Bryce Wuori Podcast Transcript
Bryce Wuori joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brain Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Bryce Wuori. Bryce Wuori is the co-founder and CEO of Pavewise and 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, 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 in every paving project.
Well good afternoon, Bryce. Welcome to the show!
Bryce Wuori: Good afternoon. Thanks, Brian, for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Bryce. You’ve got such an amazing background as far as what you’re doing in construction management and asphalt. We’re going to jump into that here in a minute, but I’m just so thrilled to be able to spend this time behind the microphone today with you and learn about some of the things you’re doing and kind of really disrupting your industry.
So, jumping into the questions, Bryce, you’ve got quite the career in engineering construction management. You’re a senior executive. An entrepreneur now, and the co-founder and CEO of Pavewise. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Bryce Wuori: Yeah. There’s really not a secret. You know, I grew up my dad owned a construction company. My grandpa was an entrepreneur who owned a construction company from a young age. I found that hard work starting early in the morning and just working hard always produced you know, good outcomes. So, I’ve taken that into pretty much everything that I’ve done from, you know, I started boots on the ground running equipment to moving into management to going to college and finding, you know, my engineering construction management degree.
I’ve always used that mentality that hard work is a good way to present yourself and it always produces a good outcome. If I had to really put one thing that really inspires me it is the construction industry. It’s an amazing industry filled with people. Great individuals. It’s an industry that sometimes is overlooked.
A lot of people say it’s the smallest, biggest industry in the world. But you think about all the roads we drive on all the infrastructure without this industry we wouldn’t have the society and economy we have even currently. So, my drive, my passion to improve that industry by. Just giving knowledge that I’ve learned from individuals infusing technology into the industry is just absolutely my biggest passion.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing. And I appreciate sharing the roots that go back in your family as well, but you’re absolutely right. The, as they say, the early bird gets the worm. And that, I think that truly is one of the pillars, foundational pillars of success is getting up. Early hard work in getting after the day.
So, I appreciate you sharing that. And Bryce next question here for you with any construction project, there’s always inefficiencies and cost overruns, right? I’ve done project management in the tech sector before in my past. And I get it right in the road paving business though, there’s a national statistic that States 38 percent of all projects don’t finish on time.
What are you doing to help mitigate this problem?
Bryce Wuori: Yeah. So. Actually, that was one of the reasons I was attracted to the asphalt industry originally was I was a college inspector intern watching over a, a contractor doing paving. And I just realized that there was so many things that could have been improved with, with communication and just even watching the crews that’s what attracted me to, to that industry originally was a little bit of the brokenness, so that’s.
Kind of where I really took off with, you know, involving technologies practices that help these contractors do better, with technologies with efficiencies and it’s really one of the most inefficient industries out there and a lot of it is not just because of the people and the crews, but you’re dealing with external environments where you can’t control rain, wind there’s a lot of moving variables in, in this industry as well, truck logistics, there’s, you know, Big crews with lots of subcontractors.
So, a lot of moving parts the ways that we’re trying to mitigate this problem is proactiveness. 1 thing that our software does is we put in. Impacts for weather 714 day impacts, and that’s based off of the engines we’ve created that we know what a 25 mile per hour wind will do to efficiencies quality and impacts to a project.
So, we’re trying to mitigate those risks up front and even offer. Advice when they do come when these environmental things are happening to how we change the operations to combat them to stay efficient and effective. So proactiveness really knowing that these risks, these things are going to happen.
And we can’t do anything about it, but how do we adjust and adapt to them to stay successful?
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re right. Being proactive in any project, but in your business is particularly important and I’m glad that you are really seizing this opportunity. Challenging as you may call it, but making this a better place.
Especially when it comes to our road and our road safety at the end of the day, we want us all to come home safe. So, Bryce, you believe there is plenty of room for improvement in the paving business. We talked about that a little bit. Why is training in the asphalt business so important?
Bryce Wuori: Training is one of the easiest things you can do to mitigate risk.
Honestly when you’re able to put the time and effort into training your operators, your managers on best practices, what to do, it eliminates those small little inefficiencies. And honestly, it’s when you add up all those small little inefficiencies, that’s what costs a lot of time and money on these projects.
Yeah. Those often add up to more than just one big event. So, if you put the time and effort in training into your operators, into your individuals, then you eliminate a lot more of those and. Everybody’s on the same path, I guess, that’s one of the main things that we try to do in our software is it’s a platform that brings everybody on that has the same goal.
You have the same team, everything that you know, what you need to do to achieve success. The training aspect of it is really 1 of the things that scare me the most in this industry right now, because there’s a lot of experienced individuals that are retiring that have just. A wealth of knowledge that is not getting passed on to the next generations or maybe some of it is, but there’s so much that’s missing.
And we’re trying to capture some of that with, you know, even training videos, just practices to, to pass on cause and effect. And this is why we do certain things. I spend a lot of my time just going out and working with crews. I was an operator in the past. So, one of my favorite things to do is jump on And work with a new roller operator and show them this is why we turn out in this direction.
This is why we keep your roller in this temperature zone, these impacts, because that stuff resonates. They know, they now know why not to do that instead of just being told, don’t do this. So training is by far one of the best things you can do as a company to improve success overall.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right. Training is key to the success of any organization, any individual looking to grow their career and be successful as well. And I love the story of you rolling up your sleeves, jumping in and helping the new guys in there, right? That’s so important. And I appreciate that you’re such a great leader and Bryce last question of the day, you’re obviously leveraging some new and emerging tech in your business there.
Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
Bryce Wuori: Yeah. So, I mean, we are kind of leading the role in, in some of these new technologies. Obviously, AI is a huge buzzword in tech right now. And we are leveraging some AI. We’re building a, what we call a virtual assistant in our software that we know, and what we want to try to do is give back time to these busy project managers, these foremen in the field.
And I managing projects. One of the things I always struggled with was. I was managing data and documents so much that half my day was consumed by just trying to put documents in the correct folders, getting a hold of quantities for my subcontractors. So, we’re creating our project assistant tool that uses AI to pretty much virtually manage.
Documents and productions and goals through the software to give back the project manager, the user, at least one to three hours. We’re finding one to three hours. We can give back to a user right now by just taking care of the busy work. So that’s some of the cool technology we’re leveraging along with some pretty neat Hyper local weather stations that we put up on site that are actually tracking fully automated weather, putting it right into our software for the users as well.
So, yeah, some pretty cool tech out there.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Bryce. I appreciate you sharing what you’re doing in the construction management asphalt business. As far as technology, we are a tech platform and we love. To hear what everybody’s doing in their industry or vertical. So, thank you. And Bryce, it was such a pleasure having you on today.
And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Bryce Wuori: Yes. Thank you, Brian. We really appreciate it. And thank you again for the opportunity.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Bryce Wuori Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
