From Dealer to Builder: How Albert Bou Fadel Is Leading Home Nation’s Modular Home Vision

Quinton Comino: Today, I'm sitting down with Albert with Smart Barrel. Super excited for this one. It's a very innovative product. What he's tackling is the issue of punching in and punching out specific to construction sites. What seems like a simple task—punching in and out—isn't so simple on construction. You have things like rain, mud, snow, ice, dirt, dust, equipment you're wearing, gloves you're wearing. What Albert is solving is making sure you're tracking labor hours as closely as builders track material. We know how many nuts, bolts, and pieces of wood it takes to build a house, but for some reason, we have a hard time tracking the hours. Pen and paper doesn't cut it. Smart Barrel steps in and solves that. They can tell you what time someone clocked in, where they were when they clocked in, what they were wearing, what they looked like, and if they're in compliance. All those things are built into this punch-in/punch-out box that Smart Barrel has. Super excited for this one. Tune in, and let's hear everything Smart Barrel has to offer. Hi, Albert.

Albert Bou Fadel: Hey. Yes. Albert. Awesome. Thank you so much, man.

Quinton Comino: I'm really glad that we got to connect.

Albert Bou Fadel: Yes. I'm here. Thank you.

Quinton Comino: Great. So, Albert, you're with Smart Barrel. Just tell us a little about what you guys do. I'm personally really excited for this. It's a very unique offering. When I look at the competitors, I don't really see a lot that offers what you do. So if you want to go into what Smart Barrel is and how it helps change the modern construction landscape.

Albert Bou Fadel: Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me. In a nutshell, Smart Barrel is a biometric timekeeping solution that's growing into a workforce management platform. The reason I differentiate both is I have to go back in time. I personally come from construction—I was a glazing contractor for over ten years. Construction is really about material and workers. You need the right material in place and the right skilled worker to install it. Construction is a sequence of thousands of those line items. Material you can manage a million ways—inventory, tracking. Labor is a whole other mess. Labor is complicated, expensive, hard to find, and you have to retain them. It's our biggest expense, but we're tracking it with a paper clipboard. How does that make sense? That's where the pain started. If we're going to save money or improve efficiency, we need better tools. Pen and paper causes fraud, poor documentation, accuracy issues, lost learnings from project to project. At the time I was working for a big commercial glazing contractor in South Florida. I was tasked to find a solution because I raised the problem. I thought it'd be easy. This is the age where you order food on your phone, stream Netflix. But for labor tracking, there was nothing. I procured over 12 different solutions and realized it's a much bigger problem than people think. Construction has fragmented job sites, different every day, weather elements, unique workforce demographics. They’re smart but not always tech savvy. You can't just throw any solution at them—it’s more complicated.

Quinton Comino: Yeah. I love what you said there. We track our materials so closely, spreadsheets and numbers, but the labor force isn't tracked nearly as closely. That really illuminates the problem. We're watching this huge expense, but not tracking it the way we should.

Albert Bou Fadel: Yeah. And labor is fluid. If you order 100 doors and don't use them for six months, the cost stays the same. You can reuse them, repaint them, return them. Labor? You have 40 workers on site. Whether they're installing or not, the clock is ticking. Someone once told me labor has negative economies of scale. For everything else, the more you use, the cheaper it gets. Labor is the opposite. Use 100 hours? You hit overtime, double time. It's an asset you're penalized for overusing. Underspend time? The project doesn't finish. You have to hit that window precisely.

Quinton Comino: So it's more than just clocking in and out. There's another side—management. But even the clocking in/out seems simple until you factor in the jobsite challenges. Remote, dirty, weather, etc. And when I researched Smart Barrel, the competitors seemed fancy but not a good fit for construction. They looked like they'd work in a doctor's office, not on a jobsite. Can you talk about that?

Albert Bou Fadel: You're absolutely spot on. When we decided to solve this, we had to build hardware from the ground up. What you see behind me is the orange box. But it wasn't always that. We started with a much bigger, bulkier tower—that’s why the company’s called Smart Barrel. We used to make existing barrels "smart." We realized we needed a physical time clock. Something 100% excuse-free. Insanely accurate but insanely simple to deploy and use. The box is shipped straight to a jobsite—think of your most tech-averse foreman. It's magnetic, no installation. Rain, mud, dust? Weatherproof. Power? Plug it in or use a solar panel and battery. We even built an adapter so you can power it with any power tool battery. It has cellular built in. No setup. It'll even connect to Starlink for remote sites. Workers show up, type their phone number, it takes a picture, pushes it to the cloud. Facial verification, geolocation, PPE compliance—hard hat, vest—it all gets logged automatically.

Quinton Comino: That's awesome. How do you get in front of people? Are you satisfied with where you’re at? Competition doesn't seem to serve this market the way you do. Or are you still trying to grow?

Albert Bou Fadel: We're happy, but there's so much more to go after. We're in every state, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico. But the industry is huge and fragmented. A contractor in Florida has nothing to do with one in Atlanta or California. You have to build networks city by city, state by state. Even national builders operate in very fragmented ways.

Quinton Comino: And you're designing for that foreman who hates tech. But on the business side, it needs to integrate with payroll. How do you avoid making it overcomplicated? Companies often overbuild with add-ons that become a whole ecosystem. How do you keep it simple for the business side?

Albert Bou Fadel: Great question. The problem is you *do* need those integrations. Payroll software, daily logs—they’re non-negotiable. Many competitors focus on the buyer—the CFO or GM. They build exactly what those execs want. But when it gets to the field? Total rejection. We did it the opposite way. Even though the worker isn't writing the check, we wanted to win them first. Make sure it's easy, simple, accurate, so they want to use it. Then build on that to deliver everything the office needs. Because compliance is the enemy. If the workers don't use it, the CFO's check means nothing.

Quinton Comino: That's really good. And there are side benefits. A foreman or worker moves to another company and says, "Why aren't you using Smart Barrel?"

Albert Bou Fadel: Of course. Usually, timekeeping has an adversarial relationship with workers. We want to change that. Make it fair and transparent. Not everyone is fraudulent, but if you use a paper clipboard, you’re inviting "looseness." Why not round up your hours? Why not pad them a little? It's human nature. We're trying to create accountability while keeping things simple and honest.

Quinton Comino: I love that. And when you talk to the right person in the business, they'll see that. Even if their team resists, they'll say "No, we need this."

Albert Bou Fadel: Exactly. But to keep it simple, we focus on innovating, not just digitizing. It's easy to say yes to everything a client asks for. But that leads to a spaghetti, overcomplicated system with 700 buttons. Second, you have to play the long game. There's pressure to say yes to close deals quickly. But we want to build the right thing, even if that means saying no now and doing it right later. In the long run, that wins.

Quinton Comino: Have you had to say no to deals?

Albert Bou Fadel: All the time. Or we say "not now," or "we'll do it next year." We have to prioritize or else the software becomes unusable.

Quinton Comino: It's hard to keep things simple. Customers want more features, and there's always justification. But you have to keep it on track. It sounds like you've done that well.

Albert Bou Fadel: And the added challenge is there's no standardization in this industry. Talk to ten contractors and they all do it differently. We have to ask why they do it that way, then figure out if there's a better approach. Often, they don't even know why—they've just always done it that way.

Quinton Comino: Have any companies changed their processes to work with you?

Albert Bou Fadel: A lot. We're stubborn but more confident now. We push back. Clients see the results: more adoption, streamlined processes, accurate data with less input. That's the goal.

Quinton Comino: That's so good. Your background is construction. How did you transition to building this? Coding? Hardware? Websites?

Albert Bou Fadel: I don't know how I did it! Honestly, naivety saved me. The hardest part was building the physical hardware. I started teaching myself to code on YouTube. Behind me is the first prototype—just a junction box filled with wires and electronics. I built it in my bedroom. Eventually, I built a team way smarter than me. We even built a mobile app for small crews. Same DNA: punch in, face photo, geofence—it all works on tablets or phones.

Quinton Comino: That's fantastic. How many people do you have now?

Albert Bou Fadel: Close to 40. About half in Miami, half remote.

Quinton Comino: What makes you so motivated?

Albert Bou Fadel: I think it’s really needed. And if this fails? By Monday or Tuesday I'd be back in glazing. That's my background. If I'm ever in glazing again, I wouldn't want to run my crew without this. So my own fallback plan depends on this working.

Quinton Comino: That's great. What's your vision? More states? Overseas?

Albert Bou Fadel: For now, just North America. U.S. and Canada are huge markets. We want to be the go-to for any contractor managing workers—employees, union, temp agencies, subcontractors. Liability, operations, toolbox talks, T&M tickets—track it all simply and accurately.

Quinton Comino: Do you see adding other services around labor?

Albert Bou Fadel: There will be more modules, but we'll win one at a time. The nucleus will always be the worker.

Quinton Comino: When did you start Smart Barrel?

Albert Bou Fadel: February 2019.

Quinton Comino: Young company, but with a ton of maturity. The prototypes behind you show that evolution.

Albert Bou Fadel: Thank you.

Quinton Comino: Where do you think you'll be in six years?

Albert Bou Fadel: Hopefully we'll be one of those legacy payroll software names for labor management. A full platform any contractor knows about.

Quinton Comino: And it's identifiable. It has its own look and brand. Your workers become your best brand ambassadors.

Albert Bou Fadel: Exactly. We brand a lot with the workers. They're our ambassadors.

Quinton Comino: That's awesome. The pre and post Smart Barrel moment is like pre and post Uber. Once you've used it, you never want to go back.

Albert Bou Fadel: Exactly. That's our goal.

Quinton Comino: Fantastic. Albert, this is so innovative. Thank you for your time. If people want to learn more, where should they go?

Albert Bou Fadel: Just visit smartbarrel.io. Request a demo. One of our team will help walk you through everything.

Quinton Comino: Wonderful. Thank you, Albert. Really appreciate having you on the show.

Albert Bou Fadel: Thank you so much.