Gaining business insights using data with Charley Burtwistle

Show Notes

On this episode of โ€œThe Building Code,โ€ Zach and Charley are chatting with Matt Hoots, owner of SawHorse design build in Atlanta, Georgia. Matt has over 20 years of experience in green building and dedicates a lot of his time to educating fellow builders and clients on the importance of using sustainable methods.

Tune in to the full episode to hear more about what it means to be a green builder and how to implement these building standards into your business.

What is something thatโ€™s becoming more popular in the realm of green technology?

โ€œBecause of COVID-19, I think people realize we do need filtration, we do need fresh air. And finally, that’s come to the forefront again, and we can do this not only in commercial spaces but in your own home. You can go into a house, and I tell you the indoor air quality is much worse than it is outside even if you’re in a city, ironically. So, that’s the challenge because we spend most of our time inside. I think the health aspect is something I’ve always been aware of because I have allergies, but a lot of people just don’t realize that you don’t have to have allergies, especially if you’re inside all the time, and you’re sneezing. Well, there’s something that’s triggering and creating those reactions. So, what can we do to that environment to keep that from happening?โ€

What should builders do to get started in green building?

โ€œGreen building is just one of those tools that allows you to offer better services or just better understand how things are installed. I would start with just looking at what certifications are offered for you. Take a class on that. Maybe even take a class on something that’s not even offered in your area and see how different building programs are put together. The building science physics and principles are pretty much the same across all different areas. Just come up with what youโ€™re going to make standard in your business. I think once builders see some of these things, and they see how their risk can go down when they build a certain way, more people will want to do this.โ€

Related content:

Check out the Burtwistle Ranch where Charley grew up.

Learn more about our Pro Services on the Buildertrend Marketplace.

Need help with reporting or creating custom fields? Visit the Help Center within your Buildertrend account.

Got podcast topic suggestions? Reach out to us at podcast@buildertrend.com.

The Better Way, a podcast by Buildertrend:

Looking to improve how your team plans projects with the top residential construction management platform this year? Pick up Buildertrend project planning pro tips on the newest season of โ€œThe Better Way, a podcast by Buildertrend.โ€ Subscribe and stream all six bingeable episodes on your favorite listening app now.

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Listen to โ€œThe Building Codeโ€ on YouTube! And be sure to head over to Facebook to join The Building Code Crew fan page for some fun discussions with fellow listeners.

Transcript

Paul Wurth:

You’re listening to โ€œThe Building Code.โ€ I am your host, Paul Wurth, you are listening to episode 95. You may notice we do not have a co-host this time, for all you listeners out there who listened to episode 94, my co-host for many years and 94 episodes, Tom Houghton, gave you a sign-off. Tom has taken another position outside of Buildertrend, which happens with very talented people. So, we wish Tom the best. He’s got an exciting opportunity in front of him, and he has been a great asset to Buildertrend for many, many years. So, all you listeners who love hearing tech Tom, Hollywood Tom, Tesla Tom, he will be on some airway somewhere, I’m sure. Go follow him @contechtom on Instagram and I’m sure he’ll post you there. Great podcasting with you, Tom, and I wish you the best. Alright, so we are going to transition to episode 95, if you just clicked on this, it said data science. So, stay with us, don’t leave yet, we’re going to make this interesting because I’m very happy to be here with my guest, Charley Burtwistle.

Charley Burtwistle:

Burtwistle, yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Burtwistle.

Charley Burtwistle:

Super happy to be here, Paul.

Paul Wurth:

Charley, how long have you been with Buildertrend?

Charley Burtwistle:

Coming up on just about three years here in January.

Paul Wurth:

And your title here?

Charley Burtwistle:

Data scientist on the Data and Research team.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. Buildertrend is about 560 employees strong as of episode 95. I will say you probably have the most exciting name we’ve ever seen come through the new hire process.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wow. It means a lot.

Paul Wurth:

Had a star on your name right away, it’s impactful.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I appreciate it. It was a strange journey to where I’m currently at, for sure.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Tell us a little about that because I think I know a little bit about your background, but I’ll tease it a little bit. Didn’t you reach out to us and just try to get your foot in the door anyway you could?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, pretty much. I heard about Buildertrend my senior year of college and kind of knew instantly was a place I wanted to work at, got in touch with David Arnold, and he gave me some advice on things I needed to do, to prep to get a job at Buildertrend. Originally, I wanted to be a developer here, so I went and got a whole bunch of experience doing development, which I haven’t used since, came in โ€ฆ

Paul Wurth:

And hold on a second, for the listeners who are probably developers, you don’t mean construction.

Charley Burtwistle:

I do not mean construction developer.

Paul Wurth:

What do you mean by that?

Charley Burtwistle:

A software developer. So, a lot of coding, went out and learned a couple of different languages that we use here to try to get a coding development job.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. How hard was that, was that tough to do? Was that your background before that?

Charley Burtwistle:

It was a little bit of my background before that, that was the career path I anticipated going down. So, I came in to interview for that position, and Luke Christiansen at the time was the VP of product, and he just had this wild vision for a data science team. And looked at my background, math and physics is what I got my undergrad degree in, so he was like, hey, we’re going to try this data science thing, do you want to give it a shot? We don’t have a team or anything yet. And I was like, yeah, sounds super interesting and hand wavy.

Paul Wurth:

Wait, wait, wait. What does that mean?

Charley Burtwistle:

Hand wavy? It means no one really knows what it means, super ambiguous, you just kind of wave your hands around, like, ooh, data science.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, I see the science.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right?

Paul Wurth:

Okay, cool.

Charley Burtwistle:

And to this day, I still don’t think anyone, including me, really knows what it means, but we’re figuring it out.

Paul Wurth:

Well, happy to have you on the podcast to explain it.

Charley Burtwistle:

Talking all about it. Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Well, we’ll try to zero in on what data science is, it is, as you said, a newer term in technology and in businesses, but I think what we’re going to try to do today is explain how it’s benefited Buildertrend greatly. And so, shout out to Luke and your entire team there, and how we can maybe correlate that to how you could use it in your business as a construction company.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

Right? Alright. So, one interesting thing about you, and many people who listen to this podcast do not live in Nebraska as we do, but Omaha, Nebraska, the big city โ€ฆ

Charley Burtwistle:

Right.

Paul Wurth:

You didn’t grow up here.

Charley Burtwistle:

Nope, I grew up on a cattle ranch in Northeast Nebraska, and so, Omaha to me is, yeah, absolutely, the biggest city in the world.

Paul Wurth:

What’s the ranch called? All ranches have names, right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Burtwistle Ranch. Yeah, check us out, burtwistleranch.com.

Paul Wurth:

Alright, shout out โ€ฆ

Charley Burtwistle:

We raise quarter horses and cattle.

Paul Wurth:

We’re going to put that in the show notes. You got any gear? You guys got any …

Charley Burtwistle:

I do have some merch, I didn’t bring it with me today.

Paul Wurth:

You got some merch?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Okay, we’ll put it up on the podcast now. See if we can’t sell โ€ฆ

Charley Burtwistle:

I’d have to check with our marketing team, i.e. my mom. She’s been working for awhile.

Paul Wurth:

Alright, I kind of like that though, can I get a hat?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

Alright. Great. So, Charley, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into data science, once you got in here, what’d you discover? What was it for you, what’s your experience?

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh, right. So, at the beginning, it was really just more internal reporting, so how many sales were coming through the funnel every month, really just trying to benefit our internal team as much as possible. When I started, it was just two people, me and my manager, we were under the umbrella of the product team, as I’d mentioned earlier. Eventually, our team grew and now encompasses data and research, so data is more of the quantitative side, the numbers, the nitty gritty, qualitative is interviews, customers, research, user experience, stuff like that. I think we have 13 people on our team now โ€ฆ

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm.

Charley Burtwistle:

… encompassing, yeah, like I mentioned, data and research, both sides, the qualitative and quantitative sides. And we’ve transitioned from just internal processes, how can we improve Buildertrend as a company, to really, how can we help our customers find value in their own data, as we’re doing here at Buildertrend?

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. So, three years ago, we were 12 and a half years in the business, so obviously we had some data around sales and the different metrics that we cared about. Would you say it’s safe to say that the Data Science team was our investment in wrapping up in a more formal process and allowing you guys to dive deeper?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. The first step in any sort of data science project is really just figuring out what data do we have, and then how can we leverage that to find additional value and make use of it. So, there’s definitely, like you mentioned, at that time, 14 years worth of data collecting, I don’t know how many customers we had at that time, but just a massive amount of pretty much all things building, construction. You think of everything that you enter into the Buildertrend system throughout building a job, and you think at what massive amounts of jobs go through the Buildertrend platform. If anyone in the world should know how to build a home or remodel a house, do any sort of commercial or residential construction, it should be Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. So, you think the people who would work at Buildertrend on the data science team, you guys going to spin off your own construction company?

Charley Burtwistle:

I don’t think that that is in the near future.

Paul Wurth:

Could be a good research project.

Charley Burtwistle:

It would be an incredibly good research project.

Paul Wurth:

Alright, stay tuned for that. So, the Data Science and Research team, you said how many people are there now?

Charley Burtwistle:

13 people.

Paul Wurth:

So, can you explain, maybe from your perspective or anybody from the team, what were some of the biggest impacts you guys have had on the business over maybe the last three years?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s an interesting team for sure because you don’t just do data science for the sake of data science, as much as I would love to. Really your projects have to have some sort of value, so most of our overarching themes or missions come from different areas of the company, so we’ll have someone from marketing reach out to us, someone from sales, someone from customer success saying, hey, we’d like to do this, we’d like to accomplish that, we have this sort of data, how can we leverage that to improve our internal processes? So, it’s an interesting team structure for sure because we’re not really just coming up with our own projects, it’s always people coming to us.

So yeah, some big projects or milestones along the way, I think the first thing that I worked on was some sort of churn predictor, so looking at our customers that are using Buildertrend, and as their usage starts to decrease, or they maybe start to run into issues, that would trigger a flag for a rep to reach out to them and just make sure that everything’s going along smoothly. If they need any help, any additional resources that we could provide to them, we’re able to proactively reach out to them, to get them back on track before they slip away and end up canceling their subscription.

Paul Wurth:

Right. So, Buildertrend’s basically classified as a software as a service, right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Correct.

Paul Wurth:

So, that basically means you pay month-to-month to use Buildertrend, but there’s no contract, so you can walk away at any time you want, for whatever reason. In this industry with such a low tech adoption, construction and so, many variables, seasonal work, employees come and go, there’s a number of different reasons where a company who uses Buildertrend may find themselves in a spot where, hey, we don’t want to continue using it right now, maybe in the future. What you’re saying is, is that you looked at the usage of the product, how many times they started a schedule, what features they were using or not using, and you able to predict a company that may be sliding towards that spot. Where maybe they’re not getting the value out of Buildertrend, or maybe they’re going to that place where they may not be using it anymore.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. Another thing you mentioned, too, was maybe, perhaps they have an internal employee leave, that’s something … you know they’d remove their login from Buildertrend, and then obviously, their rep would then need to know like, hey, there’s additional people that need onboarding. We want to make sure that that employee leaving for them doesn’t impact the way they use Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Right. I mean, in an ideal state, Buildertrend would have 16,000 employees, one for every client we have so, we could give that personal attention, right? That obviously doesn’t scale economically, and so, essentially, we have employees who are in charge of a book of business. Their whole job is to make sure that their book of clients are getting the most value out of Buildertrend. Right? And so, they’re reaching out to them, a number of different ways, but that’s impossible to know, where every single company is within their business. And so, basically, the data science team and your project, we’re basically hitting light bulbs, where, hey, this company may need us to reach out, let’s find out what’s going on. Let’s engage them more in the system. I mean, in general, if you’re in construction, Buildertrend solves issues for you. So, it’s not necessarily that, it’s maybe where they’re at in their life cycle of their company, something’s going on in their business that they’re not getting the full value out of it.

Charley Burtwistle:

For sure, our Customer Success team is amazing. I was listening to your episode you had with Marge Haley earlier this week, and I think you stated it the best, they don’t just have one customer they’re focused on, their book may be 400 customers any given day. So, it’s really just up to us to sort and rank those customers by who needs outreach, who’s doing fine just on their own, who is finding value, who could find more value and really just help prioritize that queue for our reps.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. I mean, I do appreciate you shouting the customer success team, but I feel like you also just tried to butter me up a little bit there.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, just letting you know I listen to episodes.

Paul Wurth:

OK, sure. No, I caught that.

Charley Burtwistle:

I did my research before coming on.

Paul Wurth:

I caught that, and I appreciate it, too, Charley. Very smart. OK, so the Data Science team, obviously, has been really, really helpful for our business, and if you follow SaaS, our industry, you can see that data science is becoming more and more integral in everybody’s business. How do you see that correlate to our clients, maybe our listeners? Is there something that they could be, without having the resources to spin up an entire team and find a genius in the making in small town Nebraska and bring them on board to help save their company, like we did with you?

Charley Burtwistle:

Stop, I’m blushing.

Paul Wurth:

What can a construction company do, maybe just to start thinking about data as a way to help drive insights into your business and become more efficient and in different areas of your business?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. What I made reference to earlier, where really the first step of any data science project is just realizing what data you have. A cool thing about using Buildertrend to run your business is, you now have access to a ton of data points that you didn’t previously have access to. So, we have some built-in reports, if you’re not already utilizing those that have a ton of really, really interesting data points, lead activities by salesperson, lead status by source or where you’re getting leads from, as well as estimated versus actual costs, baseline versus actual, things like that, schedule slippage. Those are already pre-built in Buildertrend, so definitely take advantage of those. But another really interesting feature that we’ve seen clients find huge success with when it comes to just tracking data, is custom fields. On a lead, create a custom field, or in schedules or anything like that, any data point you want to start tracking, is easy enough to just create a field and start tracking that. And then you can watch over time where that’s trending towards, where you can find value.

And I think you’d be really, really shocked to see all the different places that data could be beneficial to you in your business once you just start tracking it and start looking at it on an everyday basis. Because it’s really something that, before using Buildertrend, it’d be kind of impossible to have.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, exactly, so I’m going to get to that. So, I guess, taking a step back, when you guys stepped into the data science team here at Buildertrend, you were spinning that up, did we have the right processes in place, or data in place? Or have you guys been working on getting us better systems behind the scenes as well?

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m a little bit of both, definitely had a plethora of data that we already had access to that was set up and ready for us to start analyzing. But then, like I mentioned, once you start thinking in that data mindset, you started thinking, well, what if we track this? What if we were able to do that? So, definitely another huge shout out to our internal team here. We come to them with requests pretty much constantly, like, hey, can we set this up to track this data point? Or can we build something where we can start surveying customers? And so on and so forth.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm. Good. So, the first step for somebody who wants to better understand their business and use those insights to obviously improve their business, whether that’s revenue or being more efficient, you’ve got to be able to start tracking it. So, that mindset of just not having everything out there, but putting it somewhere is good. If you’re listening to this and you have Buildertrend, you’d mentioned we have some built-in things, by using Buildertrend, that is sort of your operating system for your businesses if used correctly. So, we’ve got some things built out into reports, right? So, you’ll find your reporting tab, if you don’t see that, just contact your customer success coach or anybody at Buildertrend, we’ll spin it up for you.

But one thing we’ve had for many years, even before our reporting tab, and the reporting tab was our effort to corral all this information that we learned companies like to see in Buildertrend, and we really surface it pretty easily for them, we’ve had custom fields forever. So, if you’re not using custom fields, check out the Help Center, search custom fields and our team will reach out to you, and we’ll show you all about it. We serve four basic segments in construction, right? So, that’s new home builders, remodeling, renovation companies, commercial construction, and especially contractors, and if you’re a business like Buildertrend, serving that many different styles of companies, you can’t pre-build everything perfectly for every single type of company so, we’ve got these custom fields.

So, if you have something special to you, as a business, like for instance, in lead process, let’s say you have five questions you’d like to ask every lead. Well, if we don’t have those things built in for you as fields, you can custom build them yourself, are you pre-approved, maybe you have a rating system when you talk to a lead, one through five, maybe you want to have a field for referrals and where did they actually get their referral, you want your own custom settings in there. You’re saying not only can you easily build those things in every aspect of Buildertrend, where it applies, but you can easily report on those things as well. So, essentially custom fields is customer reports.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. And that’s another great parallel to what we did here at Buildertrend, is just once you’re able to start tracking those fields, I’m sure you already have a pretty decent idea of what that looks like on the backend, maybe we do better with a certain type of customer or preapproval, maybe we do better here or there. When we first started the Data Science team here at Buildertrend, is we had a lot of those assumptions already in the back of our mind, we do better with this segment, we make more money with this type of Pro Service or something like that. And when we started tracking that data and actually reporting off of it, we were able to prove out some of those assumptions, and we’re also able to prove some of those assumptions wrong. So yeah, just the first step is tracking it, and I think he’d be pretty shocked with what you may find, or not find, just from analyzing that data.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, I think that in your lifecycle of your business, and I know we went through this with Buildertrend, a lot of the decisions you’re making are based on gut and what you see, your perceptions can be swayed a million different ways if you don’t really have it in data. And to your point, you’re probably right, if you’re successful, you’ve probably got a good gut for you and your business, and who you are. But I’m sure there’s some crazy things you’d find, maybe those assumptions are wrong, or maybe there’s just different insights for you. So, a couple of things within Buildertrend, and so, the life cycle of a construction job, leads makes a lot of sense, right? You get new people who contact you, you should identify how they found your name, right? So, that’s an easy one, you get a hundred people contacting you in a year, find out where your most lucrative channel of marketing comes from and spend more time and money in that channel, marketing. Right? Easily tracked within our reporting tab, that’s what you referenced when it comes to leads and source, your source lead.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, correct.

Paul Wurth:

The other one I see a lot of companies take advantage of is in scheduling. Scheduling is the backbone of every good construction project, and within our Scheduling tool, you can set the baseline, right? And that basically means that if I’ve got a hundred-day schedule, and I’ve got it mapped out, and that’s the ideal schedule when we start the job, let’s take a snapshot of that, and inevitably when schedules change, because that always happens in construction, our system is going to automatically, behind the scenes, track every change for you. And throughout the job, and very importantly, at the end of the job when you do sort of like a job autopsy, you understand where you got from your hundred days to 150 days. And if that’s consistently happening in your business, well, then you’ve identified areas of improvement. Right? So, those are really easy ones. And really, I think anything else a company can think of, if they contact our team, I think we can show them a way to either do a custom field or report, to help them identify that stuff. Right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

Perfect. OK, so data science sounds really exciting. You’re three years in, how do you feel about it?

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m really excited, the progress we made, for sure. Like I mentioned, growing the team from just two people up to 13 has been pretty exciting. I’m also super pumped about the direction we’re heading, a lot of cool things coming down the pipeline, and we’re expanding the umbrella of things we’re working on, like I said, from internal processes to really try to help the customers find more value. So, something we’re really excited on right now is lead scoring, and just knowing when to offer customers a different Pro Services to help them find the most value they possibly can out of the system. So, as you’re well aware, and hopefully a lot of our customers are, in addition to our core subscription, we also offer a ton of different Pro Services, you can find them in the Buildertrend Marketplace.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, Charley, what’s that?

Charley Burtwistle:

The Buildertrend Marketplace is your one-stop shop for anything Buildertrend. So, you’re utilizing it to the best of your abilities right now, I’d highly recommend going out there and checking out what else we offer. And the Pro Services are really something that we’re trying to pump right now, but in the right way. So, what we need to do is, we need to analyze what sort of customers are in a spot in their business when they’re ready for something additional.

Paul Wurth:

Sure.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, a couple of ones that have been pretty exciting to work on is … payment processing and BRI are a couple that I’d like to dive into a little bit.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. So, Pro Services is something that the aforementioned David Arnold who is our chief strategy officer.

Charley Burtwistle:

Big time.

Paul Wurth:

I mean, he got you into this business, so, wow.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yep, he was on the pod as well, too. I’ve listened to that.

Paul Wurth:

He’s been on our podcast. Yes. Nice.

Charley Burtwistle:

Listened to that episode.

Paul Wurth:

So, David Arnold, one of his first things he did here at Buildertrend was essentially lead our team in developing these Pro Services. And essentially, for anybody who doesn’t know, our core subscription is what you pay, your monthly fee to Buildertrend, right? It’s the operating system for your business. It’s how you manage leads, how you do project management, where you keep all your files and communication, and obviously, where you do your financial. And then, what we’ve found is that we want to serve our clients outside of the core subscription, we have 16,000 plus clients, there’s a lot of commonality in what they need outside of the core of Buildertrend. And so, what David Arnold’s team has done over the last few years is really identify those opportunities, reached out to different partners in the industry and created some partnerships where it benefits you to become a Buildertrend client.

One of those you, you had mentioned, is payment processing, so I want to go into that and how the Data Science team maybe helped in that aspect. Another one’s BRI, so builder’s risk insurance is an insurance that certain type of construction companies need during the process of construction. And it’s a really exciting one, it’s one of my favorite ones, because essentially, we pooled the Buildertrend clientele and worked with a provider to offer an exclusive rate. And we surface that right inside the job, when you start a job, and so it makes it really easy to actually bind a builder’s risk insurance policy, have all the information right there and hopefully, and not guaranteed, it gives you a competitive rate. Maybe one that you’re not getting right now, is that right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

So, we have these Pro Services, and a lot of our clients find them on their own because they go out to the Buildertrend Marketplace or they talk to our Customer Success team and we say, hey, by the way, we have this, check it out. But not everybody knows about those, so was that part of your project? To maybe surface it to our clients or to our customer’s success team, to say, Joe Construction Company just started a job. He’s this perfect profile for builder’s risk insurance, it would benefit him, call him right now?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. So, exposing those Pro Services to our clients, but at the right time, so the right clients at the right time, the right content. There’s nothing more annoying than getting a million marketing emails every single day, with various different things that people want you to sign up for. And I think our marketing team has done a fantastic job creating content and highlighting some of the Pro Services that we offer. So, with the BRI one specifically, we could easily send out a blast email to all 16,000 clients that we have, say, hey, sign up for BRI. But the fact of the matter is, it just won’t be a great fit for some people, especially workers may not need it, remodelers, it’s really primarily in the new home segment. So, that’s an easy data point right there, it’s like, let’s filter down BRI leads to just people that actually need it.

But then we can get even more in the weeds of like, okay, when do they need this? So, you know they need it when they start a new job and they start building up, and they need risk insurance for their house. So, we’re, obviously, not going to bother them with marketing when they’re in the middle of a build, they’d already have BRI by that point, we’re also not going to bother them with it when they’re in the off-season and they have no need for a new policy at that time. So, just with those two data points alone, we’re already filtered down to the right builders at the right time, and that’s when we can start offering these different Pro Services, BRI specifically, because that’s when they’d find the most value from it.

Paul Wurth:

OK, I love that. So, not only are you not bombarding our clients with unnecessary marketing messages, but it’s helping our teams spend their time efficiently, right? You talked about โ€ฆ

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, that’s the goal.

Paul Wurth:

… they’ve got a book of business, and their whole job and their whole goal is to help our clients out as much as they can. So, you can’t blast everybody with every marketing message, essentially what you’re saying.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. You water down the value that you’re providing if you’re doing that for everything.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great, that makes lot of sense. One thing, when you talk about right message, right time or just knowing when it’s time for you to contact somebody, if you’re one of our clients listening, and you’re using our lead tool, within our lead opportunities, you can create marketing messages, right? Emails can be dialed up and Buildertrend and sent out on a schedule that you want them to. But if you dig further than that, many people don’t know this, you can actually put a link in an email. So, what’s your website for your farm?

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh, burtwistleranch.com.

Paul Wurth:

OK, so let’s say your marketing burtwistleranch.com to a thousand people, and you put that link in the email, within Buildertrend, you can actually see when your leads click on that link. So, that would be the right time to call somebody, right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely, you got to strike while the irons hot.

Paul Wurth:

So, there you go. So, a takeaway for all our clients, if you’re using our lead tracking tool, if you’re not, you should be, and if you’re using it and you’re creating messages in Buildertrend email messages, put a link in there to your website and you can actually get set up to be notified when somebody clicks on that link. Probably a pretty good time to call them, maybe they’re ready for that conversation.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right. Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

Perfect. So, BRI, that makes a ton of sense. That’s a win-win for us because it’s something that we’re service … we’re giving them something at a great rate most of the time, and also something super convenient for them. And so, the other Pro Service you talked about was payment processing, now this is one of our most popular ones because it’s actually one of the most longest-term Pro Service we had. Essentially, that is the ability for our clients to electronically pay their subs and vendors, and get paid electronically, is that right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yep. Nailed it.

Paul Wurth:

Okay, so, that obviously makes a lot of sense. I mean, it eliminates the need for cutting checks, it eliminates the need for, every Friday, your subs and vendors coming in and getting checks from you and those conversations happening. It seems like a big-time saver, it seems like it makes sense if you’re using Buildertrend to automate your business, as your operating system, you might as well take that all the way to how you get paid and pay people. So, how has the data science team helped that Pro Service?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, again, it’s really just about finding the right builders at the right time. So, what we’ve really started to dive into, just been for the last few months here, has been the customer journey, so where they spending their time within Buildertrend? What features are they using, what different Pro Services are they adopting? But then also what’s next for them, we constantly want them to be finding as much value as they can be within the Buildertrend system, and not just settle for how they’re currently using it. So, when a customer first starts using Buildertrend, there’s some really, really quick wins, like you mentioned, they can set up their scheduling, they can set up their lead process, so on and so forth.

What we’ve identified as kind of the next step, once they get those core functionalities down, to start moving onto some of our financial features. So, they can already track all their financials in Buildertrend, their purchase orders, their lead proposals from customers, their customer invoices, things like that. So, the next step is really just going from tracking them to actually processing them and collecting that money, and things like that, through Buildertrend. So, again, we wouldn’t want to push payment processing on a customer if they’re not even at the point where they’re tracking their financials, we just find everyone adopts Buildertrend at different rate.

Paul Wurth:

Right. So, again, it’s the right message, right time, why would we inundate … We’ve got 26 major features within Buildertrend, this is outside of the Pro Services you offer. And so, sometimes when construction companies come to us, they come to us for a certain reason, but most times they come because they want Buildertrend to help them automate their process, have a place where they actually do everything. So, again, it’s their operating system. Now, construction, out of all 15 major industries in the world, ranks the second lowest in terms of tech adoption, which basically means our industry is not very used to yet. Using technology in their business. And so, a lot of times we find that if you are looking at Buildertrend and going, yeah, I could use all of these things, but where do I start? And how do I change the workflow within my business?

Because that takes time. To unlearn how an entire business does each part of the business, it’s going to take time, eventually. That’s why our team’s here, they’re experts in onboarding and training and getting a game plan. But to your point, you can’t just overwhelm people with everything. There’s a step to learning Buildertrend that we’ve identified, being in business for these 14 years, and how our onboarding is put together. So, essentially, you’re saying, as a company onboards on Buildertrend and uses the features, there’s a time and a place for us to introduce, hey, by the way, now that you’re really level set here on how you’re using Buildertrend, you got it ingrained in your workflow with you and your team, this is a great next step for you, is maybe look into. Would you be benefiting from online payments?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, exactly. Trying to force the entire, like you mentioned, 26 features on someone from the start just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But we do provide those services and contractors would find value from adopting them if it’s at the right time at the right way.

Paul Wurth:

Right. Exactly. And so, did you guys basically do the same sort of process where you identified what features a certain business was using, what types of employees they had set up, what roles they had, did they have their office manager, their financial manager set up, and you could tell through data just when it was the right time to introduce that?

Charley Burtwistle:

Mm-hmm. And really, when they’re first starting to use the financial features is a great time to at least put the seed in their mind, of, hey, we offer this payment processing Pro Service. Because then, as they’re setting up how they’re already using Buildertrend through the financial features, they have that in the back of the mind of where they want to get to, and our reps can help them set everything up so that it’ll be seamless when they do eventually adopt that in the future.

Paul Wurth:

That makes a lot of sense. Great, so if you’re listening and you’re a Buildertrend user, please check out the Marketplace, and you can find that in the top right of your Buildertrend when you sign into Buildertrend. You can jump out to the Marketplace, and that will show you everything that we offer outside of your core platform, including every single Pro Service we have today, and keep your eye out for more that are coming down the pike. There’s also some great features in there, like being able to customize your branding in your account and some different things that we offer as a part of your subscription. So, those are two really, really cool things that your Data Science team has helped out internally. Hopefully, we explained to the listeners how you can start thinking about using data to help your business, I think we made some pretty good correlations inside Buildertrend. This is exciting, this was a more exciting podcast than I thought it would be. Data science sounds boring, but it’s not.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. I don’t think you pulled out your phone one time and tuned out.

Paul Wurth:

I didn’t.

Charley Burtwistle:

So, I appreciate you keeping your attention โ€ฆ

Paul Wurth:

No, I was all in.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

You know, Charley, maybe we should bring you back every now and then as one of our recurring guests, we can talk data.

Charley Burtwistle:

Honestly, nothing in the world would mean more to me if that were to happen.

Paul Wurth:

Alright, stay tuned for a data segment with Charley and his team. I mean, you can’t hog the whole spotlight, there’s a number of talented individuals on our Data Science team.

Charley Burtwistle:

Some fantastic people on the team. Yep.

Paul Wurth:

Alight. Well, I’ll find about who can be next, but we’ll definitely bring you back as well. Alright, Charley. Well, thanks for coming on and talking about data science, it was really, really informative. If you want to learn more, can they just contact you directly? You want to give out your personal โ€ฆ no, I’m just kidding.

Charley Burtwistle:

Maybe not yet.

Paul Wurth:

Don’t do that. Talk to anybody from the Buildertrend Customer Success team if you heard anything that you guys want to learn more about. Obviously, you can check out the show notes, buildertrend.com/podcast is the shownotes, and you can see all of our 94 episodes previous to this one. Stay tuned for Charley coming back on as a recurring guest.

Charley Burtwistle:

Thank you so much.

Paul Wurth:

Alright. Thanks, man. Alright, everyone. Thanks again for listening to this episode of โ€œThe Building Code.โ€ Remember to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcast. Help us grow this community of listeners, tell your friends, tell your family, we do appreciate it. And if you’ve heard anything that you want to learn more about on today’s episode, head out to the show notes website, buildertrend.com/podcast. As always, we appreciate you.

Charley B

Charley Burtwistle | Buildertrend


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