Change management 101: Overcoming growing pains to find success

Zach Wojtowicz:

What’s up everybody? I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

And I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And it’s “The Building Code.” We’re back.

Charley Burtwistle:

We are back.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You got the hat on today.

Charley Burtwistle:

I got the hat on. So, fun … I already started. I’ll share it. A lot of times what’s required of us, which they don’t require much of us, but required of us, is to show up wearing Buildertrend gear.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Swagged out.

Charley Burtwistle:

And I did not do that today, and I learned that John, our producer, has a drawer of Buildertrend stuff that he keeps here just for me. Because this is like fifth or sixth time I’ve forgotten stuff.

Zach Wojtowicz:

A Charley drawer?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Dude, this is big time.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. So, if you’re not watching on YouTube right now, you can switch over there, and you can see my beautiful “The Building Code” hat, which I have one of. I have a polo. I have all sorts of stuff. I just didn’t wear it today.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You can also buy merch on the store.

Charley Burtwistle:

You can, absolutely. But enough about us. As always, today we have a couple fantastic guests, Dan Green and Matt Simpson out at Amazing Outdoor Co., from Virginia, and they are a pool, outdoor living space, patio furniture, everything that you could ever want. I’m doing a disservice trying to describe what they do because I was looking at their website before we came on here and I was blown away. I would pay an infinite amount of money to live in any of these houses that have these backyards. So, instead of me trying to describe it, let’s go ahead and get them in here and we’ll let them tell you for themselves.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Matt, Dan, welcome to “The Building Code.” We’re so excited to have you here today. A little two-for-one special. It’s going to be a good conversation. How are you?

Dan Green:

Great. Thanks for having us.

Matt Simpson:

Good. How are you doing?

Zach Wojtowicz:

I always like to ask, and we kind of got a little hint, first time on a podcast or industry veterans here?

Matt Simpson:

I’d say a little bit of both.

Zach Wojtowicz:

A little bit of both.

Dan Green:

Yeah, I think that’s our first time on this specific industry podcast.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Well, we’d like to make it our personal mission to make sure it’s your favorite industry podcast.

Charley Burtwistle:

The best experience. Yeah, that’s what we really pride ourselves in.

Zach Wojtowicz:

So, I want that review after, at the end, like, all right, give it to us straight. Let’s see what happens.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, we’re looking to grow and improve.

Zach Wojtowicz:

What if our guests just roasted us?

Charley Burtwistle:

I wish they would.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

It’s called constructive criticisms, Zach, and we’d learn from it and we’d grow from it.

Dan Green:

Roasted you on the podcast or the review afterwards?

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, we air it. We just like full blown … Yeah, you asked me at the beginning of this interview if this was good. I got to tell you I hated it. Let’s not do that. Let’s talk about you two. Let’s start with you, Matt. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Matt Simpson:

Yeah, so I grew up here in Purcellville, started a landscaping company right out of high school, that focused mostly on lawn maintenance. Kind of grew that into a landscape construction company over a period of about six years leading up to 2019 when I met Dan. And then we closed down my former company and launched Amazing Outdoors, which is what we’re operating today, obviously. And we specialize in swimming pools, pool houses, decks, patios, anything in the backyard, outdoor living spaces we could take care of. So, that’s kind of the high-level overview. I’m sure we’ll kind of dig deeper as we go through.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s right. To make it the best podcast experience possible.

Matt Simpson:

That’s right, that’s right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Dan, how about you? Tell us a little bit about your background.

Dan Green:

So, my background is acting a little bit unique. I have zero experience in the construction industry and even though we’ve been doing Amazing Outdoors for about four years now, I still kind of don’t know what I’m doing.

Charley Burtwistle:

Fake until you make it.

Dan Green:

Like Matt all alluded to, we met because he built my pool. So my background, I’m actually a college professor. I teach organizational psychology at doctoral level and business classes for University of Maryland, Jack Welch Management Institute, a couple other colleges here on the East Coast. And I was a former customer of Matt’s, and I saw that the talent that he had when it came to building pools, it’s kind of like the chef that wants to start his own restaurant, the mechanic that wants to start his own garage. So, I figured together he can handle the technical side of it, I can do the business and the marketing and the background side of it and hopefully Voltron this thing into a good company, which I think it is so far.

Zach Wojtowicz:

First Voltron reference on the Building Code.

Charley Burtwistle:

Check that off.

Dan Green:

That can’t be the first one. I’m trying to date how old you guys are.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Oddly enough, we track the stats and that was the first. We had a category for Voltron references. We just checked the box. That’s amazing. Also, I love the organizational psychology and landscaping, and that’s peanut butter and jelly. I mean that lines up.

Charley Burtwistle:

I was going to say

Dan Green:

Good combo. I think we’re starting something new here. That’s going to be the formula going forward.

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, it’s going to be a fun podcast and Zach and I always learn a ton. This is the best job in the world. We just get to ask questions that we’re curious about.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Noted construction pros as well, obviously. You’re actually a very good company. We don’t have construction background either.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, this will be a good one. So, tell us a little bit more about the company specifically. You said 2019 was when you met or when you founded the company?

Dan Green:

Yeah, so Matt’s former company was called Amazing Earth, and he’d been doing that for a better part of a decade, mainly focusing on landscapes and landscape design. Amazing Outdoors was formed to be that holistic offering to customers here in the Washington, D.C. area. So, things such as expanding the service model, past landscape architecture and design to swimming pools, patios, pavilions, outdoor living spaces. If you’re familiar with our area, people around here can be, let’s say, demanding with their backyard spaces. So, we want it to be a one-stop shop that offered all of those things. The reason is because when I was looking for my backyard, I found it very frustrating to have to almost be a general contractor myself. I had to find a pool guy, I had to find the guy to do the masonry, the outdoor kitchens, things like that. So, when we formed this, we wanted to be that one-stop shop to serve as a highly custom design build firm here in the D.C. area.

Charley Burtwistle:

That sounds awesome. How many clients are you guys taking on a yearly basis?

Matt Simpson:

Too many. Too many right now.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, the pool, it’s booming?

Matt Simpson:

We’re coming off the rush from COVID when the outdoor living market just kind of went crazy. And yeah, we’re still finishing up a lot of those projects, but ideally it would be somewhere around 20 tops.

Zach Wojtowicz:

20 a year?

Matt Simpson:

Yeah. And those projects range anywhere from $300 to almost a million dollars, $300,000 to a million dollars.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, maybe talk us through, you’d mentioned the COVID rush and the outdoor living space being a new company or at least a new partnership between you two and then instantly being thrown into that. Talk us through that experience. I know the demand was just crazy at the time. How did you go about choosing your projects and ensuring it was able to be done and scalable? And maybe just walk us through that frenzy as I’m sure it was.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m just going to call you guys business geniuses. You saw it coming. You’re like, you know what, we got to get this outdoor living thing because we’ve got a pandemic next year.

Matt Simpson:

We actually thought it was going to be the opposite when the pandemic hit.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Dan Green:

Yeah, we actually, when the pandemic first hit, we had, I remember, quite a few customers who had actually said that had paused the conversation with us when they said “We don’t know what’s going to happen with this whole pandemic thing.” So, at first we saw a huge dip, right?

Matt Simpson:

It wasn’t long though.

Dan Green:

It wasn’t long though. I think then once people started to realize like, “Hey, I’m going to be stuck in my house for who knows how long,” that’s when we saw the explosion.

I think with that explosion came a little bit of challenge and a little bit of growing pains. We certainly have stretch marks from growing as fast as we did, but I think the way that we were able to successfully navigate through this is to really show that we were a trustworthy company. So, our marketing, and now we’re pivoting towards marketing strategy, but here’s where it’s relevant. Our marketing strategy was to make sure that we came across as a very trustworthy company. We’re from here, we raise our kids here. They go to school here. Because one thing we saw that happened during COVID, is all of these fly-by-night pool companies popped up. So, what became the selling, I think, the differentiator for us was being able to show that we weren’t a fly-by-night company, even though we were just formed a year before. So, we had a little bit of that challenge, but I think we got through it and I think that’s what helped us grow probably faster than we would’ve liked, but had it got us to the point to where we’re today.

Zach Wojtowicz:

This is the fun part, this one, we can decide what direction. Do we stay to the script or do we jump off? Okay.

Charley Burtwistle:

Always jump off.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Always jump off. Sorry, Chelsea, again. So, that’s really interesting. There’s a lot of cool stuff I want to pull on there. Let’s talk about some of those growing pains a little bit. Let’s make you relive your awkward teenage years. So, what were those pain points? Were you having to hire more people? Was it a labor issue, and you just couldn’t keep up with the bandwidth? I kind of have this vision of that stereotypical scene from a movie where they make the discovery, and they weren’t sure it’s going to work, and all of a sudden he starts getting phone calls and now they’re rich. What was your plate like? You know what I’m talking about? What was it like?

Matt Simpson:

I would say one of the worst growing pains was definitely having to scale our team really quickly and not really allowing ourselves enough time to vet those individuals out to make sure they were the right fit for our team. The demand was so heavy and the phone calls, as you just alluded to, were coming in nonstop. So, we added salesmen, service folks, marketing people internally that at the end of the day were staff that we really didn’t have enough time to check them out to make sure everything was legit. So, I think that was probably one of the worst and most expensive mistakes we made. What do you think, Dan?

Dan Green:

Yeah, I think so. Like you said, there was a rush for talent. To give you an example, I grew up in the D.C. area, but I lived in Austin, Texas for about 10 years. And what you find there, I don’t know if you’re familiar, this could be there, too, is you’ll see these neighborhoods that are half built, right? Because what happens is all the trades in the neighborhood, they get offered 50 cents more an hour to go work somewhere else, and everybody just gets up and leaves. So, you kind of had a similar labor rush here in the area where people, we didn’t have time to check them out, and they’re demanding high salaries, and we just bring them on because we have all this work. So, that was, I would say probably a little bit more vetting for people.

But then there’s the technology side of it, right. Here’s where Buildertrend comes in. Is this idea that we were able to grow. We didn’t have a very strong CRM at the time. It wasn’t very robust and it didn’t have the ability to kind of grow with us and manage our customer relationships. So, we were doing things on Excel sheets, napkins, I’m sure you guys have heard all this crap before to where we’re sending out emails, we’re dating emails, we’re doing online Google sheets, and it just didn’t work. So, we actually found that a lot of our technology that we had and a lot of our talent actually slowed down our growth, which may have been a good thing, but it definitely made us focus a lot more internally, taking away attention from our highly demanding customer base. So, I’d say it was the talent and the technology that really hurt us during the growth period.

Matt Simpson:

That was the case on the internal team, but we also struggled with field help as well. Anywhere from carpenters to electricians to plumbers to anything. I mean any of the trades, being a full-service outdoor living contractor, you kind of pull from each of those trades. And once people realized May of 2020, I guess, that they were going to be stuck at home for the foreseeable future, all of those home projects began, and so every trade and every subcontractor was booked out for months and that wasn’t something we were used to. So, when we sold a lot of our work, we promised faster delivery times than based off of availability pre-COVID and then found out that that really wasn’t the case. So, that was a big battle we fought until pretty much now.

Charley Burtwistle:

And I was looking at your website right before this, I saw you guys just got a nice Best Place to Work award, which is awesome. So, clearly you grew through some of those pains pretty well and have landed in a good spot. What is kind of the current team structure and how much you kind of have in-house versus how much are you working with the subcontractors and trades?

Dan Green:

You want me to?

Matt Simpson:

I can take that one.

Dan Green:

Yeah.

Matt Simpson:

So, I kind of lead operations and sales. They do a little bit of both. Dan, like he mentioned, does a lot of the backend stuff, the marketing, the business side of things. And then we have two project managers on staff, one field operations guy, and then about 12 to 15 field staff that are on payroll. The rest of our stuff is subcontracted out, whether that be the gunite, the steel, the plumbing, carpentry, those trades are all subcontracted. So, our structure hasn’t really changed. Our numbers on the internal side of things have dropped because we just realized we don’t really need that bloat that we thought we needed when that demand was at an all-time high.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That makes a lot of sense. I had a thought, too, around you talk about spreadsheets and using tools. The idea is you have this hyper-growth, but, I call it the friction, can have this effect that if you’re not putting the WD-40 in the right places, it’s even more painful. You get razor burn essentially. A lot of analogies in here, too.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, you’re going great. We got analogies, movie quotes.

Zach Wojtowicz:

In a lot of ways. That’s what I do at Buildertrend. I am kind of the backend. I help reduce friction, so that we can grow, too. So, it’s really hard to get it right. It’s really easy then to fall into your habits, too. It’s like when something isn’t working, it’s like what can I do that’s super-fast, easy, but it doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t set you up for long-term success. So it seems like you’ve recognized you need those processes in order to maintain this velocity, right?

Matt Simpson:

Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely hard to implement those processes though when you’re going 150 miles an hour, we’ve found. But we’re getting there slowly.

Zach Wojtowicz:

What have you learned? Yeah, where are you at now in that process?

Dan Green:

I think we are not, well, according to our Buildertrend account manager, I think Nick, I think we use Buildertrend very well. There’s some features that we don’t use.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, it sounds like you did an account review recently.

Dan Green:

What’s that?

Zach Wojtowicz:

You did a little account review recently saw some of our data in the background.

Dan Green:

Yeah. Yeah, we saw we had an account review last month.

I think we use a good amount of the features. I think we’ve finally gotten the tool to the point to where, okay, certain things work better outside of the tool. Most things work better inside of the tool. I think a lot of it, too, was on the internal adoption with our team. So, you have to remember within this particular industry you’re dealing with, even though they work internally for us, you’re still dealing with guys that were former plumbers and former carpenters and things like that.

So, our challenge was, and we previewed a whole bunch of different tools before we settled on Buildertrend. As you know, there’s a lot out there. The reason we settled on Buildertrend was one, we liked the support, we liked the idea when Shelby came out and did a training with us, and I’m sure she probably still has battle scars from that one, but it was high-level enough to where it could handle, technically, all of the demands that we had during our sales and production process. But then it was still intuitive enough to where our in-house guys, like the plumbers, the carpenters that are working internally for us now, don’t just see some massive IT system that they’re never going to log into. So, I think that’s been our biggest hurdle is getting our internal guys to adopt it. And I’m pretty sure we’re pretty close. We’re using it pretty well, I think.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. So, a question I always like to ask, and this is literally 90% of Zach’s job is figuring this out, but I’m always curious about what the correct order of adopting Buildertrend is. And you guys, you’d mentioned when you first alluded to it, you were trying to figure out the CRM, which I’m sure was very high-priority with all the incoming leads that you had in the client relationship and management sides. But as you mentioned as a comprehensive program, there’s lots of different avenues you can go down and a lot of different features you can use. What was kind of your order? And then two, it sounds like you both have incredible growth mindsets of like, “Okay, we may not need this, but we know we will need this.” So, how do you kind of choose of when you want to expand usage, what you want to tackle next, and just the end-to-end customer journey?

Dan Green:

Yeah, I think I mentioned earlier on the call that I’m a college professor. One of the classes I teach is change management, specifically with adopting new technology. So, relevant to what we’re talking about, right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh my god.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Well, if you ever need a job at Buildertrend …

Dan Green:

There’s something you’ve probably heard or talked to former guests, there’s something called the WIIFM. It’s an acronym that stands what’s in it for me. But I think the danger with a lot of big software implementations is the individual end-user will say “Okay, I understand this is great, has all these features, but what’s actually in it for me?” So, one of the biggest issues we had, the first thing we tackled, and this makes us sound very bratty when we say this, but we just had so many leads we couldn’t keep up with them. Leads are coming out of everywhere and we can’t even call people back.

So, the WIIFM, what’s in it for us, said right away we wanted something that was the really good lead management system. The first thing we previewed when we looked at all the different systems is how it managed the leads. I really liked how Buildertrend did the whole left side of the house thing. Lead opportunities come in, you could tag them, assign everything. So, what we did is we identified our pain points, which for us was being able to capture and qualify all of the leads. And then we just started with that first. We actually only did left side of the house for probably a few months. I think it was probably a couple months first. So, the way that we rolled it out, whether it was a traditional rollout or not, was we focused on the reasons why we specifically were looking for a new … Because we had another system, which I won’t name, that just wasn’t cutting it.

Charley Burtwistle:

Avoiding cease and desist letters. So, that’s good.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’ll talk about it once we stop recording.

Dan Green:

So we just focused on the quick challenges it would solve for us, which at the time were we had leads coming out of everywhere, so we have to find a way to capture them.

Matt Simpson:

I will say in our adoption process, we were a little late. I think we had Shelby come out the 1st of March maybe.

Dan Green:

Yeah, I think it was in March.

Matt Simpson:

And our busy season starts March 15th. And so it was just late. We went to IBS and you guys were, I guess, which was in the middle of February, and you guys were coming out two weeks later. So, yeah, it was definitely early March, and it was way too late. So, when we got into that heavy selling season, we were able to understand the leads, but writing proposals was a killer. I do a lot of that and we had another guy that did it as well, and the turnaround time was just taking too long. And so that, I will say for someone that has a very seasonal business, definitely time. That was definitely a big dagger for us, I think.

Dan Green:

Yeah, it was trying to build a plane as we fly it.

Matt Simpson:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wow. Great analogy. Much better than whatever Zach said like five minutes ago.

Dan Green:

I got to beat Zach’s analogy. I’m pulling deep here.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We need to talk to Shelby.

Charley Burtwistle:

Is this hurting or helping the review?

Zach Wojtowicz:

I need to talk to Shelby.

Charley Burtwistle:

Shelby reports to me now.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Front row seat. So, you know what? I’ll get your review and let you know what she says depending on how the outcomes of this meeting goes. No, Shelby’s a rockstar.

Matt Simpson:

Is she still doing the onsite stuff?

Charley Burtwistle:

So, she just moved out of it. So, she actually is on our customer enablement team, which is like group webinars kind of leaning towards a little towards community is kind of what we’re working towards. So, she does BTU and helps facilitate that. Our webinars, we got some other cool things planned for that team as well. But yeah, she’s great.

Matt Simpson:

Cool.

Charley Burtwistle:

Glad to hear you had a great experience. How long were you guys using Buildertrend before you did an onsite?

Matt Simpson:

Oh gosh, I think we signed up in November.

Dan Green:

I say November.

Matt Simpson:

And then we were like, what is this beast? And then we kind of realized there was more options out there of how to get this thing implemented. And that’s when Dan and I were like, yeah, we need some onsite help.

Dan Green:

We did all of the, I went through, I signed everyone training, okay, you do the sales path, you do the project management path, and I think everyone did it. And they’re like, I still don’t really know. Because again, how do you carve out time in a 10, 12-hour workday where you got to be on customer site at 7:00 a.m. Some of our guys are project management, laying stone, whatever they have to do during the day and then come down, switch modes and do training for an hour. So, I think it was tough in the beginning. That’s why we had to have Shelby come out and say “Hey, lock the doors, don’t schedule anything. Let’s just focus on this.” And then we were able to get it going pretty good after that. But before that I think it was a little slow, a little slow.

Charley Burtwistle:

And we hear that.

Matt Simpson:

Also, when you talk about building the plane as you fly it. We had Shelby come out in the first part of March. We had just hired, I don’t know what, three or four new staff members January one.

Zach Wojtowicz:

The Lions den.

Matt Simpson:

So, onboarding, this new CRM, we’re teaching employees that were not even from the industry, what we actually do.

Dan Green:

Brand new office.

Matt Simpson:

Brand new office. It was a lot at once.

Dan Green:

We’re masochists. We like to inflict maximum pain on ourselves.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Is that the psychology in you? I know how much they can tolerate. They’re not even close to their breaking points.

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, now I want to know what’s next. So, it sounds like you guys went through hell and back. You came out on the other side, are better for it, have implemented a solution, have processes in place, won Best Place to Work. What’s the next goal for you guys other than doing less jobs, which is the best problem in the world to have?

Matt Simpson:

I think that’s really it. I mean, just slow down and focus on the customer experience more than anything. Because I think Dan and I’ll both admit that a lot of our customers were probably not given the experience they deserve during the rush and all of this growth that we went through. So, I think our goal for 2024 is slow down, focus on delivering projects on time, sticking to our schedule, actually being able to share a good schedule. That’s one of the areas of Buildertrend that we’re not using nearly as much as we should. I think that would be my stance. And we’re looking to add some offerings, too, that are a little more streamlined and not as custom, especially with the headwinds in the economy. We’re looking at doing some stuff that’s a little more affordable, still gets you that backyard experience with a swimming pool, patio, all that stuff, but a lot faster and a lot cheaper. So, that’s kind of where we’re headed in my opinion. Dan, you can build on that.

Dan Green:

Yeah, I mean, obviously, being in the psychology space, my focus has always been on that customer journey. And if you were to map it’d look like a nice U, right? They’re very happy in the beginning, they’re very happy in the end because they have their product, but in between they have this dip in satisfaction. They hate you, you’re missing deadlines, you’re doing all this stuff. And in our particular area, we’ve actually found that customers, they don’t really care too much when you miss deadlines because they understand the work is sequential, there’s weather delays and things like that. They just want to be communicated with. Right? Back in my older couples counseling days, I used to say, “Communication is lubrication.” So, you can use that. You can use that line. And so, one of the things that we’re going to try to do …

Charley Burtwistle:

That might be an HR violation.

Dan Green:

Do a little bit more, is to make sure that we use the Customer Portal on Buildertrend and really communicate with them, have it all documented one place. Because right now our PM’s getting texts, he’s getting emails. I have to go and find and say, what’s going on? We have to find the status. So, I think doing a little bit less, focusing on the customer journey and really using the customer portal side of Buildertrend to make that a better experience for them for because sometimes we can be in someone’s yard, backyard for almost a year if they have a million-dollar job. So, communicating along the way is probably going to be my focus or our focus for the next year.

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Matt Simpson:

It just makes everybody’s life easier.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so funny, Zach and I look to each other when you said that. Zach, how many times would you say you said the words “customer journey” just today?

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, that’s all I think about.

Charley Burtwistle:

All I think about.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I just dream about it.

Dan Green:

I thought you were going to say, how many times have you looked at each other and said, lubrication?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I think we’re at one today.

Dan Green:

Wait, cut that.

Charley Burtwistle:

But today’s been a slow day.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You hit the Voltron checklist and then lubrication, that was also on the bingo sheet. That’s really amazing. You were able to do that.

Charley Burtwistle:

But the U experience that you’re describing is exactly the experience that Buildertrend has with their customers. Sales sells you the dream of look how pretty and perfect and everything this is.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Just had a room of builders like yell at me about that. Like “They said, it would take a day to set it up.” I’m like “There are no salespeople in this room. I was not that person.”

Charley Burtwistle:

And then Zach’s team gets you onboarded, and it works perfectly where you guys are at, and they’re really happy with it too. But there’s a lot of stress and a lot of hard work and a lot of communication of actually implementing a software. So, the customer journey mindset that you’re discussing there is applicable in almost every industry.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We call it customer success.

Dan Green:

To give you a little bit of a knowledge bomb, it was Dr. Kubler-Ross in 1969 came up with that, and it is called the Valley of Despair, just in case you ever wanted to call it by its official psychology name. It’s called the Valley of Despair. The Kubler-Ross Change Curve.

Charley Burtwistle:

Otherwise known as Zach Wojtowicz’s life.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Matt Simpson:

You didn’t know you were getting a psychologist today did you?

Zach Wojtowicz:

Despair, indeed.

Dan Green:

You might need a drink before this one.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Well, actually that was where I was going to ask it. Obviously, got this perspective from the psychology space. We have actually quite a few PhD psychologies on builder, different staff, funny enough.

Dan Green:

Oh, nice.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. For our talent evaluation. We also have people on the, we call it the insights team that has validating educational programs. So, we’ve used a lot of those social sciences. I actually have a Political Science master’s degree, so I’m into social science quite a bit to validate research methods and doing it the right way. I wanted to ask, how are you bringing that to your business? It’s one of my favorite things about construction, by the way. I’ve talked about this on the pod quite a bit. The patchwork of backgrounds that join construction is never ending. So, it doesn’t surprise me that a psychologist would find his way into construction, even crazier ones that I’ve heard. So, how do you infuse that into your business?

Dan Green:

Well, I think a lot of it, you mentioned earlier, we won Inc. magazine’s 2022 Best Places to Work. So, oddly enough, my job when I was in corporate America, I worked at a Fortune 500 company for about 10 years. My role as an executive there was to work in talent management and selection and building high performing teams. So, this came to talent selection. I love to do personality assessments, assess emotional intelligence, derailers, things like that to really understand could this person be a fit? It’s all about organizational fit, right? I think when Matt had talked earlier, one of our challenges of why maybe we started hiring too fast, we didn’t really have time for that selection process to really do that. But what I tried to do on the internal side is just find people that fit the culture. You can learn new stuff, you can learn, Buildertrend, you can learn what a joist is and all that fun stuff. But if you’re not a fit, it’s probably not going to work here.

So, we do a lot on the internal side to make sure that they’re a fit. And then on the external side, actually, we’ve started qualifying our customers, too. So, again, this makes us sound somewhat selective, but I think we are, we’ve gotten to the point now where I think during COVID we were new, we’d take anybody that wanted to give us money, but we almost interview them a little bit now. We want to see how they are going to behave when they change, when money changes hands, we want to make sure we keep that relationship intact. So, we do a lot of psychological assessment, too. We have a whole sheet of questions we can ask them. It’s almost like a structured interview to say, how is this particular customer going to be? And we’ll also do that to put them in project orders as well. So, we save our pain in the ass customers for different times when it’s slow and that type of thing. So, we’re using it for customer selection as well.

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s incredible. What personality assessment is the most legitimate that you think we should take? Is it like Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, they all suck? Do I need to contract you to run a psychoanalysis?

Dan Green:

Do you want the super nerdy answer or you want the big one?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yes. Give me the real thing.

Dan Green:

All right. So, Myers-Briggs is trash.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I knew that. I’ve always heard that.

Dan Green:

Anything that is a type-based personality assessment, which Myers-Briggs is, it puts you into a certain type. Either you’re an extrovert or you’re an introvert, right? It doesn’t talk about the different spectrums. You want something that’s trait-based, that talks about the big five, openness, neuroticism, agreeableness, things like that.

The best personality assessment that you can do is something by Hogan assessments called the MVPI. It’s the motives, values, preferences inventory. And what that does is that helps me. So, if I was to give you the MVPI, that tells me what you value. Do you value being recognized? Do you value working somewhere that’s fun? Do you care about money? Do you care about working on beautiful things? Do you care about tradition, job security? So, basically, what motivates you. So, what we do is we give the MVPI to… What you can do at Buildertrend is you can give the MVPI to incoming people that are working there, and you can frame their 30, 60, 90-day plan to say “Okay, Matt’s going to need a little bit more love in this particular area where Dan may need a little bit more here to really feel like they fit here.” Especially with younger talent, we see with younger millennial talent and even younger than that, that are coming out of college, they don’t stay places very long.

They stay for less than 18 months. So, how do we get them to stay? How do we get people to stay here? It’s really about understanding fit. So, the actual term is a Clinical Level B Psychometric Assessment. That’s what you want, and Myers-Briggs is trash.

Charley Burtwistle:

Hashtag. Yep.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m hyper.

Dan Green:

There’s your nerdy answer.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. That was sweet.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That was amazing.

Charley Burtwistle:

Zach has a big grin on his face.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I legit am absolutely grinning ear to ear right now. How does your teams receive all that? I know you probably don’t give them all that, but what do they think? I really want to know.

Matt Simpson:

It hasn’t worked out that well.

Dan Green:

They think I’m crazy a lot, but …

Zach Wojtowicz:

I love it.

Dan Green:

Yeah. Crazy could be good.

Charley Burtwistle:

That was so funny. Matt’s face right there.

Dan Green:

We’re slowly trying to get everybody on board to, let me, if you’re familiar with comics, my favorite comic is Mr. Sinister, my license … I like to tinker with people’s minds and kind of play around with makeups and the way things are set up, but they don’t let me do that yet, but we’re getting there.

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s so funny. Yeah, the Matt’s face right there. He’s just shaking head, hasn’t worked out well.

Matt Simpson:

You want to touch on when we brought Kathy in and how the team received that? That’d probably …

Dan Green:

Yeah, so one of the things that really helped enable us be a great place to work was to offer benefits that no one else in the industry offered at the time. And one of those things was performance and executive coaching. So, what we did is we got an executive coach, I guess we don’t call him executive coach. We’ve got a performance coach for everybody. And we made sure that everybody during our time of growth, and this was part of when we were rolling out Buildertrend as well, made sure that they had a performance coach. Have you ever watched that show Billions?

Charley Burtwistle:

No, I’ve heard of it.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Dan Green:

Yeah, that’s actually a super good show. But they use performance coaches for these high-profile stock traders and stuff like that. It’s kind of like a Wolf of Wall Street, but they focus a lot on the performance side of it. So, we hired performance coaches for everybody, kind of aligned on that psychological side, and that did well to kind of alleviate the stress, the high pressure and pace of opening a new office, hyper-growth, learning a new technology. Some people were learning a new industry, like Matt had mentioned, one of the guys we hired was a great salesperson in the car industry. So, we said “Hey, you’re really great at selling cars. Maybe you’re really great at selling patios.” So, we had some people that were trying to learn to work in a new industry as well. So, we had performance coaches for everybody to make sure that they didn’t have as much anxiety as they probably could have.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I love that. I feel like a lot of the stuff that you guys are talking about, Zach and I are writing down. We’re like, all right, we’re going to implement that here. It’s funny, I take notes during every episode, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a notebook that started with just Valley of Despair. People are going to be really worried about my mental state.

Zach Wojtowicz:

The downloads on the episode …

Dan Green:

And the way you get across the Valley of Despair, this is in the research, you have to build the Bridge of Hope. I don’t like to say that because that sounds corny as hell.

Charley Burtwistle:

I googled it, yeah.

Dan Green:

The Bridge of Hope.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I Googled it here. It has climbing Mount Stupid and navigating the Valley of Despair and then ascending the Slope of Enlightenment is what they have here.

Dan Green:

So, you’ll find with building the Bridge of Hope is a funny one, too.

Charley Burtwistle:

I love that. Well guys, we are actually quite a bit over time. You guys have been incredibly fun to talk to, so I didn’t even notice that we were over. So, apologies there. But thank you so much for coming on. I think we got a little bit of everything. We got starting a new company, implementing Buildertrend, despair.

Zach Wojtowicz:

The journey.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, the journey.

Zach Wojtowicz:

The whole journey with the intro, the Valley of Despair, and now we’re happy. And five out of five best podcasts you’ve been on, right?

Dan Green:

That’s right. I already submitted the review. It’s already in.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Pause. Long pause. Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

We really do appreciate the time, guys.

Matt Simpson:

It’s been fun.

Dan Green:

Yeah, it’s been fun. My only requirement is you can ask Shelby how, don’t ask her how crazy we were when we were here because then your opinion of us may change. No, I’m just kidding. She was great.

Matt Simpson:

Yeah, she was awesome.

Dan Green:

I just want to give another nod to Shelby, she was really good. I think that’s one thing, and we can end with this if you’d like. I think one thing that you guys do really well is that too often I see organizations within software where they sell you the software, they flip the switch and they say, have a nice life. There’s no J.B. Woods refer to this and 2009 book Consumption Economics. There’s no real ongoing push to make sure that, “Hey, we’ve sold them the technology. How do we make sure that they’re actually consuming it and then using it well.” And I think that Buildertrend does a really good job of that. And when Shelby was here, she did a great job with that. So, hats off to her.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s going to make her day. Thanks for sharing that guys.

Matt Simpson:

She did a great job.

Charley Burtwistle:

Sweet. Well, thank you guys so much and we look forward to talking again.

Dan Green:

Great. Thanks.

Matt Simpson:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Well, Mr. Burtwistle, that was a lot, honestly. I love when we have on the podcast, and we get some tangible things that I was like, “Oh, I could be a better leader for these things.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s a lot of fun. Hopefully you listeners out there feel the same way. What’d you think?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. I think he mentioned at the end there he is like “I hope it wasn’t boring.” No, that was an incredible interview, and that’s what I love about this job and this podcast and you and our whole team and every guest that we have so much, is like no two episodes are the same. And that one was one that is applicable to everyone, not just in the construction space, not just in the pool space, not just in the technology space, but how do you manage change? How do you grow, not just a company, but a team. There’s a lot of applicable things. I have some awesome notes written down. So, yeah, I’m fired up. They were great.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. And we’ve got some big things happening. We hope you’ll come back and check it out. We’ll be here – we think.

Charley Burtwistle:

We’ll be here. They swap them out every hundred or so – be about right. As always, please make sure to like, review, subscribe. Tune in next week. I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

We’ll see you.

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