Good afternoon, everybody.

We are so happy to have all of you here at City Hall in Raleigh.

I am Janet Cowell, the mayor of Raleigh, and I am going to introduce uh our governor to make a big announcement about uh new jobs and a new company that will be locating here in downtown Raleigh.

So uh Governor Stein, our 76th Governor of North Carolina.

Mayor Cowell, thank you for the introduction and congratulations on this big day, and good afternoon, everybody.

It's wonderful to join you all with some great news, not only for Raleigh, not only for Wake County, but for the state of North Carolina.

I am proud to announce that Build Ops, a veteran-owned technology company, will be establishing a center of excellence right here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We anticipate that it will bring 291 jobs to Wake County, and I'm a roundup kind of guy, so maybe 300 jobs to Wake County.

The average salary is well over 100,000, 11,000, whereas the average salary in Wake County is 77,000.

So these are good paying jobs.

Build ops will invest more than $700,000 here as they streamline and optimize their work to bring an operations software software platform to commercial builders across the country.

This is a bad week.

We promise you this is a bad week.

North Carolina has been a top two state for business four years running.

But we are not resting on our laurels.

We will continue to invest in our state's assets, most importantly, the people of North Carolina.

It's a vase, beautiful vase, designed by North Carolina's own Ben Owens, and it has our state seal on it, S.A.

Quam Vidari, to be rather than to seem.

And we are welcoming build-ops to be a part of North Carolina.

Clay, thank you.

Come join us, and we look forward to having you being part of North Carolina.

Great.

Thank you very much.

So I'd first like to thank Governor Stein, Mayor Cowell, the North Carolina Department of Commerce, uh Raleigh and Wake County Economic Development, uh, NC State, Wake Tech, the Chamber, and the North Carolina General Assembly.

And so what is build-ops?

So build ops is a end-to-end solution for the subcontractors.

And so who's who are subcontractors?

They're the ones that keep things like power running, water running, the AC, which is today a big deal, right?

They're the they're the guys who are working on that all the time.

And so our platform um is there to support them.

And the truth is there's not enough people in the trades across the whole country.

After 2008, uh for 10 years, nobody went into the trades, and so now there are very few people, and so our technology is used to make the people that are left as efficient as possible.

And so that's the mission of build-ops.

Uh we have been on a rapid growth path for a number of years and just raised uh a series C round, and so we are continuing our growth.

And so as we look at where to grow and how to grow, uh, we needed to be on the East Coast.

And so as we looked at that, we said where is a spot where we can have access to great talent uh because in a tech company it takes really smart people that want to work really hard.

Um and the obvious solution for us was Raleigh, North Carolina, right?

You can barely uh throw or hit a golf ball in any direction and not hit a premier university.

And so it's very uh exciting for us to come to Raleigh and uh one of our core tenets at Build Ops is collaborate to win.

And throughout this whole process, we felt uh that the state of North Carolina and Raleigh in particular, uh the counties involved, everybody wrapped their arms around us and made this a success.

And so we're happy to come.

We are very excited about the opportunity.

We're looking forward to to hiring lots of folks, and I'm with you.

I I don't have to stop at 300.

We're we'll we'll shoot for the moon and and hire twice that maybe.

So uh I keep telling them on the West Coast that this is gonna be the biggest office and the the driver of uh more growth than we've ever seen.

So thank you very much.

Thanks for having us, and uh, we're happy to be in North Carolina.

Well, now that we've had the big reveal, I can say um the whole council is just so excited to be here with us, and we do have almost everyone.

Mayor Pro Tem Fort, uh Councillor Jonathan Lambert Melton, Councillor Harrison, Councillor Patton, and who am I missing?

Anyone?

Got them all.

And we appreciate City Manager uh Marshall Adams David, who's here with all the senior staff, everyone at Raleigh who helped make this happen.

We're glad that you feel like Raleigh is a place that you want to come.

We welcome you here to this community, and we're particularly glad on a heat index day of 106 that you've got folks that can fix air conditioning right around the corner.

So uh thank you for making Raleigh an even stronger place to be, and we look forward to partnering with you uh to make sure you're successful here.

So with that, um I guess are we doing questionings or pictures?

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.