Feature Spotlight: Work in Progress report with Scott Vonderharr

Tom Houghton:

You’re listening to “The Building Code,” your guide to a better way to run your business. I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

Great job, Tom. I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks for that vote of approval there.

Paul Wurth:

I mean, you do a good job.

Tom Houghton:

Well, thank you.

Paul Wurth:

Very professional.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, well I try.

Paul Wurth:

The ying and the yang that is “The Building Code” podcast.

Tom Houghton:

Sure.

Paul Wurth:

Which one are you?

Tom Houghton:

We’ll leave it up to the listeners. You can vote on that in the show notes.

Paul Wurth:

Show notes.

Tom Houghton:

This is at buildertrend.com/podcast, producer, Kaylee, is setting that up right now. She’s so excited. Or you could vote in The Building Code Crew on Facebook, our group.

Paul Wurth:

Wait a second. What is that?

Tom Houghton:

The Building Code Crew is what we’re calling our fan club. We’ve got a fan club.

Paul Wurth:

Wow. That’s presumptuous.

Tom Houghton:

I think right now there’s probably three people on there. One of them is my mom.

Paul Wurth:

You can go on … This is news to me. You can go on Facebook and you can search for The Building Code Crew with a C, I assume?

Tom Houghton:

I’m going to call you out. It’s news to you, yet you posted about it on Instagram, I think yesterday.

Paul Wurth:

Paul Wurth did?

Tom Houghton:

Paul Wurth.

Paul Wurth:

Or Buildertrend did.

Tom Houghton:

Whoops.

Paul Wurth:

No, I didn’t.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, you did.

Paul Wurth:

I personally posted on Instagram?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, you totally did. Producer Kaylee’s laughing in the background right now because that is correct.

Paul Wurth:

Show me where that is. I just pulled up my phone.

Tom Houghton:

On your story.

Paul Wurth:

I don’t have a story. Oh, there you go.

Tom Houghton:

The light bulb came on.

Paul Wurth:

I really got to manage my own … Well, I post because my picture’s there. I guess I didn’t really read the content. The crew. Tell me more.

Tom Houghton:

Well, we’re off track here, but you can follow Paul at The Paul Wurth on Instagram and you can follow Tom at Con Tech Tom, as in construction tech, that’s Con Tech Tom, and you can listen to our guests right now. Our in-house guests joining us today on the podcast, Scott Vonderharr, director of product strategy. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.

Paul Wurth:

Welcome Scott. That title sounds important. What do you do here?

Tom Houghton:

Director of product strategy.

Paul Wurth:

Talk us through it real quick.

Scott Vonderharr:

Well, I’m working with the product team, obviously, new position, director product strategy. I’ve been in product strategy role for a while, basically leading different teams within our product organization to look for different opportunities to improve our platform, better meet our customer’s needs, help us grow the business.

Paul Wurth:

Cool. For all those who don’t know outside of our company, or even inside, what is the product teams function?

Scott Vonderharr:

Exactly that, it’s looking for different ways that we can improve the platform that we are providing. We’re really looking for a collaboration between a lot of different parties to do that. We’re talking to our customers, we’re talking to different pieces of our organization, whether that’s our sales or CS team. We work a lot with our corporate development team. Then ultimately what we’re doing is putting together projects, putting together opportunities to improve, and then helping our development team sort of drive those working with design, working with engineers, to get those into our product ultimately.

Paul Wurth:

I think a lot of our clients think that like the development of our software is like just one big team. It’s really a couple of different pieces. Your piece would be trying to hear from our clients, what do you want new? What do you want improved? How’s your satisfaction of the software? Then you guys sort of ideate. You create the new feature in its concept, and then there’s somebody behind who actually develops the actual engine. Is that fair?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yeah. I mean, ultimately what we’re [crosstalk].

Paul Wurth:

We lost…you Tom. I lost myself [inaudible].

Tom Houghton:

I think you might’ve lost the listeners too.

Paul Wurth:

I actually know the processing and can explain it. Whoopsie daisy, go ahead, Scott.

Tom Houghton:

He’s the expert.

Scott Vonderharr:

No, I mean, I think what we’re ultimately trying to do is put together what are the problems that our users are having with the platform today? We think we have a great product, but it can always improve.

Scott Vonderharr:

We’re trying to work with those different people to identify what are the areas that people are having problems with? What are the things people could be using better? What are the things that could be more discoverable and working to ultimately define kind of those problems and hand them off with the work of a design team to our engineers to develop that solution.

Paul Wurth:

Makes sense. Now that we know what you do, Tom, what’s he doing here?

Tom Houghton:

Today we’re going to talk about a feature, doing a feature spotlight on a specific feature that was highly requested by our users and we have delivered this.

Paul Wurth:

It’s an exciting setup.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks. Well, so we’re going to talk about work in progress reports, or we’re going to call them WIP reports from here on out, just because that’s a little easier. No comments from the peanut gallery apparently.

Paul Wurth:

WIP reports it is.

Tom Houghton:

WIP reports.

Paul Wurth:

I’ve heard this term ever since I started here at Buildertrend 13 years and some change ago. Scott actually, little sidebar, he was on the sales team for awhile.

Scott Vonderharr:

Yes.

Paul Wurth:

Scott’s been in all three.

Tom Houghton:

He’s been in all three major departments.

Paul Wurth:

Major departments, that’s maybe the only person?

Scott Vonderharr:

I think so, yeah. I started here about eight years ago in our customer success department, spent about a year there, moved to the sales floor for a while. We ended up having an opportunity to open up over on our engineering side to really get a product team up and running. So been doing that for about the last six years.

Paul Wurth:

Would you say you’ve heard this concept of WIP reports or work in progress reports as long as you’ve been here as well?

Scott Vonderharr:

Pretty much.

Paul Wurth:

I don’t think it’s necessarily specific to construction, is it? Or is it?

Scott Vonderharr:

The version we’re doing is.

Paul Wurth:

Right. But I think the concept of a work in progress report is probably more global than that. Let’s start there. Explain to us, I don’t know if this is, is this the next question?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, this is.

Paul Wurth:

Usually keep it on the rails here.

Tom Houghton:

You’re just going off the rails.

Paul Wurth:

Explain to the crowd what is a work in progress report?

Scott Vonderharr:

It lets a builder know where they stand financially on a job and helps really remove surprises.

Paul Wurth:

Sounds important.

Scott Vonderharr:

I think so. If a builder has questions like which of my jobs are getting ready to wrap up and are giving me the best profit margin or which of my jobs need extra attention because they’re over budget, this report is going to help you move forward and make decisions before it’s too late.

Tom Houghton:

That’s smart.

Paul Wurth:

Today we have a budget in Buildertrend, a budget view essentially. What we allow you to do is import all your estimated costs and then track all your actual costs. How is this different?

Scott Vonderharr:

Well, I think our budget does a great job for job costing. At the end of the job, it’s pretty much telling you the full story.

Paul Wurth:

So at the end you know the deal?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yeah. But what this is going to help with is identify problems while the job’s in flight. While we’re in progress, what kind of cash flow are we looking at? Are we profitable up to this point? Are we drawing enough cash to make sure we’re going to be able to pay our subs?

Paul Wurth:

Oh, cool.

Tom Houghton:

That’s hence the in progress part of the name, right? The work in progress?

Paul Wurth:

Right? I just didn’t know if you’re entering bills in real time, you’re just not realizing all your costs yet, so that’s probably the process. It’s just filling that gap that we don’t have today.

Scott Vonderharr:

Yeah. Which ones are completed? Are we making sure we’re invoicing our clients?

Tom Houghton:

Why, Scott, would you say that a work in progress report is critical for any builder?

Scott Vonderharr:

Well, like I said, I mean, I think it’s going to help you remove surprises. If you’re going to have some of those things that are going to come up where maybe you haven’t invoiced your client yet, but you have some work done and it’s time to pay that subcontractor, you can run into real problems there if you’re not staying on top of it.

Tom Houghton:

Sure. Why do you think it’s probably hard for contractors to produce a work in progress report in something like Excel or something? How are people otherwise doing this now?

Scott Vonderharr:

I mean, I think it’s a good question. Exactly that, in our initial research, we found that people are building these in Excel today. They’re taking data that they’ve already put into our program and they’re exporting it out. They’re manually creating these reports. Some of the builders we interviewed actually talked about this being something that they’re spending four or five hours a week building for their projects. That means besides it being really time consuming, they’re also not getting real-time data at the end of that four or five hours of work that they just did, because if anything changes during that time, they’re already out of date. That’s what we really set out to solve with this and what I think we’re going to end up delivering. Can I give a shout out to our research team on this one?

Tom Houghton:

You can absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

I was going to mention that because you had mentioned that we talked to our clients and I think that is something we talk a lot about on this podcast, but maybe some people don’t realize, this inaction. This is the result of talking to our clients. Walk us through how you guys researched this.

Scott Vonderharr:

Just shout out to the research team. We had Gabby Colson, Sarah Biben, Sadie Lewman, and Nate Wurth, really critical on this one. We realized we had an opportunity to strengthen our financial reporting overall. Like you mentioned, Paul, we have heard this WIP report specifically. But what this group of people did, is they went out and they talked to dozens of our builders about the reports that they’re running today, why they’re running them, what kind of value they’re getting from running those reports. Then what we did was we worked together to build a prototype version. We ran these back with some of those same builders, different groups of builders, brought this to BTU, Buildertrend University, and had some of these people test this out.

Scott Vonderharr:

What I think they really helped us out with is a rollout, a really improved overall reporting experience. There’s a few other reports that are kind of getting a facelift at the same time as this one, but this one’s sort of the highlight. It’s bringing a lot of updates at the same time, but wanted to just shout out that this is a great example of working with our clients in collaborating on that final design and what we’re going to deliver.

Tom Houghton:

Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

We’ve talked about this before, the product influencer list. Is that the list you guys used for this?

Scott Vonderharr:

We do start there a lot of times. We do have a small group of contractors that we’re speaking with pretty regularly. They helped out a lot with what do these WIP reports look like today?

Paul Wurth:

Well, I’d like to get … If you’re interested and you’re listening to your client at Buildertrend, if you’re interested in getting in on the product influencer list, just email us at the podcast. What’s our podcast email?

Tom Houghton:

Just podcast@buildertrend.com. We kept it simple.

Paul Wurth:

That’s easy.

Tom Houghton:

Or better yet, join the Facebook crew and just message us in there.

Paul Wurth:

You have to follow Tom on Instagram, join the Facebook group.

Tom Houghton:

A couple steps.

Paul Wurth:

Then you’re qualified. Message us and you’re in?

Tom Houghton:

Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

We’d love to hear from you.

Tom Houghton:

We would. What would be some benefits? Somebody out there listening right now saying, “Is this feature for me? What do I get out of it?”

Scott Vonderharr:

Those insights that we talk about, like helping someone understand if they’re ahead of or behind schedule, understanding profitability on their projects, what job they’re producing, higher margins, what project managers are the best at making sure we are profitable, where are we slipping?

Paul Wurth:

That’s a good one.

Scott Vonderharr:

Where are we slipping on getting paid for these projects? We hope to be answering all of those questions with this same report.

Paul Wurth:

It sounds like some of who you interviewed, it’s going to save time, like four or five hours a week if they’re doing it already?

Scott Vonderharr:

Absolutely. That’s really what we found is that a lot of the reports like this are things that we already have the data in our system so why should we make people export those out and create them on their own. Should be a huge time savings.

Paul Wurth:

I mean, I think it’s safe to say that anything that you’re doing outside of Buildertrend that can be done inside Buildertrend and we can automate that for that for you, we’re on the search for those things. Is that safe to say?

Scott Vonderharr:

Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

This definitely hits all those things. I’m really excited about it because I know this is something that’s very important to a lot of contractors we talk to. Talk us through this. This is not a question that was on the list so you may not know this, but when we have something big like this, how do we get out in front of our clients?

Scott Vonderharr:

We actually do have a newer process for this, where we roll it out to a small group of people first. Like I mentioned earlier, we do have kind of this prototype idea that we do where we’ll design a solution. We build it and we get an in front of people before we actually write the code to implement it into our solution.

Scott Vonderharr:

That’s really our first point where we’re getting feedback on our designs. It’ll go through a lot of iterations after that. But once we do actually get it into developer’s hands and we code it, and it’s a part of our code, we have this release process where we actually are still showing this to a small group of people so we can make small tweaks, show it to a lot of people, obviously internally to get them understanding what the benefits of it are so that they can sell and support the updates. We’re rolling this out to a small group of people, a larger group of people. It’s a staged rollout process where we maybe we’ll have 100 people, then we’ll roll it out to 1,000 once we feel like we’re comfortable with how those 100 people are reacting to it and then ultimately to the entire user base.

Paul Wurth:

Great. When you log in the next time, will there be some sort of notification that it’s available or is there something to that degree that we’ll do?

Scott Vonderharr:

We’re working on some different tools right now with Intercom to potentially be able to do things like that.

Paul Wurth:

Intercom is that new chat feature you’re probably seeing, both on our dot com public facing website and in the product. We’ve got an entire team we spun up to answer your chat questions. I think what we realized, not only within our clientele, but just in general in the world, people are more comfortable asking questions via chat, and then we can give answers really quickly. Make sure you look out for that and utilize that because the whole team’s waiting.

Tom Houghton:

It’s like an immediate response too to help you out, which is really nice. I think it’s just a really great new offering from our support team.

Paul Wurth:

Correct. That chat has a notification option that we’re going to start using, which is really cool, so look out for that. A couple of teasers there, Tom.

Tom Houghton:

That’s right.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a business term.

Tom Houghton:

I just thought you were going with another teaser Tom or something, new nickname.

Paul Wurth:

Not yet. I’ll handle those.

Tom Houghton:

Good.

Paul Wurth:

Let’s learn more about Scott.

Tom Houghton:

Let’s talk about Scott. Let’s get to know Scott a little bit more.

Paul Wurth:

I’m excited.

Tom Houghton:

Scott, we have a series of questions that we line up for our guests and those questions are hard hitting journalism facts.

Scott Vonderharr:

Oh boy.

Tom Houghton:

Yes. Are you ready?

Scott Vonderharr:

I think so.

Paul Wurth:

Hard-hitting journalism questions. You’re really workshopping this one.

Tom Houghton:

I know. Scott, true or false. Maybe we’ll make a game out of it. You are getting married soon?

Scott Vonderharr:

Correct. Yes. In April.

Paul Wurth:

That’s exciting. April 25th.

Tom Houghton:

Mazel tov.

Scott Vonderharr:

Thank you.

Tom Houghton:

Scott, you’ve worked in every department here at Buildertrend, which one’s been your favorite and why?

Scott Vonderharr:

Well, I love what I do right now. The product department is what I think has been the best fit for me just because I do like the aspect of still working with our clients, but really solving their problems through the use of technology is just something that’s exciting to me.

Tom Houghton:

Nice. Second question, would you say you have any kind of milestone moments that stood out in your last eight years of Buildertrend history here? Any funny stories that you want to share?

Scott Vonderharr:

Milestone moments? I mean, I think there’s been a few. I moved to a couple of different departments. Started off in our CS department. I think moving to sales was exciting for me, getting to see that side of the business. But most recently moving to director of product strategy was exciting for me.

Tom Houghton:

Fantastic. What’s your favorite place you visited?

Scott Vonderharr:

Well, favorite place I visited had to have been last year, went to San Diego. That’s actually where I got engaged.

Tom Houghton:

There you go. You’re engaged.

Paul Wurth:

You and your fiancee travel a lot?

Scott Vonderharr:

We do.

Paul Wurth:

It’s typically for concerts, right?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

What’s the favorite concert you’ve ever been to?

Scott Vonderharr:

Oh man. I would have to say Red Rocks. I saw My Morning Jacket there a couple of years ago.

Paul Wurth:

My Morning Jacket, now that’s a band?

Scott Vonderharr:

It’s a rock band, rock and roll.

Paul Wurth:

It’s a rock band. I’ve actually heard they were great.

Scott Vonderharr:

They are.

Paul Wurth:

Check them out. Check them out live, right?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yes.

Paul Wurth:

There you go.

Scott Vonderharr:

For sure.

Tom Houghton:

You are an animal lover?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yes.

Tom Houghton:

You have a dog?

Scott Vonderharr:

I do, Carl.

Tom Houghton:

Carl’s your dog?

Scott Vonderharr:

Yes.

Paul Wurth:

It’s a great name.

Scott Vonderharr:

He is a labradoodle.

Tom Houghton:

We’ll put a picture of Carl in the show notes.

Scott Vonderharr:

That’d be great. He’s 10 months old and he’s full of fun.

Tom Houghton:

Producer Kaylee’s super happy about that.

Scott Vonderharr:

We’ll get him on.

Tom Houghton:

Well thanks so much, Scott, for joining us on this podcast and telling us about work in progress reports and a little bit about yourself as well. We enjoyed having you on the podcast.

Paul Wurth:

It’s been great.

Scott Vonderharr:

Thanks for having me guys.

Paul Wurth:

Appreciate you.

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.