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*Winner - Best Tech Podcast - 2025 Quill Podcast Awards*
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. While addressing various aspects of the housing supply chain is essential, no single approach can fully solve the challenges we face in scaling housing production. So, what's the blueprint for growth?
In November 2023, DIGITAL — Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies — launched its Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The program brings together collaborative teams of industry leaders to accelerate technology-driven approaches that are driving real, tangible growth for British Columbia's housing production sector.
Amy Vilis, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at DIGITAL, chats with innovators doing groundbreaking work within DIGITAL's Housing Growth Innovation Program to develop and implement technology-based solutions within British Columbia's housing sector across the full scale of end-to-end production. These conversations showcase how ideas are making it into the real world where they can become comprehensive, viable and, best of all, achievable solutions to accelerate housing production for British Columbians.
It's tough, know, when someone doesn't show up or we can't find workers with the skills we need. It really creates this domino effect and that can mean serious delays for the whole project. Yeah, having skills is really important, but trust and reliability are too.
construction industry is critical to our country's health. Our housing, our infrastructure, and our economy all depend on it. But do we have enough people to get all these important projects done? Our government is betting big on new homes to help solve the housing crisis. It says it plans to build nearly 4 million homes by 2031. But who is going to build all those places? There's already a construction worker shortage in this country. According to a report by the Royal Bank of Canada, we could need
more than half a million additional construction workers on average just to build all the homes that are going to be needed between now and 2030. When 700,000 skilled trade workers are set to retire between 2019 and 2028, it's clear the construction industry needs to start attracting fresh talent now. What will it take to solve construction's people problem? Maybe it's time to take a look at not just who they're hiring, but how they're going to break new ground.
I'm Don Schaeffer, today I'm talking to folks actively working to solve the construction industry's labor pains, like Kevin Brittleton from Vantana Construction, whose job it is to make sure the right people show up to work and move quickly to help fill gaps when they don't. Amy Villas joins us from Digital, where her role as Director of Housing Growth Innovation gives her a front-row view of technological advancements making a difference now. And John Reed,
brings his innovation into the fold. Faber Connect, a platform designed to connect workers with the gigs they need to develop their skills and advance their careers. Now that we've got our crew, let's get to work.
Kevin Griddleton is the field operations manager at Ventana Construction. He's in charge of recruiting, managing, and dispersing trades and labor on multiple sites across BC's Lower Mainland. A certified great place to work, Ventana Construction is focused on building a strong employee culture with folks like Kevin at its heart. So I used to be a superintendent, so I did work on site previously, but for my current role I'd...
Usually start my mornings in the office dealing with emails, any kind of incidents, people who've called in sick, making sure that they're covered if the sites need any replacements or things like that. Just dealing with any emails that have come in overnight. And then usually I'll go to the sites. I'll try and go to the sites probably once every two weeks for a variety of reasons. I do review meetings with everyone once a year or after three months for new hires. So usually I'll use that as an excuse to go to a site and have a chat with the people on that site. The supervisors see if there's any issues with the guys.
anyone I should check in in particular if someone's maybe having some trouble or struggles on site. Yeah, just checking with the guys and see how things are going for them. If they need any support, sometimes encouraging them to sign up for training, say their apprenticeships and stuff like that. Just to make sure they're on track with things, just giving them whatever they need to do their jobs. And then also relocating anyone who needs to be moved. Sometimes it's because of lack of work. Sometimes it's just the demand on other sites.
They need to pull someone just for a few days or for long-term just to have the team that's required to do the work. I guess you've got a pretty good view of the construction worker experience. Yeah, exactly. That's basically my entire job dealing with people. So now I don't actually deal with the construction side other than to coach the lead hands and foremen on how to approach the leadership and management of the team and also to organize themselves and help them prepare for moving into superintendent roles one day. How many people does your team manage?
And are they mainly working on projects around the lower mainland? My team is at the moment around 80. A couple of years ago during the busy period, we were about 140. And then on top of that, we were up to about 60 temp labor. So total team of 200 at that time. So yeah, just trying to coordinate all of those guys, making sure that the sites have got what they need. And obviously when you have 200 people, there's a lot more people who can't make it for one reason or another.
that time things were very busy so we had to make sure that we gave the guys what they needed on site to be able to do things. Yeah so we predominantly work in Greater Vancouver. We do sometimes go outside of that mostly just the Lower Mainland so Squamish, Mission. We have a school that was starting in Mission a secondary school and we also have a couple of jobs in Chilliwack right now. Well one now we did have two and then sometimes we'll go to Kelowna or Vernon and stuff like that. Usually
If a client requests it, our motto at the company is relationships to build on. So we tend to work with repeat clients very often. mentioned that you're working on a school project. I'm curious if that's the type of project that Vantana is known for. We have schools. We're doing a rec center in Burnaby, the Burnaby Lake rec center right now. We also did the rec center in Poco. We do a lot at UBC. We built their biomedical sciences building, which we finished end of 2024. And then also some residences.
two wood frames and a tower for student and staff, which includes a daycare as well. Yeah, we do have a variety of different stuff commercial, a lot of rental housing right now. We work with Squamish Nation and BC Housing on a few projects. And then we're also building the First Nations Health Authorities Head Office in North Vancouver right now. That's some critical infrastructure your teams are building. Yeah, that's something that our employees often give feedback on. They enjoy the fact that they get to work on things that contribute to the community and
that they can then use sometimes with their families if they live in the area. you concerned that a lot of critical tradespeople will be retiring soon? You think there's enough new recruits to fill that gap? Yeah, so I recently attended a youth in trade fair for high school students. The turnout was less than we would have hoped for. And that has really been a theme since I've been in this role for the last six years. I often work with youth in trade program in Vancouver and some other trade programs from high school regional bodies that try and encourage people to get into the trades.
And there's never an overwhelming amount of interest. I did some interviews for the Youth in Trade program a couple of years ago and across all of Vancouver, there was only six people who were interested in carpentry. And then we obviously have a lot of guys over 50 or even over 60 who are approaching retirement. And it's definitely concerned in the lack of new entrants into the industry. The one thing I would say is that we do see more people come into the industry after they've maybe gone to university or tried other careers.
I often see people who've been in culinary careers who decided to go and do something different. So we do get some kind of late twenties, early thirties or older who are starting for the first time in construction or have been working in labor positions and decide they want to take a trade. So it's not that there's no new people, but it would be great if we could encourage more young people. This is a great AI resilient careers and you can make a lot of money doing it for a long time. It's been the maker of a lot of people's lives in terms of.
establishing themselves and buying homes, starting families. It's pretty hard to beat in terms of the number of opportunities for high paying jobs that you can get. mentioned that this type of work is AI resilient, which is interesting. You'd think that kind of job security would be attractive to more young people, especially in the age of AI. Yeah, absolutely. A few years ago, they had a study that said the last thing that could be replaced by robots and AI was a plumber because it's the most technically difficult thing to program and to have.
the dexterity to do the job that they do. But I'd say that goes across the board for most trades. If you were to expand that list of which ones are the last to be replaced, I'd say most of them would be construction related. It's a changing environment. There's lots going on. Things are constantly moving. It's a pretty interesting career as well. So that's the other reason to get into it. It's like no two days are going to be the same in construction. these benefits, you're noticing that less and less young people are getting into this line of work, which has to have an impact on the job site.
So let's paint a picture of what that looks like. What happens on a project when you don't have the team you need to do the critical work? So whenever there's a kind of situation where a trade that's crucial on critical path, which just means that the path that they're on is the timeline for the project goes through that path, then it has a cascade effect where every trade that's following has to then be delayed in order to allow the team to catch up, whoever it was that was supposed to be doing the work.
And that can sometimes have knock-on effects in terms of if the following trades have other obligations on other sites, they may miss the window that they had for you to do the work on your site. And that can then add days onto the total length of the project, which costs time and money and usually a lot of frustration for everyone else trying to coordinate the changes. So yeah, there's a really big impact when you don't have the team that you need to do critical work. So I'd say that it's more common actually that we don't have enough qualified people.
do the work then we don't have people turning up. Generally most construction professionals are reliable in terms of being where they say they're going to be on the day that they say they're going to be but a lot of times it's just that the older guys who have the experience there's just not enough of them and the young people coming in again we don't attract them from a young age so sometimes the supervisors or the tradesmen maybe don't have the right qualifications and experience to do the work and sometimes that can cause issues and quality control issues that have to be rectified later which also delays the project.
So adequate training opportunities available to these young folks is going to be more important than ever. Absolutely. Yeah. One of the things that we have faced is a lack of available courses for people who want to do apprenticeships. This was a big problem in 2023, 2024. It was over a year wait to get your level one apprenticeship. And that can dissuade people from even going and doing their apprenticeship because they think, well, if I have to wait a year to do level one and I've already been doing it for a year and then I have, you know,
They kind of extrapolate those delays and sometimes they might decide, okay, this is going to take too long. I'm going to try something else. And I find that when you do lose someone from the industry, they very rarely will come back. So I think that's one thing that we could do is to try and make sure the availability of training and maybe increase the support for the training in terms of financial aid and things like that. With the fees and the books and all that stuff for the people who do want to get trained is going to be very beneficial if the government decided to help with that stuff.
So how has the hiring landscape changed throughout your career? Yeah, I'd say at Ventana we have a different approach to most of the maybe smaller companies. I'm sure some of the bigger companies take a similar approach to us, but I will do a phone screen and an interview and a reference check. And then sometimes we will do trial placements as well to make sure that we get the right people in the right roles because we found the consequences of having the wrong people in the wrong role. Right role. takes a lot of time to deal with that.
My experience in the industry before Ventana is a lot of it was done just off a resume and a phone call. And it was hired by the supervisor on site without necessarily the correct training on how to vet people and to ensure that they're hiring the right people. And a lot of it was also just like friends of a friend. At Ventana, we do have a referral program for our workers because we find that having a referral from a worker who we know to have good character and skill is about as good as you can get for a guarantee they're going to fit into the team.
We found that our employees don't really recommend people unless they're very confident in the fact that they're going to fit into the kind of culture that we have here. Because it's not just about the skill, right? Yeah. Are you going to be a good person to work with? To be honest, that's more important to me. I usually hire for character and train for skill. I would rather have someone who has a good attitude, is reliable, and is willing to learn than someone who has a lot of skill and causes problems for the team.
Not every construction company has a Kevin. Someone whose sole purpose is to ensure sites are adequately staffed and workers are showing up to a supportive environment where they can truly do their best. While Kevin and his team are doing the work to build a culture young people might like to become part of, tech innovations might be able to help pick up the slack when resources fall short. Could a more technologically enabled construction industry appeal to the younger generation
it needs so desperately to attract. Our next guest knows a lot about that, and the way she arrived here gives her a deeply nuanced point of view. I'm Amy Villas. I'm the Director of Housing Growth Innovation Program at Digital. And I can tell you a little bit more about Digital. It's a Canadian global innovation cluster for digital technologies. And my work is at the intersection of housing production and technology. So I spend my days with builders, regulators, innovators, asking
How do we deliver homes using digital tools, innovation, new training models, things like that to unlock production of housing on the ground? And I lead this through an initiative through our provincial government here in British Columbia. Is it me or do I hear hammering in the background? Yeah, right behind me we've got a construction site and they're working away and a very traditional duplex being built right next door. That's perfect. You know, it's a great set.
Yeah, I arranged it just for today. So how did you come to this line of work? I'm curious. What's your background? Yeah. So I started my housing journey in the nonprofit sector in the downtown East side. So for some of the larger housing providers, the Portland Hotel Society look out. So I worked within that space and seeing the need front line of what we need for housing in BC and Vancouver in particular.
and looked at where I could take this and what really needs to happen, which is production of housing. So I worked at the city of Vancouver for five years looking specifically at how to expedite social housing construction. So in their regulatory environment, how can we remove barriers to get things done quicker? And it led into the only way to sit in that space is to look at innovation and technology to help solve some of these regulatory barriers.
and time and expediting different things. So it kind of went from there into when this program was created, I was hired to come over. And it's been two years now since we started this program. I'm curious when you take your experience from the downtown East side and you look at what you're doing now, there's a lot of buzzwords out there like sustainability and affordable housing. How do you put all those things together? I almost want to say nowadays, I don't think we should on the backs of producing housing.
I think you'd throw in sustainability, affordability, social justice. There's so much that we're putting on the backs of housing production that it's actually getting to that point where it's not cost effective, the timing's surrounded in it, because competing priorities are just that. Are you putting sustainability over the level of affordability, the design changes you make to meet those sustainability thresholds are increasing the costs.
I feel like now there is that step back for me going all of those things, yes, are important, but at the cost of actually producing this housing or like getting those levels of affordability that aren't there anymore because we've demanded so much on the back of our housing. That's a big piece for me right now is stripping back what it actually takes to build a home and where our priorities lay and understanding how we can align them.
in a current market and a current market situation right now is we're not building homes because the cost of delivery is too high. So is that the only issue or are there a number of key issues? I think that there's a number of key issues, but if you're to ask some of my lovely developer friends, what the key issue here right now is they're not building new product because they can't sell it. So pre-sales are in the toilet. So it's a very uncertain market with financial instability around the cost of delivery of a unit.
it's too expensive for people to purchase. So that has something to do with it. But when we can lock in as time goes on, if we can secure pipeline, that pipeline needs to be built by folks. And it's part of our narrative today is around workforce. We need the people to build the homes and there definitely is gonna be a lot of through the end to end actors that are producing the homes, whether it's the labor force that are building them or the regulators that are.
ensuring that they're built safely. We see constraints on that level as well with retirement rates and lack of uptick in the labor trades markets over the past 10 years. there a shortage of people or a shortage of alignment between projects and talent? I love that question because I think I might go against the grain a little bit. We're going to see shortages of people with certain skills. We have very audacious build numbers being thrown out by our federal government and build Canada homes.
how many homes we wanna build. We have retiring building officers, chief building officers. There is gonna be a big vacuum of retiring building officials to make sure that these homes are built correctly. So you take the volume of homes, you take how many building officials we have, and I think maybe only 5,000 of them nationally. So you're like, how are you gonna get those two don't marry up? So I think that we have a lack of some folks and then...
As we change how we build homes in new modern methods of construction, offsite manufacturing, when we lean into that, which is a buzzword you can't get away from nowadays, we're not using people maybe the most accurately, or if you've got a workforce of laborers, are they using their tickets or their skills in the right place? And so I think, you know, might not be a shortage in some, it might be realigning where these people are being used and how they're being used. You don't need a skilled carpenter.
on a manufacturing plant floor, but you need someone with multiple trades. So someone that could put in a level of plumbing into an interior wall panel that you need more multi-skilled. I'm curious, you were talking about innovation. Does innovation and housing risk becoming purely about speed and output? Where does the worker experience fit in? I think a huge piece of technology and innovation that has happened in this space has been about
work environment related, health and safety. So there are helmets with virtual reality tools that help with safety checklists. There's more monitoring available for providing those supportive environments. When you start building offsite in modern methods of construction, you're alleviating all the dust associated when you're cutting steel in the environment, the noise. As we progress with these modern methods and embed them,
the work environment does become a better environment for trades, especially in that offsite manufacturing space where you could be doing it in the comfort of a warehouse that is heated and not out in the elements. So there's quite a few evolving pieces there that will speed up production that use modern methods like robotics and other things, but provide a more interesting engaged workforce as well.
I think about my 17 year old and the conversations we have about entering into the trades. They don't want old processes. They are very digitally enabled. They spend their whole time on their phones and want to be able to engage very different in how they learn and implement things. So new tech is appealing to attracting those participants. And we have to think, okay, who are we building the trades for and how?
and they're going to want a more digitally enabled, innovative way of doing work. You know, it's funny, I have a new house being built, three houses down our road, and it's interesting to watch it get built and come together. But I see all the tradespeople on their iPhones. My day, see the young tradespeople on their iPhones, the old people I don't see so much on their iPhones, which is interesting. So there is a change. With the industry changing so much with so many people retiring, I think I read
a half a million to 700,000 people are retiring in the next five years. What happens to the industry? Who is being trained? Where are the tradespeople coming from? Yeah, very, very good question. And the second part to unpack is what about the intellectual property that those people that have been doing this work for 30 years, they're going to take it with them. So we're going to get that vacuum.
We're using technology, AI products with a project we're doing called AI Inspector, where currently senior building inspectors are going out on a site, capturing with a language model. know, we're on this type of site. What normally fails? Because they know, because they've been doing this for 30 years, we're in this type of soil conditions. We need to double check that they made the footings deep enough as an example.
And you know that because they've been working in a region and they know that because they've had to fail X amount of projects beforehand on that. So we're capturing, this project's capturing that narrative and that knowledge base before it goes. And then we're able to harness it with a language model to help support a new building inspector that comes in and is new and is learning that they'll be able to access that information as well as the builder themselves that can go, okay.
Using this information, I know that in this location, we need to make sure that those footings are deep enough, given the soil conditions. So there's some transfer there. And I think that is going to be very useful. How we attract the trades is the other part of this. So I think over generations, you know, we pushed for BAs, like how many people have bachelor degrees? We pushed this higher education scenario and left some of those trades out.
But meeting them where they're at and where they need to be, the economy for generations right now, it's hard. You're not going to do a four-year degree to walk out with a ticket. During the boom of Silicon Valley when they needed programmers, you're not going to do a four-year computer science degree to program Python. You could learn it in a boot camp environment in six weeks, and that's how we did it. That's how we upskilled when we needed to. So I think there's a lot of space.
currently for looking at bootcamp style things, learning while you're earning. And that's the beauty of Faber and the project that we're working with Faber on is that you can see your skills and your pathways while you're still earning a paycheck so you can pay your rent and you don't have to take off. And when you decide that there is something that really interests you because you've tried a few different things, going and doing school, you de-risk.
and you're not going to go, okay, I'll go to plumbing and then realize you hate plumbing. you talk about Faber Connect? Can you unpack what it is and how it works? Yeah. So as we were looking at how we can most impact the workforce, as part of my program, we wanted to avoid a dirt road. So if we're talking about housing production, we wanted to focus on one of the most important elements is the people.
So looking at Faber, they have an amazing connection with over 100,000 labor workers and they've been around since 2018 and have facilitated over 40,000 gigs. So they've been connecting people to work and know where the people are at and what they're after. So it seemed a no brainer to me to work with an established company like this that could support the workers where they're at.
So we chose it because it's not just staffing tool, like someone can get someone that comes and helps support a build. It's going to be able to provide that learning and data so people can log in, earn some micro credentials, see where pathways are, connect with opportunities to try a new type of trade to see if that's the pathway that they'd like to go, have recommendations given to them so where it's not clear.
And I certainly at the beginning of my university career could have utilized someone helping direct a little bit of an option or path through agentic learning around that as well, and making it more relatable for the generation that we need to start engaging and coming into trades. It's that proverbial meeting them where they're at.
Speaking of meeting them where they're at, this seems like an opportune time to meet John Reed. He's the co-founder of the platform Amy just mentioned. We got a chance to talk with him about Faber and how it's creating a new pipeline of fresh talent with its fresh approach to connecting workers with construction gigs. And like a lot of tech startups, John's got one of those inspiring bootstrap origin stories. It actually started off a Facebook post. I was in a fraternity at UBC and one of my friends had posted on
our internal Facebook page saying like, Hey, I want to start a business. It's going to help construction companies connect with construction workers and it's going to be on an app. And I was like, this is like a green light moment. I had the entrepreneurial bug, wasn't loving being in school at the time. basically from coming into construction industry of trying to find a job, trying to get paid for that job, all the other things our software does. And I was like, I had that aha moment.
And that was basically when I replied to him and I said, Hey man, I think this is going to be like an amazing idea. Let's meet up. We met up a week or two weeks later, talked about vision and where we saw this business going nine years in, we're still here, which is wild to think. What started as a random Facebook post to now being in four major provinces in Canada and one major U S city. I look back a lot at where we are now and where I was six years ago when I was sleeping on a couch in San Francisco.
two of my best friends trying to build this business, right? In the most expensive city in the world and not having enough money to be able to have an apartment or anything like that, right? And we're sleeping on couches in a fraternity dorm room at Berkeley trying to basically build this business. And I look back at that and I think that was like some of the best years of my life, right? Obviously not a care in the world, just laser focused obviously on trying to build this platform up. And I think.
That's the great and magical thing about a startup is it's not about the destination. It's about the journey that gets you there. And yeah, we've had a lot of fun, obviously along the way, which, you know, I love talking about that story because you know, the Jeff Bezos, all those entrepreneurs started in some way that capacity. And it's been a really exciting ride over last nine years. Which is very cool. It's got to feel great. I think what's most inspiring for me personally is seeing this tool A develop, but also
Seeing the workers and having them get access to all these gigs on this platform, being able to work with construction companies day in and day out and hear where their pain points are and actually bringing in an innovative tool that's making positive changes to the industry. think we sometimes unfortunately get into this spiral of technology where it's like all these fancy tools and everything like that. it's like our tools actually fixing a real world problem and I see it. It's not just some nice to have thing. what's your background? Yeah. So.
Background's little bit all over the place, but worked a little bit in construction, kind of high school summers, university summer, doing some carpentry work. Definitely wasn't the best carpenter that was out there, that for sure. But like getting out in the field and getting my hands dirty and being outside. So that was obviously a big advantage, but definitely saw in the construction industry, the lack of the ability to find work. And so that's obviously why we're here today at Tabor. Can you unpack what you saw, what was happening, what was going on in the industry?
Yeah. So I think the biggest challenge that I saw was I knew that construction was obviously a booming industry. I knew I wanted to get into construction when I was in high school, first year university pays really well, very flexible, obviously in the summertime, but there wasn't really a way to just enter the market. You could obviously go on job boards and send out your resume and apply, but you'd obviously be shuffled in with hundreds of people that were looking for maybe the same job.
Or you had to know someone that was in the construction industry, right? Like I got lucky, my friend's dad was in the construction industry, so I was able to go work for him. But a lot of the construction industry is very heavily word of mouth. And so when we were getting to the development stage, we're like, well, how did you get a job in construction? And my co-founder is like, well, my friend's dad was also in construction. And so kind of got our brains thinking of what happens if there was a platform that showed all available construction jobs, what they paid. And basically everything going on with famine.
Yeah, that's obviously why we've developed Faber. Can you walk us through what Faber is and how it works? Faber is a two-sided marketplace where construction companies can basically go onto our platform and post gigs. These gigs can be one day, these gigs can be six months. These gigs go out to a large database of construction workers. have about over hundred thousand workers in our database. And these workers basically have a mobile app on their phone where they can see all of the gigs in their area.
We've matched people that are 800 meters away from construction sites, but they see everything that's going on with the gig. So they can see like how much the gig pays, what the gigs description is, et cetera. So we're really putting the power back into the construction workers hands, opposed to like how it's currently done today. Some people compare platforms like this to Uber for trades. Why is that comparison incomplete or misleading? Yeah, I think Uber is a really good example. It's the easiest one to obviously compare us to.
being a two-sided marketplace, but I think the big differentiator between Uber and Faber and the model is Uber obviously has a standardized rate when it comes to being a driver, right? But on the Faber platform, you can have skills like plumbing or carpentry or electrical and everything obviously is different when it comes to durations and pays and things like that, opposed to Uber, which is very point A to point B driving.
The other big one is Uber doesn't allow their drivers to actually set the rate that they want to get paid. It's all standardized by Uber. On the Fabor platform, we actually allow all of the workers to choose what they want to get paid basically on that gig. So that's obviously putting the power back into the actual worker's hand. I think that's really big. And then obviously choosing the ability to pick up gigs. We don't force any of these gigs onto anyone. Uber obviously sends out these rides and tries to keep the drivers busy as much as possible.
You could be a college kid who wants to work two days a week in construction, or you could be someone who is new to the construction industry and wants to find a gig that's going to potentially land them into a great career path. And I think that's what differentiates us a lot from Uber is we're a stepping stone into the industry. Can you unpack how trades get paid? mean, how do they all charge different rates based on experience and qualifications or?
Basically workers log onto our platform. set up their profiles. They're able to put in all of their skills, experience, et cetera. That gets verified by our system. And then we obviously start linking them to gigs based on their experience, qualifications, certifications, et cetera. And then basically they can just set a bid on every single gig. So for example, if a carpenter says, Hey, can you frame this retain wall for $50 an hour sort of deal that carpenter could be like, yeah, look, I'm actually going to only do it for $65 an hour. Right. So.
You're creating a lot more power vacuum for the actual construction worker to be able to pick up jobs and choose the rate. So I'm trying to understand more because I understand that there's going to be a real drop off in the labor force coming up in the next decade with a half a million or more people retiring. How does Faber fill in that hole? How does Faber work in that environment? Yeah, that's a great question. think fundamentally when we started this business, looking at the data,
Whether it's the amount of people entering the construction workforce, especially young people compared to the people retiring. Our goal at Favour was to make it as easy as possible in order to enter the industry. The other thing that's really nice about our platform is workers are actually able to upskill themselves on our platform. So our goal is obviously taking someone with no skills and giving them the power to obviously upskill themselves to become a tradesperson. And we're seeing this real world experience basically by
workers on our platform getting endorsed for the skills that they're learning out in the actual field themselves. So yeah, we've been able to take workers that have had no skills using our gig economy and turning them into people that have skills and actually upskilling them. how does upskilling work? Yeah. So basically workers that have no skill on our platform will start off as a general laborer. They'll continue to start working jobs. We'll collect a lot of the data on those jobs that that person's working or in this case gigs.
and those workers will get endorsed by the companies that they're working for. So for example, if I'm a general laborer and now I operate a power drill, that's a new skill that I've unlocked. And during the approval process on that hour that that person is working for, they'll get endorsed by that subcontractor and then can upskill themselves. If you help connect an employee or a laborer to a gig, what keeps them on that gig?
If the worker performs really well and is doing really well in their gig, they can obviously get extended on that gig to be able to continue to keep freelancing on that project. But you know, our goal is never to handicap anyone to go in and taking another career path within the industry. And we see it all the time. We see construction companies that get connected to someone on our platform and eventually bringing them on into their full-time workforce. And like, that's great for us because we're obviously bringing more people into the construction industry, which is
what we're most passionate about, right? We think that there's a huge broken piece of getting people into construction. I think just access is the biggest issue, right? Technology can bridge that gap and we're seeing it in real world examples. Does this platform change the culture on the job site or just the intake process?
No, I think that 100 % impacts the culture that's on the job site, right? For example, we have a very transparent glass door rating and review system, right? Workers get rated and reviewed on our platform and contractors get rated and reviewed on our platform. Back in the day, I don't think I ever got a, you're doing an amazing job when I worked in construction. And now today, maybe it's not verbal, but it's a prompt that that worker now gets saying, hey, you did a really great job on this gig. Here's a thumbs up.
If I was a construction worker, I would feel pretty good about that. If someone was telling me I'm doing a great job. And also if you're not doing a great job, you need that indicator, right? And so our platform is allowing more transparency into the construction industry, which I don't think happens currently. And that's not only for workers. That's also for the people that obviously post these gigs. It's important for these construction companies to realize, you know, maybe your superintendent isn't the greatest person to be running a job or whatnot. And so.
Yeah, I think it changes the culture quite a bit. Also, it's really amazing. It's like we've seen where someone will post a gig for five people for two weeks. And now those five people who might not known each other in construction now do get connected with each other. Right. And they're working this gig for two weeks and they're able to go and work more gigs together. Right. So yeah, I think we're definitely changing the paradigm there when it comes to the culture on job sites. Any resistance from old guys like me with lots of gray hair to technology.
Yeah, Dawn, I think we still see quite a little bit of that. I don't know how many people still call the local pizza shop and talk to the person at the front desk for 15 minutes about the specials, but unfortunately it's construction industry still has that quite a bit and change management's really difficult. Everyone and we're all humans. We all do things the same way for a number of years and you get stuck in that rut, but we're able to build tools and different workflows and processes in order to make it possible for the gray hair construction guy setter out there.
Yeah, I think that's what's so amazing about Faber is that we adapt. We adapt to the young generation, but we're also flexible for the older generation, right? At the end of the day. Well, I would think you'd be making my job as a site manager a lot easier. Yeah. Yeah. You would think that, but unfortunately some people just are stuck in their ways when it comes to not wanting to use technology at all. It's easy as a young person to say, Hey, you should be using this, but you know, you'd be surprised how many people still print boarding passes at airports. So yeah, I think it's just a time thing.
So if I was a site manager and you were standing in front of me, what would your elevator pitch be? Yeah, I think my elevator pitch would be Faber is the best platform to find labor because you're able to actually see what you're getting prior to that person entering your job site. You're able to see ratings, reviews, past job history, all the certifications that that person closes, how many gigs they've worked on, how many hours they've accompanied to those gigs, how their overall performance was.
opposed to what's currently out there where you just call a temp agency and they just send you whoever's either at the front door or whoever's on their call sheet. So we're putting the power back into the construction superintendent's hands as well at saying, look, no, like I don't want to take anyone or yeah, look, I'm going to pick out of the five people that picked up this gig. Sabre is basically just the middleman in between both parties. And we obviously manage all the compliance and all the payroll that obviously runs through the product.
and makes it super streamlined and easy for construction companies to access these people for short-term, long-term or medium length gigs. So if I'm one of the guys on the roof, three houses down from where I live, that's looking for a gig next week, what would you say to me? Yeah, I would say that construction is heavily project-based and it's great to hear that you're an amazing trades person in the industry, but there's going to be times where your construction company that you're fully employed with slows down.
This is a great opportunity for you to obviously fill up your schedule and pick up gigs on your accord at your rate. if this works perfectly, what changes structurally in construction? You know, I think we'll definitely see a lot more productivity increases. You'll have less people that are no-showing, but you'll have the right people that are in the right gigs. You'll see a huge productivity swing in the overall construction industry because the right people are on the right projects.
We'll obviously at the end of the day, be able to meet demand and meet these tight schedules that the industry is demanding right now. We've talked about the upscaling facilitated through the Faber app, but I've heard you're also partnering with Amy and Digital to add training opportunities to the platform. Can you talk about that? So it's a super interesting new product that we're experimenting with and testing, but our platform will allow these workers to connect with third party training providers.
Faber isn't handling any the training internally. We're not doing any certifications or anything like that on the Faber platform, but we're basically allowing third party vendors, whether they're full safe training providers, safety training providers, or carpentry training providers, access to our database of workers to be able to upskill them. So if I'm a worker that wants to unlock a safety ticket, they can basically go into the course section on the Faber app and they could connect with third party training providers.
And we're the only product on the market in Canada that's going to have access for construction workers to be able to get this service. That's really exciting. I've not heard of anything like that. Yeah. Again, it's going to allow construction workers the visibility into gigs that they might not have been able to see before because they don't actually have those certifications. yeah, digital is playing a really big role in obviously getting us access to these third party training providers. So yeah, I'm really excited to get this launched here pretty soon. That's very cool.
I would think that if I was a project manager, your platform will allow me to be much more efficient at my job. Yeah, 100%. I think the nice thing about Faber is the fact that we scale as well. It's not a pen and paper solution. It's not a, hey, pick up the phone and call the front desk and hope you get what you get. It's all self-sufficient, which is great. It puts the power back in not only the gig workers hands, but also the construction company's hands.
We're not forcing anyone to do anything. We're just giving you a platform to be able to connect with these people. And I think that's what's super powerful about our product. think it's really exciting. It's really cool. The way you bring both together, you offer unique services for both. Yeah, for sure. think it's a great service happening. And I know that we spent a lot of time talking a little bit about what Favour does. We've talked a little bit about how we are tackling the labor shortage. And I think a little bit on how the industry is tackling the labor shortage and
My biggest ask from anyone that's listening to this podcast would definitely be take a second and review how you bring people on. You might be doing the same thing you did 20 years ago at this massive construction company that you work for to be able to find people. And that's changing and that's changing quickly. And if you're not adapting and changing to the times, you're not going to be able to get the younger generation involved within your business. So.
Yeah, I would definitely applaud anyone who can take a couple minutes and try to review how you're bringing people into your business.
After hearing John's story of using technology to disrupt the way workers get hired, I thought it would be a good idea to bring the conversation back to Kevin and Amy. What do they think the future holds for the adoption of tech innovations like these in construction? I've been in touch with Faber for a number of years. I've done meetings with the tech team to try and give them my opinions on certain things and what they maybe could do to improve the software. I think for a lot of companies that don't have someone in my role, it's a really useful tool.
And also for workers who don't necessarily have a desire to work for one company long term. And also for those who want to have maybe unorthodox schedules. They don't want to work 52 weeks a year. Maybe they don't want to work five days a week. It's far easier for them to build that kind of life for themselves on Faber. And also then they have a track record, which includes their training, references from sites they've worked on, how much time they spent working with the product.
So I think that's great to be able to see all that stuff up front and it allows people who are reliable and highly skilled to benefit from that rather than having to start fresh on every time you go to a new placement. And I know that's the case for Faber is they do have workers who are just out full time all the time and they're constantly requested and they are probably able to charge a little bit more because of the fact that they do a good job, which is great, I think. And it obviously provides that transparency to the people who are looking for the labor to know like, okay, this guy's
Been with the company for a number of years. They've had a number of positive reviews and I can see clearly what tickets they have, where they live, do they have a vehicle, all that kind of stuff.
I think where Faber really comes in at this moment in time is they have a strong group of folks that are using their site already. So you're meeting the people where they're at, you're giving them opportunities for visibility on the training elements of micro-credentials, how you can move from sweeping the floors to working in a carpentry space, or you really like plumbing, or you like landscape.
You can learn and then be shown through the algorithms of you've done these jobs, this makes sense for you to continually pursue in this space if you like it. So it's providing a really good level set of meeting the folks where they're at and using the technology and agentic AI products to help guide those decisions as opposed to leaving folks to kind of fend for themselves and just figure it out. It gives you that shoulder up.
It's really interesting as we entered into this with Faber, Faber conducted a mapping exercise to see where the reality was on the job sites, like who's sitting in what space and where are the gaps. And some of those gaps that came forward weren't a surprise that Gen Zs are trying to figure out how to navigate paying rent and working and wanting to upscale themselves.
that sort of space. But one finding was very interesting was the middle management and the lack of capacity that they have. And often it's because of retirement, because of different ways of doing things, there is this lack of connective tissue with learning from someone on site or learning the ability to know how to be a good leader because they haven't learned those skills and they're put in those positions quickly or else.
They're not evolving in space, which is sort of what you've brought up here. And what we're looking at doing is putting in some modules to help support those middle managers and how they can show up to better support the younger generation and the retirees that are coming through the system as well. What happens to housing targets if the workforce innovation doesn't accelerate? I mean, it doesn't sound like we're going to hit the housing targets that have been proposed. I think we're already seeing that.
2025, we had quite a few housing starts and we're seeing that build. need that start. There is a notion that if we have more homes, they'll become more affordable. I know the jury's out on whether those things are going to put in, but if we don't have new models for upskilling, if we don't have new models for how homes are built and we keep doing it the same way that we've done without looking for those efficiencies, I do have a digital innovation lens to this.
is that efficiencies can be found through interoperability. So the more our systems start to become digitally enabled, how they talk to each other, I think is how we're going to look at finding efficiencies. And that can be on multiple levels in such a complex system. Is the construction industry slower to adopt digital than other industries or about on par? I think it's been earmarked as the slowest next to agriculture.
Traditionally, research and development dollars in construction are very hard to come by. They sit maybe in the 13 % in a healthcare environment where they're putting 13 % towards R &D. I think the stat is like 1 % of R &D dollars make it out. Often when you're innovating in a housing space or a build space, you're putting that cost of innovation on the unit.
So it hasn't been an area where there are going to be strong investments when the bottom line is what wins bids and the bottom line is what people can afford to pay for. So it has traditionally not been seen, but we're seeing lots more digital implemented modern, you know, to support it. It's the backbone of modern methods of construction. So it's coming and then it's here and we're adopting more and more of it. So what's the question that I haven't asked that I should have?
I don't know. think that we're at a time and a place that we know... I don't often talk about the crisis, the urgency. We all know that we're all pushing towards wanting to solve for our generational issue. I've got teenagers and it's like, well, where are they going to live? Are they ever going to move out? Are they going to be able to afford somewhere? Housing is such a core reactionary piece. Housing first strategies have always been the thing that we need to implement.
And I think if we can look at ways of utilizing innovative tools to support the construction of housing and the people that need to learn how to build in a new modern methods way to make it more appealing, I think we do need to really focus energy and time in that space.
If we're going to meet housing targets and fill the construction workforce with fresh talent that can build their skills and take the reins from those retiring, maybe we need to, as Amy puts it, meet them where they're at. Providing young people with a gateway to a great career through their phone certainly sounds like a step in the right direction. As for other innovations that can help bring construction into the future, perhaps we need more willing people to take chances.
and do things differently. Anyone who likes the sound of that might want to have a word with John. So when a 22 year old comes up to you who's bored out of his mind at school and wants to know how to become an entrepreneur, what kind of advice would you give him? Yeah, that's the good question. I actually talked to a young kid who actually is on a lead from solder the school business and he's pursuing an AI platform and
The first thing I told him is congratulations. And he was like, well, what do mean congratulations? And I said, well, congrats. You made the first step. Starting your business is actually starting it. It's a big leap. So I would tell any 22 year old kid who potentially listens to this podcast is definitely follow your dreams and school is always going to be there. You can always go back. But this idea to go out and try to build something might not always be there. Right. And especially when you're young, you can fail and you can manage a risk a lot more when you're that age. So.
Definitely go for it and shoot for the stars and try to reach out to as many people as possible along the way because you never know where you're going to end up. to our guests, Kevin Bridgleton, Amy Villas and John Reed. This podcast is an Everything Podcast production. I'm Don Schaefer. Our show runner and writer is Jessica Grechik, sound engineer, John Massicar and our executive producer.
Jennifer Smith.