139. Choosing Software With Angus Cowan

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I can see how some of the frustrations I had in software over the years and you realize, okay, yeah, look, software is not an easy, it's not an easy game. But I tell you what, if you create the right software, it solves so many problems. Foreign.

Builder's Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by Angus Cowan. Angus is from Angus Cowan Constructions and Buildern. Angus, welcome to the show.

Hi Will, and thanks for having me on today.

Yeah, I'm really excited to have a chat today, Angus. We've caught up a couple of times now to chat about your story and how you got to where you are today. So I think there's going to be a ton of, ton of, of value in here for the builders out there. Listening.

Yeah, no thanks, Will. Everyone's got a bit of a story and mine is deep embedded into the construction industry, mainly in the, in the residential and my journey with trying to find a software to run, run my business. Yeah.

Would you want to dive into that while you're talking about it? What is your background and how did you get started?

Yeah, sure. So I'm born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and went to school here. And then, look, I've got no family, no family background in the construction industry and I wasn't really intending. I had no desire to go to the construction industry. Not that I didn't, but the only thing was when I was younger we had a house built and I sort of looked at the carpenters and the builders and whatnot and thought that would be pretty cool. But as I was finishing school, I wanted to do architecture and I had a few, you know, you go to uni and you sort of list your priorities. I didn't get into that, but I got into construction management. It was sort of just on the list. So off I went to uni and I was only, I think, about six months into it and soon realized that I wasn't really, you know, I just done 12 years of school sitting In a classroom. And it probably, I realized I was probably a better practical learner than I was in theory. So I sort of diverted my attention away from Unified University and I did get a carpentry apprenticeship with a prestige home builder here in Brisbane. And then from there I finished my apprenticeship. Well, actually when I first started my apprenticeship, I really thought, gee, this is pretty hard work. We were doing hardwood frames and hardwood pitch roofs. So it was right in that era where it was really good carpentry and you really learned a really, you know, deep, deep trade about how to build a house and how to solve problems. But anyway, I finished my apprenticeship and then I was, I was keen to go places. I always wanted to, you know, run my own business in, in whatever form. So I contracted back to my, the builder who signed me up and sort of helped him run our projects as a, as a leading carpenter and whatnot and started to help him within the business a fair bit. And then I guess I was about 20, probably about 24, 25, and I thought, I can do this on my own. I sort of went at nighttime and started doing my builder's license. And then I guess, yeah, a couple of years later I started up Angus Cowan Constructions. And as it is as a, as a young fellow, as a chippy wearing a nail bag, you start on the small jobs. We started doing little decks and whatnot. But over time that, that, that grew into, into bigger projects. Sort of around the 1999, I started the business and then, yeah, it just slowly grew from there and I started using, I mean we only. I think it was, I don't know when email started, but to the normal person, I think an email was, it seemed about 19, mid-1990s, I guess. So by the time I started my business, I was only really just starting to email. I think I even send out a lot of my proposals in the post. Wow. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was a, it was a bit of a moving ground underneath our feet. I think the GST came in the first year I started and that was a, you know, all these moving parts, you know, it was pretty hard. But my brother taught me how to use an Excel spreadsheet just to do the, really, just to do the, you know, the real basics. And then I used Microsoft Word to do my proposals and that's about it. You know, everything. There was a lot of pen and paper and all that sort of stuff. I don't think there was even. There must have been Internet banking, I gather. But anyway, so, yeah, that's sort of my Background originally and then from there, you know, I grew a team of two to three crews of carpenters. Anywhere from say nine to 12 carpenters. I do all the estimating and pretty much the bulk of the project management. I've got a supervisor, head carpenter on each project. Yeah. And then it was just a journey from there to improve the systems in my business. And that went from, you know, Excel spreadsheets to then using a, you know, a proper industry estimator program. And then from there I, you know, tried to use a separate project management program. And then it all started with trying to merge those two together and realizing there was just nothing out there. There were a few good estimating programs that sort of tickled in the project management, but it may as well be non existent and vice versa. So yeah, that's my background and that's when I went on my search to find software to suit our business.

Yeah, so what you're telling me is you can't learn how to build a house at university?

Well, you know what, that's a really interesting question. And I say, yeah, the builders of today. And you sort of do split it where you can see that a lot of good builders who were, who have done this I call the school of hard knocks. So they're now bag builder. And you can see their product is really, is really nice, you know that you can tell they've got pride and they know how to, they know how to put together a house. You can't just rely on really good carpenters just to build you a house. And when I say carpenters, I mean there's all the other trades but we do predominantly timber homes. So most of the house is built by carpenters. Right. But then, and you see the project management side sometimes is not so great. Then there's the other side. You can see some of these bigger residential firms, they sort of run big on marketing and everything but you look at some of their products and you think that's actually not a great house. So if I was giving a young fellow any advice, I would probably say do an apprenticeship, follow it up by going to university to do a project management course or in construction and then you got the two together, you've got the ingredients to run a really great operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It can be challenging I think if you just dive from being on the tool straight into running your own business. Which just sounds like what you did anyway. But I mean you're just in the deep end.

Oh yeah, it took, I reckon I probably spent 10 years from the time I was about to 25 to maybe 33 in. That was just a lot of school. Hard knocks. You do something, it didn't work. But if I had a bit more or even just a business degree, I look back and if I did that over, even like just a night course or something, over a year or something, it probably would have been very beneficial. But anyway. But sometimes doing the school of hard knocks is that you realize what not to do and you've become pretty in bed in doing the right things from now on.

At what point in your growth journey as a business owner and as a building company did you realize that, you know, working with spreadsheets and just, you know, disparate tools was not going to work for you?

Yeah, I guess I've always been one to be, I mean, quite organized. I'm not OCD or anything, but I like things to be in their box and whatnot. And I think a lot cleaner when the, when my systems are cleaner. So I tried to evolve as much as I can with what was available. But I think I got to the point, it was probably 10 years ago where I just thought, you know, the products coming on the market seem to be fulfilling my needs as you're learning how to use this software and whatnot and extra features and whatnot. But it seemed to be a bit of a dead spot once it came online. And then I thought, okay, this is really going to improve and to wrap it up all in together and have a software go from, from, you know, from start to finish. But it just, it was seemed to be a dead spot where I started searching for something and I just couldn't find anything. And look, I've used a couple of the big ones, you know, notably from, from the States and, and even Australian ones. But they, Yeah, I just couldn't find myself using them for everything. I had to use other tools to make everything work. So then I went on a, the guy went on a journey about. Look, it did stay like that for many years. So my frustration just, it wasn't any particular, you know, pinpoint in time. My frustration just grew and grew to a point where I thought, okay, I'm going to get really serious here to find a tool for my business. And as the months went by, I just thought there was nothing there. There was just nothing there. But there were some good things which I spoke to some of the developing team. I was able to nestle my way into those software companies to talk to people. Yeah, I don't know, I just keep on knocking on the door and even Sat in on some of their meetings to see this is what we need. And you could just tell people working in the software, it was quite evident that they weren't getting the information through to the people building it. So what happened is I stumbled across buildearn and I hadn't heard of this. It was actually in one of those software forums where, you know, they talk software and whatnot, and they mentioned, you know, a whole heap of different softwares. And I had a look at builden and I. It was quite refreshing. I thought, gee, this is, this is, it's got a really nice interface. It seems to have all the modules we need. And so I started a trial on that and as I got deeper into it, it seemed it was a, it was a bit shallow. It was sort of. Each module didn't quite have what it needed and it didn't link with this and whatnot. So look, you know, I just sort of emailed them back and said, look, look, thanks very much for the trial. Look, I won't proceed, but listen, you know, you've, you've got some good things here. I wish you all the best. And then it was the, the CEO Mayak came back, I think the next night, and he just emailed me and said, look, thanks, Angus, very much for trialing. Can you please let me know what we're lacking? Da, da, da. So I always try to give everyone the decency to at least point them in the right direction as to what I was thinking, and wrote a couple of paragraphs, what they're missing. And then I think 24 hours later, my had come back with two or three screenshots of exactly what I had mentioned and what I was thinking. And there was no fluke in that. He had really listened and read those through a few times to come up with, with what I'd asked. And I thought, wow, that's pretty cool. So I thought, let's give him a little test. We'll just go and, you know, type a few more paragraphs, see what he comes back with. Yeah, let's, let's see where this goes. And then over, I think in the next 24, 48 hours, he came back and same thing it was, yeah, that's, this is cool, this is good. That went on for about a week, and then, then that went on for about two weeks, over a month. And I just said, whoa, hang on, I'm just, what am I doing here? I'm building this guy some software. And then I realized, I said to my wife, I said, this guy's Taking up a fair bit of my time. But I tell you what, I'm really liking it. It's sort of, sort of found a bit of a passion in, hey, I could put a bit of a, put my fingerprint on this. Yeah. So it looked involved in some discussions and we came up with an agreement and said look, let's go with this. And that was about two and a half years ago. It's been an interesting ride. I can see how some of the frustrations I had in software over the years and you realize, okay, yeah, look, software is not an easy, it's not an easy game. But I tell you what, if you create the right software, it solves so many problems. You know, I don't pretend to be a coder or a software developer, so I'm at the end game. I'm a user. But I can certainly, I'm learning a bit more. Not that I want to know about coding, but I'm learning how it works and how we can do this and this and this. But yeah, so yeah, it's been a, a very interesting ride.

It's interesting with software because you can go down that path of having something which does one thing very well, like an estimating software for example, or you can try to create this all in one software which build earns gone down that path. And as you mentioned initially it was probably a little bit too high level across everything, which is often the trap you fall into when you try and create a software that does everything right. So how have you guys approached that and how far along the journey are you now in terms of making sure it's robust enough in all of the areas it needs to be?

Yeah, no, that's a good question. And you're totally right in that I think a lot of the industry has gone down that creating the software like the estimating and they'll get very deep and deep and deep into it where I mean, if you're finding across the industry there are certain people and the way that they do their estimating and probably bigger companies who do want and need that. But I mean, I was trying to create a software for something like for someone of my size business which is, you know, you can cover a business doing, you know, say 500 grand turnover. So he's doing half a million turnover which might be, might be, you know, five renovations or six renovations for a nail bag builder through to, you know, someone turning over 30 or 40 million. There's no reason. So we're trying to cover that scope, which is actually a very big Funnel of residential builders and who do the custom stuff, you know, is builder in certain suited for project builders? Not, not really on that big scale. No. That they're going to have their own sort of setups. But so we try to create what we are creating. So you've got all the modules that you need and they're certainly in depth enough so that, so that you can use all of it and understand it quite quickly rather than having to have full on, you know, demonstrations and setups and whatnot. Most of our builders can find their way around Build Earn pretty quickly, but certainly on the, you know, the roadmap ahead, you know, we're just each module we're just going into a little bit more depth on all of them. For those builders who want to dig deeper and use more of those extra tools.

Yeah. Can you give me a bit of an overview of what the experience is like using Builder? Like for example, you diving in there and setting up a project and then seeing it from start to finish with all the bells and whistles in there or. Yeah. How does it work?

Yeah. So I mean the idea is it's a one stop shop so that we can create. Once you start using Build Earn, you, you can pretty much, you know, from your, your latest project, if you keep on putting more information in, you can save them as templates as you go. So what you do is you're as you, as you using. As you're using Build Earn more and becoming more fluent with it, your templates are then getting better as well. Yeah. And you're literally all your filing systems throughout. So you're just creating that system. Each project that you do, you should be using it. Yeah. Just getting better and better. And your team and your guys in the field, even if your subcontractors are tapping into it, they're going to get, starting to get a lot more fluent with the software as well. But in general it's mainly your team from Estimating Admin and the supervisors on site who are going to be using Build Earn as well. We have a client portal so that the client will receive all their information through Build Earn as well. And our messaging system through all that is underdeveloped now so that you know, really absolutely everything is tied into the software from literally every, every email as well.

Right.

Right through to the end. Yeah.

What happens for example, if, if a builder really wanted to use a different software for one portion of their, their end to end process for whatever reason? I don't know what that would be.

Yeah.

Can you kind of dive in and out a bit.

Oh look, look, of course you can. Yeah. And there's, there's, that's the thing with software. Like, I mean is, is any software going to be absolutely perfect for every. Everyone? Of course not. But you know, the idea is to get that as close as possible. But look, you might have, I mean, I can't really see a lot of builders over the time, up until about now have been really splitting the estimating and the project management and that's what we're doing here is we're putting that together for. And both of them are becoming more powerful as well. So that you can use, you know, you can go into depth as much as you want and that's, that's evolving quite quickly. But look, of course there's nothing stopping a builder from. If they, if they want to use a very high tech scheduler or something like that, I think ours is great. I don't know why you wouldn't use it, but of course you could, you could use as many and as little modules as you.

As you want.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we do have packages where. Yes. Or three separate packages so that you can. Different levels. You have, you know, a starter pack, middle pack and a high pack where you can bring in as many, many modules for that. For that pack. Yeah, yeah.

Really like the idea of the templates. It sounds like then you can kind of, you know, customize it to a certain extent around your own processes and systems and then duplicate that time after time. Right. Yeah, yeah.

We've tried to make the templates very efficient so that you can. Yeah. As you go along you can just save your last project as your template and it's quite quickly to roll it in. I found that sometimes using other software, it was just trying to get that you'd have to literally manually go and change things rather than just duplicate things and put them into your template. We've tried to. Yeah, I mean it has been, it has been in a way really good that I, you know, I'd like to think myself as an experienced residential builder and Mayak, who didn't have a lot of experience in the, in the building side, he's a software specialist and a problem solver. So, you know, it was actually, it's worked together really well. He doesn't pretend to know a whole lot about construction. He's learning very quickly. Sometimes it's actually good not having that in a way so that they don't try to get their own ideas to make it the way they'd like, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, it does. I must admit my interactions with Mayak. Is that how you pronounce it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've been. I mean, he's very diligent. It's kind of like your experience with, when you went back to him with the feedback on the trial or the initial the very first time you went to check out Bill. Done. He's very responsive and very open to just trying things out and actually giving everything a red hot go, which I think is a great kind of trait for a CEO in this space who's just trying to, you know, build a tool which is genuinely useful for people.

Yeah, yeah. And what sort of grabbed me is the conversations we had at the start was that he said we're going to make Build Earn to be the best software for builders out there. He said, I'm so confident that it will happen. He said the time bit I'm not so worried about. If it happens really quickly, that's great. If it takes a bit more time, that's fine too. So he said, I just don't want builders to come to Build Earn and then sort of move on to something else. So we want to be the product that builders come to and they grow with us. I mean, we're a growing software. I think that we're probably in the last 12 months added the most features of any software that I still dabble in just to see what the other softwares are creating. You know, you got to keep your, you know, your eye on what's happening and what people want. But. And look, and I got confidence in that because it's slow. What he was saying is slowly evolving. You know, we're really putting our footprint out there. Yeah. And he's a passionate sort of a guy. And yeah, we're in this for the long haul and we're confident in creating an awesome software for our builders to stay with, you know, for their journey of building. Yeah.

So take me back again to the process you went through from transitioning from your. Whatever you had currently into Build Earn. So what was your setup before? You said you had some spreadsheets, you had other softwares you were working with. So how did that process look and where did you see the most improvements and efficiencies?

Yeah, well, I mean, we have, we have the ability to bring your, like an estimating template. Because to build an estimating template, it can take, it literally takes years. It took me years to get to the one. Yeah, you're constantly evolving and it can be quite an extensive spreadsheet. I Guess. And if you're doing. On Excel, on, on, on a CSV file, most of the softwares will be able to, you know, download a CSV file. And so we've made the ability to, to import not only from other softwares but just through a straight Excel to import a lot of the data. So all your, all of your estimating schedules or your cost codes or your pricing information, a whole heap of stuff that you can import. So we've tried to make the process, obviously, as easy as possible because it's a big, It's a challenging thing for a builder who's been doing something for so long to say, yeah, come and load up all your gear on this. And it is, it's a, it's a process and it can take a few months. So if we can assist by importing that information. And as far as the efficiencies. Oh, look, just. So I started. We went live with myself using Build Earn because even though it was up and running when, two, two and a half years ago, we sort of just really weren't hunting for any sales. We realized we've got to fix this product up when I came in. So it took us a good six months to seven, even eight months. So I went live about. Must have been 18, 18, about 20 months ago on Build Earn. So, you know, and we still had some, you know, and so it was, it was great. I was using the software, which I want to use forever and get other builders to use. So it was great to use it and then even come across little, little things that we had to, you know, improve or bring on. But to be honest, now to use Build Earn, I come back to my office after being on site and I sit down and you start getting around and it's a pleasure to be in one software without bringing up different screens and shutting things down and trying to suck this information over. It's all in one spot. So if I can talk about efficiency, that's it. It's all in one spot.

Do you think it's. Cut down your admin time in the evenings or whenever you're doing that?

And my, I don't stop working. So if I'm not, if I'm not in. If I'm not estimating or dealing with clients or I'm working, I'm working in Build and. But. Oh, definitely. So I've got, I've got, I've only got one admin office manager and she does. She actually works a lot from home. So that's how easy it is as far as you know, it's online, it's the whole, the whole thing's there. We can both be working on it. So. Yeah, I actually forgot the question I was answering. What was I answering there?

How much time do you think it's saved you on?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Admin tasks and things.

Well, yeah, just the efficiency of having it all in one spot, you know, and it's. I don't have a, I don't clock in, clock out or anything like that but you know, it's definitely saving me time.

Yeah, well, I think you've, I mean you're still running a building company and now you've also got a software company, so. Yeah, yeah, you've had enough time to, you know, look it up.

I won't call it my software company. I don't think Maya would appreciate that.

But yeah, you're heavily, heavily involved in another project, I guess. Or you know, even if you want to call it a hobby, like it's something, another interest that you can, you can work on.

I'm a very, let's just say I'm a very small partner. But yeah, yeah, but yeah, it's, it's been, it's been a great journey and, and I, we see the builders slowly come aboard and look, one of the, one of the most satisfying things is that I've found as well is early on we, you know, I'm a point of contact for a lot of the builders just to do a demo, right. So I'll spend. But my normal day is I'm out on site in the morning just, you know, touching base with the guys on site. I try to get to most of my jobs. I'm only usually running three or four, but every second day at least if not every day. But I try to get back in the office by about 1pm and then I've got like an eight hour shift that starts from then. But I'll sneak in a few demos with the, with the guys, you know, starting on Build Earn, who want a bit of. Especially some of the local guys, they just want to talk to a, you know, Brisbane, Brisbane builder or something. But look, I've, I've spoken. It's amazing. I've learned so much just in what guys are out there, what they're using and how they're going about their business. I mean, yeah, I'm not saying I'm an expert in how to run a, you know, a business for construction but you know, we've got some really good systems in place and it works well for me and a Lot of them just are like a sponge trying to, you know, once you start talking, they say, oh really? Is that how you do it? You know, but we've, we've had guys talking to guys who are, you know, building three and $4 million, you know, houses here in Brisbane. And they're still pen and paper. He says he, he gets, he gets his plans and he's doing his son's on the plans is all his, all his sums with it with a pencil. And he's got this figure down the bottom for 2.8 million. I'm like, what, what? I had to sort of, I had to get him to tell me that three times before I believe him. But. And then he realized, and then, yeah, he was so, he was so worried about how much, you know, you have to learn software and whatnot. But, but yeah, you get everyone from in between, you get other guys who are, who are. You can see they're extremely organized and you know, they're, they're really asking me every little question under the sun about does it do this? Does it, you know, so it's, it's good to see the ray of, of fellow builders out there and what they do. That's been really a bit of an eye opener.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like there's a portion of the market that you guys can capture which is just people still using spreadsheets and pieces of paper rather than, you know, it's not necessarily taking them from other software products.

Yeah, oh, definitely. And like, I mean, I mean, I know you guys do all your, all your stats and you guys know where the market's at with, you know, all the, all the different areas in the industry. But I think, you know, I think Australia has got the highest per capita of builders who actually use software. I think, I think the states aren't so high. I think New Zealand is pretty up there as well. But in saying that it's still only like 1 in 3, isn't it? Or, or less than a half of, of putting me on the spot.

But our, our State of Residential Construction Industry report actually has the data in it. I'm trying to pull it up in the background now to see if.

Yeah, right. Yeah. But it's still a lot of builders who, who do not use software. Yeah. And look, a lot of you think that the younger generation of builders coming through will probably, you know, you think that they would adapt to it, but because half of it's probably just a, you know, a fear of not knowing how to use software. Or, you know, lack of understanding. But so, yeah, we figure there's a massive journey ahead here with software in the construction industry as more people choose to take up to use it. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm just pulling up, I mean, the project management software. There's one question in our report that looks into that. 14.5% are using no project management software. That's across the whole globe. If we look at, if we look at Australia, 12.7% US, 16.6%. So yeah, you're right in terms of that. But there's also, out of that, a portion are using spreadsheets. So 12.5% of people are also, or building company owners are also using spreadsheets there. So that if you add those two numbers together, it's for, just for project management alone, you know, you're looking at a quarter of the market overall across the four main geographies that we surveyed, which is Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada are relying on spreadsheets or no software at all to manage.

Okay. I thought it was actually more than that, but I think I read somewhere else that because possibly, possibly you're not capturing a lot of those people who.

Exactly, you know what I mean, are generally already online.

Right.

The ones that are probably responding to our survey. I mean, it's, it's a large cohort, it's 18, 17 building companies. So yeah, yeah, it's a good number. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's still, you know, it has got a lot better because we've got four years of data now and it's got better every year. But there's still, I mean, yeah, even if it's say 30 or a bit more of the market that aren't using a dedicated software and that's just project management, that's not looking at, you know, estimating and things like that as well.

So. But yeah, my advice to, to any builder out there who, who, you know, looking to. Because I know there's a, there's a big fear of transition and it is, it's because builders are so busier. It's not a, it's. We all know that you and I know we're sort of in the industry and whatnot. But yeah, it's not an easy game. You've got to have, you've got to be right on top of your game in so many areas. But you know, software, only a good software can only sort of streamline that. And for any builder who's out there, you know, sort of umming and arring you know, just take, you know, take the plunge because, you know, 12 months down the track, you'll turn around and go, gee, why didn't I do that sooner? You realize how powerful some of these tools are?

Here we go. I've got the estimating software one for you. So across all the geographies, so the combined data, 25.8% using spreadsheets rather than a dedicated software, 15.8% aren't using any software at all. If you look at the US 30% are using spreadsheet, 30.5% and 19.5 is using none. So that's 50% of people building companies in the US don't have any online software to manage estimating.

Yeah, yeah. And then you've got to think of the fact that, okay, they're using a spreadsheet, but I bet you bottom dollar that that's not really tying into much else of what they're doing. It's an independent spreadsheet which then, you know, they go along and do variations and, you know, all their invoicing and whatnot. But if you've got a system that every number is tied into something else, it's just a push of a button. That's the. That's where it becomes efficient.

Yeah, we're going down a rabbit hole now. I'm looking at takeoffs as well Now. So takeoffs 43% don't use any takeoff software across all geographies.

So. Yeah, and that, the other thing, like human error, you know, human error is. That's the big. That's the big curse. Like, I. I did one of my jobs early on, and it only takes one human error. And I think I was only just starting out, but I missed something which was. I think it was. It was just literally I missed it on the spreadsheet and it was, it was 10 grand. And yeah, my profit was probably, you know, it was years and years ago when I was just. But I think it was probably half my profit, which is gone because I missed one thing, you know, but now we've got. We've got little alerts that, you know, you have to tick off. You just got to push a button, say you've completed that. That group, you know, but you just don't. Yeah, just the little things. But human error is a. Is something that is all in us. But we obviously try to create systems to eliminate that. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it's so easy to make those small mistakes. If you're busy and you're doing, say, for example, you're doing it, you've been on the, on the side all day and then you're trying to do your admin at night and you're plugging, you know, numbers into a spreadsheet. It's so easy to make a mistake.

Yeah, yeah. Another, another bit of advice is, yeah, try not to. I think a few people say this. Don't, don't estimate late at night. If you're doing your estimating, try to get up, get up early. It's amazing how sharp, how sharp your brain is in the morning. I could do triple the amount of work efficiently in an hour in the morning. It'd take me two or three hours at night.

Yeah. Some people argue that they're night people, but I've never been able to do anything at night.

I try to do just the more routine things at night with admin rather than estimating. Cool.

So what does the future look like for Builder and what's happening in the next, you know, short to six to 12 months.

Yeah. So look, we have got a, we've got a road map going, going forward and look, some of it does line up with, with AI. You know, we're all. This AI becomes the sort of the, the new, new tech word that we're all using. You know, am I an expert at it? No, far from it. But we've got the people who, who are. So, yeah, we're starting to bring in like, got a system now where as the. You get emailed your invoices, we just forward that straight onto Build Earn and it's going straight into what we're getting is sucking all the information out of it. So it's going straight into our bill section, has the PDF up ready, starts, you know, putting order numbers on it and filling out all the, all the details so that you just come in and skim, skim over it to make sure you might change your Costco on it or something like that. So just those, those really efficient things to take away the human input, which is time, which is money. Right. So. But yeah, look, we've got a roadmap as long as you can go and we're getting through it. But it's exciting and it's exciting seeing these things come aboard. We've got approximately every two weeks we have a, we have a new release where, you know, as you refresh your screen you'll see Build Earn has a new release and you just go straight away and it'll tell you what, what our new features are, whether it's a new feature or improved or whatnot. So you can just skim across because I think there's nothing worse than the software evolving and you don't even know it's there. So we're really trying to educate our users so that, hey, look, a new release is out. This is what's new. Just get you to try it out, at least know about it. Yeah. So about every two weeks and yeah, we're just rolling in our new features, I think our next while ago, our next by the end of the year. Yeah, we're seeing our users, our user subscriptions, you know, rise on a nice sort of curve there and bringing on the features. We're listening to our builders. I know that everyone says, hey, look, you know, yeah, we're listening to what you say, but we genuinely are, you know, I know there's other softwares where you'd put in your request and you know, it was, it took. Took one. I won't go mentioning it took one. They didn't have an app. So we do have a mobile app for our. For build Earn, but it took them five years to get a mobile app and it was a bit of a train wreck when it came out. It's sort of like, you know. But yeah, we're listening to the builders and obviously prioritizing those things. So We've got about 13, around 13 to 14 developers on this full time and as our, as our user subscription is growing, we're putting on more because we, we put on about three quarters of the developers onto all our new features coming up and then we've got about a quarter of our team just improving and any small requests that we can tag on to the existing features that we have. Yeah, so we've got, we've got a team hard working at it full time. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I can hear just based on your story as well, Angus, that obviously the care is there in terms of listening to. I mean, you were, you were one of those INIT customers, right, that Myc and the team listen to and actually, you know, put things in place. So.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, yeah, so we, we just want this to be. Yeah, we just want to, like. Yeah, we, we just want to solve the problem and it's so rewarding to, to, to solve the problem and of course there's lots of more problems we've got to solve. We've had builders put in requests where, you know, I'm thinking really, you know, you, you do things. Yeah, I'm quite surprised. I thought, oh, you got, you got to listen to them. Yeah, everyone, everyone's weird and wonderful and do things different way and then a week later we'll get the same request. It's like, really? Wow. Okay, maybe I'm the. Maybe I'm the funny one, but doesn't matter. Let's roll this out. So, yeah, I think there's only some point where those little requests will sort of will filter out because hopefully we're solving them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Well, Angus. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets today. For any listeners out there that want to find out more about Build Earn, go to buildearn.com or for APB members, you can check out the Build Earn rewards page as well because they're part of our rewards program and you can get yourself a cash rebate if you're lucky. It sounds like Angus might be able to give you a demo of the product as well.

Absolutely.

For our audio listeners, Build Earn is spelled B U, I L D E, R N. And for anyone on YouTube, you can see that beautiful logo on Angus's chest.

Well, thanks, Will. Appreciate you having me today, mate. It's been a, it's been a good conversation and we might speak to you soon.

Yeah, really good. Thanks, Angus. Also, a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus Root will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you Precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.