Forging Success in Carpentry Apprenticeships and Growing Job Demands

Built Environment

Jul 27

*This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu. This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure.

Christof Franzsen is head of the Apprenticeship Program at Forge, a residential construction company based out of Boston, Massachusetts.

In this episode, we learn how this novel program is being designed to meet the growing job demands in the residential construction industry through small cohort-based learning versus the traditional one-on-one model. They do this through a super intentional focus on mastering four skills: windows, cabinet, trim and door installations. Forge uses video technology to help apprentices get more face time with seasoned mentors while on the job. We also learn about Christof's journey leaving his job as an actuary to take a risk in becoming a carpenter and finding his way to becoming an instructor of woodworking. Enjoy the show!

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*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on Jun 28, 2023 (Published on Jul 27, 2023)

In this episode, we cover:

[01:53]: Overview of Forge and its focus on workforce development
[02:58]: Forge’s services
[04:18]: Forge’s Apprenticeship Program
[05:46]: Joining a crew as an apprentice and on-the-job training
[08:55]: The traditional path to becoming a carpenter and drawbacks of one-on-one training
[11:29]: The diversity of applicants to Forge’s Apprenticeship Program
[12:44]: Christof’s background and connection to carpentry
[16:01]: His transition from a white-collar career to woodworking
[17:06]: How Forge measures success: crew contribution, financial performance, and a happy workforce
[20:45]: How Forge supports apprentices financially during their training
[22:50]: Key elements of Forge’s apprenticeship curriculum
[26:23]: How climate change figures into Forge’s work
[27:49]: The company’s aim to reduce climate impact through reduced drive time, accurate measurements, technology, and creating a trained skilled labor force

Yin Lu (00:00):
Today we dive into a trade that we haven't touched yet on the series, the trade of cutting and joining timber in order to construct buildings or other structures, carpentry. My guest is Christof Franzsen, who is head of the carpentry apprenticeship program at Forge, a residential construction company based out of Boston, Massachusetts. We learn how this novel program is being designed to meet the growing job demands in the residential construction industry through small cohort-based learning versus the traditional one-on-one model. Through super intentional focus on mastering four skills, windows, cabinet, trim and door installations, and using video technology to help apprentices get more face time with seasoned mentors while on the job. We also learn about Christof's journey leaving his job as an actuary to take a risk in becoming a carpenter and finding his way to becoming an instructor of woodworking. Lots of good stuff ahead, but first...
Cody Simms (00:55):
I'm Cody Sims.
Yin Lu (00:56):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:57):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:04):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:09):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Yin Lu (01:22):
With that. Christof, welcome to the show.
Christof Franzsen (01:26):
Thank you, Yin. Glad to be here.
Yin Lu (01:30):
I believe it was Sam Steyer who connected us with the CEO of Forge who said you have to talk to Christof because he is the apprenticeship person who's come up with the apprenticeship program because we've been in the show wanting to learn about different trades and carpentry is one that we haven't really talked about. And so really excited to learn from you today and maybe as a starting point, tell us about Forge. What is the company? What's your role there?
Christof Franzsen (01:53):
So like you mentioned, Forge is a residential construction company. We're based here in Boston. We provide installation services and our two biggest service lines right now is providing installation services for replacement windows and doors and new construction kitchen cabinets. We provide those installation services and that's the business side of it. We're for-profit. Our mission statement is to build and empower the next generation trades worker. My role is to run our carpentry apprentice training program and the goal is to provide a platform to bring new people into the trades and have a very quick ramp to being a profitable and efficient member of a crew for Forge. And we also have a technology layer or a software development team, and their goal is innovations that introduce technology to provide efficiencies to our crews in the field.
Yin Lu (02:58):
That's helpful. So Forge is a for-profit company with the front end to a regular consumer is you do residential construction, houses, you touch on plumbing, a little bit of HVAC and carpentry. Are these new builds? Are these retrofits in existing homes?
Christof Franzsen (03:17):
So on the window side of things, it's replacement windows. So these are existing homes that need replacement windows. So for the most part older homes. And on the cabinet side of things, it's mostly new construction apartment buildings, condo buildings where we work with property developers who need all the kitchens installed. So that's new construction.
Yin Lu (03:43):
Gotcha. And I want to say that some of my favorite companies that I've seen in the built environment space have not only a service that they offer, but they also have a workforce development angle to what they do in order to have the IQ points of people that can then render those services. Whether it's EV charger maintenance or multifamily dwelling retrofits, it's important to have a crew of competent, happy people working at their trade in order to help rewire how we live in our built environment. And so I love that Forge has a similar model. So tell us a bit more about the apprenticeship program. How did it get started? What does the program look like? How many people participate in it and how does that program then feed into the front end business?
Christof Franzsen (04:31):
Sure. Our first assumption that we made as a company or the fundamental assumption that we made is that there's a trade shortage and that there will be enormous value in having a skilled labor force that can provide services in carpentry and other trades. So we've taken that knowledge and developed an apprentice program to provide a platform where we can train people to become skilled and able to join our crews doing our services. The current version of it is a 12-week training program. It's 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday, we run from 7:00 AM to 3:30 PM. It's full-time and it's hands-on. We normally have core groups of 10 to 12 and the training is really focused on the skills and knowledge necessary to provide our services. Right now we focus very heavily on window and door installation, specifically replacement windows and doors and on new construction cabinet work and interior trim work.
(05:46):
Because those are the services that we provide and those are the crews that we have out in the field doing revenue generating work.
(05:54):
So we've picked those service lines because we knew from the start it's taken some iteration and will continue to take iteration to really hone in on ultimately where we want to be. But the services that we picked have a narrow scope in the skills needed to complete the job. That allows us to really hone in on those specific skills during training and get a lot of repetition so that our apprentices can become good at it relatively quickly. When I say good at it, the first step for someone completing our apprenticeship is to join one of our crews as an apprentice. So we have crews and we do hire experienced carpenters to lead the work because we need that experience and knowledge from the industry to be able to lead the onsite work.
(06:54):
So our apprentices joined those crews and then continued their development through on the job training. And it's like I said, installation services, that's very repetitive and it's a narrow scope. So their development goes very quickly because you're doing the same thing over and over and over and some of our success stories, we've been doing this for about two and a half years now. And some of our first apprentices from two years ago, they're just now getting to a point where they themselves can lead crews. So they've gone through the apprenticeship, joined a crew as an apprentice, and through hard work and perseverance, really honed in on becoming really good at the specific thing that they do and now they're leading crews and I'm graduating apprentices onto their crew. Now they've become the mentor or the teacher to the new apprentices.
Yin Lu (07:59):
I'm curious how Forge decided to land on this model. I haven't heard of very many residential construction companies having this workforce development angle and I think it's really smart. What were the business decisions that went into saying actually we're going to spend a nontrivial part of Forge's time and money to develop this program, to hire you to lead it in the hopes that it can build a bigger workforce, but also knowing that maybe some of those people that you train might not stay at Forge and leave?
Christof Franzsen (08:26):
There's obviously that risk and it does cost a lot of money to run the program and to invest all this time into training. And not everyone we train we end up hiring and not everyone we hire ends up staying and our goal is to provide employment that people want to stay with. So people leaving as a motivator for us to improve our company, to provide a better experience for the people who work for us. And like I mentioned, our mission is to build a next generation trades community, trades workforce. And the traditional path to becoming a good carpenter is to find an experienced carpenter, join him or her as an apprentice or as a helper, and then through, might even be years, you develop your skill working with that carpenter as an apprentice. And that's a great model. One-on-one training with a really experienced skilled carpenter.
(09:39):
You learn a lot that way and that's how most people in the industry who are experienced carpenters now probably got to where they are, but that's one-to-one and it's on the job learning. So whatever learning happens needs to fit within the budget and the scope of the work that the carpenter is doing. When Mark, our founder founded Forge, the purpose was to tackle the labor shortage. One-to-one learning wasn't going to solve that problem, so we developed an apprentice program to scale that training and to bring more people in faster.
Yin Lu (10:24):
That's really helpful to understand and really challenging the existing model of how carpenters become carpenters. And saying rather than doing this one-to-one multi-year process, can we scale that and can we have a program where you have smaller cohorts, not one-on-one, but maybe groups of 12 to 20.
Christof Franzsen (10:42):
12 to 20.
Yin Lu (10:44):
12 to 20.
Christof Franzsen (10:44):
At the moment we're around 10 to 12, but we're going to a phase where we're trying to increase to 12 to 20.
Yin Lu (10:50):
I anchored on the 12 and I went up. And maybe narrow in on the specific skill sets at first to just focus on trimmings and doors and to get people through and get that foundational level of craft down and then to build people from there. And partially doing that to be the tide that raises all ships in solving the labor shortage in the carpentry space. And part of that to build a really tight-knit ecosystem of people that have gone through this shared experience together so that you have people that end up going through Forge and staying at Forge and hopefully growing at Forge. Really great to understand. I'm curious who are the folks that are coming in and raising their hands to say, "I want to be part of this apprenticeship program?" And do they have any experience in wood working to begin with? Because someone like me who has zero experience say, "Gosh, this is something I'm interested in," and apply for the program. So what's the process to "get in"?
Christof Franzsen (11:49):
We get a lot of different people and it's really great. We get people who apply straight out of high school, people who have gone through college and maybe even did a few years of some other career. We get a lot of people who are career changers that have done five to 10 years of a career. Whether that be bartending, working in an office, working in a hospital, or as a teacher. They have a passion for carpentry and they want to make that switch. We provide a platform for them to do that, and it's a wide range of backgrounds and age groups that apply and it keeps it really interesting. So far we haven't figured out what makes an ideal candidate because someone from each one of those groups have ended up being wildly successful with us.
Yin Lu (12:44):
Speaking of personal journeys and why people decide to come into this particular trade in carpentry, curious to hear about you and how you came to find a love of woodworking and ended up at this particular chapter of your professional career doing the work that you're doing. Can we rewind back?
Christof Franzsen (13:04):
I'm from South Africa, grew up on a small farm outside [inaudible 00:13:10] Bay and my dad still owns and runs a saw mill on the farm. Being in and around the factory and the machinery is definitely a big part of my childhood and my dad's definitely a builder as far as I know. Every house we lived in, my dad built and my brother and I contributed to that. I'm sure my dad would say we contributed less than we think we did, but it's definitely memories that I enjoy and there was a lot of building and working with machinery in my childhood. School, I was good at mathematics, so I went to university to study mathematics. Ended up at Boston College and was a teaching fellow there. Then for about 10 years, had a career in actuarial science and statistical modeling.
(14:03):
I worked at a company called AR Worldwide where they used the [inaudible 00:14:07] models to calculate the potential impact, financial impact of natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. So I did that for about 10 years, but I knew I wanted to pursue woodworking, so I left that behind and took some work building custom cabinets and furniture. And in 2020, Mark, the founder of Forge, he was doing a larger renovation at his house. I was doing the kitchen remodel. Towards the end of that project is when he and his founding team came up with Forge and the business model. That's when he started talking to me about the carpentry apprentice program, whether or not I wanted to join to develop and run that program. So that's how all that came about.
Yin Lu (15:01):
Hey everyone. I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective. Here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more.
(15:47):
Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
(16:01):
I'm curious on your decision-making process to leave actuarial sciences and pursue carpentry. Can you speak to the financial decisions that you had to make for yourself? When we think about a career switch like that, going from a white collar role doing actuarial sciences to doing woodworking, what goes into that decision? What went into that decision making for you?
Christof Franzsen (16:28):
I knew I wanted to do woodworking. I knew I wanted to build things, and that was a passion that stems from my childhood. So it was an easy decision from that perspective, knowing what I wanted to do and what I knew I would be able to enjoy doing. I had a lot of confidence that I could make the shift and have the skill and experience from my childhood and early adult career. So I had a lot of confidence from that perspective. And then financially, it was just a flat out risk. I didn't know how it would pan out. I just took a leap of faith and tried to see what happens.
Yin Lu (17:06):
So it sounds like it was a risk on the financial side to decide to leave a nice job behind a keyboard that had some cushion, to starting your own business and seeing what else might be out there, but pursuing this passion that you've had since childhood. It sounds like you started your own business and then quickly met Mark and found this role and carved out this role at Forge. I want to understand what success looks like for you in your job at Forge now and what success might look like for you 10 years from now? When you look back to say, "Wow, we really made an impact." And maybe go beyond the obvious. If we can train X volume of carpenters, what would be a grander vision from that?
Christof Franzsen (17:51):
So on a short term view, it's very easy to measure success or not in my role. We have crews out in the field doing work. A lot of them went through the apprenticeship and they joined those crews and they have to be valuable contributing members. So the finances of our jobs, our labor costs versus our revenue very quickly tells us if we're successful in our training. So from that perspective, it's very easy for me to just see from the numbers whether they're a success. From a more bringing in the human element, I'd like to know that the people are happy that they work for Forge. Whether they went through the Apprentice program or whether they're an experienced carpenter that left their own business or work somewhere else and joined us to be part of the journey and be a crew lead and continue the training of the apprentice.
(18:53):
We've definitely hired some really great carpenters who had successful careers at doing their own thing, and they're very bought into the mission at Forge, and they're very motivated and happy to pass along their knowledge and their experience and I think derive a huge amount of satisfaction from seeing the development of people who join their crews day in and day out working with them and helping them improve their skill and their knowledge and their efficiency. So having a happy workforce for me personally is a bigger mark of success. Longer term, we have growth goals and hitting those goals would be a measure of success.
(19:42):
I think it would be very important for us as we grow as a company, not to lose the human element of individual people that we're training and bringing into this industry and hopefully providing them a very stable career as a carpenter. So I think there's the numbers to hit and those are set by financial goals and revenue targets. And then there's, again, the human element of being able to grow the business, making it scalable, increasing class sizes, but not losing the human element of yes, this is someone's life and they're looking to either get into carpentry, change a career, or just continue a career and they want to be happy in what they do and have a stable, reliable income doing it.
Yin Lu (20:45):
I'm trying to think about to your point about are people happy in the role that they're in and proxy for that is how much money they might be making to have that economic stability. So when someone wants to enter into the Forge apprenticeship program, do they pay a fee to enter or do they get accepted and they're just kind of part of the workforce and they actually get paid? What does that look like? Economics for the apprentices?
Christof Franzsen (21:08):
So we actually pay them $15 an hour for the duration of the training.
Yin Lu (21:15):
So from day one, it is a paid role.
Christof Franzsen (21:17):
It's a paid role, it's a 12-week employment. So that employment ends at the end of the training. And at that point, if the training was successful, then we hire them to join our crews full-time. But it's a paid role, not a lot, but I think that's important because some of our most successful candidates are people who change careers and some of them have families and young children. And they can't afford to go without an income, even if it's a small income for three months to take a risk at getting into this career. So we decided very early on that it's going to be important to provide a paid apprenticeship, and I think that allows us to attract people who wouldn't otherwise have taken the risk to make the career change.
Yin Lu (22:17):
What does the income level look like when someone graduates from the apprenticeship program and gets hired on as a full-time carpenter?
Christof Franzsen (22:25):
Straight of the apprenticeship, their apprenticeship continues, but now on the job on a crew and now as a full-time employee, and that entry level pay is $21 an hour with other full-time employee benefits. And from there, hopefully the career growth is up to them.
Yin Lu (22:50):
Great. I want to take a minute to dive into the curriculum for the apprenticeship program. I'll sneak my vegetables into this question. How do you teach someone the basics of woodworking for them to come out at the end of this process, knowing how to hang a door, how to build trimming, how to build cabinetry? And second part of that question is, as you're thinking about training this new workforce in a time where we're talking about climate and doing things in a way that are climate friendly, what are some ways that you are integrating that type of education into the curriculum for an apprenticeship program? Are there specific materials that you are telling your students to use over others because they have better durability and better eco-footprint, et cetera? Say more on that please.
Christof Franzsen (23:44):
Sure. Answering the first question about the curriculum and learning the skills and knowledge. Ultimately the goal is for apprentices to join crews and perform the work. So it's a lot of hands-on learning and a lot of repetition of doing the same task over and over to become good at it. So for example, on the windows side, we start off with trying to lay a foundation of knowledge about windows, anatomy of a window, anatomy of a wall around the window, standard installation processes. And then we practice them and progressively make it more difficult, but also providing opportunity for a [inaudible 00:24:31] to build the confidence along the way of hopefully increasing their skill. So we spent about four weeks on knowledge and the individual skills necessary to complete the task. And like I mentioned before, we've picked our service lines to have a narrow scope of work so that we can hit all the skills or most of the skills necessary to complete the task.
(25:03):
Then the second half of the training, we start focusing on what does it feel like to be on a crew? On a job site? Installing the actual window might be a small portion of the total amount of time that's spent there. There's a lot of setting up the job site. There's setting up dust containment and protecting the customer's furniture. There's understanding the flow of the job. It's unlikely that you are going to stand in front of a window and do that window start to finish. You're going to do one small part and then someone else is going to come through and do the next step and people will rotate off. So we start focusing on building the muscle memory and the habit of the small things that are important on a job site to help the team be efficient. Simple things like keep the job site clean, anticipating what is the next task, and getting those materials ready or those tools ready so that there isn't a stop or a pause when the crew lead or someone finishes a task and then suddenly the next thing is needed, but it's not there yet.
(26:20):
Someone has to run downstairs and get it. Then in terms of being climate friendly. During the training itself, I don't think we really focus on any training or material choices that has that specific aim. Obviously we use material during the training and a lot of that is waste, so we try and optimize for using as little unnecessary material as possible. But in terms of having a positive impact on the installation process itself, we're mostly following the process of how the job was sold by the partner that we're working with. They've sold windows and we'll install those windows. So there's very little as far as material selection that we can do to have a positive impact. As a company, we don't have any goals that are specifically motivated by having a positive impact on climate change. We do have our software engineering team. The goal with them is to introduce innovative technology solutions that will drive efficiency and what that might look like.
(27:49):
Something that we focused on from the start is trying to make expertise mobile. There's two motivations there. The first is part of solving the trades shortage. There's less and less experienced carpenters out there. We want to be able to leverage the knowledge that they have beyond just the job site that they're on. So if an experienced carpenter can support multiple crews in multiple different locations without having to drive to every single job site, maybe even not having to drive to any job sites. But having a crew on the job that is trained to solve 90% of the problems they might encounter, and then have the resources to get that remote assistance to solve that last 10% that don't have the experience yet to solve for themselves. That's a big goal of ours with our technology team. And the second goal with making expertise mobile is simply to reduce drive time and add that efficiency to it.
(29:02):
There's definitely a lot of driving in this industry because depending on the service line, the job site is people's homes. That could be anywhere and the crew has to drive there. If we can eliminate having the super experienced professional having to drive to all the job sites, then that's a positive for us in driving efficiency by eliminating having to have that most experienced person on every job site where they might be needed for only 15 minutes a day to solve that one problem that's beyond the experience or the skill of the rest of the crew. There's also a lot of measuring and estimating that happens in the life of a job well before the job actually happens. And if there's a mistake in measuring a job and then those measurements are sent off to a factory where a product is produced.
(30:02):
And then the weeks go by and that product is shipped to the supply house and we pick it up and then we go to install it. And then we find that we arrive on the job and we've driven a crew of four with a big van, with all the materials to that job site. And within five minutes or 15 minutes, we know we can't do this job because it's been mismeasured. That's a big inefficiency and that's something that obviously costs us a lot of money. And being able to improve the measuring accuracy at the beginning is something that we're hoping technology might help with. To expand a little bit on your question about material innovations and building technique innovations, that's not something that Forge is specifically trying to tackle or have the expertise in-house to tackle. I think there's definitely a lot of really amazing companies out there working on a lot of innovations that would have positive impact on climate change.
(31:06):
And whether that be improvements or innovations in building techniques or building materials, tools or equipment, there's definitely going to be a need for a skilled labor force trained to implement those innovations. And hopefully the role that Forge can play there is having that skilled labor force and having the training infrastructure, where we could be ready to work with these great companies that develop these innovations.
Yin Lu (31:42):
That's awesome. That's really helpful to understand. I'm putting it into a framework that we often use at MCJ to talk about the different types of areas that we invest in. Just imagine on an x-axis, you have moving bits to moving atoms, so pure software and hardware people, physically moving things, optimizing things. And then on the y-axis you have sequestration of greenhouse gases, mitigation to get us off of dependency on fossil fuels. There is resiliency building, and this is the last category of enablement. How do you enable more money and IQ points to move into the rest of the space so that we can accelerate climate solutions? And what I'm hearing from you is for Forge, there's the software side, the moving bits that you have to try to optimize for efficiencies in the workforce. So rather than having an experienced carpenter having to go to three sites a day, is there a way that through video conferencing and through software that you're building, you can make that person more efficient and decrease their carbon footprint in doing the same number of jobs.
(32:42):
And then on the moving people side of things, with the whole apprenticeship program, you're really challenging the existing model of one-to-one and making it 12 to 20 to one to just get more people who have that baseline foundation of carpentry in their tool belt and to be able to build careers from there. So it's really neat to see a local business based in Boston try to tackle how we think about the built environment from so many different angles. Thank you for the work that you do. We need more folks in the trades as it's been abundantly clear from not just talking with you, but talking to many people from all different trades. And I think the instructor plays a special role in enabling the whole ecosystem to thrive and grow because we need teachers to teach and pass down the skills and whatever role technology plays in optimizing that.
(33:33):
So let's have more of it. Christof, thank you. Thank you for taking time today to chat with us and teaching us about your world, and so excited to see how the apprenticeship program continues to grow and thrive. Let's get more carpenters to help with our home electrification, home optimization journey. And Christof, thank you for taking the past 45 minutes of your time out of your busy day to chat with us and teach us more about your world, really just appreciative of the trade that you're in and the work that you're doing to enable more people to be part of that trade and to build our workforce.
Christof Franzsen (34:12):
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on.
Jason Jacobs (34:13):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (34:17):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (34:27):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at mcjpod.
Yin Lu (34:40):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Cody Simms (34:49):
Thanks, and see you next episode.