Barton Malow's CEO counted his own software stack at 40 tools per PM, no productivity gain. Plus: planning for the next downturn early, and what hyperscaler clients mean for the GC's next act.

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Barton Malow counted its own software stack: 40 tools for a project manager, 35 for a superintendent, with no measured productivity gain. Ryan Maibach's response is to consolidate the stack itself, the next lever he's pulling.

Ryan is preparing for the next downturn while growth is still strong. Barton Malow hasn't seen a contraction in 15 years, its longest run in 102 years, and he's using the calm to plan ahead.

Hyperscaler clients understand construction data as well as Barton Malow does, closing an information gap the GC and CM model has relied on for decades. Ryan treats that as a prompt to redefine the value on offer.

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Barton Malow runs roughly 40 different software tools for a project manager and around 35 for a superintendent. Ryan Maibach, president and CEO of the 102-year-old Detroit contractor, counted them himself, in a conversation we had with him for the Bricks & Bytes podcast: "Have we seen the productivity benefit from that? I think it's reasonable to say that no, no, we haven't."

Barton Malow self-performs civil, concrete, structural steel, and drywall work across a business Ryan puts at $5 billion to $6 billion in recent annual revenue, with around 3,500 team members. Ryan is now trimming that 40-tool stack down to a size his site teams can manage.

Digging foundations, placing concrete, and erecting steel haven't fundamentally changed, in Ryan's account. What's grown "exponentially more complex" is the process surrounding those tasks, driven mostly by software. He remembers running Barton Malow's Prolog rollout single-handedly, back when the entire technology stack a project team touched was countable on one or two hands. Today a superintendent manages 35 or 36 applications.

The industry-wide numbers track with what Ryan is seeing on his own sites. Construction productivity has grown roughly 0.4 percent a year in the US since 2000, against 2 percent for the total economy and 3 percent for manufacturing, according to McKinsey. Two and a half decades of accelerating software adoption across the sector hasn't moved that number.

Ryan’s fix is to cut the stack down to something a site team can actually carry. His own coping mechanism is telling: a paper notebook with a monthly checklist. Sometimes the simplest tool in the room does the job better than the newest one. It echoes a workflow-first lesson we've covered before: the prerequisite for AI that works is a workflow clean enough to put it on.

Ryan ranks the next downturn above the skilled trades shortage on his list of concerns, and he's using this period of strong growth to prepare for it early. The timeline explains the instinct:

A historic growth run concentrated in one client type is exactly the setup Ryan wants Barton Malow prepared for well ahead of time, giving the firm room to act early on its own schedule.

Hyperscalers build data centers repeatedly, and Ryan makes an important observation: these clients understand the underlying data and technology as well as, or better than, the contractors building for them. It's a genuine shift from Barton Malow's usual client base, where a sports client might commission a stadium once every 20 years and a hospital system might expand once a decade.

Michigan, where Barton Malow is headquartered, has become a proving ground for data center pushback, with dozens of communities imposing temporary building limits and a statewide moratorium under active debate in Lansing. We've tracked national opposition data showing a majority of Americans now oppose a data center being built near them. Ryan expects the buildout to continue regardless, with public sentiment "lagging" the pace of construction itself, which gives contractors and clients alike a real window to get ahead of the conversation early.

LIFTbuild, the top-down tower construction method Barton Malow, started developing with structural engineer Charlie Thornton almost ten years ago, is the company's strongest test case for how long real change takes. Ryan calls it proven: Barton Malow built a twin of its Exchange tower in Detroit using conventional methods alongside the LIFTbuild version, and the LIFTbuild version came in faster and marginally cheaper on both cost and schedule. The project became a 2023 Harvard Business School case study on innovating inside a slow-moving industry.

Prospective clients kept asking to see a completed project first, so Barton Malow became the developer of Exchange itself and backed the method with its own capital. Deploying capital in the built environment is high-stakes, and clients naturally gravitate toward risks they can already measure.

Ryan's advice for executives navigating AI now draws on the same principle Barton Malow leaned on running weekly all-company calls through COVID: say plainly what's known, what isn't, and what's changed since the last conversation. Plain, regular updates earn a team's trust through disruption faster than any single tool. 

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