We sat down with Adam Zantis, Managing Director of Zancon, to learn more about how the company came to be. Check out the video and transcript below!
Video Transcript
Q: What inspired you to start Zancon?
Adam: There's been a number of inspirations in my life that has led me to start the business, Zancon. But I'd say the first and leading one would be the real vision through my career of seeing a gap in the Australian market for a true construction planner. I found that there was a number of inconsistencies in the market, starting with New South Wales, Sydney, where the business originated from, where true expertise in construction planning, as opposed to purely programming, were few and far between.
So, a lot of construction planners that I have worked with who are all brilliant in their own right, have a mixture of backgrounds. And I think that's what really informs a good construction planner. It's experiences, experiences in different building techniques, design processes, understanding of development processes, and really having a true grasp on the project life cycle. So, the range of different experiences I found led to construction planning in building businesses and development businesses being quite haphazard. So, unlike quantity surveying—where there's a real established discipline and a core skill set, sets of rules—in my mind, I looked at the QS profession and thought, 'wow, it'd be great to have a construction planning discipline across the market that was consistent.'
Time, as we know is money. So, often it was undervalued in terms of its impact on projects. So, that was probably the yearning in my being to want to start The Zancon is a construction programmer.
So, from a business need point of view, that's where I saw a gap in the market. Selfishly, what led me to want to create the business, I think it was a marriage of two different disciplines, being: construction planning and programming - let's call that one - but also the commercial and legal aspect of time.
Partway through my career, I decided to study law and was admitted to practise law. So I am a lawyer, but I'm not practising. And through that process, I really got to understand how time works in relation to construction contracts, and the law. So being exposed to expert witnessing and delay claim disputes, really gave me an insight into how time can better be managed to avoid those situations. And when parties do find themselves there, how one can assist, either be through the programme resolution, management principles or even formal disputes with expert witnessing. So, I think the combination of those in my career really allowed me to see that there's a real need for construction planning and programming, combined with the strong legal and commercial aspects.
I said selfishly before, what I meant was, the only place I could really find and get the exposure to both of those was through a new business. So, Zancon was established with that in mind that we wanted to really service the market in those two aspects: proper construction planning and programming by people who have boots on the ground construction experience, as opposed to pure programming. I think the combination of the two, being able to plan a project, understand construction techniques and also understand how to use the software as a data management tool is powerful. But then you throw on top of that, the legal and commercial side of things, we really find ourselves to be trusted advisors for clients.
On a personal level, starting a business, I grew up in a family of small businesses. My parents were actually, and my mum is still, a jeweller. So I found myself providing quality customer service from a really young age—the age of four—I was facing clients in the family business in the store. So, it was not foreign to have clients to understand their needs, to really listen to them, and to be able to service what they're after.
So, it was a natural step. And everything's about timing, particularly in our industry. I had a fortune of opportunity of having two stars aligned at the same time, being the time at which I really wanted to step out and commence Zancon, which was at the end of 2016, and our first client providing me an opportunity to work with them as a contractor, and that client we still work with today, which is a testament to them and to us.
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