The Project Management Playbook | Podcast Ep. 112 | Toolbox for the Trades

Aaron Hilger, you are the CEO at smacna, the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association. I'm so excited to chat with you today. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jackie. I'm happy to be here.

I'm so psyched to talk to you. I think you've got a lot of knowledge that I'm going to hopefully unlock while we're chatting today. But before we even get into that, I want to know, how did you get into the trades and eventually become the CEO at smacna?

Sure. So I'll give you the medium length version, not the super long version perhaps, but I had the great fortune of growing up in the construction industry. So my father and grandfather were in the roofing business. We were roofing and sheet metal, primarily industrial work, a lot of public work as well, union contractors. So I got to grow up doing all of those things, which started at a very young age of, you know, visiting job sites in the summertime with dad or sometimes with Grandpa to having your first job sweeping the warehouse floor. And I'm sure I was paid for that sort of, we'll ignore the child labor law violations there. And then, you know, loading trucks, driving trucks, eventually working on crews. I did not join the union. I didn't go through the apprenticeship program, but I had a pretty good schooling and how to roof and also how to bend architectural metal. I had no intention of being part of our family company. However, after college, after I worked in Washington for about a year and a half, two years, and was finishing a master's degree, I ended up being the chief operating officer of my family's business. I ran our construction operations, which was a great experience, taught me a lot, did that for about five or six years. And then we made a strategic decision to no longer be in the unionized segment of the roofing business in upstate New York. And we, dad and grandpa went in their separate ways doing the real estate and other things. And I started running associations full time. In about 2003, I took over a company called the Builders Exchange, which was a trade association formed in the 1880s that had about when I left, about 600 members. Ran that and 12 other associations for almost 20 years and then took over smack in January of this year. Two of the groups that I worked with, with Builders Exchange were actually Smack the chapters I started working with Smack the Rochester in 2005 and Smack, the New York State in 2008.

Nice. That was a perfect medium length answer. And thank you so much for giving me the background that you did work in the trades before you started doing the association. Funny how I had no intention of working in the family business. And then you blink and you're like, wait, how did I get here?

You know, it's one of those things that happens over time. Right. You know, what I found doing political and lobbying type work in Washington is that I already had more experience than a lot of the people I was competing with. But I may not have worked for the right campaign or worked with the right individual. So I wasn't going to get a good job. So even though, I mean, I probably could have stuck it out and I'm sure the career would have been just great, I made a decision to finished my master's from GW in political management and you know, then start, you know, join the roofing business as I was doing that and got an MBA in that process because I didn't understand accounting or finance. So, you know, did a lot of different things and, you know, that was my way of collecting knowledge.

I think you're actually the first guest on the show that's ever gone from politics to. To trades. Even though you kind of. Well, you were kind of. It was. You sandwiched a politic political career in between your trades experience. And eventually, yeah, there was a little.

Bit of here and there. You know, I always was active politically and you know, in upstate New York and in my role at Billy Exchange, I was certainly very influential in this in the state politics and local politics. So that was a big focus of my work for almost 20 years in Rochester and, you know, still a focus at SMACNA National.

Nice. Very cool. So I want to know a little bit more about smacna. So recently Service Titan became a Gold Associate member or Gold Associate sponsor. I want to know what differentiates SMACNA members from other contractors.

So I think there's a couple different things that we could touch on. And you know, certainly there's great contractors that are SMACDA members and great conquerors that aren't. So I don't want to draw too broad a distinction, but to be fair, I think, you know, anybody, if you're a member of smacda, you're a union contractor. Some could say that has its pluses or minuses, but that's a business choice that our members have made that does lead to some very positive things though. They are committed to training, they fund training. They spends a real spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and energy making sure we have some of the best trained guys in the business. Guys being men or women workers in the business. And we continually reinvest in that aspect of training. So as we talk about things like ventilation verification or you know, making sure buildings aren't sick buildings, you know, our members are experts at actually making those buildings, you know, safe and effective for our kids to go to school and for us to go to work in every day. I would also say that SMACDA is a standards creating organization. We have a number of what I'm sure some would find riveting titles. I find them very exciting things like the H Vac Duct Construction Design Manual or the Architectural Design manual. There's about 40, 50 standards that we're involved with and our members use those to build great projects. They are the design standards that you will see in spec books every single day referenced by the design community. And we do a lot of technical education in those areas. I think the other thing I would add is that, you know, while we certainly have contractors that are very small and many that are very large, we have a lot of specialty folks. For instance, one of the few aerospace certified contractors in the sheet metal industry in the country is a SMACDA member. That's Kathy Kerberish, great, great individual, happens to be a member of SMACDA's board. We also have the contractors that will be on almost all of these megaprojects that are coming up in the next, you know, five, three to five years. You know, those big projects that Ford is building or the auto manufacturer, the auto manufacturers are building to produce batteries, the silicone manufacturers are building to produce chips in the United States. Those are all products we're going to do because we have the size and the bonding capacity and the technical skill to do them.

Very cool. So leader in standards, like just general baseline, best in practice standards. When it comes to all the design elements that come into all the industries that smack touches training. You're breaking into these really incredible industries and you also have access to some of these mega projects like you referenced. Now I have to tell you, I don't personally don't have any trades experience. My dad was a carpenter growing up, so I kind of, I can and I've been hosting this podcast for over a hundred episodes. So I can kind of like I could manage a water cooler conversation I think. But when it comes to union contractors, I am completely out of my depth. Service titan. A bunch of our customers early on were primarily non union. So just for my, just for my knowledge, I would love it if you could just tell me like in your mind, like what do you think is the primary Difference between union and non union. Obviously you know there's a union, but is there anything that I should know as someone who's interviewing you and getting into the space that I should be aware of?

Sure. I mean I think the, if you look at the, if you're union or non union you can look at them as two different business models. Right. The non union sector, you know, doesn't have a labor partner. What does that mean? That means the individual contractor is responsible for recruiting, training, finding workers. And some contractors are incredibly successful doing that. Their workers may or may not be portable in the sense that they may not want to move locations or work between different contractors. And that's one of the bigger, one of the bigger differences is if you're a union contractor, you're part of what's called the multi employer bargaining group. What that means is you could work for John Smith Mechanical one day and then work for Dave Smith Mechanical the next day based on hiring needs and staffing needs of those individual companies. And that transfer of movement is very fluid and very easy. In the non union sector you might be working for one company and then you get laid off, get fired. Whatever happens, you make a change, you've got to go find another job. That job isn't going to find you. There isn't a ready, there's a ready pool of contractors certainly, but they aren't necessarily connected together to make that transition easy. The workers benefits are also very different in the union sector. They are multi employer benefit plans. So that means the employees healthcare, retirement pensions, I'm sorry retirement pensions, annuity funds which are typically like 401 s are done by an ERISA trust. So those benefits follow the guy. So that worker is working for John Smith one day and his health care contribution is made to the benefit fund. He doesn't have an interruption in health care when he moves over to the other contractor. If you want to be truly fair, one could say that it sounds great having a labor partner. It sounds amazing that you can have all these workers found for you. But your labor partner doesn't always do as good a job as you'd like them to. So that's something you have to work on. I think smarts leadership does a great job. But one of the downsides of being a union contractor is you have lost some of that control. You may have picked up enough benefits for that to be a sacrifice you're willing to make or a choice you're willing to make. That's why I really describe it as it's a set of Choices in terms of how you want to run your business.

Thank you so much for that explanation. As I mentioned, my dad is a carpenter. Was a carpenter. He just retired. He was a union carpenter. So I'm just picturing him screaming as he listens back to this audio that I just asked a very simple question. So I appreciate you entertaining me. Oh, gosh.

Where did you grow up? That's a better question.

I grew up in, I grew up in Flushing, Queens.

Excellent. So he's part of the New York City local, which is the one carpenter's local in the northeast I really didn't work with, but had some friends in there.

So I was like, I could go to my bedroom and get like an old sleep shirt that has his local number on it and tell you. But that's, that's, that's all I know. Anyway, fun aside, you were talking about mega projects. So I want to know a little bit about how you and the Smackna team help contractors manage these mega projects.

So there's a lot there. There are an extraordinarily large number, somewhere between 40 and 50 megaprojects on the horizon in the next three to seven years or some timeframe like that. Not all of those projects will happen. Not all of them will have the workforce projections they say they're going to have. But the fact of the matter is they're all market changing. So for instance, the Blue Oval project in Tennessee, which is kind of on the western side of Tennessee, that project will likely employ somewhere between 750 and 1000 sheet metal workers. And there's probably union and non union collectively about 4 or 500 in that area. So you're talking about dropping projects in areas where in many cases there isn't a particularly large workforce, or if there is a large workforce in an area, what does it do to that particular market? So from the union contractor's perspective, as well as smart, the, the union we work with, you know, we are concerned about actually losing markets. You know, it's wonderful to go staff these projects. It's amazing to get all these workers on one project and even on a series of those projects. But if you do though, if you do that and you don't actually hire enough other workers or find enough workers, you actually lose the customers you already have. And those are opportunities for perhaps the other side to gain market share or competitors to gain market share. But we've seen it in many different markets where it had a mega project that perhaps all the trades were on and that megaproject ends and then you have all these workers that don't really know what to do, and the travelers go back home, and you've got to figure that out. So the number one thing that Smackdown Smart is working on is how do we staff these things? We have contractors who have made substantial investments, not just in bidding these jobs and getting ready to do them, but in some cases, they built shops next to them and they've got manufacturing facilities where they have to find 30, 40, 50, 60 workers. And those workers don't exist in that community. And you can't. You're not going to be. We. And they are not going to be successful if we steal those workers from Cleveland, Pittsford, Pittsburgh, and Rochester and Buffalo and all the other cities that people might travel from. So we got a lot on our hands to play with.

Wow, that's so interesting because, yeah, when you talk about bidding for these massive projects, you win a contract, you plan, you know, the next several years based on, we're going to have all of this work coming. But that, that labor problem that I talk about all the time on the show with non union contractors, but having to balance that with, okay, we can filter people in, but how can we do it in such a way that we're not completely upsetting this new market we're going into and not to stabilize in the one that these workers are leaving? That's what it sounds like.

Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's. It's interesting at some level that, you know, a large number of these projects will have project labor agreements on them. And, you know, the reason they have project labor agreements on them is they know that the union side can staff them. That sounds lovely. But if you staff them at the expense of the market you already have, you've actually hurt yourself long term, not made yourself stronger. So we really appreciate the support those large manufacturers are providing the trades. We have to make sure we don't actually hurt each other, hurt ourselves as we staff those projects, which we will be able to do. You know, the labor problems that you've talked about on this podcast with other people, they're very real. I mean, the pandemic certainly didn't help that it accelerated retirements that we already knew were coming from the baby boomers. And, you know, the extent to which the generations that follow were slightly smaller means you have less people competing for those jobs or wanting those jobs. And our immigration system's a mess, so we probably aren't bringing in, you know, workers that would actually take them from other countries. And if you look at the History of construction, trade unions, but also the construction industry, broadly speaking. They were waves of immigrants who built this country. It was the Germans, the Irish, the Italians that populated unions and those are the easiest things to track. But it's true for the non union sector as well, that brought their skills from whatever country they came to and then joined the industry because they needed jobs and then moved out of that industry as they got different jobs or moved into other industries. And we need some level of rational immigration policy to start filling this workforce up again, which is certainly hard to do in this political climate.

Oh, my goodness. I just want to tell you, we've only been talking for a handful of minutes, but the more and more you talk, the more I'm like, oh, his political background probably is really coming in handy in the running of smacna.

This has been, you know, I would say the last year for SMACNA as well as, you know, a number of the trade associations. But certainly for SMACNA has probably been, from a legislative and regulatory perspective, the most productive year that I certainly recall in 20 or 30 years of paying attention. You know, some of that I'll give a lot of credit to Stan Colby and his partner Dana Thompson. And Dana actually retired in July of this year. But, you know, Stan has been working on some of these issues for more than 30 years. And you know, that ranges from, you know, calculating Davis Bacon in a stronger, better, more rational way to, you know, encouraging 179D and the various tax credit programs that allow people to make better decisions about the projects that they're building or getting funding in the infrastructure acts. All that stuff are things that SMACNA has worked on and we are working on to this day. So it's a lot of fun, actually.

That's awesome. It does sound really fun. I'm going to hop around a little bit. I hope you don't mind, because this is just something that is so prominent in the industry union, non union, but in terms of filling up that workforce and finding people to fill those vacant spots from these early retirements from pandemic, you're looking at generations that are smaller than what the boomers were. You're dealing with some immigration issues that's prohibiting you from putting new people in this country into these roles that they've historically occupied before. So when you're looking at getting more workers and getting more people into the trades, what are you thinking about?

So the one thing you didn't list in there was, I think, probably the biggest flaw, which is what does K12 education look like. And how is K12 education rewarded? So if you're a high school principal or a superintendent, you're not rewarded when a kid goes into an apprenticeship program or gets a job in the trades union or non union that isn't considered a plus or a good check mark and you get a win. We report on X number of kids. X percent of kids went to a four year college or a two year college or in the military, because military is okay. But we don't talk about someone joining a four year apprenticeship program where they actually get paid to work the whole time and don't incur any college debt. I have a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees. I'm the poster child of someone who is successful because of learning. So I don't want to come across negative in any way about that path. But I think we can make stronger, better, rational choices in education if we align the incentives a little bit. And going back to the broader part of your question, I think there's a lot of things that the industry has done to illustrate that construction is a lot more interesting of a career and has a lot more path than people think it does. They think it's a bunch of big, strong, dirty guys out in a job site working all day and breaking their bodies. Sure, there's aspects of construction that are hard and everything's heavy and the work's really difficult and it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter and there's elemental things you have to deal with. And then there's a tremendous number of paths around that and through that. And you know, you can become a highly skilled worker who's an electrician or H vac or a plumber. You could be a fantastic carpenter and have an amazing living. You can become an estimator, project manager, superintendent, you can own a company. All those things are possible. And if I had to, I don't have data on it, but if I had to guess, the vast majority of our SMACNA members were started by someone who started in the trades and learned how to be a good tradesman of whatever trade they started in and then became a contractor and then survived being a contractor. So the path is, I think, quite extraordinary. We just have to tell that story. We also need to work to show kids that there are things in a contractor's shop or operations that are a lot of fun. So you've seen, I'm sure, Angie Simon and her work with the heavy metal summer experience where we bring in know kids to do, you know, they Build projects. They create things in a. In a shop. From, you know, drawing it to learning how to be safe to then actually building the darn thing that creates excitement. And, you know, some of those kids get a job right away. So those kinds of things are a lot of fun.

Yeah, I keep hearing this over. I thank you so much for indulging me. I keep hearing this answer all the time, especially in terms of the K through 12 element. Like, how do we make the trades cool again? How do we help one another in terms of correcting this false narrative that blue collar work isn't legitimate work that somehow manifested at least the years since I've been alive. And I think it's just really important to constantly reinforce that message and see, you know, over time, how can we all work together to elevate the trades as a whole? So we're right on the same page.

You and I. Yeah, I couldn't agree because I think we've done. We've done a lot of people a real disservice, you know, And I love education. I like learning. I think learning is great. But. But, you know, we said go get a degree in whatever topic the degree is. And then, you know, they're out working in fast food or at Starbucks. And there's nothing wrong with working with Starbucks, certainly, but they probably could have worked with Starbucks, at Starbucks or in the fast food without it. So the question becomes, did we need to incur that debt? And how do we encourage smarter, better choices for people to have, quite frankly, better careers? Yeah, and I'm a. We didn't touch on this, but I'm a dad of triplets that are seniors in high school. And we are in the middle of the, you know, let's go to college experience, which I've got to tell you, is everything you're thinking about when you think there's three at once doing it. It. And then, of course, I keep thinking of the background. You know, here I preach the trades the whole time, and, you know, none of mine want to go in the trades.

Well, maybe they'll follow your path. They'll get several degrees first, and then they'll go back to it.

You never know. That's certainly possible.

You never know. All right, so let's go back to project management. Here at Servicetitan, we are really focused right now on how to create software and automate processes that make project management more effective for contractors, more efficient, more profitable. So what are some of your best tips for running efficient and profitable projects?

I think there's a number of different things. But I'll start with using technology, which would probably be number four or five on my list of things that I think about when I start giving advice. But one of the things that our contractors have to do is, is actually learn how to use technology and embrace it. Not just spend a bunch of money on it, buy it, and then pretend to use it and then complain about how much they spend on it. Because God knows we've all done that a few times. And I think you see that need reflected in things like smacness product show or Nika's or MCA's product shows. The number of great partners like Service Titan that are at those programs has increased dramatically over the years. And that's in part because we have better access to information, the ability to capture more information, and then we're all still figuring out how to use that information. So your more successful contractors have found a partner like Service Titan to help them figure that out and work their way through it. And I can't say that I can endorse. I was in construction 20 years ago, so this stuff didn't exist at all. So I'm not. I didn't get to use it on day one. I'd love to say that we would have used it. Well, I'm sure we would have struggled with it like everyone else. But I think it would have been a neat thing to watch my father and my grandfather transition into better technology. And I think they would have fought at kicking and streaming, which I find hilarious, because they were probably the first people in my small town to have a cell phone in their truck. And they probably had some of the first. I think they were TRS 80s, the old little junky computers that were floating around in their offices. Right. And they were writing programs about how to estimate. So we, I think, had this culture of embracing technology and construction, and then we kind of lost it. Now we're refining it again. So I think that's fascinating. I think the biggest things, though, in terms of running projects are actually more strategic decisions. You know, the first one is knowing what size you ought to be. You know, a lot of people want to grow every year, and they want to grow just to grow, but you might be really profitable at $12 million a year in construction and lose your rear end at 20 million. So having an understanding of what your actual capabilities are and then bidding accordingly, I think is very important in terms of how you run your business. I've seen a lot of firms spectacularly fail when they grew too much or grew too fast. I've also seen those same firms realize that not cut their overhead quickly enough as they try to get smaller and also fail. So you really need to be mindful of what your size is and what the size you want to be. And then related to that are, what are the types of projects that you're really good at? What should you be specializing in? What are the things that as a company have the best profit margin that you have the right staff to do, that you're actually really strong at completing and getting through the last 10% of the project and getting paid. The third item which falls into the strategic category is knowing who your partners ought to be. Are you bidding to every general contractor? Are you bidding to every construction manager? Or are you bidding to the ones that you actually get to run good projects with? And those projects are profitable? Recognizing sometimes in the low bid universe, you need to get the project you need to get. But if you know that one company that you've done 10 projects with them and every single time you've lost your bottom, then maybe you should not bid to that firm any longer. Or if you do, you should bid with a much higher number. And if you've got another partner that you've worked with and you've done 10 projects and nine out of the 10 were fantastic, and the last one is kind of, eh, well, guess what, you should probably bid more often, maybe a little more aggressively to that guy. So you make some, you know, I think your start about good project management is making the right choices as to what your company ought to be doing and who it ought to be doing with. And then you follow that up with good technology, good training of your people, empowering people at lower levels to make decisions about projects if they see something going wrong, to be able to fix it than having some level of early warning system or management oversight. So you get in front of a project that's going south. So I guess the last item I would say is when I was a contractor and you know, in more than 20 years of, you know, being an association person, the farther the contractor is away from their money, the more difficult that project is. If there's a program manager, a construction manager, a gc, a sub, and you're the sub sub, you're four or five steps away from getting paid, which means your risk is probably a little bit higher unless they're all really great contractors who you have a wonderful relationship with. So those are things to think about.

Very much so. So this is just really fascinating for me because I've been so Focused on the, well, not only the non union side, but also the residential service and replacement which has the cod, you know, cash on delivery. And you don't really get into this account receivables area where a lot of, I'm assuming SMACNA members are a part of. And I was just thinking about how as you grow within the construction business, you can, how you should be running your data in certain ways to be able to know which contractor should I be working for, what types of jobs am I most profitable on and which ones historically have proven most successful. And the second point that I loved that you said is just because you're 20 million doesn't mean you're more profitable than when you were at 12 million. And it's up to you to really keep, to like to track that growth really strategically to make sure that you're not overextending yourself for this big revenue number that at the end may just be bleeding you dry.

I was actually with a contractor last week and we were having this discussion and you know, he shared rough numbers with, you know, one group they did 22 and one year they did 20. But their real sweet spot is 12 because as they went up they didn't necessarily make more, make enough to justify the extra risk. And if they stay in that 10 to 15 range, they're in a really good spot for their business with their staffing and the size they are. Because every time you grow, you've got to add layers, you've got to add more people, you've got to have more supervision, you've got to have more field people who can do the work. You're presuming those field people are as good as the ones you already have. A lot of our contractors in SMACNA do service, it's primarily commercial service, some do residential. But your risk profiles in those markets are very different. Residential service project goes really south. The person doesn't pay a two, three, five, maybe ten grand is what you're really at risk for. If a $10 million construction project contract goes south, it's a much bigger risk profile and a bigger structure to deal with.

Sure.

Which you should be equipped to do otherwise you shouldn't be bidding that job.

But that's a, that's a whole other conversation. So it's really interesting. The 22, 20 mil versus 12 million. Is there a particular suite specific spot you see for most successful construction contractors that are bidding on, you know, big, high risk, high reward jobs that you just see in terms of a pattern or is it really just relevant to who's running the business, where are they located, what their specialty is. And it's kind of hard to nail down a number.

I don't think there's no one size fits all answer to that question. So I think it does depend on who the contractor is, what their experience is. You are seeing more firms, you call it a trend. If you'd like doing things like partnering on large projects, finding like minded contractors they can share the work and the risk and the reward with. I think that's very smart, particularly as you talk about some of these mega projects because that can, you know, those can tie up your entire capacity of your firm for a very long period of time. And if you do it by yourself, and that may not be the right bet from a long term success strategy for your company.

Got it. So I want to say that a lot of folks that have come on this show who are owners of residential service and replacement shops, when I asked them what allowed, what was like the one thing that you did that allowed you to grow to where you're at? I'm going to say like maybe like 6 out of 10 times I say, oh, we dropped all commercial, all new construction and we just focused on residential service and replacement. You're smiling. So I'm assuming you know what I'm talking about. I wonder, as someone who works for Smackna, who's been in the construction space, what would you say to someone telling you that or what? Maybe you wouldn't say it, but what would be something that you were thinking if you heard of a contractor who attempted construction commercial and I'm lumping them together, let me know if I shouldn't be and they end up just, you know, what, you know, they, they uncle. And they just move to residential service and replacement. What do you think they could have done better to make those elements, those areas more profitable and more successful for them?

So I would start with what I said earlier, which is you ought to know what you're good at and what you're not good at. And one of the things I have seen over the years with residential contractors, and I don't mean this to sound negative, if it does come across negative, is many of them think they're big contractors. They do five houses a year or they have three or four service guys and they're a big contractor. And in reality your larger contractors, you know, do their entire annual sales volume on Monday of the first day of the year. So there's just, you're, you're like an apple in an orange. You're in two different markets, two different universes. In the residential sector, yeah, there's building code, there's other things you're aware of. But there, generally speaking is no spec book. There isn't a set of plans. You know, you're showing up doing service work and you're all self guided. If you're doing larger commercial work or commercial work in general, there's a spec book and a set of plans and you know, a whole set of rules you have to follow to it, follow along with it isn't, hey, this is how I feel like doing it, I'm going to go do it. Which is probably the, the number one headspace difference between those two markets. Now, to be absolutely fair, you know, the new build market, large home market obviously looks a little more like, like commercial than, you know, residential service. Right. So there you are building things to spec. You have, you know, a list of your set of plans and a spec book. It may not be quite as evolved as the commercial stuff. You may not have to meet the same standards, but you do have the same sort of process to follow. So for what that's worth, I think it's really understanding what's different about the market going into it. And just because you're good in one market doesn't mean you're going to be good in the next market. You could be good in the next market if you put the same level of effort and attention to becoming good on it. And don't presume that that skill set from one goes right over to the other.

Thank you so much for indulging my questions about this because I'm just learning. I'm learning as well, so I so appreciate this. I have a few more questions that I want to ask you. Just take a little bit more of your time. But before we even move on, anything that we should have talked about that we didn't talk about yet, about project management and what contractors who are taking on these big projects should be thinking about.

I think one of the things that I've seen some firms do it really well, and I've seen some not do it really well, is that we sometimes think when someone starts in the industry, they've learned everything they need to know. They're a journeyman out of the apprenticeship program, they've been a project manager for 10 or 20 years or they've done whatever they've done. If you're not reinvesting in your people, if you're not sending them to programs about how to be a better project manager or run the business better or paying attention to that, you're probably not running your company as well as you could. We often think that we should be paying attention to field staff and making sure field staff learn things. But we're not necessarily sending our junior PM to the Project Managers Institute or which is a program that Smackdown runs or to Business Management University. Maybe we send the junior vice president to that, but that's great. But maybe someone else, maybe three other people who you're thinking of making a vice president ought to go to that kind of program as well. So if you're reinvesting in your people, one, you're showing them you want them to stay, which helps your retention and other things, you're helping them build a great place to work, and two, you're giving them the tools to make you be more successful. And I think a lot of times, especially because we live in a low bid industry, in many cases where you need to be the cheapest provider, not the best provider, which is something I'd love to change at times, we fail to make those investments and that prevents us from being better contractors.

So given what you just said about how important it is to reinvest back in your team, not just the field staff, but also your junior project managers, the people that really are on that managerial side, what are some things that SMACNA offers that enables contractors to send their folks to different places to network to learn? What does that look like?

Sure. So SMECNA has historically had a number of really strong programs and I've been to several of them, not all of them, so I can't. Certainly I plan personally, not all of them, but I've heard good feedback on them. There's a whole project managers track called Project Managers Institute and Advanced Project Managers that is very strong. There's a Business Management University program which is a week seven day program that is, I think very interesting, a financial boot camp which is very good for even the non people, the non financial people, because they start getting a better understanding of the cash, the dollars and cents that flow through projects. That group has been sort of the traditional ones that we've done every year. We're actually in the middle of expanding that programming. Some of that expansion will be things we develop ourselves or we develop with strong partners like our associate members. The other things I'm excited about are the things we can do jointly with NECA and mca. The MEP Tech Conference is a good example of that. We are as a group of members and there's about 30% overlap between Smacna and MCA from our perspective, a little bit obviously less overlap with Nika. Our members are on the same projects every day, all the time. We actually benefit when we're learning things together and our people are experiencing things together. So, you know, doing the MEP conference jointly means that, you know, we're going to have probably 5, 550 contractors there this year. And this is one of those conferences that I think will be perhaps a thousand member program in a few years as it grows and our hotel room locks are able to get bigger. But they're going to sit and look at, you know, different providers of technology on day one. They get to see actual demos. That was a request coming out of last year that, you know, Service Titan might do or Procore might do or the Alphabet soup of, you know, Autodesk, Construction Cloud or whatever they want to look at. They're actually going to see how those programs work. And then there's another day and a half of content in the tech space to add thought leadership to the discussion as well as a product show. So I think there's a lot of benefit to, you know, learning with your peers and who you're going to work with on the job sites and then actually maybe people make some of the same investments too, so your systems actually work better together. So I'm actually really excited over the next year to expand smacna's educational offerings. You know, we've traditionally heavily resourced our labor department, our technical standards department and our government relations department. So we're now, we're adding some resources to education.

I love that. And I think the financial course not just for the finance people, so important. You know, while I think the type of work that residential contractors, which historically is who I've focused on with this podcast before, and then commercial construction contractors, there's a lot of overlap and themes that are really important. Making sure that your teammates know, you know, how the financials actually work, what makes you profitable, getting other folks excited about the trades, being champions for the trades. So while the work is very different and how, you know, the meat is made, so to speak, is very different.

Like the.

A lot of the common issues are shared amongst those different types of contractors. So I'm so happy we had this conversation.

We're all in the construction industry, so those problems are shared problems. We're competing for the same workers in some way, shape or form. Right. If there's a X number of people that want to be a construction worker, well then the individual trades or disciplines are competing for those workers and all the contractors then are competing for those workers, depending on where they are and what they need. I think we often overvalue our differences and undervalue our similarities when we talk about the industry as a whole. They are separate in some ways and distinct. And residential and commercial are very different in terms of the rules and how things operate. Just like some of the work the non union sector does looks very different, some of the work the union sector does and heavy industrial work is very different than architectural work. Right. But you're still trying to find and solve many of the same problems.

Wonderful way to put a button on this episode. Aaron, I have really enjoyed our conversation. I've got one final question for you, which is my favorite question of all. If you had to choose a song to be the soundtrack of your life, what would it be?

You know, that is a really, really good one. And I bounced all over that one when I saw that on your list of things to think about. And my first thought was not a song. Actually it was, it came from our convention because we had Frank Caliendo there and he does those funny voices and things like that. And you know, one of his bits was having Morgan Freeman narrate your life. So I think having Morgan Freeman sitting behind me and saying, and this is when Aaron thought this was a good idea or a bad idea or whatever would be hilariously funny. And then I defaulted to, well, you know, I'm fiercely independent and always done lots of these things. So Frank Sinatra's My Way certainly would fit in there as a theme song. But that seems a little cliche. So. But I probably, you know, it could end there pretty easily. And then I'm a classic rock guy. And then I kind of self destructed because there's too much music that I like. So if you wanted to take the entire soundtracks of like, you know, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac and Creedence Clearwater Revival and a bunch of others and just start, you know, just hit go on random. I'd probably be pretty happy too. So I'm not sure I really answered your question there, but I had a lot of fun thinking about it.

Well, I'm glad you had fun thinking about it. That's why it's in there. I gotta humanize all of my, all of my contracting guests. Not that you're not humanized already, but I love that. I love answering, I love asking that question. I thought your answer was fantastic. Aaron Hilger, thank you so much for coming on to Toolbox for the Trades, telling me a bit about Smackna Best practices for projects. I really enjoy chatting with you.

I love chatting with. Well, look. Look forward to doing it again sometimes.