One of the things that Barton Malow’s wholly owned subsidiary, LiftBuild, sought to learn about its “top-down” construction approach for the Exchange residential project in Detroit was whether the process could be improved by automating workforce scheduling and bonus payments to skilled trades, reducing delays due to spikes in material prices and scheduling mix ups.
LiftBuild used AI-based labor incentives platform Trunk Tools to accomplish this, and the startup has now secured $10 million in seed funds, led by Innovation Endeavors.
Trunk Tools’ platform can handle payments, accounting and messaging for skilled labor and the contractors they work for. It uses behavioral economics, psychology and project management tactics with an AI-driven system to motivate workers with monetary incentives—such as prepaid Visa debit cards—for completing certain activities faster to help keep the project on schedule. Trunk Tools also helps contractors track project completion and ensure goals are being met, including safety objectives. By aligning the incentives from project executives down to the skilled trades on the site, Trunk Tools seeks to encourage greater efficiency while improving overall profitability.
“In my background I know all of these construction CEOs, and I would ask them ‘what’s your biggest problem?’ And every single one [was] talking about the labor shortage,” says Sarah Buchner, who developed Trunk Tools while getting her MBA from Stanford University. Buchner started her career in construction as a carpenter and became a construction technologist at Neumayer ZT GmbH and Strabag in her native Austria. Trunk Tools was also accepted into the latest cohort for the Stanford dy/dx, a startup leadership development program supported by Sequoia Capital.
“I’m talking to these billionaires, and all they care and think about actually is how to find more blue-collar workers and how to keep them and make them happy,” she says.
On LiftBuild’s Exchange project, the Trunk Tools platform was tied in with LiftBuild’s accounting system, a process that took some setup, but once it was ready, its recommendations identified activities that could be done more safely and efficiently. Structural steel and concrete workers were sent text messages with offers with incentives for certain activities being completed sooner. Trunk Tools tracked the completion of those activities and paid out the bonuses in the prepaid debit cards when they were done. The pool of project savings was split 50-50 between LiftBuild and the skilled laborers that accepted the challenges.
“We sat down with the team and said, ‘Okay, here’s current production, here’s budgeted production. If we can save X amount of [worker] hours, that would equal X amount of dollars;’ 50% of that we would give to the trades in the form of bonuses, and then of course, 50%, the company retains and it’s a win-win for everybody,” says LiftBuild COO Joe Benvenuto. “We were doing it during the floor lifting while we were assembling the floors, which works really well because all of those activities are really defined.”
Benvenuto said LiftBuild was trying to get down to its expected goal of a 10-day duration for lifting each floor. Eventually they beat that and were getting floors done in nine days thanks in part to the Trunk Tools bonuses. Barton Malow was an early investor in Trunk Tools and Benvenuto says they’ve grown with the platform.
“We used [Trunk Tools] primarily as a kind of beta when it was in that form. We were piloting it but we used it for all of our self-performed trades, ironworkers, carpenters, concrete and some of our interior folks as well,” he says. The skilled trades liked the cards, he notes, because gas was over $4 a gallon at the time and they would use them to pay for gas to and from the site. Benvenuto says LiftBuild plans to expand those incentive activities such as completing a budgeted amount of linear feet per day of interior framing on future projects.
