Government builds and Buildertrend with Michelle Warren

Tom Houghton:

You’re listening to “The Building Code,” your guide for a better way to run your business. I’m Tom.

Paul Wurth:

Hey Tom, I’m Paul.

Tom Houghton:

Paul, It’s good to hear-

Paul Wurth:

They all know that by now.

Tom Houghton:

Well, maybe this is their first episode. We’re having new people join the podcast all the time. In fact, we were talking about it today on the Buildertrend Online Conference. A lot of new users of Buildertrend out there and they’re just finding out about the podcast. So welcome to the podcast.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, I’m Paul Wurth and that was Tom Houghton.

Tom Houghton:

That’s exactly. Now you… [Crosstalk]

Paul Wurth:

Maybe we can go… We’ll go first names next time to be more informal.

Tom Houghton:

There we go. Well, we’ll make it a little more informal for them.

Paul Wurth:

Hey, what’s the online builders conference?

Tom Houghton:

Buildertrend Online Conference?

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, that one.

Tom Houghton:

That one, yeah. It’s a great conference, it is a free conference, it’s a two-day conference. You can sign up online at buildertrend.com/online-conference. That’s the longest name. You can also find it in the resources tab under buildertrend.com. It’s a great conference for anybody wanting to learn more about Buildertrend. So really excited because obviously during this time of the pandemic, we’ve had a huge increase in people who have joined the Buildertrend family. Which is great, because construction has been deemed essential in a lot of places. So, great to hear that of course. And people are looking for technology because it’s 2020 and it’s very challenging to communicate in the world right now in person. So technology is a great way to do that. So people are signing up, they’re coming to the conference, they’re learning more about Buildertrend and it’s a win, win, win.

Paul Wurth:

It’s free.

Tom Houghton:

It’s free too. That’s the best thing about it.

Paul Wurth:

Level up your knowledge. We’ll throw some links in the show notes.

Tom Houghton:

Perfect. Yes, we will definitely do that.

Paul Wurth:

Tom, I have a question.

Tom Houghton:

Yes.

Paul Wurth:

Tell the audience who we have today.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, yes. [crosstalk].

Paul Wurth:

Please.

Tom Houghton:

We’ve got a great guest joining us today. We’re honored to be joined by Michelle Warren, president of Caliber Construction. They’re based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which I was thinking about this before the show started. New Mexico is probably one of only four States I have not been to. Fun fact.

Paul Wurth:

I was just there.

Tom Houghton:

You were just there? [crosstalk]. You were just there. That’s right. [crosstalk].

Paul Wurth:

So another fun fact. When this pandemic, that we’re still in, started, I was on vacation with my family in Phoenix. And in lieu of flying home, we decided to drive home. And myself, my beautiful wife and four girls in the same van. We went right through Santa Fe, New Mexico. And it was delightful.

Tom Houghton:

There you go. I have to make a trip down there once all this stuff passes.

Paul Wurth:

Delightful area.

Tom Houghton:

Well, I’m sure Michelle, can probably speak to the region a little bit more. So let’s bring her on. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michelle Warren:

No, thank you for having me. And Tom, when you do make it to New Mexico, let me know. The key question here is if you want red or green chili.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, okay. I’ll get some time to think about it. That’s good. That’s given me something to think about. I’ll mull over this decision, very carefully. Awesome, well, thank you so much Michelle, for coming on the podcast today. You have a really unique background. Let’s start there. Let’s talk about your background a little bit. Let’s talk about the company. I know one of the things we also ask our guests is to tell us a little insight into the name of their company. So yours is Caliber Construction. So give us a little background and let’s start there.

Michelle Warren:

Okay, so Caliber Construction… Because I do have a military background, which I’ll share in just a minute. But to me, when you are a caliber of something that is of the highest integrity, the highest skill, the highest knowledge. So that’s where the name caliber came from.

Tom Houghton:

Fantastic.

Michelle Warren:

Yeah, so I’m actually born and raised in West Texas. Got a degree from the University of Texas in history and speech and became a teacher for about a year in Odessa, Texas. And in the midst of that I decided maybe I wanted to travel a little bit more outside of my very small world that I had lived. And the opportunity came up to join the Air Force as an officer. And so I went through boot camp, did my push-ups, took my tests and became an officer in the United States Air Force. My first duty assignment was Tokyo at Yokota Air Base.

Michelle Warren:

So I did get to do some traveling and spent 20 years moving around. I’ve lived coast to coast. I have lived in many States, DC, done some headquarters tours. And just a quick highlight of some of the things that stand out in my 20 years. One, I did a Bosnia tour where I closed down the camps from the Bosnian conflict. And worked with foreign governments in providing them the equipment that had been left by the US National Armys and Guards and Reservists that had been over there. Then I did two back-to-back tours in Iraq where I ran the contract for base support for all of the soldiers that were over there. So base support includes more than just food and a house. It’s all of the logistics that it takes to run a camp. So like in World War II, all of that was done organically by the Department of Defense. And now they contract that out. So I ran those contracts.

Michelle Warren:

And maybe the last two things I’ll share about my 20-year career was, towards the end, I got to be the contracting officer at a Boeing plant out in the State of Washington. And we did the production of the aircraft for the Navy. The P-8A, which is a submarine hunter. So I ran that. So I know a little bit about aircraft, a little bit about Army logistics. And then I rounded out my career as a squadron commander, doing kind of the same type of contracting, but with the subcontractor feeding into the defense industry. And I retired 2012 and then started work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I was their Director of Western Acquisition, where we did everything from, building a boat to building the Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.

Michelle Warren:

I got to do a lot of traveling, into the Pacific America. Similar as lots of time in Hawaii, a couple of trips up in Alaska. So it was… NOAA’s a great agency, I can’t speak enough of its mission. And rounding out my executive career with the federal government. I went to DC for a year and worked for the General Services Administration, where I was the person in charge of about a 1,200-contract portfolio of about $86 billion of professional services. And that is where I decided to make a transition and leave the government service.

Tom Houghton:

Wow, Michelle, you have quite an experience there, and we appreciate you sharing that. And also just have to mention, thank you so much for your service. Everything that you’ve done for our country, we greatly appreciate it. And we also appreciate all of our other listeners out there who have served in the armed forces in any capacity. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for our country. Again, we really appreciate it.

Michelle Warren:

I had a great 20 years. I always say, “I liked every day, but three,” I won’t share those stories. But that’s not a bad gig. To work for someone or some agency or some corporation for 20 years and only not like three days.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, that’s pretty solid. So you had a pretty great long career kind of pretty widespread of what you did. So why construction? Where’s that transition come into and how did you get to New Mexico?

Michelle Warren:

So I come from a set of parents that taught me to be fearless and that I could do anything. And I, working as a federal executive in the government, I had pretty much reached the apex of that part of the industry. And I can run a government contract. I know how to write one, I know how to read one, I know how to administer one. And in the midst of my time in DC, I met someone named Wayne Barry. He’s my business partner, and he is a local developer here in the Albuquerque area. And he mentioned to me that he would love to do government work, but there’s a very high, hard barrier to break into that work. And if I was ever interested in opening a business, he’d love to partner with me.

Michelle Warren:

And the time came where I was like, “You know what? I think I’m moving to Albuquerque.” So I called him in December of 2018 and said, “I’m going to be in Albuquerque on the 1st of April of 2019. Let’s start a business.” And sight-unseen, I bought a house. I’ve never been to New Mexico before. Bought a car because I’ve been living the urban lifestyle. So I had to buy a car and I packed up my stuff and drove out to Albuquerque. It was just a random conversation that got me thinking, I think I can do that. Let’s try.

Tom Houghton:

I love that. You just say, “Hey, I’m going to take a risk, but it’s going to be worth it. You’re going to make it work.” So that’s fantastic. So tell us a little bit about the projects that you do at Caliber Construction then.

Michelle Warren:

Okay, so Caliber Construction really does target only federal construction projects. And one of the reasons for that is, I am the president, I own 51% of the company, so that makes it a woman-owned business. But along with that, I am also a 70% disabled veteran. So we also have the service disabled veteran tag to this business. Which gives us… Some times it gives us a little bit more of a push towards getting in a contract. Right? There are preferences given, especially to veteran and women owned. In the construction business, it’s kind of not as significant as maybe a minority, but it’s still good. Right? Businesses is good. So our contracts are… We started… We kind of incorporated, started getting our name out in Albuquerque, in April of 2019. I spent the summer doing a lot of handshaking, hobnobbing, lots of socializing, a lot of networking. And ended up becoming a subcontractor to the prime contractor who does the operations and maintenance at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Michelle Warren:

And we did a very small kind of remodel of office space area for them, and they liked our work. They liked how we kept our site clean. They liked the site superintendent that we had hired. Everything we touched was gold. We couldn’t have asked for a better first project. And that led to our second project, which was similar in nature, but a little more expansive in that we had communications and electrical and a very significant amount of HVAC. And then that led to the Air Force, looking at us to become a prime contractor with them. And we are now in the midst of building, what’s called a SCIF. And that is sensitive compartmentalized information facility. Secret stuff happens.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, that sounds like very important work you’re doing. So that’s pretty cool.

Michelle Warren:

Interesting like every single day… What I have found is every single day in construction, I learned something which makes it a great day and it’s never the same. Not one day has been the same.

Tom Houghton:

It’s good to keep things interesting and new and different. Speaking of different, what kind of challenges have you been facing with this new and different pandemic that we’ve been facing?

Michelle Warren:

Pretty difficult to maintain a sanitized construction site?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Michelle Warren:

It just is. So immediately I bought a lot of bleach. I mean a lot of bleach. And my site superintendent Kurt Sullivan, couldn’t ask for the better guy to have done this. He instituted a process where if you come into our job site, you basically sanitize yourself and your entire tool set. Anything that goes into our space, get sanitized. And then in the midst of the project, every hour, they take 10 to 15 minutes to re-sanitize. I found unique ways to source bleach and hand sanitizer. Right? Because at the beginning, in March and April, you couldn’t find it anywhere. So we’ve done a lot of support with our local distilleries and then I added a whole bunch of lavender oil. So we weren’t smelling like Vodka. So, yeah.

Tom Houghton:

Wow.

Michelle Warren:

I mean just sorting the materials you need to keep it sanitized. And I’m not going to say it, because I don’t want to jinx us. But we are doing really well with keeping the health of not just our workers. We have a lot of subcontractors who come in and out of our space and it’s been appreciated and noted by those companies how serious we’re taking it.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, that’s kind of… One of my questions I want to ask is, if you’re just doing government work. Right? That’s your niche. Does that come with more regulation? Maybe with COVID, but even outside of that, is that part of the cost of doing business in your area?

Michelle Warren:

It is. It is absolutely. But it’s something that I understand very well. So to me, it’s like a normal day, but correct. So we use Department of Labor wages. You have to keep your contract files in a certain way. You have to have auditable… Auditable financials. And In response to COVID, there are certain things that can and cannot happen on base. One example would be, if you travel outside the state, you don’t get to go to base for two weeks. While you quarantine. So nobody in my crew was taking summer vacation. Just kind of happens that way. Right? So, there’s an exorbitant amount of clauses rules that are… It comes, what’s called the Federal Acquisition Regulation or the FAR. And it’s about a book that’s about four inches thick and it’s the really thin sheets of material and every single page has something important on it.

Tom Houghton:

Wow.

Paul Wurth:

We don’t often do this, but that really has got to lend itself well to like Buildertrend. Right? If you have somebody with that type of oversight that’s required, that you’re building for. You’ve got to have a platform where everybody’s going, “well, here’s the documents, here’s the time cards, here’s what we are doing.” Right?

Michelle Warren:

That is exactly why we chose Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Good.

Michelle Warren:

So beyond just as a company, how great Buildertrend is in running your day-to-day operations. The platform, the historical keeping of documents, the change management that it allows and the tracking of that and acknowledge management. All of those things incorporated, is one of the reasons why Buildertrend was our choice.

Tom Houghton:

That’s great. And so, do you have then a contact in the government that you’ve led in to Buildertrend in a limited degree or your subs, your vendors yet? I mean, you guys are fairly new to the product. Is that right? I mean…

Michelle Warren:

So, April of ‘19. So our business started in April of ‘19, but Buildertrend… We had a few jobs and it was very apparent to us, we needed something.

Paul Wurth:

Right.

Michelle Warren:

Correct. We started with Buildertrend in March of 2020.

Paul Wurth:

Great. [crosstalk].

Michelle Warren:

And we do have… We allow access to all of our owners as Buildertrend calls them and our subcontractors. There are some connectivity issues between the government and Buildertrend. Because of the firewalls that the government has in their IT world. So the IT on the customer side is limited and they do not access Buildertrend on a regular basis because they can’t get to it. They certainly have the option to access if they were to choose to not log in through their Air Force, email. Our subcontractors are using it by the minute, every single day and are sold on it as are we.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great.

Tom Houghton:

That is great to hear. I know you’ve spoken previously with one member of our team about a new feature that we have just talked about on the podcast. A couple episodes ago, our Work in Progress feature. And I was curious to hear kind of from you, how that has helped your business and how that’s helping your process a little bit.

Michelle Warren:

I love it. So having come from the other side, we had WIP reports run every week. Right? Work in progress. Here’s your work, here’s the status of the work, this is what it’s going to take to finish the work. Who doesn’t love that kind of information. It helps you make decisions. What Buildertrend WIP does, is it provides it in one snapshot. All of my projects. So I can push a button and look at the… Currently we have six jobs going on. I can look at all six jobs. Where are they? Where are they in schedule? Like look at the variances. Because I don’t… I’m not the one running the job day-to-day. So I may not be intimately familiar with the details. But being able to look at where the project is, in the process, it has helped me immensely, to focus my attention to where I need to narrow in.

Tom Houghton:

So based on that data that you’re getting from the Work in Progress report. How are you making adjustments? Is that something that you’re checking daily and having to call up people and say, “hey, we’re… This is where we’re at” or is it a weekly basis? What’s that look like for your team?

Michelle Warren:

So different jobs require different oversight. And what I will say is right now, we really liked the estimating part of Buildertrend. So building out that estimate and then that creates your budget and then looking at the variances between that budget. So I can monitor over time. For example, the SCIF project that we’re working out at base, is a six-day week, 12-hour day job. Which could eat up a lot of labor costs. Right? I mean, it could really eat into any kind of profit that the bid went in on. So being able to monitor the variance of, “why do I have 80 hours of overtime,” for example. As opposed to when, “I thought I was budgeting enough overtime at 20.” Right? So it does. One of the great things about the WIP is it’s real time information. It’s not a week later. It’s not, “Oh, let me go make a phone call, have that person sit down and figure out why, create a spreadsheet, send me an email.” No, I like it from my phone. I can hit a button and look at it. That’s great.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, the Work in Progress before was one of the most anticipated reports we’ve had. I mean, since I’ve been here, people have been talking about that. And when we released it, I think it’s one of the most popular releases we’ve ever had in terms of people viewing it and using it. So you can find that in your reporting tab. Right, Michelle?

Michelle Warren:

Correct.

Paul Wurth:

Okay.

Michelle Warren:

That’s correct. And you can make it a favorite. Right?

Paul Wurth:

Good tip.

Michelle Warren:

It’s really one of the only… You have a whole slew of reports. There is a thousand different ways to look at the data. You can top it, slice it, dice it, run your numbers a million different ways, but that WIP report provides it all in one glance.

Paul Wurth:

That’s sold.

Tom Houghton:

I’ll take it. Again, you can find that in your reporting tab. And I guess for those listeners out there who might be wanting to implement some more financial reporting, why would you recommend this report specifically? Or the other ones that you can find in there.

Michelle Warren:

If you’re running a company and you are not paying attention to your financials on a daily basis, eventually that’s going to catch up with you. So again, it goes back to that, I don’t need to know every single detail, every single day. But what I do need to know is where do I need to focus today? So running that report and not just that report, but the estimate to budget report. Or, “hey, the WIP report even tells me my invoices.” Right? “How much is outstanding?” Right? “Do I need to call and see why the government hasn’t paid me in a timely manner?” Those types of things. So really that one snapshot does allow you to set up where you want to spend your personal time in running your business. Right? Because my time is a resource that helps grow the business.

Tom Houghton:

Absolutely. What I’d like to do is, I’d like to just end on a note about how Buildertrend has improved, maybe the way that you’ve managed projects. Obviously working outside of that prior to, obviously you just starting the company a couple of years ago, now having that… Is in your process, what’s that been like for your day to day, outside of the reporting tool, what other features do you love and use?

Michelle Warren:

There are lots of things that make Buildertrend valuable to my company and maybe I’ll share the top three. The first one is it creates a platform where a community within my business feels connected, valued and a part of the actual decision-making process. Right? It allows everyone within the company from up and down the chain, to access information, to provide information and to see what all is going on. The ability to limit or give full access or, “hey, I know this person needs this.” The kind of information that this person needs this and that, kind of information. The agility of the program and how you can share information has created a collaborative effort in my company. Caliber Construction, we’re small, we have nine people total and it works amazing with those nine. And then the… Like literally, up to a hundred subcontractors we have that are part of our work effort as well.

Michelle Warren:

So one, the collaborative community effort. Two, the real-time information allows good business decisions to be made. I can look at labor, I can look at costs, I can look at schedule. Right? Those are the three footstools of any project. And it definitely gives you an opportunity to adjust as the project goes on. Right? And you’re getting timely information when you’re making those decisions. And then the third thing that I think is outstanding about Buildertrend and the financial reports and why it’s so important to a business is, for us in particular, the program captures everything. You can have your documents in there, you can have your safety stuff in there, you can… Your estimates can go from big, overarching big lots, down to, 10 nails for this wall and 50 screws for that wall over there. I mean, your flexibility within the program of how you house information and how you access information has been phenomenal for us.

Tom Houghton:

That’s great to hear. I love that your two, you got those organized points of, the collaboration that has helped your team, the real-time updates and then the flexibility, really that program has offered you.

Michelle Warren:

You made those… You made my little speech, just those three words. That is key. I think those are the notes I’m going to take down. Yeah, collaborative, flexibility, real time.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, I mean, that’s so great to hear from you. And I know it helps other listeners to help kind of pinpoint and look for those successes in their business. Because obviously sometimes when you’re working, you’re just so focused on kind of what you’re working on. You kind of lose track of it also. It’s nice to kind of take a step back and realize like, “Oh yeah, this is helping because it’s helping us in so many different ways here.” So it’s really great to hear how it’s helped your business and helped too, with the, working with the federal side of the government and handling the government contracts and things like that. That’s also something that we don’t frequently talk about on this podcast. So we appreciate you coming on and kind of sharing your expertise and your knowledge in this area, because it is a very structured area. And it’s nice to hear that the program does help you with that.

Michelle Warren:

Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Tom Houghton:

Yes, thank you so much for coming on and again, we wish you continued success in your business. If you want to find out more about Caliber Construction, check the show notes. I will put a link into their website there. You can find the show notes at buildertrend.com/podcast. Thank you so much, Michelle.

Michelle Warren:

Thank you.

Tom Houghton:

Love what you don’t forget to rate and subscribe to our podcast. So you can hear from more guests that will benefit your business. Also, please check out our show notes page for more information on what we discussed on this episode. You can find it at buildertrend.com/podcast. Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next time on “The Building Code.”