Elizabeth Geiser knows preconstruction.
Geiser spent 23 years as senior director of preconstruction, before becoming vice president of preconstruction for Southfield, Michigan-based Barton Malow. The 25-year industry veteran has spent her career planning out the early phase of building, before stakes are driven into the ground and lumber is sawed.
A seasoned pro who remembers using measuring wheels and hand-held tally counters to gather data before entering it into Excel, Geiser now leverages cloud-based tech to streamline the first stages of planning. Her latest find has been Join, an Oakland, California-based firm that provides preconstruction software.
Here, Geiser talks with Construction Dive about her experience with preconstruction and how her team uses technology today.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What was the preconstruction world like when you first started?
ELIZABETH GEISER: When I started, you joked that you could weigh the different drawings to know the price of the job. We had highlighters and wheels.
Elizabeth Geiser
Courtesy of Barton Malow
We had the clicker to count, and then a lot of our estimating was done in Microsoft Excel at the time. I helped move us to [estimating program] MC2, and then WinEst [another takeoff tool].
I jokingly said that three changes is my limit.
Now, we’re using lots of different tools for takeoff, mostly Bluebeam, or Autodesk Takeoff. It’s crazy how far technology has come.
You started using Join, a type of preconstruction software. When did you start using it, and what problems were you trying to solve?
I remember the first job we worked on using Join was a hospital project, the Intermountain Health Lutheran Hospital project in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.
Join is a cloud-based tracking tool that you can upload your initial estimate to, and then any changes until the next time you do a full estimate. It’s the source of truth, is what I always say.
Before Join, we tracked that in Excel. We had a cost control log in Excel. Then you had to know if you had the right Excel file or not, if you had a PDF print of it, was it the latest or not. Then, really only one person could be in Excel at a time to update it. So there was that kind of limitation as well.
I said, “Okay, guys, we’re going all in, good, bad or ugly. This is what we’re doing.”
We invited everyone — I think that we had 70-plus people in that project — and it went well. Everyone was really happy with it. The owner liked the transparency of it, that they could go in and export things and play with things. And even since that project, there’s been so many advances.
How did Join help on that hospital project?
We level-set at the very beginning with all of the users, understanding what their rules are and what they could see and do. The owner’s rep was a power user. He was exporting things into Excel and then doing his own playing around.
I don’t know if I was surprised by it, but it was always up to date, like whenever you were looking to see where we were, everyone knew that was the latest and greatest information.
You didn’t have to wonder, is this rev one final, rev one final-final, you know, the whole naming game of different things that come through.
Any other aspects that stood out to you?
I will say that, on Michigan State University’s Engineering and Digital Innovation Center, which started in December 2023, that was when Join’s Scenarios feature rolled out.
It’s basically doing a “what-if” scenario, and you can see it live. You don’t have to have a side sheet of, “What if I accepted X, Y and Z.” You can, in that scenario, select X, Y and Z, and see what your final answer is, and see how close to budget or not you are.
For that project, we had some pretty significant budget challenges. The budget was $300 million. We were at $415 million so it was like, “Okay, we have more building than we have budget. So what can we do?”
Without Join, I don’t know how we would have done it in the time frame that we had. We had a day or two turnaround, and had to come up with 10 or 15 different choices. Today, we can do that within an hour.
How much does it cost?
If you break it on a per-person basis – we’ve probably got 100 people using it — it does feel like kind of a lot compared to some other software.
But I think it’s worth it. I keep fighting for it. I don’t want to go back to Excel, that’s for sure.
