Authenticity on Display

The latest episode of the “From the Fabricator” podcast is now live, and it features two incredibly genuine people.  I start with the very sharp Kristina Buckett of Dallas Flat Glass and Excel Glass Systems.  Fun talk that covered a lot of topics and really delivered when it comes to networking.  Plus, Kristina may have dropped the line of the year when it comes to relationships in our industry.  Then Joe Silva joins me.  Joe is on for two reasons, one being his role at SmartLift, and we cover the massive benefits there. We then talk pizza (tremendous), and we finish with a conversation about the recent book Joe authored called “19 Days of Grace” about the unexpected health emergency and then the passing of his beloved wife Marianne.  Joe was raw, and because he’s got an insatiable trait of helping people, this book has become therapy for so many.  We talk through it, and you’ll come away with inspiration to move forward no matter what.  I’m honored Joe was willing to talk through it all with me.

Thank you in advance for checking it out.  Both of these fabulous people will be at GlassBuild too, so you may run into them and immediately be added to their networks.

VIDEO

AUDIO (Or search “From the Fabricator” on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts)

A huge thank you to my friends at FHC-Frameless Hardware Company for their support of this episode!

Interested in Joe’s book- click HERE to learn more and purchase. 

Elsewhere…

-- The most prestigious awards in our industry have been announced, with the Glass Magazine Awards being released.  Some very notable and deserving winners!  If you have not seen it all yet- check it out HERE

-- Also ALERT- There is AGMT testing happening at GlassBuild, and there are a few openings.  So if you have folks due for testing, this is a great opportunity to get it done.  There is some subsidy to help defray costs too.  If interested, let me know, or you can reach out directly to Scott Kennett at AGMT - skennett@amscert.com

 Now on to part 2 of the Summer Catch-Up Series.  Note: the Links of the Week and Project of the Week are below at the completion of this interview with Omar Maalouf of Momentum Glass.  In this piece, we talk about Omar’s deep care for the industry, what can be done to be better, and what’s next for Momentum Glass. Tons of people read part 1, and I can tell you, part 2 is just as interesting.

MAX: A lot here to be proud of.  I just have to ask, if you look back at 2011 Omar, and you look at now 2026 Omar, your mind has to be blown. I mean, the things you've come up with (See part 1), and you and your team have worked on, none of it was even a dream in 2011, right? 

OMAR: No. When I started in 2011, I told myself, look, all I want to do are two or three jobs a year. I want to make this amount of money. I want to manage the growth. I just want to be a nice, just a good glass guy. And there's a real need for good glass guys. And I think when you do one or two jobs, and you're good and successful, then all of a sudden you're doing four and six jobs. And when you're still good and successful, then all of a sudden you're doing a hundred jobs, and it becomes a complete disaster. But I think it's completely different than where we started. My wife and I worked together. We did QuickBooks, and she did all the back-of-house paperwork I had nothing to do with. I hated it, and I did PMing and sales. And you go from that to where we are now, it's crazy. 

And let me make sure that I reiterate this point. This isn't just me. It's an unbelievable amount of talented people that we have in this company. And from the technology guy to our accounting teams to our back-of-house, PMs, GMs. And it's easy for me to say that because it's true. It's not just wordsmithing. It's really true and it's made my life very easy. It used to be I would work in the company, and now I get to work ON the company. And those are buzzwords that I listened to in Vistage groups or peer groups that I was like, "What the hell does that really mean?”  Now I understand when you're able to work on instead of in, you can create bigger and better things. The other thing that I think we've done a really good job on is our controls, our cost controls and accounting. 

We struggled understanding and tracking costs. And there was a time when it was not pretty here through COVID and after COVID when we had material supply issues and triple P money, and nobody knew the costs, and it was tough. I think next to our technology, the cost controls and cost management that we've implemented have made us a very successful company. 

MAX: You do care greatly for our industry. And again, what's interesting about you is that you're working on your company, you were working in your company, and some people would just be content with that, but yet you still have an eye on the industry as a whole, which somebody like me, I'm grateful for. I appreciate that you care enough. What can we be doing better, though, that the industry needs to take a look at, because otherwise we're in trouble and the other trades aren't fans of ours, that's for sure.

OMAR: I get asked these kinds of questions from a lot of people, and everybody wants to talk about training. Everybody resorts to the easy answer, which is, "Hey, we need to train. We need to train our field."  I agree with that. Don't get me wrong. Training is a big deal. We've put 40-plus people through AGMT certification. We are a firm believer in training and recruiting. I think what I'm really starting to focus on is the glass associations. And let me tell you why. I think the glass associations need to work better and harder at educating general contractors. And I know the general contractors know everything. Don't get me wrong. I know they're so smart. But here's the problem. 

Everybody across the contracting spectrum is hurting for people. General contractors too. So they're hiring younger people, inexperienced people, and they're putting them in leadership positions. And I understand that everybody has to learn. Don't get me wrong. I think what we need to start doing, and we did this here in Houston, and it was a great example, is we had a program where we invited three or four general contractors to come in and sit at the Houston Area Glass Association. And there was a great round table discussion. What can we, as glass companies, do to help you? To me, having glass companies and glass associations bring in general contractors and have these open, candid round table discussions, I think that's a huge thing. I think if general contractors know we don't need to be the 13th person awarded a job, we need to be in the top three, top five.  I understand concrete, I understand underground utilities, I understand steel. But my God, we're the exterior envelope. We take time to build, to do the shop drawings, and so on.  We need to be released earlier so we can be successful for you. That's to me educating them and educating general contractors just in that aspect is important. And that's when we're bidding work. And I mean, other companies get the benefit of negotiated work, and I get that. But even the reasons why the companies that get negotiated work are successful are because they get the head start. They get in early, they get to work with the architect and design, and show what will and will not work. That's why they're successful for the most part. So how do you create that kind of success in a bid opportunity? Get us in early after you've gotten the project.  Let us work with your team. Let us start the shop drawings earlier. Let us not be behind the eight ball the minute we sign a contract. That's indicator number one in my opinion. The other thing is, we're the second- or third-riskiest trade in construction. I mean, you have a roofer, a glazier, and a waterproofer. All three of us are responsible for water management of a building. We should be prioritized ahead of most everybody else. And educating the general contractors is important. And we're not drywall guys. You can't cut a piece of glass and stretch it or cut aluminum. You have to understand what the expectations are of a glass company. And this is part of the education that I think not only mid- to top-level general contractor personnel need, but field superintendents as well. And it's not a badmouthing of the general contractor.  It's trying to get on a page where we can share, educate, and work together to both be successful instead of an adversarial relationship.

I also think project management training. So everybody in the country right now is focused on recruiting or field training. I think it's great. Don't get me wrong, it needs to happen. But, we have an aging out of project managers. We have an aging out of estimators. We need to focus on recruiting people to be project managers, to understand estimating. We have to find people that know how to handle the project managers. And so for us, what we've started doing is going straight to colleges and paying a premium. 

I'm competing with the general contractor salary. We've recruited kids from Texas A&M, from Texas State, from Louisiana State University. We now have a training program that we run all these college graduates through. It's a two-year program. They spend six months in the shop, three months in estimating, a year in the field, and then three months as an assistant PM. And they start to figure out a little bit of the company, and then they figure out where they want to go, what direction they like. And so we're trying to build that. And it's a costly venture because you're competing against the top-notch general contractors for these kids coming out of A&M or coming out of LSU or coming out of wherever. Everybody needs the talent. So that's to me, everybody's looking at field and training. Again, I agree with it. We have to focus not only on that, but the management side as well. 

Back to the glass associations. I'm slowly but surely getting more and more involved with them. I think the other thing that all glass companies need to recognize is that we will all be more successful if it's friendly competition, not this race-to-the-bottom reverse-auction competition. And we had an issue in Dallas, and the glass groups in Dallas were super. The guys that we dealt with in the Dallas market were what I would've expected out of any glass association. And to me, being able to stick together as a group of glass contractors who know what kind of things we have to deal with, and not undercut or sabotage another, is a huge issue. And that's the kind of thing that if everybody can realize: if you're good competition, and I'm not talking about anything illegal, I'm talking about good competition. Know your costs. Know what your true cost of the job is. Don't underbid jobs just to steal it from somebody else. Good competition will make everybody successful. And I think if the glass associations can work on promoting good competition, work on educating general contractors on, "Hey, how can we both be successful? How can we create an environment where we're teaching each other and learning from each other?" I think those are the things that I’m going to start investing a lot of my time and talents in. 

MAX: Where do you go from here?

OMAR: What does Momentum want to do? And what does Momentum want to be? Defining Momentum is very interesting. Five years ago I said, "I want to be a powerhouse in Texas." Well, I think we're doing a pretty good job. And we said, "Well, let's expand. Let's go to Nashville. Let's go out east and let's keep building the momentum." And so we've got some pretty sizable projects out in the Virginia area. We've got some projects out in Florida, Atlanta, Nashville, and we're establishing presence, not just remote locations. And I think it gives the contractor a little bit more comfort that this isn't a fly-by-night pop-in, pop-out type deal. It's a company that's going to plant a flag, build a shop, put the people in place, and be successful.

LINKS of the WEEK

The stories about Ryanair are classics-but THIS one may take the cake https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ryanair-passenger-sucked-through-window-37484745.amp

Dogs rock… plus a glass railing makes a tiny cameo. https://www.thedodo.com/daily-dodo/dog-shows-up-at-neighbors-door-every-day-after-learning-what-he-does-for-a-living

Some impressive kids in Colorado! https://www.upworthy.com/pn-student-built-house-construction-class-colorado/

PROJECT of the WEEK

Out to LA to a pair of super cool buildings via Walters & Wolf! This is the Vermont Corridor, and it has two buildings that complement each other beautifully, and quite frankly, the look of the façade is stunning- and the glass absolutely stands out.  Kudos to Walters & Wolf on an amazing project and to all who may have contributed and collaborated!

The Consensus Says...

The AIA Mid-Year Consensus Forecast was just released, and as you could expect, the numbers were adjusted downward overall.  You can see it all HERE, but for me, it's fascinating that office numbers are bullish while education is not.  There’s a fly in the ointment somewhere because I really feel like those education numbers are undercounted. In any case, no matter what the numbers are, our job remains the same.  Know your costs, be close with your supply chain, communicate more than ever, and stay resilient!

Elsewhere... and on to the Summer Series

Reminder- GlassBuild registration is open- use code LV26 for free show floor entry! Register now!

NOTE: Links of the Week and Project of the Week are below the interview!

This week on the summer “Catch Up” series, I get with the brilliant Omar Maalouf of Momentum Glass.  Omar absolutely brings it in all that he does, and in our talk, he really provided tons of fabulous content and actionable items.  And there was so much good here, I had to break it up into two parts.

MAX: The last time you were on the podcast was 2021. In five years, I'm assuming a lot has changed. You made the bet on yourself in 2011, and we talked about that. Still happy with the way things are going? What are the biggest things that have changed at Momentum Glass in the last five years? 

OMAR: Yeah, really happy. Love where the company is, love where we've gone in the past five years, and frankly love where we're heading. I don't think there's anything that we've done that I would change. Part of what we did in 2018, late 2017, was take on a private equity investment group. We completed our agreement with the private equity group and exited. And that was a big deal for me. I learned a lot, took on some challenges that I wasn't aware of when getting into private equity, and exited successfully. And I think to find a glass company or trade partner that has taken on private equity and exited successfully is very rare. And I pride our team on being able to do that. That's probably the biggest change in the past five years.

We've also really focused on technology.  I am of the position that we need to be the leader in our industry in technology. That's something that I really believe in. I think doing things the same old way over and over again will never advance any company. So we hired a gentleman, and he's now our chief technology officer. And part of what we've done is I give him my ideas, and he executes, and it's awesome. I don't know how to do any of this stuff, but I know what I want to do, and he and his braintrust get it done. And I'll give you some examples. We developed... The first thing is BIM. Our big thing going forward was knowing that BIM was going to be a major player in the construction industry. And as a glass company, I wanted to be a leader in BIM technology. 

We have seven full-time BIM professionals in our company, and so we don't outsource our modeling. We also don't outsource, for the most part, any of our shop drawings. So we keep everything in-house, and part of that is to manage expectations and goals. But having the BIM team in-house, and having the BIM team as our team and not outsourcing, allowed us to do multiple different steps from modeling.

We developed a manufacturing software system. We are basically able to track cutting, assembly, glazing, bunking- I mean, everything from start to finish inventory. And we do it with QR codes and tracking. Then we said, "Okay, let's take it one step further." We have a model. Now we take the model, we export all of our fabrication from the model to our CNC machines. We've created a manufacturing tracking system that tracks every part and piece through quality control, through the bunking, through the installation. 

So we've done this with the BIM team's lead. And so you model a building, you produce cut lists, fabrication drawings out of it. You have software that tracks all the parts. You have a QA/QC section that manages the quality. And then when it goes to the field, we scan our parts or units as they get installed, and we can track production. So then what did we say? Well, we want to share this. So, we took it another step forward, and we now have transparency where we share the model with our client. As we cut something, the parts and pieces turn a different color. As we assemble, they turn a different color. As we glaze, as we ship, as we install. So our clients have access to our manufacturing process and our tracking. And so there's never a... “Hey, what's going on? Hey, where's this? " You can see it full-time, real-time. Every three minutes it's updated. And we share that with our client. What's the goal there? Well, the goal there is when you turn in your pay applications and your requisitions for money, you don't have to fight for, "Hey, are you really this percent complete or not? " Just look on the app, go look and see what we're doing. Go look and see what's installed. You don't have to worry about it anymore because we're transparent. We share every bit of data with you. And the best thing about it is we share the good and the bad. So if there's an issue, we can say, "Hey, look, we've stopped fabrication. We have an issue. We need to make some adjustments," and we can show them full-time where we are. The things that we've done from our manufacturing, our BIM, that part of the technology is, I think, cutting edge and industry-leading. 

Now, after helping our manufacturing. Next was helping our field and our back-of-house folks. We need to support them and create tools to make our superintendents in the field more productive. So, what did we do? We said, "Let's do a facial recognition app." So we created our own facial recognition app. Why? The team clocks in and clocks out when they get to the job site. Now, when they get to the job site, they clock in with facial recognition, and when they leave, they clock out. So I know exactly when you showed up, and I know exactly when you're leaving. You don't always get eight hours every day. It's not any of these handwritten time sheets. And what does that do? We get accurate time, which then automatically populates a back-of-house time sheet, which automatically feeds our payroll processing. So I've eliminated people having to handwrite, people having to do data entry, people having to do all these manual steps with mistakes and errors because everything is done automatically with facial recognition. 

Then I said, "What else can we do to help our team?" Well, one-week look-aheads. It's the simplest thing in the world, but we've created an app for it.  We told our superintendents, “All I want you to do is plan your work one week, just one week ahead." And we have this data-populating app where all you have to do is use the drop-down menus and plan your work. If you plan your work and send it out, we're having every one of our project managers review it and walk the job, which forces them to get out of the office and walk the job with the superintendent who put together the one-week lookahead. You're able to see, oh, I need to have this material. Oh, I need to make sure they have these pieces, or they need to have this caulking or this background or whatever miscellaneous items. It's all part of the one-week look ahead, which is the most simplistic thing to do. But now we're automating it, and we're putting it on their iPad so they have an easy way to do it and to force the PMs to walk out and make sure they walk the job with their superintendents. The biggest problem I have right now is our PMs are covered up with work here, and they never get to see the progress and go to the jobs. 

We also created two different superintendent-based forms: a non-conformance form and a material request form. How do most people do this? They send a text to their PM, or they send an email, and it gets lost or backed up, or there are 42 texts, and you never remember the first one. We created an app where they fill in the blanks, they send it to the PM, it's tracked, and there are open logs. And until it's completely closed out, we track every MRF or every NCR report so we can address it every Tuesday or Wednesday in our staff meetings. So it's helping our field team keep up, be successful, and be proactive in our approach. I would tell you, if you ask me what the biggest advancements that we've done at Momentum were, closing out a private equity deal was huge. The technology that we have adapted and created, I think, is paramount. I think it's helping this company become more successful, faster, and more proactive rather than reactive. And that's something that I think is very important. And then I think expansion. We continue to talk about where Momentum wants to go. 

 Next week- Part 2- covering industry advocacy and more.

LINKS of the WEEK

What a waste- a lawsuit over what is a “window” seat on a plane https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/sf-lawsuit-united-windows-22339061.php

 The GLP-1 trend is huge… but are there long-term effects? https://www.wsbtv.com/news/2-investigates/georgia-woman-part-lawsuit-claiming-link-between-glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-blindness/KIGRAQR6NJF7LA6CNCS5OEKWZI/

The true costs of living off the grid https://people.com/couple-explains-why-off-grid-living-isnt-as-cheap-as-people-think-exclusive-12022597

PROJECT of the WEEK

To the awesome country of Canada… and this one is a rare “in progress” one for me, but the project looks amazing, and the backstory deserves some pub. From the feed of Rob Wood from C3 Specialty Glazing a project long in the making… here it is in his words:

After four years in storage, the jumbo glass is finally being installed at the new Estonian Centre in Toronto! Designed by Kongats Architects, the centre features a public courtyard shaped to reflect the outline of Estonia. Its bespoke structural-glass façade, designed and installed by C3 Specialty Glazing, incorporates insulating glass units measuring up to 3m × 7m - without vertical supports or fins.

Huge stuff!  Now, in the comments, someone asked Rob about the delay, and the answer really got me:

Our client wanted to mitigate risks from inflation during COVID, so we agreed to have the glass fabricated and stored. The expected start date then got pushed back a few years due to site delays, largely due to issues with proximity to the TTC line.

Now that’s some proactive and next-level thinking.  Wow. Anyway, congrats to all on this one, and hopefully I’ll get a picture when it is all done!