Episode 26 - Marc Bovet, BONE Structure

Update: 2022-04-29

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Prefab Review

Hi my name is Michael Frank and this is The Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Marc Bovet of BONE Structure - a building system, I’m not actually sure if you consider yourself a prefab company, that's responsible for homes across the US and Canada. Marc, thanks for joining.

Marc Bovet - BONE Structure

Well thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here.

Prefab Review

I guess to start, can you tell me a bit about your background and how you became involved in building homes?

BONE Structure

Yeah, well the short version of the story is that like many people out there who have initiated to build a brand new home, and back then I was part of the management at the world class company, Bombardier, and traveling quite a bit and my wife basically undertook the project. So she went out and we hired the very best architects and very best engineers and we laid out the plans and you know, we went through the whole sequence. And with the smallest details because I'm that type of individual and so is my wife, and sure enough when the time came, we went out there and got 5 builders to come in and look at the plans and come up with some quotes and timelines. Believe it or not, when all of those came back there was a delta from 5% to 72%, without having 2 of them close to each other. So back then, we asked the architect, “did you send the same set of plans to everybody because something is fundamentally wrong here or appears to be wrong?” So that's how this quest really started. It really got me fired up and I've been in the apparel industry most of my life. I was in the advertising business. I was a consultant for many small, medium and large companies and bombardier was one of them. And I was part of the management at Bombardier back then and we were implementing six sigma which was the world class recipe to make it right. And so what I did is I reviewed the whole thing and tagged it just as if it was a six sigma project which no one in his good common sense would do for a residential project. I mean people don't even go that far even for a skyscraper or an industrial complex. But this way I was satisfying myself and saying, “you know we'll get things out there. We will be ready. There will be no surprises and let's not fall into a trap of having late deliveries or having not double checked what we were ordering and finishes and so on.” So with all of that preparation and that eccentric craziness of a gantt charting exercise. With all the possible buffers of what a nordic climate could bring to you from an ice storm to a snowstorm to anything. We went along and finally decided to opt for and this is one of the most significant things to be remembered, we opted for someone that we trusted and at the end of the day it was none of the 5 forecomers that we had initially welcomed. So we went on with someone that had to drive fifty miles every single day. He was a GC and he had his own team. So the conditions were clear: finish all your job sites, finish all your contracts and the day that you will come here, you will be fully dedicated with your team on this job site. So he accepted the challenge which he probably regretted when I pulled out the gantt chart and then he said, "oh crap, what am I getting into here." But to a certain degree, we had sort of facilitated his job because he saw that we went into the extreme planning

Prefab Review

Yeah, yeah.

BONE Structure

And with the buffers and everything else making his life easier. All that being said, and I did mention buffers - we ended up, my wife and I, with four kids in a hotel room. So that got me thinking, if it was a hundred million dollar project, which it was not, trust me, how is it that Mr and Mrs Jones and our architectural firm and John the contractor and our sub-trades can make things happen with rigor and discipline? And keep in mind that is all orchestrated. So we started to do research and it became sort of a pet project at the beginning. So I had some research done personally. I did some research and I've put full people on it. And we've looked at everything and in the end anything that was prefab, modular, industrialized platforms concepts North America, Asia, you name it, we pretty much looked at it. In fact, we looked at thousands of patents even before getting into the game. And the more we were digging the more we realized that this was for good or worse a very artisanal industry which goes by, "well, we've always done it this way" and to a certain extent and to a certain extent with all due respect to some of the best prefabs out there, at the end of the day it's we've always done it this way, but you add on the prefab. So we really wanted to challenge all of this and take the knowledge of people that I've hired and put a team together and really create some sort of A team here where we would just pulverize and come up with a totally different mindset and look back, as far as in California per-s, the first home that was built in California was in 1800 or so. Take it or leave it, for the past two hundred years we've been doing the same old thing with about the same materials. It's just that because of manufacturing facilities, because of different processes, because of certain things nowadays, even facilities, capabilities and digital capacities that we have out there. The industry has reinvented itself and you've seen over the past twenty four months covid being just a sideline to this, seen some pretty incredible big companies which we won't name, that had humongous funding that were supposed to come and revitalize and reorganize and restructure the industry. If you look right now, what's happening in Australia and New Zealand and so on and so forth. So, at the end of the day the way we went about it is, "let's not look at what the industry's been doing but let's look at what human behavior needs and redefine what home is and redefine what the expectations are. What is the relationship between individuals be materials and availability of labor and so on so forth?"