The Construction Source

NOVEMBER 2020 to repeat that experience. “I’d come to a couple fundamental realizations,” he recalls. “One, I realized it was far more important to me to feed my family than to feed my ego.” His ego, he explains, used to be by doing really large projects. Afterwards, he would point to them and think ‘Wow, I was the PM that did that.’ He says there was satisfaction in that pride, but that ultimately, it was more satisfying to go home with a smile on his face. Too often, in his previous roles, he was unable to do that. “And it wasn’t the culture of the companies I worked for that didn’t sit well with me,” he is quick to clarify. “I was very comfortable with those companies, andI stillhavea lotof respect for them. The challenge was more the environment in which we worked. We were doing relatively large publicly- tendered projects. That environment I found to be quite adversarial. There wasn’t much appreciation for partnering and working together. It was more a matter of us against you. That’s the part that grated on me.” “When I started Édifice, it was with a very deliberate effort to accept that reality, and the reality that I couldn’t prevent wearing my heart on my sleeve,” he adds. “I can’t not care about what I do. I can’t not care about the people that I’m working with. When it seems like that’s not the case, that’s when I’m least happy with myself. I wanted to try to create an environment where I could distance myself from those situations.” Instead, Dan says, he wanted to create situations where every project stakeholder was on the same page and working together, and never against each other. To that end, he gravitated towards retailers and property management companies, who he found “really understood the value of time” and the “value of cooperation.” The Édifice team also gravitated