Spruce Homes: How this builder can take on more projects with construction tech

Their Story: Organizing schedules to assist rapid growth

“It felt like we went from managing two to three projects to six to nine projects in just a matter of months, which although was great for our business, it made it very difficult to effectively coordinate schedules with our team and subcontractors,” Brad said. “We looked into a few different construction project management options, but ultimately decided to work with Buildertrend thanks to its streamlined scheduling tool and customer support team.”

Their goal: Getting everyone on board

Brad quickly trained his team as well as 90% of their contractors on how to use the calendar and scheduling tools, so they could work on project deliverables independently, which allowed him to focus on expanding the business.

Spruce Homes’ business continued to scale throughout 2018, making Buildertrend’s scheduling feature an essential tool for managing the company’s growing team, subcontractors, project deadlines and more.

Their solution: Going “all-in” with Buildertrend’s all-in-one platform

Brad always knew there were more features to the Buildertrend platform than just scheduling, but it wasn’t until he attended Buildertrend University, the company’s monthly two-day educational conference, in April 2019 that he decided to go “all-in.”

While attending the event at the company’s Omaha headquarters, Brad was able to sit in on more than a dozen educational classes, have one-on-one training sessions with Spruce Homes’ Buildertrend coach and network with other builders using the platform. He then chose to fully integrate the company’s financials, estimates, job costing, purchase orders and customer management processes into the platform.

“Although I was content with just using the scheduling tool, attending Buildertrend University really opened my eyes to how the platform could be used throughout day-to-day project management across business functions.”

The Spruce Homes team now relies on Buildertrend for all aspects of their business and can’t imagine how they’d be able to manage the number of projects they currently have without Buildertrend.

“If you told me a year and a half ago that we’d be completing 15-20 projects annually, I wouldn’t have known how we would manage them. We simply wouldn’t be able to handle our current volume of projects without Buildertrend,” he said.

Brad said one of the biggest benefits of the platform is that it streamlines the bid estimate process.

“Our old process for bid estimates and resulting to-dos required me to do manual data entry between my email and an Excel spreadsheet,” he said.  “Not only was this time intensive, but it made it difficult for me to delegate tasks to my team since so many of the details were living only in my email. With Buildertrend’s Bids and To-Do’s features, all information is organized within the platform, which makes it easy for anyone on the team to access, track updates, and delegate tasks at any given time.”

One feature Brad did not expect to be so valuable was the Customer Portal, which gives homeowners direct access to project updates in real-time.

“I was surprised by how much our customers have enjoyed knowing the exact time of when we’re putting in tiles or installing windows, which we’re able to provide by sharing the Schedule,” Brad said. “Offering so much visibility into projects makes homeowners feel 100% involved in the process, and it has become a real differentiator for our business.”

Their success: Adding efficiency with construction software

Overall, thanks to Buildertrend, Spruce Homes is more organized and efficient, which means the company can continue on its positive growth trajectory and take on more projects at the same time.

When asked if he would recommend the platform to other residential construction businesses, Brad quickly replied, “as long as they aren’t my competitors, I’d say to absolutely invest in Buildertrend.”

Read more about our construction case studies here.