Top-performing people and companies will tell you that success doesn't happen in isolation. People get the best results when they learn and collaborate with others.
Alex Belkofer, Senior VDC Director at McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. fully understands this. That's why he believes in building strong industry connections and promoting thought leadership. These things are especially crucial as the construction field continues to evolve and adopt new technologies.
We caught up with Alex and discussed his career story, the lessons he learned, and what he intends to do to forward innovation and development in construction.
McCarthy is a 100% employee-owned national construction company with 160 years in business. We're the nation's oldest, privately held general contractor. It’s rare for a contractor of our size to be 100% employee-owned and it’s a key part of our firm’s culture. As employee owners, we are vested in creating great experiences for our clients, trade partners, craft professionals and the communities we serve.
McCarthy traces its origins back to 1864 when carpenter and founder Timothy McCarthy moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and began building farm structures. Since then, we've grown to be a multi-billion dollar organization that focuses on maximizing client outcomes on complex construction projects.
We like to do the tough stuff, and that's a big part of why I came to McCarthy seven years ago. I wanted to live and grow with a company that was employee-owned and had a national footprint.
I've always been excited about transforming this industry. It's been near and dear to my heart ever since I was a kid, and I always felt like architecture and construction were calling my name. And lo and behold, at this stage in my career, I believe I've found my forever home with McCarthy, and it's been a great place to live and work.
My focus at McCarthy is driving virtual design and construction (VDC) adoption and standard practices across our portfolio of projects, while promoting digital transformation and continuous innovation on how we apply technology throughout the project lifecycle.
I currently serve as our Central Region VDC director and lead our VDC National Leadership Core Team. Our efforts together collect all of McCarthy’s VDC leaders from across the country and serve as the strategists for how we continue to transform digital innovation through BIM, VDC, and other emerging technologies.
My father was in the blue-collar trades. When I was growing up he did a lot of manual labor including landscaping, chemical applications, and many things related to the built environment. As a youngster, I enjoyed being outside, getting my hands dirty and working alongside my dad starting at the age of 8.
I was first introduced to architecture as a potential career when my cousin, who is four years older than me, selected it as her major in college. I had a curiosity for the what an architect does largely due to my fascination with design building Lego sets and curiosity for how building structures come together.
I’ve always loved creating and shaping things and developed a knack for pre-planning and visualizing. While I love getting my hands dirty, I wanted to be involved in the planning stages of a project to help teams come together and build something awesome. Ultimately, this led me to pursue both architecture and construction management at The Ohio State University. Once in college, my uncle who was a licenced architect in the state of Texas, offered me a summer internship where I learned more about the practice and what an architect really does. From there I also learned more about what a construction manager does, which drew the process-oriented side of my brain to finding my true passion in work on projects as the builder who helps bring design to life and make it a reality.
It's paramount that we, as construction practitioners, embrace technology. It helps us deliver our services faster, more economically and more efficiently. As an industry that has traditionally been slow to adopt new things, it's more important now than ever that we embrace technology and learn how it can help us.
The demands of our industry are so great that I think technology is a critical component of how we evolve, deliver design and construction services, and help owners find more value across every stage of the building lifecycle.
How can a built asset last 50 years, 100 years, or 200 years? Well, technology plays such a role in the planning, designing, constructing and operation of that built asset.
That's a big reason, too, why I am involved in several organizations that focus on technology, building transformation, and industry standards.
A lot of it has to do with digitizing our work as designers and contractors. So, it's not just about creating drawings, building models, and putting work in place. It's much more about how we create a smooth approach and process to do our work, and then capture the built environment accurately for the end user who has to maintain it for years to come.
That capture element could be something like producing laser scans of existing conditions, tracking work progress usings photos or scans against a 3D model (‘advanced reality capture’) or a fully accurate 3D model with facility information data - similar to a ‘digital twin’ - which has been a really big buzz word in recent years. Lots of people are still trying to find what that digital twin asset is for them or their organization.
Those are things that I feel are critical and that we, as an industry, should start to dial in on and embrace. Everyone cares about data and insights; it just depends on what data you care about and who is going to use it.
Once we start figuring out with our clients how we can use more data to drive more insights, we'll get more value out of that.
So, those two categories—i.e., advanced reality capture and digital twin—are areas we are hyper-focused on. We're seeing more and more clients caring about meaningful data sets to operate and maintain their built environment.
One of my proudest accomplishments was helping to create a formal VDC National Leadership Core Team at McCarthy. While we were pushing a lot of innovative things with technology in the business for a long period of time, we had “a bunch of BIM people doing BIM things” at the regional level and not talking much with one another - really just trying to meet their regional business needs and not having much thought about a national approach.
Back in 2017, we recognized that to scale VDC and help drive meaningful digital transformation, we needed to work together, do more things as a cohesive unit, and create our internal standards, efficiencies, and processes. We formed a core leadership group that unified all regional VDC leaders within McCarthy to get behind a one-company approach that was necessary to sustain the business. So, I'm really proud of this core team. It's moved the company in one direction from a VDC standpoint that will allow us to scale for the long-term.
What was born from that was our first-ever National VDC Summit, which occurred in the fall of 2023. About 100 VDC practitioners gathered for two days and focused on growing the next generation of virtual builders. We had field operations, preconstruction, design integration and other aligned functional areas represented too, which was super cool to see these other practitioners leaning into how we build virtually across all the project lifecycle. Autodesk was represented there as well. And now we aim to have this summit annually.
One of the biggest challenges is having a myriad of technologies out there. The challenge is distilling them down, compartmentalizing them, and really digging in deep to find the value propositions that will connect those technologies to our strategy.
It's easy for someone to go and find a technology and say, "Hey, I think this can help me." And that may be true, but there may also be a technology we already own that may help that stakeholder. Or, something may be of value, but if it doesn't plug into our overall technology ecosystem, we have to pause and ask ourselves, "Well, if this technology could be really valuable, how could we make it work?" Or, "Is there something else that we either already own or could develop that may be more economical or beneficial?"
There's always this delicate dance between acquiring new technologies and trying to figure out something similar to what we've already invested in. It is a super big challenge because everybody has a smart phone. Everybody has access to information in multiple ways, and you have vendors, suppliers, and influencers who are all out there trying to drum up business.
We, as construction technologists, have to be very mindful of those facts and do our best to work together to curate a strategy and plan that can be sustainable for McCarthy. Otherwise, we'd be just investing in every single piece of technology that's out there.
How does technology help with those challenges? I believe we must have strategic technology partnerships that help us solve many of those challenges.
That's why we've invested in key technology partners like Autodesk. We're leaning on you to help us figure out where technologies can drive value across all project types. Maybe it's an integration. Maybe it's something that Autodesk acquires. Maybe it is something where Autodesk forms a strategic partnership.
We're leaning on our key technology partners to help us with some of these decisions so we're not doing it in a vacuum. I don't want to try and evaluate something in a silo by myself. I'm going to pull in my technology partners so that we make a well-informed decision and that we're not missing an opportunity.
Much of it is leveraging each other's footprints, relationships, and strategic connections to come together and help solve each other's business needs.
The Autodesk partnership has been special to me because the very first technology conference I went to, back in 2009, was in Cleveland, Ohio. Chuck Mies, a long-time Autodesk partner who has also become a mentor to me, spoke.
I heard his presentation, and I'll never forget it. His message was that every asset owner needs to ask themselves three key questions:
That left a huge mark on me, and it was a big reason why I worked closer and closer with Autodesk as a strategic partner throughout my career.
And so, Autodesk has meant a lot more to me than just software. It's meant a lot in the realm of strategic thinking, digital transformation, and how we're leveraging networks and relationships to get people to come closer together, embrace technology, transform the industry, and do more with less, all those great things.
But if not for that first presentation and seeing Chuck speak, I'm not sure my career would've gone in the direction that it did.
Bob Bray at Autodesk is famous for his tandem speech about "seeing meaningful data through a single pane of glass." That's resonated with me a lot over the years because everybody is flush with looking at information in so many disparate places.
I think that's the one thing Autodesk is trying to help us do better day in and day out: getting that single pane of glass experience to our data sets on all of our projects and looking at the health of our construction footprint.
That, to me, is where we need to continue to go as an industry. How are you looking at your footprint and ecosystem as it relates to the information flowing in and out? How are people experiencing that information?
It's a never-ending challenge. We're constantly chasing that, but I think we are chipping away at it with intensity and intentionality.
What I'm trying to help us envision here at McCarthy is a digital transformation strategy that connects the leaders in our business and gets like-minded thoughts moving in unison regarding digitizing our business.
It's about using digital means to accomplish many traditionally manual processes, workflows, work products, and outcomes. That's how we can get on the cutting edge of data insights. So that's a big, hairy nugget to chase, and it's my focus internally.
Externally, I spend my time and energy in organizations that are forward-thinking. I sit on several committees, and while it might seem crazy that I have the bandwidth to do that, I do it because I think it really matters. So there's the National Institute of Building Sciences or NIBS where I currently serve on the Digital Technology Council as the vice chair. There's also the Design-Build Institute of America, DBIA, where I serve as the VDC committee chair, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers’ Industry BIM Consortia where I have served for over 5 years now and finally Building Transformations based in Canada where I am a council board member.
Those are examples of organizations that are trying to lead the way with digital transformation through the use of BIM, VDC, and other emerging technologies. Those organizations, to me, represent where the industry needs to keep heading: thought leadership and use cases centered around digitization.
I try to strike that balance internally and externally, leveraging my knowledge and the sharing that happens in those organizations back to McCarthy.
I'll try to give you three pieces of advice. The first is to embrace technology right from the start. Learn the tools that can help you do your day-to-day work better. Don't be afraid of new technology. Immerse yourself in what is available to you.
The second one would be to always continue to be curious. Go to industry conferences, network and build your personal learning database. Exchange ideas. Build your network from the standpoint of peer-to-peer and cultivate those industry relationships so you are at the forefront of the conversations. You never know when you will need them, and don't let new ways of doing things (like technology) sneak up on you. Stay connected and informed.
The third one is to be intentional with leveraging our industry organizations when they have training offerings. Lean in and look at what is going on with efforts happening with the Construction Industry Institute (CII), AGC of America, Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA), National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) and many others. These are a wealth of knowledge and can come with certifications or designations that can bolster your growth and continuing education. These efforts often look for industry volunteers and their work is what is needed to catapult our industry forward.
Look at the things shaping the industry from an educational standpoint, and take that curiosity to the next level to become an industry practitioner. Do these things not just for the role you serve in your organization but to learn what else is going on out there so you can keep bringing that back to your business.
