Strong foundations: How smart planning and software help your business grow

Zach Wojtowicz:

What’s up everybody? Welcome to “The Building Code.” I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

And I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And today, we have a very exciting guest, very energetic guest today talk a little bit about strategic planning. So, buckle up because we are about to come up with some effective strategies, Charley …

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely. Because it’s a …

Zach Wojtowicz:

… give you some help.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, it’s a timely topic, obviously, here at Buildertrend HQ. Just put together our Q4 plan, rolling into 2024 plan budgets, spreadsheets, PowerPoints – is just my entire life. So, I’m excited to hear from someone else how they do it. Hopefully, pick up a few things.

Sam’s incredible. I know he was in Omaha not that long ago. I’ve heard nothing but great things about him. So, yeah, I think it’s going to be a good interview.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. We won’t waste too much time. We got a lot to talk about. Let’s get him in here.

All right. Hey Sam, welcome to “The Building Code.” It’s so great to have you on. How are you doing?

Sam DeMaio:

I’m doing great today.

Zach Wojtowicz:

How are things out in New Jersey?

Sam DeMaio:

We had a rough patch of weather come on over the last couple of days. But I can tell you, last weekend was phenomenal. I had people down our shore house in the ocean. So, it went from …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Oh.

Sam DeMaio:

Oh, yeah. 78 degrees to 31 degrees. So, not really a good day for us today.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s some Nebraska swings in weather.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, that’s a wild swim.

Zach Wojtowicz:

But we don’t have the ocean though, so we never feel too bad for our coastal friends. We’re landlocked. We got maybe a couple of lakes that we can check out occasionally.

Sam DeMaio:

Nice.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’re really excited to have you on “The Building Code” to talk about some interesting topics that we haven’t really spent a ton of time talking about. Like, how do you budget for the future? And your strategic plan of your business. We’d like to get in those, so I’m excited to dive deep. I also heard through the grapevine that you came to Omaha for Buildertrend University recently.

Sam DeMaio:

I sure did.

Zach Wojtowicz:

How was that experience?

Sam DeMaio:

Stan and I came there, and I had no idea. I thought there was just going to be bison, cows and all kinds of farmland.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s why I …

Sam DeMaio:

I was pleasantly surprised.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s not to stereotype but I love talking to East Coasters because their perception of Omaha are always like that. Like, “Where’s the bison at?” So, I always have this saying. I’ve said it before, “Omaha is a city that will exceed your expectations because you don’t have any.” So, hopefully, you had a great time. It was awesome that you came and visited us, and the girls that help us produce the show were raving about you. So, no pressure today. Ever been on a podcast before?

Sam DeMaio:

No, this would be my first one.

Zach Wojtowicz:

All right. We like to hear that. It makes us look cool when we know what we’re doing.

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

But if you took us out on the job site, you would not bring us back. We would not last very long.

Charley Burtwistle:

Like Zach mentioned, we’re getting into some exciting stuff later on in the episode. But first of all, for those of us that weren’t fortunate enough to meet you at Buildertrend University, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and how you got started in construction?

Sam DeMaio:

Sure. I’ll do the abbreviated version, so I don’t want to take up the whole hour just talking about myself. But I can tell you, I started getting into this business after I joined the military when I was 17 years old. So, my junior year high school. I was in Fort Knox, Kentucky, came out, finished my senior year. After my senior year, I started at a good old Camden County Jail as correction officer. I stayed there for five years. I bought my first property at 19. This was before they had this thing called YouTube where you can pretty much learn anything you want. You just go on there, search it up, and then you can pretty much figure out anything you want to do as far as learning, for free.

Fast-forward, I bought my first house. They didn’t have YouTube. I go to Home Depot, I bought this book. I still have it. I think it’s called Home Depot 123. That was my YouTube. You flip to the page, and you go, “Oh, I could probably figure this one out.” Did that for a while and then fast-forward, I bought … Once I have my duplex, I lived in one side and rent out the other side, I bought another property. I rented that out. And then a couple of years later, I bought another property. Did that. By that time, I had a construction company going, right? I was 22 years old. We did a lot of insurance claims type of work. Then we signed contracts at 23 with a couple of the insurance carriers that were local to us, and we were their exclusive contractor. There, I learned all how to do Xactimate … I studied all the price books. We got to pretty much a network of 11 full-time employees and some great subcontractors.

Then after that, I became a police officer. I started a flooring store while I was a police officer, showcased flooring. I did that for about five years until I had 10 years into the law enforcement career. I was able to retire out of that 10 years, not with my full pension but I said, “Hey, let me go ahead and make this leap. I think I’m ready for it.” And I was making the same money as I was and my part-time business was really full-time. But I was doing both full-time I had to make a choice. It was either continue to grow or just finish out this police career. I thought this was an exciting career. I like doing the design. I like dealing with people. In a good way, able to make them happy every day. I also like my police job and helping those people, but I chose the construction route.

At that point, I pretty much left the police department. I bought my first flip. I had about $30,000 passed to my name. I bought it for $30,000, took me six months to fix it up because I had no money to put into the building supply. So over the next six months as I was making money, I put it into the property. Put an additional $30,000, so $60,000 total, sold that property for $125,000. Now, I had money.

My next house, I bought it for 70. I put 30 into it, I sold it for 170. I did that 17 times that year continued out.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wow.

Sam DeMaio:

Now, what I did is I started buying rental properties. I took that money that I was making from my flips, and I also had my flooring company going, and I started buying rental properties, cash. So, I’d buy two flips, I’d flip two. And then that was my thing. I’d rinse and repeat it. I’d buy rental, cash. Now, I own 40 properties. I also own a hotel down North Wildwood, on the beach, eight units. I also own a couple of other rental properties down there. And now, we’re doing new construction. I have a staff of 40 full-time employees, and we have subcontractors.

I read a book, it’s called Traction from Gino Wickman. I suggest that book to everyone. I’m not a good reader, but guess what? I’ll read a book twice, I’ll pick it up once, right? From that point, I figured, “Yeah, I could definitely do this myself. It’s going to take a long time.” I ended up hiring a coach after 20 years of doing it. I go, “Hey, I’m going to hire a coach.” I should have done it in the beginning, but I thought there’s no way I can afford it, it doesn’t work, and you don’t need CRM. You don’t need none of that stuff. And later in life I go, “You definitely need all that stuff I said you didn’t need in the beginning.”

The other issue or challenge I made for myself, because again, I never really worked for anybody but myself, was I built a business around me. So, everything was me. The sales was me, the installation was me in the beginning. Everything was me, and I still have that. So, I’m breaking out that in habits over the last three years. That’s when I linked up with Buildertrend. I used the software for a good year before I even rolled it out to my team because I figured it’s very robust. It could do anything you possibly can want in a system. Let me pick out three things, get sufficient at those three things. And then in three months, I’ll do another three things. And then in a year, I got 12 things under my belt. Now, I got 24 and we got it out to our team. So, it’s a great process once you get it in place.

And then I was able to, obviously, travel out to Omaha and meet the team and see how wonderful the system is at Buildertrend. Even the people in the system, which makes the system, because the people are Buildertrend, those guys were phenomenal. Everyone is there to help you, and it’s really appreciative from me, myself as the owner, all the way down to our field crew that if they have questions, they can go on there and get them answered. I like the way that Buildertrend was laid out. You have your sales team in the middle, and pumping up the sales to your technical side. You could tell they’re technical people. No pun intended.

But anyway, fast-forward I guess in my construction company, now we’re setting up templates, which we had it on paper and thousands of pieces of paper. Now, we have it on Buildertrend. So, literally, a job comes in, a kitchen job. I’ll give you an example. Kitchen job comes in, our operation guy pumps a template in seconds into the computer with a Gantt schedule and that gets pushed off to the project manager who confirms all the measurements and puts the order in. Our next thing is POs. You get those POs set up and the whole process is going to be seamless. And it’s all due to, obviously, the book traction and Buildertrend along with our team, really put it to you.

So, if you’re willing to take the extra step, an extra mile or putting your time into it, you will get it back and some on the backend once it’s set up.

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s awesome to hear. Zach is one of the directors of our customer success team, so I’m sure you talking about how you rolled it out and learned and implemented the software was music to his ears.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It sounds like it went swimmingly. I just love to hear it.

Sam DeMaio:

Oh, yeah. I got to tell you, it was a big step for me because again, QuickBooks versus Joist, and then having Trello, and having tried every… Jabber. I’ve tried every software. You tell me. I did the paid trial. I paid for Buildertrend for the year. I spent that few thousand dollars just to say, “Hey, does this work?” I did the thing with a bunch of different software. But you can pretty much tell me where you’re at in your process, and I’ll tell you, “Hey, this is the one for you for now. And then when you grow up, you got to go to this one. And then when you grow up, you got to go to this one.” So, that’s kind of where I fit into things with Buildertrend and our construction company. And where I see our future is definitely right now, into templates and into making selections on the front end and having those selections there for the customers.

So, that this way, we’re not reinventing the wheel every single time we sell a kitchen, every time we sell an addition or a new construction project. We have the packages. I’m going to start selling packages instead of selling the job itself because I feel like it’s just that much smoother once you get it all set up.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Especially given the volume and the reach of the types of things that you’re doing with your business. It’s important to have repeatable processes and things that actually … Make it so those will happen on their own effect. As you pointed out, having to always be the bespoke craft of someone who has a very specific skillset for your process. So, it’s really cool that you’re really leaning into what Buildertrend is great at, which is keep building scalable solutions, making it so your life’s easier, and you can continue to grow.

Sam DeMaio:

Yes, absolutely. That’s the other part of it. Once we started doing templating and once we started doing the actual accountability and the actual position names … Because before was we were a big team but everyone was doing everything. And the problem with that, there was no accountability when something wasn’t done. It was, “Hey, I thought she was doing it.” “Hey, I thought he was doing it.” And it’s pretty much passing the buck. So, now, we have an operations manager who’s in charge of the project managers. And then we have a sales manager, Stan, who couldn’t make it on the show, but he’s in charge of the sales guys. And then in the field, we actually have … It’s almost like a … I call it a football team because we do a lot of the football players, a lot of the Eagles guys. We’re definitely Eagles fans, and we call ourselves almost like a football team. We’re a team where we have different positions and different people that we need to execute these projects and get them done. Buildertrend has been instrumental in putting it all together.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s amazing. We wanted to bring you on today, talk a little bit about that evolution. It sounds like you, at one point, where kind of a one-man show. You’ve grown tremendously and now, you’re recognizing the need to have different specializations within the business.

When did that start to happen for you? When did that realization of you’re needing to create these verticals within your company start to really take hold?

Sam DeMaio:

Okay. I think once I started getting to a point where I wasn’t able to remember everything going on and I was outgrowing that paper – writing notes down everywhere. And I thought I had a good system. I had a lot of whiteboards, and those whiteboards worked great for maybe 30 or 40 jobs at a time. We’re pushing over a hundred jobs right now at a time. So, once I got to that point where I go, “Hey, listen. This isn’t going to work. There’s no way I’ll be able to effectively put up a schedule and keep track of it, keep on top of the customers, be able to know every single job actually have my hands on it.” That’s when I realized that we needed to do something, which we did. We took some action. We had maybe about seven different software between clocking in as one, doing the estimating as a second, project management as a third, which was on paper and half on another CRM. All that stuff.

We were able to put that all together and make it work with Buildertrend. That, to me, was something that we had to do and is making my business actually scalable and equitable. Because the other thing again when you’re talking about a business, when you take that main person out of the business and it doesn’t run anymore, that’s not a business. That’s a job. So, I don’t want to have a job. I want to have a business where everyone knows what they’re doing, everyone enjoys what they’re doing, and everyone knows how to execute if someone falls out. Just like a football team, right? If something happens, someone else is able to pick them, steps up, know exactly what to do and be able to scale that project or that instance to that next level.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I love that. And maybe going off that a little bit more with the strategic planning aspect, one of the things that we want to get into today, I love hearing your story and how you started is put. Everything I had into one house until that was done, flip it, then buy the next. I want to move on. So, you’ve always been planning, which I think is … I mean, your story is just an awesome one to hear.

How has that translated as you’ve grown, as you’re managing multiple locations, doing multiple different things now? How do you take the early planning, which was just like get this one house done, and how has that transformed and shifted as you’ve grown your business?

Sam DeMaio:

Okay. For that, what we do is, we have systems. We call it … For kitchens, like an 18-point checklist. We also have for a whole house flip, I have a 42-point checklist. For bathrooms, we have an 11-point checklist. And you can package those up individually or together. So, say, you’re doing a house with two bathrooms and a kitchen. We pretty much have that ready to go, from the start of the job where the sales is taking that sales contract, which is made in a template, and able to pick everything out onsite with the customer to passing that off to the project manager who’s going to take that and come up with a checklist with an ETA. Like pretty much an estimated time of when we’re going to start each phase of the project, who’s going to be there, what they’re going to actually be doing. And then meet. We’ll report back to the office and check off, “Hey, this is done today.” Buildertrend does that for you.

So, that’s where I think the scalability and strategic planning comes into play with future jobs, too. So, we know this bathroom here, we know it’s going to be a week and a half. Or this bathroom here we’re setting up now, we’re trying to set up the one day Wetwall bath system which will be part of our whole package of sales. We know this crew is going to do 25 bathrooms a month. They’re going to go in here and do this, and then we’re going to have the guys come behind them and strategically plan that out, so that all our material is at the warehouse, ready to go, and stage for the pickup for their driver that day. And repeat that every single day.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m curious. One of the things … I think everybody … Mike Tyson line, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It’s interesting because I think contractors were probably caught off guard with COVID. No one … Everyone was. It wasn’t just contracting. Did you pivot how you were operating your business during the COVID times at all or did you double down on what your plan and what you were trying to execute on at the time?

Sam DeMaio:

Okay. Yeah, we went sideways on COVID. So, I’m like, “Now, what’s going to go on?” We kept on continuing our jobs. We shut down zero days. Zero days. Before COVID, my whole outlook was we would buy one house a week to flip in addition to our bathrooms and our kitchens and our additions and our decks and all of that. And what had happened was all those evictions got paused. You couldn’t evict. The foreclosures got paused. I wasn’t getting that income anymore. And all of that was all tied in with how we operate our business every day. So, fast-forward as we’re getting these jobs done, I’m thinking, “What’s going to go on now?” Even the market started to tank. I bought another house for myself to live down the shore.

But what ended up quickly turning was now, all of a sudden, everyone’s calling us for these retail jobs, and now I have the capacity to take them on. Where other guys, they were shutting down. They’re like, “We’re going to get rid of everybody.” No, I was running full force right into this thing and planning and strategizing, “Hey, how can we get all these jobs covered?” And so, instead of doing that, the retail or the flip house, we were doing the retail kitchen and the retail bathroom, and it just came on. It came on so fast and so furious that we couldn’t keep up. That’s when we started hiring, and I think our processes needed to change, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last year and a half, those processes.

So, this way, if this market does change and it will. There’s no way it can stay up there. I mean, it’d be great if it did but we’re going to be ready for that change also. We’re just going to be more organized, we’re going to be more efficient, and we’re going to be a lot smarter and have all of our materials in-house at our warehouse versus going out and just buying them as it goes along. Because I feel like we have the control over not having subs, having in-house guys, to do what we do when we need to do it. And then also if we have the material there, that kills the downtime of going to the supply chain, supply houses, and waiting for them when we can staged it way before that even happens. And that’s, so far, increased our efficiency about 19% since we started rolling out in January.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Wow.

Sam DeMaio:

Our bottom line numbers are going up, our jobs are also going up, and I was actually strategizing for them to go down. But that’s okay. I’ll take it. I’ll take it while it’s here.

Charley Burtwistle:

I think your mindset and the way you think about things is awesome to hear. It’s something… Like I said, Zach’s just grinning from ear to ear because how you guys think about things and use Buildertrend, how we want all of our customers to. Process, process, process, efficiency, standardize, how can we get rid of repeatable tasks and really incorporate the entire business. So, it was awesome to hear that that’s working for you. Obviously, we’re in … When we’re recording this now is November, I think it’s getting released in December. People are sure thinking about 2024, what their goals are.

As you get to a year-end and you’re getting ready for your next year, what are some of the large pillars that you like to think about of what you’re going to do, not just from maybe a strategy perspective but from a budget perspective as well, and what’s your process for nailing that as the year’s turning. I think our listeners would find that really beneficial.

Sam DeMaio:

What I’m doing, start with the office. I have an office and a showroom. We went through, over the past three months, and I really analyzed and dove deep into what we were selling. What was most profitable, what we want to keep on with us and what we want to just cut out totally. And some of those things, we made money on. One of those things was concrete. Concrete was something where we made money on it but we didn’t make enough money to keep us where we want to be profit-wise and job-wise, so we’re going to cut that off totally. We’ll use that as a subcontractor instead of having it in-house, which again is still there. We just don’t want to focus on that primarily because to me, to scale it, isn’t going to be there.

Now, the other thing is where we did be able to figure something out, bathrooms. Bathrooms is something I’m going to have in stock. We’re going to have pretty much the nicest panels, and I searched from May until now. I flew all over the country to find the top products that I’m going to stock in-house for our system, for our one day bathroom. They’re beautiful. They’re a solid surface material, and then we’re going to set up trucks for just that. So, I bought three new trucks just for that. We’ll have three installers just for that, and we’ll have salesmen just for the bath systems.

We’re also going to change our displays and showroom to have all those systems, so that this way, the customer wants to actually see it, feel it, and touch it. They can come in and do that also. And then as far as the other part of the task of projecting what’s going on, we think there’s going to be a downturn in as far as how many people are putting, obviously, new homes, with the interest rates going up. I think that might die off a little bit, but that could change at any moment. We’re not really worried about that too much. But what we are concerned about is making sure that our guys are busy every single day, and we’re making a profit every single day. So, the way we’re lying our jobs up, utilizing again our Buildertrend for the templates, for the scheduling, the selections process in there, and then pretty much systemizing everything from start to finish.

That’s where my key points are, to basically target that as my most important thing to do from now until the New Year. And then New Year just roll out and fully have what we’re doing in the first quarter, getting our selections down and getting our sales started, and then starting to turn over to pretty much our in-house stuff versus our suppliers and all of that.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You’re thinking so many steps ahead. I saw the 10-year treasury bond dropped a few basis points today and the interest rates may … They’re tied very closely to the prime rate, so maybe we’ll get a little relief in the New Year on the interest rates. But that was where I was going to go with it, is it’s like with COVID. And then now, we get the high interest rates. I’m like, if you don’t have a plan and you’re leaving … You’re risking the unknown and you don’t have a baseline to try and get back to or know what you need to change.

I am curious, too, as far as how you administer your Buildertrends. Do you have an operator that runs it end-to-end or you have your sales manager runs the sales side and your construction manager runs the construction side? How do you actually do the execution, which is just as important as the plan?

Sam DeMaio:

Okay, I’ll go into that real quick from start to finish. So, call comes in, we have a system called 3CX. It rings our office phones, voiceover IP. It records the conversations. Anyone could pick it up from their cell phone if they have the app downloaded. We can also do a group call on it, kind of similar to what we’re doing now. We also can forward that call over to somebody. The customer can also text that phone number, so they’re not texting our personal cell phones. And whoever’s responsible for that person can pick it up and say, “I got it.” Literally, they click on it, it says … Or they can archive it or it says handled. Literally, you click on it, it said click it handled, it’s done. You don’t have to worry about it. It’s off the plate. It goes to theirs personally.

Once they do it, they archive it, and it’s done. So, basically we see it funnel in, we see it funnel out. New sales coming in as far as through the phone system, we have an off-site person who handles all the scheduling for the sales and sets up the appointments for our sales guys. And then once that’s done, they’ll report back, and she’ll check in with the sales guys. And pretty much what she does is make sure she follows up with the homeowners. If the sales guys are tied up, she’ll say, “Hey, tomorrow you have these four people. It been one week.” If we don’t get back, she sends them out an email or calls them, follows up, answers any questions to the best of her ability, then it gets passed off.

So, on the sales part, that’s going to be Mary. And then on the next side, which when people make the deposits, we automatically know that the deposits are made. That’s where our office manager takes that, puts all the information into a job packet. And then if it’s a permit, she’ll handle the permits there. Once that’s done, it goes over to operations. Operations, then loads the operations sections of Buildertrend, the scheduling section of Buildertrend. He preloads whatever templates involved with each job, and he gets that ready for the PM meeting. And normally, for just say an idea, within 24 hours of a deposit, they get a welcome email. And within 48 hours, they get a call from the project manager to schedule the PM meeting. The PM meeting, depending on the size of the job and what’s entailed with the job, sometimes the salesman needs to be out there with them just to go over things and make sure that nothing’s missed.

Or something that might’ve been said at the time that the customer and sales guy were talking that doesn’t get said, “Hey, he was supposed to do this.” Now, we nipped that right in the bud at that PM meeting. From that PM meeting, we pretty much already have our kitchen layout or layout already done because the permits were already completed and turned in, so that the project manager will meet out with the subcontractors, electricians sometimes or plumbers, and then they go over their process. And then once it’s in the PM’s hands, it pretty much stays in there until the job is completed a hundred percent. And then once that’s completed, we bring our sales guys back for the jobs to take pictures, talk with the customer, go over what went well, what went better, was there anything else that we could do for them, and basically, thank them for giving us the opportunity to serve them in that capacity.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s amazing. There’s so much that has to happen before you can even do the construction.

Charley Burtwistle: Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

But you’ve got the velocity down. I mean, there’s no dead time. Everything’s thought of, the details are outlined. If you’re a listener, this is how it’s done. That’s a serious operation you got going. That’s amazing, Sam.

Sam DeMaio:

Thank you.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m sure you just did it probably overnight. Just imagine.

Sam DeMaio:

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. When customers go, “Man, how long have you been doing this? It’s crazy.” I said, “This is actually my third day.” They’re like, “Third day?”

Zach Wojtowicz:

They’re like, “Wow, this must be easy.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, no kidding. That’s so funny. I think something that I’m really impressed with as well, and maybe you could speak a little bit more on, you’ve been heavily focused in this interview on the process, the internal work. Obviously, you’re flying all over your finest quality materials. How can we become more profitable business? But you’re also still delivering really, really high quality work as well, too. Could you talk a little bit about that side of things and just the focus that you have on your customers, on your product, and ensuring … Obviously, you built a tremendous reputation for yourself. Just ensuring that high quality and that your name sticks out when people see it.

Sam DeMaio:

Yes. Our customers are our company. We love our customers and our customers love us. We have a great reputation with our customers and I feel like we always go to extra mile, and people buy from people. People really don’t buy from companies. When we go to the job and our project managers go to the job, they actually care. We have people around here that are happy to be here. If people aren’t happy to be here, we ask them to leave. And I think doing that over and over again, you’ll see that our customers and our culture that we build around here is second to none. When we go to our customer’s houses and we figure everything out and we try and get their vision and we try and put it in and make their dream come true, I really feel having the right people in the right places, the right tools and equipment, and the right attitude is what you need to succeed.

The money comes later. I don’t really care about the money. If it’s something where, “Hey, we should have done this or we shouldn’t have done that.” Or, “This is the right thing.” Always do the right thing even if it costs us money because in the long-term, it always comes back tenfold. And that’s the attitude we take with everything.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m right there with you, Sam. Right there with you. We’re up against the clock, so we’d love to come back and …

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, we got to get another episode on the books. I feel like we’re just scratching the surface here. I just looked at the clock and yeah, 28 minutes in already. It felt like two. So, appreciate the time today, Sam. This was fantastic interview and appreciate you making time, and got to come back to Omaha again. I think I missed you the first time around but yeah, we would love to see you here in HQ.

Sam DeMaio:

Got it. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate that, Charley and Zach.

Zach Wojtowicz:

All right. We just had Sam in here talking all things Buildertrend, all things business decisions and planning. It was a lot of fun, a lot of energy. Sam was a lot of advice that you could pick up and I just really am impressed with how he has every detail has been considered in the way that he operates his business. And there’s just little things that you think don’t really make a difference, but then in together …

Charley Burtwistle:

Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

… the integrated choices you make about how you’re going to reduce that friction really helps you do a lot with … Do a lot of execution because you’re able to address every situation.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And I was just really impressed with. That is a rare thing that you see and only the fastest growers have that all figured out.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that there’s a surprise, the correlation between how much he thinks about process and planning and ironing out every single detail and the success that he’s had. He was, obviously, just an awesome individual as well, too. I think he may have to be on the short list on people that we bring back for a second episode.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. And you know what’s really interesting is? He’s got this infectious energy. And we’re talking about things that I’ve sat in meetings talking about those very things, and I don’t feel the same way.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s just because he had this jovial … Just love of what he does and how it helps his people and the product he’s delivering and the clients he gets to work with. And it’s really special. It’s just an honor to get to talk to someone who really has that perspective.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you and I are both going to go back to our desk right after this and just crank out some work, finish out the day.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Build some SOPs.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. Honestly, maybe stay a little late.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Will we have SOP sesh?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, let’s rip some coffee and get it done. That’s right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Now, if we could do something other than coffee, but …

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, like Red Bull …

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s right.

Charley Burtwistle:

… is what Zach meant.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yes.

Charley Burtwistle:

I think that about does it for us today on “The Building Code.” Zach, always a pleasure. Sam, thank you again. Any closing remarks?

Zach Wojtowicz:

We hope to have you back. Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe all social channels. Check out all podcasts available or more episodes of “The Building Code” for you to discover. Thank you so much for listening.

Charley Burtwistle:

See you next time.