Turn Construction Into Product
Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck — Co-CEO @ Goldbeck
About this masterclass
Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck is the Co-CEO of Goldbeck, one of Europe's leading integrated design-build-operate companies. With thousands of employees, 16 factories across Europe, and a fully integrated model spanning preconstruction, design, manufacturing, assembly, and operations, Goldbeck treats buildings not as one-off projects but as repeatable products and systems.
What This Masterclass Covers
Most of construction is built around solving one-off problems with pride. Hendrik's thesis is the opposite: the real opportunity is in solving scalable, repeatable problems better than anyone else. His masterclass is about what it means to think like a product company in an industry that has never operated that way.
In this masterclass, Hendrik walks through Goldbeck's evolution, his own path into the company, and the lessons from decades of industrialized construction at scale:
- Why a building should be understood more like a product than a unique artifact, and how Goldbeck evolved from steel elements to full building products to a lifecycle ecosystem
- The principle of "know your borders": how far you can push productization before you lose the systems advantage
- The importance of confronting reality early: why startups need to spend real time with customers and supply chain participants to find the path from pain point to payment
- His "elephant on the mountaintop" metaphor: why you need a bold long-term vision but must break it into digestible pieces connected to today's tools and projects
- Where Goldbeck sees the future: a fully integrated project data world where design, cost, schedule, construction, and operations data all connect, with AI, automation, and robotics reducing friction at every step
- Why his biggest contribution wasn't one big invention but bringing curiosity into the company, constantly asking what the next technology, product, or capability could be
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Transcript
Introduction
Hi, I'm Jan-Hendrik. I'm about 49 — so approaching very old. I was born and raised in Bielefeld, and I was always in touch with the company because I was basically born right next to the factory itself. I studied in Karlsruhe at the KIT, and then my first job started at IVG Immobilien — at that time the largest publicly listed real estate company in Germany. I was the personal assistant to the CEO. And then in 2005, it all began — pretty much exactly 20 years ago — when I started my journey at GOLDBECK.
Growing Up Around Construction
I was more or less raised close to the factory where we produced the first metal parts. That was my first impression — seeing the welding going on, the fabrication of construction elements. That was always in my memory. Then, first time on a construction site — you see the big machines, and I think every kid finds that amazing. But really understanding how it's all organized — that came later, once I was already in the job. To realize how all things come together, what technology does with construction — that was for later.
Like a lot of kids, I was eager to build sand castles. And then Lego — that was something construction-related, actually not so far from what we do today. While I was growing up, around the age of 14, I was thinking about going into literature — being a writer, perhaps even poetry or philosophy. But then I did a short internship at a local newspaper, and I found there was a lot of basic work to be done that wasn't very inspiring. Writing about someone who broke a leg — I thought: okay, this is not changing the world. Will I ever get to the point where I can actually make an impact? That was my level of aspiration at 14 or 15. A rather high one, I would say.
And then I realized: there is this family company in my background, my father's company, which he founded in 1969. Around 20 years later, in the late 80s and early 90s, I was thinking: perhaps this is the best basis to actually cause a difference, to create something with real impact. And that's when I decided to go in that direction — to join the family company, to go into construction.
Family Attitude & Education
The attitude of my parents I would describe as pseudo-liberalism. They basically said: of course, everybody can do whatever they want. I've got two brothers and we were all completely free. But they also wouldn't be too sad if you joined the company. That was the gentle direction of their will. Of course I could have gone my own way — but once I decided this was my direction, I simply followed the educational path that would lead me there. I studied Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen — industrial engineering — with an emphasis on the construction sector. I did internships in construction. I was on construction sites here and there. I did an internship at the factory here in Bielefeld when I was still a student. So there were these small touch points along the way.
First Steps at GOLDBECK
My first year at GOLDBECK, I accompanied a project that had a few different layers to it — it was a development project in Poland where our own company was the tenant. So we built a project for ourselves. That was partly project management, but since I wasn't moving to Poland, it wasn't day-to-day site management — more the project development side. That was okay, since I already had experience with that skill set from my previous job.
After that project was realized, I became a real site manager on a real warehouse construction site — boots on the ground, day-to-day life as site manager. That was a level deeper. Negotiating the cost of a square meter of laid bricks, whether you can procure directly and add manual labor to it — all the facets of how to organize the schedule, what to do when something screws up, how to rearrange to get back on track. All the typical madness involved in day-to-day construction projects.
The best experience is really on the job — seeing real problems in real day-to-day life. And I think for startups, that's also the crucial aspect that's sometimes missing: direct confrontation with reality. What are the actual problems in the design process, in the production of elements, on the construction site? The more you can get into the real basic experience of what it means to actually realize a project — the more it helps.
The Family Business & Sibling Dynamics
My brother started in the late 90s and was basically already taking over responsibility for everything related to financial issues — essentially functioning as CFO. When I joined in 2005, my father was still active as CEO for the first two years, and then in 2007 he handed things over to us. We also had a strong, experienced management team running the show.
So I came in with freedom — the freedom to do what was most reasonable for me, my career, and for the company. That's why I was able to be a site manager, then spend time in the real estate segment, and really get that grassroots experience. Around 2006, 2007, 2008, I had the chance to actually see what it's like to deliver a real project. One experience that was particularly intense was a year in the Romanian countryside — Transylvania, actually — where we built a factory for Nokia. 14 different nations involved on that project. Inspiring, challenging, and a basis for enormous learnings about what can go wrong on a construction site.
What GOLDBECK Is Today
When I joined, the company had a turnover of around €400 million and maybe 2,000 employees or so. We had a focus on certain asset classes we could build particularly well — mainly logistics. We had already started internationalization. It was a very hands-on company, a size where you still knew almost everybody. I was remembering last week when I walked into the canteen — back then you were actually happy if you saw someone you didn't recognize, because it meant either a new employee or a customer. Nowadays I'm happy if I see someone I do know, because it's grown vastly bigger.
The core idea — let me walk through the history briefly. In the mid-1960s, my father was working in his father's company, a small metalworks business, a classic craftsman shop of about ten people run by two families. It was a deadlock situation — two families where everyone did what had always been done, nobody would challenge the other family, very traditional. My father had a lot of ideas: how to change the flow of material, how to use early aspects of automation. The answer was always: no, we won't change anything. It's always been like this. It works. Leave it.
At some point, he said: the only way to fulfill my ideas is my own company, where I can freely pursue them. And that's what he did in 1969 — not an easy time to break away from the family. He started with the core idea of bringing a better production flow for steel construction elements. The first idea of industrializing the production of structural steel. The original intention was never to develop into a fully integrated design-build-operate general contractor at the scale and reach we have today. But with that core idea of doing steel construction in a better way, he just took logical steps forward.
If you want to sell industrially produced steel elements, and you're at the far end of the food chain from the customer, it's not easy to articulate the value. So you need a more integrated proposal. From steel elements in the 1970s, to more integrated structural systems. Then, in the 80s, from structural systems to fully-fledged products where you could approach a customer and say: if you're thinking of building your own production facility, think of us — we can do it in a better, smoother, more intelligent way, and we can be your partner very early on to optimize the classic triangle of time, cost, and quality.
By the end of the 80s, we had this idea of real products — a car park, an office, a production facility. But to place them with the customer at the right early stage, you had to be decentralized. So we developed a decentralized organization. And critically: if you want to do this, you have to have design competence in-house. Think of the automotive world — you cannot have someone else do a unique, individual design for each car and then expect BMW or Mercedes to just produce what someone else designed. It's the same for us. We have to own the design, own the product, and be at the customer's side from the very beginning.
When we were able to do that, a lot of people in the industry said we were digging our own grave — messing with the architects and engineers who had always been the customer's closest advisors and were not going to welcome us into that space. There were many experts who were certain our business model wouldn't work. Fortunately, we're still here. Some of those companies are perhaps not.
The Role of Luck: German Reunification
I'll admit something that not many managers are willing to admit: there is a secret ingredient in a successful business model, and it's called luck. In the late 80s, we had the reunification of Germany, which dramatically shifted the demand-supply situation. Suddenly there was enormous demand, and we were in exactly the right position to serve it with our business model.
By the time we went into the great construction crisis in Germany in 1996, we already had our product-based thinking firmly established, with a lot of references and completed projects. That gave us the credibility to compete for the kinds of buildings we had actually built.
From Product to Product-Service Ecosystem
In the 90s, we developed the idea that it's not just about the product — it's about the product-service ecosystem. Think of a smartphone: it's a product, but it's also a complete ecosystem of services. Why not think of a building the same way? Because, frankly, the customer doesn't interact with you because you have beautiful blue eyes. The customer interacts with you because he wants to experience a great operations phase — he wants to sleep, learn, work, store, or park in a building. That's the final goal. To have a great design phase with the customer, you should know what his demands are in the operations phase.
So we integrated all the service aspects — facility management, property management, car park operations, interior fit-outs — into a fully integrated package. That enabled us to stay close to the customer for the entire lifecycle of a building. And if anything changes — new space needed, sustainability upgrades, a new energy system — if you have those capabilities and you're already the trusted partner, you work together with the customer to find what suits them best. That was the development through the 90s and into the 2000s, and then from around 2010, the focus shifted more to tech innovation.
The GOLDBECK Business Model Today
The core idea of GOLDBECK's business model is the fully integrated optimization of a building — design, production, and build. We think deeply about insourcing and value creation within our own capabilities. We have around 4,000 people involved in the entire process before a single element is built on site: permitting, design across all phases, structural calculations, earthwork optimization, MEP and HVAC engineering, sustainability engineering, and more.
Then there's the production itself — 16 factories throughout Europe producing steel elements, precast concrete elements, steel-concrete hybrid elements, windows, doors. We also develop further integrated elements that we have others produce to our standards — for example, prefigured HVAC systems where all the responsibilities are preassembled into a container or rack that you can simply plug and play into a building. We always think about how to produce value in a more industrial, automated environment.
Then we bring these elements to the construction site and assemble them — like Lego — with our own assembly crews, coordinating all the other trades needed for a turnkey building. And if the customer wishes, we go into the operations phase as well, including the often-missing link of commissioning: we start commissioning before handover to ensure all systems are working and the transition into operations is smooth.
With this fully integrated, productized approach, we are somewhat different from other construction companies. The core of it is understanding a building like a product. Think of it like the automotive OEM model — we are the system integrator, producing some parts ourselves and developing others together with our Tier 1 suppliers. We leverage all the classic advantages of industrialization: automated production, design-to-value, design-to-cost, partnerships with Tier 1 suppliers, and economies of scale. Instead of buying an elevator for one project, we might be buying 2,000 elevators for 500 or 600 projects in the next year or two. That brings a completely different kind of value creation and mindset.
The classical construction professional takes pride in solving unique, one-off problems. That's not what we want to do. We want to solve scalable problems — solutions that can be repeated. We do not want to reinvent the wheel every single time. From an engineering perspective, this puts us closer to the classical German industrial segment — the precision machinery companies that Germany is known for. Optimizing a detail is worth it if you can repeat it thousands or tens of thousands of times. It's not worth it in a one-off business. I wouldn't say our approach is always better — but for 70 to 90% of the buildings that need to be delivered anywhere in the world year after year, it is definitely better.
My Contribution: Curiosity
I wouldn't dare claim that I single-handedly changed any particular product or process. What I think I introduced to the company — a little bit more than before — was curiosity. What else might work? Where is the next level, the next step, the next market, the next product, the next technology?
That's my direction and level of aspiration. By staying curious and watching what's happening in the world — not just geopolitically, but in technology and customer demand — you can pick up signals about where things are moving. And as the person managing this company, it's my responsibility to move the organization early enough so we develop the capabilities to cope with the coming shifts in demand.
When I joined, we were already well established in the warehouse sector. I remember joining IVG in 2003, when there was still a serious discussion about whether a warehouse could even be considered an asset class. We were talking about net yields of 10, 11, 12% for a warehouse. That changed significantly. And the skills we had to build warehouses very fast and efficiently led some managers to say: let's just focus on that. Focus and priority are always valuable. But if you forget to diversify, you eventually discover that asset classes are cyclical. There is no such thing as an upwards-only market.
So at some point, I said: let's reinvent our office product. Some people said: we don't need it, let's stay with warehouses. I said: no, let's try — we've sold offices before, we just need the next S-curve. And in the beginning, it was a disaster. Our first customer on the first new office system told our project manager: "Congratulations — your performance was miserable." And now — you just have to get up, accept it as the beginning of a continuous improvement journey, and keep going. That same customer actually built more buildings with us afterwards. It perhaps wasn't as catastrophic as he stated.
This applies directly to the startup world, where a lot of construction GC startups forget this: it's a long journey. You have to make your mistakes, have the right level of endurance and stubbornness, and of course capital — because you have to pay your people. You might not earn money for some years while you gather the experience needed to create a market-ready product. We always went through this same journey when inventing a new product: start with an MVP-ish approach, find your first customers, learn from your mistakes, then create maturity in your product by adding features the market requires. That broadens your addressable market. But draw your borders — if you cross into complete individuality, you lose your comparative advantage entirely.
International Expansion
We started internationally in the 90s in Poland and Czech Republic, and had some adventures in France. In Czech Republic we're active and quite successful; in Poland too. In France, we treated it like we treated Germany — just copying and pasting what was successful here, ignoring all the cultural aspects of building in a different country with a different, already-saturated construction market. That was a hard lesson and eventually a hard decision to stop activities there.
Then we expanded from Czech Republic into Slovakia and Hungary, and established a joint venture in Austria, which then extended into Switzerland. The second big international push came around 2017-2018, when in early 2019 we acquired GSE — a French construction company covering the French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian markets. We also bought a Danish company from which we're building our Scandinavian presence, starting from Denmark into Sweden and eventually looking at Norway and beyond. We opened the Dutch market organically, and from the Netherlands we're expanding into Belgium.
The UK is also a market we've been in for many years with varying levels of success. It's a great market, perfectly suited for the GOLDBECK approach, and we've been re-emphasizing our management and organizational development there in the last year with some significant expansion.
No matter which direction you expand or how you enter a country — acquisition or organic — you cannot simply do what you do everywhere else. Every country has a unique set of regulations, a unique culture around how projects are done, and unique technological habits. You have to understand the core drivers of your business model and interpret them for each national market. In the UK, for example, there's a so-called British institutional standard for warehouses — not a regulatory requirement, just a market convention that warehouses on the island look a particular way. We tried to change that. At some point you realize these are windmills you're tilting at. So instead, we developed a system that appears to follow the institutional standard but incorporates a lot of the value we create ourselves. That's the pragmatic path.
Innovation Culture & Organizational Momentum
There is naturally not a lot of internal momentum to open up yet another market or develop yet another product. The classic reaction from your team is: we already do enough, we're successful, we have a lot of work — why should we bother with new things? So you have to create momentum for a new product or a new market. Ideally, someone else is driving that initiative and you as CEO just say yes or no. But the truth is, I often had to personally get involved and motivate someone — look, imagine how great this could be if we do this, here are the arguments, both factual and emotional, for why we should put in this extra effort.
We are currently thinking about forming a joint venture in the US — that's something that no one would spontaneously bring to me and say: let's go there. Those broader steps have to come from the top.
Two Key Success Drivers
What drove our growth? The motor was seizing opportunities. But you are enabled by having two core success drivers. The first is the business model itself — having a future-oriented, superior business model. Ours is this design-build-operate, product-driven approach with integrated value creation and a systems-based approach — as we've discussed. The second is simply: treating your stakeholders well. Being a good company.
What does that mean? You have values, and you have an ambition to treat your stakeholders right: your customers, your own employees, your partners — the subcontractors who help you create the final building — and, last but not least, society. Be a part of society. Contribute positively — ideally with good buildings, but also through CSR activities. Contributing to the competence of our country and industry to deliver great products.
This creates a sense of purpose. And when people have purpose, it brings out the entrepreneurial spirit in your employees: I want to give my energy, my ideas, my creativity to this system and improve it. I'm a contributor to this company, not just a number.
In terms of company culture, our values come down to a few things. First: performance — a high level of aspiration, a winning mentality. Second: what we call humanity — being open, straight, fair, and friendly. Get rid of the work-life antagonism; create a working environment that's livable, where people can also enjoy their time. Third: trust and responsibility — we trust our employees to make their own decisions, but we also expect the responsibility that comes with that freedom. If you say you'll take care of something, take care of it. And fourth: pioneering spirit — stay curious. As Steve Jobs said: stay hungry, stay foolish. The future is being shaped by someone — why shouldn't it be us?
Lessons from Failure
I mentioned France — treating it like Germany was a mistake, and we had to close down our initial approach there. Eventually we succeeded in France by acquiring a French organization and embracing French culture, which is genuinely different from German culture but works — just differently. That also makes you humble. I don't know exactly what works in every country. It might be different from place to place.
I also experienced projects that went completely downhill — because we didn't correctly assess the management scope, didn't have the right organizational skills to deliver them, or weren't careful enough in our due diligence on the customer side. Technical due diligence — can we actually deliver this? That's our day-to-day job. Economic due diligence — can we make a profit at this market price? That's manageable. But there's a third dimension: the fit between your company and the customer. Sometimes you look a person in the eyes and you already know you won't be able to work with them. Maybe the project is alluring, but on second thought it's a disaster waiting to happen.
If a project does go wrong, it's your duty to make it worth something. You should extract the organizational learning from that pain. Around 2010-2011, we had a troubled office building project. Some of the same team members are still with us. They just finished a very large, very successful office project — with the same core team, now more experienced. What's the lesson? At some point you have to build up organizational skills, not just define processes. You have to understand how workflows actually live in practice, how people can execute great projects. And keep the people. In construction, when a project goes downhill, people tend to leave. Sometimes that's okay — but often the problem was the overall setup, not the individuals. Keep them, encourage them, get them back on track, and you gain organizational knowledge and loyalty that will pay off enormously later.
The Future: Project Nexus & The Singularity of Construction
The technologies that will shape the industry are already out there. We've been talking about digitalization in construction for 20 to 30 years — nothing more and nothing less than BIM. That often sounds boring. But what BIM was always really about — in its original conception — is creating for each and every single project a complete data multiverse. You start with the idea of a project, add layers and layers of information — not just geometry, but time (design timing, construction timing), cost (integrating all cost aspects into the model), communication (tracking every decision across the project lifecycle), and on-site progress (how the building is actually coming together day by day — changes in schedule, changes in cost — all tracked in this data multiverse).
At some point you have an as-built digital twin, you transition into the operations phase, and you can on a fully data-integrated input-output level work thoroughly with the building to optimize its operations. Since BIM is often associated primarily with the design phase and three-dimensional modeling, I call this vision something different — in my mind it's Project Nexus: the thing where everything connects. If you will, the singularity of construction. Integrating all the data and then operating on it.
The core idea of AI in this context is: if you have this repeatable experience across the data multiverses of all your previous projects, you can do predictive everything — from a given set of parameters, predicting what will happen next, or checking whether what you're doing now is right, whether your assumptions are sound, whether you're overlooking something. AI can match complexity across all different details at a far more sophisticated level than any human.
And then there's generative design — large parts of the entire design process, including shop drawings for precast elements, can be prompted and generated. Construction robots can only work in a well-structured, data-driven environment. The natural habitat of a robot is exactly this kind of data-integrated room. When everything connects at that singularity level, you get truly transparent process control, the ability to overlap processes, reduce construction time, increase efficiency, reduce cost. And because it's all transparent, sustainability becomes fully trackable and manageable.
The Death of the Front End
One barrier to tech adoption in construction has always been the burden of yet another front end, yet another app. Construction managers will tell you they don't want to learn another system. They have to be the master of yet another interface, and that takes time and energy they don't have. That time is coming to an end — largely thanks to AI. We now have LLMs with voice interfaces. You just articulate what you want, and the AI agent understands and transforms your wish into action in the back end. I call this the death of the front end — and it's not bad news. For those building UX, yes, that scope will change. But for all those who have to use technology, it's great news. The ease of interaction with tech is already remarkable with today's AI tools.
This also means that niche back-end solutions that really add value — solutions that previously couldn't find their place in the market because people didn't want to deal with yet another interface — can now reach users easily. You just articulate what you want, you have a human-centered input-output relationship with the tech universe, and you can use far more technology without overloading real people on real projects.
The Mountain, the Elephant, and Getting There
I like to think of technology and innovation in a company as having two layers, with a critical middle layer connecting them.
The base layer is the day-to-day: site managers, designers, salespeople — they have real daily needs and pain points. Finding tech solutions that make their lives easier is how startups were invented. This interaction between daily pain points and the startup world is crucial — provide quick wins, applicable solutions. This is hygiene. Non-negotiable. If you don't bother, others will have smoother, more efficient processes, and at some point they'll just be better companies than you.
The top of the mountain is the big vision — what I jokingly call the elephant on the mountaintop. Ours is this fully integrated data multiverse for every single project, this Project Nexus, the singularity of construction where all data — geometric and "flat" — is rationally integrated. If you can understand that vision and communicate it clearly, people can direct their efforts toward it.
The middle — how to get from the base to the top, how to digest the elephant piece by piece — is the hardest part. You have to clearly map how each initiative, each intermediate project, contributes to reaching the top. Otherwise you have innovation and tech teams running hard and then being told: actually we just decided to introduce another tool that partially covers that, so we're stopping your project. Everyone is frustrated from having invested in alpha and beta testing that now gets cancelled. So you must have a clear understanding of how each piece of the elephant you're working on actually contributes to the mountain top.
Roughly speaking, the pieces are: generative, iterative design tools that transform the customer's vision into the design of a building; transforming that agreed-upon design into execution and shop drawing level documentation; translating execution documentation into physical reality through fabrication automation and robotics; predictive analytics on the construction side, learning from previous projects; and finally, the operations phase — a building operating system, a thoroughly digitally controlled lifecycle.
All these layers have to work together. And no single company can do this alone. You have to find your partners. I'm quite happy to join forces with the Foundamental ecosystem and the great construction tech startups within it — there will be partners who are the right ones for this journey.
Advice for Founders
The "stay hungry, stay foolish" attitude is already in the DNA of most startup founders — you don't need me to tell you to keep it. What I think is more important is: confront yourself with reality. It's not about your solution — it's about whether there actually is a problem that your solution addresses. Are you really solving a real problem that people are willing to pay for? Without answering that question honestly, you might be running in the wrong direction.
Most people are open to interacting with ambitious young people when they can clearly explain the idea behind their drive. So get into interaction mode. Go out there and talk — talk to people active in your value chain, definitely to your potential customers. Extract what's really bothering them, where their real pain points are. The idea is: from pain point to payment. You have to find a solution to a real pain point — otherwise you might have a great idea and great technology, but nobody will pay for it.
Also speak with Patrick from Foundamental — I'm genuinely not kidding. They really understand the whole picture of how construction tech comes together. But even more important: speak with the industry, with people who do real projects. Your funding is not unlimited. Build your timeline with realistic monetization milestones for the near term, and keep the longer-game vision clear. Where is your mountain base right now — rooted in reality? What competencies and skills do you want to develop over time to reach the mountaintop? That's strategy. As simple as that.
Reflections
Would I do everything again as I did? Reflecting on it, there would probably be numerous situations I'd have handled differently. But on the overall view, the company development was successful and I'm a happy person. What would I fundamentally change? Not much. It was all driven from a place of wanting to create positive impact — to be curious about how the world develops, what our contribution to a changing world can be, and how to leverage the changes created by innovation and technology to transform our industry and deliver a better contribution.
And with that same mindset, I believe the best is yet to come. The momentum of this Nexus-elephant-mountain — this singularity of construction — is immense and yet to be fully harvested. There will be complications, hindrances, and difficult moments in transforming tech ideas into actual value creation. Before you reap the competitive advantage, there is a period of competitive disadvantage where you're bearing the costs — process-wise, monetarily, emotionally — of introducing new things. But on the long run, it creates exactly that advantage. With the same attitude as before, we continue — and we see what comes.
From our perspective: if we give our best — high aspiration, the power of innovation, creativity, and this aspect of humanity and treating people well — together with everyone in the same boat, creating a crowd that believes in this idea of building a better future: I think we're fine.
And if there were a magic fairy that could transform every wish into reality — I'd wish that we were already on that mountaintop, having fun with that elephant.
Watch the video on YouTube.
