What happens when you spend over two decades working on some of the most massive infrastructure projects in the country and realize the traditional building automation model is completely broken? You go out and build a company to fix it.

In this episode of It's a Controls Problem, we sit down with Dave Mulcahy, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Unified Controls. Dave takes us behind the scenes of his 20+ year journey in the trenches of the trade, opening up about the brutal early lessons that shaped his engineering philosophy and the exact moment he knew he had to leave a stable career to start something new.

We dive deep into the meat of the industry's biggest headaches: why building systems remain so frustratingly siloed, how to build a technology-agnostic strategy so owners actually own their own data, and the reality of keeping OT networks secure without locking facility managers out of their own systems.

Finally, we tackle the massive ”age out” and knowledge loss our trade is facing as veteran technicians retire. Dave shares how we can capture that critical institutional wisdom, what the next generation needs to know to survive the steep learning curve, and why he’s genuinely optimistic about the future of smart buildings.

Whether you're a seasoned master systems integrator, a building engineer drowning in alarm noise, or just starting out in the sandbox, this conversation is packed with real-world perspective you won't want to miss.