I have been a Project and Cost Manager in the construction industry for over 20 years working for worldwide companies and managing nationally renowned projects and every project regardless of size starts with the financials. What my client wants vs. what my client can afford.
Therefore, I begin every project the same way, with an in-depth financial model created in Excel. As a project develops and/or changes, so does the model, from inception through to completion, which requires me to manually update my financial model to reflect every change along the way. To put that into perspective, imagine the bathroom in your house and how many different materials and products make up that bathroom; it’s a lot! Now imagine listing out every single one of those materials, along with their associated cost; your brain hurting yet? As if that was not enough, now we have to hire workers to install every single one of those materials; vendors, distributors, transportation, storage costs and so on. Now, multiply that exercise by an 18 story mixed-use apartment and retail building.
So, as you can imagine, these models are robust, ever-evolving and constantly being distributed to other parties for review, and/or running their own manual simulations. How much would adding another floor to the building cost? Or, another hotel room on each floor? And, without fail, my models are returned, riddled with errors (decimal point off, formula errors, simulation data not removed, etc). Every time this happens, I would say to myself, “there must be a better way of doing this”, and after scouring the internet, I came up completely empty. It simply does not exist. Deflated, and understanding that I was doomed to manual maintenance of spreadsheets for eternity, I simply made peace with it and moved on.
Jump to the end of summer 2019, I’m on a road trip with my best friend and business partner, Yoni, and while admiring the fall landscape of the Midwest, we discuss our struggles in our respective jobs. We quickly found that we shared a common and painful struggle of maintaining financial modes in spreadsheets. While Yoni is in the tech industry and I am in construction, we both were struggling with the lack of automation of basic budgeting, and then knew the struggle was universal, and not industry-specific. After realizing our shared pain-point, it only took a split second, and we both had a revelatory moment! Next thing I know, we are saying to one another, “why don’t we create this?!?!”
Needless to say, the remainder of our road trip was centered around starting what is now MRGN.
Big things are coming very soon in early 2022; stay tuned and look forward to you joining the MRGN family!
