Michelle Salyer:                Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH, where we discuss the most innovative, interesting, and outside-the-box solutions to some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the world of architecture, engineering, design, construction, and mission solutions. You’ll hear directly from the problem solvers at BRPH as we dive deep into the latest news, trends and topics in aerospace, defense, manufacturing and industrial, commercial, education, entertainment and hospitality. I’m your host, Michelle Salyer, and I’ll be your guide as we open the lid on these topics and more and invite you for an insider’s look at one of the most successful, fastest-growing employee owned AEC firms in the United States. Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH.

The commercialization of the aerospace market is driving big changes in the way these products are delivered. Non-government contracts are dependent on the premise of low cost and speed to market and this architecture, engineering and construction firm has mastered the process of delivering exactly that to its clients, in part thanks to a new approach to traditional pre-construction services. Here to elaborate on how BRPH is designing engineering and building more quickly, more efficiently and more inexpensively are Matt Tyler, president, and Rob Baldwin, senior vice president of BRPH Construction Services. Welcome, Matt and Rob.

Matt Tyler:                         Thank you, Michelle. It’s good to be here.

Rob Baldwin:                     Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Michelle Salyer:                Great. Thanks so much. Well, let’s give our listeners a little bit of background about both of you. Tell me how long you’ve been in the AEC industry and specifically in the construction industry.

Matt Tyler:                         Well, I’ll start. This is an area that Rob and I have in common. We both started in the construction industry when we were very young, so mine goes all the way back to, I hate to say it, but back to 1979 when I started doing construction with my grandfather as he was getting ready to retire out of his home building business. And it’s grown since then. I got my engineering degree a little bit later in life and construction side of the AEC industry just kept pulling me back. And so I’ve been doing this for quite a number of years.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. How about you, Rob?

Rob Baldwin:                     Yeah, it’s been about 35 plus years and same thing. I’ve been in construction all my life. My dad worked for US Steel and ever since I was 13 I was working summers in construction doing dangerous stuff that they wouldn’t allow these days usually because of OSHA. But anyway, when I got out of high school, I went to work in the trade, so I was an iron worker and a carpenter. And then I went back to school and got a degree in building construction, but I set tile when I was in school. So I’ve always loved to work with my hands and I still do, but I just had the good fortune to do a lot of different product types. Started out with power plants and now it’s launch facilities. So it’s been a little bit of everything.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow, exciting. Well, that’s a lot of experience between the both of you. So to help our listeners to set the stage a little bit more, tell me how has the landscape for aerospace changed in the last several years and what has it meant to the AEC industry specifically?

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, I mean, aerospace historically has been a purview of the government with NASA and the Air Force and really throughout the world. It is basically governments that do aerospace work and it became a very process-oriented thing after some of the incidents every time that … And they made mistakes and they learned and things got better, but they also got a lot harder to do. And I think what’s really changed is that over the last five years or so, the commercial entities have gotten into the aerospace business and basically today they’re doing things that only governments used to do and to the point where really NASA, their role has changed to be more visionary, if you will. And the government still has significant aerospace activities and interests, but most, a lot of the aerospace is going to commercial clients who have a whole different mindset. They want quality, but they don’t want the process and procedures that go along and the delays that go along.

It used to take four or five years to build a launch facility and now they’re looking for it in less than two years. And the only way you do that is by being very efficient and moving forward, solving problems and overcoming obstacles, I guess. So the whole market has changed that way when the commercial folks have gotten into it.

Matt Tyler:                         So as the commercial guys have gotten into it, they’re driven by business mindset versus the NASA and the old-school way of where government was doing it. So when it’s driven from a business aspect, it’s all about getting products done faster, getting to speed to market faster, and, for the aerospace business, getting rockets into the air. I think I read a statistic here in 2024. There was just over, just under, right at 100 launches in 2024. 95 of them were from commercial entities, so you could see that the commercial industry has really taken over the aerospace business.

Rob Baldwin:                     And it’s a very sort of high-risk, high-reward business. I mean, to get started in the business, you have to develop a vehicle, you have to bring in engineers. You have all this capital expenditure just to get to the point where you can launch a vehicle. And they make money by sending things up. That’s why they call it the payload. That’s when they get paid, but there’s a huge upfront investment in making that happen. But you look at the valuation of these firms that are successful and start to get government contracts and it’s just incredible the growth potential. But that’s why I say kind of high-risk, high-reward. And so early in the process, they’re trying to spend all their money to develop the vehicle, to hire engineers to do the work. I mean, the ground infrastructure, which is what we’re doing to support it, is a necessary part of it and a very important part of it, but their focus is mostly on the vehicle. So we try to bring our expertise to bear on what resources they have available and time they have available to make it work.

Matt Tyler:                         We can talk about this for the whole podcast. This is really an interesting topic. I mean, if you look back on it, a launch used to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And because of the commercialization of it, now a single launch is less than $100 million, a fraction of what it used to cost. And that’s the result of the commercialization of the industry.

Michelle Salyer:                And Matt, I know you’ve been here a couple of years now. How do you think BRPH has adapted to this new business model or what changes were necessary in our way of thinking to adapt to this faster speed to market, tighter schedule, lower cost?

Matt Tyler:                         Well, as an integrated services firm, which we’re professed to be an integrated services firm, an integrated services firm is one that brings both the design and the construction to bear for the project. I think that we are mastering how to do that in an efficient manner. And so what does that mean? The subject of this podcast is pre-construction. Pre-construction the primary or the key function that fits into this model. So from a historical standpoint, you would look at it and you would have design. An owner would go out and hire a designer, then they would get the design done, then they would go out and hire or put out a solicitation and hire a contractor and then the contractor would come in. So you had three different parties and the risk was divided up among the three parties, but at the end of the day the risk sat with the contractor.

So under that model, the contractor held the risk. And if there was a design, an error, an omission, or just a miss on the design, the contractor ultimately held that risk. So the contractor would turn to the designer and say, “Hey, what happened?” And the designer would say, “Yeah, it was a mistake.” Well, he had no recourse for recovery from the designer. So he’d turn back to the contractor and say, “Well, it’s your issue.” And it would cause a dispute between the owner and the contractor. And under an integrated services fashion, we are the same, so we hold the whole risk, the design and the construction risk. And so when there is a problem, it’s up to us to solve it. And what does that really do? That allows us to manage that risk. If we hold both the design and the construction, then we hold all of the risk and we can manage that risk much more efficiently.

So I think how BRPH has adapted to this model, this faster speed to market, lower cost model, is we’ve introduced a way of doing pre-construction to where design is a part of pre-construction and the whole process is run more efficiently and we’re able to manage that risk on behalf of the owner much more efficiently.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, great. And let’s jump into that a little bit more.

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, and I was going to sort of add because you were asking about what set us apart really and made us prepared for this transition to commercial. BRPH has been around since the Apollo program and so they were at the very beginning. And they were and still are known as one of the premier designers and builders of aerospace work. Well, the commercial really got its sort of kickstart through these commercial spaceports and Wallops and United Kodiak. And we were fortunate and these space forces are quasi-government agencies. They’re almost marketing, if you will. They’re trying to bring aerospace industry into the markets and collaborating usually with the Department of Transportation for funding. But they were trying to build resources outside of NASA to attract commercial smaller launchers. And so we were able both at Wallops and Kodiak, almost all the work that was done there, the payload processing facilities, the launch facilities, the horizontal integration facilities, all of the different elements they were building when NASA was still doing the NASA thing.

And so they developed basically a smaller version of Kennedy Space Center at Wallops and at Kodiak and we were there doing that for commercial clients. And so that really with the history that we had of understanding the whole NASA legacy, ways of designing and bringing that kind of value to it, we got experience to now we got a whole different class of people that don’t have unlimited government funding. They do have a contract, but they want to get it launched quickly and sufficiently. And so we were able to do that at those two spaceports. And at that time, there hadn’t really been many new launch facilities built. They were all built back in the ’60s and ’70s. And so we were sort of at the cutting edge and I think that’s part of what helped set us up for this.

Matt Tyler:                         Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point, Rob. We had the long legacy of the space program. We know all of the aspects of the space program from a technical side, from an engineering side, and that goes back to that risk element. So we’re able to bring this integrated services to the markets, as Rob’s talked about, in a manner that can allow to be less risk to the owner and a more efficient process.

Michelle Salyer:                And we’re talking not just about launch pads, but processing facilities.

Matt Tyler:                         Anything to do with spaceport related.

Rob Baldwin:                     Right. And really, it’s almost broader than that. I mean, we do other defense work. In fact, around the world we do ground station work. And those are smaller elements, but they’re all part of the space program. That’s a part of the whole communication piece. And because of our experience in working integrated and understanding sort of the overall picture, it’s not uncommon to get some broad criteria for a project and the country that it’s in. And they’re looking for a firm fixed price for us to go and build it.

Matt Tyler:                         Yeah, so that brings all the way back around to pre-construction. It’s because of our pre-construction element of that program that allows us to really excel at that program around the world.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, so tell us what that really means. When we talk about pre-construction, what sub-processes are involved in that?

Matt Tyler:                         Well, pre-construction traditionally is estimating and scheduling and some people have subcontract management as a part of that. And we do, too. That’s part of our pre-construction group, but we treat pre-construction a little bit differently. As I said earlier, our design falls into pre-construction, so pre-construction is really a strategy for us. Pre-construction is the strategic element of a project. When a client comes to us with a problem, or an idea, or something they want to do, we immediately get our pre-construction group involved, which brings our design team in, which brings our estimating team in, brings our subcontracting team in, and it brings our scheduling team in.

And all of those pieces of the puzzle are brought together and so that we can, one, we can work with the client and say, “Okay, well, what is it that you’re really looking for and how quick do you want to get to an end product? And what kind of budget are you talking about?” And we’re able to take our pre-construction group and build into the design exactly what the owner wants. Maybe not exactly what he wants if he wants the Cadillac, but what he really needs that end and what he can afford.

Rob Baldwin:                     Right. And I guess another unique thing, most all the clients that we work for, whether they’re commercial launch companies or they’re defense contractors, their primary line of work is not construction. They’re out there, they’re building weapon systems or they’re building communication systems and so they hire us for our expertise. Now, a lot of times pre-construction was, okay, well, we’ll meet with the owner. We’ll find out what he wants. Tell us all your requirements. You tell us everything you want us to do and then we’ll go off and we will take a stab at it. But in these projects, the owner hires us because he knows what the end result, what he needs. He doesn’t necessarily know how to get there and so we really developed from the very beginning, the basis of design.

We developed that, we developed it. And so we push information to the client and just say, “This is our recommendation and here are the options if we do trade studies and all of that.” But instead of trying to pull, you need some information, but you need what’s the funding source? What’s the timing of it and when do you want to be there? When do you need to be ready? And so we can bring everything that’s needed almost turnkey to help make those decisions and give him the information to make informed decisions and to meet the schedule and the budget.

Matt Tyler:                         And that’s the most evident in the ground station program that we have because they truly come to us and say, “We need a ground station here.” Sometimes they don’t even know where here is and we take it from there. We give them exactly what they’re looking for from soup to nuts, from the very big first concept through a finished product.

Rob Baldwin:                     Yeah, so I think that’s one of the big differences. And even traditional design build, you’ve got the design builder who’s a collaboration. In most cases it’s a contractor and a designer that come together. We’re unique in that we already are under one roof, so it’s integrated and there’s not this intermittent coming together of firms, two firms to work together. And then you’ve got a client and usually it’s one person asking questions and the client giving answers. And we have to do a lot of that obviously, but, again, we try to help them develop their vision and put it into reality. And we push that information because we have experience in the market segments where we work enough to be able to do that. I think that’s a little unique.

Matt Tyler:                         Distinguishes us.

Michelle Salyer:                So in the end, all of that is saving time and money because it’s just a much more efficient, more timely process.

Rob Baldwin:                     Yes.

Michelle Salyer:                So we’re not designing something and then hoping that somebody can build it.

Matt Tyler:                         Well, to be honest with you, these clients that we’re working with, particularly in the aerospace and even in the ground station, this is all noise to them. This is all a must for them. It’s a necessary evil for them. They really just want an end product. And the faster we can get them an end product that meets their requirement, the better off they feel about it.

Michelle Salyer:                Let’s talk about the procurement part of all of this. Are supply chain issues still a concern? How does early procurement help this speed the process along?

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, I mean, they’re not nearly as bad as they were a couple of years ago. And so I think post-COVID, most of that disruption has gone away except for certain segments. There’s still electrical items, transformers and switchgear that are very long-leading generators. And that’s just because they haven’t caught up, I guess, with the demand. People weren’t building backlog. It was just in time and that got disrupted because of all of the different logistical issues with deliveries and all of that. So most of that has gone away. There’s always things that pop up, but we probably gained the most valuable experience again by working overseas. Because in most of these, we’re still working on US military bases or joint bases, but they want everything to be UL. They want it to be US standard. So everything had to come from the US. All the major components had to come from the US and they hired us and so we had to buy all that material.

And because we’ve got in-house mechanical and electrical engineers, that made it a little bit easier. We could partner, make sure we get input from them on what we needed. We get submittals, they look at it and approve it, and then we release it and then we’d hire local people to do the installation. So that’s what sort of gave us the grounding to be able to buy major components and then we developed relationships with all these people. And then recently we’ve been working for some major, let’s just say, construction consumer clients who have huge national accounts. And in some of those projects, they availed us of those national accounts to support that project. Well, I mean, it also opened up a different level of relationship with us. So now we’re able, instead of just calling the local supplier for switchgear, we can call the national supplier for that same person. Instead of him just looking in the southeast region for where he has eye line panels or whatever it is, he can look throughout the whole country.

Michelle Salyer:                So we might get materials more quickly ordering from another location versus …

Rob Baldwin:                     Right. And it helps mostly with time than money. Not always with money, but it also gives you a little bit more leverage if there’s issues because they see you as a client. We’re not electrical contractors or mechanical contractors, but a lot of the suppliers view us that way because of how much we buy. And so we have the same amount of leverage that they would and so we can go out and buy it and save. And there’s a savings in doing that. Anyway, it’s worked out well and it gives us a lot of opportunities to sort of buy down the schedule risk by pulling things back in early and being able to release early.

Matt Tyler:                         So through all of this, through all of this and because maybe because of COVID or partially because of COVID, it allowed us to refine our integrated services process. So our early procurements are a part of pre-construction, which we’re here to talk about, but what it really allowed us to go, “Okay, as an integrated services firm, we can start buying.” We can define in the design very early in the design the major pieces of equipment, the steel purchases, the major mechanical equipment, major electrical equipment early. We can get that to further along in the design faster or we can start ordering that material faster through our pre-construction efforts, which really reduces the time. So through COVID, because the supply chain got so long and because of some of this overseas work, we realized this is a real value offering for our clients.

So we can start the design, we can define stuff, we can start buying the materials for him completely transparent to him. We’ll solicit it, we will show him the prices, we’ll open the books to him. They can make the decision at that point. Let’s go ahead and buy this stuff that will reduce months and months out of a schedule.

Michelle Salyer:                Yep. Matt, I know you reference a lot the concept of the master builder when we’re talking about this process. Tell me what you mean by that.

Matt Tyler:                         Well, you want to talk about the master builder? I mean, Rob talks about as much as I do or more.

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, yeah, I can speak to that. So it sort of goes back to I think of it more as taking ownership, if you will, because most of the time you hire a contractor and you hire a designer and they have a scope and that they live inside that box. Part of what we bring to the clients that we serve is we don’t have edges to that box. If they have an issue, we’re going to solve it. And so we really come on board more as a trusted advisor, if you will. And once we negotiate whatever the fee and the general deal is, then basically you ask me who I work for, I work for that client and I’m looking out for his best interest and we truly do that. And I think that gives a lot of trust so the client will give us a lot of opportunity to work on their behalf.

I mean, we just did a major project here, $100 plus million, and the client didn’t really have any resources in the area. And so we acted on their behalf with the approving agencies, with the lease agencies, with everyone, so it was beyond just the construction. And if they had an issue, we would work hard to try to solve that issue, even if it wasn’t exactly related to our scope. So I think we try to take a bigger role. And the master builder to me is just the one that’s going to come in and a whole lot of people can be talking about problems and they’re the ones that kind of come in and solve them.

Matt Tyler:                         It’s interesting because the master builder actually came about decades, maybe a century ago, and it was through the architecture. Architects used to be considered the master builder back to the pyramids. Maybe it wasn’t a true architect, but it was the guy sort of conceptualizing this that was truly the master builder. What we’re doing today here at BRPH is we’re trying to make all of our staff into where they consider themselves to be master builders so our designers understand the construction. Our construction guys understand why we design something a certain way so that everybody sort of considers themselves and looks at themselves as a master builder.

Michelle Salyer:                So you’ve mentioned that this approach saves time and money. Can you give me some more concrete examples of where that’s been the case?

Rob Baldwin:                     Sure.

Matt Tyler:                         Let me give one concrete. This goes back to the early procurement, so the job that Rob was just referencing, again, through the pre-construction process we bought out $40 million of this $100 million project during pre-construction. So it’s not in terms of materials, so that gives you a concept of how much of a benefit this is to the client to be able to order that amount of material early in the projects and how much I can cut out of the schedule. It’s not really cost savings. Well, I think it probably was cost savings, too, but I kind of wanted to bring that back into it.

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, yeah. I mean, part of how we bring value is we work with the clients early to establish their budget and the schedule. And we did that recently on this project and we had a number that was a target, and then we worked all the way through the design. And there’s always changes during the design. As things evolve, I didn’t really think about that and you have issues like that that come up, but every time that we ran into that we tried to find some offsetting thing to compensate for that. At the end of the day, we hit or actually came in a little bit below that original number. So change management during the process is a big part of, I think, the value we bring. There are other contractors that would, “What? The owner wants a change? Sure, we’ll change it. Whatever you want. We’ll just keep adding them up.” But we’re really trying to be good stewards of the owner’s money and we made a commitment and we’re going to do everything we can to meet that commitment.

If the owner truly needs a change and wants it, that’s fine. We certainly will accommodate that, but we’re going to do everything we can to work within the original budget all the way through the design and as much as we can through the construction.

Matt Tyler:                         This goes to the previous podcast we did about integrated services. We talked about progressive design build. That really fits really well with this process. It’s completely transparent to the client and the client will get the ultimate benefit by going through a progressive design build process with us where we’re completely transparent and it’ll reduce the schedule and reduce the cost.

Michelle Salyer:                And Rob, I know you’ve mentioned in the past an example where you were able to change the shape of the steel beams and save $2,000 a ton.

Rob Baldwin:                     Well, yeah, it wasn’t exactly like that.

Michelle Salyer:                All right, you tell it better.

Rob Baldwin:                     It’s hard to change this shape, but you can change the size. But anyway, no, the …

Michelle Salyer:                That’s why you’re the builder.

Rob Baldwin:                     In that example, and this was a collaboration, I mean, we had our steel designer on. Of course he was from the beginning. We brought in one of the major steel mills, Nucor, who’s the biggest in the country as a partner. And then we went out and put out a preliminary package for the first mill order and we hired a fabricator. And this was just for all the main structural elements, if you will. But through that process, so we were able … And when you’re thinking about construction and cost of construction and design, where you can influence costs the most is at the very beginning because as you develop the design, you start to lose opportunities. Because opportunities you have to back up and that costs you time, more money. So you have the best chance. So the more resources you can bring early, the more you can help control that cost.

And so before the first mill order, we had a fabricator on board and the supplier and of course our engineers. And then they worked together through that whole process, again. We had a target tonnage that we wanted to hit and at the end of the day the average market was paying $7,500 or $8,000 a ton for in-place steel and we spent $5,800 a ton. And it was just sort of working every piece of it all the way along the way and trying to drive costs and look for efficiencies, but getting everybody in that mindset, I guess, if you will.

Michelle Salyer:                That’s a big savings.

Rob Baldwin:                     Yeah, it is. And I mean, we did some other things, unique things. And that particular area, it was a wetland, which is like most of Florida swampland. So it was another good piece of Florida swampland. And so you have to mitigate them, and then you have to excavate the muck, and then you have to bring in structural fill to bring it back up. Well, most places structural fill is a big premium, especially in this location because you had to bring it in a long way. And trucking costs is what really drives that up, so we worked with our civil engineer and we had some big ponds that we were designing. And we looked at the geotech report and we saw that down about six feet there was good Florida sand, which was actually you could use for structural material. We got samples, got the approval to use it.

So the design accommodated over digging that pond another 10 feet. And so we basically harvested the structural fill out of that pond. And we were able to spread it out and scarify it and basically use that for the structural field. So we didn’t import anything, we just harvested it on site. So that’s not a huge thing, but it saved millions.

Michelle Salyer:                It all adds up.

Rob Baldwin:                     Yeah, it saved millions of dollars.

Matt Tyler:                         But again, going back to pre-construction, that’s the construction of field people working with the engineers to come up with solutions.

Michelle Salyer:                We’ve talked a lot about the aerospace projects, so we don’t necessarily need to be the constructors of a project to offer the pre-construction services. Is that …

Matt Tyler:                         Well, we’re a design-first firm, so we still do a lot of designs for owners that will go build it with somebody else. That’s still we are a technical firm first and we do do design first, so our pre-construction services are available in that case. Our pre-construction services being scheduling and estimating, that all goes with a good design. So whenever we produce a design that we’re not going to build, our pre-construction services do support that from an estimating and scheduling perspective. But I’d like to go back to the integrated services for a minute and it’s really a beautiful thing when you see the construction forces, our pre-construction, construction forces working hand-in-hand with the design team to come up with solutions. It’s really a unique way of seeing how a design is developed, where constructability becomes an input into the design versus after the design is done we start looking at constructability. So our pre-construction services are a strategic element of our integrated services, but yes, they do support our design-only projects as well.

Michelle Salyer:                So thank you so much, Matt and Rob, for joining me today on Outside the Box with BRPH. Hope to have you back for another episode soon.

Rob Baldwin:                     All right. Well, thank you, Michelle.

Matt Tyler:                         Thanks, Michelle.

Michelle Salyer:                Thanks for joining us today for Outside the Box with BRPH. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode as we explored some of the most innovative and challenging projects and the most pressing issues and trends in the AEC world. Learn more about us at brph.com. Email us at info at brph.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X. You’ll find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when new episodes are posted. See you next time on Outside the Box with BRPH.