Stop Before You Start

When you got home from the office yesterday, could you name one thing you actually moved forward?

Summary

Steve Burrows spent nearly three decades at Arup, led AECOM's building engineering business in North America, served as EVP at WSP, and joined Katerra as head of engineering. Today, through his consulting practice B2Burrows, he works with traditional firms and construction startups on preparing for a future the industry isn't close to ready for.

In TRXL 228, his central argument: the construction industry has designed itself into a system that nobody wants to fix because everyone in it is getting paid, and that's exactly the problem. Time-based billing rewards inefficiency. Meeting culture is self-perpetuating. Every startup that tries to plug a solution into this system discovers, sooner or later, that it's trying to improve an episode of The Office.

But this episode isn't just a diagnosis. Steve offers a framework and a surprisingly simple individual-level action that can start to change things from the inside out.

What's Inside

• The 90/10 split. Why most firms treat their standard, repeatable work as if it were custom creative work (and get paid for it) and what it would look like to finally stop.
• Defining the problem first. What it actually means to pick one thing to optimize for before you start solving, and why most AEC startups skip this step entirely.
• The sheet of paper. A deceptively simple daily exercise that Steve argues could double your productivity in 30 days, and why its simplicity is exactly why most people won't try it.
• The billing trap. How the time-based fee model actively punishes efficiency, who benefits from that arrangement, and what it will take for AI to finally force the industry's hand.
• What Katerra actually got right. The lessons worth keeping from a company whose collapse is easier to dismiss than to learn from.

Episode Analysis