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When Jon Hegarty, regional construction director for Five Guys, pours his morning cup of coffee and jumps online, he may be looking in on multiple job sites with just a handful of clicks. The director says his organization’s partnership with EarthCam has become a part of his morning ritual. It allows him to see job sites in real-time or watch the previous day’s or week’s work, sped up or slowed down depending on his preference.
“I get on EarthCam every day,” Hegarty says in an EarthCam interview. “I’m tracking to make sure everything is trending in the correct direction in terms of construction schedule and vendor completion; it’s the first step in making sure our projects are on track.”
With Five Guys rapidly expanding across the Midwest and beyond, Hegarty’s job is to keep all of those projects on time and budget. He’s responsible for Five Guys’ ground-up builds and renovations, partnering with both franchisees and corporate teams.
To keep pace with new store launches and tight deadlines, the director has championed the use of standardized construction camera systems like EarthCam. The partner ticked all off his critical boxes: ease of use, quick deployment, and reliability.
“The simplicity and the standardization of your system is beautiful,” Hegarty told EarthCam. “Everything came in a case. You pull it out, the camera snaps right on, the modem’s internal, and it’s all self-contained. When you’re done, you pack it right back up in its ballistic case and you can ship it or carry it with it.”
The director’s leadership is in line with his appreciation for EarthCam’s technology. He loves transparency. He approaches each project with the idea of making data visible and actionable for everyone involved, including owners, general contractors, and corporate staff. Hegarty will make cameras accessible to their traveling national vendors so they can hop online and check the progress of projects as well, ensuring that there won’t be any surprises when they arrive at a job site.
The idea of cameras wasn’t an immediate hit, the director admits.
“From the owner’s die, it was a little bit of a hard sell with the GCs,” Hegarty says. “Getting them to accept that we’re providing cameras that are going to provide a live feed to multiple people across the country…now that they’re in the program, they understand the benefits of it, too. Their office staff absolutely loves it. Field staff, well, they’re still on the fence about it.”
The director says the cameras aren’t about surveillance, but smart planning. They don’t use the feeds to micromanage the building process. His goal is to foster accountability and ensure that all stakeholders know the flow and timing of how a project is working out. Every hour saved is money saved.
Procore, the project management platform, is another critical part of Hegarty’s workflow. His team links EarthCam’s visual data with Procore, and the project is then managed from that platform. Hegarty says it’s created a one-stop shop where both EarthCam and Procore are accessible, a centralized location for information and keeping all stakeholders in step.
At the end of every project, his team archives time-lapse videos of every build, turning months of effort into easy watches. It’s both a fun watch and an opportunity to address pain points and better prepare for the next build.
For Hegarty, his partnerships continue to bring clarity and transparency to projects that always have so many unknowns and unquantifiables. Five Guys is building at such a fast pace that the director needs every edge he can find, and it’s made him a trailblazer of technological innovation in retail building.
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