Stay Lean, Stay Agile and Stay Listening: A Chat With EHAB CEO Josh Graham

There are three main reasons why we chose to mitigate weather risk in the construction industry. Firstly, due to the climate crisis, weather risk is ever-increasing and unfortunately it’s not going anywhere fast. Secondly, it’s a problem that the construction industry has historically been pretty lousy at solving on its own. Thirdly, an infrastructure-driven recovery could offer a solution for economic growth after the global pandemic. That, combined with booming populations, means that the amount, and scale, of infrastructure that we build is only going to increase.

So we realized that the future construction industry faces this dual problem - a lot more infrastructure, a lot worse weather and no solution!

The weather risk issue is one that affects two parties - a client and a contractor. They have some sort of agreement as to how they’re going to share that risk. For example, if there is a heavy rain event, the client is supposed to pay the contractor some sort of compensation.

But both parties might have different sources of information, or they might interpret that contract in different ways. As a result, when there’s large amounts of money on the line it’s hard to find an agreement, which can often result in dispute, or more likely the contractor forgoing payment in the first place..

So we set out to create a system where the agreement is made upfront. If adverse weather conditions occur, then the outcome is already laid out and agreed. DLT enables us to do this, creating more certainty for both parties.

We’ve built four tools, all of which are now moving into paid pilots. We’ve been lucky enough to work with a number of big clients, so we’re at the stage where we can have a lot more meaningful conversations with them about how our product works as a solution.

The Innovate UK grant, part of the Transforming Construction Challenge, has been invaluable - we probably wouldn’t exist without it, and certainly we wouldn’t have these clients without it.

In terms of winning your first client, do your research! You have to genuinely know that the client is facing the problem that you’re solving. We have only been able to work with these clients because for a whole year we have been diving deep into the issues of weather risk. We’ve spoken to hundreds of people within these organizations, at every level, and even then we could have spoken to more.

It’s the difference between a “nice to have” and a “need to have”. Ask how critical to that business's operation is that problem? Especially in construction, there are innumerable “nice to haves” but we had to focus on what was needed, not only now, but five to ten years ago!

To choose a focus for your product you need to speak with the commercial people in the organization who have an oversight of the money side of things. Various people within the organization will see their day to day, but it’s only the commercial team that will see the problems that are really affecting their bottom line. You need to get that Commercial Director, or whoever it is, to say “yes, this is really useful”, because ultimately they will be the buyer. That’s when you know what to focus on.

We were lucky because the whole point of the Innovate UK grant was to build products in an innovative way. We had a constant iteration cycle of speaking with loads of different people from various organizations. Once we had identified the problems we wanted to solve, we then started building four separate products simultaneously.

We could have tested more products before jumping in and building them. We had to do a bit of redesigning and redeveloping - but we still gained a huge amount of valuable insights from doing that!