Somewhere along the way I figured out that working a job alongside a crew is more satisfying to me than most of the ways a person is supposed to relax — that the shared effort is the good part, not the price you pay to get a result.

That isn't a sentimental position. It's the reason this company exists and the reason it works the way it does.

Construction is the largest collaborative act most people will ever take part in. A school, a hospital, a data center — none of it gets built by one trade, one company, or one good idea. It gets built by a lot of people, most of whom will never meet, agreeing on how the work is going to go. When that agreement is clear, the job runs. When it isn't, everybody pays for it — in rework, in waiting, in friction nobody can quite point at.

I've stood in most of the seats around that agreement. Hands-on in the trade. Design and engineering. VDC and BIM. IT. The C-suite of a mechanical contractor. Contractor side, owner side, and now the technology-producer side. The view is different from every one of them, and what has struck me from all of them is how rarely those seats can see each other.