Jimmy Corric

Jimmy Corric is Pre-Construction and Innovation Manager at NZ Strong and Project Director of Hangar 4 at Auckland Airport, a building he claims as the world's largest clear-span timber aircraft hangar. In his first-ever podcast appearance he sets out why he thinks the industry is broken ("broken, because I imply it can be fixed"): too many people sit between the person who wants something built and the person who can build it, and the trades have lost their standing as an art. The spine of the episode is his own vocabulary for diagnosing construction, a set of "commandments" he has accumulated over a career that began when a woodwork teacher found him an apprenticeship with his son-in-law. Chief among them is construction as a game of edges: defects and complexity live at boundaries, never in the middle, and the lens works equally on a gib wall, a contract, a cost plan or a design team's relationships. He walks through three modern-methods projects (St Benedict's Street, 468 prefabricated pods at Whitaker Place, and Hangar 4), argues the industry has no mechanism for sharing what works, and closes with an unguarded account of his own mental-health crisis, pulling over on the drive home to cry without knowing why, and the conclusion he drew from it: build an identity outside work and protect it.

Key Topics Discussed

• Why the industry is broken, two root causes. First, intermediation: "we put too many people between the guy who wants something and the guy who can do it," and each person added multiplies the conversations needed exponentially. Second, "we've lost our art", every trade has an art and the Romans revered their builders, where now the trades read as "an annoyance to get what people need."
• Construction is a game of edges. The signature idea. On a standard gib wall the defect will not be in the middle, it will be at the skirting, the door frame, the light switch. The lens scales: a services subcontractor who does not do the seismic or the passive fire creates edges; so does where the building meets the ground, or the neighbour, or the cost plan meets the geotech. "Every time you have an edge, you add complexity." He uses it to find problems before they surface.
• The "100% design" that isn't. Detailed design reaches a 100% gateway "except the fire, the mechanical, the passive and the seismic", all contractor design. He defends designers pointedly: you cannot coordinate a services corridor without knowing the mechanical, fire and seismic solutions, so it is the procurement structure, not the consultants, that hamstrings the deliverable. "We beat up on designers way too much, to a point where it annoys me."
• RFIs, self-critically. If a main contractor raises RFIs two weeks before it needs them after six months with the drawings, "we have to question whether we've done our job." The counter-argument that contractors are not paid to find design gaps only ever appears at the delay claim, "the car's crashed at the delay claim; the ambulance is at the bottom of the cliff at that point."
• The pressure - stress continuum. There are 100 energy points on a job and you will take every one; the choice is the form. Pressure is a force you exert (resequencing to drive at a PC date two weeks early); stress is what hits you passively at the end, all at once. They manifest differently in the body and draw different responses from people.
• Capacity and the 20% rule. Everyone is a vessel, "some people are a 44-gallon drum, some are a shot glass", and at 100% capacity "water ends up on the table." The industry habitually runs people at 110%. Leave 20% and people have time to think, which is what actually fuels innovation.
• Treat the design team as the people who sign your completion. "How many times are we smoking design teams at the front end, yet they're the ones that sign off PC?" People remember how you make them feel.
• Modern methods of construction, defined broadly. He chooses the term deliberately over volumetric, panelised or mass timber: it is "thinking differently about how you approach something," project by project, never one-size-fits-all. The test is whether a constraint makes a different method materially better, "the answer might be no. Great. Don't do it."
• Three worked MMC examples. St Benedict's Street, Auckland, the first design-and-construct leaky-building remediation in NZ; no room for scaffolding against the neighbour, so timber-framed wall panels with linear weatherboards were built in their Matamata factory and craned in, and the council inspector was driven to Matamata to do the cavity inspection on a wall destined for Auckland. Whitaker Place student accommodation, 468 prefinished pods built in Matamata, stacked six to nine a day as a "super sub"; a temporary-waterproofing failure soaked them (insurance covered it, finished on time) and he is candid it was "a pretty gut-wrenching time." Hangar 4, the cable-tray insight: rather than fixing trays before lifting the trusses, fix only the unistrut brackets at ground level, because the trays were quick at height and the small screws were what consumed time; plus hinged base plates (an idea he dates to a photograph sent to his engineer on 4 September 2018) now in use on other projects.
• "How do we keep the sparrows from the sheds?". his PrefabNZ talk title. After Whitaker Place he walked into the modular shed weeks later and found nothing: the jigs, the team and the capability were built, and no pipeline followed.
• No vision, no pipeline. Andy relays Vincente Valencia's challenge, name where New Zealand will be in 30 to 40 years, and neither can answer. Rail? A four-hour Auckland - Wellington train? Better airports? "We do a bit of everything."
• Consenting speed. Andy cites his own earlier analysis: paper to spade in the ground takes 10 - 14 months in New Zealand against 3 - 6 months or less overseas, because places like Dubai let the substructure and earthworks package go out while the superstructure design continues.
• The industry has no way to share what works. "There's no platform for us to share information… it's all about, oh, this is my patch and I'm going to protect it." He shares deliberately, the hinged base plates spread because he talked about them. "The best innovation goes unnoticed." Lessons learned are rarely done properly and never published.
• Legacy. "Doing what you can with what you got." Everyone has a sphere of influence and an obligation to leave the industry better, technically, or in how they treat the people coming up behind them. He and Andy trade the All Blacks framing from Legacy: sweep your own locker room, you only ever borrow the jersey.
• Mental health, first-hand. During and after Covid, running big data centres flat out, he would drive home, pull over at the side of the road and cry without being able to say why. What got him through: mates, talking, senior people at NZ Strong, and CrossFit, but the real lesson was structural. "I'd invested far too much in my work version of me." His single recommendation is to build and protect an identity outside construction. Andy reciprocates with his own, six months with Drew Knowles, who "practically saved my life," while starting the company on 16-hour days.

Notable Quotes

• "We put too many people between the guy who wants something and the guy who can do it.", Jimmy Corric
• "Construction is a game of edges.", Jimmy Corric
• "Our industry is called construction management… we should rename it management, because that's what we do right now.", Jimmy Corric
• "The car's crashed at the delay claim, the ambulance is at the bottom of the cliff at that point.", Jimmy Corric, on RFIs raised too late
• "When you're at capacity, water ends up on the table.", Jimmy Corric
• "I'd invested far too much in my work version of me.", Jimmy Corric
• "It's not just about concrete and nails, we're a relationship industry.", Jimmy Corric

Guest Background

Jimmy Corric is from Taranaki, has three daughters, and came into construction sideways: school did not suit him, and his woodwork teacher arranged an apprenticeship with his own son-in-law, the first house Jimmy built was the woodwork teacher's. He ran his own company at 19 or 20 doing group housing, moved through residential into commercial with a Waikato-based firm doing modular and prefabrication, and that is where the shift from building to innovation took hold. He recalls prefabricating a treehouse on the ground as a boy and hauling it up with ropes. He is Pre-Construction and Innovation Manager at NZ Strong and Project Director of Hangar 4. Outside work he hunts, fishes and does CrossFit (currently at Mecca, previously FitFam), the gym is central to the identity-outside-work argument he makes. He posts on Instagram as Tales of a Tortured Builder, a format he chose because he struggles with reading and writing and wanted to bring the human side of construction across in short form. This was his first podcast appearance.