How to build a successful team: Legend Homes

Tom Houghton:

You’re listening to “The Building Code,” I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

We’re going to bring our guests, Joe and Andy from Legend Homes on in just one second. But first we want to tell you about an exciting opportunity we have called Buildertrend University on the road. We’re calling it BTU on the road for short, this’ll be taking place in Dallas, Texas on October 3rd, 2019. It’s a one day event for you and your team to learn more and how to optimize your usage of Buildertrend.

Tom Houghton:

We have a limited time early bird discount available right now, so if you go to the website, buildertrendu.com/dallas, you’ll see that the limited time pricing there depending on when you’re listening to this episode if I already be gone. So as soon as you listened to it, go check it out. You’re actually going to hear from Andy and Joe, share their Buildertrend University experience at the end of the episode.

Tom Houghton:

So make sure you listen all the way to the end, to hear their thoughts and their takeaways from Buildertrend University. Now let’s get started with Joe and Andy. And joining us on this episode, we’re chatting with two individuals from Legend Homes, Andy Ferguson, vice president and Joe Crider, he’s the division manager there. They’re based out of the greater Nashville area. How are you doing guys?

Joe Crider:

Doing great. Thanks. Appreciate you having us on.

Andy Ferguson:

Good to see you.

Paul Wurth:

Well gentlemen, good to have you. We talked a couple of weeks back at Buildertrend University, we talk about that a lot on the podcast, but that’s where we meet a lot of our clients which is why we love doing it here in Omaha. So at the end of this show we’ll talk to you, maybe we’ll ask you fun facts about your trip to Omaha.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

But we were talking, you guys have a great story, so we thought it’d be really cool to bring you on. And as we talked about, when we were discussing the podcast, I think our listeners love hearing about fellow companies, how they started, some challenges they face today, some wins they have, stuff like that. So we always ask for a company profile, do you want to give us a rundown?

Joe Crider:

Yeah. So our company is Legend Homes. We have about 15 employees. We’ll build probably about 25 homes this year with about a $30 million volume. We’ve been in business since 2006, back in 2006 there was a couple of us and we’ve just been growing steadily ever since.

Paul Wurth:

So 2006 that’s when we started as a business. So about a year and a half or two years later, a huge boom and building happened, right? Or the opposite of that?

Joe Crider:

Yeah, not part of us, we had a boom in remodeling about that time.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, that’s right.

Joe Crider:

There you go.

Paul Wurth:

So a lot of people think that that’s really smart. So is that how you guys survived?

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. We honed our skills and pretty much anything people would pay for, we did.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joe Crider:

Sure.

Paul Wurth:

So what was that time like for you guys? 2006, you build your business based on building new homes. There’s some concept of like, “Here’s our process, here’s how we’re going to go, design this stuff, here’s how we’re going to sell it, here’s how we’re going to produce it,” and then everything just changes.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. And for us, it was a terrible time for our industry. For us it wasn’t that bad only because we didn’t own a bunch of lots at the time, so we were just starting out, we weren’t carrying a bunch of baggage. It really helped us hone what we do and at the time to be successful and to survive, you just had to be really good. There were still a few people building and a few people buying homes and we just had to be very good to attract those folks.

Paul Wurth:

So you guys were leaning off and that’s very similar to our story at Buildertrend. I think when that happened there was only five or six of us here, so we hunkered down and just got through it and learned a bunch of lessons and then we’re better for it today, so that’s good to hear. Do you still remodel today? Or are your laser-focused on home building?

Andy Ferguson:

We do not do much remodeling, we’ll do it occasionally for clients, but generally speaking we just do custom homes.

Paul Wurth:

And so is that pre-sold custom homes or are you doing specs as well?

Andy Ferguson:

So we’ll do about 60% pre-sold homes and 40% specs, really our bread and butter is the pre-sold homes, it’s really who we built our staff around and all of our people, our project managers, our designers, that whole staff is built around that customer experience and building custom homes.

Paul Wurth:

Well let’s talk about that, so what was your vision for building the staff? Because a home builder, I think can go a lot of different routes, obviously bringing on full-time employees is a big overhead, right? With everything that goes with it. Some people have their salespeople be the real estate agents. Some people outsource designing, some people outsource architecture, I meant interior designer. So did you guys have a plan and what does it look like today in terms of staff?

Andy Ferguson:

That’s a great question. I think our business and working with clients, it’s such an intimate process, so we’ll work with clients for well over a year from the pre-construction phase through construction to after construction. And so all of our staff are very good communicators, great people, people, persons and just really good at working with clients and that’s our main focus it’s just making that experience very good. And so we’ve hired and we’ve built our staff based on folks that can help us pull that off.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so … Go ahead Joe.

Joe Crider:

So we’ve recently brought a lot of folks that maybe don’t have any building backgrounds but they’re just really excellent communicators, they’re college athletes. It’s a similar mold that you guys pull their work there at Buildertrend, it’s the same people that have the intangible skills that you can teach because what we do every day it’s pretty easily taught, takes a little bit of time, but the communication is really probably the hardest thing that we do on any day. Well that’s really where Buildertrend helps out or is helping out a lot of estimate.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a great nugget to take out of this episode is that. And do you think that’s a trend happening in construction? Or do you feel like that’s still pretty unique to take people outside of construction and just plug them into your systems because they’re good communicators and understand business, that kind of thing.

Joe Crider:

I think there’s really two types of construction businesses out there, especially in the residential, there’s the guy in his pickup truck who runs this whole business out of his house. And then not that or more professional, but it’s just a different type of profession where we’re taking young college educated folks with a lot of building experience, but understand the technology, understand how to leverage technology to make us more competitive than the next guy.

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome.

Andy Ferguson:

I think that’s the future of home building right there. Leveraging technology it’s integrated into so many other parts of our lives. It just makes sense that we’re using it to do this as well.

Paul Wurth:

Well, and there’s a skilled labor shortage, right?

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

So at certain point you need to make a shift from trying to have in-house labor and that’d be your hiring to just somebody who understands technology and business and communication and just apply your process, right?

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. I love your tagline on your website. It says building a luxury home should be a luxury experience. I like that because it … Right? Doesn’t that look good?

Paul Wurth:

That’s good.

Andy Ferguson:

Well done guys. We’ll make sure we put a link to your website in the show notes page so that people can check it out, but where’d you get the tagline?

Paul Wurth:

The tagline?

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

Yeah. I think it really comes back to just what we do everyday in terms of just making it a great experience. That gets back to where we were just talking about as far as hiring great communicators, our clients are all really successful. So our clients are CEOs, they’re doctors, whatever they do they’re extremely professional in their field.

Joe Crider:

And they’re used to having really great experiences wherever they go, whether it’s restaurants or buying a car or whatever they do and whatever they consume, they’re used to that being a great experience. And so our approach in our businesses to make what generally people will come to us and they’ll assume that building a home is going to be a terrible experience because they’ve heard that time and time again from friends or maybe they’ve actually had that experience in the past.

Joe Crider:

And so they, they come to us most of the time, assuming it’s going to be a terrible experience. I think by kind of our processes, by our people, we’re just trying to make it fun, make it enjoyable and make it extremely easy for our clients.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. Just to illustrate that a little bit, a couple of weeks ago, I was finishing a house for a client and she asked me, she said, “Well, have you started another house yet?” And I thought, “Man, what a great compliment.” She thinks that I am only building one house, little does she realize I’m involved in 12 other projects. But for her to think that my only responsibility is to build her custom home … And I’m not the only one that does that, our whole team makes our clients feel that way. I think that’s really what is a luxury experience, like that exemplifies.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a great point.

Tom Houghton:

That’s incredible.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Making them feel like that is super unique. That’s really great.

Tom Houghton:

That is.

Paul Wurth:

I want to go back to one thing before Tom moves on, because he’s going to make me move on. You have a long sales cycle as it were, right? You meet with somebody, you guys do a design.

Joe Crider:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

A very hot topic in the industry right now is charging for design. When and how do we charge for estimates? How do we charge for design? What is your take on that? What’s your process?

Joe Crider:

You know, one thing I guess we have the luxury of is, we’re not bidding against other competitors a lot. We generally, when a client comes to us, they’ve usually been in some of our homes or they know of us, when they come to us we pretty quickly get some type of architectural deposit or construction services agreement to say, “Hey guys, we’re going to do this work for you, we’re going to walk you through the process of designing a home, we’re going to spend time with you to help develop construction specs, we’re going to work with you to develop a site plan and we’re going to essentially build this package with you and it’s going to cost maybe $10,000 or $15,000, but there’s a fee associated with it.” If at the end of the day, when we deliver pricing to them, if they say, “Hey, this isn’t going to work out.” No problem. The deposit would be, non-refundable assuming that we go to contract, we then apply that deposit towards the contract price.

Paul Wurth:

And if you do that, how many homes do you guys build a year for pre-sold?

Joe Crider:

For pre-sold let’s say 15.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. So let’s say you present a prospect with that just round numbers, $10,000 deposit a hundred times a year. How many people just walk away because of the deposit?

Joe Crider:

I would say 10%.

Paul Wurth:

And that’s probably a healthy 10%, right? Because they probably aren’t that serious?

Joe Crider:

Sure. And part of that process is really understanding expectations on the front end, before we ever even put a bunch of work into it, it’s really understanding, “Okay, what you the client may be describing, we think is going to be in this price range. Does that feel okay? Are we talking about the same thing?” And so really understanding and having realistic expectations versus putting a lot of time and effort on everybody’s part only to find out in a few months that, “Hey, we’re thinking two totally different things.”

Paul Wurth:

It’s that qualification we talk about, which is super important in construction.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Just so you’re not spinning your wheels on everybody.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

And particularly if someone says, “Hey, we’ve got a budget of X,” we’ll steer them to a particular area.

Paul Wurth:

Got it.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

I’ve seen some Nashville homes on a TV show. My wife, not me watches, “Keeping it Cavallari” with what is that Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari?

Joe Crider:

Come on Paul. Oh it’s okay.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, just don’t tell anybody, but I’d kind of do like that show. But those are some monster houses when they drive around.

Joe Crider:

It’s a beautiful area down there.

Tom Houghton:

It’s a beautiful area.

Joe Crider:

So my wife just told me, it was all over the news here that they just moved. I’ve never seen the show, but they actually just moved into a neighborhood where I originally met Andy and I was working for another builder at the time. This was 10 years ago, but that is one of the neighborhoods that Legends built a bunch of homes in, I’ve built a bunch of homes in and we’re building in four or five other communities just like that at the same scale and magnitude but it’s pretty impressive market here, for sure.

Paul Wurth:

It really is. Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

I was just down and actually in Franklin earlier this year. And I thought it was beautiful even for … I was down there at the end of January and of course in Omaha in January, it looks horrible outside but Franklin still look beautiful. So-

Joe Crider:

We actually live in Franklin, the bulk of our business is really South of Nashville and Brentwood and Franklin. So it’s really where we operate most of the time is in that area. So-

Paul Wurth:

Beautiful. Let’s peel back the curtain and talk about your business and the processes that you had in place a couple of years ago and how that’s evolved if you don’t mind. Could you give us a snapshot of how things are running maybe about four or five years ago?

Andy Ferguson:

Sure. And even nine months ago-

Joe Crider:

Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

It’d be pretty comical if you saw how we operate, which I consider to be a great business. It was in large part due to lots of three ring binders and lots of various Excel spreadsheets and all kinds of various programs that were not linked together. Whether it’s paper copies and binders of estimates and bids or a purchase order system, based on an Excel spreadsheet or design selections all plugged into a three ring binder. So generally our systems were very antiquated and paper-based.

Joe Crider:

Yeah, I guess up until several months ago, when we really started to use Buildertrend if you wanted to double check to make sure that you have the final information on the selection, the only way to really do that was to call the office or drive to the office, pull out the binder and look at it.

Paul Wurth:

Wow.

Andy Ferguson:

It’s hard to believe we were doing that.

Paul Wurth:

And so when you guys talk about bringing in young professionals and when they walk into an office and see that maybe this antiquated system, what was their reaction to that? Were they pushing you guys to like “Really, isn’t there a kind of a better way to do this?”

Joe Crider:

I guess maybe when I joined-

Andy Ferguson:

I think Joe was shocked when he joined the team about a year ago.

Joe Crider:

Yeah. I have a pretty extensive background in operations and I did home building, I went to join the military, I was in the Marine Corps for six years then I came back to Nashville and ended up linking back up with Andy. And I just felt like there would be a much better way to do this. And that’s where we got back into Buildertrend. And I think to answer your question though, Paul, when we brought on all these new folks, we also realized that we didn’t really have a good system to train them.

Joe Crider:

And we didn’t really have anything that we could hand over to them and say, “Here’s our process and here’s how you should manage a project.” And so now with Buildertrend especially using templates and having schedules laid out, I can take somebody right off the street tomorrow and we would have a much better implementation plan for somebody with no construction experience or somebody with a lot of construction experience. You know, every builder does think differently. So we’re now using Buildertrend to help codify the way that we do business. It’s just kind of an institutional knowledge up until now.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a big benefit that we probably don’t do a good job of speaking to in a sales process, just because there’s so much we’re trying to cover, but I think it’s something people realize is that, instead of Andy having to like or Joe you having to like just download out of your head for four months, this is how we do this, this is how we do this. It’s just like, everything’s done in here and it’s labeled change orders, right? And there’s a manual and there’s a video. So check it out.

Joe Crider:

Well. And Paul, I think you hit the nail on the head. What it’s really become eye-opening for us is we now have the potential to grow a whole lot easier. And so back dealing this older system that we’ve been doing, it was almost like additional growth just seemed impossible because it would involve teaching new people these very cumbersome processes that it look to be like, we just had mapped out our growth-

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joe Crider:

… and once we’ve changed, it’s been very eye-opening as we start to implement various parts and pieces of Buildertrend to see that growth is going to be easy at this point.

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. Producer, Brooke just showed us a photo I don’t know if you guys are okay with us sharing this on the show notes, but there’s a photo of a whole bunch of binders. I think maybe you guys see it-

Joe Crider:

Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

So yeah. We’ll post that on the show notes if you guys are okay with it.

Paul Wurth:

We’ll caption that before Buildertrend.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

It’s okay, we’re embarrassed but yeah, you can show it.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

Well I think a lot here will relate to it.

Paul Wurth:

The reality is, is that today 80% of the market is still there.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

And what we always preach to people is like, “We’re not here to judge, we’re not here to be somebody who says you’re doing something wrong or even that your systems are antiquated.” The adjective I was thinking about is like, they’re customized to how you guys do things and it’s hard to teach somebody your custom workflow and the way you guys do it. And everybody can get better, our company can get better every day. So it starting to become very obvious to building construction companies like there is a better way to do this. It doesn’t take that much. It doesn’t cost that much. And like your savings are out of the window or crazy. That was a bad-

Andy Ferguson:

What do you mean the out of the window?

Paul Wurth:

Out of the window? Out of control?

Andy Ferguson:

Out of control.

Paul Wurth:

Out there?

Andy Ferguson:

I don’t know.

Paul Wurth:

VP of sales everybody.

Joe Crider:

Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

The cool thing is if you do look at the photo of all the various notebooks, we’re really doing anything different or operating out of Buildertrend, we’re still using a PO system. We’re still categorizing all of our selections, we’re still scheduling. We were just doing it in a much different way with 15 different systems. We’re now able to just put it all into one program.

Joe Crider:

Yeah. I think one thing about Buildertrend when we first started is, you guys have selections and all these really awesome tasks. My first thought was, “Okay, this is how they intend for this to work and that’s work.” But after going to BTU, what I really realized was it’s really adaptable to the way that you run your business. And there’s no … Buildertrend, doesn’t have a specific workflow that it has to follow to be able to use the system, whatever workflow that you develop is really how you should use builder canons. And I think you don’t really know that until you get in there and start using that.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That’s a great point, Joe. And quite honestly, it’s an internal struggle we’ve had for a long time of, do we create the workflow and make a new company change their workflow? And like, this is the way we do it or do we keep it super flexible and know that if we don’t talk to them and explain that it’s super flexible, we might lose some people there? So it is an internal struggle for us to always think about like, what is the right way? I don’t think there is a right way because there’s advantages to both.

Paul Wurth:

Some people do come to us for our consultive, “Hey, you guys obviously know what you’re doing because you work with 15,000 companies like me and you’ve been doing it for 13 years. So you tell me how to run selections.” And there’s other people who come to us and go, “Hey, we’re comfortable with our process, just adapt that process to your software because everybody here knows how to do selections our way.”

Andy Ferguson:

It seems like the system now works for either path-

Paul Wurth:

Right. True enough. Yeah.

Joe Crider:

I think the thing for us too is we built some really detailed customs and then we also built some specs homes that are at a lower price point that don’t have as much that changes to them. And so we almost need different processes for different projects because the client has an input and how well the project can run and we really need a framework, not an absolute system. We’re not a production builder, we can’t build the exact same way every single time. And so for a company like us, Buildertrend, doesn’t give us a lot of flexibility. And then I think too having met our coach and he has really helped us say, “Here’s some other clients, this is how they do it.” And he’s given us some really good ideas on how we could update a process or make a process better by using Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great.

Joe Crider:

Can we give our coach a plug?

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Who is it?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

Griffin Gum.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, Griffin. You probably like him because he’s from the Southeast as well.

Joe Crider:

We do.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

We are related.

Paul Wurth:

I don’t know, I think he’s from South Carolina.

Tom Houghton:

I think so.

Paul Wurth:

He married-

Andy Ferguson:

North Carolina.

Paul Wurth:

North Carolina. Yeah. He married into Omaha. I’m sure that’s probably still a point of contention in their marriage after the winter-

Tom Houghton:

Probably.

Paul Wurth:

… after the winter we just had.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

But he’s a great guy. So I’m glad. Yeah. Give him a shout out. I had two things there though. So the one misconception is, templates are for production builders. The reality is, is that templates just save you time because they’re a framework, as you said, Joe, “For the next home.” Even though that home might be wildly different in the schedule or the actual selections or the actual details of the purchase order, you’re still going to need framing and framing’s still going to need to come before drywall, right?

Joe Crider:

Yeah. And that’s a great point because when we first started, we built this really detailed schedule and then we created a template. Well we got to the next job and we had some unexpected delay and it just got so cumbersome, we deleted the schedule and started over. So what we made then was a 10 or 15 activity schedule. And then that is our template that every job follows, just like you said framing comes before installation, installation comes before drywall. And then we use the schedule as the project manager and the field update. I sit down and we review two weeks schedule, we solidify what’s happening for two to four weeks and then that’s where we really get in and manipulate the system and make it work for the individual projects.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That’s great advice because I think there is some misconception there. And so that’s another good nugget from this one for everybody. Tom’s probably going to make me have to stay on schedule what’s next Tom?

Tom Houghton:

No, this is all good. And I was thinking from an outside perspective, I think a lot of clients will relate to where you guys were at, which was you were using the software but you weren’t leveraging it to its maximum capabilities. So what was the changing point for you guys that said “We’ve got to do something,” and then I guess now if you can fast forward, so this is a two-part question, sorry, but tell us what was the crux of you saying we got to make a change and leverage this more? And then where are you at now?

Joe Crider:

Well, a lot of it just came about when I started, I think when they handed me a “Here’s how we do our schedules,” and it was a paper schedule and “Here’s where all your selections are,” and it was a binder this thick full of printed copies that had multiple stamped finals on it and I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing in the field. We just realized that there’s got to be another way to do this and there has to be a technology to do it. And we did have an account we were using co-construct and one of the downsides was that it wasn’t functional from a mobile phone. And so I would say up to 15 people that are in our company, four or five are at the office every day.

Joe Crider:

And the rest of us, myself included come to the office maybe once a week because we do everything remotely. And so for Buildertrend when we resigned back up, it was really about the functionality of the mobile app. You know if I’m going to ask or we’re going to ask our teams to do stuff and update it on a day-to-day basis from the field, they have to be able to do it from the iPhone.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joe Crider:

We could tell them to go back at night and pull up the computer and do all that stuff. It’s just now you might as well just do paper, it’s just as difficult.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That makes sense. So how did you approach onboarding and then teaching all of your people? Did you two take the lead in sort of like, “This is how Buildertrend works let me explain it to my guys and girls,” or did you get everybody in a room and learn together?

Andy Ferguson:

I think we started … I’ll back up one thing, I think the other thing just to dovetail on what Joe said is we also sat down, maybe it was nine months ago and just talked about what were the bottlenecks in our company. And as this as an overall theme was, the building of the house, the actual physical construction really isn’t that difficult, but what was really … We were struggling with in our business with just the processes of getting information to the guys building the houses.

Andy Ferguson:

You know, how do they know they’ve got the right information? How can we help them schedule and just trying to improve our processes. So that really pushed us towards, “Okay, we want to eliminate some bottlenecks and improve processes.” We really then went back and started looking real closely at Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Andy Ferguson:

I think the first thing that was just looking back was that the first thing we implemented was doing daily logs and I think that’s a consistent theme that we hear on the podcast and how guys can jump in. And I will say for me personally, the Daily Logs changed our business overnight. And just having that ability for me, I’m in the office 90% of the time and I had no vision of what was going on in the field unless I got in the car and drove out to the site.

Andy Ferguson:

And so which led to really long hours, working on the weekends and all of a sudden with the guys doing daily logs, it really transformed the business. And all of a sudden we had a tool to communicate from everybody in the field to everybody in the office. And that started the light bulb went off then that, “Okay, we’re on to something big here as far as being able to just improve the communication across our entire team.”

Joe Crider:

Yeah. I guess just to answer your question about implementation I would say that one, that’s probably something that we could do better and we were due for another sit down but I think the most important thing is just an incremental approach. So Daily Logs, pretty easy to pull up the app, take a picture, write a few notes and then we’ll push out, “Hey, start checking the weather box on the daily log.”

Joe Crider:

And then it’s like, “Hey, start using this tag,” or we decided we want to be able to, I guess to-do list this is another example, we’ve decided we’re going to try to-do list to do a hold a weekly production meeting. And some of it, we’re just figuring out as we go and then when we feel like we’ve got a process that works, we’re kind of sitting down on whoever it most impacts because the folks that are issuing the POs aren’t the same folks that are building the schedule. We haven’t really spent as much showing them all the process of POs. Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Right. There’s like a concept of you don’t have to teach everybody everything. There’s a role-based concept of rolling out software and especially Buildertrend, right? Like get the people in there who need to know POs. Your guy in the field maybe doesn’t need to do that unless he issues POs in the field or bills, but he doesn’t have to know how to develop them. If he just needs to have be able to go look at which ones they are or approve work done by the drywall guy, right?

Joe Crider:

Yeah. And I think the other thing too is you just get a couple of things implemented and all of a sudden everybody sees the value in it. And then they just click they’re like, “Oh, this is really cool. Now I know where to go to find the information.” And the software is so intuitive that it doesn’t take a lot of training and it’s like watching my two year old pick up the phone and be able to stop and start his videos without ever having any training or really even know how to use it.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. That’s awesome.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. It’s great for our UI, UX team, they continue to work on that ease of use. I think they always talk about if it’s the first time you ever see it, we want it to be something you can do like two or three things with.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. And we’ll put UI, UX definitions in the show notes, for those of people who are not in the design-

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That’s right.

Tom Houghton:

… product-

Paul Wurth:

Hey-

Tom Houghton:

… update videos.

Paul Wurth:

… do you guys see Tom’s recent update videos every month?

Andy Ferguson:

No, I’m not [crosstalk]

Joe Crider:

[crosstalk] probably not.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, gosh. There are-

Paul Wurth:

Where do you find those in the system?

Tom Houghton:

So in the help center.

Paul Wurth:

So you go to the top right of your app. If you’re on a desktop click on the question mark.

Tom Houghton:

Yep.

Paul Wurth:

Go to your help center. So Tom, every month does a really great video about all the new features we’ve done.

Tom Houghton:

And we also give a sneak peek at features that were coming soon.

Paul Wurth:

At the new features coming out.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. That we’re working on.

Paul Wurth:

So check out the upcoming-

Tom Houghton:

Recent updates videos.

Paul Wurth:

… recent updates videos. And Tom is in a Santa Claus hat at one point. Was that December?

Tom Houghton:

That was probably December.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. You’re not getting a straight cut and drive video with Hollywood Tom, he’s going to put a spin on it.

Tom Houghton:

There you go.

Paul Wurth:

They’re entertaining.

Andy Ferguson:

We’ll definitely check those out.

Paul Wurth:

Check them out.

Tom Houghton:

Okay. Thanks. So back on track, let’s wrap up with your experience at Buildertrend University. What was your favorite class that you had here?

Joe Crider:

You know, I’ll jumped in, I guess, first off on the experience, one, I would highly recommend it to anybody that’s looking to get deeper into Buildertrend we just had a fantastic experience. One of the biggest things was just meeting a lot of different people and I guess our best class was really the time we spent with our coach was when we were really able to take a deeper dive into things we talked about in classes and things we were thinking about and we were blown away with our coach’s ability just to listen to what our problems or issues are and basically help us plug into the Buildertrend and how Buildertrend can help us solve those problems. You’re just very intuitive.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah. I saw it. I think the other thing for me really was it didn’t feel like I was going to a paid conference where they were there to take our money. I literally felt like I was going in where there was a big group of people that are really best in interest in our successes not only our own business that we get the most out of the program. Unfortunately I can’t remember exactly who they were, but there were two questions that I had. One was like a little software glitch I was having and something else.

Andy Ferguson:

And I talked to those folks on the first day. And then on the last day, they both came and found me and they gave me a response or a solution to what the problem was. And I didn’t see him write anything down, I didn’t see him take any notes but they really paid attention to what was going on and what our questions were. I think just because of that, it was a first-class experience and I would definitely go back.

Joe Crider:

Yeah. It was a very personal experience. I definitely walked away with the feeling of that just Buildertrend in general was much more than just a software, it really felt like a partner to our company that was really interested in helping us do better.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

That’s amazing. That’s really why we created Buildertrend University is that we wanted to break that wall down.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

We didn’t want to be the guys who talk to you when they need your renewal and hit you up for every new upgrade and that relationship, we talk internally all the time about being your non-equity business partner. And this is a way for us to really display that and it’s a credit to our people here.

Joe Crider:

So we felt that a hundred percent when we were there.

Andy Ferguson:

Yeah, for sure.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome.

Paul Wurth:

And we have a bar.

Tom Houghton:

That helps too.

Andy Ferguson:

And the bar was nice too.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. The bar was nice too.

Andy Ferguson:

It all works together.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, it was good. Good. All right guys. Well, let’s wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and sharing your Buildertrend experience. We’re so glad that you guys came up and joined us for Buildertrend University and then we wish you continued success in your business and thanks for your time.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. It’s amazing that you guys are doing so well. And just for us to be a little part of it, it makes us feel really great and let’s keep building together anything we can help you get to whatever goal it is, let’s go to 50 million, a hundred million and then the moon.

Joe Crider:

Yeah. Well, Paul and Tom, thanks. We appreciate it. And I would say that Buildertrend’s a lot bigger than a small part of our business now, particularly going forward over the next few years, so we’re really excited and we appreciate you guys.

Paul Wurth:

All right. Come back to Omaha-

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

… soon.

Tom Houghton:

Or we’ll come visit you guys.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, well yeah, we’ll be out there.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Joe Crider:

Yeah, anytime.

Paul Wurth:

All right. Appreciate you guys.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks.

Paul Wurth:

Thanks.

Tom Houghton:

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