Leveraging User Data to Transform Construction Risk Management With Peter O'Brien from Procore Risk Advisors

James BenhamOn this episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast, we're talking about leveraging user data to transform construction risk management with Peter O'Brien from Procore Risk Advisors. The InsurTech Geek Podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We'll be interviewing guests and doing deep dives into specific tech we see changing the industry. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out. Smart Compliance is your compliance partner delivering seamless certificate of insurance management and tracking. Learn how Smart Compliance eases your compliance worries at smartcompliance.co.

And we are back another great episode for me, a personal merging of my two worlds, the world that I that I lived in for about fifteen years of being super heavily involved in the construction tech space. For those of you who don't know, I was a CEO and owner co owner of a construction tech company called SmartBid that sold in 2018 and also was a host of a rather popular construction technology podcast called the contact crew. My cohost, Jeff Sample, now runs and operates that podcast.

And I've had Procore on many times, became friends with its founder, Touille Cortimanche, back in the early days when Procore did a whopping $10,000,000 of revenue. And, Touy and I always traded notes, talked about business. We got to know, each other, and it's been great to see them go public and end up with, several $100,000,000 of revenue. Now it looks like, 2 to 300,000,000 a quarter of revenue at Procore. So pretty, pretty massive company now. And and with us today, I've got my illustrious cohost who's gonna geek out on the insurance side of this, Rob Galbraith.

Rob, how's it going? Yeah. I'm going well, James. Looking forward to this conversation. Yeah. Always. Good to see you. Good to hear you. And also excited to have, Peter O'Brien. Peter's over in Santa Barbara, beautiful part of, of California, and he's over there at, at at Procore. They have huge operations over there. Of course, they have offices all over the world now, but, headquarters is there in Southern California. Peter, how are doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Last time, Peter and I hung out, it was, AGC, Risk, Conference down in Southern Florida.

And so it's, good it was good hanging out then. It's good hanging out now virtually. Peter, you've got a really interesting background. I always love talking about the people behind insurance technology and insurance. And, of course, back in the day, talked a lot about the people behind construction tech, you're kind of all of the above. Like like me, you had a a heavy involvement in the construction tech space through a company called Honest Buildings. It was an owner focused own owners management platform for managing all of your construction that got acquired by Procore.

But let's go back in time before that.

Peter O'BrienWhere were you born and raised? My name is Peter O'Brien. I'm Irish. So naturally, I grew up North Of Boston. And, you know, I haven't lived there in a long time. I've lived in a lot of different places, but I've been mostly located on the East Coast and then moved out to Santa Barbara a year ago to be at the Santa Procore headquarters.

James BenhamAwesome. So I'm guessing that means you're a Red Sox fan. I am a Red Sox fan. I love,

Peter O'Brienyou know, all the Boston teams, but I I would say I'm not a massehole, which Yeah. Comes with

James BenhamAnd that's a distinction. That's actually a really important distinction. It's, you know, like hashtag not a massehole. If you've never heard that phrase, just go Google it. It's the combination between Massachusetts and another word that blends to to form that word. It's it's interesting. I lived in Boston 2000. I turned 21. I was intern with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Lived on the Severn, I lived on the Charles River, sorry, riding Cambridge for a summer. Loved it. Had a great time. Love Fenway Park. Love all the Boston teams. Couldn't live there.

Brutal winners, you know, but, certainly a fun place to visit. So when you were growing up as a, as a young Irish boy in, in in Boston, the the stereotypical Irish guy in Boston, What what did you wanna be when you grew up? Like, what was the the life aspiration back then? It was just thinking about insurance every day as just a small kid. When you're a child. Yeah. Right. Right. Said nobody ever. Yeah. No. I mean, I was just I wasn't always an active kid.

I love sports.

Peter O'BrienSo, like, that was my ambition, figure out how I could play it at something at the highest level. I was involved in every sport from soccer, lacrosse, hockey, snowboarding, things like that. And, you know, I was just always deeply passionate about it. And, you know, as I thought about things that I wanted to do when I grew up North Of Boston, a lot of my my friends' parents and fathers, they were all in real estate. So that was always like an attractive asset class to me.

It was a tangible asset. You could see what they were doing, how it had an impact on society. So I always loved what they were building, and I was attracted to the building industry.

James BenhamYeah. That's that's really cool. And you ended up leaving Boston to go to University of Colorado Boulder. That was a pretty big transition. What was the what was the thinking there? Well, the thinking at the time was I didn't want to go to college.

Peter O'BrienAnd the reason why I didn't want to go to college is so I mentioned before, you know, I got into snowboarding when I was young. And when you're young in snowboarding, you do these competitions called like regional competitions. And I ultimately got very good at those regional competitions. I got invited to do the national competition, and I ultimately won the national competition. And when I was going to high school, I got a call from this school in Vermont called Stratton Mountain School. And they said, hey.

You could come to our school and pursue snowboarding at the highest level, and we'll give you a scholarship to do so. And I was just blown away. I was like, I didn't know that was an option. So ultimately, went to this school in Vermont, which is just focused on trying to create Olympians. And I pursued snowboarding at the highest level and ultimately went professional at it when I was 15 and and, you know, started really focusing on that as a career and balancing the two. And so to get to Colorado, Colorado was, it's where we landed in an argument with my parents to say, I don't want to go to college.

I'm making so much money. I wasn't making very much money in reality. Felt like it, though. It felt like it. It felt I felt rich, but I just wasn't at all. And my parents were like, well, maybe just, like, go to this, school in Colorado. You can still snowboard. You can still compete, but you're also gonna get a college education just just in the off chance snowboarding doesn't work out. Fast forward, got injured, you know, a few times. Snowboarding didn't work out. Going to college was a great outcome.

James BenhamYeah. Parents might have known what they're talking about. 100%. Yeah. Know, Stratton is fascinating. There are those, you know, prep boarding schools that exist out there with a focus. My my daughter is actually at one right now. She's at Interlochen School for the Arts, which is, like Stratton, but for people who want to sing, dance, act, or be on Broadway. And, you know, it's it's amazing. You have five and thirty kids from all over the world, world class talent. It's, it's amazing to watch what those kind of schools can produce.

Even if you don't go into your field that you went to that school for, you still still have a great life experience. So you went to you went got an econ degree from, from Colorado Boulder. You owned a bar to again, you did you it's like you it's like your genetics, like, came through. Like, the the Irish guy starts a bar. So you had a business ownership experience in college. I'm guessing you had a good time doing that.

Peter O'BrienYeah. I mean, I would tell you everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, but it really started before that. We started an event company in college where we would throw events, and we were very early on how to utilize Facebook to drive demand for events. So, you know, in the early days of Facebook, there were all these groups, and you could be like a YouTube channel or it would be like a a group on Facebook for I like animals at the University of Colorado.

And that group would have now 10,000 people in it because who doesn't like animals? And it was the early days of Facebook where people were very bought into Facebook. We'd figure out who owned those groups. We'd go find the kid in his, you know, his dorm room and be like, here's $500. Make me the admin on your group. And then I would use all that sort of demand that I could create and just send event or invites to all these events. People would show up. We got really good at throwing events, and that actually turned into how we ultimately bought the bar because we realized we could, you know, drive more demand to a bar than the owner of the bar could.

So and it was sort of a distressed asset. So we got into it that way, but, yeah, I made every mistake. In the first week of owning the bar, I got served because I didn't know when you purchase a business that you should do, you know, an asset purchase versus a stock purchase. She inherited all the liabilities of the the the the business, and the business hadn't paid anyone. They're you know, we were in arrears on rent. We owed, a law firm a lot of money.

So I got served in the first week. I called my dad. I was like, dad, I'm so sorry. My life's over. I've been served. Nothing you know, I I thought, like, truly the end of the world was here. And he was like, listen. You're not worth any money. So they can't come, you know, end your world. So I learned a lot of lessons in those early days that you could work through a lot of issues. You could figure out, you know, how to get a positive outcome.

We ultimately settled with all of our debtors and we're able to move forward. And, you know, we grew the bar into a very successful bar and, you know, exited it. And it was a good outcome, and that turned into a, like, a broader business that we pursued for a few years. That's amazing. And with with a ton of scar tissue and life lessons and, certainly

James Benhamgot got you, prepared for a difficult life and probably taught you the value of, let's see, errors and emissions insurance, property insurance. There's there's quite a few insurance products that can protect you against those kind of claims. So employer's liability.

Peter O'BrienWe can't I always laughed. Like, when I bought our, you know, our insurance for the business, you know, it actually wasn't that expensive. And I'm sitting in the business being like, there is a lot of risk going on in here. I'm trying to keep underage people out. There's potentially fights happening. There's, you know, over service. This is a very risky, you know, business. And, you know, I think my premium at the time was, like, $10,000. You know, it wasn't something that was massive given sort of the the potential risks.

James BenhamMight not have been appropriately priced. Yeah. That's awesome. So then you you actually got into to Honest Buildings, and that was the the company that was acquired by Procore. Tell me about your your, six, seven year stint with, Honest Buildings and Yeah. How that started and and how it ended. Yeah. So, you know, like I mentioned, the

Peter O'Brienbusiness that we started, we were buying a lot of hospitality businesses, and we were spending a lot in construction. And that got me really passionate about sort of turning around distressed real estate. I then went into a real estate program in at MIT and, you know, I was getting out of that and I was looking at where I was gonna start working. I partnered and and worked with a development in Boston at Liberty Wharf and that got me closer and closer to construction. You know, a lot of times I was going to the job site every day.

I was managing and and trying to figure out change orders with the general contractors. And I just really had a firsthand experience about how frustrating construction was. And, I was then moving to New York. I was dating a girl at the time in New York as the story always goes. And I, I was looking for a job and I thought I'd work for a traditional real estate owner asset manager in New York. But I got connected to this CEO, Riggs Kubiak, who had just started this company Honest Buildings.

And he's a very charismatic guy and spent a lot of time chatting with him and learning about what he was doing. And he really saw the opportunity at the intersection between construction and technology. And he was coming from a large, you know, landlord called Tishman Speyer. And we just saw this massive opportunity to build construction management technology for the owner as a key stakeholder. There had been technology for general contractors and subcontractors, but really the owner, the person responsible for the outcome of the project and who was funding the project didn't have best in class technology for managing their construction.

So that was our focus. That was the pain point we were trying to solve when we built that business up over seven years. And then, you know, ultimately, in we had a great relationship with Procore. We ultimately were acquired by Procore in 2019.

James BenhamYeah. And Honest Buildings, I I remember using it, like, the first year it came out. I checked checked it out because it was a neat concept really originally in this modified, you know, you can talk about over over time, but started as like a social network of buildings where buildings actually had a profile. Yeah. And you could connect to buildings. So you it was a it was an interesting deal where it was almost like LinkedIn for buildings.

Peter O'BrienYeah. I didn't wanna get too in the weeds. I know we have an insurance, audience. But yeah. I mean, there was I could do a whole podcast on the ups and downs of Honest Buildings and the three you know, the two major pivots we made along the way. I can tell you when Honest Buildings was launched, it was not launched to be a owner specific project management platform, but you learn along the way. You have agility. You adapt, and you build a business that the market ultimately validates.

And once it validates, you can build something that's meaningful. That's great.

James BenhamSo let's you you got acquired by Procore, ended up there. You were head of strategic development, and now you're the GM of Procore Risk Advisors. So first off, know, Procore is now like a billion dollar company, right, roughly?

Peter O'BrienIn market value?

James BenhamNo. No. No. No. No. In revenue.

Peter O'BrienWe are a billion dollars. Today is earnings day. You'll find out we're a billion dollars today.

James BenhamYeah. Yeah. It's probably allowed to say that. Yeah. Yeah. No. I I I know you I know you're following the rules. So it's, you know, 1,000,000,000 in revenue. It's a it's a big company. You know, fifteen years ago, it was a $10,000,000 company. And so real, really impressive growth on Procore. But Procore risk advisors, first off, you know, what, you know, Procore is a project management platform plus, plus, plus, right? It's construction network, bidding, project management, BIM. It does all these things. What is Procore risk advisors and why did Procore get into it?

It's a great question.

Peter O'BrienI mean, you you know TUI. TUI is the founder, of Procore. It started twenty years ago or twenty two years ago at this point. The catalyst for him starting the business is he was living in the Bay Area and he was building a house in Santa Barbara and he needed and wanted visibility into what was happening on his project. So the catalyst for starting out his buildings was he was trying to reduce risk of building a project that he wasn't close to. So the entire sort of build of Procore has been focused on how do you actually reduce risk across the construction And we really focused in project management initially, then we got into quality and safety, and then we've expanded into financials.

But every action that happens within the Procore platform is to reduce risk along the project delivery life cycle. So really when I joined Procore, I got the you know, I was lucky enough to join Polly Andress, the CFO and Danny Siegel's partnership team. And they mandated that I go start investigating partnerships with the largest partners, right? We had built this contact marketplace as JB knows really well. But most of our, I would say all of our partners were much smaller than Procore. And that's great because they're great solutions, they're great technologies.

But we're trying to figure out who were the people that actually had a huge impact on construction that we were not partnered with. So I spent a lot of time talking to banks like JP Morgan, all these people that were lending in the construction space. And they said, We love your technology. We love when our clients are on it, but we're never gonna mandate it. And we don't understand partnership because that's just like not the business we're in. The other big partner was insurance. Right? And so I met, started meeting with insurance carriers and they'd say, this is interesting.

Let me connect you to my boss. And I kept on just going higher and higher in the sort of levels of people I'm meeting with. And I go, I still have no idea what I'm talking about, but these people really think there's something here, so we should continue to explore it. That ultimately led to a partnership with Travelers, which was great. Like Travelers has been a great partner of ours. They put this partnership in place that subsidized the cost of Procore up to a certain percentage for their clients that are utilizing the software.

And the entire thesis behind that partnership is contractors that adopt best in class technology like Procore are at better risk. Better risk means they have less incidents. Less incidents mean they have less claims. Less claims mean a better combined ratio. So that played out and that initial partnership was really well received by the market. People got really excited. It drove millions of dollars in revenue for Procore adoption or revenue itself. And it just showed us that there was a huge amount of signal in the market.

So that's really what got us in this place. And then after we took Procore public, we started looking at what are these other opportunities in the industry where we can add value to our customer base? Procore has always been a massively customer centric business. And we started exploring all these options within the fintech umbrella. And, you know, when you think about all the financial services that we could build and supply to our customer base, it's everything from payroll to financing, to lending, to payments, and then insurance.

And insurance is very hard to figure out how you are gonna enter the value chain. There are so many different people in that value chain. So we had to decide how we're gonna enter it. That ultimately led us to becoming a retail broker with some underwriting in house. And that's what I'm GM of today. And, you know, happy to go into different details and how we ended up on the retail path versus other paths. But it's been an interesting arc, but really excited to be building what we're building.

Has it how has the market responded to this? Right? Like it's a software

James Benhamcompany getting into risk advisory is not, you know, really none of your competitors are doing it. Right? Like, I I know I know your competitors pretty well. Yeah. And and they're not jumping into the space. So how what's been the market reception? When you say market, do you mean like our customer base construction? No.

Peter O'BrienWhat's what's been the customer reception? Yeah. So everyone's been really excited about what we're doing. And the data story is really resonating. And I think that's what's unique to what our opportunity is. Because of companies like Procore and our competitors, what we've done in the construction industry over the past twenty years is digitize the construction industry. This is an industry that was primarily pen and paper until, you know, ten years ago. That digitization effort has unlocked this massive data asset that can now be applied for better risk control from just a holistic risk management standpoint.

And then you can apply it to sort of developing better risk profiles. And then that leads into how do you improve underwriting? So the folks that are making investment in technology understand that they're a preferred risk. They understand that they're doing the right things every day on the job site. However, have felt like that's not being rewarded by their carrier partners because no one's in between telling that story about why the data matters, how the data matters. So from a market standpoint, people have been super excited about what we're doing.

Of course, we're a technology company moving in the insurance space. It's not gonna happen overnight, but there's been a massive

Rob Galbraithyou know, sort of positive response from the customers that we've been engaging with. Awesome. Rob? I'm gonna flip on the other side, Peter. So I'm just curious. You know, you talked about becoming a broker. So I'm interested about the role of a broker,

Peter O'Brienhow it's evolving, and then what have those conversations been like with your carrier partners as you're trying to get appointments and, form relationships on the insurance carrier side? I would say, like, when we first looked at how we were gonna enter the value chain, we're initially, we're like, we're we'll be an MGU. That makes the most amount of sense, right? We have the data, we'll underwrite more effectively, and then we'll distribute through third party and that'll be a great business. But the more we spend time with our customers, hearing their pains and learning about the different roles within the space, what we realized is the broker is critical, especially in the construction and commercial insurance space, right?

That person is highly relied upon for decision making when it comes to risk management and insurance decisions. What we also found in the construction space is construction companies almost outsource all of their thinking to their broker. They don't actually have a lot of the internal knowledge on how to make the right decisions. So that's why there's such a reliance on the broker. So when we thought about the role of broker and we started to understand like why they're hired, what we realized is like the role of the broker is to tell the best possible narrative to get the best possible outcome with the insurance carriers that they possibly can.

And when we started to understand like our competitive advantages against a traditional broker, we realized it's like we sit adjacent to the nexus of the contractor's operations, right? They're running their business on Procore. That allows us to understand how we can represent them when we're developing their submissions much more effectively. So we create a narrative, and then we substantiate that narrative with all this interesting data that helps the underwriter get much more comfortable with the risk. And what we've really learned, this is something I did not know about the insurance space before I really got into it, is in commercial construction insurance, there's a huge amount of underwriting subjectivity.

I assume that this was like purely actuarial driven rating plans. It's not. There's almost like a 50% spread when it comes to subjectivity in either direction. And what we found is like our data story and our ability to create the most effective submissions drastically is changing the outcome from the underwriter community and how they get comfortable with the risk and how they are able to get preferred terms. And it's not just price. Right? It's also coverages and how they're able to step up. So that's how we saw the broker opportunity.

It is certainly the hardest path we could have picked. I'm not gonna lie. This is very challenging market to enter into. But it's at the end of the day, because we've always been focused on the customer, it's the best possible outcome for the customer.

James BenhamLet's talk about submissions because filling out forms can be a colossal pain in the butt for insureds. I mean, a massive pain in the butt. How because you have all of their data, you have their safety observations, you have their job walks, you have the number of projects, you have the volume. Like, you you you know all the things going on. If they have Procore financials, you even got, you know, more insight into their financials too. Right? So how much of their submission process are you automating because you have all the data?

Peter O'BrienI would say that's a huge opportunity for us and where we're seeing a lot of success. I would say, like, when I think about innovation in this space, you know, from a technologist, like I'm more of a technologist than an insurance expert. When I first came into this space, I was like, there's so much low hanging fruit. I cannot wait to tackle some of these opportunities. But then I like spend time in insurance and I understand like where the pain is. The pain of creating a submission, a lot of that work falls on the broker and then they're pinging their client or their insured for information all the time.

So what we've been able to do is digitize that submission process. We've been able to aggregate most of their data into the submission without ever asking them for their information. We're able to create this really strong submission and then we send it to them for essentially approval. Hey, does this look good? Anything you would change? And then we are able to send it to carriers. And that workflow greatly expedites the process. It allows the insurer to get much more comfortable with the risk and then allows the underwriter to have much more information the first time they see the risk.

I sort of joke, but we heard over and over again from underwriters that brokers would just ask the insured for information. Insured would forward that information to the broker. Broker would forward it to the underwriter and say like, Please quote. And that's just crazy to us. Like, how could you expect to really improve the outcome for the insured if you're putting all this work on the underwriter to figure out if this is a good risk or not? So we just want to make it super easy to say yes and create the best possible outcome for our client base.

Yeah. So it's not just about

James Benhamthem not having to fill out and check so many boxes because you you you can. You can you can auto populate so much of their submission. It's also about telling a better story around them to try and get the underwriter to use that subjectivity to get better rates for your clients. Is that Yeah. Really? Is that the is that the big objective is lower rates,

Peter O'Brienbetter coverage? Lower rates, better coverage. I mean, I think when engaging with the underwriting community, that's the goal. At the insured level, we want to help them never have to use insurance, right? Like, we want to help them implement the right controls on their projects and focus on the right, actions within their projects that have the highest impact at reducing risk. So we're all about just like, how do we holistically help the organization manage risk? And by doing that, they're going to become a better risk profile and then we can utilize that information to get them the preferred terms.

So it's really working in coordination of all these critical items.

Rob GalbraithYeah, Peter, I want to follow-up on that risk management part because I feel like that's really fascinating. If this doesn't go just one directional, but really bidirectional, right, in terms of you're actually understanding probably what some of the losses are, what could have prevented those losses. Right? You're you're seeing an aspect of the business that you probably previously, right, as as Proko before you set up the risk advisers, weren't necessarily privy to. So just kind of curious, like, how has setting up Procore risk advisers maybe helped you in that role of of even upping your risk management game over and above what it was previously just as a core, pre core

Peter O'Brienor grow core. Sorry. It's a great question. Well, I think first, we had to validate our thesis that tech enabled contractors are a better risk. Right? There's always this belief, yes, I'm better, but there's no tangible data that proves that they're better risk. So we spent a lot of time early in our strategy to actually go out and figure out how do we prove that. Typically, the way to prove it is like see outcome data. Outcome data is our claims, right? We didn't initially have all the claims from all of our customers.

So we couldn't prove whether if they adopted technology, what was their impact to recordable incident rate or claim rate? So we had to figure out other ways to triangulate to get to that same outcome. And one way we did that is in the construction space, there's, and I guess any sort of heavy manufacturing industry as well, there's OSHA, which is OSHA data around scores. We were able to match our customer base to the OSHA data. And then we were able to normalize the data so that we were comparing apples to apples of like contractors.

And what we saw are highly adopted Procore users had almost 40% improvement to the weighted average of the industry when it came to incident rate and days away rate. So initially we're like, Okay, we have a preferred risk pool. This data validates it. Now let's try to figure out of these good contractors, what are the things that they're doing well on a job site, right? Like what are the behaviors? Like if you try to apply this thinking is very similar to thinking what's happened in the auto industry with telematics, trying to figure out like where are the behaviors that have the highest impact or risk and how do you get contractors then focus on improving those behaviors.

So we started digging into the data and that gave us a really good signal on the things that good contractors do. And those are things that you wouldn't necessarily think of, but those are things like managing requests for information in a timely manner. What we found is like when those things aren't managed well, it derails the project. It means there's gonna be rework on project. Rework is when you do a job incorrectly and you have to tear the project back down. That's ultimately where a lot of work comp issues happen because people are moving fast.

So we were able to build this risk profile and this risk profile is now fed through our machine learning or AI platforms. We're able now to bring that to our insured base and saying like, here's your virtual risk manager that's going to tell you when things are going off the rails. If you pay attention to this model you build, you're gonna have better outcomes. So that's our opportunity to really help our insured base manage risk more effectively and more proactively so they create, you know, the best possible outcomes for them and their business.

Well, let's wrap up with this question.

James BenhamBrokers. A lot of tech companies came around InsurTech in the last ten years saying they were going to disintermediate brokers, bring all all insurance direct to consumer, that the days of the broker were over. That has not happened. Most companies that said they were gonna disintermediate brokers ended up building tech for brokers and then integrating with them and using them. So, I mean, it's it's it's obvious that the broker plays a critical role because customers have very loudly chosen to continue to work with their brokers rather than going to direct to consumer websites.

How do you, just, you know, looking forward in the next several years, how do you think the role of the broker, continues to evolve? And, obviously, y'all are y'all are brokers. Yeah. Well, I would say I was

Peter O'Brienon the other side of the fence of that at one point. Right? I looked at this opportunity, and I was like, oh, this is great. We're going to go direct to consumer. I can build this tech. I can build a digital application. They're going fill out this information. I'll sell them whatever policy that they need. And I was like, this is a huge business. Why isn't everyone doing this all the time? And then you get into the weeds and you're like, that's not how this industry functions.

And then you get a bunch of gray hair trying to learn out how it really functions and and sort of digging into it. So, I would say the the future of the broker the success of the broker is to empower the broker to do their job better and to give them the tools that so they can be the best possible client advocate advocate for their insured base. So I'm very bullish on the role of the broker, especially in the commercial construction space. I think there are other industries where you'd see the, direct to consumer work obviously better.

But in commercial construction, there's just these construction companies are trying to run their business day to day, right? They're trying to win new projects. They're trying to execute projects. They're trying to find the next project. They don't have time or resources or risk managers on their team to figure out how do you go get the best possible policy in place. So you always need this broker. But the problem is you have a lot of generalist brokers in this space, people who aren't necessarily construction experts. And they're trying to be experts when they're not.

And that's why they have to rely on wholesale. That's why they have to rely on all these other channels to get the, you know, a good outcome for their client base. So our focus is just to build the biggest construction insurance and surety brokerage and empower those folks so they can be the best risk advisors to their clients as possible and to enable them through the technology that's not at their fingertips today.

James BenhamThat's awesome. Great, great way to to summarize the the thoughts on the on the entire space too. So I appreciate your clarity of thought on that.

Rob GalbraithRob, any closing comments? Yeah. Just, I guess, Peter, if if, who are you looking to partner with or folks wanna know more about what you guys are doing at Proko Risk Advisors? How can they find you?

Peter O'BrienWell, it's a great question. You can find me on LinkedIn or you reach out to us on risk advisors. You know, we're always looking for to do interesting partnerships with more and more insurance carriers. We've been very lucky and and blessed that we've been able to have full market access. And, you know, we have really strong partnerships with all the carrier community. And I'd say, you know, there are certain carriers that we're leaning into more than others, and they're utilizing our data in their underwriting already.

You know, we've partnered with a company called Shepard, which is a tech enabled MGU that's already sort of internalizing the Procore data to provide credits in their underwriting process. So not just the subjectivity. They're actually you looking at usage scores and adoption and how contractors are using this, and that's creating better outcomes. So if there are any other carriers out there that want to lean in with us on that, we'd love to have those conversations. Awesome.

James BenhamGreat. Well, thank you for your time today. Hopefully, one day I'll get to go snowboarding with you and you can show me how to not spend half the day on my rear end. And you can you can give me some give me some pointers. I'm a I'm a I'm a two skis guy, not a snowboard guy. So I I would would enjoy that, but it's been a a delight catching up with you, and I appreciate you being on the show today, Peter. Yes. And thank you out in listener land for tuning in today to geek out our interview with Peter O'Brien from Procore Risk Advisors.

See you next time. The InsurTech Geek podcast is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. I've been your host, James Benham. That's jamesbenham.com with co host Rob Galbraith at endofinsurance.com. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech. So enjoy the ride and geek out.