Dr. BuildLove? Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Construction

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When I started my career, I had thought the financial industry was the right path, even though I came from a family of civil engineers.

My grandfather, my father and his brothers all were engineers and builders. But I thought to myself, I’m going to be different. I’m going into business. So I went to London, England — got a job at a large bank and was an entry level employee there on the emerging markets desk. But I soon discovered that creating virtual dollars out of thin air just wasn’t for me. So I came back to Toronto, joined a construction accounting startup and, well, the rest is history.

“With every stadium project I would close out… every owner’s meeting that I would present at… I knew that I had found my family. I knew that I was home.”

The startup was small and short-staffed, so I moved to implementations from support in under a month. To my amazement, I soon found myself helping the largest general contractor in North America to implement one of the most complicated payrolls in the world. It worked, and I loved it. The jobsite trailers… the yelling… the physical building process. I came to feel like I had imagined the builders of the pyramids must have felt. Yes, I was just part of a software vendor to the industry, but my own hands still had touched the foundation of that building before it later soared into the air. In short, I was sold.

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With every stadium project I would later close out… every owner’s meeting I would present at… with every president, project manager and superintendent I would meet… I knew that I had found my family. I knew that I was home. Indeed, it’s hard to explain to people what it means to drive by a building and actually be able to say, “I helped to build that.” But that is the ultimate job satisfaction.

And now, as the technology continues to evolve and construction moves from a tech laggard to a tech leader — using the very tech that I have had the honor to help spread — I am happy to be able to say today that I was part of this evolution from Day One. And I am even more excited to be a part of all the remarkable things that are still to come for this most inspiring industry.

Based in Carpinteria CA, the author is executive vice president of marketing and enterprise strategy at Procore Technologies, which he joined early last year. Previously, Hamdy had spent 13 years with CMiC, where he served as chief marketing officer from 2008 to 2015. He can be reached via e-mail at bassem@procore.com.