Episode Transcript
Kirk: Hello and good morning. Today, we are joined with Justin Bruce, the Executive VP from Bruce & Merrilees, and the President of The Association of Union Constructors. How are you doing today, Justin?
Justin: Doing great, Kirk. Thank you for having me.
Kirk: I appreciate you being here. I always like to start off with a totally random question, just something that'd be fun and personal. What is the last song you got stuck in your head?
Justin: The last song stuck in my head was… now you're making me come up with a title.
Kirk: If you want to sing a few bars, that'd probably be okay.
Justin: You don't want me to sing a few bars, I promise you. I was The Kinks, Lola.
Kirk: Nice. Wonderful selection. That's not bad. I once had the America's A Horse With No Name stuck in my head for a year, which isn't a bad song. It was just forever. You'll learn a lot about people. The songs are just on repeat.
Just up from the top, as I said, you're the president of The Association of Union Constructors or TAUC. How did that happen? How did you come to be a member of TAUC and work with the association?
Justin: Bruce & Merrilees has been a long-term, longtime member starting with the NEA back when it was the National Record Association. That really spawned from my father's involvement with the NMAPC. As the NEA evolved and formed in TAUC, I was asked by the president. It was actually still with the NEA at the time, or I was asked to be part of Ford, and looking for younger members to get involved. I'm happy to get on board with it.
Certainly, it's always been a really good organization. I've just been very fortunate in the role that I've been able to help portray, just continue to stay involved. You can either help learn more about the organization or learn more about our industry and how we can help continue to evolve and advance it.
Overall, that just led me to where we are today, which is now, me, almost seemingly surreal at times, being the president of the organization. It's been a great ride so far. It's been fun and exciting to see how much has changed both with TAUC and with the NMA over the years.
Kirk: That's awesome. Obviously, your name is Justin Bruce. You mentioned your father was with the NEA, the NMAPC, and your company, Bruce & Merrilees. Talking a little bit about Bruce & Merrilees, you grew up in construction, it would seem.
Justin: Yeah, more or less. This is our 75th year we're celebrating this year in 2023. My grandfather started our business back in 1948. We're the third generation owner and operator at this point. We actually have a fourth generation member that's working in the field right now. We continue to keep it family-focused.
We're a professional organization, but we're still a family business. My team is very family-oriented. Really, everything we do is about our family. Our family are our team members. Our core values reflect that, the way our business does that. We're primarily an electrical-focused business. The largest trade we employ is the IBEW, but we also work with laborers, operators, and carpenters.
We do have multiple trades that we work with and primarily focused on heavy industrial transportation, power generation, the large power data center, data infrastructure, and communications. A lot of the heavy industry type work that many of our member organizations and many of our owners represent.
Kirk: That's awesome. Like you said, the third generation is coming up. How old were you when you were first at the office, out on the job site, working around? How'd that work for you?
Justin: I think I started in the summer. I started when I was 11 in the warehouse with my grandmother, actually at the time. She was probably the hardest working person I've ever been around in my life. I think even some of our older field members and even some of our entire team members that are still around, would reflect the same thing. They said, nobody ever outwork her. She just worked and worked and worked.
We started there. [00:04:48] getting paid about a quarter an hour as an 11-year-old, and then worked our way up through and did different things, always the worst jobs that my dad could find for us to do at the time. We want to make sure we understood that school was a good thing, so go to school, but at the same time, understand better about the work that we do in the trades that we're all supporting and helping to grow and develop.
My brothers and I own and operate the company now. We all went and did different things. I left that and went to college, but all went to do different opportunities that we had after school. It was not our option to come back here at the time. My dad's setup was for that. It was in Temple.
Kirk: It was never a pipeline to join straight into the company firm type situation.
Justin: We all came back at different times, in different ways, and for different reasons. The company really was based upon an opportunity or a need the company had at the time.
Kirk: During those years, post college before coming back, were you working in management? Were you working in construction? What kind of things were you out there to do?
Justin: No, I was actually working for the hospitality industry. I was a sales manager for a couple of year round resorts out west, where we had both summer, winter, every season type opportunities and development. We did everything from hosting large groups to general sales stuff, to actually developing a golf course, condominiums, townhomes and selling those. That's a really cool experience overall.
Kirk: That is cool. I've always been in the video/media production world, but I did spend a few years working with the hospitality sector. It's a fun corner to be in for a while.
You still have a pretty, I would imagine, fairly robust and long understanding of what's going on in the construction industry. I'm curious, from your perspective, the construction industry now versus growing up, versus 10 years ago, how is the construction industry right now?
Justin: I think it's evolving faster than it ever has. The projects continue to evolve. It's interesting because years ago, we used to get a big roll of drawings. A customer would have spent months and months with engineering, details, and have everything completely planned and drawn out perfectly. You would get this gigantic roll of drawings. You would lay them out, start working through the estimate to come up with a price, and things like that.
It was perfect with details. Of course, there are always changes and things throughout a project, but it was really, really well-engineered. It seems to be just a decline over the last 20 years of that continuing to be less and less and less upfront and more on the contractor. The contractors have had to be really the ones that can take on all the more interesting types of niche or innovative type projects. You have to have that capability internally to be able to handle lack of engineering with projects and less upfront information.
Sometimes it's almost like you get a picture. Okay, this is what we want to build, how much is it going to cost? You have to come to the point of saying, okay, well, luckily, if you have the experience and the team members that are skilled enough to fill in a lot of those blanks, you can put that picture together into at least a reasonable price and a reasonable plan to build the work. Any engineering works out typically for the customer.
I think the biggest involvement or the biggest change in evolution has been from purely that the owner designs it, he visits, and he builds it. Now it's more of that integrated constructability design and working with contractors to grow and develop the process and the procedures for that job so that it's ultimately constructed. But it probably doesn't even look that much like the way the original picture did when the owner probably had it in mind.
Kirk: It seems that it transitioned from here's what you're building, here's this role, here are the plans, to a little bit more of a collaborative approach. Would that be a fair statement? Is it more of a give-and-take?
Justin: With good customers, absolutely, that's the way. The other part of it is you're trying to develop new customers, where they're almost testing you in ways. Okay, what can you do here, how can you do this, and can you give us a price on something that you really don't have any idea what you're building? It's just a concept in their mind.
As an organization, the evolution has been not only being able to creatively, in many times, imaginably come up with here's what we need to build for you and here's the way we're going to do it, and then doing that. Tying in all the technology and trying to put the pieces all together, engineering, utilizing drones, ground penetrating radar, and laser scanning within projects to try to make everything work, and to deliver a final project where it may have changed 12 times because of just the new technology that's advanced along the way. The people that you have to have and the processes you have to be able to develop takes a professional company and companies to do that.
On top of that now, many times, the customers or what we're seeing now, the latest trend has been, and we've talked about it a lot within our TAUC organization, is the mega projects. Because of what they're doing now, the owners are going, yeah, you know what? We're just going to build this entire enormous project. We're going to go to basically one company or maybe a couple at most, so we have very limited next to grab. Let's go build these mega projects.
We're not hiring the mom and pop necessarily down the road to build these mega projects. I think that's another part of it, the challenge and evolution of things. You have to grow up pretty quick.
Kirk: It's one of those double-edged sword questions. A lot of these, like you said, the lasers, the drones, and the ground penetrating radar, has opened up a lot of capabilities. For sure, we all see what that has allowed us to do. Does the speed of technology, the speed of change, the new widget, the new tool, the owner saying, oh, my gosh, this is so cool, does that prove an impediment at all, or is it just a great opportunity?
Justin: I don't see it as an impediment. I think you have the opportunity to educate the customer on the information you can give them. The information, generally speaking, all of us have just on our smartphones is so much more advanced than ever before, and the access to that information.
How do we take that information and we actually make it useful for not only our companies and our team members that are building the jobs, but also ultimately for the owner and the customer. How do we use that technology in a beneficial and return on investment way so that customers can actually get some information that's usable and it benefits them?
Is it making the job more efficient to install and build? Is it taking care of challenges before they come up so that you don't just get into something and realize that now it's a challenge, we've got to go through and regroup everything?
It's much more about trying to find a way to drive that value to the owner, as well as obviously, if you drive it to the owner, you're driving the contractors that are doing it. Certainly, it would go both ways there.
Some owners are just loving technology and all the gadgets. Others are exceedingly resistant to it. No matter what, all of them want out of the project, what value am I getting from that, and how am I getting it?
Really, it's about driving the return back to the customer. How are we making it better? How are we able to innovate and drive that efficiency, both in terms of installation or schedule, but also, obviously, there's a cost component to the efficiency? Many times, owners are willing to pay for the value that they find, but you have to show that value.
The construction world and especially the union construction world, we have to really show our value. It can be a challenge because that can be an initial barrier entry with some of them. Oh, wait, you're a union shop? I mean, they're going to pay more? Okay. At times, our rates or our hourly cost could be higher, but that doesn't mean you pay more in the end. We have to give the best value.
Driving the best value for those owners is really what our whole union construction industry is about. We build it better, faster, and with higher quality. It doesn't mean that each specific hour, that could be a higher rate at times for certain individuals. But when we use less of those individuals and we use more trained individuals, then we have less quality issues. If the schedule is improved and better overall, then when you get to the end of the day, you're valued better. That's really what we all have, to stay focused.
Kirk: I'm actually really glad you brought that up. This is not new, but there's a lot of tension or talk about union versus non-union. Why is Bruce & Merrilees or why union? You just talked a little bit about it, but what's the benefit of going union?
Justin: I think the biggest benefit of it easily is the trained professional you get on each job site. You know what you're getting. Many non-union competitors stop at the local corner, for lack of a better term. They'll just stop at a local wherever to pick up people to go to work that day.
Those people could have been laying carpet, they could have been working as a greeter at Walmart, they could have been brooming a floor somewhere the day before, and now you're going to ask them to go and be an electrician helper and ask them to put conduit in the ground, dig a ditch, or something else that they've never been trained for and never had any experience. That's just a low-level piece.
For us, we look at getting the type of infrastructure, technology, and value items that we're dealing with for an owner. We're installing millions of dollars worth of electrical switchgear within a facility. Millions of dollars and 50 weeks of lead time just when you order it, as an example, of one small item.
What happens if you damage that item? What happens if you put that in the wrong way and you cause serious issues? It's one thing that you have to replace it, the cost of replacing it. A bigger issue is the time, the downtime, and the lack of that customer being able to get up and running or get back up and running.
Our biggest value is the quality of the people that we get from our union trade partners, the consistency, and our access to them. There are certainly always going to be challenges to access the people with times, places, and things like that, but you have a tremendous pool of people to pull from. You know when you get them on the job, everybody's a little different, but you know they've been trained at least on a basis of certain items.
They may have specialty in certain things versus others, but they've been trained. They understand how to work in the field that we're putting in to work into. I think there's just such great value that comes from that. I think when owners see those professionals on a job site, they also see that value.
Kirk: One of the comments I've heard, the opposition to union is how the PLAs or the executive order last year by President Biden was anti-competitive, that the unions are anti-competitive. I find this interesting, personally, because I've seen a lot of these contractors that feel like there's still a lot of competition in the union world. It doesn't feel anti-competitive to me.
Justin: No, there's a ton of competition for any job. We compete with non-union, union jobs all the time, some contractors that are more general contractors, that do a little bit of this work, a little bit of that work, and also they start competing with us on our scopes of work.
Competition can be very good. I'm not going to say it can't be for the owner. Definitely, there's a value to that competition. To think that there is no competition, that's crazy. It's crazy to think that even these PLAs drive to ensure that everybody's under the same, at least, prevailing wage. Sometimes it's just being in a certain living wage as part of the certain trades. I think that's much better for the people involved.
Again, you get the people that really value that job. They get on with that job and they want to be there. They want to be working. They're not just showing up for a day, then somebody else calls the next day, and they're going into that job. If you want people there for the long haul on those jobs, you don't want to have that cost of turnover or rotation. I think driving that involvement from a union force is beneficial all around. Many times, competition keeps everybody honest. There's no question about that.
Kirk: I can feel you. It's one of the most, I guess laughable, these policies are anti-competitive. I was like, no, I just feel like they're ethical. It's making sure that the competition is ethical. It's just the baseline. It feels like it's just playing fair.
If we can get out our magic eight ball and our crystal ball, what's coming next? What do we have to prepare for? What's coming down the pipe that we're prepping for?
Justin: There's a tremendous amount of projects and work. I think the biggest challenge we all face in the union construction industry is having the manpower support and all the people to do the work. We have got to continue to recruit, develop, train, and pull more and more of high school graduates, college graduates—it doesn't really matter—into the workforce, and get them trained and ready to go to work.
There's a tremendous amount of work and these mega projects that we talked about and highlighted a lot within TAUC and the NMA, these are really exciting, industry-type changing mega projects, whether it be these new technology for batteries. Whether they be electrical vehicles, electric vehicle batteries, or even grid-supported batteries or grid storage. Those are mega projects.
We've got chip plants being built that are insane mega projects. These things are just enormous, enormous projects. They require a tremendous amount of people. We've got to continue to grow and develop those people. It's not just on, oh, tell the unions, they need to go out and get more people. It's not that. They have a big, big part, don't get me wrong, but it's all of us in the union construction industry being able to recruit, pull those team members in, help to grow them, and make them understand it's a good living.
Especially now, it's never been a safer time to be working in the construction industry when you're with a professional and solid organization, as all of our members are and certainly, the majority are within the union construction industry because you have to be. You can't have on-site safety issues and incidents. You just won't be there anymore, you won't be working for them.
It's the recruitment. It's being able to support and drive these mega projects. They're going to get built, that's the point. These owners are going to build them. If they want to build them with the union field force, that's fantastic. We have to support that. If the union field force, team, contractors, and the whole tripartite, if we can't support it, they're still going to build it. They're just going to go find another way to build it, and that's not what we want. We have to step up and be able to deliver.
Kirk: I appreciate that. Yeah, very true. Just for a sense of scale for those who wouldn't know, a mega project is 100 people a million dollars, 300 people a billion dollars? Define a mega project for me.
Justin: Mega project typically is defined as a $1 billion or more investment. That's not just the labor, obviously. The whole owner investment into the project is $1 billion dollars or more.
Kirk: I think there are more than a dozen right now.
Justin: There are over 110 within the United States that have either just started or will be starting. The end of last year, the beginning of this year, 110 across the country had $1 billion or more mega projects. If you go to 2024, you add another 40 or 50, and if you go to 25, there's another 30 or 40.
Kirk: That's really exciting just for America. If you really think about the difference between love and hate, the difference between exciting and a little scary, that's a very fine line. For one person, the roller coaster is a good time, for one person, it's a nightmare. There's a fine line between those two things.
Justin: I know. We're right there right now.
Kirk: Right. That chink-chink-chink-chink going up the hill and getting ready for the drop. Exciting times. Any sign of slowing down?
Justin: Not that I've seen. Certainly at times, there'll be some institutions of different items, rates, and things like that, that'll have an effect on certain customers. You always have that plus and minus of those projects happening in real time, where, okay, this one got delayed five months, but then, oh, this one got pulled up six months. Or that one got delayed for another year or two, but here's a new project nobody even heard about. There's always that ebb and flow, so I don't see any current slowdown. No.
Kirk: Awesome. Justin, you have such good insights and stuff like that. Any other final thoughts or words on just the construction industry? Why union? Why apprenticeship programs? Anything else you want to send out with?
Justin: I think we all just need to continue to focus and educate our young people. We have many apprentices and many workers in the field that went to college, have a college degree. Now they're working in the field because they realize, oh, my goodness, what a great avenue this is. Just because you start in the field, it doesn't mean you always have to be in the field forever, but it's a great way to learn and work in exciting projects, exciting times.
It can be physical to a point, but at the same time, there's a lot of work that happens in our field that isn't necessarily you're not out there just lifting big beams and digging ditches all the time. There's a lot of technology use. There are a lot of interesting types of work that we all do to encourage and really help our young people learn that this is a great opportunity, and we need everybody.
In order to grow our work and our industry, we need people to do it. We don't build a product. We don't make a widget. We provide a service for owners, customers, and others that are building these widgets and products. We've got to support that.
If we do a really good job of that, we're going to be there for a really long time for that customer and owner. Right now, this is a generational change in terms of these projects. It's never been a better time to incorporate more of our young people, more women this being the women construction week. It's a great time to encourage that.
We have a lot of women in our field force that are excellent, excellent trades people. We have more minorities coming into the trades. You have to really encourage that. We have to reach out.
Many times, it's education more than anything else. It's just that people go, oh, I didn't know I could do that. Oh, I didn't realize that. It's so much about education, and it takes everybody to do that. It is not just a union issue. It's not just the unions that need to get out there and promote, educate, and train. It's everybody involved, owners, the unions, and the contractors.
Kirk: I appreciate that very much. That whole tripartite is just so important. Thank you so much for giving me a few minutes of your morning, Justin. I look forward to having you on again in the future.
Justin: My pleasure. Thanks for doing this. It's a great thing.
