Gavin Crump, the Founder and Consultant of BIM (building information modelling) Guru, is an inspiration to many in his field. He began working as an as an architectural graduate in 2012 and whilst many years have passed since then his perseverance remains constant. He initially began his career by working on a $2 billion hospital project in Adelaide, Australia and received great initial exposure to architecture, construction, and BIM.
His inclination towards BIM software accelerated him through technical, coordinator and middle management roles and in 2015, to continue his journey, he went to Sydney to a BIM management role where he managed training, content, systems, and projects in the context of BIM. He moved through various medium to large scale firms in Sydney and got some great exposure to various projects and company types.
Ultimately, he opened his own BIM consulting business at the start of 2020, and while most people would expect it to be an unfavorable time to initiate a business, he made most of this time and in hindsight, believe that was a prime time since Market lag gave him time to market and get the business up to speed, whereas this time may have become redundant and unproductive in performing a corporate type role at this time.
About the company
BIM Guru offers five key services: strategy, modeling/systems, coordination, coding, and training. Most of its services center themselves around the Autodesk product collection which is dominating the BIM landscape in Australia currently. BIM Guru draws upon experience at all levels of BIM – from the trenches up to the boardroom, which causes his clients to always find a level of relatability and suitability in his offer and delivery of solutions. Gavin has begun releasing templates and contents via the BIM Guru website shop which aims to provide a better benchmark for firms without access to these due to industry silos, as well as varying rates of BIM adoption.
Struggles and Successes
The journey climbing to the top is never an easy one, and every entrepreneur must face a plethora of obstacles along their way to stabilize their foothold. The AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) industry is surprisingly quite slow to change – they only really embraced digital workflows on a mainstream scale over the last 15-20 years. For every disruptor out there, there are at least 100 people working in the opposite direction, whether for the pursuit of nostalgia or fear of change. Silos of information and workflows are also a serious problem that stifles this industry’s potential. Large-scale firms create proprietary ideas and practices and keep them closed off from their competition so one ends up with a lot of redundancy when we look at the bigger picture.
BIM Guru has only been active for about 3 months now, but in this small period, they’ve delivered solutions for more than 30 unique clients across the globe – most of them becoming repeat clients. In April, BIM Guru released a project template for the program Autodesk Revit, which generated over 100 sales in less than a week. In future, they have more than 20 packs of support content queued up to expand the potential of this product. They also aim to release some online courses in a few months’ time that will train people in industry-relevant software from a real-world context – something which many other courses do not emulate.
Future goals and Words of wisdom to the budding entrepreneurs
When asked about future business prospects, he replied that currently, his business is a full-time focus. Ultimately, his goal is to develop the business into a platform which he can take and ‘attach’ to companies in a management/joint venture capacity in order to reintroduce his services at a deeper level than which external consultants are usually offered. When he was asked to give advice to the young mind, he said: “Ultimately I recommend three things…
1. Have the financial backup personally available before you begin
2. Have a strong network of potential clients and industry peers ready
3. Have the will and dedication to work autonomously and hard
Without these three things, I don’t think I could do what I’m doing right now, and I see many small businesses fail because of this – in particular the first item; if a business is overly focused on the money they will ultimately lose sight of the quality of their service.” So, it is conspicuous that if one has their eyes set straight, then time is just a number.