Building Trust at Scale: Engineering Reliable Construction Finance Systems with Samuel McAravey

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Our guest is Mcaravey Samuel, welcome.

Samuel McAravey (00:45)
Hey, how’s it going?

Rishi Srivastava (00:46)
Okay, first section here is on your background. Samuel, before we get into the tech side, can you share your journey from software engineering to leading global teams and building platforms in the construction finance space?

Samuel McAravey (00:59)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I started out as a pretty classical software engineer, you know, but pretty early on, I kept on getting pulled in towards that messy mess in the middle, if you will. You know, so it wasn’t just simply, oh, I write some software and I’m done. You know, it was constantly, how do you deal with weird things going on with the finances and in accounting, you know?

early years it was a lot of dealing with ERP systems and just kind of dealing with that mess but then not too long after that I started working a lot more with sort of the fintech side of things so a lot of the accounting, invoicing and how to actually move the money around I found out that people get very very touchy if you make a mistake with their money you know it’s a

So that was early lessons learned very quickly and you know these days when you look at construction finance it’s all of that but turned up to level 11. People get very upset if their money is slow, late to get to you, anything goes wrong they get very upset and so and it makes sense I mean no other industry have I really seen it being common for a 90-day invoice.

or something like that. know, so construction has a lot of very unique issues to deal with. So yeah, ultimately boiled down to, you know, I found out that while I could write software, I preferred figuring out how to build a system that businesses could trust. You know, you can vibe code your way these days into writing some software, but that doesn’t build trust automatically. So.

Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (02:43)
When you’re writing a real system for real end user, the edge cases can be lots of them there.

Samuel McAravey (02:51)
Yeah. Well, I I imagine that you’ve run into that quite a bit with the stuff you’ve worked with. I mean, is there stuff that you’ve seen that’s kind of broken?

Rishi Srivastava (02:56)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right. Exactly. And vibe coding can be a good start without a real systems engineer or an architect. It’s very hard to get a reliable working production system.

Samuel McAravey (03:10)
Yeah, exactly.

Rishi Srivastava (03:11)
You’ve worked across industries like FinTech, SaaS, and construction tech. What drew you specifically towards the construction technology sector?

Samuel McAravey (03:22)
Yeah, so construction was very interesting. In some ways it was a little bit of an accident, but it turned out to be a fascinating industry because it’s so big and yet so much of what drives it turned out to be so manual. It was actually a little unbelievable to some extent how manual things even are today. mean, things are getting better, but

You still have people dropping checks in the mail and you still have people meeting in an office to sign a lien waiver. mean, construction is inherently a physical process, but the back office was really what was surprising to me. know, so some of the things in construction that were really interesting, I thought, were, you know, it’s real world, it’s high stakes, you know, it’s not something that’s unimportant. It’s a really important industry.

and the reliance that construction has on their systems was also a really interesting challenge because everyone needs an ERP system and everything about the business lives and dies inside that accounting system. And so with everything being so manual, the less friction you can make, you know, the better it can be. one way that I remember thinking about it was.

It’s kind of like an air traffic controller, especially these days you can’t see it in the news. If it’s all running smoothly, no one ever pays any attention to it. But the moment something goes wrong, everyone’s down your throat yelling and screaming at you. So, you know, it’s interesting industry for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (04:52)
Yeah, know, the service providers, are just like, water in the tap. It needs to be always working. It needs to be always there.

Samuel McAravey (04:58)
Yeah,

exactly.

Rishi Srivastava (04:59)
As someone who’s led both startups and large scale engineering teams, how has your leadership style evolved over the years?

Samuel McAravey (05:08)
Yeah, so the kinds of teams I’ve led over time, just as a bit of background, I started off just being the one individual contributor. And back then that was, you’re interested in what work was assigned to you, you just kind of get it done. And sometimes you’d be sort of in hero mode where you got to move fast and get it done.

Pretty quickly, I moved on to leading groups of programmers and other engineers. And what you need to do in that case changes. It’s a lot more about, you deliver things reliably, repeatably? Can you not break things and make everyone’s life miserable? But since those days, I’ve moved on to running a number of businesses, even outside of construction and

even outside software to some extent. Leadership to some extent is the same, regardless of what business you’re running. But in the construction world, it’s extra important because your focuses are on, can you make the right trade-offs without destroying not only your own business, but the people that rely on you since you’re also now a service provider.

my leadership style, how it’s changed, I’d say it’s a lot more focused on making sure you get it right rather than rushing to get something half-baked out the door. It’s a little hard to put it into one sentence, if you will, but that’s kind of, if you sum it up, what I’ve mostly come down to. Do it right and do it right the first time.

Rishi Srivastava (06:33)
Next section here, Samuel is on building and scaling in construction tech. You scaled pay ewave from concept to an established brand. What were the biggest technical or financial challenges you had to solve early on?

Samuel McAravey (06:50)
Yeah. So, you know, pay ewaive the, the current business that’s focused on construction finance and well, I’ll be blunt. It’s not like back office construction software is anything sexy or interesting, you know? So part of the challenges for us is it’s not cool. It’s not like something you can go out and be like, Hey everyone, look at this awesome thing. You know, we’re moving things that building things that move money. And so,

Rishi Srivastava (07:04)
Excuse me.

Yeah.

Samuel McAravey (07:15)
For us, one of the biggest challenges has been this whole thing around building trust. How do I, not only from a system point of view, have something that’s reliable, something that’s resilient? There’s a lot of trade-offs that you make, and all of this is ultimately to say, okay, can I convince the people who are touching money, millions of dollars, billions of dollars, that this is something that they can and should rely on?

You know, so in some ways it’s not really even a challenge that’s technical or financial, but both of those back up, you know, this concept of can people trust me?

Rishi Srivastava (07:47)
when someone’s buying something for you, they don’t know how you’re to perform. They kind of putting their faith on you. And trust is so important, right?

Samuel McAravey (07:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly. And it’s really hard to earn that trust, you know, just like any other relationship, know, you screw up once and, you know, it’s really hard to earn that back again. So having that from day one is critical.

Rishi Srivastava (08:10)
Actually, I’m going through a custody issue with my ex-wife and that just comes to my mind. Like, once you’ve lost the trust one time, it’s very hard to get back. You know, we’re probably going to be in the court here soon.

Samuel McAravey (08:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Rishi Srivastava (08:22)
What did you learn about product market fit when selling to construction companies that have complex financial workflows?

Samuel McAravey (08:30)
Yeah, so product market fit, it’s a bit of a tricky one. You know, lot of people that are, working in accounting departments, and a lot of people that are probably listening to this podcast, they’re not really worried about, you know, hey, product market fit, that’s not something that kind of crosses their mind. But it does when they start looking for something that they want to buy or maybe to help them, you know, so things that we’ve seen,

You know, they don’t, a general contractor isn’t going to be interested in, do you have a giant feature set? You know, they’re going to be looking at, is there a lot of friction and does it surprise me? They don’t want surprises. Those are bad. Yeah. So they’re looking for a service or software that’s going to help them. You know, typically it might be,

I really hate having to manually chase down lien waivers all day, every day for the last couple of weeks of the month. That might be their pain. So they’re going to be looking for something that helps ease the pain. They don’t want something that’s going to be, multiple months to set up and get running. And that’s going to be constantly giving the problems. And so for us, when it comes down to, you know, a market fit,

It’s not that we want to be able to cover every possible use case and edge case that’s out there. It’s can we find the most painful thing, help make sure that that pain goes away and you know, that’s the best medicine. So, you know, if it needs a giant change on the contractor side, it’s probably not a good fit and it’s probably not going to be successful, at least for them.

Rishi Srivastava (10:05)
Yeah, people are very resistant to change, you know, seems very risky.

Samuel McAravey (10:10)
Yeah, I mean, and I don’t blame them. Honestly, general contractors have a lot of reasons to be hesitant for any change. But that’s why at least for us, it’s where are they feeling the pain the most? And that’s the thing that they’re most likely to want to change because it hurts so bad. You know, if you’re spending hours and days on something which is annoying and makes you miserable, well, look for something that’ll make that easier.

Rishi Srivastava (10:35)
You built multi-tenant and ERP integrated systems. What’s your perspective on how integration complexity impacts adoption in the construction finance world?

Samuel McAravey (10:48)
Yeah, so this I’d say to some extent is similar to their conversation just now about, you know, the product fit because the complexity is in the integration, the integration with the systems and integration with the process. That’s really the product, you know, like in our case with pay ewaive, you know, we’re doing a lot of stuff around compliance. Well, anyone could write a compliance tool.

But does it treat the ERP system as a gravitational center? Does it tie in nicely? Does it help? Or is it just going to be another burden? So at the end of the day, a clean, tight integration is in some ways almost more important than the product itself. Does it work? Does it work well? Does it make my life easier?

The smoother the on-ramp to be onboarded, the more customers get to be on that highway, if you think of it that way.

Rishi Srivastava (11:44)
Yeah. Actually, when you think about these construction ERPs, they don’t want you to integrate with them in some way. To keep everything so close, it’s almost like a game to try and integrate with these guys because they have their own game going on.

Samuel McAravey (11:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, also some of them are so old. It’s, you know, 30 years at least on most of these systems. you know, I think that lot of the accounting folks could see that it just, it’s painful to use, it’s painful to integrate, but that’s kind of your only choice.

Rishi Srivastava (12:15)
Yeah, hopefully some of these really old systems, they’re going to die here in next few years.

Samuel McAravey (12:20)
Yeah well, if I know some of these accounting folks it would be pried out of my cold dead hands.

Rishi Srivastava (12:25)
When you designed integrations with major ERPs, what surprised you most about the data or processes inside construction accounting systems?

Samuel McAravey (12:35)
So, well my gut reaction the first time I looked at some of these accounting systems for construction it was just like, what am I looking at? You know, some of them are such a mess, at least when you first look at it, that you’re just like, okay, why is anyone using the system? But you know, kind of as time’s gone on and I’ve warmed up to it a little bit, I think I realized just how much of that

mess and that complexity is actually the human policies of things. If anyone wanted just simply a way to track and move their money around, okay, that’s a very simple system. But now in construction, when you’re talking about invoices and payment applications and all the different forms and laws and fees, taxes, everything that you have to do,

and how much of it is only focused in construction. It’s not surprising that these systems are so big and so complex. A lot of the things that I’ve seen in these systems, they’re pretty implicit with the rules. A lot of times it’s, OK, why was something done this way? it turns out that in construction, maybe, well,

Take my favorite example I like to give to people with lien waivers. You have an unconditional lien waiver and it’s really like a hostage situation. The vendor doesn’t want to hand over their signed waiver until they’ve got the money, but the GC doesn’t want to hand over the money until they have the signed waiver. What do you do?

Rishi Srivastava (13:52)
you

Thanks

Samuel McAravey (14:04)
Each system that I’ve seen they handle a little bit differently, but at end of the day, ⁓ it’s a human process. Someone has to decide what they’re going to do. you know, everyone has a different requirement, a different way of doing things. And it’s just these ERP systems have encoded it in their databases, in their programs some way. And, you know, it’s

Rishi Srivastava (14:14)
you want to have a different requirement.

We some systems that have encoded it in there. The base is in the program somewhere.

Samuel McAravey (14:25)
Integrating with the software is the easy part. It’s figuring out what in the world all these habits and what these people do that’s ⁓ so difficult. But that’s what people need at the, you know, if someone in the back office at a general contractor, you know, they’ve spent their entire career working in this way. So it’s up to us as a service provider to figure out, okay, how does it work? What do they need? Detangling that whole mess. And yeah, it’s

Rishi Srivastava (14:32)
Excuse me.

Samuel McAravey (14:51)
It’s complicated, for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (14:53)
Sure. The next section here is on finance, operations, and strategy. You’ve had full P &L responsibility. How do you connect engineering decisions to financial outcomes in your organization?

Samuel McAravey (15:07)
Yeah, so I’m going to answer that by answering a slightly different question first. so pay ewaive, it’s one of the, it’s the current business right now that I have full P and L responsibility over. Um, but prior to pay wave, I used to run a family business, it was a bakery and the P and L responsibilities there were similar, but I’d say it’s a little more obvious because it’s sort of a physical business.

Every single day it was a question of the price of my bread that I’m selling, does it give me enough profit to pay for the ingredients, does pay for the people, pay for the building and the insurance and my invoicing lead times and this and this and this this. So, while it’s not software engineering, there was a production process and

every single decision ultimately tied back to, you know, can I afford it? Can it grow the margins on the business? Can it do all the great and wonderful things that we wanted to do while also trying to check and make sure, well, okay, is this decision I’m about to make? How much risk does it have? Is it dangerous? Is it going to take the business down? Am I going to regret this later? And the same thing happens in the software business, you know.

Can I afford to hire these people? Can I spend my resources building out a feature that no one’s gonna ever use? Ultimately, it’s trying to figure out exactly how much time, effort, and money I can put towards solving some of these pain points that people have. So you have to know how to speak the language. Margins, risk, exposure.

Rishi Srivastava (16:40)
So, we’ll have to go out.

Samuel McAravey (16:45)
In a business like this, engineering isn’t a cost center. It’s supposed to be the way you make your margins.

Rishi Srivastava (16:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I really liked the bakery example.

From your experience, what metrics or financial signals tell you that a product or process change is actually driving operational efficiency?

Samuel McAravey (17:05)
Yeah, so operational efficiency. That’s one of those tricky ones. What’s the metrics you’re going to measure to decide if you’re being efficient? Generally speaking, the kinds of things I’m looking for is how much do you have to manually touch the product and how many surprises do you run into? This could be anything from

If someone bangs on my door and says, I want to use pay ewaive. How long does it take from them knocking on the door to them having it live in their system? You know, that would be potentially one, signal that I would look at. ⁓ how many times does something break? How many times does someone have to go in there and fix something that fell off the rails? you know, there’s a whole slew of different kinds of things that we could look at. ⁓ but.

At a high level, I look at it as how many times does a human have to get involved and how many times do things break and surprise us. But if the only metric were things like, oh, velocity, how quickly can I get something out the door? Nothing is ever going to get easier, you know, because you’re not shipping value at that point. Now you’re just shipping speed. You know, how fast can you drive the truck down the highway?

Rishi Srivastava (18:13)
I really love that. Yeah, because you know what ultimately customer wants, that’s what you want to be building even if it’s like not at the highest speed.

Samuel McAravey (18:23)
Yeah, to some extent, you know, I don’t want to move fast and break things because, you know, that’s the sort of motto in Silicon Valley these days. We would all get yelled at endlessly if we were just constantly breaking things. No one wants that. Not in this industry, at least.

Rishi Srivastava (18:39)
Yeah.

yeah. Stability matters here, for sure. ⁓ How can CFOs and controllers better communicate their needs to engineering teams to ensure solutions align with business priorities?

Samuel McAravey (18:44)
Yeah.

So this was a lesson that took me a little while to learn and to figure out. Because this isn’t always just a matter of trying to communicate. It really relies on both ends. Oftentimes, I would be asked to build something earlier in my career. And sometimes you just have to do it. You don’t really get to ask why.

Oftentimes you’re coming from the other side. I’ve realized it’s not enough to simply say, build this and it’ll get done because almost all the time, know, the CFO or whoever it is, is never going to communicate quite enough and they’re going to get something that they don’t really want. It’s sort of a half baked version. So what I’ve realized is, especially if someone in a CFO position,

Don’t come asking for features. Don’t come asking for a specific button or, you know, email report or something. I mean, sure you could, but it’s much better to sort of describe the decisions that are being made, the constraints and the risks that you have. You know, so, for example, what are the things that need to be audited? What are like, where does the data come from that we’re using to make decisions?

Rishi Srivastava (20:01)
for example, one of the things that needs to be audited… ⁓

Samuel McAravey (20:10)
what things absolutely cannot break in the system. These are the kinds of things that CFOs should be describing and talking about. Here’s an example. So with Payewaive, you go and you sign your lien waivers and you fill out the schedule of values and do this and that. Those can probably survive a little thing breaking here or there or taking a little longer.

But as a CFO, I would turn around and say the one thing that could never break is the payments. When I say move the money, the money needs to move and it needs to move today. You know, so now as someone running an engineering team, can say the CFO says absolutely cannot break the payments. Therefore that’s where we’re going to put all of our focus. And in prior FinTech

Rishi Srivastava (20:35)
of the CFO.

and talk to you later.

Samuel McAravey (20:57)
kinds of companies I’ve worked at that’s sort of been… when that happens is when we have the most success. know, many many times in the past I’ve been asked to just build a specific feature or this or that and sometimes it’s mostly what they were thinking of and sometimes it’s not. You know? So yeah, mean it’s communicated a little more than just simply giving me a wish list.

Rishi Srivastava (21:15)
So yeah, mean, we’ll communicate a little more than

Samuel McAravey (21:19)
You know, tell me what it is you really need. What it is that’s really holding things back.

Rishi Srivastava (21:25)
Yeah. The next section here is on cloud and technology evolution. You’ve led teams through major cloud migrations. What lessons can construction finance leaders take away about modernization and risk management?

Samuel McAravey (21:40)
Yeah, so there’s a bunch of lessons learned, I guess, from the purely software engineering side of things, but that’s not really relevant to anyone in construction accounting. The big things though that I do think carry over are, for example, in software, you don’t really want to ever do a big rewrite of everything. You want to do it in little steps, piece by piece, replace or fix.

in chunks that are manageable. You never want to basically knock the entire house down and start over again. And with anyone in construction finance, you know, think of their entire process. You never want to totally overhaul the entire process all in one go. Not only is that going to be horribly expensive, it’s almost definitely going to be broken once you put it back together again. So do it in little pieces, step by step.

Another one is when you do these kinds of migrations and software, making sure that visibility, you know, monitoring our things working the way you expect. That’s a key part. And so when you do something like, ⁓ you know, from the construction accounting side, if I bring in a new software vendor or add a new tool into the well,

Rishi Srivastava (22:40)
something like…

Samuel McAravey (22:49)
Are you monitoring to see if that tool or that service is actually helping you? Because that helps in two ways. One struggle we’ve seen is trying to convince people that using our software is going to help them. They might say, ⁓ it might help, but not very much. Well, did you sit down and run the numbers? Do you have any way of checking? And I don’t mean that in ⁓ a bad way, but when you implement something new,

it’d be good to know did it really make a measurable improvement? Did I go from spending six hours of time chasing down lien waivers from subcontractors to 20 minutes? If you don’t have visibility into that, you’ll never know. basically whenever you’re trying to modernize something, whether it’s software or your process, you need to just figure out the blast radius and minimize it as much as possible.

Rishi Srivastava (23:32)
Basically, whenever you’re trying to modernize something, talk to…

Samuel McAravey (23:42)
Declate a nuke over your entire business because you want to just change everything because you’re so sick of it. Do it in pieces.

Rishi Srivastava (23:49)
Small manageable changes. How do you approach balancing innovations, AI, automation, new features with the need for stability and compliance in financial systems?

Samuel McAravey (24:00)
Yeah. So I’ll take a little slight on software engineers here for a sec. Whenever there’s a new technology around, I think just about every software engineer looks at this new cool thing and they want to play with it. It’s the new shiny little ball that they want to chase. You know, in software that’s not a good idea because I mean, sure, it might be something good and useful.

Rishi Srivastava (24:08)
Mm-hmm.

Samuel McAravey (24:24)
but there’s all sorts of weird dark corners of where things can go wrong that you don’t know. No one knows if it’s going to be a waste of time or not. And if you immediately start jamming something brand new into a stable system, well now you’ve just shaken everything up and you might ruin it all. So when you look at sort of the accounting process, you really need to make sure you keep the stuff I’m experimenting with away from

the stuff that you’re really using your system of record, you know, do you have some guardrails in place? Maybe your ERP system lets you set up multiple companies. know, AI is a big one. You don’t want to just randomly throw AI in and say, wow, magic. You have no idea if it’s working or not. You need, this is where service providers can actually be a pretty big help because you know, like your software, you do a lot of OCR of documents.

If I were to just randomly try and do it myself because it’s cool and new, I’m probably gonna fall flat on my face. But if I can go to a service provider like you guys that have been doing this for a while, you kind of know what you’re doing. It’s a lot safer. You’re not likely to go and suddenly destabilize the entire business by bringing it in. So there are good ways of introducing some of this new stuff while still being stable.

I would really hope that the leaders in these organizations are able to kind of tell the difference and, you know, don’t accidentally break everything because you’re playing with something new and fun. So.

Rishi Srivastava (25:45)
Thank

Yeah, as you said, it’s such a good way. AI is inherently statistical. You throw the same input at it twice, it’s not going to give you the same output.

Samuel McAravey (25:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you just got to, you know, there’s people that that’s all they do it all day every day is they figure out how to make it better and make it safer and make it higher quality. And, you know, that’s probably a really good situation where buying instead of building it yourself is, you know, a smart choice, not just a financial cost. You know, I mean,

Rishi Srivastava (25:58)
You know?

Samuel McAravey (26:20)
I’d mentioned you guys doing your OCR stuff. mean, OCR has been a problem just in business for ages. I mean, I remember 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was like magical if you could do any sort of OCR work. And then it felt like you’re constantly fighting the system, even with systems that weren’t using AI. So in some ways, you AI has really made it lot easier, but

You know, it’s really good to see how some of these new features are finally being a lot more accessible. I I hate sitting down at a computer and typing in stuff from documents all day. I have to do that around tax season and I hate it. You know, I’d much rather say, here AI, please do it for me.

Rishi Srivastava (27:06)
Yeah. Yeah. Great point. For the listeners who don’t know what we do, we are a construction AP automation solution.

Now, the last section here, Samuel, is on leadership, team building, and career. You manage distributed teams across the US and Brazil. What cultural or structural practices helped maintain accountability and performance?

Samuel McAravey (27:32)
Yeah, so I got to cheat a little bit on this one because I worked for a couple of years in Brazil. And now it’s been probably 12 years now. I wound up marrying someone who’s from Brazil. you know, my wife and I, speak Portuguese, kids speak Portuguese, we go to Brazil all the time. So the language barrier, mostly non-existent. mean, software lingo is very different.

And so that helped a lot with managing teams that are kind of geo distributed. but whether it was a different country or just a different state, even, there were a few things that really jumped out. So, you know, first of all, it’s communication. You know, you’re not sitting next to each other in an office anymore. So you have to be able to communicate properly. You have to know who’s in charge of what.

You know, who owns the work? When is the work done? And you have to have some rituals. I mean, we don’t ever call them rituals, I don’t think, but meetings where you do some planning, demos, review stuff that you’ve done. You know, think of this as like a, maybe you have a meeting at the end of month closeout for the accounting team. You know, if you’ve got a diverse team in different parts of the country or something.

You know, do you guys sit down and have a meeting to talk about how the last month went? Do you talk about, what everyone’s doing? What maybe someone was overloaded this last month? Who knows? You know, and to some extent metrics and measuring like, you know, how long did things take? How much work did everyone have to do? These are all things that are not focused on butts on the chair time, but more just how much was produced? What was the outcome?

And to some extent, that’s a much more valuable thing to measure as well. You know, so if I were to sort of sum it up, it’s not that remote teams lower any standards, which I know is sort of an issue early on with remote work being a big thing, but it really sort of exposes if you even have standards at all. If you never have those kinds of meetings, if you never have those kinds of follow-ups, you know, that kind of situation will

Rishi Srivastava (29:12)
So, by which you sort of went out and popped that…

Yeah.

Samuel McAravey (29:35)
make it very obvious very quickly.

Rishi Srivastava (29:37)
Yeah. Having founded multiple ventures, what advice would you give to finance leaders or founders trying to scale from small teams to enterprise systems?

Samuel McAravey (29:48)
So this is obviously going to be an opinion, not gospel, but pretty quickly you have to figure out how to be so dependent on people, whether it’s yourself or business partners or early employees, and become a lot more dependent on the system, whether it’s the systems you’re building or other systems that you can rely on. So for example, on the software side, there’s things like

tools to watch what your software is doing, tools to make new releases of your code. These are all things that you really need. You could watch it manually, but that’s a problem. Earlier we talked about how little does a human have to get in the middle. And so when you look at now an accounting department or any kind of founder, how much of the work are you having to do by hand?

You know, going back to what I’d said about the bakery that I used to run, one of the things that I knew was going to be painful, but I didn’t really know how bad until I got there was how expensive people are. People are so expensive. I mean, I don’t remember the exact numbers then, but it felt like it was three quarters of all my expenses were basically salaries. And so it was in my interest to say, well,

It might be a whole lot cheaper for me to buy piece of equipment or some other system to make me less dependent on people. And you need that to grow. you can’t have, tons and tons of people doing small little jobs. If you can, you pay for a computer to do as much of the work as you can. So.

Don’t hire heroes if you don’t have to. mean, it’s good to have them. Basically, if you don’t have a platform or product or something that you can use to help you, you basically have a giant bottleneck. That’s what I would say. And just don’t throw your money out the window right away. You know, be clever about it.

Rishi Srivastava (31:38)
Yeah, system dependence over people dependence as you scale.

Finally, looking ahead, what excites you most about the next five years of construction finance technology?

Samuel McAravey (31:49)
So I’ll be biased here. It’s making the back office, for construction firms feel less like you’re on an archaeological dig and more like you have some real time control. it’s even with running my own businesses, it’s very painful to say, well, how much did something cost me? You know, where did all this money go or why did we’re things late? You know, it really does feel like you’re on

a bit of a dig to go through the system, run the right reports to kind of piece the puzzle together to answer these questions. And some of them might be, you know, once in a lifetime things you have to answer, but if it can feel a lot more real time, a lot more control over what’s going on, better integrations, things tied together better, you know, less humans, more automation, you know, it’s all of these things pieced together are really where I’m

excited to see things go. It’s not exciting, it’s not sexy, but these are the kinds of things that make a real impact. You know, if you’ve got two or three people maybe that are in charge of a portion of your finance department, well, how much can you grow with those two or three people? Can you sort of empower them by giving them some software that will help them automate their jobs? You know,

One of the things that scared everyone, I think still does to some extent with AI is a lot of people feel like it’s going to take their jobs away from them. But I think that blinded a lot of people to how much these tools, whether it’s an AI tool or something else, isn’t really there to take your job away, but it’s really there to help you do more with your time that you got. you know.

I don’t know who wants to go back to a time when you have to carry your clothes to the river to get them washed. I’m perfectly happy to give it to a machine to wash it for me, you know. I don’t think anyone feels slighted by that. And you know, a lot of these things I think are the same. I don’t know that anyone really wants to be doing the grunt work. You do something more interesting and more useful and let the machine do as much of that as you can.

Rishi Srivastava (33:35)
See you.

Yeah.

out

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think people are scared of like a rogue AI taking over and making you and I slaves.

Samuel McAravey (33:57)
yes. Yeah,

so I’m sure we will see movies like that, but at least for now, we’ve got a long ways to go for that.

Rishi Srivastava (34:05)
Yeah.

How far do you think we are from a rogue AI controlling us?

Samuel McAravey (34:08)
Well, I don’t know. I’ve seen people trying to do all sorts of crazy things now, but I don’t know. Part of the problem is I think both you and I, kind of know from the technical side what these things can do. you know, I think we’re a very long way still from Skynet, but, you know, maybe a lot sooner we can, you know, just don’t let anyone build the robots and then put a gun in the robot’s hands and then say, okay,

Rishi Srivastava (34:25)
And.

Samuel McAravey (34:32)
Go do things. Yeah, let’s not do that, you know But you know for all the boring things though. Great. I love it

Rishi Srivastava (34:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Samuel, thank you so much coming on to the show. I had a great conversation with you.

Samuel McAravey (34:46)
Yeah, I appreciate it.