Build Value. Not Just Data.
Goodrich Fabre of HardHatCoach.ai (yet another that I hope to meet in-person soon)
We talk a lot about technology in this industry.
AI. Robotics. Digital twins. Connected field tools. The list keeps growing. And every week there's another platform promising to transform how your team builds, bids and operates.
But Victor Muchiri, an engineer turned construction economist, and author of the blog The Next Build, asks a question many people will skip right past.
Are we actually creating value? Or are we just getting better at tracking activity?
That single question is his superpower. And after sitting down with him, I'm more convinced than ever it's the question the industry needs to sit with before clicking "buy" on another software subscription.
What Does Economics Got to Do with It?
The conversation began with a unique perspective on capturing value.
Think about a grocery store. It creates enormous value from the supply chain to the relationships to the convenience of having everything under one roof. Objectively useful. And yet grocery stores run on notoriously thin margins because the product is commoditized, and the competition is relentless.
They create tremendous value. They just can't capture it.
Airlines are the same story. You need to get to Dallas. Flying is immensely valuable compared to driving. But with Southwest, Delta and United all fighting for your seat, the value gets competed away before anyone can bank it.
Now apply that lens to construction.
Contractors build things that are genuinely irreplaceable to the owners they serve, whether it be hospitals, data centers, schools or infrastructure. The value created is enormous. The ability to capture that value through margin?
Historically brutal.
That's not an operational problem. That's an economic one. And until we start treating it that way, all the software in the world just gives us better tools to lose money more efficiently.
The submittal isn't the point
In his time at Turner, Victor did what engineers do. He processed submittals. He sat through OAC meetings. He pulled overnight shifts. He knows how the work gets done.
And then he left the industry for several years and found himself at both a fintech lending platform and an innovation firm. These roles forced him to think in financial models, incentive structures and strategic economics. So, when he returned, he saw construction differently.
He wasn't looking at how we do submittals anymore. He was asking why.
The answer, if you strip it back far enough: everyone needs to operate from the same data at the same time. That's it. The submittal process is just one (imperfect, paper-originated, slow) mechanism for getting there. The question is whether the software we're buying actually solves that underlying problem, or just automates the imperfect process we already have.
Digitizing a broken workflow is not transformation. It's just a faster broken workflow.
AI Hype versus AI Noise
Many will look at Victor’s stance on broken workflows as anti-tech, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He's not anti-tech, he’s anti-hype with no substance behind it.
Looking at AI specifically, his take is sharp. If the tool is real, the value potential is real. But the moment every platform claims to be "AI-powered," the phrase stops meaning anything. It becomes marketing. It becomes noise. And for a project manager in a trailer trying to evaluate three platforms before the end of the quarter, noise is expensive.
So instead of asking whether something uses AI, Victor recommends to start asking whether it eliminates steps. If a tool can reduce a ten-step workflow to one step, that's worth exploring. If it's just surfacing dashboards you still have to interpret and act on manually, you haven't saved time, you've just added a screen.
And the superintendent still has to be on site either way.
That's his other point that lands hard. Saving someone two hours on a task doesn't save you a headcount. The superintendent doesn't disappear because the daily report generates faster. If someone is selling you "time savings," push back.
Time savings toward what?
Because if the savings don't reduce actual cost or create capacity to take on more work, the ROI story starts to fall apart fast.
Your Challenge for this Week
We talk a lot about thought leadership in this industry, but Victor gets very practical. So when I asked him what's one question people can ask to start challenging their business model?
He gave me two.
First, go find your CFO (or business manager or whoever controls the financials) and ask them how you could make more money based on the work you control. Simple. Direct. Most people have never actually asked that. You'll either get an uncomfortable silence or a very energizing answer. Either one is useful data.
The second is more personal. Ask yourself: if I had to build this job at half the fee I'm currently charging, would I still take it? If the answer is no, that's worth understanding. It might tell you something about which work you should be pursuing, and which work is slowly eroding the business.
Notice neither question requires a software platform. They just require honesty.
The Kind of Business You Want to Be
Look, none of us are pessimistic about where construction is headed. Many are actually encouraged by how much investment and attention the industry is getting. The data center boom. The labor pressure. The AI wave. All of it is forcing conversations that were easy to defer just a few years ago.
But Victor has a forward-looking challenge that most of the industry isn't quite ready for. The boom won't last forever, and when things normalize, the companies left standing won't be the ones who chased every shiny platform during the sprint. They'll be the ones who used the sprint to figure out what kind of business they actually want to be.
Self-performer? Get really, really good at that.
Heavy on subcontracting? Figure out how to use data to chase higher-margin work.
Building owner relationships that could extend into other services? Explore it now while the capital is available.
The technology is not the strategy. Knowing why you're building (and for whom and at what margin) that's the strategy. The software is just the infrastructure that supports it.
Victor built his entire career around asking why before what. It's a habit that doesn't come naturally in an industry built on delivery schedules and daily production logs. But it might be the most important habit you can develop right now.
So with that in mind, the next time someone sells you a software platform, don't ask what it does. Ask what problem it actually solves, and whether solving that problem gets you closer to capturing the value you're already creating.
If they can't answer that, you have your answer.
Construction is cool, tell your friends!