 customer service and education isn't just in the beginning, it's in the middle, it's at the end, it's over a long period of time. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody, welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams and my co-host Beth Poppinglove is not here today. So I'm flying solo and I'm disappointed she's not here because we've got a guest today that we've been talking about having on the show for a long time now. We've got Michael Woods, who's the CEO of Black Buffalo 3D Corporation on the show with us today. Michael, welcome to the show. Hi, Zach. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me. So Michael, we've been following you for a little while. You have an incredible company and I'm really excited to just dive in and talk about what you guys are doing in the building product space. For our listeners, why don't you give us a 3,000-foot view of yourself, what you do, and what Black Buffalo 3D Corporation. Sure, no problem. So I'm the CEO and COO of Black Buffalo. We are a 3D construction printing technology company. So essentially, we're a vertically integrated construction tech firm. We're not the builder. We don't compete with our clients who buy our machines and our material to do their jobs, to build their homes, to build their factories, their tunnels, their bridges, whatever it may be that they're using the 3D tech to do. So we do essentially two things. We create the robot. We create the gantry platform or the robot arm. We actually do both of those. We create that to make it simpler, faster, more user-friendly for someone to be able to use this in the field. Then secondly and most importantly, we really concentrate on the material science, the output of what is going to be used. We do not supply that material. We work with large local concrete companies. We license our IP, our ingredients, right, our recipe for that dry mix that gets delivered to them on site. It's extremely important to partner with local providers of that mixture. It's heavy. You can't ship it a long way, otherwise you're going to lose the cost effectiveness. So you work with local providers to do that locally, but we also work with the global regulatory agencies to get the material coded and standardized, which no one else in the world has done. They do a local municipal exemption for their material that might be proprietary. We wanted to do something that was globally accessible for all builders to be able to use the same material, just like when you're buying lumber at Home Depot. You're buying the same piece. Here you're going to be buying the same material regardless of where you are in the world. It's a really smart approach because you were saying this before we even started recording, which was just like you said lumber. You've got to have code and regulation around the material that goes into a 3D printed house. Which I was like, of course, I didn't even think about that. But now you're saying, oh man, when you're inventing a new product or building a new category, that's something that a lot of people probably aren't thinking about. Yeah. Think about it. Everybody knows UL, the UL codes, the ICC, the International Coding Council is the largest regulator for all building codes, residential, commercial, industrial codes over 55 different countries that they're accepted in everywhere in the US, obviously. The code is called the AC509, Apple Charlie 509. That code regulates 3D printed structures in concrete, specifically in a concrete or cementous type mixture. One quick example is the compressive strength, how much pressure per square inch that wall can take. One of our biggest material competitors, of course, is a CMU block. Everybody knows the block, right? That's used pretty much everywhere throughout the globe now. That block is usually when you put a wall in together with the block on top of block, you're about 3,000, 3,500 PSI pounds per square inch. We cure with our material at 7,500 PSI in roughly 14 days. After 28 days, we're over 10,000 pounds per square inch. We're three times the strength of a CMU block wall when you're 3D printing. Not only do you have more creativity, do you have the ability to go faster, less expensively, you're also most importantly, creating a better product, a safer wall, a safer structure for people to work and live in. There's been a lot of talk about 3D printed homes. It really got in the scene last year when housing prices started to really ramp up. It was in the news all over the place. I'm curious to get your take as somebody who's on the front lines of this. Where do you see housing as a whole moving? Do you see every house at a certain time being 3D printed, or is it certain scenarios? Are there particular situations that you're trying to solve a problem that your product meets a very specific need? Good question. We're solving a few different problems, but for sure, 3D is not the answer to everything. Take a large complicated structure, a high-end house that has wings and different angles and everything else. You'd have to have a pretty darn big printer over that foundation. Remember, you can also print on the side and tongue-in-groove panels. You do concrete panels just like a factory. You've seen all the warehouses on any interstate throughout the US. All those warehouses where the semi comes and back in, gets loaded out and then goes away, those front veneers are all just concrete precast panels that are just tilt up, notched together and tilted up. That's exactly what you can do with 3D. 3D can help to do a lot of different things. The main couple, two, three things that it's going to do, one, it's just way faster. We print it roughly 250 millimeters per second, which is roughly 10 inches per second. That equates to printing a 1,000 square foot floor space home with 10-foot high walls, the whole frame of the house, windows, doors, all openings, et cetera, all completed in 22 hours on average. Think about that. But how many people does that take to do? You ran out your product to, or let's say a builder buys it or you run it out to them. How many people does that take to do that? Four people. And how trained do those people have to be? Do they need a lot of training on your product? It's a good question. So we usually give two weeks of training, then of course we service, we maintain, we do parts, et cetera. So we have plenty of service contracts. But usually when somebody buys or rents a printer from us, there's about a four and a half to five month supply chain before we can deliver it. So you're training them in that time frame? Exactly. Okay, that's smart. Yeah, that four and a half to five months don't come to the factory for a week. They'll shadow our people. If they think they need more training, come on back the next month with your team and we'll train you again. And then we also show up on site when our printer is delivered with two techs to really get them started and re-engage them again for what they learned at our factory. See, and I think that's a really important point, Michael, because a lot of manufacturers who are listening are going like, okay, 3D printing, maybe that applies to them, maybe it doesn't. But what you're doing that I think is applicable to anybody is that if you're introducing a new product into a marketplace, I mean, you're not just, you're not, you're introducing a new category, frankly, you're not just introducing a new product, is how do you get your customer or the end user to really buy in? And you're saying, hey, come on site, we're going to train you. And I would ask you like, what's the buy in pre and post that initial visit? Is it like, I mean, are they coming and you're like, hey, just come here. And they're like, maybe they're hesitant about using the product. But then once they leave, they're like, oh my gosh, like it's a total game changer. I imagine that's how it typically goes. Yeah, typically it is. And also on the other side, when they actually do rent one of our machines and usually they keep it for three to six months, that machine doesn't come back. They just keep renting it? They just keep using it? No, they just, they buy it. Oh, they buy it? Okay. Yeah. So we have a rent to own platform, 50% of what they rented goes into the purchase price. So it just never comes back, right? Which messes up my inventory, but that's okay, right? But like you're saying pre, what most builders, contractors, governments, disaster recovery firms, those are all of our clients, right? So they usually ask a couple of things on the front end. One, I want to come see at work. I want to touch it. I want to feel it. I want to know it's real, right? Then can you show me something that was done? What house of one of your clients was built or what kind of structure was built? What kind of different samples do you have, et cetera? Of course, all their most technical people are involved with that decision making process. Then a lot of times they'll also send us a plan. They have a community of houses or they got a condo that's going up or a factory that's going up. They'll send us their Revit file, right? So we'll get their file, their CAD file. We'll splice it over to 3D CAD, which is just called Rhino or Grasshopper. Those are the normal programs for that. Then we'll help them to make the decision. And sometimes they may have a design that doesn't work for 3D. And we'll tell them, look, that's not going to work. So you really shouldn't look at this technology. But most of the times it does work. And we put together a great scenario analysis for them in terms of this is how much is going to cost you a material. This is how much time it's going to take somebody people to your question that you're going to need. This is how the printer will run on your design so you know exactly what to do. And then if they say, okay, we want to move to the next level, we usually tell them, come to the factory. Let's do a miniature design for you. So we'll do a practice run. And we'll show them, this is exactly your house, your factory that you're building in miniature scale, and they can watch it. And the funniest thing is their, you know, the jaw goes down while they're here. Wow, it's really moving that fast. Yeah, it's moving that fast. And with 3D, the faster you move, the better the print quality. All right, so we'll turn that up and so that they can see it go as fast as possible. So, okay, so I have like a million questions right now, but my, I imagine you're trying to change a lot of minds here for people to use your product. There's, there's probably a lot of friction you've encountered over the years, maybe that friction has decreased because people have become more familiar with 3D printing. What are some of the things that you all do to reduce friction to get adoption by let's say those builders? Are you paying for them like simple things? Like are you paying for them to come to your facility? Or are you providing any guarantees? Like what are you guys doing to make it easier for people to buy from you? So we don't pay for anybody to come visit. That's, you know, that's their, that's their R&D budget, right? We don't guarantee anything because we do have a warranty on our printers for one year, if somebody purchases a printer, or of course, during the rental period, a lot of they have it. But, you know, the main thing that we've been doing is very similar to all the other very friends and colleagues that are in the business. You know, any new technology, you want all of your peers or your competitors, you want them all to do well, right? And so we're very focused on growing the industry and doing, you know, very nice, you know, podcasts like you're doing right now. Let's get out there and educate folks. But the proof is always in the pudding. So what we do a lot of times is when somebody builds something with our printer, we ask them, can our future clients, future builders, their competitors, right, their building contractors or developer competitors, can they come visit this house? Can they come visit this factory? Because they need to see an example of it being done. So here at the factory, what we do is we have different designs that we make, like a quarter of a wall, a half of a house, whatever it may be, we do progressions. And we show this how you do a door. This is how you do a window. This is how you do a rafter hanger for the second. This is how you tie the roof in. This is how you leave a space for the conduits and the light switch and the outlets, etc. So we make it as simple as possible when somebody comes here to understand how it works, how you adapt it in your business. But the biggest thing, Zach, is afterwards customer service and education isn't just in the beginning. It's in the middle. It's at the end. It's over a long period of time. So we have developed a really good business development team, a customer support team, and we have three traveling tech teams that go out to help when somebody has something go wrong. The pump stops. I have a big air gap in my pump constantly and I'm getting these bubbles. It's concrete. It's complicated. So we help them to get through that complication and make it a smoother process for them constantly. I think you said a couple of things there, Michael, that's really important, which is customer service and education isn't just on the front end. It's on the back end because you've sold the product, but you want to repeat buyer, right? You want them continually buying into this idea and buying into the category. On top of that, you're not trying to necessarily just steal jobs from your direct competitors. You're seeing that, you know, what is it, all tides rise all ships or rising tides. Yeah, I'm butchering that saying, but it's true. You think about it like I think about this with a lot of product categories that are new. It's like all of these competitors in this new category fight each other. Instead, they need to fight the old way of doing things. Exactly. It's like, I think my favorite example of this is composite decking. It's like when Trex runs and add on Superbowl. That's great for every single composite decking company. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. It's great for every composite company because people are going to go, oh, look, I can get a composite deck and then they go to the store and they go, okay, which one's right for me? Trex might not be right for everybody, but they've convinced people that I can use composite decking same with 3D printed homes. Spot on. And think about how big this is. Construction is 14% of global GDP. It is hands down the largest industry in the planet, right? Let's talk about concrete. Concrete is the second most used substance in the world. Second only to water. It's insane how much concrete is used in so many different applications. Concrete being number two most consumed, construction being number one industry in the world, there could be 100 black buffaloes and we would not be able to keep up with the demand, right? So to your point, we want to work with our competitors and prove to everybody with more and more projects, right? That this works and it does. The pilots and the prototype projects are so two years ago. Now what you're seeing is scaled projects, 50 houses, 100 houses. We're part of a really good partner of ours, Alquist 3Ds project in Pulaski, Virginia. They're using our printers and our material exclusively for a 200 home project in Pulaski, Virginia, the largest 3D printed community of homes in the globe. That's huge, 200 homes, right? And they're doing it smart. They're doing a row of homes and then another row of homes because we talk so much and we've talked today about the material cost, the labor cost, the speed, etc. But it's the efficiency of doing multiple homes is where you really get the cost savings and you get the benefits of just speed of being able to do multiple things very quickly. So is that when you get a builder who's interested in using your product, what is the linchpin for them that says, yes, I want to use your product? Is it the cost? Is it efficiency? Is it something else? What gets them to go, yeah, I want to try it? Is there a common thread there? Yes and yes. It's both of those things. It's when we do that analysis that I mentioned to you, the time, the material, the structuring, etc., they take that and they put it in their financial model and of course they're bidding on this project with another builder usually. They're usually always in a competitive bid. So they take that, they confirm it with their local concrete producer for the material cost, they confirm it with us and they also look at other folks and other of their competitors like an all-quist or some other R-squared in Texas, printed farms down in Florida, there's so many of them now using 3D. So they'll call one of their peers and say, hey, did this really happen? Do you get it done this this amount of time? Almost everyone says the first house is slower, the second and the third gets much quicker and quicker and quicker because they get into it. They learn the tricks of the trade like anything. So it all gets confirmed through time. They put it in their financial model and then the ZAC, that's when they say, I'm in. When they really start to put it down to the numbers, like, wow, I saved so much more money. I can build this house cheaper. I can also still make my margin on this less expensive house and I can build two or three of them in half the time. Yeah, this is something we talk a lot about on the show. It's not just a better product doesn't typically win, it's a different product. And yours is so different that it's really getting people's attention. What do you see the market for 3D-printed homes going, Michael? Like, if you zoom out, let's say five years and then 10 years, what percentage of new home construction do you foresee being 3D-printed homes? Do you see it taking longer than that to get like real market adoption or are you seeing some dominance starting to fall sooner? Yeah, we're seeing the first few dominoes falling based on scale, large projects, rather than a one-off prove it to me. As I mentioned, that's done. But it's not done everywhere in the world. We see 3D basically geographically in terms of the scale. What do I mean by that? So let's take the Middle East. So the UAE has already mandated that by 2030, 25% of all homes need to be 3D-printed. Saudi Arabia, the kingdom, has already tried to match that. They're saying, and it hasn't come out yet, but it's supposed to be coming out that starting in 25, same thing, 25% houses would be 3D-printed. That geography is going to be huge for 3D-printing. We think also Latin America, South America, because it's all blocked, has been blocked there forever, that's going to be a big area for us as well. US is going to be in spots where you have disaster issues, weather issues, most of yourself in your coasts, and also seismic issues with California because this is such better tensile and compressive strength product. You're going to see probably, I would love to see, our goal is to have every job site within the next five years to have a 3D printer on the job site doing its job, just like a crane, just like an earth mover, just like a forklift. The 3D printer, it's not that expensive to have it on there. There's so many applications. It's not just the wall. You want to have a bench, print the bench in an hour. I think that's a great goal to have because it's not just the entire home. You print it, is there different applications for different types of homes. I think about a custom builder. A custom builder might do five homes a year. There's probably situations in each home that they go, hey, why don't we 3D-print that? Exactly. You want to do a retainer wall. I want to do a retainer wall that needs to go down three, four feet in the ground. Why wouldn't you 3D and it's supposed to be 10 foot high? Why wouldn't you do a 13, 14 foot high wall in a day for as long as you want and put it right there as a retainer wall, do it in sections and tongue and groove it all together piece by piece? This is exactly what's being done in China. If you talk about our competitors and everything else, our biggest competitor as an industry is Winsun out of China, W-I-N-S-U-N. Candidly, they crush all of us in terms of everything that they're printing. Hospitals, three, four-story homes and buildings, seawall retainers, everything they're 3D printing and the government supports them and they're doing a great job. We need, as a globe, we definitely need to pick up the pace because the efficiencies are there, the cost effectiveness is there, the speed is there, and the simplicity of the use is now getting there and that's what's really getting exciting. I love it. Michael, for our listeners, if you have a piece of advice to any manufacturer, regardless of category that's going, this is really fascinating stuff. I need to do a better job at bringing my product and educating people. What's the one piece of advice you would give them? Challenge your productivity and that's the biggest issue that the construction industry has. When you look at any chart for the last 30 years, construction productivity has gone like this and it just flat lined down the bottom because you're not introducing new technology. Be open to the new technology. You've got plenty of folks that are going to be honest with you. It works. It doesn't work with 3D. We do this all the time. Take a look at it. Have your R&D team, your techs, your artists. Take a look at it and see if it works. But also, I think the biggest people have to be open to is be more creative with the design where you want to do a bay window. You know, Zach, that takes a lot more time, a lot more money, etc. Now, this 3D printer can just go zoop right around, lickety-split, no more cost, no more time, no more material. Be creative and get your architects involved with creating a more habitable home. As we all know, round walls inside a home make a person feel better. They have a better feeling about life. They have a better feeling about themselves. It feels more expansive. It feels more open than a squared wall. Use the technology. Don't just try to emulate and repeat the CMU block wall. Use the tech for the creativity. Michael, if someone wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, go to our website. Go straight to www.bb3d.io. You've got a question area there, just contact us right there on that. Or you can email me at any time, michael.woods at www.blackbuffalo.io. That's great. We'll make sure we link to those, link to your email and link to the website in the show notes too. Michael, man, thank you so much for taking time to join us. You said you were literally in the facility today, in the factory today, getting stuff done. I love it. That's awesome. I'm a little dirty. I'm sorry. I had to clean up a little bit before I got on this, but we did a nice little test print today. We're actually printing, doing something really fun. We're printing inside walls, just as like a veneer in our front office. We're just doing demos of what we do, our clients do out in the field, and just making it more visual for people when they visit. That's really cool. Again, for our listeners, if you enjoyed this content, make sure you check us out at veneer.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams. Thanks again, Michael, for joining us. Thanks, everybody.