TZL - Reg Prentice - TonicDM 0:00:03 - (TZL Open): Welcome to the Zweig Letter podcast, putting architectural, engineering, planning, and environmental consulting advice and guidance in your ear. Zweig Group's team of experts has spent more than three decades elevating the industry by helping AEP and environmental consulting firms thrive. These podcasts deliver invaluable management, industry client, marketing, and HR advice directly to you, free of charge. The Zweig Letter podcast, elevating the design industry one episode at a time 0:00:37 - (Randy Wilburn): Hey, folks, and welcome back to another episode of the Zweig Letter podcast. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn, and I'm excited to be with you today, as always. We have a great episode in store for you. I want to give a shout-out to Christopher Parsons from Knowledge Architecture. I've known Chris for several years now, and he has connected me with some amazing people in the design industry who are specifically working on how we aggregate and disseminate information, technically and otherwise. This next guest is no exception to that rule. I'm so excited to have Reg Prentice, the CEO of TonicDM on this episode and this is one of those episodes that you're going to want to save, you're going to want to rewind and watch again and gain some insight and information. Reg is an amazing individual and somebody that I'm glad that we've been able to bring on the podcast to talk about what he's doing and learn about how he is helping firms aggregate and utilize the information that design firms capture on a daily basis. Because you and I both know that every firm, both near and far, captures a lot of data and a lot of information. The challenge that every firm faces is how we access that information, how we disseminate that information, and how that information impacts the role of mentoring within the confines of a design organization. There are so many implications when it comes to how you deal with data, how you access that data and whether or not you have access to that data in a way that is usable. It's one thing to just take a bunch of drawings and some files, notes, and some emails from a specific project and just file it away in your Google Drive or your AWS or your Dropbox but it's another thing to be able to have a recall for that information that you've stored. Reg is going to spend some time today talking about what TonicDM does, but more importantly, just what he has learned over the years in his time in the design industry space. So, without further ado, I hope that was okay, Reg. Welcome to the Zweig Letter podcast. 0:03:05 - (Reg Prentice): Thanks, Randy. It's great to be here. 0:03:07 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah. Absolutely. So tell us just a little bit about yourself and your background then let's start talking a little bit about TonicDM and some of the problems that you're solving for the design firms everywhere.
0:03:19 - (Reg Prentice): So my background is from architecture school. So I'm a graduate of architecture school, but not a licensed architect. Even at school, I was very quickly the computer nerd in the computer lab, as we had. And for the initial firms that I worked for, that was when CAD was just coming to be a standard thing in firms. So that was my role. I became the person who knew about CAD and helped the firm with that. So right from the beginning of my career, it was about design technology for me. Immediately, my brain went into information structure and how firms were organizing their files in the network drive and putting some structure around that CAD, just the structure of the CAD files themselves and layers and all those kinds of things. So pretty quickly, it was about information for me and information management. I think the flow of information, just the amount of information that the individuals in the firm had to deal with. 0:04:33 - (Reg Prentice): I think right from the beginning, that was a problem that I saw and was trying to work on, making life easier for the staff and the firms. 0:04:42 - (Randy Wilburn): So you got your architectural degree, you didn't get a license, and you saw a need, I guess I would say, based on your experiences as you matriculate through the university, as we like to say, what's the best way to express this? You kneeled in and focused on that one thing and said, hey, how can we do this better? And based on what you shared with me in a previous conversation that we had, you've worked with some pretty stellar firms, and you cut your teeth, if you will, in this design industry space, in this area of information management. 0:05:23 - (Randy Wilburn): Can you talk just a little bit about that? 0:05:26 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. The first full-time job I had was with Frank Gehry, which came from work I was doing at university, research work with Mark Barry, who is an architect on the Sagrada Familia Gaudi's church in Barcelona. So it was an interesting one because we were in New Zealand, I was at University in Wellington, and it was the early days of the Internet. So Mark was able to hook up to a server in Barcelona, and we would do work, and he could even print on their printer. 0:06:01 - (Reg Prentice): So that was kind of early intro to computers and 3d modeling specifically, and script writing, analyzing Gowdy's models using Lisp routines and AutoCAD. And so that is what led me to Frank Gehry's office, who was also working on complex shapes using similar kinds of software that we were using at the University in New Zealand. So that was a great connection to make and then I spent eleven years at Gary's office, and it was a journey. 0:06:34 - (Reg Prentice): When I started, it was really about cad management and writing Lisp routines. But I think over time it was the information and the flow of information, which I gravitated towards, just how things are organized, how they're structured, how people share and that kind of thing. So information flows. And I ended up writing some, like the extranet and the intranet, and even the public website for Frank's office. 0:07:03 - (Reg Prentice): And then I went to Gensler, which again was a really interesting experience. I was there for nine years, so it was a very long journey. It wasn't getting to the point
of starting a software company around information management. It was pretty much exactly 20 years that I'd been working in the industry on the IT or digital design side. 0:07:29 - (Randy Wilburn): So, you can make the argument and say that TonicDM was developed in a lab of real practice for 20 years and what we see now with this new company that you're about to talk about is the culmination of your experiences at these two firms. 0:07:47 - (Reg Prentice): And I think about it as a career path. It's always easy to say, man, if I just started this 20 years earlier it would be huge now. 0:07:56 - (Randy Wilburn): Or like they say, overnight sensation. 0:08:01 - (Reg Prentice): But I’m not sure that you can do that because the point of the tech company right now is the culmination of having just sat, and it's a very slow process to sit with people at their desks, watch what they're doing, watch them click through things, help them come up with different solutions and try them and try an enormous number of available commercial solutions before actually stepping into it myself. 0:08:30 - (Reg Prentice): So in one way I beat myself up like I could have started this so much earlier. In another way, I feel like if I had started it earlier, it wouldn't have been this, it would have been probably just the same as all the other tools out there, and there isn't much point in just creating another version of what's already out there. 0:08:48 - (Randy Wilburn): Well, I mean, I think the reality is that you would have still had to iterate through several processes and several evolutions of what you've now created. It's just that you were that much further along when you decided to create TonicDM, and it was fully formed. And so that's the beauty of it. You're not a noob as far as this is concerned. When you created TonicDM, you were ready to rock and roll at that point. 0:09:16 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. And I think a differentiated point of view is something that is, I remember from our leadership courses at Gensler, it's important to have a differentiated point of view. And I think that's also true not just for, let's say, leaders in architecture firms, but also for leaders in technology firms. And so four things came out of my time in firms, the primary one being the value of simplicity being tasked with training and rolling out systems in firms, and just seeing how even something that appears simple, is not simple to the person whose process has to change. 0:10:03 - (Reg Prentice): And the time spent learning software by staff, it's already maxed out. It's not a good thing to come in with a software that might be incredibly amazing, but also requires a huge amount of learning because people just don't have the bandwidth for that. They don't have it now. I'm not sure they ever did. 0:10:25 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah. 0:10:26 - (Reg Prentice): So just realizing things like whatever we deliver has to be really simple. It has to be functional, but it can't be unnecessarily complex. So there are just things like
that, which I'm not sure I would have had if I'd started the company more just with a tech background without having sat with staff for 20 years, working on technology. 0:10:54 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense, and I understand what you're saying. So tell us a little bit about TonicDM. Why don't you kind of unwrap how TonicDM came about that you decided to just start a company? 0:11:08 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. So there were two parts to it. One was just seeing the rate of flow of information and how difficult it is to organize that efficiently on a project so that the firm can get value from it. The two most valuable things a design firm has is its people, number one. That's always going to be the case, but number two is its history and its institutional knowledge, which primarily exists in the form of the information that's stored. 0:11:46 - (Reg Prentice): And today, that's all digital. It's practically all digital. When I started in the profession, it was practically all physical, but that switch has taken place. And then the second one was just seeing how tools that were used in the industry constrained people's understanding of the value that they provide. So, to be more specific, the focus of digital tools on deliverables, I think, has subtly led people to see the value that their firm creates as deliverables. When you say it like that, I'm sure everyone would say, well, clearly, it's not the deliverables that are our value, but the way that the tools are structured, it kind of forces you into that paradigm. 0:12:39 - (Reg Prentice): So, particularly tools like BIM are very deliverables oriented. And so Tonic is also a platform for design thinking and how tools that people use, even though it is just a tool, but how that tool can help engage with design thinking and design value more. I'd say that's more of a long-term goal with Tonic. I wouldn't be promoting Tonic as currently being that. 0:13:14 - (Randy Wilburn): And how long has Tonic been in existence now? 0:13:17 - (Reg Prentice): So, eight years. 0:13:18 - (Randy Wilburn): Okay. Eight years. 0:13:20 - (Reg Prentice): So it is the ten-year overnight success. 0:13:25 - (Randy Wilburn): Well, you've made it past that five-year hump. And now you're almost going to double that, which is pretty exciting. And certainly, clearly, there is a need for what you have to offer for design firms. I'd be curious to know, and you don't have to go back to the beginning, but what is the biggest aha moment that firms have when they start utilizing TonicDM within their organization? 0:13:52 - (Randy Wilburn): If you had to kind of capture the essence of what that is. 0:13:56 - (Reg Prentice): I think it's the being able to have a stash of important information or information of significance that is arranged by a project in a way that is very easy for staff just to find the project, open the project, and there is the information of significance. So we work with a
wide range of firms, and it ranges from firms where project numbers and just the basic idea of a project is very fixed within their systems, all the way to firms where they don't even use project numbers outside of accounting. 0:14:45 - (Reg Prentice): So their files on their folder system or their network are organized just by project name without the project number. Again, when you say it, it seems like such a prosaic thing, but project numbering changes over time. You have sub-numbers. Some companies will put the client number in their project number. It's quite a source of debate. It's just how you number projects, how those flow through the proposal stage and issuing proposals, and then into a billable stage, and then into an archive stage. When is a project over like that? 0:15:26 - (Reg Prentice): You know, that's a very subjective thing. So the first thing about Tonic is we organize everything around project numbers. We work with each firm to do a bit of customization about how Tonic will see project numbers in their firm. So we have scripts that we implement on a per-company basis. So some companies will strip off everything after the last Dot. So it's quite common to have a project number and then dot, zero, zero, zero (.000) might be the in quotes main project and then there are sub-projects under that. So we'll often customize the way the project numbers come into Tonic. Nearly all our customers link Tonic to their accounting system so that the projects are automatically generated. But that immediately just gets to the point where you're not going to put every part of every project into a system like Tonic. You want Tonic to represent what is the project from an overall contract point of view, and from a perception point of view as to what the staff perceive as being the bucket called project. 0:16:37 - (Reg Prentice): And then once Tonic is established in the firm, like that, the email file transfers CA information, contact information kind of almost magnetically goes into the projects. We've implemented many different ways to automate, or semi-automate how information gets put in the project, and to make it the easiest path for staff. So if you want to transfer files, it's easier to do it in Tonic than it is to go to your Dropbox or some other system. 0:17:13 - (Reg Prentice): So that over time, you have this confidence that you go to Tonic you just type in any part of the project name or number, you click on it, and voila you have the set of correspondence, aka email, from all the different people in the firm collected in one place that you can reference. You have the file transfers organized by date who they're from and who they're to. You have the CA information, and it's having confidence that that stuff will be there that I think makes a huge difference instead of scrambling through many different systems looking for what you need. There's one place that is properly organized with a clean set of data. 0:17:57 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah. And, I mean, it sounds like the way you say it, it sounds simple enough, but the reality is that I won't say most, but do you have even an idea of the percentage of firms that don't do or have any type of real structure, like what you've just described across the board in the design industry space. I don't know if there's data behind that. 0:18:19 - (Reg Prentice): I don't know that it's a data-driven opinion. But I would say there are very few firms that we engage with where I would say are close to zero. Pretty much every firm has started the journey and is somewhere along that path. So things like naming the network
folders beginning with the project number, I would say most firms do that. Like 95% do that already. You rarely find a company where there's no project number in the file path. 0:18:55 - (Reg Prentice): The rigorousness of that still varies. When I'm advising companies, I like to see it very rigorous because there are contracts involved as well that need to be matched to the information that's saved. Then I think where starts to break down for firms is one, is email. Because email by default is organized by person, not by project. So people get emails and people have mailboxes, and it's very hard to cross over mailboxes. 0:19:32 - (Reg Prentice): I haven't seen any firms where everyone has access to everyone else's mailbox. Generally, you only have access to your own. 0:19:41 - (Randy Wilburn): But are you supposing or saying that like, if everybody has this kind of central repository of putting data in a place, then everybody has access to it? Not necessarily to your specific email, but maybe to the information that was referenced in that email? 0:19:58 - (Reg Prentice): No, I would say in Tonic by default, everyone has access to everyone else's email. So it is a copying system. So emails are copied from staff mailboxes into the central Tonic repository, and you don't have to trigger that, right? So you could choose to have emails stay in your mailbox and not be copied to the company Tonic project store. And there are also some features for confidentiality and locking projects so that not everyone can get in there. So there are some basic roles around that, but for the average email, it will be in Tonic and everyone will have access to it. 0:20:41 - (Reg Prentice): And the key for that is that often questions come maybe a couple of years later, and the people on the project may have even left the firm. And so the person tasked with answering that question, like they either have to go to individual staff mailboxes from the past and try to find the information just from a mailbox, which is practically impossible, or they can in just one minute, they can go to Tonic, type in the project name or number, and there is all the email in a filterable and searchable way. 0:21:15 - (Reg Prentice): So some firms see the value mostly in the archive, to go back later. But it's also very valuable while the project's going on because not everyone is on every email, particularly a project manager may come onto a project partway through, and they kind of need to know what's being discussed already. And if it's structural engineering, they can just filter by that firm and see all the emails on that project relating to structural. So there is value both while the project is going on, but also for the archive for later as well. 0:21:50 - (Randy Wilburn): That sounds exciting because I think what it does is one of the problems that it solves is, and I talk about this all the time, is just the proper transfer of knowledge, not just between generations within a design firm, but between colleagues. You're down the way in a cubicle, and I'm here in a cubicle and it's like how do we get the information or get access to information that I need, that you've had, or that you've processed? And so I think it's important to figure out how you make that as seamless as possible, because that transfer of knowledge, that transfer of information is vital to a design firm. It's vital to any
organization, any vertical that we talk about. But primarily, we're talking about design firms here and how important the information is. 0:22:40 - (Randy Wilburn): And you talk very elegantly about information and the flow of that data. So I think it's important for people to understand that you can't just by mere happenstance, fall into a program like Tonic. You have to think about what you need and then I'm assuming that when companies reach out to you to inquire, you take a high-level view of what they're doing and make recommendations from there. 0:23:09 - (Reg Prentice): We do. People come to Tonic at different points in their journey, but our engagement with a firm is typically quite long before they make a purchase. There are firms that we've been talking to for five years. 0:23:25 - (Randy Wilburn): Okay. 0:23:27 - (Reg Prentice): Which is fine. They're watching Tonic develop, seeing when is the right time that Tonic will work for them. But the typical cycle would be about three months. So we'll have initial conversations and talk about their need first because from an efficiency point of view on both sides, we don't want to go into a deep dive if it's just not suitable for them. So we'll talk about them and where they are in their journey, and how their information is organized and what they want to achieve from it, and then we’ll show them the product obviously and how the product would work for them. 0:24:11 - (Reg Prentice): But then usually, as you kind of assume, Randy, there's quite a period of back and forth, like, okay, if we did it this way, how would that work for us? And a lot of it has to do with people as well. Like, this person needs to do this, or how would this person's role change, or how would the way they complete their work change? So usually there is quite a lot of discussion along those lines which is the part that I enjoy the most is talking to firms about their process and the information flows and how they can get more from that information. 0:24:46 - (Randy Wilburn): Well, I mean, you gain great insight and data that informs how you interact with other firms. So, I mean, certainly, that is hugely valuable. 0:24:55 - (Reg Prentice): And that's how I started myself when I was in practice as well, is that most of what I knew I'd learned from someone else in the firm. So it was kind of a node or a connector where I'd be like, oh, yeah, you should just go talk to this person because they've done it already. And so that continues when I'm talking to firms through Tonic lens. 0:25:19 - (Randy Wilburn): Okay, and do you primarily deal with CTOs or a CTO-like individual, or do you find COOs or operational leaders are the ones that you primarily communicate with on something like this? 0:25:33 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah, that's an interesting one because initially, I would have assumed it would be more a COO thing, but it is primarily a CTO, CIO, it manager. It's often not digital design-related people who tend to focus more on creating information, and they're almost half in
the architect camp working on projects so it's often the person who is whose responsibility it is to manage the data that we first talk to. 0:26:08 - (Reg Prentice): But in all cases, after having spoken to us about it, they'll bring in the other stakeholders within the firm who also want to see it and participate in the decision-making. But it is what you might call an enterprise decision. So even for small firms, it's not a small decision. It's like, this is a platform that's going to manage and archive and store our data. So it's not like people just try it a little bit and then walk away. It's a serious decision they make and so that often takes building a relationship, understanding their problem quite deeply on our side, and them understanding the solution quite deeply on their side. 0:26:52 - (Randy Wilburn): And you mentioned size, so I'm assuming you would work with a small firm up to the big types of firms, like a Gensler or somebody like that. So it doesn't matter. You could be a ten-person shop and TonicDM could help them. 0:27:07 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah, we have many customers. We have only a few at the one and two people because that's an architect who is naturally predisposed to organization. And so right from the beginning of their, of their journey as an independent architect, they'll look for something like Tonic knowing that they need that, that's part of their set of tools, but that's less common. So it's usually around the 10, 15, 20 size that firms will start to get interested in this. 0:27:38 - (Reg Prentice): And then most of our customers would be between, let's say 50 - 1,000 people. But because it's a cloud-based system, there's nothing that gets installed on your devices or your servers, everything is in the cloud. So the setup process is surprisingly similar between let's say a five-person firm and a 500-person firm and you connect it into your Microsoft or if you have, we do support other platforms too, but if you connect it into your Microsoft you connect it into your accounting system. Typically, although smaller firms often skip that step, then you set up your projects and you're pretty much ready to go. 0:28:19 - (Reg Prentice): It takes usually only about an hour to 2 hours to set the whole thing up, regardless of firm size. So that's one of the advantages of cloud software, is that small firms get the same software and the same experience as even the largest firms do. 0:28:34 - (Randy Wilburn): I love that. I love when companies can offer a service where they don't have a silver level and a gold and a platinum level, but it's one size fits all and then it's scales based on how much usage you have so I love that type of setup because then that means you get everything right out of the box. 0:28:54 - (Reg Prentice): And just as part of our obsession with simplicity, it makes that possible because it needs to be simple for large firms, just like small firms. It's quite surprising that you'd think large firms have enormous IT resources, so it wouldn't be a problem. The fact is that large firms do have amazing IT resources, but they are still overwhelmed. They have way too much to do and they don't want this kind of thing dropped on them with some heavy lift. They would much rather take a couple of hours of their time when it's running.
0:29:30 - (Reg Prentice): So that works the same for both ends of the scale, small firms maybe don't know. So they need it to be simple. But the large firms, know, but they still don't have the time to deal with a complex system. 0:29:43 - (Randy Wilburn): I didn't think I'd get a Biggie Smalls reference in this podcast, but just like there's more money, more problems more projects, more problems. Just because you have more projects, you’d think, oh, we're making more money, but that creates more problems when it comes to corralling that information and gaining control of it. 0:30:04 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah, and that is a system design issue where you want the amount of effort to scale non-linearly. You don't want the amount of effort to scale up exponentially. You want it to just stay very low, no matter how many projects a firm has. And so that's one of the things that we've built into Tonic, is just that it doesn't matter how many projects you have, the complexity doesn't increase with that. 0:30:34 - (Randy Wilburn): Of course, I'm going to ask you this question that everybody's asking nowadays. I have a few distinct questions before we wind this conversation up. I just spent the weekend sitting on my brother-in-law's couch, watching every AI video that I could watch because I'm a big AI fan. I'm using AI quite a bit. AI has changed things in terms of the way that I process and manage information when it comes to the podcast that I do because I don't just do the Zweig Letter podcast, I have my podcast that I do here in Northwest Arkansas. 0:31:14 - (Randy Wilburn): And then I help companies all over the country manage their podcasts and run them and AI has been a game changer for me. I'm curious as to how you see AI informing what you do at TonicDM and are you already incorporating it into the workflow? 0:31:33 - (Reg Prentice): I also am a huge user of AI, so I spent most of my weekend chatting with chatGPT. 0:31:44 - (Randy Wilburn): Kindred spirits. Here we go. 0:31:46 - (Reg Prentice): I find it hugely beneficial for just being able to know what technology exists and learn about it so quickly. And when it comes to writing computer software, which I don't do professionally, because we have real software engineers that do that at Tonic, I'm doing things related to software programming, it is amazing. It is incredible. So it's changed my life. You would think that Tonic would immediately see how AI could change and benefit the profession, but I would say, I find that question much more difficult. 0:32:32 - (Reg Prentice): So what we're doing with it at the moment is organizing information, which sounds like what we just talked about. However, a problem that I see for design firms getting the benefit of AI is that information is hugely contextual. So knowing that something worked in one circumstance doesn't mean that it's going to work in another. And so the way that we are building towards offering customers AI enhancement is by looking at how we can add more parameters to the data that we store for them.
0:33:15 - (Reg Prentice): So first, having your email organized by project in a database-driven system like Tonic is a huge step forward, because without having emails organized by project, asking AI to answer a question is going to be very difficult because it's not going to know whether this email relates to a school. Well, I mean, at some point, presumably it will, but at the moment it needs some context around it so we're increasingly making Tonic have more context. 0:33:49 - (Reg Prentice): And I think search like within the context of a project AI can make search more interesting because you don't have to know the exact word. You can ask for a concept and have it bring that back. But that has to be still bound by project, and it still has to respect the security, like the role-based security we were talking about before. Like if someone has filed an email confidential in the project, AI also can't reveal the content of that email. 0:34:23 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, so that's a good point. 0:34:25 - (Reg Prentice): In an enterprise sense, it's trickier than in a personal sense. If you just want general information, like say you're interested in Greek mythology, chatGPT is incredible but when the information store is an enterprise information store, there are a lot more overlays in terms of how that information relates to the person asking for it. We're not jumping into the AI bandwagon. We're looking at how we can do more of what we do well, which is to organize information in a way that will benefit AI at some point for the firm. 0:35:04 - (Randy Wilburn): You have to think with AI in mind now as you develop and you start to process things. I'm doing that now and just thinking about what GPT five is going to look like, because that's supposed to be coming down the pike in the next seven to twelve months and as they say, it's going to be a game changer and I can only imagine. 0:35:27 - (Randy Wilburn): I won't call them large language learning models, they're small language learning models, but I'm creating them just on my information. And for me, it's perfect because then I get to process this information in a different way than just the way that you would normally search for data. And so it's kind of amazing, to be honest with you. I'm using Google Notebook which is like my sandbox for playing with language learning models to see what they're like. But I'm in the process of creating one for my website where I have five years' worth of podcast data worth of transcripts that I want to make searchable so people can find out any information that they want. And eventually, at some point in time, I want to be able to do it for the Zweig Letter podcast. So stay tuned, listeners. We will have an ability for you to search because, I mean, I have some amazing interviews from this podcast dating back to 2016 when Mark Zweig and I first started sitting down and recording it. So all kinds of information is valuable to people and the end user. And so I think AI is going to make a difference for us all. I'm stating the obvious, but it's just going to be interesting to see how it plays out in different pockets and so in the pocket that you're in with TonicDM and how that impacts the day-to-day workflow of a design professional, I think it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. 0:36:58 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah, I would say I'm fairly opinionated on that. I wrote a blog post for our TomicDM.com. I'd say it's emerging, but we have some content we're putting there. So for practitioners who are thinking about how AI is going to affect them as designers. I always fall on
the side of kind of humanism, and I think to the extent that a firm produces deliverables with no creative input, I think that's an area where they may want to be very careful because AI might be able to do that pretty well. 0:37:37 - (Reg Prentice): But I'm guessing for the listeners of this podcast, they mostly perhaps wouldn't put themselves in the category of having no creative input. But to the extent that a firm works with their clients to understand who they are as people and to come up with a spatial solution to what that person needs, I think that part of being a designer won't be replaced by AI. So I think of what an architect does as understanding the unexpressed desires of their clients and being able to come up with a spatial solution that meets the needs of their client, even though the client didn't express those needs. 0:38:25 - (Reg Prentice): And that comes from experience and knowledge and just empathy. And that's where I see the value of the design line. And if it's a smaller residential project, it might be quite a simple client organization. It might be one person is the client. But often designers work in situations where the client is incredibly complex, like the users are not the same as the owner, who may not be the same as the person providing the money. 0:38:53 - (Reg Prentice): And so it's an incredible skill that designers have to be able to listen to and integrate all the needs of these diverse populations, even the community at large, and the environment and our customers in a way of affirm. And I think if you do that well, I don't think you have anything to worry about when it comes to AI. I mean, slowly AI will help you produce drawings and it'll help you do all kinds of pragmatic things. 0:39:24 - (Reg Prentice): But I think your value as a design firm won't change, and that is understanding the needs of a client, even though the client can't express those needs. 0:39:34 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, I agree with you 100%. You did say one thing that stood out to me in our previous conversation that I wanted to bring up before we close. You said, and I'm paraphrasing here. You noted that digital tools have made mentorship and collaboration more abstract and difficult to engage in with files stored in folders rather than visible on a board. And mentorship has always been a big thing to me. 0:40:03 - (Randy Wilburn): We used to talk about management by walking around and just physically interacting with people. And now with all this data and information being stored in these places that we can't even see, one of your hypotheses has been that it does create a challenge for mentorship. How do we overcome that and do you have any recommendations for our listeners in this area? Have you found that TonicDM can help overcome some of that or is it just an issue that you're still trying to find a solution for? 0:40:36 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. As a very skeptical person, as I was working in firms, I was trying to understand the downsides of computers as much as the things they're beneficial for. And that's something that did strike me as quite a big change when CAD took over from hand drafting, was that you couldn't see it anymore if you were walking around the office. So you can
look over someone's shoulder and see their computer screen, but most likely they're zoomed into a detail. 0:41:09 - (Reg Prentice): It wasn't like when you had a full-size board, and just by looking over someone's shoulder, you could get a holistic sense of what they were doing. So I would recommend just, and I think architects are generally like this print stuff out and put it on the walls, make paper models, or just find ways to get the work out of the computer. And I think it annoys me when what I call the digital zealots resist people working outside the computer. Because in theory, everything is more efficient if everything is in one piece of software, inside one computer or one computer network. 0:41:51 - (Reg Prentice): But that just doesn't work creatively. Like, different tools think differently, and so different designers will gravitate towards different tools. And if the value of the firm is in the design, to me, it doesn't make sense to handicap a designer by telling them what design tool they should use. For if someone works best in Sketchup and produces higher quality designs because Sketchup just thinks like they do, isn't that the most important thing for the firm is to get the highest value design from them, regardless of what tool it is? 0:42:27 - (Reg Prentice): You know, some people rhino, some people Photoshop, or some drawing programs, some people, it is indeed Revit that thinks like them the most. And so for that group of people, obviously Revit might be the best choice for design, but that's not everybody. Design is distinct from documentation. So I would say the firm needs a consistent documentation platform. You don't want people documenting the result on different platforms. But in a lot of cases, I think it's also physical media that allows people to think the clearest. 0:43:02 - (Reg Prentice): So I think engaging with sketching on paper and physical modeling. And of course, now you can iterate through by printing, scanning, drawing on top of, and then scanning back in, printing again. And the same, even with 3D models, you can create a physical object, then you can scan that physical object into the computer, manipulate it digitally, and then reprint it, or if you have a laser cutter, you can reproduce it so you can go in and out of the computer. And that's something that Frank Gehry's office is extremely good at using the computer and physical media together, and also just using the space as a way to get things out of the computer. So if you go into, or if you've ever seen pictures of Frank's office, it's just full of stuff, And in one way it looks like a mess but in another way, it allows people to walk past and see and learn and comment on things in a way that if it was fully digital, you would have to be opening and closing files, which is just not this opportunity for serendipity. 0:44:13 - (Reg Prentice): And I think the way that relates to mentorship is just if senior people are walking around the office, what do they see? Do they have any entry point into what a more junior person is doing or what they are thinking? If things are too digital, I think there's a problem there. One way perhaps to counteract that would be to print more, pen up more, and maybe even work more on paper. And again, the deliverables, you don't want to be printing a huge set every night, but when it comes to design, the number of materials is much, much smaller. And then obviously, people still print and work through sets with a red pen.
0:44:59 - (Reg Prentice): And in one way that's, in quotes, a waste of paper, but in another way, it allows people to just walk up and interact with something in a serendipitous way. 0:45:10 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, well, I mean, I still think the human brain processes information that way in a more efficient manner. To me, it's not an or, it's an and. It's like, how do we do this and keep things in the real world in front of us because we need that? It's the same argument we make for FaceTime versus a Zoom call. There is a real tangible benefit to being face to face, kneecap to kneecap with somebody because a lot of stuff gets lost in translation online. 0:45:45 - (Randy Wilburn): And I think the same would apply to digital data and information that we are consuming on our computer screens. 0:45:53 - (Reg Prentice): And certainly the rise of AI and digital communications, I think, makes physical meetings even more valuable. And so I'm looking forward to meeting Randy in person at a conference later in the year. But it's like that meeting will just be materially different than what we're doing now. I think AI makes that even more valuable because there's so much opportunity for manipulation and intermediation with AI that just meeting someone and knowing that they're a real person is going to become increasingly important. 0:46:30 - (Randy Wilburn): Oh, yeah. Relationships, it’s the ‘r’ word, as I like to say, and it's extremely valuable. There is no replacement for real relationships being developed in skin and flesh. And, of course, I know that virtuality will be a thing at some point in time we'll be able to have a hologram of each other and sit down on my couch behind me and have a conversation, but we're not quite there yet. 0:46:56 - (Randy Wilburn): And then at some point in time, the Trekkie in me is loving the idea of just being able to transport myself somewhere. Don't know if I'll see that in my lifetime, but I'm sure we'll be able to assemble and disassemble atoms, disassemble people at an atomic level to be able to do that but we're not there yet. 0:47:14 - (Reg Prentice): I'm not going to be the one who's going to offer to go first, put it that way. 0:47:18 - (Randy Wilburn): No, I will not be signing up for that one, that's for sure. Well, Reg, if people listening to this want to get in contact with you, what's the best way for them to do that with the understanding that everything that Reg is referenced here on this call, we're going to certainly put in the Show Notes. You'll have access to all that, but an output Reg is his LinkedIn profile in the Show Notes. But certainly, our Zweig Letter podcast audience is very loyal. If people want to get in contact with you to find out more about TonicDM, what do they need to do? 0:47:48 - (Reg Prentice): I think LinkedIn is probably the best. I don't usually accept people from outside the industry but I will connect with anyone who's AEC-related, so just reach out that way. I think it's probably the easiest.
0:48:00 - (Randy Wilburn): Okay. We’ll put a link to all of that in the Show Notes so people have access to that. Again, we’ll link to TonicDM so that people can check out more about what Reg and the rest of his team are doing. They're based in LA, so I think it'll be good for you the listener to take a closer look at what we've been talking about for the last 50 minutes. I think there's some valuable information and insight that you can glean from to kind of figure out what the next steps are for you if you feel like you are struggling under the digital divide of information that exists, especially in our industry. So, Reg, I can't thank you enough for joining me. Once again, Chris is batting a thousand with the people that he has told me that I need to have on this podcast. 0:48:48 - (Randy Wilburn): You are another amazing podcast guest, and I want to thank you so, so much. I do look forward to meeting you in person so that we can sit down and really catch up that way. But I appreciate all the wonderful work that you're doing. Keep doing it, man. I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for the not just your success, but the success of TonicDM and more importantly, how that will continue to impact this industry. 0:49:10 - (Randy Wilburn): So thank you so much. 0:49:11 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah, and thank you, Randy. Really appreciate it. 0:49:14 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, absolutely. Well, there you have it, folks. That's another episode of the Zweig Letter podcast. To learn more about one of the oldest newsletters in the design industry, visit zweiggroup.com. you can read articles online, listen to this podcast, and sign up for a free subscription to the newsletter and have it delivered right to your email inbox every Monday morning. Sign up today. For more info about Zweig Group Advisory services or any Zweig Group publications, visit zweiggroup.com. You can subscribe to the Zweig Letter podcast wherever you listen to it. And please, please, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn, and we'll see you back here real soon for another new episode of the Zweig Letter podcast. 0:50:03 - (TZL Randy Wilburn): Peace. Thanks for tuning in to the Zweig Letter podcast. We hope that you can be part of elevating the industry and that you can apply our advice and information to your daily professional life. For a free digital subscription to the Zweig Letter, please visit thezweigletter.com. Subscribe to gain more wisdom and inspiration in addition to information about leadership, finance, HR, and marketing your firm, subscribe today.
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