Construction Case Study – An Audio Podcast

The Importance of Trust in Technology Adoption

Introduction of Participants

She’s joining. I’ll add her to the, meeting. Hello? Hey, Shay. Morning.

Hey. How are you guys?

Doing good. Good. I’ve got, Belica Sison on the line. Belica, say hello to Shay.

Hey, Shay.

Good morning. How are you?

I’m great. How about you? Hope you’re great as well.

Let’s just start with maybe Shay, can you just introduce yourself to to Bell, what, you know, your when you joined the organization?

So I came on board, four years ago, actually. That’s from this month.

And the purpose of joining MDM was kinda twofold. One, there was an opportunity for me to kinda leverage a lot of the experience that I had as far as modernizing the business.

But also to, there’s a lot of discussion around second generation and so forth. So, the initial idea was to basically come in and and do kind of an assessment of where the business stood at that time and start kind of identifying, like, those what what’s the vision of the company? Where do we wanna move it? How do where do we wanna be? Anything from, like, scaling our footprint across certain markets, all the way to integrating our, back and front office, streamlining processes and procedures, and so forth. So there was a lot of, things that needed to to take place in order for us to meet some of those, future objectives.

Initiating Business Transformation

And so when we decided that we needed to go through a transformation for this conversation’s sake. But when we decided that there was a need to kinda overhaul a lot of those business processes, revisit how we’re getting work done, mobilizing our field with digital technology all the way to integrating a lot of the systems that we had, in place at MDM. We then started identifying or meeting with, a handful of, technology vendors to just basically get a better understanding of what they could provide, and share with them our needs. And then we kinda went from there, and that’s where we landed on a partnership with Ray and his team.

So from there, it was really diving into the weeds, establishing everything from roles, responsibilities across the project life cycle, what systems they use, what forms they use, and doing a deep dive on, where the roadblocks live, how can we better integrate things, what is that gonna take, is it gonna, you know, require us to revisit some of the roles that we have, and, basically, revisit their responsibilities.

So it was it was quite an overhaul as far as just overall business transformation.

Project Timeline and Initial Challenges

We started that in what? Was it two thousand late two thousand eighteen, right, I wanna say? And then I think we checked off the project, like, in q one of two thousand nineteen, and we broke it out into, like, these iterative rollout starting with the CRM component.

And so from there, we just started moving forward. And, up until pretty much when COVID happened, it shut down, you know, obviously, a lot of businesses, which then impacted a lot of, projects and revenues that we were bringing in from our clients, which obviously turned into a mess when it came to trying to push forward, our investment in the technology.

So we didn’t get as far as I would have liked to have seen, but I feel like we’re close and we’re hoping to pick that back up as soon as, you know, business kinda gets back to normal for us.

But, you know, nonetheless, you know, we were on on pace to to reaching those those future objectives for the company. And I don’t know how you’re, marketing your platform now, Ray, because I know at one point in time you were looking at kind of, consolidating the, you know, BidBook Work and BidBook. I’m not sure. But at the time, we broke kind of the way I I understood it when we were working closely together was BidBook was more acting as our CRM component of the business, and then we were moving into more of the field management module, which was I don’t know if they’re still you calling it Worker Bee or not, Ray, but we were moving into that as well as bringing in accounting seed, to do a lot of accounting, features. So we got, I would say, probably seventy five percent of the way with all of them.

BidBook or the CRM part of it is pretty much completed, you know, with the exception that there is a little bit more customization that we would like to see. But, again, you know, that just comes down to budget.

The field management part, we were in the process of doing, user testing and basically trying to get some training underway to roll that out in the field. And that’s pretty much when a lot of the the change started happening as far as the COVID impact on our business.

Shift in Focus Towards Revenue Generation

So then the the focus, you know, then became about we just need to drive revenue, you know, because, obviously, a a project of this size when you’re rolling it out across the entire company and every department, it requires, you know, not only the the training and the adoption part of it, but also getting those kind of champions internally to participate in a lot of those workshops and and discussions and so forth. So we we basically had to, turn their attention more towards, generating revenue versus, you know, trying to get the projects or I’m sorry, trying to get this, technology initiative underway.

So, I’m not sure if that answers your question.

But I’m I’m gonna I’m gonna elaborate on this.

When you bring up COVID, it’s more positive, right, with the impact of it. Right? So, you know, I see, you know, there’s there’s a few things. One, of course of course, it’s a disruption of the business for everybody.

And we, you know, we all had to, deal with that that surprise.

Having said that, one of the things that I recall, was a desire in the modern modernization in your the technology stack that you’re using is moving from something that was accessible on premise or VPN or, or difficult to access, being able to access it via cloud and maybe shortening some of the cycle times between sales and design estimation team, between job site, capturing job site information and feeding it to design. I think one of that was one of the original things on the CRM or we call it the pre construction sales side of things where, you know, your that that sharing information was was a benefit and improvement to business pre COVID. That’s one of the things you were looking to drive.

Now with COVID, of course, that was a hard push. Right? So people were definitely, you know, if you weren’t operating on job sites and remotely then, you certainly have this this additional factor of being able to support people that you normally are not field people needed to support them at the office. So I think that, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think at least on that part, BitBook did offer some advantages having part of that in place at the time that COVID hit that from a sales sales side and the CRM side that you’re able to kind of operate and provide some remote tools to your employees.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Right. And just kind of on a side note too, you know, when you talk about the specialty trade, area of construction, you know, a lot of them a lot of those companies are operating on kind of dinosaur approaches and and systems. And one of the things that we looked at was we had a lot of, and I hate to say we’ve replaced people with technology, but that’s kind of, like, what happened when we start modernizing it. And we had people in place to do a lot of these mundane tasks that were really duplicated efforts, but it was because our systems were so old that they didn’t even have the ability to integrate with other systems. We had to migrate everything to to the cloud and start working with people like Ray.

Operational Efficiency and Cost Reduction

We’re we’re working on a platform that will scale up with the business. So once that took place, we actually started revisiting roles, and we ended up reducing some of our, operating costs as well as some of the overhead. So on that note, you know, we were saving a lot of time.

We were able to, like, raise that for cycle times, really increase that.

Sales also had the ability to start moving a lot quicker on the bid side. So, because a lot of times, you know, again, you’ve got, if you think old school construction, it’s these sales guys going out to construction sites and sketching something on paper. And in order for them to get the information back to us, they have to literally come back into the office and actually sit down and go through it and do a lot more paperwork. And so nothing was automated, and nothing could be shared in real time. And so everything always kinda got delayed based upon when sales could get back in the office. So that would obviously delay us even getting started on a project.

So it it definitely improved our sales cycle time with the CRM component. And as far as the field management, right, you know, one of the biggest challenges we had too was, sales was committing to the customer, on project start dates that were very unrealistic because they but the reason why is because they didn’t have insight into what our, field schedule looked like, what we were what jobs we were already forecasting and plugging in some of our staff to take on. And so, testing and plugging in some of our staff to take on. And so we found ourselves always having to go back to the customer and say, well, you know what? We can’t meet this date, because they didn’t have the ability to see what we already had on the schedule.

Field Management Challenges

And so the worker bee component was going to help solve a lot of those challenges, as far as giving them insight into what we call our E and D calendar.

It’s I hate saying this, but it’s erection and dismantle, like, for service with. But yeah. So, I’d like to see that, you know, obviously, get completed. We were working on the AutoCAD plug in.

So customizing that to integrate our AutoCAD design to generate a a bill of materials based on actual inventory that’s in the yard. You know, the way it’s always been done is we just go ahead and and create a design, and sell that design to the customer. But we don’t always know if we have the inventory to support that design, in the yard. So which would end up creating a lot of what we call rerent costs. We’d have to go to other scaffold, providers and basically rent scaffold from them and then rent it back to our customer.

Integration of AutoCAD and Inventory Management

So there’s a lot of expenses that go along with that, and we wanted to reduce, the rerent cost, and the Worker Bee component was gonna give us the ability to do that as well as the AutoCAD plug in. And, again, that was just one of those things that we didn’t get fully, the staff fully trained on and rolled out on due to the the COVID impact.

But Right.

And then the solutions are are are there. It’s just, getting the the full and, you know, to be authentic. Right? The adoption is something that construction organizations should, you know, have strategies for and for the different groups, and you’ve got a lot of experience, with that. And so that’s kinda where the focus is. But to just to kinda clear up, you know, what that solution looks like, Abel, is, the design they use is the three d CAD design or a two two or three d CAD design of their scaffolding projects that they use in the sales process, which, the customers, enjoy from them and and, and find them additional value.

And each of those drawings will break down into individual parts that become a material list on a project.

And is, the project is costed, based on that material list and that estimates are are produced.

And what she’s referring to is the actual, visibility into whether those parts are in the yard or in inventory and or they need to, to purchase additional or rent additional to be able to create efficiencies in the operations, for the materials that they have. That that material list then gets put on a truck and and delivered to the job site for the crews to begin. So that’s, that’s part of that, field service solution and part of a a metric they they they are close to still achieving, and that’s, that’s on their, on their wish list. It’s easy to look back, you know, Shay, and and or it’s easy it’s it’s easier I guess, it’s the human nature to look back on what you haven’t done yet versus taking stock of your accomplishment.

Reflecting on Achievements Amidst Challenges

And when you look back on how much we’ve actually done despite the, obstacles and the curve balls that have been thrown at us, you know, with the economy and with, with COVID, that reflecting on that sometimes is, is, requires kind of an outside perspective sometimes, or it’s just kind of reshifting your thinking. But, but, yeah, materials that they have. And that that material list then gets put on a truck and and delivered to the job site for the crews to begin. So that’s, that’s part of that, field service, solution and part of a a metric they they they are close to still achieving, and that’s, that’s on their, on their wish list.

It’s easy to look back, you know, Shay, and and or it’s easy it’s it’s easier I guess, it’s the human nature to look back on what you haven’t done yet versus taking stock of your accomplishments. You know?

Mhmm.

Out of our human nature.

And when you look back on how much we’ve actually done despite the, obstacles and the curve balls that have been thrown at us, you know, with the economy and with, with COVID, you know, that that reflecting on that sometimes is, is, requires kind of an outside perspective sometimes or it’s just kind of reshifting your thinking. But, but yeah. That, that that solution the solution has also drive a lot of something that was, another, objective of yours and and by implementing the processes, and you’re able to kind of really begin to document roles, responsibilities, and the processes for your employees, not only to to better optimize your processes, but also for new onboards to be able to give them a clear picture of what their responsibility is and how their tasks affect one another.

Documentation of Roles and Processes

That’s something that you didn’t have that I think you have pretty well documented at this point.

Right? And and, on your processes and and and jobs. So, as a part of, you know, scaling business, I always look at, you know, a automation effort kind of being a three legged barstool, people process and technology.

And, you know, people understanding what their what their tasks are and what their process is and and the inputs and outputs to that, that documentation and was, is important to have independently, but institutionalizing that in the software is is even better.

Going back to some of the metrics. You mentioned metric, metric on the field service side.

So back on the on the on on the, on the sales side, one of the one additional improvement that I remember may maybe you could, you know, elaborate on was getting visibility to sale to the CRM sales estimation design reporting.

And, you know, I think, you know, the the the the reports weren’t easy to get or maybe there were data was captured in different islands of of app of applications.

Is that something that, you know, you felt that you were able to get better better grasp on this the metrics that drive your business, at least from the from the sales side up to, you know, field service side?

Yeah. Definitely. Because, before, you know, bid book came around, we were doing a lot of spreadsheets.

And, you know, that the manual input of that is, not always trustworthy.

So, and she was always coming too late. And just the fact that the recording took a lot of time, it always became a last kind of priority, which and, you know, when you think of business, it should be a a high priority so that you always have a pull from what’s going on across the company.

But because of the timing it took to pull these reports together and capture the data across all these systems, and not to mention some of our systems, only certain people had access to and or training on because it’s it was so archaic and hard to use and train on that. We just really trained kind of our accounting staff on on one of the the platforms. So before that, sales didn’t have anything. There it was literally just a lot of paperwork file folding or file folders and saving stuff on their desktop, and hoping that they’re they’re staying organized and getting stuff to us on a timely basis. So, definitely, that real time visibility to be able to go in and look, at how the sales team is performing was huge for us, because we never knew. You know? We only knew after something got billed, and then it was, you know, the time we would start building reports and capturing those revenues and so forth.

So, like, for example, this morning, Matt sent me some dashboards today to get my pass on, if we’re looking at the right data in Salesforce. And, you know, it’s obviously all great, and I love the dashboards.

But getting our people to put put the the data in the field, obviously, is what’s going to create a more accurate view.

So that’s a whole another thing. But, yeah, the dashboard reporting function is is has been really helpful from a management standpoint just to kind of see where sales is.

But it’s also been very helpful for our other departments because they can go in and they can kind of start forecasting and preparing, what’s coming down the pipeline and what they’re gonna need in order to meet some of these very stressful deadlines that we’re always up against. So, it did give that that visibility to all of our employees because, you know, when a project comes in, it touches every single person in the company, And it allowed them to better plan and prepare, for things that were gonna be hitting their desk.

Key Sales Metrics and Tracking

It’s a good point and, like, for operations to kinda see what kind of labor, demand on labor resources are going to be, how they’re gonna be impacted based on, the reports and and, you know, estimates outstanding and all the way downstream. So so in the reports that you have now, I’m just wondering, you know, down to metrics. What are the key metrics that you’re you’re tracking on the on the sales side? Is it, hit rates, win loss, volume Yep. Sales?

A lot of those. So, a lot of you know, obviously, your your typical pipeline report to see what’s coming down the pipeline, we like to look at the sales activity across the team, as far as the total revenue that’s being, that that the guys are bidding on versus what’s actually been awarded. So we’ll look at the comparison, on that. We look at it from on basically, on a monthly, a month over month kind of situation, and then we roll it up into the quarterly to kinda start looking at trends across the the sales team and see you know, we obviously have kind of a moving revenue target based on previous or prior months. If we’re not hitting our goals, then we kind of move our targets around to try and make up for those goals that weren’t hit. But so we’ll do a lot of comparison, using the dashboards for that.

Automating Follow-Up Processes

We also leverage, bid book for, follow-up. So we have basically set up kind of these automated reminders and tasks that, you know, once a bid has been submitted because one of the things that we learned, which, is is a good thing is that now that they were able to kind of cycle a lot of these days a lot faster, it was almost like they started bidding and then they would forget to go back and follow-up. Right? So then the tool allowed us to be able to kinda set those reminders and say, hey. Did we, you know, did we get an approval on this? If not, you know, reach back out to the customer, find out what’s going on.

And so we started utilizing that feature.

We obviously look at how much work is being done by sales rep, and we’ll compare that to their revenue goals, to see where they are in meeting those.

We look at the number of bids that they’re, pushing out. So, you know, we’ve kinda try we’re trying to get basically an average overall, of what how many bids should be submitted and awarded in order to reach kind of this awarded goal of ours.

And that’s still you know, we’re still trending that, so we’re we’re looking at it over time.

Every sales rep is different. They bid different types of projects, and some are more complex and take a lot more time during the bidding stage. So, you know, one sales rep might turn around twenty, thirty bids a month, and another one might do two or three or five, but they’re larger projects.

So it just kinda depends on the type of projects. We’re we’re monitoring that, to kind of see how how much time and effort is being spent towards, bidding certain jobs, basically.

Understanding Project Complexity

We’ll look at it by the type of project, so that’s helpful as well. So if it’s, like, a shoring job or if it’s a scaffolding job or a mass climber job, you know, it gives us the ability to kind of further dive into, the timing it took to turn around one of those bids and actually get it awarded, the the level of effort that it took, from some of the team members, especially in the design phase. So which takes me to the design queue, Ray, because, you know, once once we have we’ve decided to, bid a project, then we’ll submit customer provided drawings and just some, initial job specifications to our design team. And that’s when they take it and they’ll actually start creating the designs around it. And then we submit those designs along with a proposal and our what we call our bid package.

Design Queue Management

So the design queue is helpful because then we can see, you know, how many designs are being submitted, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

What’s the turnaround time for, getting those designs back to sales so that they can meet the bid due date.

We also can look at how many if sales is putting their notes in, we can also go in and look at how many revisions this took.

Was it customer driven, was it, you know, on our end, stuff stuff like that.

And that just kinda helps give us a little bit more, analytics around effort on to get a project awarded.

I I can see, you know, a few metrics, you know, come out of that. You know, one is, at the beginning of the conversation, you’re talking about the health of a pipeline to be able to, to examine that, just to, see whether the the pipeline health is going to meet your your business goals and when need to occur and to examine different transactional and strategic sales cycles, to see the timing of that, to, to determine, some create some goal planning.

And then, you know, with your design queue, that’s more of a productivity efficiency metric where you’re more efficient at the use of time and and perhaps, creating, in production cycle times for producing that deliverable, which then would, you know, decrease your sales cycle times too. Your your time your your sales process time.

So there’s a few Well, it helped yeah.

It helped us to better prioritize designs as well. Right? Because before, it was literally an inbox on some you know, on a designer’s desk, and sales would just go drop something off. There’s no information on it other than, you know, I need this kind of a design created.

Improving Design Collaboration

But there’s no actual information around timing, to be honest. So everything was, I need it yesterday. Right? So this allowed the design queue allowed, design to have more collaboration upfront with the sales reps and better understand what kind of a timeline they’re they’re really working with.

And then it helped them prioritize their day accordingly.

So if they knew that they there was a really big project that was gonna take two or three days to work on, you know, then they might move that up in the bid queue and make it more of a priority to start working on even though it’s not it’s due later. So it just gave them better, visibility to kind of plan out their day and prioritize the amount of design requests that were coming in.

Because everything everybody wants their yesterday, and it’s tough.

And we call it emergency project. We’re always not paying them an emergency, it seems like. So and it also, you know, from a remote standpoint, being in the cloud, it allowed sales if they knew something that needed to be turned around pretty quickly, then they were able to submit a lot of the drawings and specs from the actual job site on their mobile, take pictures and so forth, and get that into the design. What we call it an an ERF, an engineering request form, which is basically Ray and his team built out fields that they just basically have to go in and input the data into that, and then it would then submit, and turn into a design request along with any photos or or drawings that they wanted to share.

So it it allowed them to stay productive out in the field with customers versus having to come back in, pull it all together, put, like, something in their inbox on their desk, and then hope and pray that they’ll get it turned around in time. You know. So this just kinda kept the wheel going constantly.

I’ve got a follow-up question, but I think I I it’s it’s it’s on Belica’s list.

And I know exactly how it is would be.

It’s chaos, to be honest.

Our industry moves very, very quickly, and it’s typically because, our our specialty trade is we’re scaffolding.

So when, like, general contractors are putting together their, an RFQ or what have you to submit to the trade, they’re never thinking about scaffolding. It’s always an afterthought.

So all of a sudden, what will happen is construction starts and, this is ninety nine percent of the time, and then the customer will go, oh, gosh. We need to we need to get our guys up there. We’re gonna need scaffolding. Oops. We need that now. We can’t stop construction.

So that’s just the nature of our business as far as the the speed. And and having tools in place that can support that speed is really, really vital to our success, especially now because a lot of our customers are on technology and using a lot of things that are in the cloud or with some of their, contractors. And, so for us to stay competitive, we’ve gotta be able to keep up with that speed and how fast they’re moving now. Right? And before, we couldn’t do that.

Adapting to Industry Speed

Our revenues were, good and they were healthy, but I think that was also just the nature at the time before COVID.

But it took a lot of time, and we we were double in size as far as resources that had to actually touch the project just to get it out the door in a in a fast turnaround time.

So now we’ve we’re less than, right, in overhead, and we’re we’re ahead of schedule, and we’re able to get a lot of this stuff done without everything being last minute and people are rushing around. It was just very chaotic.

There was a lot of confusion in people’s roles because they almost were kind of forced just by the nature of of our work to wear many hats.

And so they always kinda were like, well, I guess I’m gonna go be a project manager now or I’m gonna be this person. I’m gonna be that to kinda keep it going, if somebody wasn’t in the office.

So, definitely, this tool has allowed us to streamline those roles and responsibilities, put put some more structure around people’s roles, create more value in the actual work that they’re doing, because there was a lot of frustration around, well, why am I doing this? It’s already been done before. Well, because it needs to get put into this system now. You know? So there that goes back to the duplication of effort. It was, you know, in order to get something into one of our very archaic systems, we had to do three steps instead of one.

Streamlining Processes and Reducing Errors

Last question.

And it was a lot and there was a lot of manual.

You know, it was it was very manual. So, you know, there was a lot of errors. So that’s another thing to note too is just the, the reduction in in error as far as getting paperwork done and making sure that we’ve got everything, all all ready to go before we actually You know, avoid Uh-huh. Errors.

That’s a huge, cost reduction when it comes reflecting back on our Mhmm. Yeah. Right? So that, that’s that’s a biggie.

And, and, so that’s that’s, you know, great insight. Able to do more with less and, you know, you wanna start a project, you know, looking to eliminate them, you know, staffing.

But when you’re able to do more or we redirect those resources towards other things, towards more value.

So and that also helped, you know, and just over time, what I saw too, right, just from, you know, I call it, like, our more of the employee experience side of it, is now people started feeling like they could actually put a lot more concentration and focus on their actual job responsibilities and really feel like they’re providing value in their role. And therefore, as a result, it it turned into, you know, the morale started to pick up. We started to develop more of a collaborative type culture where it was before, it was no one really talked to anybody. It was just like, did you give me your paper?

Did you give me your paper? Because they didn’t have time to talk. You know, it was just like, you gotta get get the paperwork done, get the paperwork done. So it has it’s you know, from a morale standpoint, it’s it’s completely improved tenfold because people are just feeling like they’re bringing more value to the table, and they’re not doing these mundane, redundant, tasks that they feel like don’t have any value on what they’re doing for the company.

Selecting the Right Vendor

And, we’ll close this out with this question. Let’s spell it because you got more. But, what what were you when you when we started this endeavor, what were you not finding with other resources and vendors that that you found in BidBook?

A lot of it came down to, experience in the construction industry. Construction’s big. Right? There’s a lot of different facets to it. So we wanted someone who really wanted to come in and learn the scaffolding side, and was able to customize a solution that would fit our unique business model.

Because a lot of the other platforms we look at, cost is always a huge one. Right? So we were going to, cut cost if it wasn’t gonna be the right fit, but we certainly had a budget to work within. So that was, you know, a big thing.

And then the second part was just, you know, going in and really understanding, like, what is their level of experience and asking I mean, we we made you do this too, right, by sharing with us some examples of work that, you know, they have done with similar companies. We’d reach out to them and start talking to them and, you know, kind of over time before we met you, Ray, we started, we would interview some of these companies that have worked with that platform and, you know, they would say, oh, no. Don’t don’t go with it, you know, or don’t use that. We don’t like it.

And so we got a lot of feedback from other companies in the industry that were similar to what we that’s similar to, like, what we provide.

And that’s kinda how we started tailoring what kind of a provider we were looking for.

Being well educated in the industry, having been through several, meetings and conversations, I I recall you, having some knowledge about exactly what you were Mhmm. What you’re looking for.

Belka, any other, questions you have for Shay?

Or Shay wants to Melica, you first.

Yeah. Okay.

Just, a tiny, tiny follow-up, since you mentioned that, yeah, you’ve, reached out to other companies, like, so that means, you’ve, actually tried other solutions prior to BidBook. Right?

So, what We didn’t, like, actually start any initiative by just reaching out to other companies and asking what kind of platforms they were they were working on, what they thought of it.

And it was kind of, you know, dual effort here. And then we were doing some research just, you know, on the web to find out, you know, what are some of what are some of those platforms that support the construction and then scaled it down to scaffolding, which was really hard to find. And we just started going through all the feedback. And from there, we were like, hey. Let’s take, you know, kind of the our top three and start interviewing them and just have some dialogue around what they can do and share with them, you know, the the challenges of our business and some of our key business objectives that we were trying to reach in and taking on an endeavor like this. So and then that’s where we kinda stalled.

And, Ray, I don’t know if you remember, but it was, Taylor who found you guys because I had brought him on to kind of help support me in doing some research.

And he ended up finding you guys, and then, we went from there. We did we went through the same process with, CRM of Angelus as well.

Just a a ton of dialogue up upfront, getting some some customers that they’ve worked with in the past, understanding what they did for them, and then we made our decision from there.

I remember, speaking with Taylor, and he was able to extend time to explain your business.

And, Mhmm. I think I had a couple of meetings. They were hour and a half, you know, each or more. And, some organizations that are looking to improve their business process don’t don’t invest that amount of time and or have that level of insight or knowledge.

So, I remember it, it helped us to craft the, realizing that vision that, that you had into make recommendations.

But I think that was Well, I will say before prior to me coming on, Ray, we, Carol was trying to drive, a similar initiative, which was just basically putting everything in the cloud.

Challenges with Cloud Implementation

And a group of guys came in and pitched to her.

This is where it gets a little scary. Right? If you don’t know what you’re what you need and what you’re talking about.

But they came in and said, oh, yeah. We can do it. We’ll we’ll put it on the AWS. We’ll move everything to the cloud. That was our access, program that we created internally. Right?

I remember.

And they said they said no problem. So we spent quite a chunk of change on and time working with this group. That’s true. I can’t even remember the name of them right now, only for nothing to work.

And it was frustration after frustration. There wasn’t a lot of, training. They didn’t spend a lot of time, like, helping us better understand how this platform would work. It was it just seemed like we were getting just a lot of invoices and costs, but we weren’t seeing any output.

We’re not gonna have guys just kinda come in and say, yeah. We’ll move you to the cloud. Like, we really need someone to come in and and work with us to develop the right solution based on our business needs. We needed to spend the time and due diligence to really interview and properly, you know, have discussions around what what are their capabilities and what can they do versus not do, and what could that weight against, you know, our priorities and needs.

Valuing Industry Knowledge

I recall some of the assets that that were presented that you valued was, of course, the the knowledge of the construction marketplace, particularly the the needs of the specialty contractor in that business model.

Having having a package solution and understanding of the processes yet customizable at the same time to be able to cater it to the business model.

And then I guess the an implementation process that that saw it all the way through turn came.

Mhmm.

What we later learned were these guys were actually they had full time jobs, and this was just something they were doing on the side. So the level of attention that they gave us and the detail was very poor simply, I’m I’m assuming, because it was just a second job for them.

So it wasn’t it just didn’t feel like it we were a priority, and that’s where the the communication, you know, was just bad, lack of, I guess, I should say.

Yeah.

It was a bad experience.

Learning from Failed Projects

Sometimes the answers go in places you didn’t expect, but that’s that’s good insight as well. You don’t get many chances to implement, you know, CRM. And when you have a failed project, you’re lucky to to be able to, nip in the bud and and resolve it quickly. Sometimes it creates kind of a brand and a an experience of failure within the employees that the second time you do it, it’s a lot more difficult. Uh-huh.

They couldn’t even tell you what the cloud is. They’re lucky if they’re they got mobile phones working right now. I mean, I don’t mean to sound crazy, but it is kind of like that. So you that trust factor is huge when you’re working with the trades, and they need to be educated.

Effective Communication Strategies

And that was something that you and Steven were great at, was just walking everyone through the thinking and being able to put it in words that wasn’t a lot of tech jargon, but breaking it down into consumable pieces that they could actually understand and then kinda keep the dialogue going. I think that was really, really important, and y’all did a great job on that as well.

Well, on that note, Shay, thank you for, sharing your insights with, Belle and I. Mhmm. It’s great to reflect back on that.

Thank you, Shay.

That was a lot of insight.