, we just think differently about all the things that go into a house,” Mike says.
The group also discusses the rising costs needed to build a house and how companies can transform their operations to meet the demands of the market.
