Roofing Contractor to ConTech Entrepreneur with Phillip Ogilby, Founder & CEO of STACK Construction Technologies | EP81

In this episode, James and Christian are joined by Phillip Ogilby, Founder & CEO of  STACK Construction Technologies.

The conversation begins with Phillip sharing his journey in the construction industry, starting with his first roofing business in Dayton, Ohio, which he built in the 1980s. Phillip then discusses his experience building a digital blueprints business during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, which was one of the first of its kind. From some hard-learned lessons building his first software business, Phillip digs into the evolution of his second software company and  how he eventually went on to  create STACK Construction Technologies. He talks about their product offerings, including Cloud Takeoff and estimating software, and the challenges and even ease of building a technology business for the second time. Phillip believes multiple alternative solutions must exist for the existing end-to-end construction management juggernauts. The episode concludes with a rapid-fire round in which  Phil shares an incredible incident from the jobsite during his roofing days and wisdom about the importance of looking ahead in business to ensure that you are always building for the next stage.

Phillip Ogilby is the Founder & CEO of STACK Construction Technologies. Phillip started as a residential and commercial roofing contractor in 1984, witnessing firsthand the challenges of managing people, equipment, materials, and an ever-changing bid schedule. In 2001, working with his son, Justin Ogilby, Phil formed iSqFt (now known as ConstructConnect), a major force in moving construction from paper to digital. But Phil’s vision was even bigger, and in 2008 he began building STACK, formerly known as Cloud Takeoff.

STACK Construction Technologies is cloud-based software to help contractors run their businesses and maximize profits. Their preconstruction solutions enable fast and accurate takeoff and estimating and during their construction, solutions power real-time project collaboration.


EPISODE LINKS:
Phillip Ogilby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phillip-ogilby-32889320a/
STACK Website: https://www.stackct.com/
STACK LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stack-construction-technologies/
STACK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stackconstruction/?hl=en
STACK Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/stackcontech

PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH

FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit

Transcript

Christian Hamm: 0:00

All right. Okay, so we are in a new space. We are somewhat officially unofficially, but we are in a dedicated studio for the site visit.

James Faulkner: 0:12

I know it looks good. Pretty stoked about it.

Christian Hamm: 0:15

It looks good. It sounds really good. Everyone else will be able to make that determination for themselves because we are going to be adding. I know we've said this a couple times, but this is legit now. There'll be full length video. We'll be doing lots of little cuts and edits. And there's a bit more of a production behind what we've been doing over the last few years.

James Faulkner: 0:33

Yeah, totally. It's gonna be good. My voice feels very husky. I don't know. Like it not in a good way.

Christian Hamm: 0:38

No, it sounds fine. James, it's all good. It's just a cold open. Doesn't matter. It's all good. It's

James Faulkner: 0:43

more like a COVID open. Sounds like a COVID. Open. Okay, so who we had on Phil?

Christian Hamm: 0:50

Yeah, we did. It was actually a few, a few housekeeping things that will take care of but yes, we had Phil ogilby from Stack technologies. Full Estimating Software. He was coming from based out of Florida. Well, actually, they're they're out of Ohio, but he's in Florida. And great story. The guy has done a few things in construction, contracting, roofing, and then a number of different software. Construction tech businesses. Yeah,

James Faulkner: 1:17

he's like one of the OGS Yeah, the originals. us talking means the same thing, right?

Christian Hamm: 1:22

Yes. That's what it means. Yeah, he was sharing stories about Dewey. I know from Procore. I

James Faulkner: 1:30

know. The old days. Yeah, kicking

Christian Hamm: 1:32

it, kicking it old school with drawing software. Before drawing software was cool.

James Faulkner: 1:38

It kind of made me realize how long things take.

Christian Hamm: 1:42

It did. That's all I could think about the whole time. I'm like, construction moves at a certain pace versus the rest of you know, general industry. Yeah. And just to hear, like his stories and how everything evolved, and like he was still came out as the winner at certain stages. Yeah, it's crazy.

James Faulkner: 1:56

Yeah, I really enjoyed it was pretty cool. Well,

Christian Hamm: 1:59

we also got a couple other things. So we talked about this off the hop, we've got a studio, we're going to be producing, or putting out a couple episodes a week. To get going here, we're going to have full video, we're gonna be building out our YouTube channel. I don't know, we I would love to be able to get video on. I don't know how those guys get video on Spotify. That'd be fun to figure out how to figure that out. But get our YouTube channel going. Actually, and, and be putting out one with construction stories, sharing entrepreneurial journeys, like we have been doing this whole time. But then also getting into more trends and topics and doing more of a breakout once a week with James and I and probably some guests that pop in at a later level and just really updating what are the current happenings inside the industry, also with what we're working on, and then more building out the community around the site visit. Yeah. And speaking of that community around the site visit Yeah, we've got an event coming up. We do Whistler Whistler, the construction Leadership Forum has BRCA.

James Faulkner: 3:04

Right excited about that. I was gonna say one thing about the the episode here with Phil. Oh, yeah. Is that you know, in the beginning, he does a really good job of detailing how it all started. Yeah. And the path. And yeah, I mean, listen, listen intently on that. You know, it is it is quite lengthy. He it's a pretty good monologue. He's got there but it's interesting stuff. Totally puts a puts you in the picture of where he was. Totally.

Christian Hamm: 3:39

What's that entrepreneurial story he just unpacks it from start to finish. So here it is. We've got Phil Ogilvy from Stack technologies. Enjoy this one

James Faulkner: 3:49

Welcome to the site visit podcast leadership and perspective from construction with your hosts James Faulkner and Christian ham

Zack Staples: 4:01

business as usual as it has been for so long now that it goes back to what we were talking about before and hitting the reset button

Sebastian Jacob: 4:07

we're at a place where we found the secret

Justin Bontkes: 4:07

you read all the books you read the e-myth, you read scaling up your read good to great, you know I could go on serum, we found the secret potion we can get the workers

Cam Roy: 4:18

one time, I was on a jobsite for quite a while and in we know where to get 'em actually we got some extra concrete and I've poured a broom finished patio out from of the site trailer

John Reid: 4:26

a guy hit me up on LinkedIn out of the blue and said he was driving from Oklahoma to Dallas to meet with me because he heard the Faber Connect platform on your guys's podcast

Zack Staples: 4:37

own it, crush it and love it, we celebrate these values every single day.

James Faulkner: 4:45

Let's get down to it

Christian Hamm: 4:51

right on Okay, well, we are we're here this morning. We've got an awesome guest joining us this morning all the way from the Free State of Florida, Phil Ogilvy from Stack construction technologies. How are you, Phil?

Phillip Ogilby: 5:08

I'm doing great guys. I'm doing great. Thanks for inviting me.

Christian Hamm: 5:12

Well, we are, it's a pleasure to have you on here. And it's always great to connect with people who are in different parts of the world. We're up here in Vancouver. We are on kitty corners of the continent, essentially. And yeah, you're down there in Florida. You get you basking in the sun. What? What do you enjoy the most? Well, Florida right now.

Phillip Ogilby: 5:34

You know, my wife and I moved down here full time about two years ago. So it's, it's still fairly new for us year round. It's certainly warm in the summer, but it's kind of life changing when the sun shines most every day, you know, and it's warm enough to wear shorts and flip flops on a daily basis year round. It's kind of a life changer. So I'm, you know, there's a joke in the US that it's where Will people go is and is to Florida when they retirement? At any age, I highly recommend this place like we go with it's one of the last three states in the US and that's right. Political weather's great. People

James Faulkner: 6:14

think that's the, the retirement thing, I think was baked in by Seinfeld with the Del Boca Vista. Yeah. George's or as Jerry's parents. And then George's parents moved in and then they wanted to leave. I think that was the del Del Boca Vista. Anyway, so

Phillip Ogilby: 6:34

that's really funny episodes.

Christian Hamm: 6:38

I always miss the Seinfeld comment. I don't know what it was. I never really got into the Seinfeld. And so whenever people were like, Oh, you meant like that one. When Jerry did this thing? I'm like, yeah, yeah, totally. I gotta go back and rewatch it. Yeah, totally. Exactly. It's exactly what it was. Well, right. I feel you've been so Florida for the last two years. So originally not from Florida. Let's let's dig into a little bit of your story, if that's okay.

Phillip Ogilby: 7:06

Should you Yeah.

Christian Hamm: 7:09

Maybe where you originally originally from? And then, you know, how did things get going and construction and contracting for you?

Phillip Ogilby: 7:15

How did all this happen? Oh, yeah. Great, great, great question. And it's, it's a fun story to tell. I've told him many times, if you've heard it, I apologize. Hopefully, you'll hear something new here. But you know, I remember well, I was 17 years old, sitting in my parents living room, in Enid, Ohio, a little suburb outside of Dayton. And my mom and dad are explaining to me that they didn't have a lot saved. My dad was a construction worker by trade. My mom was a secretary at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, we didn't have a lot to save for your education, Philip. We've got about 2500 bucks put aside for for your education, or there's an opportunity at the sheetmetal Workers Union in Dayton, Ohio, that your dad needs help, and he can get you some sort of provisional union card and you can get started and make I think at the time I could make, like 1250 An hour and this was in 1977. Right. That's pretty. That's, that's, that's a living wage for most people in 1977. So given those two choices, you know, I jumped in, and it started down my Dell, my construction career. And it's funny. And I've talked to many people with, with, you know, similar paths, I mean, construction, there's something about construction, it gets in your blood, especially if you start early, I think but there's something about construction that just kind of gets in your blood and keeps calling you back. So I did a few things, ultimately along the journey I did. And you know, I strayed away a couple of times. But at the end of the day, I found my way back to construction. But, you know, I was I was a sheetmetal worker at the age of 18, right out of high school. And you know, did that for a couple of years, I felt like I was making more money than certainly all my buddies at the time. And the ones that didn't go to college. And there was a tremendous amount of construction work there for several years, and in the late 70s and early 80s. And then, you know, the economy took a big hit. Before you know what Jimmy Carter is in the White House and interest rates jumped to, like 14% I mean, everybody's complaining today that interest rates are high and they are high and it shouldn't have to be but what I remember you know, as they say back in the day, right? So early 80s interest rates went crazy the economy collapse, and I found myself like many people unemployed. At this point, I've got a married my high school sweetheart, I had I had one kid and another one on the way and I bought a house on a land contract. I remember we couldn't get a loan because the interest was so high so I convinced the owner of this house to sell it to me a land contract and an interest rate I can afford and so here I am, you know I go to my unemployment office I think I did that once. And I decided that I wasn't going to do that anymore. So I, you know, I had some construction training right through my infill years and sheetmetal. But what I did is I bought a book about how to roof your house, and I read that book cover to cover. And then I went down to Dayton, Ohio at the headquarters of what was then called the Yellow Pages. And at least in, in, you know, in the US, yellow pages like the Google of its debt, I'll never forget coming home and explaining to my wife why it was important that we spent $450 a month for Yellow Pages had to get our new business off the ground. You know, that was probably the size of one of our unemployment checks in those days. But you know, she put up with it and, and we jumped in, and we started a little roofing business, and I hired some of my out of work buddies, and we started putting roofs on people's houses. You know, whatever it was, it was better for me than, you know, than unemployment. And, you know, it. We did that for a couple of years. I got a call. My dad called me one day, and he was working for a company called Schreiber, roofing and sheet metal in Dayton, Ohio. And Schreiber was a union shop, you know, trying to think back in those days, they employed about 150 people, right. So pretty good size, construction business. But they have been union that Schreiber was was a longtime union shop and Dayton and Ken Shriver at the time, the owner wanted to wanted to get out of the Union, he wanted an alternative. So he said, Look, your father's told me about your business and what you're doing, congratulations, I like you, I think you're gonna do well, but let's create a new business. And I'll put up 150 grand or whatever it was, at the time seemed like a fortune to meet. And we'll start a company and we'll do non union cheap metal roofing work in the Dayton area. And I thought, Man, this is the, you know, life changing opportunity. And so, Ken and I jumped in and we started what was called the Ogilvy Corporation, and the Ogilvy Corporation was almost immediately a success. You know, we got we got a lot of the work that non union work that Shriver was sort of out price for being a union shop. And, you know, we kind of took off within 18 months, I had 50 employees, and we were doing large scale projects really all around the Midwest, more commercial roofing now than residential and so on. But that's, that was sort of the next step in my journey. And I remember, I remember, well, you know, we did that for several years. Ultimately, close that, like, trying to think exactly why except we were losing money. That's the one number one reason to be closed.

Christian Hamm: 12:50

All right reason.

Phillip Ogilby: 12:52

Yeah. So. But I remember that was a great experience really helped me learn that commercial construction trades, you know, and went on and did a few other things. As I explained, you know, got back into actually selling material. I had a material broker business for several years in construction. And about that time, my oldest son, Justin was one of those computer genius pack kids. And I remember he was 12 years old, I came home one day, and Justin had a computer game and he had written, we literally have things shooting at each other on the screen, and he's 12 years old. And I thought, Man, this is amazing. I'm using the load of spreadsheet to do my estimating. And Justice built this game. And I suggested What if we, you know, what if we bought you some more books, and you know, some more software, and let's see if we can't create estimating software that we can use for our family business. And that's, that's really sort of what started the technology journey here. So it took longer than we thought it took probably three or four years, but by the time Justin was 17, we sold about a half a million dollars worth of our build were pro estimating software. And, you know, that's, that's a big statement to make today, but think back in those days, we had no internet, right? So I'm doing advertising and trade magazines. I'm talking to people on the phone. I'm trying to qualify him as hard as I can, because the next step for me is to buy a ticket on Southwest Airlines Southwest was the first discount airline in the United States that I recall. And I had to drive to Indianapolis to get on a Southwest flight I remember that very well. But my process was the qualify these people the leads that come in from the magazines, and then get on a plane once they've qualified him and hope that they wrote me a check before I left town when I left him with him. So that was that was really our first kind of foray. You know, it wasn't long before. Obviously, I shut down the construction side of the business and really did technology full time. You know, one of the things that bill were allowed you to do is to measure blueprints on your computer screen. And that was really revolutionary. Back in those days, there was another startup in Texas called onscreen takeoff that started about the same time I did. But nobody really had any meaningful traction. But I remember, we'd go to trade shows and we set up and we'd show people how you could load a TIFF or a PDF file up into your computer and measure it with your mouse, right. And in those days, everybody was still shipping big rolls of paper prints around. And when they saw it on screen, they were really fascinated by it. And a lot of people asked me, So what do I do? Do I, what do I have to do? Do I have to take my blueprints down on the blueprint shop, I haven't scanned in and converted to images. And I'm like, yep, if you want to do it on screen, it's the way to do it, we ended up selling a lot more digitizers in those days, if you remember a digitizer. So we sold a portable digitizer, which was a big rubber map, it would lay on your desk, and it would plug into you know, plug into your computer and the other the other stylus that came out of the the digitizer would allow me to enter into the computer the scale of the drawing, for example, and then take my mouse and touch points and it would draw and replicate the roof or whatever it is that I you know, the user was measuring and calculate various distances, volumes, things like that and send it back into the spreadsheet. And in the early days, it was just that it was a spreadsheet first. And then as we build out build were more and more we added items and assemblies and, you know, build a complete sort of estimating solution around this tool. The fact of the matter is it allows you to do it on screen, most people still did it with a digitizer just because there was so much paper, you know being shipped around. And in those days, it was hard to get digital images. tell you a funny story that I'm struck, you know now at this point in my career, but in those days, and I don't know if you guys are going to recognize the name or not but FW dodge is a part of McGraw Hill. And FW dodge was the only provider really the only national True Provider nationwide in the United States of construction project moves, right plans and specs as well as information about jobs that are bidding, FW dodge had that market cornered back in the day. And I remember when I was a contractor, I get you know, I subscribed at microfilm and I get microfilm that would show up on a put this microfilm reader on this big light table and I could look at plans and stuff like that. But they were the only game in town for nationwide for Project news. And I remember once I got build were up and running. And it was measuring plans on the computer screen. I remember dodge came out with an offering the first one in the market Dodgers CMD had come out with something similar, but dodge was the big player in the game. And they came out with an opportunity where you could subscribe and have a CD ROM or floppy disks sent to your house. And on that CD would be all your plans and specs for the jobs beating in your market, right. And one of my customers got it first and subscribe to it. And he called me and he's like, hey, you know, you should talk to these folks at Dodge, because Bill were really changes my life. Because I can pull these plans into Build where I do an estimate, you know, and use these digital images. And that made perfect sense. And I really thought you know, keep in mind. I'm a guy, you know, sitting in my sitting in my office and in Westchester time I was in Yeah, Westchester I am. And I'm sitting there, and I'm trying to build this little business somehow. And at the end of the day. You know, the Dodge opportunity seemed enormous to me. So I got a hold of the name of the person at dodge that I needed to talk to. And I love several calls into this person. He was a vice president, I wish I could tell you his name today. But I wrote it down I remember after this experience, but I got a hold of his vice president's office in New Jersey at McGraw Hill, and I'm at Dodge. And I'm calling him. And I'm saying hey, look, we got this tool, it's going to really revolutionize what you're doing. But at the end of the day, you know, we want to some sort of partnership, right? So we can promote this to your customers. And I call them called nobody ever took my call. And it was in those days everybody had a secretary. And so you know, he kept referring me Well, one day I decided to call at noon. And I thought maybe the secretary I'll pick him up at a time where the Secretary is going to lunch, right? And so I call and he answers his phone, I'll never forget this call. And I explained to him what I've learned why I'm calling and the phone is silent. On the other end. I'm thinking man I'm just presenting you with this is a golden goose opportunity for you to really expand this digital, you know, blueprint thing, because nobody was it was getting really slow adoption at the time. I remember. I said you know one of your customers is using it. It's changing his world. So anyway, I pitched this to this guy. And there's this long pause on the phone and then he calls he proceeds to call me almost every rude name you can think of and really insults me and says how do you have the nerve? I'm number four, you know this McGraw Hill owned organization, and you have the nerve to disrupt my day. It blah, blah, blah, and really was rude and obnoxious to me. And I remember writing down his name and the date and everything that happened again, I wish I still had. It's one of those things that didn't make the move at some point. But I really was put back on my heels after that call many ends up hanging up on me, right? Clearly, there's no business relationship to be had here with folks. And our build product, right. But it really inspired me it was one of those little moments along the way that you get inspiration from so fast forward. You know, a couple of years later, it's becoming clear that digital blueprints are going to be a thing, right? And so when the internet sort of big bubble happened, right, in the late 90s, it gives me the idea. And once I understood the internet, I thought, what if we create a solution that would allow a general contractor to distribute drawings electronically to his subs, right, we'll create an invitation to bid tool. And they can we can send faxes, faxes, we're still a thing from the internet. And we can send emails, and when get these contractors logging in and downloading the blueprints, my original thought was this idea could lead to more sales for build where that's sort of the way I saw the world at the time, right? But it's one of those things. And again, this is during the.com Boom, and everything's blowing up. There's big stories in California of these companies raising, you know, two or $300 million and billion dollar acquisitions, and people are getting filthy rich, and you know, everywhere I go, I get what year

Christian Hamm: 21:27

you know, yeah, what you're feeling.

James Faulkner: 21:29

So 1999 2008

Phillip Ogilby: 21:32

Yeah, this is probably 9098 probably right now. Okay. Yeah, yeah, the very first Boom 9899. So I even hired a guy to help me make introductions for me. And so I traveled from Silicon Valley many times, I was in Chicago, New York, Boston, I was all over the country pitching my idea, you know, and everybody loved it. In fact, many, many times these folks would say to me, You mean, nobody's doing this? Are you sure nobody's doing this? And I'm like, No, No, nobody's doing it. You know, give me the money. Let's go do this. At the end of the day, I'm a I'm a I'm a high school educated roofer from Enid, Ohio, and most of these guys were, were, you know, I didn't fit the mold, right. I didn't go to second time, right. Yeah, my dad wasn't, you know, a VP at Swinerton construction. Now. I didn't none of that shit applied to me. Right. I was just a high school educated roofer from Cincinnati. So ultimately, I got enough, travel all over, everybody said no, but I heard 150 nose awesome. Looking back on. I remember meeting with a guy named Andrew green and Cincinnati real estate guy a few years older than me and Andrew have made a fair amount of money in real estate. And this was during the.com, boom, probably, you know, getting late 98 and early 99 by now. And Andrew slack, call me in a week. And I'm thinking okay, well, you know, here's another No, I've had a lot of those. But I call him in a week. And Andrew says, You know what, I really liked you, I think you're gonna succeed. I have no idea about this technology you want to build, but I'm gonna give you a half million dollars. And I just like to get my money back at some point. And that, that conversation again, another one of those points in your career that really changes your life and the lives of a lot of other people. That was, you know, the catalyst. So I took Andrews half million dollars and put it in the bank and started building what you now know is iceberg. flip.com. So I SQ ft.com. It was really the foundation on which construct connect was built, if you remember. And, you know, along the way, I hired a guy named Dave Conway. Dave had no experience in construction whatsoever. He was really good at raising money. And I knew at the time, we needed to raise a lot of money for this business. So Dave helped me I hired him as a consultant first helped me raise money. And then, you know, he was really smart. And I still like Dave to this day, he's misguided. But at the end of the day, I ultimately named Dave the CEO by square foot, and I was the chairman. You know, Dave was very good at raising money and with the title of CEO, he was able to go out and do it. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, iceberg foot, one of the things we did is we decimated the Dodgers business on the side of the subcontractors. In fact, I've had dodge employees tell me the you don't know how much you changed our lives when that thing took hold. Because I square foot we just focused on the subs and selling construction news to subs and so I, for years, I took great pride in the fact that we would put a big dent in my friends business from New Jersey, as it relates to the step size anyway today, but that's a foot off the ground.

Christian Hamm: 24:45

And it's funny how it all comes full circle on a phone call like that it

James Faulkner: 24:48

is so just just so we get their chronology, right in terms of you know, where where other technologies have sort of dovetailed into your story. So when you saw Have a you know, I think Procore was back in the early 2000s When they kind of got going. And then when you if you had been out there doing digital drawings, and then you see the plan grid come out the plan grid was the one that just kind of well Blue Blue Beam. Yeah, or even before beam was before PlanGrid. But this is what you've done here. Phil is his mouse even before that? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So, you know, as as, as the person who came up with that stuff, and then you see these other like, we you consider the incumbent, but that time to them? Like, do you think that they knew of, you know, it's

Phillip Ogilby: 25:41

yeah, it's funny, I met with tui in person that the CEO Procore, about two or three years ago, he invited me out at one of their groundbreaking events, and he and I sat down in his office and, and we It wasn't as office, but he and I sat down together and just had a one on one for about a half an hour. And two, he was so very complimentary of me. You know, he was just like, Look, you paved the way for the rest of us. You know, I remember well, what you guys did, and so he's very, very complimentary. Very nice about it. So that's cool, I guess suppose, you know, in many ways, that's, that's a, that's a very true statement. You know, one thing I'll say is, ultimately, we sold ice for foot for I think, $85 million, we sold a couple of private equity firms, I basically got nothing out of that deal. You know, it was a product of having a bad investor deal. For those of you that are in the tech world, or understand how these things work, we had a 3x liquidation preference, on all the money, we raised the price per foot, right. And you guys are shaking your head. I mean, I know you know what it's like, but for those adults, so when you're raising money, and you're taking other people's money, it's a very serious thing to do, first of all, obviously, taking other people's money. But one of the ways investors sort of protect their their investment is with a liquidation preference, which basically means this, if I give you a million dollars and create a business, we sell it for $10 million. At the end of the day, I get my million back first, right, you're gonna get interest or dividends on that million, and then we're going to split up with what's left based upon our ownership percentages, right. So today, most of the time, if you see like, a lot of times, you didn't see a liquidation preference here in the last few years. But when you do see them, they're typically a 1x liquidation preference, right? We had three acts in those days, because the time we actually raised the money to get a square foot off the ground. It was the bubble was getting ready to burst. And there was a lot of nervousness in the market. And so we just had a really bad, you know, investor deal that led to many, many of us taking a hosing on that deal. But just from an economic standpoint, it's one of the lessons you learn as you go. You know, my son, my wife is gonna my son, Justin, and my wife left there, you know, back in 2009, to really create snack. That's what we're most excited about, obviously.

Christian Hamm: 28:02

No, that's really cool. And we'll get into that stack. Sorry, go ahead, Phil. Yeah, no, no. Well, I was gonna say, we'll get into the stack story. But I mean, you said there, you learn something. And I would imagine, through everything that in that whole, the genesis of I square foot, and before that, and then into, you know, selling and you probably learned an awful lot about if you're doing this again, it's going to look a lot different.

Phillip Ogilby: 28:30

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like that's, that's the way it is. Right? It is. Yeah. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, you do it once, and then you, you sort of see what worked and what didn't work, right. And so that, you know, it's funny, I remember being generally, when I look back on the ice barefoot days, right? I remember generally being terrified. And when I say that, it's because of all the things you think of right? Our initial investor at least six or seven different times, right? Hear me out on this one. Andrew would hang$100,000 Check in an envelope on his door, and we would go pick it up on Thursday to make payroll on Friday. Right? I mean, literally, and we had at that time, we had, I don't know, 4050 6070 employees, we had a meaningful payroll, but it just takes a lot of money to get a technology, but business really rolling, right. And so in general, I was terrified through the entire experience. And then you come out the other side. And you can look back and see everything that's happened and how what led to another right and pretty soon when building stack has been sort of a walk in the park, right? If you can even say that. I mean, we've had our stresses too, but but once you live through it, it really does change the way you see it the second time.

Christian Hamm: 29:50

Yeah, well, you build up a toughness of resilience right through all those things that were probably gut wrenching and made you sick. You kind of go through that and you go okay, well and hopefully not as bad the next time. But if even if it's a little bit like that you've got this toughness built up from it, and obviously the wisdom to navigate it well, or avoid it altogether. So you talk about the stack, the stack story. Being a little easier, obviously, it's difficult building a technology business. But why don't you take us? Yeah, how did that all get going? Yeah. And then kind of where things are today, as it is stack? You know?

Phillip Ogilby: 30:28

Yeah, sure. Well, so. So like I said, I left before Justin did in terms of ice per foot, my wife, Jane, and I left, she was there for business as well. We left before Justin death, we probably left this is 2023. So we left probably 2009. We left i square foot. Justin came out in 2010. So I basically went to Conway and I said, look, let's make an arrangement, where Justin has a happy landing here. And we can move on and, and so we pulled Justin out a year later. And then, you know, during the first couple of years, I had a non compete first of all, so I saw, you know, I sold some software and did some things and and then once we pulled Justin out, he started writing the code. And so literally, you know, we live Jane and I lived on a farm, you know, north of Cincinnati, and Jeff Justin lived downtown and, and he wrote code in his apartment, and we would work during the day. And I think it was 2011 or 12, we launched a product called Cloud takeoff. And that was really our first kind of venture into the into the takeoff world entirely built for the cloud. And in those days, the big question, was it is there a demand for takeoff software? That's a dial everybody knows there is? Despite all the claims that that BIM is going to change tomorrow and takeoffs will be obsolete. I knew different. So we knew there was a big market for the question was when people spend money on something that was in the cloud, right? Because you got to be connected to the internet to do your takeoff. So is my internet reliable enough? What if my internet goes down? We hear that a lot. What am I internet goes down like a bit, do all that kind of stuff. So anyway, it was really a proof of concept with our cloud takeoff product. But it was sort of revolutionary when we build it because we designed it, we're using some really cool technology from Microsoft called Silverlight. And some of the IT nerds with some gray hair. Gotta remember that term Silverlight because it was Microsoft first came out and said, This is the future of the web. This is how all future web application is going to be developed. Netflix was built using a lot of Silverlight technology in the very early days, a lot of big brand names that you would recognize uses Silverlight technology. And the funny thing is we adopted as well. And it gave us the ability to do this, for example, we created an entire mosaic and would fill your screen with thumbnails of your blueprints on your on your plan set, right so and we made it super easy to navigate, you just click on one and zoom up really fast. And it really made navigating blueprints much much better than working on a PDF file. Right? Nobody likes to steal the day what the PDF, oh, here's an amazing amount. But it's not it's not easy to navigate around instead of drawing silver, lightweight all that possible. And so with this cool technology, we had a bunch of early adopters, and in about 18 months time we went from zero customers to about 600 paying customers and at that time I'm still waiting on a square foot to sell open I have some return coming there. And but I knew we had a real business you know and in the technology world honest to goodness, you can't have a small business he saw meaning start small Bootstrap, but we did it you guys are doing it, you can certainly do that that's a path many that follow. But ultimately if you're going to succeed you kind of support you can't really succeed small you have to succeed at some scale. So I made the decision early on to go out raise some outside money and really start to build build this into a real company. about that same time Microsoft makes the very public announcement they're going to just this kind of disowned Silverlight over the next several years. And so you know, we were faced with having to completely rewrite this app that we just gave birth to like I said we had meaningful success we had all of our revenue coming from the 600 customers and and then we get another blow slap in the face which is Microsoft said Ah Just kidding on that Silverlight thing. So so we had to rebuild it so I went out raise I think I'm a million dollars was my first raise for stack and took in some friends and family money and some outside money and and rebuilt the application we launched back in January 2015. You know we have since rolled out estimating about two and a half years ago we rolled out estimating and bundled up the stack. We have now taken stack the original sort of cloud based idea for measuring literally blown up the paradigm. Right it is so much more than measuring a blueprint. You can measure blueprint for free. But with stack there's DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT built in we automatically hyperlink all the details you can keyword search, you can text find any text on the documents, like I said that keyword searching is done the O overlay is the best overlay the industry overlay multiple pages together. You know, we've just, we've just created a complete solution for accessing and working on your documents from anywhere. And it's really been a game changer for us. Like I said, we rolled out estimating a couple of years ago, we've now made investments in two or three other businesses that we've acquired to expand into, you know, project management and that kind of stuff, too. But we've taken the stack takeoff tool and really turned it into a complete platform.

James Faulkner: 35:29

So in terms of the, the PDF side of things, you know, when we were, we obviously have no insight Mac's a PDF engine also. But you know, what we found out, there was a couple of companies, there was one in the US, and then there was another one in England that had the underlying PDF technology, stuff to use as, as a, you know, use their SDK. And basically, do you find that the handling of the PDF, and all of the new things that are coming along that? I mean, did you build that all in house? Or did you? Or did you go and use some of the

Phillip Ogilby: 36:15

you know, we started initially using what Microsoft called, they used to call it deep zoom technology, right? And so it's what it's what enables you to zoom very, very quickly in on an image in a raster image, right? It's not that these aren't vector images, the raster, so it's what enables you to zoom in really quickly and have it all pixelate correctly, or zoom out really quickly and have it all pixelate quickly and correctly. So they used to be called deep zoom technology, we took that we have since sort of rewritten everything about it. But that's the technology that it was based on.

James Faulkner: 36:49

Cool. Okay, so yours are all your drawings are rasterized rather than vector drawings.

Phillip Ogilby: 36:55

That's correct. Okay. Yeah.

Christian Hamm: 36:58

Okay, this is this is pretty cool. I mean, like you we just got nerdy sorry. Yeah, you guys got you guys got a little nerdy. James is more technical. I'm a little more. I think Phil, and I could have lots of Nerja. Yeah, you guys could have good, good chat. We need like the content, man. But you can get a really good sense, obviously. I mean, you just told the stack story in like, I don't know, three, three to five minutes. But everything else about i square foot and everything and the school of hard knocks and everything like that for the bulk of our conversation. So clearly, you can see a little more streamlines in, in scaling, and everything like that, which is really it's neat to see. And clearly. Okay, So Justin, your son? Yes. And so you guys are Ben, you've raised some outside money. But this is like a family family endeavor here.

Phillip Ogilby: 37:50

You know, it's funny. I'm very first, our very first, outside money came from a group called Cincy tech, and they're doing the Lord's work in Cincinnati, is a public private partnership, Mike venerable runs the show. They're all friends of mine now. But I remember in the very early days when we pitched them, and I came to them on the heels of ice per foot, right? So and I square foot exists in Cincinnati, that's for construct connected to that. And so everybody knew i square foot, they knew me really. And so I walked in, and I had like, kind of a swagger, right like this, this guy created this. And so in the investment world, if you've done it once, you're gonna, suddenly again, a lot of intelligence points in the eyes of the investor. So it was pretty, it wasn't a hard task. But one of the things that, that the CNC tech guys really pushed back on was, hey, we don't invest in family businesses. And by the way, you'll hear that right, you'll hear that if you're got a family business, and you're out there and you're trying to raise outside money, you'll hear that a we don't invest in family businesses, so but you have to just the key to making that work. And ultimately, obviously, they invested. But the key to making that work is to have a structure that makes sense, right? Your biggest fear is to have two or three sort of CO CEOs in the room and decisions don't get made. And, you know, we've got aunt Julie over here, and you know, son over here, we're making exceptions. And so you have to just treat it like a real business have a real structure of, you know, authority and, and just make decisions based on that. So it's not really been a problem or even brought up since the early days. The family part of it is an entirely different dynamic course it said Justin and his family were just here visiting this weekend. So we obviously we still, we still get along great, but it does change the dynamic. I think the rest of justice brothers and sister I get tired of hearing about the business when we do you know, family dinners and all that

James Faulkner: 39:40

kind of I was gonna say Christmas dinner kind of

Phillip Ogilby: 39:43

challenges. Yeah, it's that plenty of challenges, for sure, but it certainly can be done.

James Faulkner: 39:51

So, Phil, what we're going to do here is, I have a meeting I gotta get to, so I'm going to we'll cut this off together. Yeah, well, Krishna is gonna do the rapid fire questions. But I would just like to say, it's been great meeting you. I'd like to continue the conversations. Yeah, I got to have you guys. We got lots of stories to chat about. So yeah, congratulations on what you've done with stack so far. And I look forward to more. So thank you.

Phillip Ogilby: 40:20

Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity, and pick me anytime if you want to chat some more.

James Faulkner: 40:25

Yeah, awesome. Okay, Phil, thank you.

Christian Hamm: 40:27

Alright, so we'll keep going here. And then we can tidy up and get through the rapid fire questions. But I think that it's, it's, it's fantastic to see that you guys have obviously carved the path and been able to keep that ethos of, of the family, family owned business, what what's the size of stack now? And kind of what things look like today?

Phillip Ogilby: 40:53

You know, it's a, it's a meaningful business today, we have about 170 employees, we've got 170 employees. Yeah, I mean, you know, revenue wise, we continue to grow 30 to 40% year over year and have for the last several years. So it's, it's, it's fun, and it's exciting. And we're in a great space. And, you know, when you get to be the size people pay attention to you people start to recognize the brand. And I think we've got a lot, you know, we have a very, very high NPS score, right. So our customers really love using the product. And ironically, even the people that churn out of product, even the people that churn and we track all this data really closely, right? Even the people that churn and don't renew their subscriptions, give us an equally high NPS score on the product itself. So it's like, most of what takes people out of our subscription is things beyond their control, right? It's, they're going out of business, they're changing their scope of the business, they no longer do commercial work, whatever. But we build a product that people really love using. So it's

Christian Hamm: 41:57

no, that's really cool. I mean, that'd be at the core of everything you do. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, that's neat to hear. Because you know, when you think of churn, especially when it comes to I know, we're talking a lot about, you know, construction tech here, and we're talking about software products, but when it comes to customers leaving, it's always you can, immediately we can jump to oh man, there's something really negative about this. But when you can have even customers that are leaving, you know, sing your praises, people move on for various things, as you said, that are totally legitimate. And you want to wish everybody well, but that's really cool to hear. So clearly, you guys have done something incredible with your team. And with the product itself.

Phillip Ogilby: 42:35

Yeah, yeah, thank you. I mean, it's, you know, I think we have a great culture at stack. I mean, I'm proud to say that the vast majority people enjoy working there, we don't, we don't have people leave stack, you know, to be honest, I mean, people that, that find their way into our organization that have a good fit in New York, you know, they just don't leave. So we've, we've got a knock on wood there. But but we're really proud of what we built. And a lot of it goes to the to the people. And one of the things that I'll say for anybody else out there who's building a business is always think about and this has served me very, very well. But always think about building the organization for the next stage of your business. Right? Too many people see the business for what it is this very minute, right? Yeah. They make hiring decisions and budget decisions based upon that. And there's a real art to seeing ahead, right? And always looking ahead and thinking I need to build a team that's going to take me to that next milestone, right? I can't, if I if I live and die with the team that brought me here, chances are, it's not going to be the same team that's going to get me to that next level. So we've been fortunate stack. And we've done a lot of coaching of executives, and so on. And we've really brought a lot of people along with us, unfortunately, you know, I look back when I square foot days, as we grew, we dropped people along the way, right? Because some people just don't, in terms of leadership, I'm talking about right? Some people can't or won't, or don't choose to keep up with their skill set. It's important if you're part of a growing business, look for ways to invest in your own skill set, we do it as an employer, but you should do it also on the other side of the table is just sort of the bias, right? You want to be that employee that that can take the business to the next level. It's really important.

Christian Hamm: 44:19

Totally, I mean, every entrepreneur wants to see their company through right to whatever vision they had initially for the company, and they're never thinking necessarily about. I'm going to do something where I've got my head down in a hole for so long, that all of a sudden people are gonna leave or abandon this thing. It's never the intention, right? But it happens, but it happens. Absolutely. Yes. No, that's That's nice to hear. And just before we kind of jump into I was saying at the beginning some rapid fire questions, it gives people a little bit more about Phil and some things that are, you know, sometimes unique. Why don't you let our audience know? Is there anything you'd want? Want to say to even your future customers of yours? Or our audience about what it is you're doing at stack? Or something about the industry itself? Do you want to leave anybody with anything?

Phillip Ogilby: 45:12

You know, one of the things that we've, I think a lot of our success comes from the fact that ever since I began, even even at iceberg foot, right, even at ICE per foot, there's a general consensus that BIM is going to change the world, takeoff and estimating is going to be no more, really, you'll just ask the GC, and I'll give you a list of quantities, I knew that wasn't gonna happen anytime soon. You know, that's been the mantra for 30 years in our industry, and it's just not been the case. And so a lot of our success is that people just sort of ignored the side of the business, right, the whole economy would take off and, and estimating I think people have ignored generally, there's not a lot of investment being made in the estimating side of the marketplace, either. We're seeing that as an enormous opportunity. We're investing heavily in estimating software. In fact, our latest release gets us into a really advanced category. And we're, I'm about to announce a huge takeaway where we've taken, you know, much 300 employees off of the competing software and move them into stack. And this is a big, gigantic general contractor. I wish I could say make the announcement now. But we just got the word today. So we're really having a lot of success and moving, you know, big old legacy companies that thought they were stuck on that desktop. For decades. Right now we're moving into the cloud. And, you know, my mantra for my employees is everybody wants to go, they all want to go to the cloud, they just need a solution that's reliable, dependable gives them the capabilities, it's tough to build a cloud app that competes with desktop apps, too, by the way, you know, my 14 year old build an amazing desktop app, it takes a team of frickin very high paid engineers to build something that does anything close to that on the web, in a web browser. So we've done a lot of the hard heavy lifting, I think, really long term, people want to see sort of the field operations and the pre con stuff come together in one solution. So they don't have to go all over the place to do that. And that's sort of where our new focus is. And so we're focused on two things really, as a company moving up market, taking away those big users that used to be founded LSP, and PlanSwift. And all those other disconnected old fashioned desktop software products. We're moving those guys into the cloud. And we're now doing it at scale. I'm proud to tell you, if you haven't looked at stack, you should because you're going to be one of our customers if you're smart. And then I think the same thing, ultimately long term for the field, you guys have got a great solution for the field. We need to do an integration if we haven't done one yet. And I really Yeah, I mean that easier. Yeah. Now they want it. They want an alternative to Procore and Autodesk, right. Let's just put that right out there on the table. We hear it all day. I know you hear it all day, they want an alternative to Procore they want an alternative.

Christian Hamm: 48:03

Well, I mean, people do want options, right? I mean, this isn't just unique to construction software. This is life, right? When you have competition, and you have you have innovation, and you hit people who prefer a different approach to things. Obviously, if you're doing if you have a great approach to it, people will flock to it. And so, again, it does sound like that, and exciting to hear that you've got some big announcements coming down the pipe. Too bad. You can't announce it officially on the site visit but that's okay. That's all right. Time. Yeah. All good. All good. Well, hey, Phil, this is awesome. This has been a great conversation, as James was saying earlier on, you know, we always love circling back, you know, later, you know, 12 months later, and you can just, you know, it sounds like things are moving fast, and there'd be some great updates. But before we let you go, we you always end with a rapid fire round gets everyone to know a little bit more about us, Zack cool. Sure, yeah. Yep. All right. Okay, well got three questions for you. And here we go off the cuff. What is something that you do, Phil that others would think is insane.

Phillip Ogilby: 49:19

I'm 63 years old. And five years ago, I took my first flying lesson. And today I my first airplane was a plane with a parachute which was very important for my wife and so she let me buy that. But about a year and a half ago, I upgraded to a turboprop. And so now I'm flying myself and my family all over North America at 20,000 feet and pressurized comfort and it's it's been one of the biggest life changing things I've ever done for myself, but it's a little known fact but I enjoy it. I just flew in yesterday from fact I did a round trip I took my grandkids from Flagler Beach to Cincinnati. And then I came home and was here by four o'clock for dinner. So it's, it's been a life changing thing for me and my family with a lot of fun.

Christian Hamm: 50:08

That's crazy and all in five years. Yeah. That's really cool that and that's pretty unique for sure. I'll give for you, Phil, if you weren't doing what you're doing right now. And it sounds like you're really enjoying yourself. What would you be doing?

Phillip Ogilby: 50:26

Oh, no, no, you know, now it's easy to say now I'd be a pilot, you know, I just

Christian Hamm: 50:30

like to just answer.

Phillip Ogilby: 50:32

I wish that I had the money. I wish I had the money. And the time when I was a kid, the fact matter is, I wouldn't have had the money or the time. You know, I used to think, you know, it's funny. Looking back, I used to think I wanted to be one of the guys on the news, right? Eating the news. I thought that looked like just a job for me. And of course, now as you grow up and become a real person, that's the farthest thing from what I wanted. But yeah, who knows? Who knows, you know, part of my entrepreneurial journey is just because I didn't have any other choice. I think, you know, when I think back on it, it's like, you know, I didn't have a college degree to go fall back on and the one thing I've always believed is you can have tomorrow is going to be better than today. And that's, that's a core that comes from deep inside me. And honestly, looking back on all the trials and tribulations may have an amazing life today, we believe and I lived right on the ocean, we have a 5000 square foot, condo, 180 degree views of the Atlantic Ocean, and I fly myself around the country but but you know, most of my life was a struggle. And it's just this core belief that tomorrow is going to be better than today. And that's, that's what's brought me where I am today. And I wish more people had that kind of ingrained belief in themselves.

Christian Hamm: 51:41

Oh, no kidding. That's a good message for everybody right now. Sheesh. But love hearing that last one for you here, Phil. Coming from construction. I'm sure you've got one being like a contractor right out of the get go. What is one of your favorite stories or most memorable moments from the job sites?

Phillip Ogilby: 52:03

Here's one for you. i You know, I've got a couple but I'll share this limb for you because it comes to mind first. It's probably the summer of 1980 or so the local B Corporation is in full bloom. We're doing roofing and I've got a roofing job on an Arby's restaurant. Just outside on Fifth Street in downtown Dayton which is Durbin a Dayton, Ohio. It's at the mouth of the Oregon district. It's right in the heart downtown. Honestly, it's an Arby's restaurant. And in those days, Arby's was specifying a lot of modified bitumen roofing, which in that case, in this case means you put it down with a torch. So you clean the existing roof off and you roll this really thick membrane out that's made with asphalt and you apply it with a handheld torch. So you hit heated up with a torch. It softens the asphalt and you roll it out, right. And so beautiful day we're working. We just started our project on this Arby's and I get a call from forest Cooper, forest Cooper, and I hope God rest his soul if he's not with us. I hope he's still around. But forest Cooper was an old time roofer from Springfield. And he, he and I came to know each other and he was probably the best Foreman I had back in the days of the Ogilvy Corporation. But Forrest calls me up at the office way before cell phones, right? My office phone rings, and it's forest Cooper, and he's like, Hey, boss, man, I got I got a problem. I said, What's your problem? He said, Well, the buildings on fire. I said, What do you mean buildings on fire? He said, I said, we'll call the fire department call the fire department. Right? And, and he said, I did and they're here and they're up on the roof right now. And I said, Okay, I'll be right. I get my car and I drove over. Sure enough, there's four fire trucks. There's firemen all over the roof. They're chopping holes in the roof of this RV. This RV is intended to remain open during the construction. Oh, no, they had a tile ceiling tile falling out and the building is filling with smoke. They had to evacuate. Oh my gosh. You know, it was one of those one of those construction liability stories though man ended up I think our insurance paid about $100,000 for that all the damages, the loss of business, all that stuff. Fast forward, like a year later, I'm in I'm in I'm in this office tower in downtown Dayton. And my friend had introduced me to this attorney that was gonna help me with some sort of planning or something. And I'll go in and sit down with this attorney. And I told him who I was what I wanted what I do for a living and he said, Are you the guy that tried to burn down my RV store? Turns out this attorney I was meeting with Oh, the Arby's through this LLC. No way. And I had no idea. Yeah, so that was a very awkward moment. The attorney's office years ago, years later after we had taken care of our fire problem, but, uh, you know, construction is yes, so riddled with liability. You've got to be careful. That's what you got to get paid. You got to Make sure there's margin there because it's you're covering up for the next mistake that's ultimately going to happen.

Christian Hamm: 55:05

Oh, man, no kidding. Well, I mean, clearly you got through that. I'm sure. Maybe not unscathed in the moment but made it through and, and and have the story to tell. That's a good one. I gotta say.

Phillip Ogilby: 55:19

Yeah. Well, I don't know. We'll save him for the next one.

Christian Hamm: 55:23

Yeah, I want to thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah. I mean, hey, yeah, I'm sure you got lots more and we look forward to to hearing more stories from you, yourself, as well as more progress from stack and your journey, your entrepreneurial journey through construction and construction technology. I just want to thank you for your time today. And yeah, I really appreciate you jumping on with James and I.

Phillip Ogilby: 55:47

Yeah, no, no worries. Again, thanks for the invite. It's been fun. I enjoyed it. Do it any time.

James Faulkner: 56:00

Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for a monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystems.com/thesitevisit where you'll get Industry Insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the site visit podcast and SiteMax the jobsite and construction management tool of choice for 1000s of contractors in North America and beyond. SiteMax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.