Build smarter, not harder: Using data-driven insights to ensure business success

Charley Burtwistle (00:05):

Do it. We’re doing it live. This is all part of it.

Courtney Mattern (00:07):

Okay, what’s up everybody? Welcome to “The Building Code.” I’m your host Courtney Mattern.

Charley Burtwistle (00:07):

And I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Courtney Mattern (00:14):

And we’re here with another exciting episode of “The Building Code.” We’re going to talk Buildertrend Business Insights. But first, Charley, and I have been working on our rapport, haven’t we?

Charley Burtwistle (00:25):

Yeah, we did a little offsite, just strictly to work on our rapport, get some inside jokes. No, just kidding. We went to … Where did we go? Boston was the name of the place we went to.

Courtney Mattern (00:38):

It was only a week ago, and he doesn’t remember.

Charley Burtwistle (00:39):

Yeah.

Courtney Mattern (00:40):

Not a good sign.

Charley Burtwistle (00:41):

For the Contractor Coalition Summit, CCS. It was the best conference I’ve ever been to.

Courtney Mattern (00:48):

Yeah. And for our listeners, you might know it’s a long-running joke that we don’t let Charley out of the building.

Charley Burtwistle (00:54):

Yeah. So, maybe me giving my stamp of approval of the best conference I’ve ever been to doesn’t hold that much weight when you put into a comparison how many I’ve been to, but.

Courtney Mattern (01:03):

Well, I’ve been to a lot, and it is the best. So, the Contractor Coalition Summit is co-hosted by some of our best in the industry. Morgan Molitor from Construction2style, Brad Leavitt at AFT, Nick Schiffer of NS Builders and Tyler Grace from TRG Home Concepts just joined the crew, so all four of them …

Charley Burtwistle (01:03):

Nailed it.

Courtney Mattern (01:23):

Yeah, all four of them share their knowledge over the course of two days, and we’re the sponsors, so we’re just along for the ride. But it’s always fun to come back from one of those trips and feel inspired by a group of builders who they’re growing their businesses, and they’re vulnerable about their challenges and successes, and they don’t want to settle. It’s Q4 here. They’re not sitting around saying, “Well, the year’s just going to be slow as we write it out.” Or, “It’s an election year, the economy this or interest rates that.” They’re taking charge of running their business. So, thanks to the CCS team for having us out there. It was really great.

Charley Burtwistle (02:01):

Well, we were out there, and we gave a little 30-minute presentation on Buildertrend Business Insights, and it got the brain turning in the wheels turning. And we thought, “We can talk about it all day, but let’s get one of our users of Buildertrend Business Insights on the podcast to talk about it directly from the source.” So, who do we have today, Courtney?

Courtney Mattern (02:24):

Today we have Bryce Phillips. He’s the accounting assistant at 4C Group based in Utah. They’ve been using Buildertrend Business Insights for about a year now, pulling it into their business and trying to see what’s hiding in their Buildertrend data that can help them solve some problems.

Charley Burtwistle (02:39):

Yeah, Bryce came highly recommended from our BTBI team here at Buildertrend. So, super excited to have him on the podcast. So, without any further ado, let’s get them in here. Hey, Bryce, welcome to “The Building Code,” really appreciate you making the time to join us today. How’s it going?

Bryce Phillips (02:54):

Doing well. How are you guys doing?

Charley Burtwistle (02:56):

We are doing fantastic. We were just talking about how envious we are that you’re down there in Park City, Utah, beautiful place. We’re stuck here in the basement of Buildertrend HQ here in Omaha.

Courtney Mattern (03:08):

Yeah, we can’t even see the sunlight, but apparently you can see a mountain right out your window. We’re jealous.

Bryce Phillips (03:14):

It’s pretty sweet. It’s pretty awesome.

Charley Burtwistle (03:16):

So, we’ll be living through you for this episode. We always like to start … I’m super excited for this one. We’re going to talk about Buildertrend Business Insights a bit, but before we get too into it, we always like to start with just real high-level overview, Bryce, background, a little bit about you, a little bit about your company, how you got started in construction, and we’ll go from there.

Bryce Phillips (03:36):

Yeah, absolutely. My name’s Bryce Phillips. I help with a lot of stuff here at the 4C Group, primarily I’m an accounting assistant, but I help a bunch with the operations, and my main focus is making sure the Buildertrend works correctly. So, I’m in it all day, every day. I’ve been working here at the 4C Group for, it’s been about a year and a half now, and I love it. So, the 4C Group is actually a decently new company. In the past, it was three separate entities. So, there was Phillips Development, 4C Design Group, and then PC Interiors. So, that was a construction company, architecture, and then interior design. We merged them all together, and now we’re one whole team, like 4C, the four corners of the table. You’ve got construction, architecture, interior design, and then the client.

Charley Burtwistle (04:21):

Love that. Then you said you joined about a year and a half ago. Were you interested in construction or were you just looking for an accounting job somewhere? How did that all come together?

Bryce Phillips (04:32):

Yes, sir. Yeah, back in high school I worked as a construction laborer and always loved it. I’ve always found a lot of interest in construction. My dad’s a general contractor, it’s pretty sweet. So, I’ve always had an interest in construction, and I actually have picked up an interest in accounting as a reason to work for the company.

Courtney Mattern (04:50):

As the company evolved, what were some of the accounting challenges that you’ve had to work on? I’m sure that it comes with a lot.

Bryce Phillips (04:58):

Yeah, absolutely. So, the company’s evolved a lot. Like I said, we merged it together about two years ago, so right before I started working for the company. And as we’ve been trying to make everything communicate correctly and work in the right way, we’ve ran into a lot of issues. For example, making sure that all of our three separate QuickBooks account were able to merge into one because we had a Buildertrend company account for the Phillips development and one for PC Interiors, so making those work together. There’s been a lot of technological challenges and don’t even get me started on the other stuff.

Courtney Mattern (05:38):

How did you get the role of making sure Buildertrend works right? Did you draw the short straw? Is it the job you were going for? Tell us how that happened.

Bryce Phillips (05:48):

Yeah, so to be completely honest, they just needed somebody to help do some of the grindier work when it came to combining accounts and stuff like that. And it’s my first two, three days working for the company, I went through all the different Buildertrend tutorials and watched all of them. And so, my role was to get really good at Buildertrend, so that I could make sure it was working. And as a result of that, was able to figure it out, helped merge the accounts, and we got it all working perfectly. So, it’s been good.

Charley Burtwistle (06:18):

That’s awesome. I’m sure we could do a whole another episode just talking about implementing, setting up, cleaning up, combining, best practices, stuff like that inside of Buildertrend. I’d love to pick your brain and talk more maybe after the episode on some of the nitty-gritty details of how you were able to accomplish that, but it sounds like it went swimmingly. But today, we’re here to talk about one of the newer Buildertrend features or add-ons, I guess, which is Buildertrend Business Insights. And you were a high recommendation from the Buildertrend Business Insights team here at Buildertrend when we were looking for someone to come on. So, super excited to talk to you about that today. But we’d love just a quick background of how you stumbled upon it, how you were getting started, what you were looking for with Buildertrend Business Insights and what the beginning looked like for you there.

Bryce Phillips (07:06):

Yeah, so like I mentioned, with combining all of the different entities and making sure all the different accounts were working and stuff, we quickly ran into an issue of trying to figure out where all of the different teams were at financially, how our performance was going and things like that. And so, actually, for about a year, I was going in and creating manual reports in Excel of different things that we were pulling from Buildertrend. For example, I would copy and paste how much every single employee worked for a week, and it would take me two hours to do every Monday. It was the worst. And so, we were looking for a way to report that information a little bit more effectively and clearly. So, as we were looking through it, Buildertrend Business Insights was the first thing that popped up. We looked into it, and it was exactly what we were looking for. It was pretty awesome. It was at the perfect time.

Courtney Mattern (07:56):

I feel like we could play a really good game, Would You Rather, with would you rather have a root canal or work for hours a day in Excel. What are some of the pain points of pulling that kind of data?

Bryce Phillips (08:15):

Yeah, one of the biggest issues was user error. As much as I like to say that I’m really good at focusing on an Excel report for four hours, I’m not. No one is. And so, as I copy and paste, every once in a while, you just mess something up. And so, one, eliminating that user error was huge. Another thing that was awesome about it was it saved me a ridiculous amount of time. So, my Mondays went from being dedicated to creating these reports to being able to actually work on other really important stuff. Those are just two of the many.

Charley Burtwistle (08:50):

I love that. So, I love that you had a specific use case that you were for in particular. And obviously the BTBI’s functionality is great for combining multiple accounts and stuff into one specific thing there. Could you walk the listeners through, and Courtney and I, honestly, through what that set up and implementation phase looked like for business Buildertrend Business Insights? Because I know that the way they position their team is like, “Hey, here’s some standard out of the box reports that we see a lot of other people finding functionality with.” But the big value prop driver is the customizability and specifically tailoring it towards your use case. So, I’d love for you to just walk us through what the first couple of weeks looked like as far as getting onboarded with BTBI and building your reports and getting everything set up.

Bryce Phillips (09:38):

Yeah, absolutely. It was an actually awesome process. So, as we started getting set up with it, our account representative, which I think I know at least we got assigned one, I don’t know if every single customer does, but we definitely did. So, we have somebody, Lee, that reached out to us, talked with us, helped us walk through some pre-created tutorials that they had already created for us. They explained generally how Domo, the platform that BTBI works through, works and what some of their pre-created reports did. So, we spent some time going through that, figuring out how everything worked.

(10:17):

It became pretty obvious that a lot of this stuff that they had created was awesome, and that it was helpful, and that it was a lot more valuable than almost everything we already had. And then after just a couple of few short calls with Lee, he was able to walk me through how to really learn how to create these reports and make them, so they were fully customizable to the point that we needed them as a company.

(10:38):

So, now, I don’t even know how many Domo reports we’ve created, it’s probably at least 30 different reports that we run often, and out of those 30, there’s quite a bit that we still use some of those original templates that they gave us. But what’s so cool about it is that we can customize those further and make it work exactly as we need it to. So, we started with probably 10 that we were hoping to create, realize this capability, and then I’ve scaled it up, and I swear every quarter I get assigned a goal to create however many new Domo reports. I just walked out of a meeting, and they gave me two or three more.

Charley Burtwistle (11:15):

So, you yourself are actually building the reports inside of Domo?

Bryce Phillips (11:19):

Yes, sir, yeah.

Charley Burtwistle (11:20):

And did you have any Domo experience before this?

Bryce Phillips (11:23):

No, not at all.

Charley Burtwistle (11:25):

That is crazy. That is very cool to hear. It’s not that we don’t have other customers that are building their own reports. In fact, I think we actually have quite a few, but I know one of the original service offerings that we wanted to package with this was access to our data science team to actually go in and build the reports for the customers and things like that. And I know some people have taken advantage of it, but I’ve been blown away by how easy it is for people with no experience to get into the platform and start building these own reports. And you said you’d built 30 already with two more coming down the pike. That’s crazy. So sounds like they’re definitely keeping you busy over there at 4C.

Bryce Phillips (12:06):

Yeah. It’s been awesome. And I will say, the data science team, especially when we’re starting, that 10 reports that we wanted to create, there were one or two that were incredibly complicated, and they did go in and create them for us. They didn’t take long. I think they took a week to figure it out, came back to us. We tweaked a couple things, and it was perfect. So, between Lee, the data science team, everybody that’s been working to help us, it’s been pretty awesome.

Courtney Mattern (12:32):

Charley and I just recently traveled to a conference for customers called the Contractor Coalition Summit with customers, and we talked about Buildertrend Business Insights, and we find that a lot of people who’ve already been using Buildertrend are just using it as a record system. You put in your daily logs, your schedule, and then for Business Insights, you’re able to find really interesting insights from all the information you’ve been putting into Buildertrend. What has been an interesting insight that you’ve learned from the information you’ve been able to put into Buildertrend Business Insights and into the data tools? Have you learned something that you’re like, “Whoa, we had no idea we were missing the mark on that?”

Bryce Phillips (13:17):

Yeah, absolutely. There’s actually been quite a few. So, we spent … I don’t even know where to start. A big one that really shocked me is Buildertrend offers, just Buildertrend alone, has a section where it explains schedule slips, which shows based upon where you estimate your schedule to be complete, how much longer it took or how much faster you were able to accomplish the schedule activity. So, we wanted to create further reports based on those schedule slips to figure out how fast we were doing our projects, how fast we were moving through the different phases, things like that. And it was crazy to see which phases were always dragging on, which phases probably don’t need to be as long. We were able to adjust our entire project template and how long it takes us to do projects. It was pretty sweet.

Charley Burtwistle (14:06):

Wow. So, you were actually aggregating those up across all the different jobs that you had done to see where those commonalities were?

Bryce Phillips (14:14):

Yeah, absolutely. So, they were, where we were hoping they would be. It was really cool too because, like I said, here at 4C, we’re one collaborative team, but there’s three separate things. So, there’s construction, interior design and architecture, and sometimes they’re all working on different projects. So, it was even cooler to be able to separate them and see how long separate sections of each one of the teams takes. It was cool.

Courtney Mattern (14:39):

And talking about that, the action that you take afterward, I think when you think about data or reports, it can feel really clinical, but there’s the human element, too, to this data and these insights, your team is finding out where they might not be effective, or some people might be really effective. How has it changed the team’s attitude? So maybe with those schedule slips, what has it done to the team morale or lessons that they’ve learned?

Bryce Phillips (15:07):

So, when we first started going on with the BTBI, we were expecting it just to be something that our company’s leadership team accessed. So, I think in the beginning, we gave access to eight to 10 people, around there, and within the last couple weeks we’ve realized the value that has for everybody. So, we actually gave it to every single employee has access to view reports and stuff like that. And it’s been cool for everybody to be like, “Oh, I noticed this in the Domo report. How can we fix this in whatever?” So, every single meeting, we now start with five, 10 minutes just going through all the reports that are team specific, seeing how things were from the previous week, seeing what we’ve done better. And it’s been awesome to see how everybody’s really started to focus in on not only viewing these reports within BTBI but focusing on using Buildertrend correctly in general. So that’s been awesome.

Courtney Mattern (16:01):

Yeah, I feel like, not to Ted Lasso it, but I’m totally going to use this quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.” Usually when you slip on a schedule or why projects are always late, and you don’t have some sort of insight, everybody has either a finger to point or a gut feeling or just an assumption to make. But these reports are pretty objective, and so, the team is curiously asking questions about how they can improve.

Bryce Phillips (16:29):

Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I think one of the coolest things about it is when we first started using the BTBI, when we first made this a focus within our company, our primary goal was to help drive more effective use of Buildertrend. And if it’s done anything, it’s done that. So, it’s been pretty awesome.

Charley Burtwistle (16:49):

Yeah, I’d love for you to expand on that a little bit because that’s, I think, a missing piece that people don’t think through as much as they should when they’re looking to get into BTBI, or they want to do the reporting.

Courtney Mattern (17:02):

Because it’s money, they want to make more money usually, and that’s what we want for them too. So, it’s a cherry on top to hear that it’s helping you use Buildertrend more effectively.

Charley Burtwistle (17:10):

Yeah, well, people will come to us, and they’ll be like, “We want to see these cash flow reports and understand how many bills are past due,” and stuff like that. We’re like, “Well, are you using Buildertrend to run all your cash flow through?” And they’re like, “No.” “There’s no data for us to show you then.” Were you guys already using Buildertrend pretty well or were there instances of things that you wanted to report on that you weren’t necessarily using correctly in the platform, so you had to change your processes a little bit or has everything pretty much been plug and play?

Bryce Phillips (17:39):

Yeah, so while we were three separate companies, we all have an agreement between the three companies for the last, I don’t know, 10, 20 years. The general contracting company, Phillips Development, built the majority of the homes that 4C Design Group was designing. And so, we’ve been running out of Buildertrend for a really long time, and so, we’ve had a lot of information in it. But as you can imagine, as we’ve pulled into separate teams and hired new employees and brought new people into our company, there’s been a bit of a learning curve with trying to make sure that we use Buildertrend correctly between everybody. And there were some people, to be honest, that maybe didn’t want to be using Buildertrend as much, maybe it was a little difficult for them.

Courtney Mattern (18:26):

You don’t say, there’s people who don’t like …

Bryce Phillips (18:30):

No kidding. So, now that we’ve been using these BTBI different reports and stuff, it’s been awesome because everybody would say, “Oh, I need to make sure I go put that in Buildertrend, so it reports correctly.” So, everybody understands this data in the way that it should be. It’s awesome.

Charley Burtwistle (18:44):

That is really cool. I think that’s always the best case scenario when it comes to BTBI is it’s the carrot to dangle out in front of, “Hey, if you enter this data in correctly and follow the right processes and workflows and stuff like that, then you get a really cool report to track off at the end.”

Courtney Mattern (19:00):

Yes, will tell your future.

Charley Burtwistle (19:00):

Yeah.

Courtney Mattern (19:00):

Just put in the right information.

Charley Burtwistle (19:00):

Exactly.

Courtney Mattern (19:08):

So, what do you think the role of data is going to be at 4C? How has it changed the company in the last year and what do you think the future holds?

Bryce Phillips (19:16):

Yeah, so the 4C Group, we live by a couple of different core values, things that are really important to us. And one of them is that we follow a process of traction, which is that we can make progress in our specific goals and keep them moving forward so that we build traction and keep things going and moving within our company. And one of the parts of traction, which is a pretty common thing within business in general, is garbage in, garbage out. If you take really bad data and you try and make decisions upon that bad data, you’re going to get garbage out. You’re not going to make good decisions. But if you can really understand your data and know where it’s coming from and what it really is, you’re not only going to be able to make effective business decisions for the company as a whole, but project by project, all the homes we’re building, we’re able to figure out more and more how to be more productive, how to be more profitable, how to help the clients more.

(20:10):

And so, that data has been huge in helping us figure out which processes we need to refine and things we need to update and change so that we can accomplish all those various goals.

Charley Burtwistle (20:23):

I love that. I think that’s something that, and Courtney and I talk about this a ton, is we always think of our problems as the biggest problems in the world and nobody else is facing them. And then we’re a big tech company and no one else can figure this out. And then we talk to our clients, they’re dealing with the same exact problems. And we talk to our partners from different industries and they’re dealing with the same exact problems, too. And I think what you just outlined there is a really, really thought-provoking way of here’s how we move forward, here’s how we get better, not just as a company, but as an industry as a whole. And I think it’s something that Court and I can take back to Buildertrend as well, too, and think about those things the same way as well.

Courtney Mattern (21:02):

Yeah, I think it’ll be fun to see where 4C Group is in what kind of place they’re in a year from now using data. Because for such a long time, Buildertrend was the competitive edge, but there are a lot of project management systems, a lot of systems you can put your schedules in. But this new layer of using it to take action to maybe challenge what you thought you knew about the business to make better decisions is now going to be the competitive edge. Is there anything that you’ve done with BTBI and the insights that feels like a competitive edge or something that the company has tried or changed that they wouldn’t have done without uncovering the data?

Bryce Phillips (21:44):

Yeah, absolutely. It’s actually funny that you bring that up. We had a competitor come to us two months ago and be like, “Hey, our project management software is the best. You need to come use it.” And it was an easy no, because not only have we been using Buildertrend for a long time, but this new BTBI stuff, there’s nothing else like it. It’s been awesome.

(22:03):

And something that we’ve started implementing, like I mentioned, we follow this process of traction, which depends heavily upon setting rocks or goals for every single quarter. So, as a company, we set rocks, then within specific departments, we set rocks and then everybody sets personal rocks. And so, we started to realize in the past, it’s been hard for all of us to keep track of all the rocks that everyone is working on. So, we started, actually, I built a report two, three months ago within Domo that allows everybody to keep track of their personal rocks, see their department rocks and see the company rocks and a percentage of how much we’ve accomplished, and what else needs to be done. And I didn’t really ever expect to use Buildertrend as a goal setting platform, but it’s been awesome. It’s really worked well.

Charley Burtwistle (22:55):

That is a super cool use case. How’d you do it? Are you actually entering in that information into Buildertrend and pulling into Domo or are you entering it into Excel and just visualizing in Domo?

Bryce Phillips (23:07):

So, it’s directly all on Buildertrend. What we’ve been doing is we’ve been building them within our to-do’s. So, we give to-dos that are a rock a special tag on them. And as we go through, everybody has to follow a specific naming convention. So, if it’s a rock, like a goal, you just put rock at the start of the to-do checklist line, and then immediately it pulls it into this report, puts it under the person that it’s assigned to, and it filters all of it by person. It’s cool.

Courtney Mattern (23:38):

Okay. Now I have to ask, is rock an acronym or where do you get the origin of using rock as a goal? I like the idea of chipping away to build a stronger foundation. Am I headed in the right direction?

Bryce Phillips (23:54):

Yeah, absolutely. So, it actually comes from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The analogy is if you have a bucket, and you need to fit rocks, gravel and sand, you shouldn’t start by putting the sand in first and the rocks in last or everything’s not going to fit. Instead, you put your rocks in, then the gravel and then the sand and it all fits nice because you started with the biggest, most important things. So, as we start with our rocks, we’re able to fit all the other stuff that we do day to day in as well. But if we start with the other stuff, we never finish the big most important things.

Courtney Mattern (24:29):

Oh my gosh, we got to add that book to our Building Code book club. We have such a long list of books that have been recommended.

Charley Burtwistle (24:37):

Yeah.

Courtney Mattern (24:38):

Surprised I haven’t actually read The Seven … It’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Leaders, right?

Bryce Phillips (24:45):

Yeah, Highly Effective People, but I think he does have one about leaders as well.

Courtney Mattern (24:49):

Oh gosh, of course.

Charley Burtwistle (24:50):

That’s awesome. Not to get distracted, using to-dos in Buildertrend as a goal setting platform to pull into Domo is such a unique use case that I definitely hadn’t thought of before, but it makes perfect sense. And why not do stuff? It’s funny, we actually use Buildertrend internally on some of our teams at Buildertrend as well, too. It’s like, “Oh, why would we go and buy to-do software if we could just Buildertrend for it?”

Courtney Mattern (25:17):

Yeah, we tried to use it even for marketing project management, I think, before I got here. We’ve tried to use it for everything, but speaking of digressions, I’m wondering if you want to play game, Bryce, because I’ve been trying to bring the fun on “The Building Code.”

Charley Burtwistle (25:30):

Courtney brings the fun. I’m too boring. That’s what she trying to say.

Courtney Mattern (25:35):

But my team made these fishbowl questions. It’s very old school fun. If you were here, I would have you draw a question out of here. Can I draw a question, and you ask it just for fun?

Bryce Phillips (25:46):

Yeah, of course. Please.

Courtney Mattern (25:48):

Let’s see what we get.

Charley Burtwistle (25:49):

Here we go.

Courtney Mattern (25:51):

I hope it’s a hard one. Okay, we’ll see.

Charley Burtwistle (25:59):

Good intro here.

Courtney Mattern (26:01):

I’m questioning the question.

Charley Burtwistle (26:01):

Uh-oh.

Courtney Mattern (26:02):

What’s the craziest deadline your team has hit because of Buildertrend?

Bryce Phillips (26:10):

Let me think really fast.

Courtney Mattern (26:12):

I wonder if there’s an accounting deadline. Get all the numbers in.

Bryce Phillips (26:16):

Crazy. That’s an interesting word. Yeah, I guess a recent one, craziest, that’s a hard descriptive word because I wouldn’t say it’s nicely crazy. Nothing about accounting is crazy. But recently, we’ve set a rock every quarter to clean up the financial statements, which is actually a terrible rock because that’s not really definable, just clean them up. So, we, this last quarter, worked on defining what cleaning up those financial statements means. For example, figuring out what’s going on with our accounts receivable, figuring out how much everybody owes us, trying to reduce that amount, stuff like that.

(26:56):

And Buildertrend as a whole has always driven that. But using BTBI, we created an AR summary dashboard that shows the top five clients that owe the most amount of money and how late they are. And it was cool to share that within our leadership meetings, and the team leaders that were responsible for communicating with that client, they’d walk out of a meeting and call them and be like, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you in a little while. Can we get this?” And it was awesome to see the AR in our company just drop. It was sweet.

Charley Burtwistle (26:57):

That is cool.

Courtney Mattern (27:29):

That is a win.

Charley Burtwistle (27:35):

Talk about a meaningful use case of something, too, money in pockets. What more do you need?

Courtney Mattern (27:43):

Adding urgency to problems that the business has. Well, Bryce, is there anything you would add to cap this off, tie a nice bow on it for other companies? You’re obviously on the accounting side, so maybe numbers and data and spreadsheets are your love language, but what’s your takeaway for other companies who are thinking about whether they’re ready for data?

Bryce Phillips (28:09):

Yeah, I would say, honestly, it never … Okay, what’s the best way to put this? I am not usually a person that fully endorses a product or a service because there’s always things that aren’t perfect about it when it comes to anything. But as we’ve been using the BTBI, like I said, nothing’s perfect, but all the imperfections we’ve actually been able to work out, and they’ve just taken an extra week or two to figure out. And I will say the reports that it’s created and the things that it’s done for us as a company have revolutionized everything we’ve done in just the last four months. So, I genuinely highly recommend it. Like I said, if there was any reason for us to keep sticking with Buildertrend versus go with another competitor, BTBI alone would be enough reason. It’s been really, really good for us as a company to not only have that data, but to have it so easily on top of that. It’s not hard to create these reports. Once you build them, you don’t do a thing to them. They just keep updating. It’s awesome.

Charley Burtwistle (29:16):

I love that. That’s a glowing endorsement for sure. I do have one more question though before we let you go.

Bryce Phillips (29:23):

Please.

Charley Burtwistle (29:23):

It sounds like what I’ve been fascinated by listening to you talk is just the buy-in across the entire company to input data the right way, to view these reports, actually make changes based on the reports to build more reports. It sounds like you’ve got the machine humming over there from a data-driven company standpoint. Is there anything specifically you’ve done or maybe advice to other people trying to do this? Because building the reports, asking the questions, having the data is one thing, but getting buy-in across the company is a very, very difficult thing to do, especially in the construction landscape. So, I’d be curious if you have any advice that either you’ve done personally at 4C or that you’ve heard other people do or you would just recommend forgetting that buy-in?

Courtney Mattern (30:09):

Yeah. Is there anybody on the team you had to buy extra donuts and coffee, so that they got on board?

Bryce Phillips (30:15):

Yeah, so, obviously, working as an accounting/operations assistant, I have a lot of superiors above me within the company. And I think what helped everybody really buy into using this software was just help getting them on board. Went to my CEO, and I was like, “Hey, this is what it can do and this is what I think we can do. What do you think?” And immediately he was like, “Oh, no way. Really? Let’s see what we can do with that. I give you full go ahead to mess with it for a couple weeks.”

(30:47):

So, I went in, created some reports, brought them to him. He’s like, “Okay, those are great. Let’s keep doing this.” And we tailored them to a place where they were good for the company, but then we realized maybe they weren’t individually perfect for the various teams. So, then I went to the team leaders and said, “Hey, this is what I want to do for your team. How can I accomplish this?” And it was cool for them to come up with these crazy ideas for different dashboards and things like that that they wanted to create for me to just go in and do them because they’re not that complicated to build. And once they see something they’ve thought of, pulling that report, it made everybody super stoked. So, all it took was getting the leadership team on board, them giving me ideas for things that would help every single employee in the company. And then everybody loves it because it helps them, right?

Charley Burtwistle (31:33):

Yeah, that’s perfect. You’re not just doing it for the sake of doing it or because you think it’s interesting, you’re actually going out to the end users and sourcing what things would be the most impactful for them, providing that value back to them right away.

Courtney Mattern (31:47):

Yeah. You need to come do some change management work with Buildertrend. That goal alignment, there is something so valuable there about when you want to implement a tool, not just making it about … Maybe for an accountant it is the bottom line or the CEO, it’s about the growth. But if you go to every member on the team and say, “What’s your rock? What’s your goal this quarter? And how can this tool help you reach that goal or give you insights on it?” Then suddenly you have everybody saying, “Yep, we got to put the right data in Buildertrend. We got to get the right data out.”

Bryce Phillips (32:24):

For sure. It’s been pretty awesome, genuinely.

Charley Burtwistle (32:28):

Well, thank you so much, Bryce. This was as awesome as an interview as I expected it to be. So, appreciate you making the time. I learned a ton. Courtney, did you learn a ton?

Courtney Mattern (32:38):

Yeah, I think mostly about change management.

Charley Burtwistle (32:42):

I know, there were a few different rabbit holes we could have gone down there. So, appreciate you keeping us honest, Bryce. Thank you, again, so much for your time.

Bryce Phillips (32:50):

Thank you, guys. It was awesome to be on this. I really appreciate it.

Charley Burtwistle (32:54):

We’ll get you back on again soon, I’m sure. All right, have a good one.

Bryce Phillips (32:57):

You guys as well. We’ll see you.

Charley Burtwistle (32:59):

Well, Courtney, we just had Bryce Phillipsaccounting assistant at The 4C Group on “The Building Code.” What did you think?

Courtney Mattern (33:06):

I thought Bryce had such enthusiasm for building reports in Domo. You don’t find that very often someone who gets started on a tool and is so thrilled by the results that they get in and dig in and find ways to use it that are creative. I especially like the example about measuring their own team goals.

Charley Burtwistle (33:27):

That was a super cool use case.

Courtney Mattern (33:28):

Yeah, making sure that everybody on the team was actually getting something out of this tool, too, something that made them work harder and give their talents more willingly on the job site. I think that’s a real win for The 4C team, and they’re going to see that pay dividends in the year to come.

Charley Burtwistle (33:43):

You know what’s funny? I just remember this right now. So, before we rolled out Buildertrend Business Insights, we had this similar concept called custom reporting, which was pretty much the same thing except we would build a report. So, it wasn’t Buildertrend would build the reports. It wasn’t drag and drop for the end user. And we actually used Buildertrend to keep track of how long we were spending building each report as well. Pretty close. I think we actually used the Time Clock feature instead of the To-Do feature.

(34:12):

But it’s super cool. Once you start building these reports and editing them and customizing them and thinking, “Oh, if we added a tag on this feature, if we added a custom field on this feature, then we could report on it.” Once you start thinking in the mindset of whatever we put in there, we then have at our disposal to build reports off of, it really opens up the door to using Buildertrend really, really creatively and uniquely to your specific use case. And that’s the cool thing with custom fields and tags and stuff like that inside a Buildertrend, you can track anything, which means that you can build anything.

Courtney Mattern (34:47):

Our listeners might not know, but Charley, you come from data science, the data science world, worked on the data science team. You have to do this kind of work or have had to do this type of work for Buildertrend, finding insights within our own data. And you were involved with Buildertrend Business Insights in the early days when it was coming to life. What are you surprised about when you hear these stories of customers and how they’re using Buildertrend Business Insights?

Charley Burtwistle (35:11):

Yeah, it’s funny. What I’m surprised about is I think we made it too easy for people to build their own reports because when we first rolled this out, we were so excited we’re going to be able to monetize our Data Science team, and people aren’t going to be able to build these reports, so we’ll have to build it for them. And we thought it was a really cool upsell lever for us of like, “Here’s this, but we’ll do it for you.” And talking to Bryce who’s like, “Oh, I built 30 of them. I’m going to build two more this afternoon when I get done talking to you idiots.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, you don’t need us.” And that’s great. That’s what we want. That is democratizing data in its truest form of it’s your data, you’re importing it, you build whatever you want with it. And that’s what we wanted to roll out. And I think we just overestimated, underestimated how easy it would be, hard it would be, whatever. It’s easier than we thought, and people are taking advantage of it. So, it’s really, really cool to see.

(36:08):

And if you want to learn more, you can go out to buildertrend.com/buildertrend-business-insights, which we’ll also link in the show notes. You can also just go out to buildertrend.com hover and click additional services, and it’ll be the first one right there as well too. But I was talking to our BTBI team, and I was like, “Oh, we got Bryce on the podcast today.” And they’re like, “Make sure you let people know where they can go to find out more.” I was like, “Oh, don’t worry. I will.”

Courtney Mattern (36:33):

We make it really easy to find us on the internet.

Charley Burtwistle (36:36):

And where will we put that link, Courtney?

Courtney Mattern (36:38):

We’ll put it in the show notes.

Charley Burtwistle (36:39):

It’ll be in the show notes. There you go. That’s the note we needed to end on. I think, as always, like, review, subscribe. Join us on the Facebook, The Building Code Crew.

Courtney Mattern (36:48):

Yeah, send us an email, please at podcasts …

Charley Burtwistle (36:51):

Podcast@buildertrend.com.

Courtney Mattern (36:51):

Charley’s got it. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know if our rapport is working. Did you like the new fishbowl game? Am I bringing the fun to the podcast? I need to know. Please rate, review, subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts.

Charley Burtwistle (37:07):

That’s one of Courtney’s rocks for 2024 is bring the fun to the podcast. So, let us know how close we are on that rock goal. Until next time, I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Courtney Mattern (37:16):

I’m Courtney Mattern.

Charley Burtwistle (37:18):

Peace.