209 - TZL - John Wheaton

ways, not every way we still like some proximity, but it's given us more options, so that's the first piece. The unintended consequence, the thing that I'm most surprised with, is that I have gotten better. I never thought I would say this, Randy, but I've had more client meetings and more interactions with customers over teams in virtual meetings than I could ever fit into a month or a year traveling. Now there is a place to travel, especially with client prospects. If you can influence a room, well, you're better off to be in person. But once you have an existing relationship, I find clients prefer to get on teams. The other unintended consequence for me as a design professional is I can be way more productive now in a Bluebeam session on teams, or just doing a QC review of a set of calculations or drawings in Bluebeam than I ever was on paper or in a room and that has been the unintended consequence for me. I haven't touched a piece of paper. We don't send out paper anymore, we send out PDFs. So that's a long answer but those are two of the significant pieces for me. Randy Wilburn [38:50] And I can appreciate that. And I think we've all had to kind of embrace technology, right? The trees thank us for sure but I think a lot of times there's just this whole idea that some things are best left translated or shared in different modes. The technology that you're mentioning, Microsoft Teams, I've noticed a lot of design firms are using that now, and Bluebeam. There are all these tools that are available to us, and they keep getting better. That's the thing about it for the work that we do in the design industry and what is required of every design professional, there are iterations of tools that are coming out that just affords you the ability to do your job more efficiently. So there's no need to try to put a square peg into a round hole when there are plenty of square holes all over the place for you to put that into and there's an opportunity for you to take advantage of that. So, I just keep encouraging people to embrace the technology that is there. I was having this conversation back in the day when we were talking to firms about doing websites and it was heresy. It was like, well, what is this? We don't have time for that. Or talking to marketing departments about really ramping things up. You've embraced a lot of what we're talking about here to the point where you even started a podcast called, The Creating Structure podcast. And I'm curious because I mean, this is something obviously near and dear to my heart as somebody that's producing more than 1000 podcast episodes himself. Whenever I see somebody in the design industry space that's doing a podcast, I can think of Michael Rasika, the young architect podcast, and Mark LePage, and there are just so many outstanding podcasters in this space. I'm curious to know what was your inspiration to actually start a podcast? It wasn't like you already didn't have a ton of things you had to do, to begin with, but you said, you know what, in addition to Wheaton Sprague and being the CEO here and going out and trying to continue to build this company, I'm going to start a podcast. What was your inspiration to do that?

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