155. Task Automation With Elena Korolkova

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 Route 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.

Your profit margins will increase, your conversion rate will increase, and the winning rate obviously will increase.

Welcome to Professional Builder 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 alayna Koralkova from KIK Consulting. KIK Consulting are Monday.com experts who help builders increase efficiency with Monday's powerful workflow automations. Today we'll be talking about how you can automate your internal processes so that you can do more of what you love.

Elena, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Will you. Pleasure to be here.

Absolute pleasure to have you on.

And I'm excited to hear more about.

All the work you're doing with builders. So let's dive in.

Okay. We've. I've started in construction building industry around two or three years ago, and it's not really a sexy story where, you know, it's been my dream and whatnot. We it was really an educated decision as a business owner, which a lot of your listeners would relate to. We started to see a huge trend where we were getting builder after builder, different construction company, small, medium, large, you know, subcontractors. Carpenters come to us for a system because they didn't have a system. And we started to see a trend and said, okay, why, why wouldn't we make it our focus and a niche? So we pivoted, we turned and, you know, as every business needs to survive through evolution, we said, okay, why don't we work with a building industry that brought us to essentially creating a system for a lot of builders. And what I love about it the most is I get to see firsthand how the benefit from what we do. And we have so many clients that come to us and say, oh my goodness, I wish I had this earlier. So that's us.

It sounds good. Can you take me a step back and talk about how KIK Consulting came to exist in the first place?

I don't know if many wives can say this, but I have to say thank you to my husband. It was his idea. I worked in finance Banking and auditing sector. Very, very boring industry and job. And my contract was coming to an end. And I always loved technology. I'm one of those people that when the new thing comes out, I usually trialing, testing, trying to break it. And he said, why don't you teach people how to use technology? I said, who the heck would pay for that? So. So that was six or seven, seven years ago almost. And it evolved. Obviously, I don't teach people how to use technology now. We simply make their businesses and lives better with technology. So I've fallen into Monday.com. it was easy to use, it was very friendly. People started to pile in through the door because as seven years ago, this is. Well, Covid played really well for us. It did a lot of work for us of moving everyone remote and everyone needing the system. So we would. I was at the right place at the right time where the business started and we started to change it a little bit of creating different system, helping people to automate. And then Covid hit and that allowed us to boom and start to focus on different things. So that's how Kik Consulting came. And Kik actually was. I think it was his. His idea as well. The reason why it's called Kick is the idea of kicking your business up the butt, or the more nice way to say it, kick it into gear.

Yeah, that's nice. Well, can you explain a bit more about what you're talking about when you say a system? And open my mind about Monday.com I think for people that don't even know what it is out there, it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on what it is. And for someone that may be familiar with it, but isn't necessarily across all of its, all of its functionality.

This is a question I get at almost every party when people say, what do you do? Then I have to explain a bit more. So a system is. And a lot of builders that come to us usually don't have one. They have everything. In many places. A system is a process where you have. For example, somebody reaches out to you through your website or sends an email saying, I want to work with you or I want to build a house with you, or that's first entry, that's your inquiry, what you do next, what the steps you take is your process. And a system is what automates that process. So it holds it like a bucket. And if you have a system, that means you as a business owner, you can have a lot more free time because your staff can actually look after your process. So what we often do with Monday.com is inquiries come in and they live in your lead or CRM or inquiry management place system where you can see where everything's at. So system is something that creates. Takes chaos and creates order for you. What is Monday.com? they started long, long time ago. That went public a couple of years ago. It started as just task management, which is what, you know, Asana, Trello and a lot of build other building softwares. Now what Monday can do is it can manage your whole business. Our business runs on it. Most of our clients runs businesses runs on it. It can send invoices on your behalf, automated emails. It's. It looks like a spreadsheet and it's colorful and it's very, very easy to use. So anyone can use it and people love it because it's so simple. So it creates automations for stuff and it allows people to have a lot more time on their hands.

Oh, very interesting. I, I kind of always, yeah, bucketed it with those other project management softwares that you just mentioned.

It can do. It can. It absolutely does compete in that area. And it also then they've been really, really clever, actually. They've changed and created different products so you could do customer management. You can raise service tickets. So if you have defects, your customers can raise a. So a ticket for the defect. So you could, you know, look after it. So can do a lot of things, a lot of different modules. My favorite saying is whatever you can dream, dream up Monday can do it. We stopped allowing clients to dream up because then the systems become so huge you can literally build whatever you want.

Yeah, well, talking about that, what are some of the common inefficiencies you see in building companies that could be systemized using something like Monday?

Our biggest and the scariest one is really having no system. So somebody that has it all in their head. I mean, it's okay. When you're a sole trader, you have you and no team, then everything is in your head so you know where things are the second you add somebody else that can't read your mind, as we all know. So they have to call you, they have to ask you what's next. So having no system is the biggest inefficiency. Lincoln Lawyer syndrome. Will, have you seen a movie, Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey?

Yes, of course. Yep.

Where? So for the listeners who haven't seen it, it's. Matthew McConaughey plays a very successful lawyer, but he works out of the boot of his beloved Lincoln, the car. And that's why they call him Lincoln Lawyer because all his files and the boot. So we have several clients and you won't believe this but they have a paper file and they're located at home office car boot off normal office job site all around. So their staff has have an idea and you spend a lot of time traveling multitudes of spreadsheets. So your staff now trying to have a system whole process but they can't because if you have a spreadsheet and I have a spreadsheet those spreadsheets not talking to each other and we don't know what we're both up to and having a lot of manual tasks. Manual tasks seem to be the most common one and you know most self explanatory that it just eliminating it will bring efficiencies. But you don't realize how much of manual work you do. We work with a factory in I know that's not construction but example factory in WA and the ROI is 400 something percent on just automating one process. So what that means is there will be benefiting 400 plus percent by implementing just one process. It's incredible.

So yeah there's so many things that we do day to day that we probably take for granted thinking that it needs to be done. Whereas what you're saying is if you open your mind and start thinking about what could be automated then there's so many efficiencies to be had.

Simplest one is emailing your customer to say your you know your items will be delivered on site, your sink or you know the fencing or the fencer is coming in or landscapers coming in tomorrow. If your staff has to do it multiple times, when can automate it. So the second you remove that, imagine what your stuff could be doing.

Okay, so there's a number of inefficiencies that you touched on in a building company. What happens if builders keep working the way they currently are? What are the implications of that?

Well the. I don't like to scare people.

The biggest often that drives action though.

Yes. So the scariest one and we're seeing it. We were hoping we wouldn't get to this place for a while but as of starting end of last year and really starting to play this year is economy tightening, people spending less. It's affecting all industries including building industries. So people are spending less. So you're getting let's say you're using your current system and your current system is like a leaky bucket and we all know no point filling in leaky bucket with water because it's all going to come out. You could have fixed the leaky bucket. If you keep using the same process and the same system, first of all, your margins are going to shrink because you're spending so much time doing all these things that you don't have to. All the manual tasks, if you automate them, you could be doing something else or your staff could be spending instead of 20 hours doing something, they could spend five. So your margins will shrink. So you start to lose money eventually or jobs become not profitable. If that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, what will happen is you will have to increase your pricing so you'll start to quote higher and higher. So you will not be competitive. You won't be converting. The other side effect that we've seen, which we didn't expect, is we had clients say that once they put a system in place purely just to even track the inquiries, have them in front of you and, and see who's contacted whom when it happened, what did they want. It creates accountability, but it also puts it in front of you. So it increased conversion rate by 32% within 30 days, which is astonishing results. So you're getting more out of your leads. So rather than spending hours creating content, doing marketing and all of that, you fix your bucket. So your profit margin goes up because your efficiencies go up. You automate the tasks, you template them. And I know a lot of builders sitting there going, oh, but I do bespoke builds. It's every process is different. We've heard that it is different. And I agree with you. Every build has different things, but there are always, we found that there's always at least some tasks that are the same. And if you just automate even half of it, that saves tremendous amount of time. So your profit margins will increase, your conversion rate will increase, and the winning rate obviously will increase. So you're already seeing tremendous amount of benefits. So the downside, if you don't do it, your business won't survive in the new environment because we, the economy is not going to get better tomorrow. I've heard that some people say another 12 months at least. So can your business survive the way it is for another 12 months to 24 months? I would rather not gamble on that.

To your point as well, like, yes, there's going to be different businesses, especially in custom build, that have different processes and different touch points and everything like that, but the sales and marketing process should be consistent regardless of what you're doing right. It should be repeated and systemized and to that point.

Exactly. Repeatable process, systemized. There is a good book, I love recommending it called Build to Sell. It's really easy, very short. But it talks about systemizing the process and how that allows to make it easier to market the business market. The service creates a niche and happier customers because you have, you set the expectation and then you deliver. If you have salespeople, if you have somebody that even answers the phone and you're not there, I'm sure everyone has a freak out moment of oh my God, I've lost control. Control. A system like Monday allows you to have control. So you. It's fully transparent so you know who's doing what and when. When is it you who hasn't done something? Where are you late on the customer? And most importantly, creating one source of truth where you can actually see who's spoken to customer. What did they say, what did they send? So it creates this repeatable process that your staff can do so you can go and talk to more customers. You can be on site more or you could be surfing more. Whatever floats your boat, really. Yeah.

And that's what everyone wants out there, I'm sure is just, I mean, that's the reason we're in business, right, Is to do more of what you love. And unfortunately, too many building company owners out there are just working crazy hours and never actually having a life outside of.

Exactly. Yes, yes. So I love seeing that, the whole idea. Why? One of the reasons I started the business is allowing people to have more time to do what they love. Because you can as a business owner. We all go into business thinking that. And one of the reasons is because we want to do more of what we love. I mean, that's why I started my business and I just came back from a five week holiday where I worked 30 hours a week every day. So every week. So it's not a dream come true. It's a reality. So clearly I need to do something about my processes too.

Well, yeah, we actually caught up. You're in, you're in Bali, were you?

Is that right?

Indonesia. Went to the island of Sambawa for surfing. So for the surf is on podcast. It's a pretty great wave.

Okay. Do you surf yourself?

I didn't. My husband did. I'm pregnant, so I'm not allowed in the water. It's a sharp reef there, so yeah, take it easy.

But typically you would surf or.

Typically I would, yes. Ocean scares the heck out of me. It's a lot of power there. I do love being on the board. Out in the ocean, in the middle of it. It's really beautiful. And when we live we have lots of sea life, so there's always dolphins around.

Nice. Nice. Okay, so it sounds simple when you talk about systemizing a building company and you know, creating efficiencies, but it's much more complicated than that. Where do you start? When you start working with the builder, how do you identify where those processes are and the most high impact ones that you can start automating?

So the, the way our process works is we identify where there is the most action. So where is the biggest pain? And that's, that's the question is to the builder is what hurts the most? Is it your. There's usually two places or three places that there is the start the top of the bucket where your inquiries come in. So if you're getting bombarded by inquiries and you're missing inquiries, we will start with that. The second one is the job or project management, is that hurting? Are you missing deadlines? Are your customers unhappy? Do you have team that's not performing, that's missing things? And then the third one, if you, if you do look, do post build, you know, customer management, I highly recommend it where it's supposed build, you know, contact or obviously there's defects and so on. Maybe you check in with the customer six months later you should build relationship really well. So if you do that then we'll look at this. So usually it's the middle part where you start to work on your process and then you tap tag in the what we call a CRM. But it is actually, it sounds complicated and because often there is not no system, there is a chaos. And that's why a lot of people come to us and they just hand over the chaos and co organize it for us. It is much, much easier because we can sit down and say okay, give me the steps, we'll pull it out of your head and we'll put it down. We do. After so many years in the industry, we've developed a out of the box solution that builders can go and implement within a couple of hours themselves. You don't have to be super tech savvy. It is very user friendly and we're there to hold your hand as well.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

I think a lot of it would.

Be in the head. That's part of the problem. Right. Like you mentioned before, there'll be some things which are done in paper, there's spreadsheets, there's other software involved and then there's a whole bunch of Processes which are just done based on experience. And I think that's where the problem comes probably lies.

So we pull it all together into one place and then create, create it into a nice workflow so it doesn't have to sit on whiteboard, sticky notes written on the back of your hand in your phone. We've seen it all.

And then in terms of repeatability of that, that system that you build or with the builder, is there training involved as well? Do you then document those in procedures that the team can, can take forward?

Yes, absolutely. The idea is we teach the men to fish. So you come in to us, you we or you install the system. It's very easy there. It comes already with a lot of recordings. So your team, you hire somebody new, you don't even have to sit and teach them hold your, hold their hand. There is recorded videos, processes. Obviously if you change something, it will be up to you to record it. We record, if any changes we make, we'll record and make sure you know how it needs to be done. And the idea is make you as independent as possible. We don't want to be talking to you in three years because you need us to train your stuff. We want you to be empowered yourself because who knows, maybe in three years you'll sell your business.

And that's I guess another benefit we didn't talk about. Right. Is the sellable, the saleable asset that you then have as a business with the systems is, is more so than the, the, the sum of the whole.

Exactly. That's one of. We've talked to a lot of, what are they called? The not buyers, agents, agencies that do sell businesses or buy businesses. Having a system is a huge, not even a brownie point, but financial point where you can. First of all that means that you're no longer key person dependent. So that's one of the biggest issue if you are looking to sell a business, first question is if you leave the business, will the business survive? If. And this, the book that I recommended was recommended to me by somebody who sells businesses build to sell. It talks about a guy, it's written as a story who is trying to sell his business. But he's the key person so talks about his journey about removing himself. And really it's creating a system saying this is my product, this is how I sell. This is the steps. So when you have the steps and your staff knows what they're doing, you, you don't need to be there anymore. Yes, you might need to be there to overview things, but you can be Removed means the value of your business increases dramatically. So having a system allows you to sell your business for so much more or whether you merge later as well, you'll be surprised. Your mates will be coming and asking what are you using? So they could use it as well. Yeah, exactly. Very frequently.

Yeah. It's very much aligned with what we, we advise builders in terms of systemizing their building companies so that they can have time to do more of what they love, work on the business more often, the strategic direction of the business, and then obviously set themselves up for whatever the future they're looking to have. So.

Exactly. And we, this is, I know some one of the things we didn't cover is integrations. We, it integrates with all the different, whether they're QuickBooks, Xero, any other tools, and it all works from your phone. So you will be walking around the building site with your phone going, yep, this is done, this is done, this is done. So it's very, very simple.

Yeah, yeah, very good. Well, for APB members out there, Kit consulting is a preferred partner.

So if you want to go and.

Check out them on our rewards directory, that's a great place to start. But Elena, where else would you recommend builders could go just to kind of get the ball rolling, start thinking about systemization in their building company. And also, you know, look into Kik Consulting and Monday.com they can go to.

Our website, Kyle kickconsulting.com one word. We do have a whole page there that talks about the building solution, how to get started, any, any benefits you get, any additional perks and everything else.

Great. And then jump on a call with someone in the team.

Yeah, absolutely.

Cool.

Well, sounds good.

Elena, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate all the tips you've shared on automating and saving a ton of time for builders. I'm sure there'll be plenty of people that are interested to find out more.

Thanks, Will. It's been a pleasure.

Great.

Also a big thanks 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.