Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s time for Nashville Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Nashville Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have the CEO with EVOLVE, Richard Burroughs. Welcome.

Richard Burroughs IV: It’s great to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about EVOLVE, how you serving folks?

Richard Burroughs IV: Absolutely. So we are a software company that sells design and fabrication software for mechanical, electrical and plumbing trade contractors. So we help them design buildings and fabricate and install the parts, the MEP systems of those buildings.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Richard Burroughs IV: That’s a great question. I’ll give you the short answer. So I grew up in the built environment, got a degree from Georgia Tech and building construction. Went to China for supply chain related to a big general contractor building apartments here in the United States. Went to business school and then fell in love with this small software business at the time. EVOLVE to join that company post business school in January or June of 2020, and grew in the ranks for the firm. And I’m now the CEO for the business.

Lee Kantor: So what was it about EVOLVE that got you so fired up that you decided to, you know, get involved to the level you did?

Richard Burroughs IV: Yeah, it’s a great question. While at University of Virginia in business school, I did a field case. So I wrote a research case working with this startup EVOLVE at the time to understand how they could grow the business, whether they wanted to pursue funding to grow the business, these types of questions. And part of the work was financial analysis and modeling. But a good part of the work was interviewing a lot of the key employees, many of whom are still at the business. So now our VP of product and he on our VP of engineering, Jason Faulkner, and hearing them describe how necessary these design automation software tools that they were building for these electrical and mechanical plumbing trade contractors in order for them to do their jobs and to design buildings faster and to be more constructible. You know, hearing their passion was really what led me to join the business.

Lee Kantor: And what about the EVOLVE solution did you find so intriguing and so important for the industry?

Richard Burroughs IV: Yeah, it’s a great question. So we’re what the world calls a vertical market software business. So said simply, we focused on a corner of the world that at the time, ten years ago, nobody else was really certain. So there’s a lot of very big companies like Autodesk who provide big platform softwares for the broader architecture and engineering and overall construction industry to leverage. But at the time especially, no one was serving these mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractors. And really, when you think about it, those trade contractors are carrying the vast majority actually delivering these buildings that we so rely on, things like data centers. The largest portion of the actual, if you get into what that building is comprised of, comes from the MEP contractors work. So they were underserved. They needed. There’s huge pressure to decrease the the construction timelines to execute these buildings. So they have to produce faster. Uh, somebody has to serve them the means to produce things faster, design faster, and to fabricate and install material faster. Uh, this company sits squarely in the middle of supporting that.

Lee Kantor: So if there was no EVOLVE, how were they doing it before you were around?

Richard Burroughs IV: Uh, so it’s a great question. There was such a need, uh, that we saw companies home building, home developing software about ten years ago. This was before AI. So frankly a much harder process than than perhaps now. But there was such a demand, such a need, that we saw contractors developing their own solutions to automate their designing of these MEP systems. Um, so in part, we actually acquired code from a contractor. We ended up rebuilding, redesigning that code base and launched what we now call EVOLVE electrical. About a year after that was May 2016. Uh, that’s a great signal of the demand. Again, it was an underserved space that needed to produce things faster and had to get the tools together to accomplish that.

Lee Kantor: And then did the same thing happen with mechanical?

Richard Burroughs IV: Uh, exactly. So we followed the electrical product about a year later. So this was May 2016, was inception of the business. Uh, about November 2017 was our fourth sale of, uh, of all, of all electrical, our launch of that product. And then about a year later was, uh, the fast follow with EVOLVE mechanical.

Lee Kantor: And so is that how you’ve been kind of growing It’s just kind of listening to your clients and then just building them a solution that, you know, will save them time and resources.

Richard Burroughs IV: Lea. That’s exactly right. You know, something that makes EVOLVE unique is our desire and willingness to hire from industry. So we have over 200 collective years of design experience from the MEP trades that constitute our product management team. They constitute our customer support team, among others. And so that allows us to really understand and live and breathe the voice of the customer, as the software world calls it. That allows us to create purpose built solutions that actually meet them where they are. Uh, so we are not here selling vision, you know, we’re selling practicality. You know, our customers think of them as, you know, the, the world’s, you know, best tradesmen and women, right? So they don’t want, you know, the, I’m going to go to Walmart and buy a given product off the shelf. I want to go to Ace Hardware. I want to engage with an expert that’s lived and breathed my craft, that can speak my language and understand my needs and help me on, you know, the mission that I’m trying to achieve. So they need service and tools. So we have to provide both great tools, purpose built and the service above and beyond that.

Lee Kantor: Um, the, this industry, do they tend to be risk averse or are they do, is it easy to find these early adopters that want to try a new thing?

Richard Burroughs IV: That’s a great question, Lee. You know, it’s oft quoted in, you know, the famous Andreessen Horowitz, uh, venture capital fund. They just came out with an article about how construction lags in digital adoption of software. And I see these things all the time and I defend our industry. You know, it’s a reflection not of their willingness to try digital tools and software. The lack of adoption is a reflection of the complexity of the project delivery itself. So the number of stakeholders, Architecture and engineering and site and civil and structural and MEP. The trade contractors, the general contractor. The owner. The local building. You know contact such as code in the city itself. There’s so many factors that go into how you deliver something like a data set. So bespoke, it’s that kind of marginal cost problem. It’s hard to get, you know, uniform software that applies to all of these different use cases and stakeholders. So that’s why the construction industry rarely lags in, quote, software adoption. It certainly is not only due to the lack of interest or desire to adopt software. Again, I’ll go back to the way we started. Our contractor trade base was building their own software. Um, the amount of scripting and Dynamo and PowerShell, the amount of kind of last inch customization, the tinkering is world class. Um, so our users often blend to almost like an engineer, like a developer in the software world, we call it in their day jobs. So their willingness is there. It’s the product’s complexity that makes applying software uniformly across the whole industry very difficult.

Lee Kantor: So because of the complexity and the fact that there’s, there could be a no around every corner in that world. Um, how do you help educate your clients or prospective clients so they feel confident that this is going to not only solve these problems but make their life easier?

Richard Burroughs IV: That’s a great question. So again, like software wants every use case to be the same, right? Because software has typically very low marginal cost to sell in the next client. They want every client to be the same. Well, as we just discussed, that’s not the case for our industry. So there’s a certain level of customization that you have to provide within your product. And that is a common talk track with us. So an example could be when I design as a user of EVOLVE, I by design, an electrical system in a building. I draw my conduit. I draw my support, I draw my equipment, and eventually I have thousands and thousands of parts and footage of these things inside this building design. Well, it can’t execute all of that at once. I have to break that up into a proverbial Lego brick. You know, a smaller part that I can act on tomorrow, what the industry calls a spool. And so we provide the ability to define your schools, and then you create a deliverable for that school, what we call a shot draw. And you can picture an 11 by 17 sheet of paper with a dimension drawing of some pipe and conduit and supports. Um, and maybe there’s a schedule that shows what those materials are, this, this semblance of a shotgun. Well, every company will have different standards to execute, say that shop drawing or maybe the size and start and end points of their spool. So we can provide things like templates and then the automation. Once you define your settings and templates, you can create this shop drawing the same way every time per your standard. But we’ve automated that kind of last ditch. So it’s this blend of automation and customization that allows you to serve and get over that kind of trust hump with industry.

Lee Kantor: But before your clients buy, is there a way for you to kind of give them a chance to try it on, or do they have to kind of go all in?

Richard Burroughs IV: Oh, it’s a great question. So absolutely, there’s ways to ingest their existing building designs and run, you know, a pilot in our words. Um, you certainly have to have that in a limited capacity. It’s in a controlled instance, but you can test, for instance, the previous example, I want to recreate a full template and a shop drawing template. I want to see a time trial and a B study of how long it takes me to create these deliverables and my current methods. And with EVOLVE. So we offer those services as part of pre-sales. As you move towards fabrication, it gets a bit harder. So for instance, if I want to test fabricating conduit. Well, now you have specialized machines. Uh, and there’s an interesting shift in the industry where especially for electrical, uh, machine automation has just now come about in existence. So we’re once all things were fabricated with manual or semi manual processes with hydraulic benders, you’re telling it when to start and stop. Now that work is done with an automated capacity with things like CNC bending. So what we’ve done to allow them to test that out is we actually invested in a physical fabrication lab. As we say in Atlanta. They can take their designs. We now have a CNC bender, a Positioner and the specialized equipment in Atlanta. They can submit their designs to us and then visit us in the Fab Lab Atlanta and actually run time trials and see it physically produced. But it gets a little harder there. You kind of got to fly and be there in person.

Lee Kantor: But ultimately that’s going to save, um, your client time and money. Right?

Richard Burroughs IV: Exactly. Right. I mean, the entire, uh, the reason for our existence is buildings have to be built faster today. So we run a survey every year, 68% of MEP trade contractors have experienced greater than 25% schedule reduction over the last three years. So they have 25% less time to build the same building today than three years ago or more. Um, and so the way that they accomplish that is they have shifted from on site construction assembly and installation of materials to offsite fabrication. So the metaphor I’ll use is picture a Lego brick, picture a one by one square Lego brick, the smallest instant size you could get. Picture a two by six, that larger classic brick size. Now try to build a wall that’s four feet long and two feet high. Using a one by one and a two by six. Well, you’re going to do the two by six. It would be a lot faster to build that wall. Uh, that’s the nature of the work our clients do. We allow them to create these parts, these spools, offsite, before the building reaches readiness so the concrete gets poured. The second that concrete is poured, they can go and install like this proverbial two by six brick, this larger portion of MSP and it goes much, much, much faster. So that’s kind of the core of our value proposition.

Lee Kantor: And so everything becomes integrated before, before they’re even there.

Richard Burroughs IV: Exactly. Right. So design and fabrication all have to occur before the concrete’s even poor, the building doesn’t even exist. It’s roughly akin to like buying furniture before you buy your house. You know, there’s a lot of sort of forecasting and design and understanding of what that’s going to look like, the amount of space you’ll have, the exact placement of certain parts that allows you to execute your designs and your fabrication before the building’s there.

Lee Kantor: But the technology helps you get all of that exactly right without having to, to, to be there and do it on site.

Richard Burroughs IV: That’s exactly right. So if we’re going to go build like the new T patch center, uh, in Nashville, before that building, before the site’s been cleared, before they put the foundation in, I’ve already designed that entire building down to the eighth inch, you know, every single element in that building. I know exactly how long my pipe needs to be, where my supports need to be placed, and then I can release those to my manufacturing facility and I can fabricate them. And they’re sitting there in my warehouse. And the second that concrete is poured, I can go install that order.

Lee Kantor: And so, um, when you tell that to your clients or prospective clients, is that is their head explode like that seems like too good to be true.

Richard Burroughs IV: Oh, so look, credit to industry. So these off site fabrication, doing these things in advance. Uh, it was spearheaded by the mechanical employment industries. Um, it’s now been adopted fully by electrical. So they understand that it’s the way of the future. It’s the business model of construction is becoming manufacturing. That religion is now believed, if you will. So we’re selling Bibles. To an extent for things like design automation, but where you continue to see the evolution of the business model itself is in what I referenced earlier. It’s well, now we fabricate things off site in a controlled environment, but I need to do that faster. I need to increase the production rates. And to do that, I have to I need to I need to find some innovation. I need to buy machine automation by an example. So instead of producing content with manual hand benders or semi manual hydraulic benders, I could buy a fully automated CNC bender, get 80 to 100 bins a day, and you can start seeing, well, you better have designs of a quality that can feed that vendor appropriately. So this seamless design through fabrication, all of the pre-processing and controls around what the nature of that design is, it’s that next level of maturity we know we have to fabricate off site. Well, how do we scale that? Now? That’s the question that we’re dealing with.

Lee Kantor: And then how do you deal with the fact that, like you mentioned earlier, that there’s so many, um, you know, hands on a project, how do you get everybody to communicate to the level they have to so that all of that can elegantly be put together?

Richard Burroughs IV: Um, it’s a, it’s a great question. It’s what the industry calls coordination. So let’s just say there might be 20 different trades, specialty trades and electrical and plumbing, etc., that combine to form the entirety of a building’s design, all the different systems. Well, like you said, well, what if, what if the, uh, the fire protection guy has his pipe and it’s running right through where the Hvac is supposed to go? How do you know that these things are a problem in advance before the building’s physically present? It’s what the industry calls coordination. They all create design. Those designs share the same common offering platform. It’s Autodesk Revit. Same with our clients. Uh, and then they can compare those designs. Where is the location of my part versus yours? Do I need to move or do you? And they, they will shift things around until the building has been coordinated, at which point they know that the design will equal what will become physical reality. So they can start to do things like spool those designs, release them for fabrication, bring them into existence and ready them for install.

Lee Kantor: And EVOLVE plays nicely with that kind of quarterbacking software that everybody’s already using.

Richard Burroughs IV: That’s exactly right. So that’s there’s companies like Autodesk has a Navisworks product. Revisto is a wonderful business that solves coordination quite well. So we’re how they design the building and how they detail that design and consume that design for fabrication. We play directly with how they coordinate. So they’ll use a different software for coordination.

Lee Kantor: So is then is your who is your ideal client? Is it kind of the master software so that you’re implemented in all of their projects, or is it? Do you have to kind of get individual people to buy into EVOLVE?

Richard Burroughs IV: Um, it’s always, uh, you, we want to serve the labor market and the company market equally. So our ideal client from the company perspective, it’s a trade contractor, mechanical, electrical or plumbing or a combination of, they tend to have around 75 or 100 employees. Um, they use 3D design and off site fabrication as their business model. Uh, or they want to, they recognized that prefabrication, offsite fabrication is the way of the future. They need to invest in the methods, processes, and technologies to allow them to do that so we could help them get there. Um, in terms of the high end, we serve some of the MEP industry’s largest um, trade contractors, Rosen’s and Cupertino’s, um the Harris mechanicals of the world, K Murphy co, you name it that e n r you know, 1 to 3 billion, uh, top line revenue, and locally here as well. I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out. So like enterprise solutions, wonderful electrical contractor. They utilize prefab to build the Fisher Center performing arts, the beautiful center at Belmont. Uh, Lee co, uh, Lee company, wonderful mechanical, multi trade contractor. Um, and we also support Stancil electric. They do a lot of industrial work, like the Dry Creek wastewater facility out here in Davidson County.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share about? Uh, maybe it was early on or maybe it was just a rewarding story where, um, one of your clients deployed EVOLVE and they were able to get maybe a result that even surprised them.

Richard Burroughs IV: Absolutely. Um, let’s reference enterprise as well and pull up the actual quote here. Um. So let’s see. So enterprise solutions, they’re an electrical contractor, um, for a recent project. So if you think about the building underneath the ground, you have to pull power from the street. These huge conduits, these big pipes with huge wires coming in from the street to get power to the building. Um, these are called duct banks. So the electrical contractor has to install underground duct banks. And historically, those are done piece by piece, pipe by pipe. But what they did is they created again this idea of this Lego brick. So they took a bunch of pipes and added them into a single what they call a skid. So think about like a big metal framing that carries like 40ft of these huge pipes carrying wire, and they break that entirety up into these different skids. And they were able to do what would have taken six months of traditional work. They were able to install the entire underground duct, uh, in 48 hours. Um, so getting that gain at the field install, that’s their throughput one.

Lee Kantor: Wow. That, I mean, that sounds impossible. I mean, when you, I mean, to even have a conversation telling somebody that that’s possible, It seems too good to be true.

Richard Burroughs IV: And it’s, um, the hard part is getting there. So again, the, the magic is in the field install. If I can install that two by six Lego brick, I can move, you know, ten, 20 times faster installing material in the field. But to create that two by six slug correctly is like, that’s the hard part. That’s the upfront design plan, the coordination, the offsite fabrication. That’s, that’s where the magic is.

Lee Kantor: Right? But it’s, um, it’s just going against, you know, a person’s anything they’ve seen with their eyes prior and you’re, and you’re, it makes intellectual sense, but just having their experience in the past be so different, it just must be jaw dropping when it actually happens. Like you promise?

Richard Burroughs IV: Um, absolutely. Yep.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Richard Burroughs IV: Um, look, just get the word out. So a broader appeal is the trades themselves. Um, the trades are a fantastic industry to build a career in. Uh, careers are incredibly accessible. Uh, demand is extreme. You know, there’s an oft quoted labor shortage, but that not just applies to field roles. It also applies to these design roles. It applies to these fabricator roles. You don’t have to work on a job site in the field installing material. You can be on a computer doing this design work in an office. Um, all of these roles are in huge demand right now. They’re very accessible. Not all of them need college degrees. So it’s a broader appeal. Look at the trades for your career, for your if you’re a young man or woman, you know, come out of high school, come out of college. Um, another appeal is for folks to understand really who’s carrying the weight of the economy. Obviously that’s a broad statement, but when you think about things like AI, these emerging technologies, if you think about the semiconductor, the chips that power, the data centers that that provide the processing for AI? All of those buildings are being built by the trades. A huge portion of the data center projects cost and material and labor is carried by the electrical. So, um, and so the growth that we’re seeing in the MEP broadly and the amount of work they’re doing to support the broader economies march towards these new technologies, it goes unnoticed. People don’t realize how critical these MEP trade contractors really are. So the awareness is is really the summary for me. Just be aware of what’s happening in the trades as they EVOLVE from construction trade contractors to manufacturing driven trade contractors.

Lee Kantor: Now, from the standpoint of your ideal customer, what are they? What’s the pain they’re having right before they hire you? What is kind of some signals that, hey, maybe they should contact Richard and his team?

Richard Burroughs IV: Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, oftentimes you’ll have. The company will not have standards. So I’ll go back to the. The previous example of a shop drawing is a shop drawing produced for a given, say, hangar or a piece of conduit or a rack of a few pieces of conduit. Is it produced the same way every time? Uh, does it have all the dimensions and bills of materials, the instructions needed on that sheet for the fabricators and material folks downstream to do their jobs the first time and not have an information retrieval wastage problem. Um, we see that very commonly. Um, the second piece you look at is if there’s no standardization or if there is, well, how long does it take you to produce that deliverable? Are you modeling your design manually? Click by click by click. Are you placing your hangers? You know, adding these details manually? Click by click. And if we see that symptom as well, then it’s a reflection that our automation can really increase your productivity. Roughly 1.3 x about 25% time savings gets you about 1.3 x gain on productivity. So those are the common signs that we see.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Richard Burroughs IV: Absolutely. Lee. So our website is WW. Dot com. Uh, and I live in Nashville, so find me on LinkedIn. Let’s, let’s grab coffee sometime.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, Richard, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Richard Burroughs IV: Hey, Lee, credit to the trades. And thank you, sir for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Nashville Business Radio.