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Calvis Wyant Podcast
See Your Custom Home Before You Build with Adam Katz of CRAYDL
- Guest
- Adam Katz, CRAYDL
- Published
- Runtime
- 57:52
About this episode
What if you could walk through your custom home before construction begins?
Adam Katz of CRAYDL joins Tony Calvis, Jr. to discuss how virtual design and construction can bring architecture, interiors, engineering, and homeowner decisions into one coordinated view. They explore building information modeling, LiDAR scans, virtual walkthroughs, and the value of finding clashes and making changes before work reaches the field.
Through examples involving cabinetry, fireplaces, door openings, and ceiling heights, Adam explains why a clear process matters as much as the technology. The conversation also looks at early team alignment, scope and budget decisions, and the role of AI and connected information systems in the custom home experience.
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Episode transcript
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- 00:00 – We are the only industry on the planet, construction, that has the distinction of having negative productivity gains for the last 50 years. When an iPhone comes off the line and it doesn’t work, that is like a statistical anomaly. When there’s a gas leak in the house when you move in, that’s just a Tuesday. – For this episode, I’m interviewing Adam Katz at CRAYDL, a virtual design and construction studio in Scottsdale, Arizona.
- 00:29 Adam is bringing a completely new level of clarity and technology into the custom home design build process. We talk about what it looks like to give builders and homeowners the equivalent of a crystal ball into their project to ensure a smooth build start to finish. His firm is doing this through virtual models, coordinating teams early, preventing expensive changes in the field, and ensuring a better experience the entire way for homeowners and builders. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Adam Katz from CRAYDL.
- 01:03 Adam, very excited to have you on the show. – I’m so excited to be here. – Yeah, this is gonna be a fun one because I always enjoy our conversations, but- – They go everywhere. – They do, well, we’ll try to keep some semblance of direction here. – I know you have a script and I have every bit of faith that you’re gonna keep me focused and on topic. Let’s do this. – So the more I learned about CRAYDL when we first met, the more I thought to myself, damn, why isn’t every residential build being done this way?
- 01:35 Can you give us that foundation of what CRAYDL is, what it’s set out to do, and how you work with your clients? – Yeah, so CRAYDL, there was a time where I really, I tried to do everything, meaning there was a time where I had a firm, we were the architecture firm, we were the interior design firm, we were doing all of the… And you know, we were the procurement, we were doing financing.
- 02:04 I mean, it was an insane business. And in three and a half years, we did 65 custom homes. It was right after the market had been left for dead, so this is like back in 2010 to 2013 time frame. And boy, when you’re inside that tornado, you learn a lot. And I also have a background in finance and software and systems, and it just seemed like a lot of the problems that were happening out in the field.
- 02:34 And I also have a background in architecture, but it seemed like a lot of the problems that I was having in the field, no matter how often I built, and no matter how frequently I was getting the road rash that I know Calvis Wyant knows really well, there were just some problems that just seemed to be logistical. We weren’t getting the right information into the right hands of the person in the moment of truth. So CRAYDL really functions, some people call us the glue and some people call us the grease, sometimes we kind of function as both, but CRAYDL exists to reduce friction in the custom design build space, and specifically in the residential space.
- 03:14 So sometimes that’s providing technology solutions. We do a lot of pre-construction, so we’re very proficient in tools like Revit and building information modeling and virtual design construction tools. But everything that we do is really in the spirit of trying to resolve the things that create friction, and normally they fall into a couple of specific categories, they’re budgetary, they’re constructability, or they are related to the fact that homeowners and even developers often don’t know how to read their own plans or interior design specs and understand the way that comes together.
- 03:52 And so our research tells us that 90% of rework is attributable to a failure, an error, an omission, a clash in planning, and we set out to try and do something about that. So that’s how we came to be. – Yeah. Yeah, and you mentioned your background, which is obviously very diverse. It’s weird.
- 04:20 How did all of that converge into this spark of the idea for CRAYDL? I mean, you have the architectural side, you’ve got finance in your background, you’ve got tech. – This has been really 30 years coming. I started buying real estate when I was barely out of undergrad at ASU back in 1998. And so I’ve experienced this problem as a developer, as a homeowner, as a builder, as an architect.
- 04:49 And the thing that became really obvious to me is that there were just so many different versions of the truth, you know? And I’ve seen this play out in a lot of other industries where even the way that we handle technology today inside of large organizations, 30 years ago, you used to call your buddy up and whether it was an application problem or a hardware problem or a software problem, you called Johnny in IT and he came down and fixed it for you.
- 05:17 Today, you’re entering the request for what you need into a system and you’re telling the system what it is that you need, and it’s getting routed to somebody who’s a network specialist or a hardware specialist. There’s one front door for all of the information and it gets routed and dealt with from there. And that, I think, is the biggest part of the problem, is that the homeowner journey, if you’re a homeowner and you decide, I’m gonna do something, or a developer and you decide, I’m gonna do something, that experience, I will call it undignified at best.
- 05:54 The more information you get, the more confusing it becomes. People are giving you information that you don’t even know how to synthesize. So I just believe that there are builders who are trying to do things differently, and they recognize that a lot of the problems that they’ve been dealing with and through brute force for the last 30 years can be dealt with with process and technology. Technology on its own won’t get you there, but it’s the process, the technology, and the commitment.
- 06:24 And those things together can solve a tremendous amount of problems. So I’m always interested when I’m meeting with builders or developers for the first time, is, where are you getting surprised? Is it in the aesthetic? Is it that you were surprised that you had a soffit around ducts in unsightly areas? Where are you getting surprised? Basically, where are you losing money, right? Where are your negative variances? And we kind of backtrack from there and say, okay, well, what information isn’t making it to the field?
- 06:54 Why isn’t it making it to the field? And often we find ourselves in the position of BIM manager on a lot of projects where we’re taking the architecture and the interior design and the landscape design and all the various types of engineering and we’re perfecting it, both for constructability so that we can run clash detection, show us two things that are taking up the same physical space so that now I can do a quick workshop with a structural engineer and a mechanical engineer and work through that visually as opposed to doing that on a PDF over several weeks, and if it even gets done and gets done properly.
- 07:31 So I think that this is the ounce of prevention that the business needs, is having a unified look of all of the information that’s coming in from all the stakeholders because it’s coming in from everywhere. And at the end of the day, when everybody’s gone, meaning the designers have been paid and the architects have been paid, whatever misgivings, whatever gaps, whatever lacks of information or lack of understanding there is, it’s the builder’s job to figure it out.
- 07:59 And so our contention is build it once virtually first so that you’re only building it once in the field. And if we need to run constructability tests, we can. If we need to show it to your customer by putting a VR headset on their head and letting them walk through it, let’s do that. And if they need to see options, let’s do that. It’s interesting because a lot of times when we work with homeowners, they’re like, “I’m sorry, can I make one more change or can I make two more changes or five more changes?” And we welcome that because we’d rather them make it there.
- 08:31 It’s less expensive to make it digitally than it is after materials are ordered and subcontractors have been paid deposits and people are in the field. So that was a lot of words, but that’s what we’re doing. – Yeah, so from a customer perspective, from your customer’s perspective, what is their experience? Are they coming in and they are seeing their house fully built or fully rendered on screen?
- 08:59 Can you walk us through what their experience is when working with CRAYDL? – Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we’re doing a first reveal today for a customer. So they’re basically gonna have, and this is an interesting scenario where a builder took over a recovery project from a builder that really struggled. It was a large-size house, 9,000 feet livable, about 12,000 feet under roof. And what was built deviated from what was on the plans, and what the homeowner wanted was a little different than what was built and what was on the plans.
- 09:30 So the way that we work through it is the first thing we do is we went out with a really super high-density LiDAR scanner that lets us get accurate within two millimeters of accuracy because the house was substantially framed. And we model that, and then we also model the architectural plans as they were submitted to the city so that we can lay them over each other and start to look for places where, has anything moved that could impact a structural definition, or is this cosmetic?
- 09:59 And the door and window package was already ordered, some of the rough openings wouldn’t have fit. So we were able to kind of help the builder and the homeowner get out in front of that first. So the first piece is kind of that workout. As part of that workout, we’re also going to, we’re working with the interior designer, because in every room, no two arches were the same, it was bananas. And they had millwork applied, wall moldings going on archways, and the fact that all the arches were different radiuses and different widths and different depths was just nuts.
- 10:32 So we literally went room by room, wall by wall, surface by surface, worked all of that out, got the floor plan and elevations design locked. While that’s happening, the interior designer, who’s just brilliant, I have a real affection for her because she’s just, not only is she talented, but she works her butt off, she literally went through every selection that was made by the previous builder with the homeowner.
- 11:01 Some of the selections the homeowner didn’t even know that they made. And so she went through the whole list of here’s everything that was selected, here’s everything that was purchased, and here are all the selections that we may wanna reconsider. So she’s literally feeding us all of that information and we are putting it into the model, and we have tools for ingestion and making sure that we keep all of that consistent. But ultimately we’re taking the cabinet plan and taking the applied moldings and going through the RCP and getting all the tray ceilings in and beams.
- 11:29 And now we kind of have the rooms laid out, and we’re kind of showing that in what we call a clay fashion. It’s, you can see everything, but it’s really kind of black and white and gray scale, but it gives you a sense of the space so that we can start to take a look at, how do these spaces speak to each other, how do the archways look now, how do the depths of these, right? So we had a lot of cleanup to do there. Now we just spent the last two weeks really applying all of the selections and finishes and textures that are going in there.
- 12:00 So today the homeowner’s gonna experience it for the first time and they’re gonna feel like they’re kind of going through a video game where the fireplaces will be on and we’ll be able to kind of walk through and show them everything as it’s been designed with the intention of them weighing in and saying, hey, can we maybe modify this, or how is that gonna work? And it’s just interesting the things that we wind up working through. So I just find that that experience for homeowners is understandable.
- 12:28 And we will create the interior design documentation and FF&E schedule on behalf of the interior designer for the builder right out of the model. So it really becomes, I think it allows everybody to really focus on the design instead of the documentation and the finger-pointing. – I would think that the concern that a homeowner might feel when they’re experiencing pain points with a build that lead into these problems, they may say, well, I need to have a lawyer on hand in case something ends up getting built that I didn’t want.”
- 13:08 But in reality, that lawyer’s not gonna be able to look at the plans, look at what has been selected, and look at the team, and be able to suggest what the path forward is. And so I guess CRAYDL comes off as this accountability partner where it’s working on the vision of the homeowner to make sure that that vision gets complete. – Yeah, I think that that’s true. I mean, if we’re talking about the role of a homeowner’s rep or the homeowner’s rep with a legal background, for complex projects, there’s tremendous value there, especially if your time is really valuable and you’re not gonna sit there and review legal contracts and subcontractor contracts and make sure that certificates of insurance are provided.
- 13:52 And so I do think that there’s a lot of value in that for a certain level of complexity. And the reality is the kind of builders that we’re working with aren’t gonna have a problem with the oversight because their systems provide that level of transparency anyway. So I look at that as being neat, but it’s not preventative, it’s not getting out in front of the problem.
- 14:24 Ultimately, whether you’re thinking about it as a BIM manager or virtual design construction or a outside legal consultant, everybody’s coming in with the idea of providing some level of protection for the homeowner, but my question is always, is it reactive, or is it proactive and responsive? And I like to think we’re proactive and responsive.
- 14:55 We’re actually getting out in front of the problems before they occur and we quantify it on every project. Every time that there’s a change, we document it in the log and we go back to the builder after the log and go, okay, if we had to move this pantry over five inches after the cabinetry showed up, what would that have cost? And they give us a wet-thumb swag and we put it in there because we’re just trying to get an idea of, what do we cost, and what’s the return? And what we’re finding is, in a lot of cases, we’re paying for ourselves 30 times over or more, because the average homeowner, and this is true of developers too, developers in some cases are even worse because they actually are more fickle
- 15:36 and they’re trying to anticipate the buying habits of a potential buyer. But what we’re finding is people are making 150 changes or more per 3,000 feet. And so I look at every one of those changes that are being made with a lot of pride because those are the very things that we’re trying to prevent from happening in the field. And every one of those changes would have been, at bare minimum, an uncomfortable discussion.
- 16:05 There probably would have been somebody’s got to stop what they’re doing and address that and pull other people in who can get them the answers that they need to support it. And after that happens 150 times per 3,000 feet, the homeowner’s going, “Why are we four months late on this build?” And I understand, I understand. I’ve been there where it’s just because there’s not a unified version of the truth. All of the information is typically sitting in somebody’s inbox, on a piece of paper.
- 16:37 Even when you go through the design process, how many iterations of design do you guys do, right, just on the architectural work, right? So every one of those becomes, in my mind, rogue information if it’s not clearly in the purview of everybody that is working on the project. And that’s the problem, it’s the classic four blind men and the elephant problem. It’s four blind, you’re familiar with the fable, the four blind men and the elephant?
- 17:05 – Go ahead and remind us. – So four blind men, and they’re men, so they don’t share any information. You’re welcome, ladies. They walk into a room and they’re asked to figure out what’s in the room. And so the first guy puts his arms around the leg and thinks to himself it’s a tree. And the next guy touches the tail and thinks to himself that’s a oddly large paintbrush. And another guy puts his hand on the side of the elephant and thinks it’s a wall. And if they would’ve just all shared their information, they probably would’ve figured out that there was an elephant in the room.
- 17:35 But… And I just see that informational disconnect every day, on every project, all the time. So I don’t know if that answered your question. – It does. And I think that what you’re getting at is this isn’t necessarily a people problem or any issue with intent around wanting to make the best experience and deliver the right home to the homeowner, but there’s this information management problem, I think you’ve called it.
- 18:06 – Yeah, and I think that’s a great way to characterize it, Tony. There’s the outcome and then there’s the intent. And I think that a lot of times builders get caught in the crossfire of the intent discussion because of the outcome. And one of the guys on my team, our VP of operations, he lovingly and jokingly says that he believes that builders are some of the most altruistic people on the planet because they’re putting themselves in the line of fire every day, knowing that they’re gonna have imperfect information and knowing that it’s gonna come back on them and knowing that it could be a risk to feeding their families.
- 18:50 What’s more altruistic than that? And I have a tendency to agree with him. It’s really, really challenging. I think one thing about having done everything at one point in time in this business, it taught me that homeowners, builders, homeowners and developers, people who are in this space don’t really fully value the supply chain or understand the supply chain.
- 19:18 I can’t tell you how many times I hear from a builder, “Can you just make this update? That’s pretty easy, right?” Well, you’re moving a retaining wall four feet on a hillside lot with drainage and grading and impacts to landscaping and impacts to the structure. And this isn’t clay and you know that because you’re gonna be the one building it. You’re gonna want the information that you need in order to be able to direct your subcontractors. So no, it’s not a flip of a switch, right?
- 19:50 And I think we move faster than anybody because of the way that we move, but there’s a reality to the inputs that need to come in, and getting the requests out, getting the information back in an orderly fashion, and then re-pressure-testing it to make sure that it’s actually workable in the field. And that just takes time because it still takes people. That’s not something that AI is gonna solve for. You can’t ChatGPT a set of architectural plans or, I mean, you can, but you’ll wind up with a toilet in your closet and I don’t recommend that.
- 20:28 – I would assume not. – It’s not a best practice, is what I hear from the interior designers, no toilets in the closets, or urinals, urinals are worse. – Oh, those are worse? – The pee goes everywhere is what I hear. – So the homeowner’s vision. With the homeowner’s vision, you seem to be really good at translating that into the plans or the visualization or the renderings of those plans.
- 21:00 What methods do you pull that vision from them? And then how do you convert that into realistic plans or understand where the plans aren’t meeting that vision? How are you interacting with the customer to get that? – Yeah, it’s a great question. Sometimes we’re doing the architectural design and sometimes we’re supporting other people who are doing the architectural design. And so we’re typically doing architectural design on things that just aren’t that, not a ton of complexity.
- 21:31 It’s a casita, it’s an addition. But I think when you’re doing something that’s gonna be a bespoke design, it needs to have an artist. And it’s funny because I’ll have, clients will come in and say, “Hey, we love this architect’s work. And do you guys do stuff like that?” And I just said, “You’re basically asking Jackson Pollock to paint a Picasso.” If you like Picasso, you should go commission Picasso, right? I mean, that’s the artist that you like, right?
- 22:02 So now the question becomes… And we work with architects who love doing concepting and they do it really, really well. And it’s not to say that they’re just drawing pretty pictures ’cause they’re not. They’re obviously doing the work and the feasibility, and they’re so thoughtful in terms of how they get that structure to speak to the surrounding environment and all the different interests that they put in there. The things that the homeowner, they don’t even know how to articulate that they appreciate it, they just know that those homes just feel amazing.
- 22:35 And so in those cases where the architects, also they’re part artists and they are proficient in doing and they want to do their own plans and do all that stuff, that sometimes we’re doing that and taking it after the fact, and just bringing the interior design to life or just bringing the landscape design to life. And there are times where we get involved later in the project, it’s not ideal because then all of a sudden the homeowner wants to make changes and things have already been engineered and designed and now there’s rework to do.
- 23:09 When people hire us, it’s for our process. We don’t let you go to second base until you’ve touched first base because we know that that is going to create rework and dislocations and we just won’t do that. So I find that for the homeowner, it’s a function of whether or not they have an architect that they’re working with or somebody in mind that they wanna work with, how far that architect wants to take that ball up the proverbial field.
- 23:42 A lot of times we work with architects and they’re like, “So I can give you the concept and you’re gonna build it in Revit and show it to me with proper wall assemblies, and you can create the sheets and I can just edit and annotate them.” And our answer is, “Yeah, and work in the tools you work in. We’ll export it in CAD if you wanna look at it in CAD or whatever tool you wanna look at it and work the way you work, but then give it back to us so that we can make sure that we’re helping the interior designer figure out what is or isn’t done on the RCP or what is or isn’t done with the appliances or cabinet selections.”
- 24:19 I wrote a blog about, whose job is it to select the entry door? Tony, whose job is it to select the entry door? – It’s a great question. I would think the homeowners at the end of the day, but- – Well, it is, but who’s their proxy? Is it the builder? Is it the architect? Is it the interior designer? Is it the… And whose job is it to get the jamb widths right? And so it’s just one of a lot of examples that I could give you where it’s not really quite clear whose responsibility that is until it becomes the builder, and ultimately, the homeowner’s responsibility.
- 24:59 But when those things get missed, nobody looks good, nobody fit. And now you have to have that door fabricated and that’s gonna take time, and deliver to the job site. And so all these things take time. And if there was ever a business where an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, this is that business, and that ounce of prevention, it’s needed. We are the only industry on the planet, construction, that has the distinction of having negative productivity gains for the last 50 years, the only one.
- 25:39 When an iPhone comes off the line and it doesn’t work, that is like a statistical anomaly. When there’s a gas leak in the house when you move in, according to some inspectors that I follow on TikTok, that’s just a Tuesday in the construction business, right? So why do we have, why are those not statistical anomalies? Why is that just the way of doing business?
- 26:07 And I am obviously very passionate about this and this is what we do, so you can handicap it accordingly, but I think that this is all just information management. This is all proper information management and visibility for all the stakeholders, is what it comes down to. – So when someone has that proverbial gas leak or they realize that there is a problem, they’re probably realizing it way later in the process than they should have, or at least that that problem should have been exposed.
- 26:47 How do homeowners recognize early on that something feels off, maybe I should look into a partner like CRAYDL to help me figure out what that problem is? – Yeah, I mean, I think that homeowners sometimes find this confusing. Builders understand us. When homeowners find us, it’s typically because they heard about us and they like visual tools and are looking for somebody to do architectural design, and I have to explain to them that we’re actually builder-first.
- 27:23 And because if I put the builder first, I’m, in effect, putting the homeowner first. If the builder delivers the expected quality on time and on budget, everybody’s happy, right? And I do explain to them that a lot of times people do a weekend project or their brother’s, sister’s, cousin’s uncle was a builder or they watched two seasons of “Property Brothers” and now they’re ready to go do some projects. And it’s a fallacy because that’s the analogy, and you know this, I’ve shared this with you, it’s a classic Dunning-Kruger effect.
- 28:04 There are some homeowners who have experienced it and we have homeowners who actually do now find us and say, “I really wanna make sure I can see it.” I’ve been through this before. I know how frustrating it is in the field. I know how much we can’t see. I get this. This makes a lot of sense to me. And so for the customers that understand the value in that, that have a realistic perspective about that and understand that those things cost time and money in the field, they wind up really gravitating to what we’re doing.
- 28:39 There are other types of builders, of homeowners, rather, who will say, “I’ve already picked my tile. I’ve already picked my appliances. I know what I want. I don’t even think I need an interior designer, which I also think is a terrible idea. I equate it to trying to play baseball game with eight players on the field.” I’ve even had that with homeowners who have engaged us, where I make this bet with them. I make this bet with every homeowner.
- 29:07 Once we bring your project to life, how many changes do you think you’ll make? And it’s very telling because most homeowners will go, “Like one or two.” And I go, “Okay. So we’re gonna put the line at 10.5. If you make 10 or fewer changes, I’m gonna begrudgingly sign a dollar and hand it to you and I’m not gonna feel good about it. But if you make 11 or more changes, you’re gonna sign a dollar and give it to me.” And I have a stack of dollars with signatures that I’m having made into a piece of art. Because I can see a space, I design, I’ve built, I’ve done all this stuff, I couldn’t do it without these tools.
- 29:45 I’m building the platform that… I’m really fortunate ’cause I have an amazing team, and we have collectively really built a platform that I wished I had when I was out building. It was like, why doesn’t anybody have this? Why can’t anybody give me a unified view of the design? Why does all my information live in 14 different systems and six spreadsheets? Why does all of that information should be coming from the same thing?
- 30:14 So long-winded way of saying some homeowners get it and some homeowners don’t. And that’s okay, we’re not for everybody. Some people need to experience the pain. We’ve had homeowners come to us and say, “Hey, I have $2 million and wanna build a 5,000-square foot house in Desert Mountain.” And my answer to them is, “You can’t engage us.
- 30:42 And not because we can’t design something for you, but because nobody’s gonna design anything for you that’s remotely close to 5,000-feet in Desert Mountain for $2 million.” So I think it’s really important to create alignment from the onset, and I think the way to do that is to complete your team and bring in the experts. And every time we have a seat at the table, we look for every opportunity to drive value into that project.
- 31:15 And I love converting homeowners when they’re a little skeptical in the beginning and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh, okay. Oh, now I see. Yeah. And by the way, when we have the NanaWall system open and grandma’s in her wheelchair, can she get in between the pool and the NanaWall system without falling in the pool?” I’m like, “That’s a good question. Let’s go take a look at that.” So it’s amazing what you get into when you can see it.
- 31:43 – Yeah, so I wanna get into the software side because I know that that’s been a big part of CRAYDL and the process. But first I wanna touch on that experience you just shared. For all those people that signed a dollar and handed it to you, when they saw their home, what were the immediate, like, oh wow, I can’t believe that that was in the plans or that that’s how that looked. Change order, change order, change order.
- 32:14 – We’re gonna need another podcast- – Oh, boy. Okay. – for this. I mean, it’s everything from we scanned the house and provided floor plans to the interior designer, but the interior designer didn’t use the accurate plans and put a cabinet plan out, sent it to the cabinet company. Cabinet company puts together their shop drawings, we take the shop drawings and put it in the model and it literally doesn’t fit. It’s five inches too long.
- 32:42 And where it’s five inches too long are two side-by-side appliances, so there’s no creating a new box to put that in there. So that’s one. We had one where the interior designer designed a fireplace with flanking walls on either side that were sitting proud of the stone of the fireplace, and what the homeowner really wanted was for the stone to be wrapped around the sides. Well, then when we wrapped it around the sides, well, now the mantel that was designed was really anemic, you know?
- 33:11 And now that we’re looking at the mantel, the homeowner’s like, “How deep is that?” And it was designed to be four inches, and she’s like, “I need at least 6.5 inches to fit my frames.” And it’s great, it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to figure all of that out in advance. So. And those are just the little things. And sometimes we worked on a project where we spent two hours just looking at hidden pantry doors and the widths of them and the construction that we were gonna be…
- 33:41 Because the way that they were originally designed, they were a little bit too narrow. And so it’s all of that kind of stuff that normally it’s the homeowner standing on the job site after the cabinets are installed, going, “Doesn’t this feel a little narrow to you?” And that’s a really tough time to be dealing with that question. So yeah, there’s no end to the things that we find.
- 34:14 And we learn a lot also. We did a project that was a substantive remodel. We scanned the house. They were removing a soffit between two rooms. And our scanner is accurate to within less than a quarter of an inch. And in the point cloud data, we were actually able to see that once you remove the soffit, the ceiling surfaces were off by half an inch. We actually made a mistake and just connected it.
- 34:42 In our studio, we were like, “That can’t be right.” Turns out the technology works. – Wow. – It does what it’s supposed to do. So now in our process for our studio, whenever they do something and they see a discrepancy in the ceiling heights, no matter how minute it is, that dimension now needs to be verified before we model it, right? And that comes from our builders, from the feedback where they’re like, “Hey, here’s a place where you could have done better.” And we love that because now we can build that into the process or into their document template and not make that mistake anymore.
- 35:19 And so I love those kinds of stories. – And going back to that idea of the ROI of working with CRAYDL- – Yeah. – before sticks go in the ground. There’s not just the ROI of what it costs to make the change, but there’s also the emotional ROI that comes with building exactly what you want and not getting to the place where you suddenly are in the room and say, “This doesn’t quite feel how it looked in my head.”
- 35:52 – Yeah. You’re explaining why I strongly advise bringing in competent interior designers because otherwise the projects just become the land of missed opportunities. It really defies logic to me to say, “Well, I’m gonna try and cut resources out of the planning so that I can spend more money on the execution, but I don’t know what I’m executing around yet.” – I think Calvis Wyant would be in full agreement with you about building the plans on paper and making sure that they are razor-sharp.
- 36:25 How do you judge that threshold of plans are built on paper, right, and they are ready to go into construction? And how does that compare to the typical process one might find? – Well, I find a lot of architects are working in CAD. And even a lot of architects that are even working in Revit or Archicad, they’re not really using it to its full capability. And so the very first thing that we do when we have a project is we stand up the architecture as we understand it, right?
- 36:56 So it seems like a logical place to start. Let’s model the lot, let’s model the foundation, retaining walls, let’s make sure that all that stuff is in there. So a lot of times we’re going through things and we’re like, okay, well, these roof planes actually don’t come to, the geometry doesn’t come together the way that you have it drawn here, and here’s kind of how the planes don’t come together. More typically, sometimes we’re just finding old information or incomplete information of the window schedule.
- 37:26 The exterior door window schedule isn’t quite jiving with what’s on the floor plans or on the elevations. And it’s probably because those things have changed and they were updated in most places, but not in all places. And so a lot of times we find ourselves doing that kind of diligence. Hey, what was the intention here? This isn’t coming together. Your fireplace isn’t centered on the beams, was that what you intended here? And so I’d like to think once we, assuming that we’re working with somebody who’s collaborative and not threatened by that, because that happens too, but assuming that we’re working with somebody who recognizes that if they lean into it, we’re all gonna drive a better outcome
- 38:12 and I can actually make their job a little bit easier. We find all kinds of things, you know? And I also find architects in general, they don’t enjoy chasing engineers around who are notorious for not being terribly responsive. And then they finally get the work back and they’ve been waiting on it for a long time and they’re anxious to let their client know, and they’re looking at everything in 2D on different sheets, often that’s not really being tested for conflicts.
- 38:52 And so just by standing all of it up so that we know where everything is, that we can start applying all the finishes I think is really valuable on its own. And the changes become really substantial and voluminous once you start getting into the interior space and now you’re figuring… Because I know you guys work very differently where you’re really doing a lot of interior planning in order to be able to really lock down a lot of those decisions.
- 39:25 But a lot of times that stuff’s not really terribly thought through. And once you start thinking it through, things have a tendency to evolve. So I find that once we start going through the process and everybody starts seeing it, you can see people’s eyes grow as they go through the process and see where those clashes and conflicts are.
- 39:56 So everything starts with the… To me, I’m less interested in where the architectural or interior design or landscape intent comes from and more interested in knowing that it’s present, it’s thought through, and it can be communicated, right, because that’s something that we can bring to life. – Yeah, and I’ve often referred to the architect, interior designer, builder relationship as sort of these three musketeers that are out to- – Your main cast of characters.
- 40:26 – Right, and CRAYDL coming in is, I mean, not to beat the analogy to death, but it’s kind of like D’Artagnan coming in, right? And it’s not necessarily to replace any of these individuals, it’s to add value, add strength. And I would think that any of the practices, architect, interior designer, builder, are gonna be grateful to have that visibility so early on.
- 40:55 – Yeah. We’ve been doing things the old way for so long as an industry that it does take time to earn trust, and it’s understandable. I make a lot of jokes over the course of the day and we keep it light. We’re not curing cancer. However, it’s serious and there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of emotions, there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of time involved.
- 41:30 So I do think, and I would also offer, we really don’t have, truly, we don’t have any ego. It’s one of our core philosophies, information over egos. If the cast of characters, think about a “Seinfeld” episode, if you’ve got Kramer, Elaine, and if you’ve got your cast of characters, you have your builder, your architect, your interior designer, hopefully the landscape designer’s in there somewhere, and you have a homeowner or customer, nobody even really needs to know that CRAYDL exists, we should really just be behind the scenes.
- 42:08 There’s existing conditions, great. We’ll go out and scan them and get them and serve them up to everybody. Okay, we’re ready to take the architectural concept and stand it up so it could be perfect, send it on over. We’re here to really, again, be the grease or the glue, depending on which analogy you like better. But I really think we’re kind of the WD-40 because we’re really just reducing the friction where it used to exist. And what I’m finding is that, again, it gives everybody the ability to focus on the design, not on the noise, not on the static, but on the signal.
- 42:46 And this is an industry that’s fraught with a lot of static. So the more we can cut that out, I think the better results we get. And then when you’re looking at the outcome versus the intention, your intentions are less scrutinized because you’re getting the outcome that everybody expected. – So you touched on a question I had in here actually, which was, how are you evolving that perception of what I need to build a house, right?
- 43:20 Because I think that obviously one may start with the architect, they may start with their interior designer. They have these individuals who their work is very visible and very easy to make an emotional connection with. The immediate thought is, okay, architect, interior designer, builder, I’m ready to go. How do we evolve that into this new level of residential building? – In a lot of cases, we’re kind of embedded in the builder. So I love it when I see a set of plans and it’s like builder verify, builder verify, builder verify.
- 43:55 Well, if builders have to verify, we’re how you verify. Because whether it’s existing conditions or anything else that you need to verify because we’re gonna build it properly and show it to you and probably find some things that will ultimately create some requests for information. The shorter answer to your question is there’s only one way to educate people and we do it by proving ourselves one project at a time.
- 44:23 We’re very… I’m a big believer that hardwood grows slowly. I’ve been at this for 30 years, but CRAYDL’s been around now for, we’re in our fifth, going on sixth year next month. And we’ve been really, really focused for the last four of the last five years getting the team right, getting the process right, figuring out who our customers are that value what we do and have a need for it.
- 44:51 And now we’re finding it easier for two reasons. One, I think even a lot of builders are experiencing what I call subscription fatigue. So we used to do all of this in binders and physical paper and physical copies of plans. And so 10 years, 12 years, 15 years ago, we adopted Dropbox and Google Drive and people started adopting Buildertrend and JobTread and CoConstruct and Procore and other kinds of tools en masse.
- 45:33 But… Then you also have your financials, which are probably sitting in Sage or QuickBooks. And then you’ve got all the stuff that’s sitting in people’s desktops, and then you have the text messages and you have the emails. And what we’ve done is we’ve digitized the chaos. And so now, because everybody has this fear that AI is gonna be so disruptive to everybody’s business, I think it’s kind of refreshed everybody’s willingness to pay attention to technology now.
- 46:08 And in some ways, I do think that AI is going to be really, really helpful to any business that has a lot of information to manage. The problem is that even if the AI can see into all your different systems, it’s not really gonna know how to relate that information in a meaningful way without some kind of technology infrastructure. And I’m not trying to get really geeky about it, but my contention is if I’m a builder, I wanna have one platform from seed all the way through maintenance and through maintenance and warranty.
- 46:48 And that system should handle everything that I need, whether it’s creating a budget or creating a proposal or getting approvals or collecting interior design information or seeing models or plans or timekeeping or go down the list, that should be in one system. And we’ve seen that happen in other industries before. We’ve seen it happen, and the internet came out, everyone was freaking out, but people didn’t throw away their fax machines for another 15 years.
- 47:18 In fact, I had a doctor two weeks ago asked me if I had a fax machine, which was mind-boggling. So now all of a sudden there’s this mad race, right? Oh my God, I’m not gonna be able to feed my kids. Or there are people on the other side of that. AI is never gonna build a house. And I think the truth is probably gonna be somewhere in the middle. And what I tell people and what I share and what I learn has led me to believe that AI on its own won’t take your job or be disruptive, but a person who knows how to use AI will because they’ll be 20 times more productive than you will be.
- 48:02 If you’re still working in spreadsheets or you’re still working in disparate systems in three or four or five years from now, I do think that there are gonna be builders that are just gonna be so much more equipped to create a wonderful experience from the onset all the way through the delivery and beyond that you’ll be competing on price only if you don’t have that kind of infrastructure in place.
- 48:30 It’s going to be what people expect. It’s actually what people expect now, it’s just that the industry isn’t caught up to the expectation yet, which is why we still notoriously have terrible customer satisfaction scores in our industry, right? So I think kind of that refreshed resurgence focus on technology is helping. And I think the other thing that’s helping is for better or worse, it’s just gotten so darn expensive to build, that if you had 5% project slippage 20 years ago when you were building for 100 bucks a foot, probably wasn’t the end of the world, but at 500, 600 bucks a foot, 1,000 bucks a foot, 1,200 bucks a foot, 10% starts to become real money.
- 49:20 And I also think homeowners are getting more savvy, and understandably they have access to more information. It’s not always the best information, but there’s a lot of information. So it’s fascinating with me when I have an opportunity to see a homeowner ask questions to a builder that they can’t understand. You know, here’s a budget that a builder put in front of them and they’re asking questions like, “Well, how much of that tile budget is materials and how much of it is labor?”
- 49:53 And they’re like, “Well, it’s just a number.” And I don’t think that that’s gonna be an acceptable answer for very much longer, I don’t find it to be an acceptable answer today. – Yeah. And you’re one of the few people I know that is… Obviously we could talk about technology AI for a long time, so I won’t get too deep into it, but CRAYDL is clearly using technology to build significant customer value.
- 50:22 I mean, from what you’ve shown me, from the product roadmap you have ahead, where do you think CRAYDL is going in terms of, what does, any sneak peeks into the next year, five years? – I’m not gonna go five years out. I do have big, hairy, audacious goals for what I think this thing could be. But if it really catches, it’ll be a happy accident because we did the right thing for good builders and there’s just so much value in that that it can’t be ignored.
- 50:56 I welcome that opportunity, but we’re not quite there yet. We’re still, even our customers that we have the longest relationships with, and we’re three, four years into those relationships, that’s not… And we’ve built a lot and we’ve fixed a lot, but there’s still things that we’re hardening. And you know this ’cause I’m talking to you about this also, but I look at technology as an accelerant, you know? That’s really all it is.
- 51:26 And AI is just an accelerant of the accelerant, it’s just giving us the ability to do things faster than we could have done. So for example, one of the products that we offer, because this is an area of friction, is a budget calculator where a builder or a developer can sit down with a homeowner and say, “How many feet are we building?” And you can look at inspiration images and make inferences, that looks like you’re about 14-foot ceilings.
- 51:55 And I see you like hipped roofs or flat roofs with parapets, and how many bedrooms and how many baths, and what are the site conditions? And you’ll spend 20, 30 minutes answering questions and it wizards you through them. And then you can dial into each room if you don’t want to accept a default. So if the homeowner’s saying, “Hey, I want the butler’s pantry to have its own refrigerator and freezer column and a wine fridge, and I wanna make sure that we have all the accoutrement out in the kitchen, let’s pick those appliances.
- 52:27 We have the Sub-Zero and Cove and Wolf and La Cornue, and we have all those… And if there’s an appliance you want to put in there, you can go out and add an appliance in there. But let’s get it as dialed in as we can based on the scope, because… And I know builders hate this question, I hate this question, how much does it cost you to build per square foot? And I always go, “How much does a bag of groceries cost, right?”
- 52:55 And people look at me kind of funny and I go, “I’m sure we can agree that if the bag is filled with ramen, it’s gonna cost different amount of money than if the bag is filled with Wagyu and lobster tails and nice wine, right?” So nobody can answer that question for you effectively until you figure out what’s in the bag, and this allows you to figure out what’s in the bag, right? And the whole idea is that for the builder and their customer to figure out in under an hour, is there something to do here, or is there not something to do here?
- 53:28 Because I would just find builders would, they’d get a set of plans and they’d spend 20, 30, 40, 50 hours chasing down subcontractors, going out to spreadsheets, looking at historical information, trying to assemble something that was detailed enough to earn trust, but vague enough that they would have some wiggle room as more information came in. And I would just argue that that’s no way to start, right? Let’s just have something that puts real numbers to something. So.
- 53:56 And builders have the ability to go and adjust their costs also. The biggest variance is actually not geography to geography, it’s builder to builder. There are some builders that only build with $3,000 a square foot, a lineal foot cabinetry, and there are some builders that build with four or $500 a lineal foot cabinetry. So it’s really about builder to builder and the quality. So they need to be able to set their own rates and they need to have something that they could really do two things with. One, answer questions in a logical fashion that the customer could understand, have a convert a budget into their language, but then also be able to offer some visualization tools for fun.
- 54:31 So however you answer the questions or if you upload your plans in there, it takes however you answer the questions about the architecture, and you can upload an image of the exterior of the home that you like and put a Houzz link in there and a Pinterest link in there, and it will take the textures from the images that you provided and it’ll apply it to the architecture that it knows and start to get you excited about your project. So you kind of go on this whole emotional journey where, oh my God, what do things cost?
- 55:02 And maybe we don’t need the 10-car garage, maybe we just do a three-car garage. And now people start to… They can ask questions, you can create versions, but you can kind of figure out if there’s a scope and budget match in there. You start at 50,000 feet, let’s get to 20,000 feet and see if there’s something to do. And then most of the builders that we’re working with, we’re kind of doing concepting and rendering early as a first phase. We’ll get the feasibility done, get existing conditions established, and provide a first phase and render it without all the selections, we’ll just make some assumptions, but at least we can kind of walk them through it or provide that kind of clay view
- 55:43 where we can walk them through it. And at that point, we ask the builder, okay, before we get engineering done and before we get all the interior design selections and stuff done, can we price this within 10%, right? And normally our customer’s going back to the budget, okay, we didn’t design 5,000 feet, we designed 4,200. We didn’t do the 10-car garage, we did the three. And they’re re-crafting that budget to make sure, are we still directionally right?
- 56:13 Or if there’s value engineering, my contention is that that’s the time to do it. Let’s figure this out now and reshape or relocate and see if we can bring this into conformity. And then at that point, normally our builders are going to contract. We’re helping support the permits and the rest of the visualization, interior design documents, and FF&E. But that’s a typical customer journey.
- 56:42 – Yeah. I mean, it’s significant, and it’s clear that CRAYDL is so important for both customer, as well as build team, right? So being respectful of time, between those two parties, what’s the best way that they can learn about CRAYDL and find you and understand where the customer value sits versus where the build team value sits? – So feel free to go to our website, it’s www.craydl.com.
- 57:14 CRAYDL’s spelled a little weird, it’s C-R-A-Y-D-L. And you can also reach out to me directly, adam@craydl.com. I love to geek out with people who are in this space and understand what people are seeing. And I just learn a lot from talking to people who are just in this fight every day. So feel free to reach out. – Well, thank you so much, Adam. This has been wonderful. And I’m excited to do round two with you someday.
- 57:43 – One day. Thanks for having me, Tony.
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