190. Better Client Communication With Ron Nussbaum and Janna Colucci

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 highly relevant for builders. Today I talked to Ron Nussbaum from Builder Comms and Jana Kaluchi from Bundle about how you can avoid cost overruns, stress and unhappy clients with better client communication. We discuss where most common client communication breakdowns happen in the build process, why outdated communication methods could be hurting you, and how to set clear expectations with your clients so that the build process runs smoothly. I hope you enjoy the episode we're.

Kind of in where a lot of the communication starts to break down. At its core of needing to talk to so many different people on the project team, but also up the supply chain. Vendors, manufacturers, and ultimately at the end of the day, that all trickles down to not great communication to your homeowner or final customer, which can really leave a not so great experience for the builder, but also for your customer. At the end of the day, that's where we see a lot of friction.

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Perfect. Professional Builder Secrets live at IBS. Here we go. This is like one of my most excited sessions. I'm not even joking. I love both you. I love what you're doing. So, Gianna Kaluchi, welcome to the show. And Ron Nussbaum as well.

Thanks. Happy to be here.

Great to have you both. John, I wanted to just start by telling everyone what it is you do and who you work for.

Yeah, definitely. So I'm Jana Kaluchi. I'm the CEO and co founder of Bundle which we're a digital procurement platform that makes it easier to buy, sell and manage construction materials. You can think of us as an outsourced purchasing team and we're really software plus service, helping you get anything you need for a project, from finished materials to your lumber package to your windows and doors. We sell mostly to small and medium residential builders and we've loved being here at the show where we have lots of existing customers and hopefully some new customers as well.

Great.

And Ron, I help growing construction companies eliminate their communication Silos through software, infrastructure implementation and consulting, and we do it fast.

And that's at Builder Comms, right?

Yeah, at Builder Comms.

And you've also got the Construction Champions podcast. You want to give that a plug?

Hey, yeah, I just leave out all the nitty gritty and I just like, here's what we do, man. Does all that really matter? Like, yeah. Construction Champions Podcast FOUNDER OF Builder Comms. That's where we do the communication thing, you know, But I just help construction businesses.

Okay, well, I think today we want to talk about communication, and communication is such a huge issue. I think every guest I've had on over the last couple of days has spoken about communication in some way or form. And both of your companies play a big part in the whole construction process and how well builders can communicate internally and with external parties as well. So, John, I want to start by talking. Talking about in your experience, the state of communication in the industry and how you see the challenges.

Yeah, definitely. I would say maybe not great everywhere. Hence why we're here in this podcast. I think we've seen a lot of room for improvement, but also a lot of exciting things on that front as well. I think where we sit in that, we are really in the supply chain as well. We're kind of in where a lot of the communication starts to break down at its core of needing to talk to so many different people on the project team, but also up the supply chain, vendors, manufacturers, and ultimately, at the end of the day, that all trickles down to not great communication to your homeowner or final customer, which can really leave a not so great experience for the builder, but also for your customer at the end of the day. And so really how we. Well, I won't get too much into the kind of solution side, but that's where we see a lot of friction. There's a lot of phone calls, emails, sometimes faxes still, where there's lots of disjointed communication happening. And therefore no single source of truth or record that can even be referred to easily to know statuses. And, you know, we just hear from a lot of homeowners that they want to come in and see an update or know where things are in a project and that's not always available to them with the tools that are being used.

They're not getting that.

Can we just reference there that we taught facts like that's how messed up communication is in the construction industry, that when we talk about it, we are still faxing stuff.

Oh, yeah, that's great. Oh, Yeah, I know.

Like that. Didn't even know they still existed. Yeah, no, that's what I mean. Only in construction. Only in the construction industry.

Literally when people say, can you fax that to me? I'm like, I don't know if I've ever seen a fax machine.

I think I've heard that sound it makes when you try and fax something to a regular phone line. But that's about it. How about from your perspective, Ron?

You know, communication and construction is a $30 billion problem. $30 billion. But we still just kind of treated it this, as this elephant in the room. Like, yeah, you know, people think we suck at it, so it's okay to be. And we don't look at that for impact it has on our business. Last week, Construction Dive released a report where they interviewed the top two, 250 CEOs and business owners in the construction business. And this is costing their employees multiple hours a week. Directly from communication breakdowns. I believe the time is now where we're actually going to take a hard look and fix this problem. Because the financial implications of it we don't really look at. We just kind of say it's just, well, it's what we do and it's okay to. And then we wonder why our profit margins aren't what they could be.

So you're talking about communication breakdown from an internal resourcing perspective?

Yeah, from the internal perspective to the client perspective as a whole, it is so fractured where like when we talk about having faxing to having emails and text messages, like there is no singular source of truth. There is no one place where I just have that data, where I have a clear understanding of exactly what's happening on this project. Within five minutes I can know like, what is that, that, that absolute truth around that project when it comes to that? For a long time the construction industry hasn't had that and we've been unwilling to accept that that's what we really need.

Yeah, yeah. John, do you want to touch on like right at the start of the supply chain in terms of what communication breakdowns might be specific to that part?

Yeah, definitely. I think as we all know, there's so many things that you need to order for a single family home, multifamily home, even a remodel, that there's a lot of players involved and that can be in your own team. But then when you start to bring in the supply chain, you know, even on a pretty simple project, you can easily have 5, 10, 50 vendors that you need to Talk to. You know, some of those are manufacturer relationships. Oftentimes that's a more local vendor that you're getting bids from and running that whole process. And there's so many different people that are not only getting that initial information. This is actually one of the reasons that I founded Bundle because I was so frustrated by all this communication breakdown in that you're first reaching out to all these manufacturers and vendors, getting your bids, then you go back to them again to place orders, figure out payment terms. Once again, that's another email, fax, phone call, all those different things. Then I get some text messages in there. Then again, you need to go figure out where everything is. They maybe have different tracking systems that you're kind of coordinating. And that's what we're trying to simplify as one piece of the process. But if you're thinking of that in number of communication points for any given process and then layer into that, maybe you have a delay in the project or we hear all too often that the homeowner is changing their mind and has decided they want different color finishes and we need to go back and cancel everything and start that process again. And there's just a lot of moving parts there that because kind of like we're saying they're happening in so many different places, there's no one place to go. And what we often see is a builder is really focused, as they should be, on the fires of today or this week, which means you aren't necessarily getting ahead to the supply chain issues or the delays of products being backordered or you know, reselects things like that until it's too late. And now suddenly you're delivering not so great customer experience experience when if there was a more efficient process, you could have, you know, kind of seen those problems before they became problems.

Yeah, I've heard a few times over the last couple of days as well, around the slow response time and how that can really like from suppliers and how that can really impact on communication and then the client experience too.

Oh yeah, definitely. And we're, we're in it, we, because we act as a procurement partner, we're often negotiating with vendors on behalf of our customers. And I was just saying that to myself yesterday, placing an order, I'm like, wait a minute, this all initiated three weeks ago.

Yeah.

And there's been 15 different back and forth messages trying to figure out all the different pieces of this puzzle. And it's like this should not be this complicated. And we haven't even, we've even gotten to the internal builder team, you know, what's happening on site, the homeowner who, you know, at this point, we're so used to asking Siri or asking anyone what's going on and getting an answer right now, there's nowhere to go to ask that. Get those answers. If you're the homeowner that's just trying to understand, you know, where is this.

Project, Ron, do you have any thoughts on that end? Or move into pre construction or where do you think?

So, I mean, you use one of my favorite words there.

Oh, love it. I brought up faxes. Now, your favorite word, Complicated.

Like, we look at communication. Like it has to be some complicated thing. Like, when I first started putting all this together in my head, the main thing that I went through was this has to be simple. Like, we were doing close to 25 million in revenue. The goal was to get to a hundred. Like, I needed to be able to grow and scale our communication. It couldn't be complex. What I already had was complex. But everybody's like, we just have to make it more of that. It needs to be more complicated. When really what it just needs to do is be simplified. Like, just make it simple so everybody can utilize it and then just make it. This is how we do it. And that. That's where I look at communication as being one of the biggest headaches, because everybody's looking at it the wrong way. They're thinking for some reason this has to be complicated when it really doesn't. It just has to be simple, just like anything we would do any day.

Mm. Isn't that part of the challenge, though? Because construction projects is. Are complicated. The industry has got a lot of moving parts. Like you mentioned, so many different pieces of communication and different suppliers you're working with. So isn't that part of the problem? It's, it's. It's not easy to make something which is simple to use that.

I would argue that point, because a lot of construction projects, a lot of the stuff's the same. There's a lot of controllables within a construction project. Every one of them is going to have variables, but we can't control those. We can only control what we control. So do that and do it really, really well and let those variables fluctuate. When we're talking about communication, there's not a lot of variables. The variable right now in the construction industry is we just don't do it. We just say, oh, hey, you know, they can find out next week.

Yeah.

Or the email goes to the spam forwarder or somebody sees the text message but they're getting ready to clock out and they're like we'll respond tomorrow. And they don't ever answer back. We could control all that if we wanted to on a project, but we choose to let that be a variable and it doesn't have to be. And I always used to say is that 80% of the work we do we can control there's a variable we can't, but we can't let that dictate the actual project and the outcome we're trying to create. So I say control what you can control.

I think also that's where technology starts to come in because I think if we think about why are we using a lot of phone based communication, which is where there's more of this breakdown, it's because you're on a job site running around doing a million things like a text, a call. Obviously that's the way to go. And I think that tends to be the initial pushback to software generally in the industry is like what the system is only as good as the data coming in and if that data isn't being updated, but like the last thing you want to do on a job site is like get home and go file this data into a system and no one's going to do that. Or we've maybe a couple of people, but most will not. And so I think what we're starting to see is, you know, where can we meet people where they are? Can text messages stay still be text messages, but can they be pulled into a system so that we have a system of record that documents some of this? And even as you know, text based understands language where we can pull in some of that to actually have that system to refer to to better communicate, to get ahead of. I think we had maybe even talked about this in a past conversation, but I was going through with one of my builders on what the dream experience would be in going through selections with their homeowner. And the builder was like, you know what? I would love them to wake up on Sunday morning, get their coffee, come downstairs in their pajamas and really enjoy the emotional experience that is a new home and pick and think and do all those things. They don't need me, but they need a system that has all of the information for them to pick from. And that's one tiny piece of the puzzle. Obviously there's a lot more to building a home, building a bigger multifamily project, all sorts of things like that. But it kind of gets at that Crux of like, can we be doing, can we give the tools that pull all that data into a system that is then usable and accessible by the end customer and then you're not making it more complicated. Hopefully we're just using the tools we have in a better way. And I think some of the technology that's out there is starting to get at some of that.

It's all about usability. Like, literally, I say, like, all software is super. You could say caveman. Like it's very easy to use, it's not fancy, it's not. I say the sexiness is in our simplicity, the fact that it just does what it's supposed to do. Like you don't have to have all these bells and whistles because for one, literally our industry doesn't care. They just want it to do what it's what you say it's going to do and the buttons are where they're going to be at. Like, that is what software should be.

Totally agree.

Interesting. You brought up the experience for the customer there. It's kind of like what you, Ron, were talking about off air in terms of like you just want to turn up and it's a work and that's the experience you're reflecting on there. It's like the homeowner, they just need all the information. The person that's building the home, doing the remodel or anything like that, they don't have to work for it, they don't have to do all that extra work to figure out where they're at in their project.

Totally. And a lot of them are busy working people themselves. The last thing they want to do is come home, send more emails to try to figure out what's going on with their project. It would be awesome if they could have some of that. And I always think, I think this is general client experience, but if the homeowner is following up with you, you've missed the mark. Like the information should be coming first, which, I mean, I say this to our team all the time and like, if our customers are following up with us, we've missed something, we've done something wrong. Which obviously that's kind of a dream vision to avoid all of that completely. But how do you put that system in place?

It's a great way to look at it though. Yeah.

To think that, think that truth that way.

Look, you're both trying to solve this communication problem with Bundle and with builder comms and Ron, it's kind of like the core of everything you do. Right.

So that's all we do.

What's your.

Yeah, that's it.

How are you going about doing that? What is the solution? Let's dive into that now.

Yeah. So what I needed was air traffic control. I needed. I needed the data I needed. We got babies.

Everybody's around now.

It's a big fan. Thank you. Thank you over there. Glad to be here. I needed to be able to run air traffic control. The wrong people, always talking to the wrong people on the projects. So it just hit me like, this is what I need. And that's what we do, is we get all your communication, all your documents, all your pictures in one place. We create a single point of data for that. We run everything through there, all the messaging and we direct the traffic. So if a homeowner has a sales question, they're talking to the salesperson. If they have a scheduling question, they're talking to the scheduling question. I used to answer the phone almost every day, and it'd be somebody saying, hey, I was on your site and you look like the person I talked to. Oh, no, we have 30 crews. I am the worst person to talk to. Like, literally, you couldn't not pit. Like, the guy in the shop probably knows more about your project than I do. And I was like, this has to stop. How do I empower that homeowner to reach out and ask the questions? Like, we had numbers that crews had to hit daily. I couldn't have a crew show up to a house and not be able to do any work because the homeowner wasn't in the loop. Or they want to change something. And here's what they always say is that Sarah's rep didn't know the form and he'll be able to help us out. Well, then they change the color on something. We're a two week delay. That was a one week project. I now have to scramble to find them something to do for a week. We lost a day's worth of business. And then on top of that, I'm paying these guys and all because the homeowner wasn't empowered to reach out and ask us if that came in black instead of blue. And I was like, there's gotta be a better way. And I just built it and then was like, we could just solve this problem for the entire construction industry. And now I get to do that.

That's cool. That's cool. And that just like eats into your profitability. All those things.

You're talking about $30 billion a year. Yeah. It's estimated that it's.

I'LL get you to send me the data on that.

Yeah, I have sent you the data on that.

Have you?

Yeah, I have. It is estimated that it costs you on average $4,300 per employee per year. That's what miscommunication. And those aren't my facts. That's third party. I don't make up any of my own numbers. Okay, $4,300 a person. So you can just do the math. Annually you have 10 people, miscommunications costing you $43,000 a year minimum.

All right, Jonna, how are you solving this big communication problem at Bundle?

Yeah, definitely. We try to bring as much data from the source into one place so that there is less need for that communication. And again, we play a little bit further upstream, but we're basically saying how can we make the entire procurement process we play completely in materials right now, how can we make all of that turnkey for any builder that's using the system? And by doing that, we're. In order to do that, we're basically pulling direct feeds from ERP systems of manufacturers often still going through distribution, sometimes direct to manufacturer. And all of that data is coming flowing right through to what that builder is buying until that product, from when that product's ordered or even selected by a homeowner, all the way to when that product is delivered on a job site. And so we're really bringing together that stream of data so that you're making decisions with the same piece of data that's coming to you initially from that manufacturer all the way through till it gets delivered on a job site.

Do you guys have like. I'm just going to ask this question. Do you have like a update tracker for like the cut for just the builder or the customer, everybody involved? Since you have that, I love that you have that front end data.

Yeah, yeah.

So and like you're able to track that. It's like the, I always say, like the dominoes app where like you can see that coming along. Is that like, that's awesome.

And so we, speaking to your Simplicity comment earlier, we even try to minimize how much people are coming into the system. So you can actually pull a data feed to your calendar and see all of those live kind of updates, tracking information in your own calendar. Our next step is integrating more with some of the scheduling tools. So you're actually seeing that in your schedule. But we've kind of come up with piecemeal solutions to do that right now. And you can always log in, you can always come into your app and see all that too. Which is where we, there was a big missing hole for a while. We were web based first and it was like, hey, this is not where people are accessing delivery information. They're on job sites, need to know if this thing's coming today or not. And so the app has been a huge unlock on that.

So we're completely web based but completely mobilized. So guys in the field get on our phone, it seems like they're on an app, but they're not. But we did build out a mobile app. So we had a university in Southern California do a four week deal on what does the customer really want. They Talked to like 30, 40 different people that had built a house, had done renovations, had done, and they all came back till they wanted an app. Which blew my mind. I was like every, no one wants an app on their phone anymore. But all these homeowners, they didn't want a porter, they didn't want a website, they wanted an app. They're like, if they were going to do something besides text message or email, they wanted to be able to do it in the same amount of clicks. So that's what we were able to give them. Within the builder comms app is that homeowner can go in there and send that message just like they're sending an email or a text message.

Yeah, I like that. That's validation of our app too. I like that.

Yeah, no, the app is. Yeah, I don't get very many of the. On the construction side. They don't necessarily, they're whatever. Construction's interesting. I mean it is, it's an interesting space. It's the wild west of software.

Yeah, it is. What we also see in our app is what people are using it for is the delivery tracking. So data information, but messaging for the exact same reason. It's like feels like you're texting what you're already super familiar with and then you can do everything same thing. And now it's coming right into our system where now anyone you want to give access to can then see that.

Well, and that's what I tell my tell my developers is like they kept wanting to make things more complicated and I'm like, like, if you can use Facebook, you should be able to use our software. And they're like, that doesn't make sense. Like, what do you mean? Facebook is a social media platform. You're building a messaging platform. Like, yeah, if you can use Facebook, you should be able to use our software. And that's just what we built. And that's what we get to hear every week. It's like the buttons are just where they're supposed to be, and it's. It's just simple to operate. But that. That wasn't by mistake. That was just by me saying no a lot. Every time they're like, we should do this. And I'm like, no, we should not, like, just do the simple, the. Not necessarily the bare minimum, but just like, let's just build what the construction industry needs and then let them help develop the rest of it. Like, I can only build what worked for. For me, but we can continue to build based on what the whole construction industry needs.

Yeah. I can't wait to see your app. I want to go play around with it now. You've sold me. You've sold me. But I totally agree. I think more of our product development is trying to cut things out. Like, make it smarter.

No, absolutely.

The back end can be smarter, but.

Yeah, that's where it has to be smart.

Totally.

But the front end is like, does anybody really care? I got the same people that did the research study for us was like, your software scored a zero in, like, desirability or something. I was like, what does that mean? And they're like, how fancy it is and how it emotionally moves people. And I was like, I know why it scored a zero is because I cut all that out. They weren't impressed, but they're Southern California software people. Different worder than what I'm trying to appeal to.

This is great. I'm just sitting as a fly on the wall. You guys are having a business meeting.

Let's have our apps talk together.

This is how problems get solved in the construction industry.

I feel like there's. Yeah. Doing a deal here or something. It's great. There's been lots of funny correlations, too. You were reflecting on Bundle being like the Domino's app and then talking about faxing.

You don't. You'd be surprised how many times the dominoes thing comes up on call. Like, people for some reason resonate with that.

Okay.

They're like, have you seen the Domino's app? I'm like, yeah, my son loves Domino's. I've seen the Domino's app. And they're like, that tracker.

The tracker.

That tracker is everything. And I'm like, really? Is it because we don't do. I don't. Like, we don't have nothing to track.

Yeah.

So, like, can we have a track? Well, what are we tracking, sir? Like, the amount of messages that are going back and Forth like we have nothing to track. I mean, I guess you could like put your completion, like we have the completion date in there, but like, are we really tracking this? Like, yeah, that's not the, the purpose of our software.

All right, I'm going to give you some tracking data and then we'll solve two. Okay, two problems here.

I don't know, you could track like response times or conversations or something like that.

I like. So we had one of the things that we've been working on for a while wire and where you eventually call the software is red light, green light for messages coming in and out. Where we can use temperament to say this is a pissed off homeowner, this is like a mediocre or this is a green light. So just by color coordinating the messages, I believe that with the information that we're collecting, the future of AI is we will be able to position every contractor, builder, every construction business owner, anybody in their companies to send the absolute best message every time, whether that is to a client or a team member is we will be able to empower them that when they send that message, it's the perfect message.

How do you triage the messages coming in? Is it always a person answering or.

Yeah. So you control all your admin settings for who runs each one of the channels and stuff. I'm not going to say that there's people not hacking. Our ability to be able to get in there and send automated messages and stuff. How it's designed is that you have people that are responsible for each channel. So if it's a scheduling question, you have somebody that's responsible for that. Is there ways to automate that and just be able to push stuff through? Absolutely. It's just like any kind of software when it comes to that. But my original goal was that it would be humans that did it.

Okay, what is the one thing, John, I will start with you. You'd recommend for builders listening in today on how they can improve their communication?

Yeah, I think it's come up a couple times and I always come back to having that single source of truth to go back to. I think there's so much that we can do and learn from with data, but we need to have that as a starting point. And so coming up with a way to bring all of that into one place. Feel like I might be doing a sales pitch for builder concept. I completely believe that.

Yeah, you have to have that. Like, everybody talks about what AI is going to be able to do, but no one has any data. So. Okay, like, yeah, you can use ChatGPT to do your social media, but if you don't have any data, you can't. Like, that's the great thing about when you get one single source, one single truth is I can send an AI agent in there and ask legit business questions. And in the past is we are operating on assumptions, we're operating on. This is what I believe to be going on. We have some facts to back that up, but it's really just an assumption that this is what's wrong in my business. If you have that single source, you can go in and ask, where, where are we dropping the ball?

Why?

What is delaying projects? What, what's the biggest customer complaint? Or even in the sales for marketing, like, what's the biggest suggestions we get when our sales reps are trying to close a deal? So then you can take that information and move it into the marketing front end. Like, but if you don't do anything now, I mean, I've been telling people this for 12 months. You needed to start 12 months ago of getting this data somewhere. So when the AI revolution really does start, it's just plug and play. Otherwise you're going to need to spend 6 to 12 months creating that one source of data. Hmm.

Any final thoughts, Ron, on the one thing builders could do to improve their communication? Obviously, apart from getting builder?

I mean, I. Yeah, well, I think definitely you should use builder comms, like, duh. But I mean, you're, you're here, you're listening to this right now. Yeah, I am. Do one thing I say at the end of my podcast all the time is 99 of people would do absolutely nothing with the information that they receive. There is something that one of us said that smacked you across the face and you were like, I need to change that in my business. Just do that one thing right now. Like, do it. Take some form of action. Like, you already listened to the podcast, now do something like. And you don't even have to do it all. There's a lot of different things you can do. But pick that one thing that was like, aha, like, I can't believe I'm not doing that. I can't believe this is the first time I'm hearing that. And then just do that and then listen to another one of these podcasts and then do one more thing from that. And that's how you fix the problems in the construction industry.

And I think probably the last thing too to add onto that a little bit is I think there's a lot of solutions kind of service software type models now that can help get you there. Right? Like that can be an overwhelming thing to try to figure out where all this data is coming from. And so look to partners. I mean obviously we're both here as partners, but look to partners that are setting up some of this infrastructure for you and trying to make it as easy as possible for you to do this or put the data in your lap to then learn from so that it isn't quite as overwhelming as it may seem. Even based on that thing you are thinking during this podcast.

Yeah, no, it can be way overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be at all.

Great. Well Ron Chana, thanks so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets Live at IBS for anyone listening at home, highly recommend checking out Bundle Bundle build I believe perfect and buildercomms.com and the construction Champions podcast if you want to dive into some more content. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed it.

Awesome. Thanks for having us. La.