BRICKS & BYTES BULLETIN
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS

THIS WEEK
102 Years of Growth, and a Plan for What Comes Next

Barton Malow’s Ryan Maibach is bracing for what comes after the boom. Plus: the COVID habit that beats strategy, and why one flat chart is lying to you.

THE EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS

Full episode write-up at the bottom↓

Key Takeaway 1:

Barton Malow CEO Ryan Maibach is already preparing for the next downturn, even while leading his firm through its longest growth run in 102 years. It shows why Barton Malow has turned down more work than it’s accepted this year.

Key Takeaway 2:

Ryan’s bigger concern: AI is closing the information gap that construction managers get paid to hold. His read is blunt. The role gets commoditized or it gets reshaped, and the same question now hangs over architecture and design.

Key Takeaway 3:

The flat construction productivity chart everyone cites is measuring the wrong thing. Individual tasks have got faster for years. The shape of the work never changed, and AI risks repeating the same mistake at scale.

7 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION
ON THE RADAR THIS WEEK

  • AI Engineer World’s Fair opens in San Francisco June 29 – AI moves from pilot to deployment. (More) 

  • ASHRAE Annual Conference 2026 runs in Austin June 27 – HVAC and decarbonization headline. (More) 

  • ISM Manufacturing PMI for June drops Wednesday – first US factory read since May’s expansion. (More) 

  • Eurozone flash HICP for June lands Wednesday – tests whether the ECB’s hike is working. (More) 

  • Wales building safety regime overhaul takes effect Wednesday – new dutyholder and HRB rules go live. (More) 

  • California’s SB 79 and AB 507 take effect Wednesday – transit housing and reuse rules unlock. (More) 

  • NOG Energy Week opens in Abuja July 5 – energy investment and grid expansion take stage. (More)

POWERED BY:

The multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster.

The construction intelligence platform delivering data and insights to act faster and outperform, from site to boardroom.

The #1 construction management software for growing companies. Manage your projects from Tender to Handover.

FULL EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
102 Years of Growth, and a Plan for What Comes Next

Ryan Maibach spent thirty years building an instinct you can’t get from a textbook. He earned it on site, walking projects for decades. It got him the corner office at Barton Malow. Now that instinct has to keep pace with software that changes every quarter, and a plan written in January can be wrong by February.

A lot of senior people are in that same spot right now. This week, we talked to two of them, from opposite ends of the industry. Ryan runs Barton Malow, a 102-year-old, employee-owned contractor out of Southfield, Michigan, doing somewhere between five and six billion dollars in revenue.

Rob Painter runs Trimble, the technology company whose hardware and software sit underneath a huge share of how modern construction gets measured and built. Put the builder’s worry next to the platform’s answer, and you get a fuller picture of 2026 than either one alone gives you.

The fear that survived the boom

We asked Ryan a simple question. What worries him more, the next downturn or the labor shortage? He picked downturn, and his reasoning is the crux of the discussion.

Ryan took over as CEO in 2011, right after the last major contraction. The firm hasn’t had a real pullback since. He told us it’s the longest run of growth in his company’s history, and that history goes back to 1924. He may be heading for two decades of good times.

You can see the discipline in how the firm behaves. Ryan said Barton Malow has turned down more work than it’s accepted over the past twelve months. In the best market in living memory, a builder is saying no. Call it deliberate pipeline discipline, the kind this newsletter keeps coming back to:

  • Fewer bids, chosen with intent

  • Higher win rates on the bids that go out

  • Healthier margins, protected through a downturn nobody can yet see

The firms protecting themselves for the next cycle aren’t doing more work. They’re choosing harder.

Ryan Maibach: President + Chief Executive Officer, Barton Malow

The argument that actually got our attention

Ryan’s argument about his own industry is what stuck with us, more than the downturn talk. It’s a hard one to unwind.

A construction manager’s core value has always been closing an information gap. The client doesn’t realize what it doesn’t know. The builder does and charges for being the one who understands the job. Drop AI into the mix, and the client can get a version of that knowledge somewhere else, cheaply.

Ryan’s read, in his own words: real disruption in construction isn’t far off. The construction manager role gets squeezed on price until there’s little left of it, or it gets reshaped into something else. He sees the same question mark over architecture and design.

We’ve written about this trap before in this newsletter. Everyone uses AI to speed up the job they already do. Almost nobody asks whether the job should exist in its current shape.

So what does a leader do? Ryan’s answer is entirely about leadership and communication. His job right now is to make sense of the moment for his people. He keeps coming back to one phrase: here’s what’s known, and here’s what’s not known. He learned the habit in spring 2020, running all-company calls several times a week with a plain account of what had changed. He sees AI as the same test, stretched over years.

One detail stuck with us. Ryan said his project managers now run around forty different software tools and site supervisors closer to thirty-five. A decade ago it was a small handful. He’s the CEO of a multibillion-dollar builder, and he handles the overload with a paper notebook and tick-boxes. We asked whether all that software had actually lifted productivity. His answer was plain: no.

Rob makes a related point worth a single line: the industry’s flat productivity chart hides real task-level gains, because it tracks the whole system instead of the work happening inside it.

Image: Barton Malow

What this means for Barton Malow, and firms like it

Ryan’s worry and Rob’s answer turn out to be the same argument, from opposite ends of the table. One man builds towers. The other builds the tools the towers run on. They’ve landed in the same place: the danger is using AI to run the old playbook faster while the playbook quietly stops working.

Barton Malow has already tested one way to act on this. The firm runs an entrepreneur-in-residence program to check which internal processes are worth commercializing and which assumptions need retiring. It’s doing the work now, while the market is good, ahead of the next downturn forcing the question.

Here’s where this leaves you this week:

  • Audit your software stack against what the work actually needs, beyond what it was bought to signal

  • Pick one process your firm treats as fixed, and sketch what it would look like built from scratch with AI native to it

  • Tell your people, plainly, what you know and what you don’t

Ryan and Rob reached the last point from opposite ends of the industry. Call it the leadership test 2026 is actually administering.


Powered by beehiiv