Ryan Maibach compares the regulatory environment for construction companies to living under COVID-19 restrictions: There are a lot of rules and it’s hard to keep them straight. “If you can picture the patchwork of the responses to the pandemic that we saw, be it various states, various counties, various cities and you apply that to the industry, some of the confusion that we saw… the challenges that we all experienced through COVID, that is pretty much what we experience on a daily basis in this industry – We can do this in this municipality, but we can’t do it over there. This is how we approach safety in this location, but it has to be done another way over there,” Maibach said. “It’s really unfortunate. It creates a lot of inefficiencies, it creates challenges in labor affordability, it creates challenges in design efficiency and design automation.” Maibach knows firsthand the difficulties of trying to build a space from the ground up. His family has been doing it for nearly 100 years. Maibach is the president and CEO of Barton Malow Holdings, which has been in the contracting and building business since 1924. It was founded in Detroit by Carl Osborn Barton and a year later, Ben Maibach Sr. – Ryan Maibach’s great grandfather – came on as a carpenter. Four generations on, the company now has 3,000 staffers in 16 offices from four entities and five partner firms across North America. Ryan Maibach joined the business in 1997 as a project engineer and worked his way up to the top job in 2011. Among his notable projects: the Shinola Hotel on Woodward Avenue, The Exchange Building in Greektown and Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s site tower in downtown Detroit. Despite the challenges his industry faces, Maibach says there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing. “Something that’s really special about construction is there’s a tangible end result. You drive through the city of Detroit, drive through the community here and you can point to these finished products, these sort of monuments to the struggle of creating,” he said. “It can, at times, be a bit of a struggle but as with many times in life, the more you struggle with something the more you’re proud of it.” He’s particularly proud of The Exchange project, which is ongoing now using LIFTBuild technology, using a patented method to hoist some one million pounds of steel, concrete and other building materials to the top of an under-construction residential high-rise in Detroit's Greektown neighborhood. The method is basically building the floors on the ground and then lifting them up around the elevator shaft and securing them in place. “Projects are a lot like kids. You appreciate the different aspects of each one of them and it’s pretty tough to have favorites. Each project not only represents something in and of itself – creating this space where there’s health care and people were healed or where cars are built or Little Caesars Arena where there’s these gatherings of people watching – but for us as an organization, these projects can be another step in accomplishing something strategically, which is exciting,” he said. The LIFTBuild technology positions Barton Malow for the future of construction, a change that Maibach says he embraces. “While I can speak pretty passionately about how I was drawn to construction as a kid and what a wonderful industry it is, I also believe it is an industry that is absolutely ripe for change,” he said. “We want to be doing things to make sure that we are positioned well as an organization to ensure relevancy well into the future and be a part of an industry that very likely will change pretty dramatically by the time I retire.” See what else Maibach had to say in this episode of The Build Up.
1:10 – Whether he always wanted to join the family business.
2:25 – What steps he is taking to make sure the family has a robust staff.
4:10 – How he handles not having elder relatives in the business and whether he’s prepping the next generation of Maibachs for the business.
9:05 – Why he loves Lego.
10:25 – His favorite project that he's worked on.
13:10 – How hard it is to innovate in the construction industry.
15:30 – How he diversifies the Barton Malow portfolio.
17:40 – How construction will change in the downtown Detroit core in the years ahead after COVID.
20:45 – Why Barton Malow employs a psychologist.
23:00 – Why Barton Malow has a chaplain program and offers grants to employees.
26:50 – How to get past the red tape in the regulatory environment.
28:55 – What his biggest failure in business was and how he overcame it.