Bryce Wuori - Co-founder and CEO of Pavewise

Jason and Bryce talk about Bryce's pivot from a traditional family owned business to a software company, the opportunities and perils of running the company in a slow moving industry and why it's important to never accept the status quo.

"I've always been the type of person wired to, when I see a problem, I want to find a solution for it."

Bryce Wuori, MPM (Co-founder and CEO of Pavewise) is an expert in Asphalt Paving and believes technology is the future key to success within the Infrastructure Industry. Bryce has been recognized nationally as an asphalt expert who is currently generating large amounts of success by integrating project variables within Asphalt Paving quality procedures to increase project revenues.

Pavewise is a web-based software that maximizes productivity and improves project quality resulting in increased incentives and profits for paving contractors. Variables such as weather, project specifications and equipment operations impact every paving project. By efficiently managing project variables and integrating paving solutions, Pavewise develops a strategy for success for every paving project.

http://www.pavewisepro.com

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Transcript

Jason Frazell: 0:12

Good morning, everybody. My guest on the podcast today is Bryce Worre. Bryce is the founder and the CEO of PaveWise, as well as a whole variety of other things. I've gotten to know him just a little bit by the time we had a chance to connect before we press record here today. Bryce, welcome. Good morning. It is the morning both where I am and where you are. Bryce, where are you joining us from today?

Bryce Wuori: 0:33

I'm joining from Bismarck, North Dakota.

Jason Frazell: 0:36

Bismarck, North Dakota. I think I told you offline. I'm originally from Minnesota, so we were neighbors at one time. If you're from North Dakota, no longer neighbors. I'm here in the East Coast, but it is morning. We're recording this in on a Thursday. It is May 2nd, which is hard to believe it's May 2nd. And Bryce, I want to thank you for making the time to be with us today. As you all are going to find out, this is your prime time for the sort of work that you all do. This is when the projects kick off. This is when you all are at your busiest. So I really appreciate you making the time for us today to share your entrepreneurial journey. So Bryce, first things first, let's talk a little bit about PaveWise and what that is so people can kind of set the context here, and then we'll go back and just have you share anything else you'd like us to know about you before we get into the details. So what, what is PaveWise?

Bryce Wuori: 1:26

PaveWise. PaveWise is a construction tech software progressive web app that we, actually, I developed. I own a construction company and I, I developed it as a way to manage my crews. It tracks on site weather. You can share plans. It's a, it's a centralized platform for data, really. Shots of communication, schedules permits, all that. And, We built it really for the, in mind for the boots on the ground individuals, so the people in the field running a company, I recognized like in my own practices, like some of the biggest impacts were weather and making our schedule to kind of fit where we can work efficiently and, Produce the highest quality of work. So that was a big, important thing. And then just communicating from the office to the field was always kind of an issue. So I wanted to create a way digitally to like, I got a new permit. I've got a new set of plans. How do I get this to my foreman, my people in the field without having to drive out or, you know, call them or email, we get a hundred emails a day. So it's really just a, and it's an efficiency tool that's easy to use for everybody in construction.

Jason Frazell: 2:37

Very cool. Let's go back a little bit and talk about your history, your background, a little bit about your, your life in construction. So you had mentioned to me, you're a third generation in this business. So a family, family owned business thing. So I think, so I think the, one of the questions that I have is when you say you created the software, what is it? Did you do that yourself? Did you hire somebody to do it? Are you, are you naturally a technology person who, and I'm really interested in this topic because as a third generation person in the family business, did you go, Hey, I have a, I have a real efficient affinity for tech and learn how to do it? Or like, how does that go? Because I could see where it'd be really easy to just keep doing things kind of the same way. In a business that's third generation, which means by design, it's been sustainable and it's been doing good work for a long time.

Bryce Wuori: 3:32

Yeah. So, I mean, what I did really was these things were being tracked. I mean, we were tracking these in what I'd consider old school methods of pen paper, trying to build out schedules and modifying them with sticky notes and, and all those types of things, I've always been the type of person wired to, when I see a problem, I want to find a solution for it. And, and in construction, I've always used technology as a way to, to improve those types of things, whether it's in the field with machine control to help the operator perform better and things like that. So I've always been a technology advocate for the industry. And that's where I really started to push a lot of these things. And I. I knew the variables. I was tracking them. I created the first, I call it the Frankenstein program because it literally was just Excel with formulas. And I knew that these, these impacts were causing these kind of cause and effects things. But the first generation beta of it was, I actually hired a software company to create more of a user friendly version of it and do the calculations manually. And that's where it really kind of took off was we'd run 27 projects through it and had high success. We seen the value in it and that's where it started to kind of naturally unfold into other people. We noticed other people in the industry were having a lot of these same effects and problems and, and we wanted to scale out and help them. And it, and that's kind of. Where we're at today we're, we're a construction tech company. We sold this, we sold the construction company last year. We're completely software now. And we just keep building, keep building things to automate and help. People in the field, just be more efficient and get the data to make good decisions, to improve profits, efficiency, life, everything.

Jason Frazell: 5:27

Yeah. So growing up, I would, I would imagine that you were, you were exposed to the business early, the family business. I learned a lot about it. If you think back to me, when you first started to do some work or, you know, just out on sites with the family and the company, did you ever envision not having a construction company and being a technology company?

Bryce Wuori: 5:51

I did not envision ever being just a software company. Like five, six years ago, if somebody would have brought that to me and told me that like as a profit or something, I would have laughed at him because construction is all I never know. And, and I mean, it's what I really do. That's one of my biggest struggles, honestly, is I love running equipment. I love being on projects. So. I've had to learn to let go of some of the physical hand, I want to go run equipment, I want to go do this and transferring that into more of a technical standpoint of this is technology can do this for you kind of mindset and but no, I definitely never imagined I'd own a construction tech software company.

Jason Frazell: 6:34

Yeah, and I asked this, Bryce, because it's so fascinating to me as somebody who didn't come from a generational family business that you have this legacy for so long of the ways of doing things and making money and providing for the family and, you know, hopefully building some profit. And. Creating a lifestyle, and then all of a sudden you go, Oh, let's actually go and do something different that's tangentially related, but not the thing that was the family business. So, and you had mentioned this earlier, want to dig a little bit more about the reason you initially did this, the reason Pavewise, I don't even know if it was called, probably wasn't even called Pavewise, it's probably just some, like I said, it was a spreadsheet. You did it to solve your own problems. And realized if you in the construction industry had these problems, there's probably tons of other companies just like you who have the exact same problems. It's an industry that's been around arguably forever. And do you remember, do you remember the moment when you realized you had a product that you could scale outside? You had something that you could actually go and give and actually make money selling to other companies like yours. About when you were doing construction?

Bryce Wuori: 7:50

Yeah, I do actually remember, I, when it got to the point where I realized like, Hey, we might have something here that can help other people, and I, I actually did some research. I looked for companies, software companies that were doing things similar couldn't find anything. Went down to one of the biggest construction expos con Expo down in Las Vegas. And walked and looked at hundreds of software companies, what they offer, talk to them and things. And I'm just like, ah, it's just, there's nothing, there's nothing here. That's really doing what we're doing with the, you know, boots on the ground, individuals integrating in weather impacts to specifications and things like that. And I think we're, you know, I think we're on to something different here and, and we're still something very different because we don't, we're not a project management software. We're, we're like a risk management solutions boat on the ground software that integrates all these different things in there and we're still very unique. We don't even know what we really consider ourselves as like putting us in a bucket of what are we and it's It's evolving all the time because really what we do is we listen to our customers and Hey, we got this problem. Well, let's see how we can find a solution for it using technology. So, but that was the time it was ConExpo about four years ago. I think it was 2019. And I, I just, I spent two days walking around looking at software companies, talking with people and just. That was really my test to see like, well, is there, is there, is there something out here? Are we wasting our time? Is this existing? We have something. And I think we can really help the industry with this.

Jason Frazell: 9:30

Yeah. I think there's a, there's a really good lesson in there for, for. Tech, tech founders, a lot of times they think they have the greatest thing and then do some research, but don't go and do enough research to find out that there's enough things that are so either they're, they're very closely related that, that a company with bigger scale could just actually decide to do it. And they could like. Put some engineering resources to it and like either do it quickly or that there's already a market leader that does it really well and you're just fighting a huge uphill battle. I really liked the idea of that actually walking around trade shows, going, Hey, what are, what are other people doing in this space? Are they doing anything in this space? How are we the same? How are we different in learning what works and what doesn't? That's really cool. Let's talk about PaveWise. So specifically, well, let's talk about the name PaveWise. What, what is I have, I have an assumption about that. I happen to know what you all do, but let's, let's talk about what you all, let's talk about what you actually do inside of the massive construction industry.

Bryce Wuori: 10:32

Yeah. The, the software itself, you know, the name I came up with just because it's like, we're giving the biggest thing that we're doing is giving. Proactive decisions of this is what's going to impact your project. And a lot of it's around things you can't control. Right. I mean, like today in where I'm sitting right now, we're going to get a half an inch to inch of rain. I can't control that. And that's going to impact any project that's in this. vicinity of this rain right now very heavily. So, so what we try to do is identify like, this is what you're going to be impacted with. And this is how it's going to impact your schedule. We try to decrease like idle time because that costs time and money a lot for companies. Like if you know you're not going to work today, why, why send a crew out there and sit and wait for it to stop raining when it's not going to, right. Or, or the quality of work is the biggest thing, like it. We don't have the right conditions to do the work. We have specifications that tell us like, this is the temperatures you need. This is you know, the moisture that you need. This is how we want this built. And if a lot of times, if you don't have the right conditions, you're not supposed to do the work anyways, because the quality of the work goes down. So that decreases a lot of the, the payment factor and things like that. And, you know, even the potential to do. What am I going to remove this because it failed those types of things. So we're really, we're really trying to give wise decisions and bring forward this data, right? This data that people can look at and be like, Oh, wow. I got three days of rain coming up on this project. I want to move this crew over to project. where it's sunny and beautiful to help them get caught up. So we're not sitting around idle and, and just kind of using all that data to, to really identify where and when can I work the most efficient at the time I have.

Jason Frazell: 12:28

Yeah. I always like to ask people in software, what do people do if they're not using a solution like PaveWise, what that, that scenario, what, what's happening. Without technology, how it's, how it's been done in the past.

Bryce Wuori: 12:42

Weather channel and papered pen, or you know what, honestly, I see this industry do a lot of, and it, and I'm, I used to do this too. It's just like, well, let's just, we're reactive. Let's like, let's go and see what happens. Well. The data is there to tell us what's going to happen. It's not going to change. So, you know, I, I used to just like, well, send a crew out and let's just see what, you know, see if you can get anything done there today. And I just paid the crew 12 hours to sit around in, in, when, when I could have moved them somewhere else or brought them to the shop to do maintenance or done this or that. So quite honestly, we see our biggest competitor a lot in that space is you know, weather apps and maybe some. Scheduling tools that they integrate a little. And that's what I was doing, honestly, I was taking multiple, I was taking multiple weather apps, Google maps and dropping a pin and then taking the data from multiple weather apps and trying to figure out how much this, the weather in the next 30 days was going to affect my schedule on this project. And what I needed to do to stay in compliance for that. Cause that's the other thing that's. Really important this industry is we have contracts. We have deadlines to get this work done.

Jason Frazell: 13:54

Sure

Bryce Wuori: 13:55

If you don't get that work done in that time frame What happens is you start getting penalized every day after that contract date It's it's called liquidated damages and a lot of times that weather is what causes it more than anything so identifying how much that weather is going to impact you to get to that completion date and understand cause and effect of that is very important because that can cost five, 10, 20, 000 a day after the completion date. And that, that can blow your profits right out of, you know, on any project. So,

Jason Frazell: 14:25

yeah. Well, the other thing, Bryce, And I, you and I were talking, I know almost nothing about this industry. One of the reasons I love talking to you is learning about something that I obviously see all the time, but don't understand the details. The other thing that strikes me about this is a competitive advantage of using something like PaveWise. Is potentially you're more accurate in your bidding, like potentially even be able to bid a little bit lower, knowing that like what you just said, you're going to optimize, you're going to optimize the value. You're not going to have a crew sitting out there because at the end of the day, the client pays for that at the end of the day, like if there's overrun built or there's, I don't know what you call it, but I think it's overrun. It's built into the contract. Well, potentially you can take a few days off the bid, or if you say it's going to take, you know, six months, maybe it's five and a half months knowing That you're going to keep that crew efficiently working as opposed to, well, Mr. Customer, I don't know if the customer, like the department of transportation is, well, you know what you're paying, you're paying my crew to stand out there under umbrellas or sit in their trucks. And they're getting paid.

Bryce Wuori: 15:27

Absolutely. And I mean, so yeah, we do, and it really does open the eyes of a lot of our new users of like, this is how many days your average, just how many days you lost, or this was your average efficiency on this project from weather impact so that you can go forward and kind of, you know, understand, well maybe I'm not putting enough lost age in and things like that. And as far as the DOT's perspective or any owner, the way I explain it to them is like, you wouldn't pay someone to paint your house in the rain. Why would, why would you want your road paved in the rain or in the conditions where you know, it could prematurely fail or not produce the highest amount of quality. So. This is like a multi facet tool that yeah, we built for contractors, but in reality what we're doing is giving the contractors more decisions to produce a higher quality product that they get paid more for, that then in turn the owner or the state gets a better quality project or product that lasts longer. That pushes our tax dollars to other infrastructure and, and we're not getting those potholes and those failing conditions that happen because of, of certain, you know what I mean? It's just like this. It's like an evolution of, of things and, and, and that's important because we're, our tax dollars are dwindling and we got to cover more roads and, and, and build better roads with the money we have, so.

Jason Frazell: 16:48

Also, just, if we just call a spade a spade. In most states, not generally everybody's favorite is the DOT. That's not generally the thing people like, I love the Minnesota DOT or the New York DOT. And like a lot of times, I think they're just doing good work and they're, they're at the mercy of weather things. And that As a consumer of those and as a taxpayer, it ends up being like, Oh, it's not efficient, but what's actually just happening is it's inefficient because of the systems and the operational part of it, not necessarily when they're out there doing the good work. I think like as a, as a taxpayer, that's, that's also the ton of value.

Bryce Wuori: 17:21

Absolutely. A ton of value. And I mean, that's the ultimate goal that we have too, with this is like, Just to build better more efficient infrastructure with data using data to build better infrastructure So, I mean that's that's our ultimate goal. We work with DOTs. We work with with contractors anybody who wants to just be more efficient and Honestly, what's really cool too is this tool is a mediator between DOTs and contractors, right?

Jason Frazell: 17:51

Mm hmm

Bryce Wuori: 17:52

We have our ground truth system, which is a hundred percent certified weather station that we can put on site with 11 sensors ran off the solar that tracks weather condition every 15 minutes. So if there's any compliance issues between the contractor and the state being like, well, we don't have temperatures to pave, we have a system there that pretty much tells you exactly what the temperature is, what the conditions were at. Any second or any minute of that project and we can use it as a tool. So there's no litigation or pointing fingers that, well, you didn't do this in the right conditions. You didn't do this. And everybody's in agreeance instead of, you know, I've, I've been part of these projects where we pick up a phone app and I got AccuWeather and it says, it's. It's 35 degrees and then I pick up another one and it says it's 32 degrees. We sit and wait because nobody can come into agreeance, we're shooting with these temp guns and everything and it's like, we just lost an hour where we could have just worked or we shouldn't have worked at this time and there was no, no like waiting for someone to make a decision. This thing here is like a intermediate, like a, almost like a an inspector on site, a weather inspector telling you when you can't, can, when you can't work, when you should, all that, like at a hundred percent accuracy. So.

Jason Frazell: 19:07

Yeah. Why not? I want to talk about two other things with you during this interview. The first one is product adoption. In other words, change management, because anytime I talk to anybody in technology, who's doing something different than how it's been done for a long time, I'm so curious, Bryce, how you see this, where you say, Hey, remember how it used to be paper, post it notes. We've been doing it this way, maybe even a spreadsheet with a, like a, like a tough book or something, by the way, we're doing things differently. How do you address that? And like, let's start with your own company when you started doing this, because if we could just call it out, people don't like change generally. Because it requires, yeah, so how do you, like, how do you do that in a way that empowers people to want to use it? And then now that you are a software company, you have a whole slew of people that you go and sell this to because the owner goes, this is brilliant. And then as soon as it gets to the people on the field, they go, ah, I don't want to do, I don't want to learn a new thing. I don't want to do it. So how do you, how do you all address that as a leader?

Bryce Wuori: 20:09

Yeah. Change is hard. I mean, honestly, that's one of the biggest things that we, we struggle with right now is we know this tool can help companies be more profitable, be more efficient collect the data to prove whatever they need. And the change. How we approach it, honestly, what's been working the best is if we can get it into the hands of the right people, like a champion that is struggling, if we, like, time is very important, so when we can prove that we can save that operation, It's manager two hours a day by automating all the data that comes through that they don't have to drive out on a site that's three hours away to check a rain gauge, to see how much rain they got to do federal compliance inspections for weather that can sit in their office and do that like that is very important. And that's one of the unique things that we have going on is we, a lot of software, especially in construction tech is built for the office for bidding for scheduling for like that part of the world and like. What we always, what I always promote is like you can bid and make the most perfect project on paper in the office work, but really where

Jason Frazell: 21:19

the bread and

Bryce Wuori: 21:20

butter is made is in the field, the people building it. So we take a little different approach. I mean, we do talk to, you know, corporate people up in the office and stuff, but they don't struggle with the pains that we're solving. So they can't really relate all the time to like we can save you your operations manager two hours a day by doing this while that's their job. Right. But that that's what the way they see it. We have to go to approach them to be that we just saved a contractor 40, 000 by helping them prove compliance on a project that talks to them. But. Really getting it into their hands. I mean, we've already put a lot into this software where we just listen to the users. And like, we've had people in the field be like, Hey, I love that I can do this, but I don't want to manage these files. I don't want to have to go take a picture or upload this and put it into this project file. So we took that to our dev team and they're like, We can build an AI tool that literally manages the files for them based off the tag files from the pictures, from where all this, and they did that in a depth cycle. And now our software has a tool called Pat Papewise, which is an AI tool. You drop in a file, it literally will put it into the right project, right folder for you. So it eliminated that friction of we don't want to do this part of it. And, and now, you know, And keeping it simple, like that is one of our biggest mottos is like 90 percent of our users are on a phone. They're using this like a weather app. So we've made it so like, it's very simple. It takes 20 minutes, 30 minutes for us to sit down with somebody in the field and be like, all right, let's download this. Here's how you navigate it. If you want to take a picture, if you want to add data, boom, done. It's, it's not overly complicated. And. I mean, like we have to show them how to use it and how it benefits them in order for them to see the use and to use it properly. So we really put a lot of time into when we get a customer, we make sure. We check in with them, we, we train them, we make sure that everything's working okay and we don't want to churn them, right? We don't want them to, to leave because they're not getting the right training to use it. So we've really concentrated on, on training and just keeping it simple and yeah, change is super hard and just grinding. It's going to take like five to seven touches we found in this industry to even get somebody to think about what you're trying to do. So it's not easy, but that's how we've been approaching it.

Jason Frazell: 23:59

Yeah. Thanks, Bryce. Yeah. I imagine just change management in any industry is hard. Or in an inside any company is hard, especially in my past career. I did a lot of things where we'd introduce new technology. People just don't like the change, even if it's so beneficial for them, even to be like, Hey, it saves you time. It saves you money. Like the person who saves money. They like that, but Oh, it saves you time. It makes your job easier. I have to do this to go. Yeah, but it's something new I have to think about and do. It's like a, it's like a new thing I have to think about in my head and I don't want to do that.

Bryce Wuori: 24:28

Yeah. It's really, it's really cool too about that too is like, so I forgot to mention like the younger generation, all for it. They want it.

Jason Frazell: 24:35

They

Bryce Wuori: 24:37

don't want to fill out paperwork and, and do like my logs on this journal in a book. I want to do it somewhere digitally. Cause I gotta, Go hand this in at the office or take a picture of it and email it or do whatever anyway. So it's really unique too, that the younger generation grabs onto this pretty fast and pushes it pretty hard in the, in the, the older generation, it takes a little bit more, but they eventually kind of, kind of see the benefit in it as well.

Jason Frazell: 25:04

I want to wrap today and get your perspective and experience around Leadership and how I want to, first of all, talk about your experience moving from an industry that's been around forever has arguably, you know, the best practices, there are some things quite regulated in many ways, especially, I mean, it's always regulated in some ways to a software company, which, and I was thinking about you as you know, when you're, when you're doing construction work, you're like, what do we do today? And you can look back at the road or you can look at the house and you go, well, today we framed up the walls. You can like. At the end of the day, when that, when it's time to go home, you can look and go, Oh, we did that. And in technology, it's not always like that. So I'm curious for you as a leader, what's been, what have you had to really shift in terms of shifting your mindset around leadership, when you move from running a company that in some ways you're inventing something new, never been done. So what's been your experience with that? And what have you learned that the audience, I'm looking to glean some glean some wisdom from you for the audience as well.

Bryce Wuori: 26:12

I honestly, the team I have is phenomenal building a great team around you. I have a, an amazing in house dev team and CTO that literally we sit down, we have cycles where they do cycles, but we have like bedding tables where we look at requests that we've had features that people are using a lot. And we really think about what are we going to build next or what do we have to improve. Because we're constantly looking at that and it's taking me time. I'm going to completely be honest. I am a dreamer. So like I am constantly thinking of like, this would be really cool. And, and it's my, it's my dev team and my CTO team that are always like, yeah, that is cool, but that's that, do we really need that right now? And, and that's going to cost us this much time and things like that. So they bring down the perspective of, of Taking it from a dream to like, we can build anything. They tell us this all the time. We can build anything that you want with enough time and money, but you know, give the biggest thing is giving what the cut, what is the customer need? Right. So I play

Jason Frazell: 27:16

a, Bryce really, really quick. I have to I just want to stop you for a minute. I heard a really great term for this recently of like a CEO or a senior person who's got big ideas and comes to the dev team, and I heard this from a pro had a product at a software company. He said, we call those swoopers and poopers. They swoop in and they come with all of the big stuff and they drop the pilot and not poop. It's all good stuff, but they're like, we need to do this, this, this, this, this. And you're like, right, am I getting three additional headcount and another half million dollars? Yeah. They know. Yeah. Swoop. And I thought I, he was like, yeah, swooper and Poopers. I'm like, I love that so much.

Bryce Wuori: 27:51

My dev team actually created a cloud bucket for me. So what that is now is like, if I have an idea, we put it in the cloud bucket and we kind of prioritize it and what it is and like what, you know, and then actually we go back to that when we're creating cycles and like, what about this and that? And what, you know, so like it, I mean, I tell them all the time we're never going to run out of ideas and keep building because there's just so many things in this industry that could be made more efficient with technology. So, I mean, building a team really, I, that is the most important thing is, is I do a lot of the listening to what the people in the field want. I have a lot of expertise in this industry. So I know what. What is important in a lot of aspects and things. And, and I'm on top of a lot of the new technologies coming down through machines and those types of things. So I bring those ideas and those thoughts from experience and just knowing people in the industry to my dev team and from my customers. And I'm kind of that link and they tell me what is possible and what isn't possible and, and we just it's been working really good that way.

Jason Frazell: 28:59

Yeah, that's awesome. What. When you were hiring your first couple of folks for the software part of the business, because you said you're running both for a while before you decided to sell the, the, the legacy of construction business. I always like to ask founders in any industry, like, what do you, what did you look for around those first couple of key hires when you realized I'm going to need, you know, we're moving this off of a spreadsheet. I need some coding. Maybe I could do it, but it's not the best use of my time. Maybe I don't know if you're a coder or not. And what did you look for in those first couple of employees?

Bryce Wuori: 29:37

Yeah. So, I mean, my, my co founder and COO is also my wife and past business partner. We've ran three businesses together, so we have a unique relationship that she's operations, she runs finances. And I am, I always make this scenario or kind of comparison that I'm sometimes like the show pony and I'm coming up with the ideas and running around and she actually is the wheels making things turn. So what we did is we, our first hire. Besides us as co founders was a CTO because I was, I was trying to manage both. I didn't have enough technical technicality to, to do both. And I actually went to a really good friend that I knew to look for a CTO for me and, and he was giving me recommendations. I was doing interviews. And this whole time I really wanted this person just to like join our team and eventually he did. So like and he is now our CTO and he's phenomenal. So like what we really looked for was. We, we knew people we wanted that had good experiences with, with the industry, with good working backgrounds and things. And, and we really went off of a lot of good recommendations, even for our next hires and things like that, where people that had success in the industry and that we knew were hardworking and wanted to, you know, it's really important when you're in a startup because. You wear multiple hats and things change all the time is like somebody who can be you have to have a little bit of structure But you also have to be able to do you things change so quick like, you know You have to you have to be flexible and things like that. So it takes a special type of person to tell you know To, to fit into this mold of a startup. But we really looked for those types of people that were kind of entrepreneur driven, like love the idea of owning a business and starting something new and things like that, because those are the people that are really going to have a lot of drive and passion to, to make it a success.

Jason Frazell: 31:38

Yeah. Have you had any, have you had any challenges hiring into the business in terms of just folks that haven't worked out because they, the pace or the, and I do a lot of work with startups. Some people just can't, can't handle the uncertainty and the quick shifts. Cause you may go out and meet with a huge client. My guess is this has probably happened. You get introduced to somebody or you're making sales calls or whatever. And it's like, could be a significant piece of business and you actually have to shift the roadmap. in order to accommodate what they need because they have a specific way of doing things. Have you had some challenges with any employees or in hiring around just, just not a good fit because of, you know, You know, like technically it's great, but the startup life just isn't what they thought it would be.

Bryce Wuori: 32:18

We haven't honestly, everybody's been, yeah, we've been pretty fortunate. We're a team of we're only six. Well, we're eight, six full time we got two other part time and actually. We're seven now. We just hired another person on sales and so yeah, it, it's where we set goals and we're pretty, you know, like we're pretty open. We're pretty tight team as far as like communication and, and like, if I need help somewhere, somebody fits in. And I mean, like, so it's really. Really a lot of just like putting out fires and stuff But like just like asking for help and knowing things are gonna change every day and and things like that It's we've been fortunate in that so far I think you know as we keep growing we might run into more and more of that But that's honestly one of the things that we ask in our interview process is like do you need? Structure to perform well, and and we really strive towards people that we know Are okay with changes and kind of like to, you know, that are okay with those kinds of environments and come from other startups. A lot of these individuals have came from other startups or in this world. So they're, they're familiar with it.

Jason Frazell: 33:32

Nice. And how do you think about. As you continue to grow, which I'm sure you will, you serve a huge, I mean, a huge market opportunity, which is nice. I like huge market opportunity. How do you, as the CEO, and by, by the way, I just have to say that I was thinking we should have you come on and talk about two things. Running multiple businesses with your wife. That is, in and of itself, you know, is a special thing. Not everybody can do that, including my wife and I. And two, hiring practices. Because most companies that have grown to six or seven have had at least one or two complete misfires. And I really appreciate that because you know this as well as anybody, a misfire with a team of five is a huge setback, especially when you have market demand and you're trying to get shipping product and meeting clients expectations. I wanted to ask you about how you think about maintaining the culture as you scale, which is a never ending, never ending thought process. How do you do that as you become, you know, hopefully someday, well, hopefully what you want is you become a little more removed from those six employees, right? You're doing, you've got a couple of reports. They're doing those things. How do you think about maintaining the culture that you've started to build there of what sounds like a really high performing and a team that gets along well and does good work?

Bryce Wuori: 34:49

You know, I thought about that because I've always been like, I don't want to be one of those bosses or individuals that doesn't know my employees. And you know, one of the things that we do now as, as a company, even. We're small enough now to, we, we take the whole group. Like we went down to world of asphalt where our devs, everybody could like see the industry and how it works. We have multiple, we have two offices right now, one in Bismarck, one in Fargo. When I go out to Fargo, I, I work, I take a day with my dev team. We sit down, we have, Pinball tournament and we, you know, we just kind of hang out and talk about things and how everything's going. I, I do want to stay continued and we have shifted into giving like our CE, our CTO more Management over, you know, he pretty much runs that dev crew. I'm, I'm just talking to him already, but we still do those types of things. And I want to, honestly, that's my goal down the road is to get more out of sales and, and even product development. I'll never get completely out of product development, but I just want to run a company that, that. People like to work for and that's been one of our, our biggest goals is like build a company that people are like, I want to work for them because they're building cool things. And it's a really fun environment and the people there are really awesome to work with. And that's kind of what we're doing now. And hopefully we can keep doing that as we keep growing.

Jason Frazell: 36:18

Yeah, that's nice. What do you, as we wrap up here, Bryce, what's next for Pavewise and what's next as a, as all of us out here who see the kind of projects that you might be utilized on, what kind of, what kind of trends are, are you seeing in construction, in the paving industry that, you that you're excited about. I mean, and, and we had talked about this previously, one of the things, and I know it's very small scale right now, but I think it's, I know Amsterdam has, it was a Detroit, they've got like a quarter mile of conductive electric vehicle charging. Now we're like with a special adapter and I think it's still in pre alpha phase where electrified, in other words, electrified roads. I mean, I think the grand vision is someday that is, that is a real thing, but yeah, I'm really curious. Like, what do you see as, as industry trends and things that you're keeping an eye on?

Bryce Wuori: 37:09

Yeah. One thing I'm really excited for is we're in this unique transition of the, there's about 25 percent of the construction workforce is 55 and older right now. And they're getting replaced by the younger generation that's, was born into technology with, you know, and phones and like is, you know, Seeing how the construction industry kind of accepts a lot of that and starts using, pushing more and more technology, the other really unique technology that I'm involved in a lot and that I have a really Big push and drive for is autonomy autonomous equipment to help digital operators run multiple pieces of equipment. This industry is hard to find individuals that want to work 12, 13, 14 hours a day in the environment. And, and, and. You know, it is becoming less attractive. So we have to find technologies to kind of take one operator and be able to put them on multiple pieces of equipment and make that equipment more user friendly. So that when you get any higher, there's not as much. Training and demand on them. They can get in a piece of machine. That's literally telling them what they should and shouldn't do or help them operate more efficiently. So those are the technologies that we ultimately with pavewise data that we're collecting that we want to help build those pieces of equipment to make those decisions. And that's one like around weather, right? If we have a machine out in the field and. And whether it's impacting the performance, we want to tell that machine or that operator how to perform better. So auto, you know, autonomy is really cool and getting pushed really, really far in construction right now. It's kind of following what agriculture is doing. So. All those types of technologies are fun and unique. And I think in the next five to 10 years we're going to see some really cool advancements in,

Jason Frazell: 39:06

in

Bryce Wuori: 39:07

the industry is going to start, these things are just going to become more norms than they are just like,

Jason Frazell: 39:12

these are, these

Bryce Wuori: 39:12

are innovations. No, these are just the way we do it now. So,

Jason Frazell: 39:16

yeah, very cool. Awesome, Bryce. Well, thank you and the rest of the team for being a part of it and for driving innovation yourself as well.

Bryce Wuori: 39:24

Yes. Thank you, Jason. I really enjoyed this and we're going to just keep grinding away and, and see what happens. Yeah.

Jason Frazell: 39:31

I, I hope, I hope at some point I will be driving down the road and see somebody on the phone and go, that might be Pavewise. That'd be super cool. Thanks for it. Yeah. I really appreciate your time today. I know that. You know, I alluded to this at the beginning, but you all are in your busy season. You know, it's spring. It's the beginning of May. So you got a lot of stuff to do. I know you have some weather there in North Dakota, like you talked about. Really appreciate your time. Cause I know you all have a lot to do here and just make the industry more efficient and also hopefully save us taxpayers some money. I think everybody likes that. So thanks for the work you do. Thanks so much, Bryce. Take care.

40:07

Thanks for listening to another episode of Talking to Cool People with Jason Frizzell. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell your friends, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and give us a shout out, or take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. If something from today's episode piqued your interest and you'd like to connect, email us at podcast at jasonfrizzell. com. We love hearing from our listeners because you're cool people too.