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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 3 60, The podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
Carol Cone:Today's guest is someone I quite literally chased down after hearing him at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Business Solves Conference in Washington, DC last fall. Brendan McCluskey, President of Trident Builders, shared such a provocative story about rebuilding distressed communities through distinctive collaboration that I knew he must share it with our listeners on Purpose three sixty. In this conversation, Brendan discusses a bold and deeply thoughtful approach for housing that gets to the heart of community, equity and economic opportunity. We talk about building affordable homes, workforce development, breaking the cycle of poverty and what it really means for businesses, not for profits, and government to work together in innovative collaborations to solve complex interconnected challenges. In this conversation, Brendan takes us inside Baltimore, sharing its housing challenges, its workforce gaps, and its untapped potential.
Carol Cone:And he discusses how he's connecting the dots between construction, community development, and economic mobility. If you're interested in how purpose driven leadership can turn complex urban challenges into scalable, practical solutions, this is a conversation about one man's vision, his wonderful heart and perseverance. And certainly Brendan's collaborative model is one that I trust will inspire you to replicate in your work. The key magic unlock here is collaboration and letting your mind stretch to bring innovative partnerships together. So let's get started.
Carol Cone:Welcome to the show, Brendan McCluskey, president of Trident Builders.
Brendan McCluskey:Hi, Carol. Thank you for having us. I'm, you know, flattered to be on this presentation with you.
Carol Cone:Well well, we're gonna have a great conversation about dealing with key community problems regarding housing and poverty and jobs and women in small businesses and how organizations can work together in a in a unique model that supports your purpose. And I love on your website that you say that Trident constructs buildings as a matter of practice but helps build communities with equal dedication. Absolutely. So as we start, talk a little bit about who is Brendan McCluskey, what a little bit about your background, and then we're gonna start getting into the depth of our conversation.
Brendan McCluskey:Alright. Fantastic. Well, again, thank you Carol. You know, I'm the my name is Brendan McCluskey. I'm the founder of Trident Builders.
Brendan McCluskey:We are a commercial general contractor located in Baltimore, Maryland. We do work that really kind of spans the spectrum. You know, federal work, private sector work, a lot of very technically sophisticated projects and doing an awful lot of design assist brand or design build work where we kinda, you know, are helping shape the vision of the project based upon like the either the business like functions and like performance requirements of it or it's or the performance side of things. I've been very blessed to work at some of the best construction and development firms in the country. I started my career in the base building division of Hick Contracting, which is a multi billion dollar national construction firm.
Brendan McCluskey:It was building high rises and skyscrapers and biotech campuses with them. From there, I did a stint in multifamily. And then I worked for the related companies out in Colorado, doing five star amenities on top of Snowmass Mountain. And yeah, I mean I just really benefited from working for some very sophisticated contractors. I'm sorry, general contractors and developers.
Brendan McCluskey:In 2015, I decided that it was time for me to strike it out on my own. I founded Trident Builders, again, to be just a commercial general contractor here in the great city of Baltimore. And yeah, it's been an interesting experience. I can tell you that it's been a slog. It's been interesting.
Brendan McCluskey:But I think that over time I spent more and more time looking at the problems that Baltimore City had and cities like Baltimore. And thought that what does it mean to be a builder? Why am I doing this? And like you know, why are we in business? And you know, what sort of positive change can we affect in the world that we see?
Brendan McCluskey:Like how can we be that agent of change? And that's what we do.
Carol Cone:I always love to ask my guests, was there something in your upbringing from your mother, your father, your family that contributed to your exploration and then actual work that is beyond building a structure, but it's building community as well?
Brendan McCluskey:I would definitely say so. You know, I I was blessed to have two great parents, you know, high school sweethearts from Massachusetts. You know, one of the things that you learn in a Irish Catholic Navy family is that it's your fault, is responsibility to fix the problem. And just having like sort of like a resolutely focused on like figuring out what the solution is to anything. Know, if there's a problem, it's your responsibility to figure it out.
Brendan McCluskey:And I feel as if those are qualities that I definitely absorb from my father who was a captain in the Navy.
Carol Cone:Oh nice. And anything special from your mother?
Brendan McCluskey:To be kind. I definitely would say that my mother, know, there was a degree of kindness and you know, and tenderness that my mother offered. And just like, you know, and being appreciative of like how the other half might live. Know, like again, having the opportunity to be a kid living overseas and like seeing how people in other countries are are growing and some of the challenges that they're grappling with was a humbling experience as youth. And so I think my mom was quick to point out how how lucky and blessed that I am.
Carol Cone:So you've taken that I think depth of heart and commitment to Baltimore. And so why are you so fiercely proud of Baltimore?
Brendan McCluskey:I'm very bullish on Baltimore. I mean, like it's a phenomenal city and it has just tremendous assets. It's got incredible, like, intellectual and financial capital. Right? It's got a great legacy, especially within the industry.
Brendan McCluskey:It's been so critical in the formation and the growth of, like, this, you know, economic juggernaut that we call The United States. You know, like the a lot of people don't realize that like the rail system was founded here, right? We are the westernmost port on the East Coast. You know, we have just tremendous amount of assets and we really were like the the opening window for the industrial revolution here in The United States. It's got so many things going for it.
Brendan McCluskey:It's in a an exceptionally wealthy state, an exceptionally well educated state, but the concentration of poverty is just something that just can't be overlooked. And I really feel as if Baltimore is like the one city on the East Coast that really hasn't figured out its second act yet. And I think that we're on the precipice of doing so.
Carol Cone:So you you were founded in 2015, and in the beginning you were just doing general construction and such. I don't think that you were quite into the community development that that you're in. You've said that, you know, you were chasing dollars early on trying to keep the lights on, but then what did that time begin to teach you about there's a difference between revenue and creating sustainable systems?
Brendan McCluskey:That's a great question. So yeah. So I quit my job on April fool's day twenty fifteen.
Carol Cone:And Okay.
Brendan McCluskey:You know, it was the verdict was out for several years whether or not this was a good idea or not. But that same month though, Baltimore was actually hit with quite a tragedy. So, you know, I quit my job on the first, all right? So my last day was like two weeks later. So it was really Monday the thirteenth that I started off business operations.
Brendan McCluskey:That was quite a thankful week here in Maryland and in Baltimore in particular because that was the week that Freddie Gray got arrested and then died. So when I started my company, I had an eyeball of about $6,000,000 worth of opportunity. You know, with the humble expectation that if I captured say 2,000,000 of it as a first year startup, I would be, you know, like smooth sailing. All of it vaporized, right, within the aftermath of Freddie Gray. And I didn't have any sort of disdain about what was going on in Baltimore.
Brendan McCluskey:It was just a really frustrating situation that I had to very quickly learn to get out there and find new work, right? And also by being entrepreneurial and a startup, it's pretty gritty. So I had to learn how to hunt, kill, cook and clean all my own very very quickly and had to deal with all new acquisition, all new client acquisitions. Like things that I had not kind of cultivated before I made my exit, I had to do from scratch. And that made for a very very hard few first few years.
Brendan McCluskey:In the first couple years, because I had been so blessed to build all kinds of different things, I really had the ability to kind of build anything. But what I found was that there was a challenge there in terms of lacking specialization and optimization, right, within like say, market sector. That margins weren't necessarily were often compressed as a result of that. So what I've really kind of learned in the last ten years that it's really about focusing on where can you develop a sustainable competitive advantage? Like where can you just outshine over your competitors?
Brendan McCluskey:And then how do you do that and maximize margin? It's not necessarily about maximizing revenue, it's about maximizing margin.
Carol Cone:So that's a great lead into you were part of Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses. And I'm just when did you go through that and did that experience help you to begin to like focus on specialization where you could build reputation, capability, and margins?
Brendan McCluskey:100%. Yeah. It was a transformative experience. So it's kinda funny. I went through the program, you know, kind of begrudgingly thinking that like this is a waste of time.
Brendan McCluskey:I gotta go put out the fires out in the business. And I couldn't have been any more wrong. What it afforded me the ability to do is to start thinking strategically again. So when any small business that is struggling, right? Sometimes you can feel like you're in a tactical firefight and you're just like trying to survive the day.
Brendan McCluskey:You're trying to figure out how am I gonna make payroll? How am I gonna make pay this? How am I gonna do that? The program basically forces everybody to kind of look underneath the hood of their business and identify what's working well and what's not working well. Some people akin to like a mini MBA, it isn't.
Brendan McCluskey:It's actually much better than that and it's really kind of scaling program for high potential growth companies. And for me again, it allowed me the space. Like I knew how to read financial statements. I knew how to execute in the field and the services very very well. I had enough background in HR and everything else.
Brendan McCluskey:Like we were fine. What it forced me to do is take a step back and say, okay, what are we really good at? What are we not so good at? What are we making money at? Let's do more of the latter and less of the things that we're struggling on.
Brendan McCluskey:And since then, I've been really constantly reapplying where can I affect positive change, where can I be strategic and just have an outsized impact based upon what it is we're already doing? And that kinda led to the white paper and the presentation that you met over.
Carol Cone:That's a perfect bridge to the to the presentation that you made in in DC at the chamber. So can you I'd love you to talk about the the entire initiative. How it started. You probably had a eureka. I wanna do this.
Carol Cone:I'm gonna solve these problems and really talk about the depth. So did you first of all, I've seen different names of this initiative. So is there a formal name for this initiative?
Brendan McCluskey:Now we're calling it the Be More Co op. The genesis of this really kind of started in the 2019. I had been invited to the Bloomberg School of Public Health to go to a workforce development program. And it was just funny because on my way as I was driving over, had two fateful phone calls. One with a friend of mine through the Urban Land Institute who had been asking me about modular construction.
Brendan McCluskey:And me being like the construction nerd that I am, I did some reading and research on it. And like I was, you know, talking to her about, you know, the the benefits and the shortfalls of modular construction. Then I had a phone call from a developer client of mine that was interested in like a lease to own program called the Cleveland Housing Network that Enterprise was doing in Cleveland, where it was helping people escape the cycle of rentals and low income housing tax credits. It was basically graduating them into home ownership. Okay, so those are two phone calls and I literally walk into a room at the Bloomberg School of Public Health thinking they were gonna be talking about apprenticeship programs.
Brendan McCluskey:We were talking about anything but. We were talking about food insecurity, housing insecurity, transportation issues, trauma, criminal justice. Like all these things that these young men in particular, but also women, get kind of knocked off the rails and like basically are prevented from being able to pursue good opportunities to be able to provide for themselves. So like there's a lot of like risk and adversity to these kids. Like right or wrong, I'm not being politically agnostic or one or the other.
Brendan McCluskey:It's just like these are factual realities that these kids are out to navigate. And in the course of that meeting, was just kinda like thinking of it and it looked more and more like a football play, right? Where there's no Superman or a Wonder Woman that's gonna solve poverty in Baltimore, right? But me as Trident Builders, right, I can cover the left side like a linebacker, right? I can tackle housing insecurity and workforce development.
Brendan McCluskey:Other people can figure out other small business sort of activities to address other sort of issues. And like that we just need to work in tandem in communication. And so what ended up happening was, you know, we started like working to scale a solution that addressed the vacants, but also kind of help spur the the investment and the capture of a nascent industry and help scale modular construction. But also doing it in a way that was thoughtful regarding like energy needs as well as workforce development programs and everything else.
Carol Cone:I wanna start with vacants because I don't think our listeners know what a vacant is.
Brendan McCluskey:Okay. Yeah. So a vacant is basically, the remnants of a house that is no longer habitable. Right? So Baltimore grew very very rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as like the industrial boom was happening.
Brendan McCluskey:These houses were built for to support that industrial worker base, right? So these are 16 foot wide, 45 foot deep red brick homes. They're literally just row homes next to each other. A lot of them were built without any sort of material science in them. These So are houses that have kind of deteriorated over the last one hundred years.
Brendan McCluskey:So they don't have, like we find like oyster shells and horsehair in like the mortar mix, right? These houses lack really any sort of insulation for the most part. And basically what ends up happening is there are houses that were built very cheaply a hundred years ago and they're frankly falling apart. I mean, just they they don't have longevity to be a home that can last another century or two. Some of them can be restored and I do believe in that.
Brendan McCluskey:I believe in historic preservation where it makes sense. But again, think a lot of what it is we're dealing with is the legacy of our industrial past. And we have all this housing stock that has fallen apart and honestly is directly a contributor to poor health outcomes for its residents. I mean, these houses are literally killing people. Never mind that they're burning down, but like the existence of these houses basically suppress socioeconomic opportunity in these neighborhoods.
Brendan McCluskey:And the act is and once they become uninhabited, they become vectors for criminal activity, particularly the drug trade. So these houses are literally like a cancer in the city. And it's if we don't address the houses, we're not gonna be able to let Baltimore thrive to its full potential.
Carol Cone:Talk about your model. So there are five problems in your presentation that you talked about. One, you're gonna deal with the vacants. But there's other parts and problems.
Brendan McCluskey:It it does start with the vacant. So again, we have this vast number of vacants. Right? And we have a math problem. We can't spend 3 to $400,000 renovating one of these houses, abating like the lead and the asbestos and getting the energy efficiency performance to where it needs to be to survive a hotter century to come.
Brendan McCluskey:And then have it only worth $2.50 at the end, right? So I've been resolutely focused on where is there potential innovation for my industry? And that actually bodes to another problem is that my industry is actually regressing in terms of our relative productivity. Yeah. Per McKinsey and even like The Economist, our industry is less efficient and productive now than it was in 1968.
Brendan McCluskey:And it's kind of an astounding thing to make when you think about like how the advent of information technology has transformed just about everything. But between the regulatory environment, an aging workforce, and then higher performance requirements, we just can't produce and be as productive as we were half a century ago. And so what I've been really kind of resolutely focused on is like how do we start doing this in a way that helps us scale the industrial capacity to make modular more cost effective than conventional construction. And then do that in an open and equitable way. The way to do that is honestly be open source.
Brendan McCluskey:So like, a lot of people could be somewhat stingy, right, and like hoard their knowledge and their know how. And I'm just looking at the size and the scale of the problem like this is way too big for even just trying to builders. So like how do we do this in a way that makes sure that my, even my competitors as low as I wanna say that out loud? How can I empower them to do this in a way that they're also successful? Again, it's both practical and pragmatic to take that sort of approach because again, the size and scale of the problem is way larger than Trident builders can handle on their own.
Brendan McCluskey:It needs to be done faster than that. But I also needed to make sure that like my competitors don't mess it up because if they're new Okay. Right? Well, because like, I mean, if the margin for error in high performance housing, like there could be bad outcomes. And my concern is that if people are out there like jokers really and getting this all messed up, it could put a stink in what it is we're trying to do and make it harder.
Brendan McCluskey:And I really wanna make sure that we're doing this in an open source and equitable way that you know basically reduces risk to everybody involved and encourages adoption.
Carol Cone:And I love you're talking a lot of emphasis on equity because one of your elements, you know, your key audiences to make this work are small scale developers. And you say that many of them are either people of color or women. So you're providing opportunities for their businesses to grow. That was one audience that was really important. And then I want you to talk about unemployed youth.
Carol Cone:Because you say that you know, because they're not educated enough or skilled enough to go into an apprenticeship. But as I think you you said in your speech, you know, they're all over. They're sitting on stoops. They're, you know, they're getting in trouble or whatever. So how did you like have that moment?
Carol Cone:Let's get these unemployed youth, let's train them and give them an opportunity for a future.
Brendan McCluskey:So first start with the smaller scale developers. Again, it's pragmatism Carol, right? I mean, yes, it's the right thing to do. But it's also like the right thing to do in terms of like execution. A lot of these communities have women based community leaders with them, right?
Brendan McCluskey:And they're the ones that are spearheading the development efforts. They know an awful lot. Like, you know, one of my clients is a PhD. She's brilliant. They know very little about real estate development and construction.
Brendan McCluskey:And this is where they get into trouble because they sometimes come across contractors that might not necessarily have like their best interests at heart and not necessarily be as mission centric as a tribe of builders. So these are minority developers, predominantly women, that have site control of housing assets within these communities. They're from the communities. They live in the communities. They're trusted by the communities.
Brendan McCluskey:Right? These communities have been are somewhat cagey. Right? They've been like taken advantage of time and time again by any number of people. So it's really hard for a guy like me to kinda come in there and be like, oh, I'm gonna redevelop this community for you.
Brendan McCluskey:By empowering them, we're building out a scale of that neighborhood can absorb, but then we're also keeping the wealth in that community.
Carol Cone:Great. So talk about the the unemployed youth because you have a very when you talk about it and you look at your website, you have a really deep commitment to helping youth get off the stoop and to have a future.
Brendan McCluskey:Yeah. Well, especially here in Baltimore, like we have a sick irony. We have a shortage of construction workers, but then we have all these underemployed youth. And like these underemployed youth have been failed by institutions their entire lives, right? Chief among them probably the schools.
Brendan McCluskey:And they don't have the academic rigor to get past the apprenticeship programs. Now, this is where it gets a little bit convoluted. So apprenticeship programs in the construction industry are usually focused on the skill traits. So electrical, plumbing, HVAC, fire sprinkler. And those are kind of dictated by a combination of basically open job as well as union sort of like labor negotiations and like what the definition of what those programs look like.
Brendan McCluskey:There's a middle gap that we're missing. All right? And that is the semi skilled laborer, right? And that's
Carol Cone:Semi skilled, yep.
Brendan McCluskey:Well, trust me, a drywall finisher that is good is worth his weight in gold, right? But like for whatever reason, we don't call them the skilled laborer, we call them semi skilled. And what we need, what we have a shortage of is those workers. So the average age of a construction worker in this country right now is like 43 years old. One in four construction workers is over the age of 55.
Brendan McCluskey:So we actually have a demographic like crisis that no one's really talking about. At the same time, we have all these underemployed youth in this in a city like Baltimore. There's other competing situations and these kids have a lot of other life factors that we can't explore everything here. But you know, that's where I kind of became resiliently focused in which we it's like, no. We gotta figure out ways to start like funneling these kids back into the formal economy.
Brendan McCluskey:And that's what we've been doing.
Carol Cone:That's that's great. So and you actually you you I love to quote you. You say that these kids, if they don't have an opportunity, they express their fear with anger. And that's where you have perhaps some street fights or we might have fires or other things. So it's great that you're providing an opportunity.
Carol Cone:Talk a little bit about working with a modular manufacturer because you also that was a problem. You know, they wanna work on a large scale, but you were working on a small scale. How did you get over that barrier?
Brendan McCluskey:The thing is with anything in the factory, right, like you need to achieve certain degrees of economies of scale. And you can't do that doing four, five, 10 units at a time. Like you really to make the the metrics number the the metrics work, where you start to beat out on the conventional construction model, you need to start getting to thirty, forty, 50 units at a time. What we decided to do is we started thinking about all of these smaller scale developers that are scattered all over the city. What if we could crowdsource their aggregate demand to hit that threshold so all of a sudden like they start achieving like the buying power in aggregate?
Brendan McCluskey:That co op now is a real entity, know. And I founded it last August with a professor at Hopkins as well as some other for profit and nonprofit developers, all alumni from the Goldman Sachs program. And there's a lot of interesting things that are happening very very quickly.
Carol Cone:Oh, that that's that's that's great. How do you select the right partners for collaboration? I mean, yes, had some buds that you met at the Goldman Sachs program, but also you're working with a lot of other different organizations. Collaboration is key. Collaboration is so important especially for improving our communities.
Carol Cone:How do you choose the right ones?
Brendan McCluskey:I've been working with the Cary School of Business at Johns Hopkins and a think take call like the Be More Co Lab where you had a lot of like mission center people, a lot of these ideal sort of developer customers of mine were in the meeting. And we zeroed in on this small group. And I really did focus on the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program simply because of a few things. One, these individuals have already been vetted by a world class organization like Goldman Sachs. Two, they've got a modicum of phenomenal business education by virtue of going through the program.
Brendan McCluskey:So I know that like they should know better in terms of business decisions depending upon when we have issues, right? And then lastly, we're kind of like a family, you know? Like I think when you're a small business owner, it's kind of lonely. Like you don't have too many peers. And I feel as if like the Goldman Sachs program has done a phenomenal job of building like a national peer group And we kinda rely and trust on each other and we don't really ever wanna go against the family.
Carol Cone:Alright. So you dealt with a modular issue. That was a big challenge. You're dealing with great partners, so you're learning there. We have not talked about one of the magical elements, solar.
Carol Cone:So can you talk about how you're using solar and how it's generating income? And also how it creates longevity because I think that that is another genius part of your solution.
Brendan McCluskey:This is where it gets interesting. So the modular construction allows us to build a very high performance building envelope, literally the outside walls. That's where we win the battle between energy efficiency. So so first, we're building a new house, a quality house, that is hyper energy efficient, that reduces the operation expenses of like an energy bill for these families of modest beets. Right?
Brendan McCluskey:What we discovered at the Smithsonian was that when we put solar panels on them, these houses were producing over 200% of the power they were using day or night three sixty five. And so what we were seeing was like, these houses can produce a lot of energy when energy is the most expensive. How do we harness this? And like there's a lot of nuance to why solar has not been widely adopted within these communities. Like just call it what it is.
Brendan McCluskey:Solar developers back in the day were somewhat predatory. So a lot of people have like a bad taste when it comes to solar about leases and how they get hog tied into like these roof top leases. What we basically determine is that we build a new house. That house is gonna have a roof that's gonna be good for fifteen to twenty years. It just so happens that solar panels are good for fifteen to twenty years.
Brendan McCluskey:So what we're doing is we're basically optimizing the roof to be leased to third party solar developers that are responsible for the roof. So a vacant becomes a vacant because these families of mosnes can't afford to replace the roof when it starts to go. So we're giving a new house with a new roof. We're bringing on a lease for a solar developer to put solar panels on top of it. These leases have options to renew.
Brendan McCluskey:And basically, the provision within that lease is gonna require the solar developer to replace the roof at that time, right? In the event that the solar developer doesn't want to renew the lease and do the capital investment, it's fine. We even set it aside and escrow a royalty or like a portion of the proceeds of the leasing to basically allow for the roost replacement. But the beautiful thing is is that I have, knowing with what energy trends are looking like, any sort of generation capacity we print online, it's not going offline. Right?
Brendan McCluskey:It's gonna be even worth even more down the road. So what ends up happening is that rainy day fund or that emergency reserve to replace that roof when it needs to in fifteen to twenty years, then becomes a windfall event for that that family. And so you inadvertently are starting to close the social wealth gap just by virtue of the sun shining.
Carol Cone:I love it. That again, it's another part of your your brilliant it's it's like putting all these different layers and components together to really break create a breakthrough solution. Can you talk about one or two of your new projects? You've got one I think that's creating a 100 units that's coming up.
Brendan McCluskey:So we have a three story row home, something that is ubiquitous in Baltimore that everyone would recognize and be comfortable to see. The 1st Floor is designed for the elderly and the disabled in mind. So it's in the ADA ready if not compliant. And that will allow like a sorely missing part of the housing market for the elderly, which is a growing, again, a growing demographic that we need a lot of housing for. To allow them to age in place longer.
Brendan McCluskey:So it defers like a lot of the end of life costs and assisted living and whatnot as long as we possibly can. The upper two floors are designed for a world class family. Now this family could be all related to each other. It could be two separate families. We're agnostic to it.
Brendan McCluskey:Like the idea is to allow the market to do what the market wants to do. Right? Let the market operate freely. Again, I'm a very much a free market believer. Right?
Brendan McCluskey:And like, but I believe that we need to bring better products to the free market than what we're currently doing. And then lastly, what's really cool is the Tivoli Eco Village, which we've been awarded preconstruction on. So that's a 100 units and another so it's a whole neighborhood development. And what's cool about that is that it's gonna be incorporating microgrid technology. So on top of solar, we're gonna be doing battery backup storage and other sort of resiliency sort of technologies.
Brendan McCluskey:Why that's important is that our national grid is also under huge strain and like the growth man, right? I mean, I've been pretty vocal about like how aggressive our year over year growth of energy generation demand and capacity is like doubling every year right now. So what we're doing is we're basically building a small neighborhood that is gonna be resilient. So if there was ever like a catastrophic failure of the grid, this little neighborhood access is an oasis within Baltimore. Right?
Brendan McCluskey:But like the thing is like we wanna build everything like this. We wanna build like, yeah, a whole patchwork. And this is how you engineer resiliency into the grid for the twenty first century.
Carol Cone:That that's amazing. So what advice would you give to young people who wanna go into construction, but they wanna go into sustainable construction?
Brendan McCluskey:Young people who wanna go into construction, like, you know, they'll focus on, like, the engineering degrees, but it's not necessary. Like, learn as much as you possibly can. Because, again, where I think the real places of innovation and where I think the industry is going is the human mind's ability to connect dots across various disciplines. I think that's where I think the greatest degree of innovation we're gonna see moving forward in construction and really across the economy is our ability to connect dots from things that seem very disconnected. And again, I would be humble, get out there, get dirty, and just be open minded.
Carol Cone:And are you using AI in terms of I know that you're a data gatherer because you wanna share it with others. Are you using AI in your work?
Brendan McCluskey:We are. What we're doing is we're basically putting our systems and our practices with artificial intelligence to do, like, again, a hundred, two hundred of the same thing over and over. It's really ideal for machine learning. So what we're basically looking to do is basically engineer up a a virtual project management agent and or superintendent agent. That what we'll do is it'll drive all sorts of efficiencies and productivity issues and and basically minimize what I would call cost leakage that happens on the job site through lack of communication and documentation.
Carol Cone:Fabulous. So we like to end our show with some fast answers, really brief. So we're gonna put you through these. So what's the one word that best describes the Baltimore you're working to help build? One word.
Carol Cone:Resolve. Resolve. Okay. What keeps you hopeful on the days this work feels really hard?
Brendan McCluskey:There's not a day that doesn't feel really hard. Hope is the only thing that's getting me through it.
Carol Cone:What's one lesson Baltimore has taught you about resilience or community that you couldn't have learned anywhere else?
Brendan McCluskey:I think I described like how it was hard getting started and how I kinda got two black eyes and a bloody nose in this first couple years, right? Walking around these neighborhoods, you see how much harder some of these communities have faced than any of this like minor tribulations that I faced with. So you know, maybe it's the Catholicism rubbing off again where it's like just shut about your problems and focus on helping somebody else.
Carol Cone:What's one small action people can take to make their communities more equitable today?
Brendan McCluskey:Examine where your skill sets are and just find somewhere where you help just a person. And it can be a complete stranger. In fact, sometimes those are the best people to help.
Carol Cone:And if you could leave our listeners with one idea or feeling today of what we discussed, what would it be?
Brendan McCluskey:Carol, to be perfectly honest with you, don't me wrong. I sometimes feel as if like I'm a Don Quijote out here. Like I feel as if I'm a crazy man, like try to like tackle climate change, housing, poverty, all the energy, all of it. Right? And like, you know, one can one's ego can make them concerned that they're gonna look foolish.
Brendan McCluskey:Who cares? Right? Like who who really cares? Like get out there, roll up your sleeves and and just work a problem. Like, just don't be don't let pride get in your way.
Brendan McCluskey:Like, just focus on what is the right thing to do and how can you how can you be the change that you wanna see in the world.
Carol Cone:That's beautiful. So I always love to give the last word to our guest. And you've had phenomenal insights and sharing with great humility, Brendan. What would you like to leave our listeners with?
Brendan McCluskey:You only get what you get.
Carol Cone:You only get what you give. Brilliant, wonderful, heartfelt, humble. And I am thrilled to have you on Purpose three sixty, and I wish you so much. Best wishes to take your vision and that others will, you know, embrace it and that you'll be helping to bring hope and housing and opportunity to so many people. So thank you, Brendan McCluskey.
Brendan McCluskey:Carol, thank you so much for the opportunity to put a spotlight on what is the this good work that we're all doing together here in Baltimore. And just so you're aware, we are bringing it elsewhere. Like, we we are very intentional about doing this in a way that we were to share our knowledge to Chicago, to Cincinnati. These are places that have reached out to me already. So, like, you know, once we figure this thing out and we fine tune the engine, we're gonna share.
Carol Cone:This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristen Kenny at Carole Cone On Purpose. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at Tru Story FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.