180. Project Efficiency With Eric Fortenberry

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets. We recorded this episode live at the International Builder show in Las Vegas, but the content is still relevant for builders. Today I talked to Eric Fortenberry, the CEO of jobtrad, one of the fastest growing construction softwares in the market. And we talk about how to deliver exceptional client results while also maximizing your profits. We dive into project efficiency and the key to working with your client from before the build all the way through to completion. I hope you enjoy the episode.

A lot of times people aren't, you know, taking the time to build out a detailed scope of work. I mean, this is, this is exactly the challenge that I faced when I stepped into that construction business. Just back of the envelope, you know, good old boy, handshake type deals and like, you know, you get into the project though, and, and now it's a bunch of finger pointing saying, well, you know, he said, she said, like, because we didn't know what was included. Nobody knew it was included. It was just a conversation with no documentation. I see a lot of builders not taking the time to create a very detailed scope of work and making sure that it is crystal clear what is included and what is excluded.

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.

Professional Builder Secrets Live. I'm here with Eric Fortenberry from jobtrad. Welcome to the show, Eric.

Appreciate it.

The fastest growing construction management software in America, I believe.

I believe so too.

Very good. You've had a great show by the sounds of it. Just got a couple of boosts away. But what have you been your big takeaway so far?

I mean, it's, it's just a really exciting time to be here, you know, having all these people, you know, in one place, dedicating their time to, to learning, to growing, to finding new solutions to help them improve their business. I mean, that's, that's the most exciting thing I think. You know, we've had huge turnout at our booth. It's been awesome to be able to meet so many new, you know, builders, contractors who want to join us as well as just all of our clients and our partners. You know, we just love, love spending that time the face to face. I think it really means a lot and just helps us to deepen those relationships.

Yeah, it makes a big difference meeting people in person, doesn't it? Yeah. I'm fascinated to hear more about your backstory. You're just telling me before job treads, you know, fully self funded and everything like that. Can you tell me a bit more about how it all started?

Yeah, so I, you know, I basically sold my first company in 2015. We worked with higher education, you know, provide software to colleges, universities, and you know, ended up taking that all over the world and had just a really awesome business there. But you know, timing just kind of meant it's time to go on to the next thing. And ended up. Buddy of mine was running a construction company, just needed some help figuring out how to scale his business. He had 10 employees, they're doing about 5 million revenue about, I think they're just, just under 5 years old. So. Had gotten through a lot of those early challenges, kind of breaking through a million and getting up to 5 million. But you know, it reached a point where he just like was hitting this glass ceiling and just couldn't break through. Was really struggling to figure out how to scale the business and asked me to come over and said, hey man, can you help me figure out like, you know, what I can do? Like, I'm just at a loss here. And you know, when, when I walked in, I mean it was just like total chaos. You know, they had papers, binders, you know, the timesheets were literally walking in the door, going into a folder. They'd print out all their bills and receipts and everything and put it in a folder, wait for the project manager, whenever, whenever that was to come and initial it to approve it. And then someone would manually type it into a spreadsheet, you know, and then it got typed over, copied this other spreadsheet, then someone entered it into QuickBooks and like my mind almost exploded with the inefficiency, right? And I was just like, whoa guys, what are we doing here? Like, I immediately saw the problem and I was just like, you know, look, you need to, you need to find some software. Like, let me go help you, I'll go find it, we'll figure out how to get it implemented. And you know, that's. I did a deep dive into the whole construction management space. I literally looked at everything out there, made it, made a big spreadsheet of all the, you know, the features, the pros, the cons, the price and like at the end of the day though, like, I struggled to make a recommendation for them. You know, I felt like, you know, everything was either like super antiquated, looked like it was going to be, you know, complicated to, to get implemented or customized to meet our needs or super expensive. And I struggled, I struggled to make a recommendation for the guys. And they started pushing me a little bit and saying, well you're a software guy, can't just build us something. Yeah, like, whoa, hold on, I'm not, I'm not trying to create another one off here. Like you guys are not software guys. Like there's no way you're going to be able to maintain this. I wasn't looking for a full time job but you know, they, they kept pushing me and I, and I began thinking like, man, like this is just like my first company. Like the, the education industry was just like lagging in technology, you know, but very small industry now. We came to the other end of the spectrum here with the construction industry, I mean like enormous industry, but again lagging in technology. And I just, I kind of came around and said, look, I'm, I'm willing to do it under three conditions. You know, one, I take over CEO. Two, I give you one year of my time, undivided attention. And three, everything I build is my intellectual property. So if this has the potential to become my next software company, then you know, I can, after that one year I can go run with it. And you know, they, they essentially agreed, made me partner and CEO of the business and I, and I just, I took over and I built this out of a needs basis. You know, we started focusing on, you know, the estimating, kind of got all that built out and like the core of Job Tread is really our budgeting feature, the financials. So we got that going, then we turned to the operations, the project management side and then lastly turned to the back office and really focused on getting all the accounts receivable, accounts payable, getting all that tied in together, integrated into QuickBooks. And long story short that we grew this from 5 to 8 million in sales and we increased their gross profit by 43%. And you know, at the end of that year, I mean I, you know, basically thanked him for a crash course in construction and you know, I knew though this is too good to leave sitting there with that one company. And so we started Job Tread in 2019, recruited my best developers, designers and you know, we, we started building built for a couple years. We started selling it in 2021. We got to around 200 companies that year. Next year we got it to a thousand year after that, 2200. Last year we entered around 4500 customers here, here at the booth. In just a couple months we've already picked up like over a thousand new customers this year. So it's like just growing very, very quickly on us.

Yeah, it's crazy. I think I remember last year at the show there was murmurs all over the place about oh, have you heard about job trade or you've heard about job tread? And it's just kind of gone from strength to strength over the last 12 months. That's cool. What, what's the value prop for you guys? Like it, does it come back to that core problem you were trying to solve around affordability and usability?

I mean I, I tell people all the time, like, look, we're not like reinventing the wheel here. Like the fundamentals of managing a construction project, they really haven't changed. Yeah, know, what we're doing is we're providing an easier to use, easier to learn application at a much more affordable price. You know, I'm, again I'm, I'm, I'm very passionate about, you know, believing that that software should be affordable for all size businesses. I feel like a lot of times you see a lot of these bigger companies out here, they, they take a bunch of private equity funding, they, they start to kind of think, oh, we gotta, you know, increase our price and focus on our ROI and, and that just leads them to start pricing out the small guys. Yeah, you know, I'm very passionate about entrepreneurs, you know, giving back to the entrepreneurial community and helping businesses, you know, and so I think, you know, again, a solo owner operator shouldn't pay the same thing as a 50 person or 100 person company. And so we're just trying to deliver the solutions that they need to be able to take their business to get everything organized in one place and to be able to like know their numbers, understand their processes, like put these things in place. Like so many of these, you know, these business owners, these entrepreneurs, you know, they've got it all in their head and they may be great at it, but like that's not skill, scalable. Like you got to set up systems and processes so that you can build out your team and so that you can take on more projects, larger projects, and not risk getting into, you know, a deep financial trouble. You know, I mean one, one job, like if you don't manage the cash flow, I mean that could literally sink these businesses. So we're just really Passionate about giving them the tools that they need, making it easy for them to implement the software, to afford it and to build better businesses.

Yeah. One thing we've seen, we've done research for five years now into remodelers and custom home builders across four countries. And the reduction in use of spreadsheets has just dramatically fallen off a cliff, especially in the last 12 months. 12 to 18 months. Do you think that you've kind of come in at the perfect opportunity where people are realizing that they need a pair, they need software in their company?

Yeah, I definitely think the stars aligned with the timing of when we built this and just kind of how everything's transpired. And you know, it's, it's something that we're also seeing. I think a lot of people are starting to realize that in order to continue growing and thriving in this industry, you're going to have to adopt technology, you're going to need to use software and find better, you know, processes. I mean, a lot of times these, these builders, you know, they've been doing it for 40, 50 years and they get stuck in their ways.

Yeah.

And unfortunately that, you know, what worked, you know, back then isn't going to work, you know, tomorrow. And so, you know, I think people are starting to really clue in on that. And we do see a big shift now happening in the industry. You know, again, just like the fact that, you know, like you can literally, you know, integrate, you know, your measurement tools, pull in a, pull that into your budget, you know, the couple clicks in a matter of minutes, generate a beautiful looking proposal that's already got these selection options. Like, you know, like if you're trying to compete against that and you're still using spreadsheets and pen and paper, you really have no chance.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. We're meant to be talking about project efficiency, so let's try to get back on track with that. We can come back and talk more about jobtrad later on. What does project efficiency mean to you and how does it play into the customer experience?

You know, I think it's about taking, you know, a very complex problem. Right. Like construction is, got a lot of moving parts, it's a lot of moving pieces. You know, depending on the type of work, you got a lot of different people, different subs. You know, there's, there's just so many components to being able to efficiently and effectively manage a construction project that, you know, for me, I think the way to, to make sure that you are as efficient as possible is by getting organized and by leveraging, you know, some sort of software technologies, tools that will help you to bring all of that into one place and to get everyone who's involved in the process like on the same page, you know, is singing from the same, you know, hymnal here, like being able to like work together to, to, to make sure that we're accomplishing everything that needs to happen in the right order. You know, because there's a lot of like dependencies, there's a lot of moving parts that like if you, if you're not, you know, organized within one project. Well, you know, when you start getting additional projects running multiple projects at the same time, like it, it, there's just that potential for everything to sort of spin out of control.

Yeah.

And so I think for, for people to, you know, really be as efficient as possible, they need to leverage these solutions out there that will help them bring that all into one place.

How do you solve those problems for so many different types of builders? So I mean you got remodelers, which is a much more complex running of a project compared to a custom home builder or a spec builder or whatever it is. So how do you provide a solution for all those different builders?

You know, we do have a very wide array of the types of builders from, you know, home builders, remodelers, you know, pool builders, deck builders, you know, commercial GCs, roofers, painters. I mean like we, we very intentionally design job tread to work for any size business and any type business. As long as you're in the construction space and you're selling construction jobs where you're custom bidding all of these jobs, you know, you could have, you know, a one line item budget, not that I recommend that, but you could, you know, up to, you know, a thousand line item in your budget. Like it's, it's, it's up to you. But like we very intentionally have focused on making sure that you can customize the content. And so like every builder, you know, they've got their own catalog that they can curate. You know, they can create their own, you know, custom fields, their own processes, workflows. You know, I know a lot of the stuff out there, you know, a lot of the other solutions. Like it's kind of like, you know, your way or the highway. Well, that was the big thing that I ran against when I was trying to figure out and find a solution for, for my construction business. And so, you know, we've, we very intentionally have designed this to be flexible and customizable for all the different types of businesses. But look at the end of the day, like, as much as a lot of these people think, you know, kind of their business is special and different, like, the fundamentals of managing construction projects and really managing construction businesses, they're really not that different. And so, like, when you have that core functionality set that addresses those needs and those challenges, then, you know, it really just comes down to kind of the type of business and customizing the content that they're using within their product.

Okay, so talk to me about managing projects. What are some of the problems that turn up throughout? Like, consistent problems that builders are seeing across their projects, which can be aided with a good software?

Yeah, I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, a lot of times people aren't, you know, taking the time to build out a detailed scope of work, you know, budgeting out their cost. I mean, this is exactly the challenge that I faced when I stepped into that construction business. Like, you know, we were, you know, just back of the envelope, you know, good old boy, handshake type deals. And like, you know, you get into the project, though, and now it's a bunch of finger pointing, saying, well, you know, he said, she said, like, you know, lacking that documentation up front, you know, that. That forced us to not be able to use change orders because we didn't know what was included. Nobody knew it was included. It was just a conversation with no documentation. And I see that a lot. I see a lot of builders not taking the time to create a very detailed scope of work and making sure that it is crystal clear what is included and what is excluded. You know, that. That's, that's the number one thing that, you know, just people need to take that time to make sure they do that, you know, and you got to, you know, I know a lot of people, they want to just say yes to everything.

Yeah.

And they want to just, you know, help them out and that one more thing. But a lot of times the client will take advantage of that, you know, and you got to be able to draw the line. And it helps when you have your contract and you have that scope, you know, where you can point back to and say, look, that just wasn't included. But we're happy to do it. We'd love to do it. We think it's a great idea, but that will be a change order.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I think that. And then the other big thing, though, I think that, you know, a lot of builders don't always understand is that even if you build a great product and you deliver a phenomenal you know, just build whatever it may be. If the customer's experience throughout that project was subpar, you still lost.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, like, you know, five, 10 years down the road, like, your clients are not going to remember the nitty gritty of the build. They're going to remember the experience that they had and how you made them feel. You know, we all know that construction is complicated. Things are going to come up, unforeseen circumstances are going to happen, mistakes are going to happen, and that's just, that's just par for the course. But it's all about how you handle when those situations come up. Are you transparent with the, with the client? Do you go to them proactively and say, hey, you know, we found this issue, we, but here are some potential solutions and here's what we recommend. You know, I think it's all about how you handle those issues. You know, just ignoring it and burying it and, you know, or putting it on some bunch list and not saying anything like that. That's not gonna lead to a great experience. And so, you know, I really encourage builders to, you know, to, to be as transparent as they can. You know, with, with job trade. I mean, you have like a client portal and it's permission based so you can decide how much you want to share. But like, I'm such a big proponent of like, you know, again, like open it up, make the client feel like they're part of the journey with you and give them that visibility into the schedule. You know, give, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying like, share every single, like, you know, item, but you know, the high level, the milestones, like when are we going to be out there, what are we going to be doing? You know, the daily logs, you know, the files, like letting them see what's happening even when, you know they're, they're even when things aren't happening. A lot of times there is something back in the office and just quick little notes. I think it really improves that client experience. Experience. And so I, you know, I actually just had my pool built with a job trade contractor, so I got to be the homeowner, you know, be that end user. And like these things, like, you know, sharing the schedule, the daily logs, like it took that experience to a whole nother level for us and then being able to have all the communications in one spot, like it just, it made the project so much more seamless for us. And you know, I really encourage builders to think long and hard about how they can focus more on that client experience.

It's important for you, I guess, to experience that from the other side. Right. So you can build that into the experience of the product.

Yeah, it was, it was super neat, you know, to first be the, be the contractor, build it from that perspective, but then be able to be the end user. The client was also very, very valuable.

I want to come back to client experience in a moment. I just wanted to touch on what you mentioned about change orders, because I've heard that a fair bit actually, over the last couple of days. If you don't have that detailed contract at the front end, it can kind of go one of two ways. Either the builder decides, I'm just going to consume that myself because I'm too scared to go to the customer and tell them they need to pay more, or I'm going to get them to pay more and they're going to be upset and disgruntled and maybe not refer me to anyone or give me a bad review. So you're kind of in between a rock and a hard place. Right. You either make no profit or, you know, you've got an unhappy customer.

Yeah. You know, and that's where I think to the extent that you can always, you know, fall back on the original contract, you know, kind of the, the, the, the scope of work, it's, it's just so much easier when you have those details and you have those exclusions. You know, having a really solid contract, you know, is, is, is so important. And, and I, and I feel like a lot of people, they kind of learn the lesson the hard way the first time and then they go and they put that into place. You know, phenomenal amount, like hire an attorney, make sure you have an ironclad contract that you can sort of just. Again, it's not about feeling, it's not about emotion. It's about being able to point back to, hey, here's what we agreed to do. I've got a schedule to run. We have a business to run. You got to just be open. And I think the little things. Awesome, sure. Just knock them out. If it's not going to directly affect the bottom line, hopefully you put a little bit of padding in a couple places where the little things. Yeah, I think you go do them. But if they're wanting big changes, you know, there is a real cost that. And if they don't understand that, then I think you might need to educate them a little bit more about all of the, the various factors that come into play when trying to Change a schedule or trying to change the designs or needing to get additional materials or things that you've already purchased. I mean, these, this is all just kind of part of the process that, to the extent that you can educate your clients going in what it's like to go through a build, you know, I think that will sort of help give you a little bit more ammo, you know, when you need to, to kind of go through that change order process.

Yeah, you made a great point there. If you've got the scope of work and the expectations are set from the very beginning and you're working with the right type of client, of course, then it shouldn't, it shouldn't be, you know, a hard conversation to have.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, talk to me about the client experience. Trust is so big in this industry because to be honest, a lot of, there's a lot of consumers out there that just don't trust builders. So how does all of the things you were talking about from that client experience, the communication aspect, help with building trust?

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, even just to touch on something else, I mean, there, I feel like there is a very, you know, it's a small group of, you know, just, you know, subpar contractors who, they really have, you know, tarnished the reputation of the industry as a whole, you know, by going out there, you know, not knowing their numbers, you know, underpricing their jobs, cutting corners, you know, just, just trying to be that, you know, that, that bottom of the barrel, you know, low price provider. And ultimately, you know, what happens is that, you know, they struggle, you know, they can't, they can't pay their guys enough, they can't manage the cash flow, you know, they're, they're going to ultimately end up, you know, likely screwing over the end customer. And then that's where, you know, again, those stories get out there and it gives the industry as a whole that bad reputation, you know. And so I think to the extent that like, you know, up front, you know, you have to position, you know, your service for the value that it is and that you are a higher tier, a premium contractor who's going to be able to be organized and knows their numbers, is going to manage the cash flow, is going to give the client transparency. And that's where again, having technology, from the very first moment you're sending out your proposals to the whole client portal, you know, showing the customers how the job will run, showing them other customers and how you've run their jobs and letting them see what that experience is going to Be like that brings a lot of confidence and it builds that trust. You know, I know that, you know, a lot of our contractors, they say that they use, you know, job tread in the sales process, not just the proposal stuff but like they show that experience. They say, hey, this is what your, you know, your portal is going to look like. This is how you're going to receive information, how you can, you know, sign off on, on proposals and change orders and make your selections and pay your invoices. Like is having it all in one place. It really helps keep people on the same page. And so you know, I think to, to the extent again I'm, I'm a big proponent of just being an open book sharing as, as, as much as, you know, you're, you're able and comfortable to share with the client because that builds that trust and that gives them that confidence that, that, that you're not going to just take their money and run. You know, I, I, to the extent that like all of these builders, you know, we need to help them, you know, to be able to elevate their own game. You know, we need those guys who are cutting those corners, you know, to realize that like there's a better way and you can do it the right way, but we can't give these things away. Like people need to make money to build successful businesses. And so I think once we can help elevate them, like we need everybody to have this abundance mentality, right? Like there is enough food for everyone and you know, your competition, like you can collaborate with them, you know, figure out what, what is their strength, what are your strengths? Like I see people all the time now that are meeting in their local markets. They're like, look, you know, I'm a high end remodel or I don't want the new builds, I'm going to give it over to you. You're a new builder. Well, you don't want the smaller remodel projects. Send them to me like you can work together. And I think that's ultimately how we're going to raise, you know, the industry as a whole and provide a lot more confidence back to the end consumer.

It's a great point and like learning from your peers is one of the best ways to, you know, jump the queue. Right. And find out what you need to find before making all the mistakes. Okay, so talk to me about how this can impact a builder's bottom line, their company, their life, all those kind of things. You gave an example of the original building company that you worked on With. With jobtrad. But what kind of, what's that transformation like?

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, the number one thing that builders need to do is know their numbers. Like, they need to understand are they accurately pricing their jobs. You know, when. When I first took over this construction company, you know, we, We. We did a lot. We did a lot of different types of work, but I found that every time we did fencing jobs and, and this one market, we were losing 10 to 12%. And. And this went on for like, six months. And I was like, how is this even possible? I actually suspected that there was some sort of fraud or kickback going on or, like, you know, and I, like, I, I didn't know. And so when I started diving in, though, I found that we had our price, the material, and so we were literally. And this has worked for, For a very large builder that we were doing, like, we were literally paying them to repair and put up their fences.

Yeah.

You know, like, that's just, like, asinine. And that went in for, like, six months. You know, like, you have to take the time to know and understand your numbers, to take that time to analyze your performance. You should be doing performance reviews after every job. You know, whether you do it, you know, every week, every other week, once a month. Like, find the right cadence for your business and take that time. But this is where, by leveraging software and technology, you can now start to quantify all of this information. It's not, you know, it doesn't need to be about emotion and feeling about how someone performed. Leverage the data, show them. You know, we found another time, you know, where we were working with a lot of different types of crews. And I found that, like, some of these crews were, you know, we're. We're able to hit, you know, kind of the targets that they gave us. And some of them were just all over the map, you know, and, like, understanding and starting to get in there and quantify and track their performance. That will help you to better coach them and help them see how they can improve so that you have better numbers.

Yeah.

You know, and ultimately, like, by leveraging, you know, software technology, like, every builder, every entrepreneur I know, like, they're grinding. They're working way more than they probably should. And so, like, when you can leverage, you know, processes that are either fully automated, more automated, like, it helps you to streamline and become much more efficient. And ultimately, like, this is going to win your time back. I can't tell you the most important thing. Absolutely. I Mean, I can't tell you the number of people that have like come up to us. And like Eric, like, you literally have given me so much more time with my family. You've saved my marriage. Like these, these challenges that come from disorganization, like they can be solved by like getting on the same page, being able to communicate and again take the emotion out of it, leverage the data and make quantitative, you know, data driven decisions.

What kind of data are you looking at after a project to do that analysis?

I mean, I'm a big proponent of, you know, when you build out your budgets, like you don't have, like some people, you know, will track every box of nails and screws and like, you know, I think that's great. At the end of the day though, like, my recommendation is you make sure that you understand all of your key cost drivers, you know, all of the large equipment, all the, you know, the large material purchases, like the things that are going to move the needle, you know, your labor, you know, if you're doing it internal with, with your own, you know, field crews, like you need to understand your production rates. If you're doing it with subcontractors, great. You need to make sure that you're getting the bids, that you're putting them in there and then you're comparing their actuals, like the ability to, to continually run jobs without analyzing the indicator profit. You know, it you have to understand like where are you making money and where are you losing money? It could be buried in a huge, you know, array of, of, of of of line items. But when you can do and take the time to do the job costing on a line by line basis, that's going to very quickly point you to where you are overrunning your budget. You know, where are you underestimating how long it's going to take to accomplish certain tasks? And so by, by collecting that data, by, by tracking time, you know, by tracking all of your, you know, your, your, your estimated budget, your commitments, your, your bills, you know, by, by leveraging all of that, you can start to get very, very, you know, granular and fine, fine tune your, your costing, you know, it can be very surgical. You know, like for us again, we found one single area, but it was a huge key cost driver that we were just miss bidding. We had the wrong cost. You know, and so those are the things that I like to get in there and look at, you know, both your, your, your material, you know, how did you, how did you track against your cost and then your labor, you know, and Ultimately, you know, the gross profit on the job is a very good indicator.

Makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you can find those costs and inefficiencies in the process, you can improve your margins, then you can invest more in the business, that helps you grow. It just all works together 100%.

And I think too, from a scheduling standpoint, like not just like in the budget, but like, yeah, you know, we have a feature where like you can like literally set the baseline for what was the expectation going into this project. And then as things shift, I mean, again, it could be weather, it could be, you know, shipping delays, who knows what. It could be any sort of factor. But like you, you shift out your schedule and so then at the end you can go back and look and it shows you exactly where you got off track. So again, you have to, though, take action. You know, if you keep doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different outcome, it's like the definition of insanity. Right? You know, when you find information and ways to improve, like you need to go update your templates. Go, go, you know, add some more padding into the schedule where you see you're constantly getting off. Go address the production rate issue, go figure out like, what are you doing? You know, how did you make a mistake? Where did you lose money and quit making that same mistake over and over? You know, make changes, implement those changes and move forward.

Makes sense. Okay, where do you see all of this going in the next 12 to 18 months? I mean, there's been so much rapid change with AI recently. There's so many construction management softwares out there now. You guys have been growing rapidly, of course, yourself. What are you doing over the next 12 to 18 months to help improve the efficiency of builders? And where do you see it going?

I mean, at the end of the day, there is, you know, we see every year a lot of, a lot of people try to kind of build something and they come up for a minute and then they go right back down. I mean, kind of like ankle biters. But you know, I think at the end of the day, it's going to be the companies that have the best products, the best technology, the ones that listen to their customers and they focus on their customers needs and their feedback. Those are the ones that are going to end up becoming the large dominant players. You know, we believe that all of our customers are our partners. You know, we have a very, very active job Tread pros Facebook community. You know, it's like 5,500 members in there they're all job trade users but like, you know, being able to, you know, listen to their feedback and make changes, you know, and implement that like at the end of the day, like we don't, we no longer have to solve all of these problems ourselves. You know, we have this like huge, you know, over, you know, 5,000 customers who are here, you know, day in, day out using the product. And I think the companies that are able to take their feedback and actually implement it are the ones that are going to end up, you know, building the most value for this industry as a whole. You know, again, it's, it's easy to kind of create a, create a website and kind of get a little shell of a product going, you know, but it's the ones who are truly, you know, working with their customers hand in hand, I think will be the ones that will continue to grow and to thrive in this industry.

How are you determining that product's timeline if, I mean, I imagine you're probably getting, if you've got five and a half thousand members, sorry, customers, all in the one group and you're getting feedback from everyone, it's probably hard to weed through and determine what that roadmap looks like.

Yeah, so what we did is we implemented on our help desk a feature request board. And so you can go in there, you know, we make them kind of search for, make sure whatever their feature request isn't already in there because it probably is. They can sort it by most popular. But that directly feeds into our product development roadmap where all of our developers, you know, we can see the highest, you know, voted feature requests and the things that are going to make the biggest impact to our clients. And so that's, that's, that's what we prioritize is based on those things. You know, I know a lot of, a lot of companies out there kind of price based on features and they move them from one tier to the next. Like with job tread, like everything, it's all included. You know, we just like built our own on screen takeoff tool and added it in there for no additional cost. Like, I mean, you know, that's, that's how you disrupt an industry, right, is you come in and you add these things where there's entire companies doing that, you know. But like at the end of the day, like we want to make sure that we're doing the things that are going to make the biggest impact for all of our users, you know, and so whether it's a small thing, a big thing, a new feature you know, update to an existing feature, like taking that feedback and being able to again, quantify it and sort it by the most popular. That's that it makes it a lot easier than than us having to kind of figure it out. It's.

Yeah, you're not making any guesses. You're using the data exactly like you recommend to the builders. Well, Eric, thanks so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets. I've had a lot of fun. And for anyone listening at home, check out Jobtrad. Highly recommend checking out Dropshed. If you're an APB member, look on our rewards directory. But yeah, thanks for coming on the show today.

Absolutely appreciate you having me on, Will.

Awesome. Cheers.