Proper Precon Podcast

Contractors usually start target value design with the construction budget. By then, the target has already been set somewhere upstream by land, density, financing, operating costs, and the returns a project has to hit to get built at all. In this episode, we follow the number back to where it starts.

Justin Ballantine returns to the show from Mill Creek Residential, a vertically integrated developer, builder, and operator of multifamily communities nationwide. He spent nearly a decade in pre-con at Callahan Construction, a third-party GC, before moving to Mill Creek. That gives him a view from both sides of the table. He walks Troy and Trey through how a project's target is actually born and how Mill Creek is working toward target value design and integrated project delivery. He also explains why the phrase he most wants removed from design meetings is "if it works with Justin's budget."

In this episode:

• How the pro forma drives the target: max density, unit mix, parking, and return on cost before a site plan even exists
• Why target value design is not target cost design, and how developers define value differently than contractors do
• The biggest cost levers in today's market: site conditions, soils export, trucking, and municipal pressure on truck trips
• How energy codes like the Massachusetts stretch energy code and passive house requirements set a cost baseline before the "pretty stuff"
• The MacLeamy curve and why 80% of project cost is set in the first 20% of design
• Set based design and cost buckets: treating the entire facade as one $10M bucket and flexing the mix of fiber cement, metal panel, and brick inside it
• Balancing form and function so one system, like triple-glazed windows, doesn't consume the whole bucket
• Continuous estimating, design phase pull plans, and moving from reactive value engineering to proactive decisions
• The real barriers to IPD: contracts, pre-con fees for trade partners, and getting investors to see cost as value
• Why vertical integration and a consistent core of design partners make value decisions easier
• A reworked Fast Five, including whether a bad number or a slow decision is more dangerous and the trade Justin wishes came in earlier

The best projects aren't the ones that hit the number. They're the ones where everyone at the table can see the number, trusts it, and makes decisions in meetings instead of months.

Proper Precon Podcast is powered by Ediphi. Catch every episode at properprecon.com, or subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Share it with your favorite builder, trade partner, developer, or architect.

Curious about Ediphi? Visit ediphi.com and click Schedule a Demo.

Every software vendor in construction has an AI story right now. Very few can explain what's happening underneath it. In this episode, we skip past "is it cloud?" and "does it have AI?" and ask the questions that will decide which pre-con tech stacks survive the next five years.

Troy and Trey sit down with Dustin DeVan, founder of BuildingConnected and CEO of Ediphi. Dustin spent six years as a GC before building software, and he's spent fifteen years since in construction tech. He's blunt about why most estimating tools aren't ready for an agentic future. He also explains why the question buyers should be asking has nothing to do with where the data lives and everything to do with where the calculations run.

In this episode:

• Why "it doesn't matter what software you use, it matters where the data goes" is the wrong way to evaluate pre-con technology
• The hidden problem with browser-heavy and desktop-to-cloud tools: what happens when 50 users and dozens of agents are calculating the same estimate at once
• Why the schedule of values is the most important document in construction, and how building a cost graph around it creates a real learning system
• The difference between AI clicking buttons for you and AI performing authorized work on the server
• A first look at Eddie, Ediphi's AI assistant planned for Q4, and why it depends on server-side architecture
• Who settles the argument when the historical steel price, current market price, and the estimator's judgment all disagree
• Estimated vs. bought vs. built cost, buyout context, and why the foreman on your project may matter more than the subcontractor you prequalified
• Why the static cost database is going away and unit costs should become dynamic, driven by quantity, location, and history
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) explained, and what real integrations look like beyond exporting and importing spreadsheets
• The one question every pre-con leader should take back to their team: can your system reproduce and explain the number two years from now?
• A Fast Five with the most overused phrase in construction tech and the danger of bad data fueling bad AI

The easy button is coming for pre-construction, but only for teams whose tech stack was built to handle it.

Proper Precon Podcast is powered by Ediphi. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, and share with someone in pre-con who needs to hear this one.

Curious about Ediphi? Visit ediphi.com and click Schedule a Demo.

Construction tech promised to simplify the work. Instead, we ended up with 15, 20, sometimes more point solutions—and Excel quietly holding it all together. So what went wrong, and is the answer really one platform to rule them all?

This week, it's just Troy and Trey working through one of the biggest tensions in construction technology: point solutions vs. platforms, and why the real problem might not be either one.

In this episode:

• Why point solutions were never the actual problem—disconnection was
• Whether "one platform, one login, one database" really fixes anything, or just centralizes the complexity
• The case for building around the workflow: concept → cost model → estimate → VE → bidding → GMP → handoff
• How AI could kill software sprawl—or accelerate it into "shadow software" chaos
• Why domain expertise gets more valuable as building software gets easier
• What happens when AI becomes the interface, and your systems disagree on the number

The future isn't just connected data. It's connected context.

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Most people think a project's cost is set on bid day. But by the time drawings go out, the decisions that determine cost, schedule, risk, and success have already been made—or delayed into becoming problems.

In this episode, we sit down with Charles Bradshaw and Sloan Walker of Scout Program Management to look at construction from the owner's side of the table. Both spent years on the GC side—estimating, precon, and VDC at firms like Hoare and Doster—before moving into program management, and that dual perspective shapes everything they do for their K-12 clients.

We get into what owners need to get right long before the bid: how funding sources and debt service shape a budget, why soft costs can add 15%+ on top of construction, and how a smart drawdown schedule can reinvest millions back into a project. Charles and Sloan share why they favor add alternates over VE exercises, how they build both design and bid-day contingencies, and what happens when the number misses on bid day.

We also dig into the human side—defining what "success" actually means to an owner, understanding the "sacred cows," building communication plans so decisions don't fall through the cracks, and why the GC who "joins the dance mid-song" needs an advocate who already has the owner's trust.

Whether you build every year or once a decade, this conversation is a masterclass in the early decisions that quietly determine how a project ends.

Learn more about Scout Program Management at scoutpm.com.

The Proper Precon Podcast is powered by Ediphi.

Technology That Actually Moves the Needle — with David Haley, DPR Construction

Twenty years ago, a CD burner could triple your bid coverage. Today, there are hundreds of tools fighting for your pre-con team's attention — so how do you know which ones actually move the needle?

In this episode, Troy Simon and Trey Darnell sit down with David Haley, Preconstruction Manager at DPR Construction, who's spent 35 years in the industry — from counting light fixtures on paper drawings with his grandfather to leading pre-con on billion-dollar healthcare projects. David shares how one of the industry's most tech-forward GCs evaluates, tests, and rolls out new technology without burning trust with its teams.

In this episode:

• How David defines "moving the needle" — and why it's harder than ever with so many tools in the marketplace
• Why DPR still teaches interns takeoff the old-school way before handing them AI (hint: you can't mentor someone who can't show their work)
• The bid leveling gap: where AI compares words but misses what's missing
• Why the trade partner who's double everyone else's price might be the one you need to call first
• How live option engineering — accepting and rejecting alternates in the room — turned 75 scope options into a $10M contract increase built on trust, not cuts
• Predictability as the next frontier: turning mountains of historical cost data into numbers owners can bank on two years before market input exists
• How DPR rolled out Ediphi to 100+ pre-con professionals — and why letting people poke holes drove near-total adoption
• Prefabrication, unit costing, and getting granular earlier: what David hopes technology solves in the next five years

Plus, the Fast Five: the one part of pre-con David says should never be automated, and what pre-con teams must figure out to win the next five years.

The tool doesn't build trust — the person using it does. But the right tool gets you in the room faster.

The Proper Precon Podcast is powered by Ediphi. Learn more at ediphi.com.

Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube at properprecon.com.

What separates software that digitizes old habits from software that actually moves preconstruction forward? Ediphi Director of Product Eric Walker joins Troy Simon and Trey Darnell to talk about the discipline of product — why good PMs dig beneath the feature request, how AI should support estimator judgment instead of replacing it, and why the companies that house the data will win the next era of construction tech.

Episode 9 defines what “great” looks like in Target Value Design (TVD) with Preston Hite (Hoar Construction). We break down the real (non-textbook) TVD workflow: starting with an owner’s target, building trust early, designing to cost, and using real-time estimating to guide decisions before drawings are complete. We cover owner + architect alignment, the precon team’s upstream role, historical cost data and scenario modeling, where TVD fails, and how technology enables faster, more credible cost feedback and shorter cycles to GMP.

Episode 8 goes upstream to construction education with UT lecturer Dan Sain. We unpack why the estimator shortage and “freecon” problems start in the talent pipeline, how students perceive estimating vs. the broader preconstruction umbrella, and what it takes to make precon a career people choose. Topics include curriculum vs. industry needs, ABC competition lessons, tech exposure in the classroom, and concrete ways GCs and partners can strengthen the bridge between academia and the field.

Episode 7 breaks down hard bid vs. negotiated work beyond the usual hot takes. With Ben (Fite Building), we define what “hard bid” and “negotiated” really look like in practice, where each model works, and the hidden assumptions that cause breakdowns (document quality, risk transfer, bid fatigue, owner sophistication). We discuss how incentives shape behavior, how trade partners experience each process, and why the real differentiator is a strong precon process + cost narrative that clarifies scope, assumptions, and deltas—regardless of procurement method.

Every budget, every early estimate, every "can you just take a quick look at this?" — it all costs someone something. But in most cases, that cost is invisible. Welcome to FreeCon.

In this episode, Troy and Trey sit down with Mike Navarro, CTO and Co-Founder of Ediphi, a 20-year construction veteran who went from lead estimator on complex high-rise projects to building the software he always wished he had. Together, they dig into one of the most quietly frustrating dynamics in the industry — pre-construction work that is deeply valuable, rarely compensated, and almost never talked about openly.

In this episode:

• What "FreeCon" actually is — and why it's not always a bad thing
• Why the pre-construction timeline stretches to 30 months when it shouldn't
• The PETA Factor: how endless pricing rounds inflate sub costs and erode trade partner relationships
• How scope clarity drives cost down — and scope mystery drives it up
• Why the estimator's voice needs to be in the room before the design is finished
• The shift from "flat line estimates" to true pricing models where everything is interdependent
• Strategic FreeCon vs. subsidizing an owner's decision-making — where's the line?
• Why Mike went from "pry Excel from my cold dead hands" to building cloud-first pre-con technology

Fast Five closes out the episode with rapid-fire takes on tools vs. behavior, owner mindset shifts, and finishing the sentence: "The estimate stops being just a number when..."

If you've ever priced the same project five times under a verbal commitment and a prayer — this one is for you.

🔗 Learn more about Ediphi at ediphi.com