Adjusting focus: How cost-plus builders benefit from updated workflows

Zach Wojtowicz:

What’s up, everybody? Zach Wojtowicz here.

Charley Burtwistle:

Charlie Burtwistle here.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s “The Building Code.”

Charley Burtwistle:

It’s “The Building Code.”

Zach Wojtowicz:

Charley, you’re buzzing right now.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, huge episode today. We’ll get into that for a bit, but I wanted to make sure I was on my A game, so I did drink about four cups of coffee this morning. I was like, “I can’t be yawning during this. This is potentially the performance of my life and I have to be ready to go for it.”

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s right. He walked in here, he was already talking trash. He was taking swings at me for being a little bit late. It’s Valentine’s Day, recording on Valentine’s Day. That’s not why it’s special, not that we’re not fans of Valentine’s Day.

Charley Burtwistle:

Of course, it’s also special for that.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’ve got an even more important event, which is a guest today. Tell our listeners about him.

Charley Burtwistle:

I would call it our biggest guest, both figuratively and literally. Jon Walker, our CTO at Buildertrend. Just joined Buildertrend about nine months ago. I said biggest because he is 6’9. He’s very, very fit. I don’t want people to think that I meant anything about his weight. He’s actually a very ripped dude. Very tall, very ripped, very smart.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Some genetics are better than others, you know?

Charley Burtwistle:

Some genetics are better than others. But no, huge guest, and why I’m so excited to have him on is he is a big fan of “The Building Code.” So, selfishly, if someone tells me they like stuff that I do, I was like, “Oh, I want to hear that more.”

Zach Wojtowicz:

If anyone ever questions why the podcast? It’s like, “Well, our CTO at this point …”

Charley Burtwistle:

Listens to it.

Zach Wojtowicz:

“… listens to it.” So, I feel like we just are … We’re doing responsibility, really. It’s an obligation.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, excited to get Jon on here. I think it’ll be a good … Typically, we try to do interviews with people in the industry doing construction. I know we branch out sometimes, but I think that his vision for Buildertrend, and the way he goes about things here internally will really resonate with our builders, our remodelers. Anybody in the construction space, any entrepreneur obviously has a very, very impressive background. So, I think it’ll land well. I’m really excited for it, not just for us to get to talk to Jon, but for our customers to get to hear him.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Let’s not mess around any further. Let’s get him in here.

Hey Jon, welcome to “The Building Code.” Insider people tell us that you’re our biggest fan, and it’s exciting to have you on today. How are we doing?

Jon Walker:

Oh, I am great, and I am a huge fan. I actually look just for fun before this, and I have just listened to my 77th episode of the podcast, and I’m sure there’s people who’ve listened to more, but I’ve been listening for about nine months now, so I’m doing pretty good.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, it’s very impressive. I think you’re probably right up there with Zach and my moms, they claim they’re the biggest fans, so we may have to figure out the count. I don’t know if my mom’s listed to 77 episodes, so it’s very impressive.

Zach Wojtowicz:

My mom doesn’t miss an episode.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wow. But does she go back and listen to old ones? Because that’s what Jon’s doing.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. I don’t know, actually. Jon, you’re going through the whole catalog, huh? You started back at the beginning?

Jon Walker:

Yeah, I listened through all of 2023, and I keep up with the current ones, obviously. And then I started to go backwards and start from the beginning and yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m sure the quality is only just increased, especially when these two young guys really jumped in, right?

Jon Walker:

No, I mean I’ve said this to you guys before, and we don’t want to get too meta podcast about the podcast. I think you guys do a great job. I think for me, it’s probably the second-best way I can learn about the industry and our customers. The best way is just talking to customers directly, which I do a decent amount of as well, but it’s really just a valuable learning experience for me, and I learned so much from you guys. I have a warm spot in my heart the same way I do for my favorite elementary school teacher for both of you guys.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Wow. We’re talking about fundamental memories here. We love to hear it.

Charley Burtwistle:

Great. Obviously, Zach and I know you very, very well. Joined here at Buildertrend about nine months ago, but for those people out there that are not lucky enough to know you, we love to start out each episode with just brief little intro about yourself, your career journey, and then, ultimately, how you ended up here at Buildertrend.

Jon Walker:

Yeah, Buildertrend is the fourth company I’ve been the CTO at, and I’m a computer scientist by … Well, my undergraduate degree is in economics, and then I got a graduate degree in computer science. And so, that’s my background and I’m also very entrepreneurial, so I’ve done a number of startups. The first two companies as a CTO of were acquired, and then the last one was probably the biggest success. It was a company called AppFolio, and it went public, and I was a co-founder of that with a good friend of mine named Klaus Schauser and was there 17 years and left to come to Buildertrend and …

It’s a public company, you can look up the ticker symbol, it’s APPF, and yeah, I guess the way I ended up at Buildertrend was I had met the founders, Dan, Jeff and Steve a number of years ago just because AppFolio did property management software, so it was in a similar space and we met them when they were a little earlier on and had a good discussion with them, and one of our old CFOs, her name is Ida Kane “They’re looking for a new CTO, would you call Dan and give him some advice?” And so, I did that. I wasn’t really thinking of leaving my baby back then, and I called and gave him a bunch of advice and then fast-forward a couple of months, and it looked like I was just ready for a new challenge and 17 years is a long time and the company was in great shape, so I told Ida, “Hey, I’m probably leaving AppFolio,” and she said, “Oh, you need to call Buildertrend. They’re still looking for a CTO.” That’s how I ended up here.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s an amazing story and really interesting perspective of where he is just like call a CEO and have no idea you’re going to end up working there. And here we are. I know right away you made a big impression in the building. Your experience is kind of unprecedented as far as what you’ve done in your career. One thing I’ve always thought, Jon, I’m curious, your story is actually really similar to a lot of our builders, maybe not at the same scale. Is that why you’ve kind of stuck in the small business space, that entrepreneurial mindset, or how do you connect your story to our customers today?

Jon Walker:

Oh yeah, that’s a great question. When I was looking for the next opportunity, I was definitely considering lots of things, and I think what was really attractive about Buildertrend to me is we have this saying, “We want to change the way the world builds.” And I’m a software engineer, so I’m not curing cancer or anything like that, but I want to have my little impact in the world, and it’s hard to find a place where you’re impacting something that touches everyone’s lives in a bigger way than home building and home remodeling. And so our customers are just having a big impact on maybe the most important part of everyone’s lives, and I think that really inspired me.

I thought, here’s a way where I can in my little way have some impact and almost indirectly, it’s our customers who actually do the work, but if we can help them be more successful and more efficient, that’s really inspiring to me. I will tell you, I do love the small businesses. I think one thing I didn’t know a hundred percent before I came is our customers are just, they are a lot of family businesses, second and third generation, and not only that, even the ones that some of them aren’t, they’re very giving people. There’s a lot that builders give back to their communities and a lot of that I hear actually on the building code, and it’s just really inspiring.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. I think what you’re hitting on Zach and I talk about on the podcast a lot is after talking to … It’s nice to be able to see the direct impact you have on our customers and then the impact that they have on the world. And I never am more motivated to go back and work than after an episode of recording “The Building Code” and being able to see that impact directly. Anytime someone asks me, “Why are you still doing the podcast?” And I was like, “If you want me to work harder and be a better employee, I need to be talking to our customers directly and seeing the impact.” So, I can definitely relate to that. Another question I’m curious on is you’ve been here about nine months now, what have been … I’m sure you expected a lot of things been CTO for a long time. What are maybe some of the surprises about the industry or Buildertrend as a whole that you weren’t necessarily expecting, happy or sad? We can cut out if any bad ones.

Jon Walker:

There is a lot that I expected of the company when I came in and those have really all proven to be true, just great people, hardworking. That comes from the top. The founders are really good people. I think we have a really good culture. My son goes to actually Pomona College, and so, I’m a little bit of a business book junkie and things, and so, when he started going to Pomona College, I started looking at, oh, who are some people that have gone to Pomona College and there’s a famous business, I don’t know what you call them, business theologian named Peter Drucker, and he has this thing that culture eats strategy for breakfast. That’s like one of his sayings. And so, that was another thing I discovered is that the culture looked really good from the outside, but I discovered it’s really true, and that’s hard to tell until you get somewhere.

There’s a funny story. I had never been in the Midwest in my life. I’m southern Californian, born and raised, and I was coming out to meet everyone before I had taken the position, and I flew into Omaha a day or half day earlier, and I’m driving around Omaha trying to figure out what it’s all about and I saw a western outfitter, and I knew people probably aren’t wearing cowboy hats in the office, but I’m like, “I’m going to get a cowboy hat.” And you can’t see this in the podcast, but I’m six nine, so I’m already a really big guy. So, I went and got a cowboy hat, and I wore it into the office to meet everyone the next day and people got a real kick out of it. That was very purposeful on my … I was doing that purposefully. I wanted to see is this going to be a place that I have a lot of fun working and I got a great reaction and that was my little test of like, is this a culture I’m going to really like?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, my first interaction with Jon is maybe one of my favorite moments at Buildertrend. I was in a meeting room probably very frustrating, everyone’s stressed. We were yelling about something and all of a sudden there’s like frosted windows. I see this tall 6’9 shadow lurk around outside, and you can tell a silhouette of Dan Houghton, and I’m like, “Okay, someone’s talking to Dan.” And all of a sudden they open up the door and Jon walks in with a cowboy hat and Dan our CEO goes, “Oh, Charley, this guy’s a big fan of the podcast. He just wanted to say hello,” which was a huge ego boost for me because I’m in a room with other people that I look up to.

I’m like, “Yeah, he’s a podcast fan or whatever,” but no idea he was a potential CTO. I thought he was just a customer or something like that. So, then I remember Courtney and Danielle and everyone in the booth back there were scrambling, were like, “Oh, this guy might be our CTO. We have to get him some podcast merch,” and gave you a hat, I remember. And ever since then the legend of Jon Walker was born and just this past Friday he implemented our first ever cowboy, cowgirl …

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s right. I was like, “This thing has gone full circle.”

Charley Burtwistle:

It’s gone full circle. We had everyone around the office wearing cowboy hats, and it was awesome.

Zach Wojtowicz:

First off, so the podcast helped seal the deal.

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s what it sounds like. I never got any …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Without “The Building Code,” you wouldn’t have joined Buildertrend.

Charley Burtwistle:

I never got any referral bonus or anything for helping get Jon Walker here.

Jon Walker:

Yeah. We’ll correct that. We need to correct that.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I definitely know Charlie wrote down on his notes a t-shirt idea for culture eat strategy. I saw him handing that down right away. So we’re going to make building code culture eat strategy branded swag. You could buy it on the store. I’m sure our marketing team is again shaking their fist at me. And then the third thing is the cowboy. I love it. It’s like the cowboy barometer test. You need to trademark this and write a book like, “Hey, I don’t work at places where if I show up in a cowboy hat, they take it too seriously.”

Jon Walker:

Hey, life is short. I mean, we take what we do seriously and we’re all competitive people, and we want to make our customers lives better, but we should have fun doing it at the same time. So, that’s what that’s all about.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, we also wanted to get you on today, not just to talk about your story and the fun culture aspect, but you’re also stepping in and making some pretty big changes in our internal software and our platform for our customers. So, one specifically that we wanted to talk about is some of the cost-plus changes that we’re currently working on to better support that workflow in our platform. Zach and I talk about cost plus versus fixed price contracts all the time on the podcast, so it’s definitely something our customers have been looking for a long time and something that I know you set your eyes on. Maybe before getting into that specific feature and some of the changes that we’re doing, I’d love to hear your story of why we chose that. You mentioned that we talked to customers and listened to feedback a lot. I’m sure you didn’t just sit down day one and say, “This is what we’re doing.” I’d love to hear the roadmap of ideation into implementation.

Jon Walker:

Yeah, sure. You’re going to hear a lot of my sayings that I say, and people in the building have probably heard them. I feel like I say the same things over and over again, but another saying I really love is good as the enemy of great, and it’s really about focus. You can only do so many things really well. And so, when I first got here, I looked at all the things we’re doing and spent a lot of time talking to customers and listening to the podcasts and learning, and it was pretty clear. I actually did 36 calls with customers that had been with Buildertrend and left Buildertrend.

And it was pretty clear that there were some themes there and one of them was there’s a couple features that they’d wanted for a long time that we hadn’t delivered on, and you want to also understand how many customers something’s going to impact. And so, I did some work there. I actually didn’t do the work, but I asked for the research, and I found out that 30% of our customers are doing cost-plus jobs, at least some of them. And so, it was something that was just really needed in our customer base and so, we really focused our efforts down on delivering that.

It’s interesting because there’s this rising tideless all boats. When we started to look at cost plus, a lot of cost plus is estimating, a lot of it’s reporting, a lot of it’s transparency for the homeowner. A lot of it applied also to fixed bid jobs. And so, I think that part of the estimating experience has gotten better through our efforts on cost plus, which is a great thing. It’s two ways to win.

Zach Wojtowicz:

As far as the team and the focus and priorities, are you able to give us any, I hate to call it roadmap, things that you’re excited about from a product standpoint that our customers, because they can get excited about because this is something that as a customer success rep, taking meetings with clients and even traveling around the country and getting into the cost plus situation, you’re like, “All right, let’s talk about it and figure out.” And a lot of it does end up at the line, you do the best you can, but the product has limits. This is something we hadn’t supported. What can our customers expect that we can put a little buzz out there, knowing this is being aired a little later than when we’re recording?

Jon Walker:

Yeah. Well, I’m a under promise and over deliver person, and so, I’m going to be really general here, and I know that’s probably not going to satisfy people, but I’m just going to be up front.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Veteran product in tech member of that community.

Jon Walker:

We have a roadmap, absolutely. And there’s actually a couple other things that people asked for a long time that are right on there on our roadmap. The one thing I will tell people to expect, and I think it’s a big change that we’re making, is we are starting to move a lot faster in delivering features in a much smaller increments and validating those with customers. And this is all based on what’s commonly called agile software development in the industry. And if you go back in 20-ish years now, the way people used to build software, there’s a little bit of science and a little bit of art to it. And so, the way people used to do that is they would write these really rigorous specifications and then try to just stick to them.

And the problem with that is … first of all, the world changes as you’re building stuff. And I think there’s a lot of carryover between building house and building software. The other part of that is that people and people, I include me, are really bad at actually describing a solution to their problem. We’re really good once we have something to say like, “Oh, I wish it worked like this,” or, “I wish it did that,” or, “This isn’t quite right.”

And I can tell you there’s real world examples where it’s easy to see this. If you pick your favorite app that you use on your phone or something, you probably tell me 10 things that you wish it worked differently, but if I gave you some generic problem that you had and I said, “Tell me the solution,” you’d have a real tough time. And so, we’re working in a much more iterative way now where we get a little piece out and run it by some customers and get them using it and prior to releasing it even we’re doing that work. And so, actually even if you look at cost plus, I was actually looking at it. Right now, it’s a set of 30 little increments like that and there’s another 20 or 30 already planned, but we’ll do the ones that our customers say they really need and prioritize.

And so, that’s the thing I can promise is that we’re going to iterate a lot faster in a lot smaller increments. And there’s a thing that’s feels scary about that and that’s like, “Well, there’s change coming to the product,” and change is hard for everyone. Really doing small incremental changes though feels really good to people. And so, I think actually the experience will be better than in the past where it’s been big or broad changes. It’ll be smaller changes. You know this, if you have something you use every day, like people use Buildertrend, some little thing changes, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s a nice little feature. I can adjust the columns now,” but if the whole thing just flips, all of a sudden you’re like, “Whoa, I need to relearn all of this.” And that’s our mechanism of avoiding this. And the whole agile software development thing comes from the Toyota way. It actually comes from manufacturing.

And so, when we’re getting stuff in front of customers, and they can say, “Oh, here’s the next piece that we need,” or, “Here’s how this could work better,” we’re eliminating waste. We’re not building stuff that they don’t need in the way that in lean manufacturing they do that. I haven’t done construction myself besides just some volunteer work, but I would imagine this is true. I know as a homeowner, your needs change even as you’re building the house. And it’s really hard for me to say … You can say, “Well, I need this many bedrooms and this many bathrooms,” but it’s hard to say exactly how you want it to be until you start to see some framing go up. That’s why change orders is a big thing in the construction industry. And so, there’s a lot of analogies there that carry over.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I think you hit on a few of them. You beat me to the punch there of talking to customers. I’m always shocked by how much similarities there are between a construction business and a software business. You mentioned a couple of the customer experience. We had someone on a few episodes ago that even said they have a customer journey mapped out that they follow along in the new homeowner …

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s come up a few times.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. There’s those, some of them you have personas for different people they want to work with. Something you haven’t touched on yet, but I know is a big, I wouldn’t call it a change, but you are really instrumental in our focus as a business. And that’s something that we talk about a ton with our customers. A lot of them grew up in the trades world. They do some framing here or there. They were doing some remodels, they were building houses, maybe they get an opportunity to do a development, and they’re spread really, really thin, and they’re not really the best at anything.

And then they have this, at least the customers that we’ve had, this realization of, “I need to pick something that I want to be the best at and really, really focus on that and learn to say no to different things.” And I think that was a big shift that I’ve noticed since you’ve joined Buildertrend is yes, we’re going to focus, we’re going to make things better, but focus isn’t just on what we’re going to do, it’s also on what we’re not going to do. I’d love to hear you expand on your mindset there because that’s something I think our listeners and people in the construction space will really be able to relate with as well.

Jon Walker:

Yeah, that goes back to the goods, the enemy of the great. Since I’ve been an entrepreneur and done a number of successful startups, a lot of times I’ll give advice to entrepreneurs, and there’s this notion that when someone starts a company and it doesn’t matter, construction company, software company, whatever, that they fail because they’re doing bad things. And if you went to any company like let’s say you could predict in advance this one was going to fail and then you went and said, “Hey, what’s a list of things you’re doing right now?” I can tell you that that list would be all good things. You’d go like, “Oh, that makes sense, that makes sense, that makes sense, that makes sense.”

What companies that fail or don’t have as much success as they could have tend to do is not to say no to some of those good things. So, they can do just the great things. And that’s the mindset that I took when I got here. And one of the first things I did actually when I got here was look at all the work we’re doing and how we were spread across a number of things. And I could talk more about that, but I just really cut that down to … And it’s funny, I told the team this and I think we’re starting to experience it and maybe our customers will, too. It feels like we’re moving faster and getting more done even though I cut the list way down by maybe a fourth or a fifth of what we were trying to do before. I hope that answers your question. I don’t know. Does that …?

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Zach, I’m sure you would agree that’s a lot of what our customers really struggle with is they’re able to do so much in being able to really focus and being great at something. It’s tempting to try to do everything all the time because you think the more you’re doing, the more you’re focusing on the better. But a lot of times it’s the inverse relation there.

Jon Walker:

Yeah, I think there’s one more element of it is that we have a lot of customers and we took a look and said, “Who are our best customers. Who do we really want the product to be great for?” And this is another one where the rising tide lifts all boats. It wasn’t like we’re going to abandon any customers we had or anything like that, but we just said, “We’re going to make this product, we’re going to be opinionated here. We’re going to make a product that’s great for professional business that’s doing about a million plus in revenue, and that is really serious about growing their business and succeeding.” And so a lot of how we focused was focusing on that particular customer. And we have some internal names for the different bands of customers we have, and we call that one the established general contractor. And it’s not just general contractors, but it’s a name we use internally, and we reference it all the time and we say, “Hey, this is the work we’re doing is to make the product great for these people right now.”

Zach Wojtowicz:

I think that’s the key is right now. You touched on that it’s not that Buildertrend as a business won’t have other things that we work on in the future, but in order to address the biggest pain points you do have to draw a line in the sand and it’s really easy to forget that quality matters more than quantity a lot, and we actually end up creating more problems if we don’t make sure we pass those quality checks. So, I’m really excited long term because it’s just a lot more sustainable for our customers who have been with us for a long time and have observed that we’ve been missing those key features.

Through the interview process, they highlighted it and they pointed it out. Now it’s like, “Let’s go deliver.” And then we will always have that feedback channel because there’ll always be problems to solve, but it’s going to pay dividends in a lot of different ways, and it’s just good business sense, like you said, lessons of any entrepreneur. I have friends who have started businesses, and you can just tell they’re like, “I’m trying to do everything all at once by myself.” It’s like, that’s not going to work.

Jon Walker:

That’s the curse of the entrepreneurs. They’re like optimists and like, “Everything’s possible, and I can do all these things,” and it’s tough. And I think you know this, Charley, you’ve probably heard me say it, but I love to say instead of no, I say, “Not now,” which is exactly what Zach just said, and that’s the truth. It’s like, “Not now, we’re doing this more important thing now.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I love that. Taking this step further, we have this vision, everyone’s aligned on it. We’re going to focus on these customers, we’re going to move fast, we’re going to iterate. The next step then that I’d love to hear your viewpoint on is then as the leader of the product and engineering team, how do you get to rally the troops around this vision and ensure we actually execute on it? I know again, relating it back to our customers, we just had someone on that was like when they chose to use Buildertrend even, they believed in it. They knew it was going to take work, they knew it would be beneficial to their company. Some of their employees were stuck in different ways, and you have to get people to buy in and ultimately follow to execute on that vision. I’d love to hear how your first nine months here at Buildertrend have gone, and is there good feedback from the teams? Do people seem bought in? Are we moving in the right direction and what do you have to do to get there?

Zach Wojtowicz:

And name names, too, if they’re not. This is a great forum to just shame them into execution if we need to.

Jon Walker:

I think one of the challenges I have as a CTO is people don’t tend to give me direct feedback. So, I love when people give me direct feedback, and I really encourage it

Zach Wojtowicz:

Because you’re so big.

Jon Walker:

I’m intimidating, people say. It’s funny, I get that all the time. I’ll tell you a funny story there. When I first showed up, it was week one or week two, and we get headshot because I’m going to go on the website or whatever, and our photographer took five or six pictures and said, “Hey, which one do you want?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I think I look bad in all of them. Who knows? I can’t tell where I look better in one.” And so, I went over to our internal communications team, and I started asking them, and there was a gal there, and I won’t name names, but she goes, “Well, on that one, you look like a used car sale.” And I had been there a week and I’m a CTO, and I was like …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Holy, that is awesome. I love that.

Jon Walker:

I love this person.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yes.

Jon Walker:

I think is going to give me direct feedback no matter what, she doesn’t care, and I really value that. And so, that was great for me. So, knowing all that, I will tell you I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from the teams, and I try to solicit very direct feedback, even if it’s negative or areas I can improve, but the teams feel really positive about it. We’ve gotten a ton of positive customer feedback too and the direction we’re going and that’s the more important part. And so, I feel like things are going the right way.

You asked, “What’d you do the first nine months?” I first spent a bunch of time, so I had been at my previous company for 17 years. I was on my third CEO, and we had transitioned the whole executive team. And so, I’d seen people come in and how they did it and observed as a long-time employee there, and one of the founders and the people that I really admired, and I learned this just really in that timeframe, were the people that came in and listened and figured out what’s great about the company that I’m coming into.

I know how to do everything that a CTO should do. I didn’t really have a good sense of what things Buildertrend was already really good at. And so, ideally you bring someone like me in and instead of just replacing the stuff we’re doing already well with a different way to do it, I’m additive. We do all the things we do really well, and then there’s some new things that we do well. So, it’s like one plus one equals three. And so, I spent the first, and it was a real long time, and especially, I’m a very action oriented person, so it was really hard for me and I very explicitly said it to everyone so they could hold me accountable because I knew it’d be a challenge for me, but I spent the first six weeks just listening and hearing what we do well and really understanding that and meeting with everyone on all the teams.

So, it was pretty clear to me where our strengths were and where we could improve. And I started with, “Okay, what’s our high-level mission as a product engineering organization?” And it ties directly into our mission as a company. So, we actually came up with this collaboratively with the whole team, and it’s change the way the world builds by providing builders with innovative solutions to produce great homes so efficiently that it positively impacts housing around the world. That’s a little aspirational, obviously, but if you start with that mission and then you can go down from there. Here’s what we’re trying to do and here’s how we’re going to focus on the things that matter the most. Here’s how we’re going to interact with customers. That’s how I started is from the mission down.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I love that. And I still remember your first time at town hall, you talked through your experience of coming in, experiencing Buildertrend, listening, going away and thinking about it, and then coming up with the action plan to execute. And your analogy was pickleball, which you had recently tried for the first time, you played it, you went away and you thought about it for a long time and then you were ready to go out and do it again. But the difference that the way you presented it is you were wearing a full pickleball outfit. People listening here think you love outfits.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Cowboys, pickleball, what’s next?

Jon Walker:

I got to tell you, I don’t consider myself a natural speaker, so I use all gimmicks myself to distract from the actual talking.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I loved it. I love it. And I still remember it was super funny because we recently had a new CFO hire as well. I think it was his first time on town hall as well, and he has to go up there and talk about numbers and Excel spreadsheets and things like that. And then we had the new CTO hire come up there with a pickleball racket. I felt bad for Bob that his tough shoes are a tough act to follow after that. He needs some more gimmicks in there.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Are we going to show up in outfit?

Jon Walker:

I had a headband on, and Dan, our CEO was speaking right after me, and I put the headband on him just for fun. I learned that he really cares about his hair because he was not happy with me putting my sweaty headband on his head.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Those CEOs, they’re all about the image. You don’t want to throw them off too much. I love it, Jon. And I was just saying, Charley, when are we going to show up in a costume on “The Building Code” Halloween episode?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I like that.

Jon Walker:

I like it.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, make it happen. Well, cowboy hat. Oh, next episode. We got to have cowboy hats when Jon comes on next time.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, we need to step up our game a little bit. We can learn some lessons from Jon for sure.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, no shortage of ideas here. Jon’s like, “Focus boys.” If you’re going to get quality out of this podcast, we need to have one idea, not 90 t-shirt ideas, just one that we actually execute on, Charley.

Charley Burtwistle:

You’re right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Mr. Walker, we are out of time, but this was a fantastic episode. You’re always welcome back, literally. I think you could pull any string and get on, at one point, probably take either Charley or I’s Job if you wanted. So open invitation, who knows? Thanks for being on “The Building Code.”

Jon Walker:

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Charley Burtwistle:

Thanks Jon.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We just had the cowboy himself here on The Building Code

Charley Burtwistle:

Cowboy himself.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’re going to spread the sheriff. Let’s get a nickname going for Jon. I like to do that. I like to just make stuff up and then hope it gets around and then comes back to me like, “Oh, he goes by the sheriff.” I’m like, “Yeah, he does.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, he does. Yeah, we’ll see if that gets going. I don’t know. It seems like he’s a big fan of bits, so he may enjoy that one. Also, I just realized we didn’t talk about your bit.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s right. I tried to. Jon, I was flashing your gift to me a product engineering. This is the closest I’ll ever get to being a member of the engineering team. He gifted this to me because I negotiated it at a special episode teased for Buildertrend University. I won’t spoil it any further. My exchange was I will take a cup.

Charley Burtwistle:

And there’s three cups. If you’re not watching on YouTube. They’re really nice or is that, well, I don’t want to give any free … Oh, you just did it. Really nice Stanley Cup. Says, “Product engineering, ruthlessly, prioritize and iterate, obsessive customer focus, win together, great missions.” I’m jealous. I didn’t want to bring it up.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That was the point. That’s why I brought it.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I did not get one, but it looks really nice. So, enough about Zach’s cup. Zach, what did you …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Gifted by Jon Walker.

Charley Burtwistle:

What did you think of the episode?

Zach Wojtowicz:

He’s so much fun to talk to. I’ve actually never talked to him about work. I’ve pretty much only talked to him about “The Building Code” and other things. I just want to ask so many questions and just keep spending time with them. So, Jon, open invitation, just slide into those DMs. We can talk shop a little bit, but great perspective on everything. The technology, where we want to go, why we’re doing the things we’re doing, and just a lot to look forward to. I think from the product world, which is, ultimately, why people come to Buildertrend. They’re using it to run their business. We’ve talked about these things for a long time. Cost plus, especially. I know at least in the customer success team that I have the privilege of working under, they are over the moon excited to be finally addressing these with our customers. And we have great leadership that I feel strongly that we’re going to deliver on, and I can’t wait to get it in our customer’s hands.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I mean the interview was so good. We really didn’t even talk that much about the cost-plus iteration that they’re doing right now, but that’s going to be massive. It’s something that people have been asking for forever talking about forever. And what I loved about the way he phrased it is “cost plus” isn’t just one feature. We’re improving the estimates features, we’re improving the homeowner visibility, we’re improving our reporting features. The rising tide lifts all boats. There’s a ton of different things that people are going to see. And I also think our customers are going to be over the moon to hear that those are going to be coming in small, incremental updates. So, you’re not going to log in one day and everything’s going to be completely different. It’s just going to constantly get better and better. And that’s just one example is, unfortunately, is under promise, over delivery. Didn’t give us too many teasers, but I would just say …

Zach Wojtowicz:

I tried, ladies and gentlemen. When you get the product people, you’re trying to tell us what’s happening.

Charley Burtwistle:

But I think it’s going to be a really, really exciting next few months for our customers and internally at Buildertrend.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. Well, this is airing a little later than when we shot it, so we’ll be able to follow up with it. But Jon, make sure you come back on “The Building Code.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Maybe bring Charley a cup.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, that’d be great. I think that about does it for Zach and I. Thank you for listening to “The Building Code.” Make sure to like, review, subscribe, and until next time, I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

See you.