Technology + Process = Increased Profit with Eric Fortenberry of Jobtread

Hey, everybody. It is Jim Johnson, your host here with Contractor Radio and the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, where we help contractors get control of their business so they can then grow their business and find that personal and financial freedom they were aspiring to whenever they started their business. And I have an awesome guest today because this guest has a knack for doing just what we talked about, helping you get control of that business, allowing it to scale and grow. And then he's found a couple of ways to. To free him up. Up to do some pretty amazing things. But before we get there and we talk about that and what it takes to be this kind of entrepreneur, we're going to have a little word from one of our sponsors, our premier sponsor, our rockstar guys that we love over at Atlas Roofing.

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All right, if you are a roofing contractor out there or have roofing as one of the trades that you do, go check out the folks over at Atlas this year. They've come out with a lot of new innovation technology for their shingles. It's going to set yourself apart from everybody else out there. And that is one of the keys to being a successful contractor, is being different. So we want to talk a little bit about being different today. And I have a pretty amazing guest today. I don't know if I've ever interviewed a guest like this. And so this gentleman is the founder of Job Tread. He's also a former commercial general contractor. He was named to Inc. Magazine's 30 under 30, World's Coolest Entrepreneur. I can't wait to talk about that. He was also named to impact 100 list best young entrepreneurs. He got those awards at the White House in the United Nations. It's pretty cool to talk to somebody that's actually been to the White House and earned a recognition for his entrepreneurial skill. That is awesome stuff. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Fortenberry, thank you. Appreciate you having me on.

Yeah, like I was, I was doing some research on you and I was like, man, how do you, how in the world do you get like, where does that. I didn't even know that list existed. But I think I like it better than any of the other lists that I've heard. You know, I hear like Inc. 500 and all these other things, but 30 world's coolest emphasis on coolest entrepreneurs. Where'd that all come from?

Yeah, so that one that the Inc. 30 under 30, that was Inc. Magazines, you know, I guess that was during my first software startup just somehow got found and you know, they reach out to you and ask you to apply and yeah, we ended up having to create like a whole video production thing for it and it was pretty neat. Pretty neat opportunity though to get that recognition. When I think I was like 29 or something when that happened.

That's pretty awesome. So kind of software wired. You have a CRM that is designed for residential remodelers. Is that the best way to describe it? Job tread?

Yeah, I mean it works really. Any construction based business, I mean if you're running construction jobs, you know, specifically, you know, jobs where you got to custom bid those jobs, you're building out a budget, you know, sending out proposals, you've got customers, homeowners, you know, who are going to, you know, approve those orders, make their selections, you're invoicing them, things like that. I mean really, any, any construction, you know, business is able to benefit from this.

So it's, it's an odd like transition and you, you earned that award with Org sync. So why don't you walk us through this transition from software to general contractor and back to software. What does that look like?

Sure. Yeah. So, so Orync was my first software company. I started it pretty much right out of school. I worked at an investment bank for, for even less than a year where you know, I went and ended up starting that software company. We, we sold software to colleges and universities, you know, as a way to help students to get involved and engaged. Long story short that we, we, we sold IT to over 650 universities in 13 countries. Had over 20 million users on our site when we end up getting acquired in 2015. And so it was after that it was a buddy of mine who was running the, you know, GC here in Dallas said hey man, can you come help me, you know, figure out how to scale this business? You know, they're basically just, you know, pen and paper, you know, they got just about 10 employees doing about 5 million revenue at that point. But, you know, I walked in day one, and I mean, it was just like total disarray, like chaos. Like, you know, just papers walking in the door, going into a folder, being put into this binder, you know, moved over to this, you know, area, you know, had a, you know, meetings where they were typing that stuff in, and then they copy it from one spreadsheet to another to another. And then someone, you know, types it into QuickBooks. Like, I mean, I just, like, you know, I think in one place I found, like, quadruple data entry. My mind almost exploded. I was just like, wow. Like, these are the most inefficient processes I've ever seen. And I'm, you know, I'm super, like, ocd, like, efficient. You know, got to streamline things, like, don't, you know, don't want to waste time on, you know, manual processes that can be automated and, you know, long. You know, basically, the guys are just like, well, can you help us, you know, figure out how to scale this thing? Like, you know, what do we need? I was like, well, you clearly need some software, you know. And so I went out and, I mean, I looked at everything under the sun, you know, from BuilderTrend, Coke, Instruct, Procore, Jobber. You know, we tried it all. And I made this big spreadsheet. And at the end of the day, though, like, I struggled to make a recommendation on which one, you know, they should implement and, you know, essentially just everything, you know, either, you know, it was super expensive, it was going to require a lot of customization, you know, or is, you know, in my opinion, you know, fairly antiquated. And it looked like, you know, it had been started 10, 15, 20 years ago. You know, it just wasn't up to speed with kind of modern technology. And, you know, I struggled to make a recommendation. They're like, well, you're a software guy. Can't you just build us something? I was like, well, I don't, you know, I don't want to create another one off, like, solution that you're going to have to maintain at some point. You know, I wasn't, you know, wanting to commit to, you know, basically being here forever with these guys. And, you know, they kept pushing me, though. And so, you know, finally I agreed. I said, you know, my conditions are that, you know, take over the company as CEO. I give you one year and everything. I builds my intellectual property. So, you know, if this has potential, you know, if we create something that, you know, has, you know, has an opportunity for me to build my next company out of. Then, you know, I had that had that option there and, you know, took over the company, built this. You know, basically we started with the estimating part, you know, worked all of our, you know, kind of making sure that our guys were building out budgets, you know, instead of just kind of salespeople making up numbers and, you know, sort of back of the envelope, you.

Know, guy would never do that, right?

Create a budget builder and we're going to come up with whatever our cost and then we're going to automatically calculate the price, you know, and like, you know, funny enough, like when it took a while for me to figure this out, but like, some of the guys were using margin to calculate their price, some of the guys were using markup, you know, so they didn't realize that a 30% markup wasn't going to get you a 30% profit margin. You know, we're trying to hit 30% profit on our jobs and so, you know, we're literally shooting ourselves right in the foot, right out of the gate, you know. And so, you know, started with the estimating, getting that all shored up. And then we moved into, you know, the production side of it, you know, the scheduling, you know, work orders, purchase orders, you know, tracking all of that, you know, the quality control with videos, photos, kind of organizing all that. And then ultimately we ended up with the accounting side of it with, you know, the AR, you know, generating invoices, pushing that into QuickBooks, and then the accounts payable side with the, you know, the vendor bills, the sub bills, paying all that out. So, you know, basically built job trade out of a needs basis. Grew up from 5 to 8 million in sales that year. And we increased our gross profit by 43%. Just wowing the system, you know, by getting our pricing shored up, you know, by tracking everything, doing the job costing. Like, they had no idea where they were making money and where they were losing money. And so they just kept making the same mistakes over and over and they had no idea about it. You know, and it's like, you know, if you focus on things and you start tracking, you know, your cost and your data and your profits, well then you can start course correcting and making changes. You know, a lot of times, like we're just using outdated, you know, pricing, you know, our material costs might have been outdated or, you know, we're sending the same subs back that we're just, you know, underperforming and we never tracked it, never knew it and we're, you know, it's just the same cycle and you know, it was literally just total crapshoot on how we were going to perform on any given job. You know, when I, when I walked in and you know, we had a well oiled machine at the end of that year and you know, pretty excited they, this, this last year they just grew. They hit over 16 million in sales. This year they're on track for 20 million. So.

Wow.

Yeah, been, been pretty awesome to see what they've been able to accomplish after that. But you know, that was, that was pretty much running that, running that company for a year was, was my deep dive into the construction space. You know, obviously had a lot of the software background, but you know, whether you're building a home or you're building some software, you know, I just, I love it, you know, constructing things and creating things and you know, so it's pretty exciting for us and you know, but that was in 2018, 2019, we formed job Tread. I recruited some of my developers from my last company where they came on and essentially rebuilt everything. I did set it up where we could, you know, actually sell it to, you know, many construction companies instead of, you know, my version was just for that one. And we built for a couple of years and 2021 we started selling it to the market. You know, I definitely underestimated how challenging it was going to be to start up a business in the middle of COVID and the pandemic and all that and you know, but finally when we could start going back out to the trade shows, you know, got to get out there, meet people face to face. I mean, started picking up some traction. I think at the end of 2021 we had about, you know, 200 customers using Jobtrad. Last year, 2022, we came almost to a thousand contractors. Now we're, we're sitting at about 1300 active customers on it. So it's, it's very quickly and exponentially growing on us. And you know, we just, we continually, you know, building out the product. We, you know, we view our customers as our partners and you know, that's, that's how we just keep evolving and keep improving it.

Wow, what a, what a story. Like, I sit here, I don't know if you know, my background or not. Contractor started back in the late 90s and it was the first thing I noticed. Like everything was Excel spreadsheets, hard folders, you move them along, like they just go through the thing and Everybody had, like, these file boxes they carried around with them whenever they were out in the field and what are we doing here? And, like, the only thing that was really available at that time was like, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Access. We ended up building a database off of that. It had a front end on it that you could actually do some stuff with. And I've always been wired that way because the more efficient you can be is the more effective you can be in the long run. And kind of took that thing along and ended up building a piece of software called Silver Lining that did pretty well as estimating tool that spit out your order and supply order and all of your estimating for your job. Made it really fast. Like, you do it in five minutes with all accessories and everything. And acculinx found out about that. They bought it from me. I became their director of sales for the first five years. And, yeah, it was really needed. I can remember talking to people like, all right, so we're gonna take all that stuff that's on your server there. I'm putting on the cloud. No dice, man. We're not doing any of that. So things have changed quite a bit since those days. Obviously, what was the biggest challenge like, as you step into that world with, you know, hard files, hard copies, and a really a commercial contracting situation? So you've got a lot of jobs going on at the same time. It's not like in a. In a single trade operation where while they may be all going on at the same time, it's like one trade. Bam, done. Bam done. Bam done. You've got this long time frame that things are being done. What were some of the hurdles for that aspect of tracking a job throughout this lifespan? Because, like, remodeling can take six months.

Yep.

Very different thing than doing a roof in a day or a fence in three days or something like that.

Yeah, for sure. No, and it, you know, that was one of the big challenges was the number of concurrent jobs that we could run at one time. You know, and when. When I. When I walked in, we're about 10, 15 jobs. Maybe, you know, one time, you know, year later, we're able to run, you know, 70 to 80, you know, concurrent jobs. You know, barely added any headcount or anything. But, you know, I think, you know, just having the, you know, where if, you know, if you got subs that are, you know, essentially having to be babysit and you got your, you know, your project managers having to, you know, go out on the side every single day, having to check in. Well, you know, that that's where their time now goes to. And now we're having to have even more, you know, kind of people out on the job site monitoring the progress every single day, you know, for. For us. And I actually even one day I went and I followed around some crews, like, I went to the job site, showed up at 8am I'm like, where is everyone? You know, and they show up, stroll up about 9:00am and, you know, I realized that all three of them had gone to Home Depot to purchase all the materials. And so I'm like, okay, you know, obviously we should have had the materials on site ready to go, you know, and that, you know, fine, we could get past that. But then, you know, about 11, you know, they realized that they needed to go get some more materials. And so instead of just one guy going, all three of them go back to Home Depot for another, you know, 45 minutes to an hour, come back to the job site. Well, now it's lunchtime. Let's take a break. You know, so then they go do that and then they come back in the afternoon. And, you know, and not kidding you, they had to go back to Home Depot again. And again, instead of sending one guy or calling the office or, hey, whatever, all three of them go back to Home Depot. And like, again, like, I'm just like, what in the world is going on? And that's when I realized, though, that, like, we. We had our. Everyone was kind of, you know, misaligned in how we were compensating. You know, we were basically selling a job at a fixed price. But then we were, you were paying our subs time and material, so they were incentivized to drag this job on. And, and, you know, why would they want to work harder? They, you know, let's go to Home Depot, sit in the ac, you know, take however long we need in the bathroom. And, you know, I don't know, maybe they're inventorying Home Depot. Like, I still don't understand how you spend that much time, but, like, they literally, like, we had a misalignment here. And so, you know, that that again, is now leading to more having to babysit, having to send people out to the job site. Are they there? Are they, you know, doing the amount of time and the work that needs to be done, you know, and then also, though, like, not having visuals. And so, like, when we basically ended up implementing where if they wanted to get paid for that day, they had to submit their photos, videos, show us exactly what you've completed like, do not step foot off this job site until I can see what you have done. You know, I don't care if you're done or not. I want to see what progress is made. And when we were able to start collecting that, you know, that data that allowed us, the project managers, to really not have to go out every single day to check on things, they could just basically look at the photos, watch the videos and. And understand how are we tracking. And that was going to help us better, you know, monitor the quality throughout the job. I mean, there was. There was this time where, you know, we basically had these massive barn doors that we had to take off this one building and put onto this other building. And then it was like a whole. You know, there are like five or six of these buildings. Well, the guys went out. They literally took the door off the wrong building and went and put it on this other building. Like, you know, and again, like, it's just total disarray. But, like, we could have prevented that if we had seen photos that, you know, when they got there, when, you know, as they're making progress.

Hey, wait a minute. That's the wrong building. Everybody.

Yeah, you know, we. We. This one guy, we were installing a bunch of fencing, and of course, the customer doesn't tell you until the very end. They're like, hey, that's great, but that's not what I paid you for. You did the fence on the west side. We needed the east side replaced. And this, you know, what do you do at that point? You know, like, we could have spotted that along the way if we were better at sharing. You know, hey, here's all the plans, the photos, you know, the subs always complain that I get to the job and then they don't know what to do. The estimator hadn't sent them all this. You know, the requirements. They don't have the plans. They don't. You know, they're so they're sitting there waiting on their phone. They're trying to get ahold of them. Like, you know, again, like, being able to have that collaborative environment to have the plans, to have the photos, to have the drawings, like, all ready for you, the scope of work, the specifications, like, it all needs to be teed up and ready for the guys when they get there, you know, and then again, just showing us where you're at throughout the day and at the end of the day, that lets us have that visual so that we can check in if we want to, you know, send some photos to the customer, get there you know, hey, like, is this looking right? Is this what you're expecting, like getting those kind of check ins and that, you know, the sign offs along the way was, was huge for us. And that's how, you know, we could then start kind of, you know, figuring out where do we need to spend our time? You know, if there are jobs that are on, on budget, they're on schedule, we're good. Like, you know, I trust those guys. They're good. You know, let's go focus on the, you know, the jobs where they're starting to go off the rails, you know, and that's where, you know, again, being able to monitor the budget and the job costs in real time let us know where to focus our efforts. And, you know, I think those are probably the, you know, some of the biggest challenges, but when you address those, it allowed us to really kind of hone in on where we needed to focus our time.

Yeah, that's, that's the beauty of a process. It's never perfect, right? There's no such thing as a perfect process. There's. Ideally it should go this way, but. But wherever those mistakes are made, if we can actually see them and have data back from them, we can make those adjustments and get closer to perfection if possible. The whole photographic and video documentation thing, man, there's a time I wish that would have been a thing that existed. I'll never forget a homeowner calling me and saying, hey, you guys are tearing my siding off. I went, okay, great. I assume we're supposed to be. And she goes, no, I'm not one of your customers. And like the house next door, right? And I've had a route. You're like, hey, guess what? You get some new siding. Hey, you get roof, and there's just money on fire is literally like setting it on fire and watching those guys go back and forth to Home Depot is. I would have an aneurysm as an owner. Just kill me. So there was something I noticed whenever the way I met you guys is I was at the painting contractors conference and somebody reached out to us, I think almost at the same time because we were going to the event. You guys saw we were going to the event and Taylor reached out, said, hey, Eric would like to do a podcast with you. And all that was kind of going on at the same time as I was actually meeting your people. I like, they were at the booth. I hadn't seen it before. Me being a CRM guy, I'm always like, hey, what's the newest, latest, greatest thing out there. And your people were amazing. They were really good. And not just like, hey, they're solid sales folks. They were just good people. And then as I look back into your history, one of the things that I believe Org Sync was known for was this place to work. Do you still see that? Is that still a big point of focus for you?

Oh, 100%. I mean, we, you know, our basically racked up a ton of best places to work awards. You know, at Org Sync, we actually just got number two, best place to work in Dallas this last year by the Dallas business Journal. You know, it's something that, what I've learned is like, the most important thing that you can do as a business owner and like, my chief role here, right, is to get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus sometimes, you know. You know, not every hire is going to be the, you know, the right fit and the perfect one. You know, you got to address it when there's an issue, but then you figure out how to drive the bus together. You make sure everybody's in the right seats, in the right roles. You know, you gotta, you gotta build the best team that you possibly can. And when you do that, when you get people who, you know, are just extremely motivated, you know, extremely intelligent, hardworking people, you get them all around the team. You know, that's, that's something that, you know, there's just like this energy, you know, when you build an awesome team together. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, I gotta say I'm most proud of is the team that we built here at Jobtread. You know, my last team was awesome. We had about 60 of us in Dallas and probably, I don't know, at this point, maybe a quarter or a third of the team. We've all worked together before. My entire leadership team, we all worked together. We ran that last company. You know, we've had a lot of people that have, you know, kind of come over and so it's, you know, it is very important that you get the right people on your team. And, you know, sky's the limit, man. When you can do that, it's. It's awesome. And I think almost all of our team too has, like, we sort of all randomly went off into construction after that first company, and then we've come back in here. I mean, like, like, I think my entire marketing team has, you know, either worked at, you know, construction companies or has had experience in it. The entire customer success team, you know, our Sales team has also come out of construction. So, you know, our team, you know, I mean, my dad, who's also our cfo, I mean, he was a home builder before this. Like, we literally, we've all had that construction experience. And so that's been tremendously helpful for us to understand, you know, the challenges and really get the problems so that we can build the best solutions possible. And, you know, I think you just, you know, you find those people who've got the right skill set, you know, whether it's, you know, customer success, sales, marketing, but then also, like, just innately understand the market and the industry and what we're trying to do. You know, I think it's. It's a great, you know, kind of success team there.

So there's a time gap there between org sync and job tread.

Yep.

Everybody went their own ways. Someone maybe stayed there. Someone went off and did their own thing. You went off and did your own thing, and then you. You kind of put out the call, right? Like, hey, I got this thing. Come on? Yep. Can you identify what it is about you that would make somebody go, yeah, I want to be on your team?

You know, people, probably the number one thing I hear is, you know, super passionate. You know, I wear my heart on my sleeve. You know, I, you know, I work really, really hard. And it's. It's, you know, I'll also tell you at the same time, like, I don't believe I've worked a day in my life. Like, when you genuinely love what you're doing, you know, you're excited every morning. Like, I'm so fired up every morning to get into the office. Like, we all come in, you know, and by the way, like, we don't do any remote work. Our entire team. So I think we've got, like, 21 or, you know, something people now. We are all in the same office in Dallas, Texas. Like, we were all together, but, you know, I think it's probably just that it's that passion, man. Like, you know, we're building something awesome. You know, we believe that we can create a new standard for construction. You know, we're. We're just very passionate about, you know, technology, about software, about construction. You know, all of our, you know, kind of just interests are very well aligned. And, you know, when you create an environment with, you know, a bunch of, you know, driven, motivated, you know, a, you know, type A people who just want to go and, you know, put up points on the board and, you know, we're in this to win. We're competitive. You know, we just really enjoy being on a team with others who are driven like that. And, you know, I think we just create an awesome culture with that. And, you know, I think one of the cool things too, like, I mean, like I said, my dad is the first person I hired at my last company, first person I hired here. Like, you know, having. Having the ability to work with him. You know, we do. We try to create that family, you know, culture, if you will, you know, where, you know, we work hard, but we play hard. You know, we do team lunches every Wednesday where, you know, the entire team comes together. You know, company, you know, kind of everyone gets to sort of pick what. What you want each week. But, you know, we come together.

We.

We've got a who's kicking ass box where anyone can, you know, put in anything for anyone in the team. You know, we read those out. You know, first person pulled gets, you know, gets. Gets a gift card. But, you know, it's just, you know, bringing. Bringing the team together, you know, and. And just celebrating your rewards along the way. Like, you're going to spend more time with. With. With your teammates, you know, than. Than you're going to spend in your own, you know, family at home at night, you know, and on the weekends. Like, I mean, you got to make sure that you've got the right people, you know, together and then just enjoy the journey. And, you know, I think we all just see this as a great opportunity. We're all very appreciative of the opportunity to be able to work with so many contractors and builders, you know, to have that, you know, those people to help us, you know, create this together. You know, it's. This is a collaborative effort. It's not, you know, we don't have to know all the answers to everything. We can. We can tap into all these, you know, awesome customers who we're working with who can help us come up with the best solutions. And, you know, we study everything that's out there and they, you know, people, you know, a lot of times bring the things they know that they love and the things that they hate. Say, hey, well, let's talk about it. Like, let's figure out how can we make the best possible solution, you know, given your experiences and, you know, just kind of looking at those things and it's just a cool time, man. Like, you're, you know, we're getting to create a solution that is very much needed in the construction industry. I mean, it's. I was very shocked when I originally looked in and, like, you know, I mean, construction is lagging in technology compared to a lot of other industries. And I mean, I wouldn't have thought that, but, you know, there's a huge opportunity here, and it's just fun, you know, exciting times, you know, I think. I think with COVID and the whole, you know, that. That whole, you know, situation, like, it. It brought about, you know, the need for software. And I mean, like, Zoom, now everybody knows what Zoom is. Like, you know, my first company, we might have to spend the first, you know, 15 or 20 minutes of our meeting helping them get on to GoToMeeting or WebEx or whatever it was. Like, now everybody knows about Zoom. They understand it. Like, now people are starting to really realize that, like, you gotta have software, you gotta have processes and technology in place to be more efficient that allows you, you know, to. To. To oversee and manage jobs regardless where you're at, you know, and so I think it's, you know, it's just kind of the right time, the right place, you know, the right people, you know, it's. Yeah. Good time.

I can. I can tell what it is. You are. You. You nailed it with literally the first word out of your mouth. You're passionate.

You.

You're you. Ebb. Energy and. Energy and passion are contagious. People are starved for it. I think most of the places that people work is like, hey, show up at 8, do my job, leave at 5, go do my thing. And just the next day I do the same thing where it doesn't feel like that. When you're around an energetic, passionate, charismatic person that's really got something thereafter, you're like, man, he's so excited. I want to be excited about this too. And it sounds like you have some other people on your team that probably have some of that about them as well. What's it like working with your dad?

You know, I. It's funny. I get asked that question a lot. And, you know, I'd say in the beginning, it was kind of like the 80. 20 rule. 80% of the time, we're loving each other. 20% of the time, we're like, you know, at each other's jugulars. And, you know, I remember he, like, cut me off and took away my credit card in the first company. And, like, we had all sorts of, you know, just challenges. Right. You know, sometimes. But, you know, we've. It's been great, man. Like, you know, my dad's always been my mentor. You know, we've. We've learned to, you know, Work really well together. You know, I'd say we're kind of like at the 95. 5 or, you know, maybe even better than that. You know, just, you know, we're, you know, I'm definitely the one that's kind of, you know, the visionary, you know, kind of high in the sky, sort of chasing dreams. He's the one that's, you know, very conservative, you know, keep keeping one foot on the ground, making sure that, you know, the lights, you know, are staying on and we're not blowing through all of our money and things like that, you know, so it's, we've got a really good balance where, you know, I, I can, I can go and really kind of focus on the product and the vision and driving the company forward and recruiting and building the people. You know, he, he's, he's literally our one man. Accounting, finance, you know, payroll taxes, like he just one man army, you know, and it's, it's honestly just crazy that he was that for my last company too. But he's, he's awesome. You know, everyone really enjoys, you know, getting to work with him too. Just, I mean, he's serial entrepreneur, you know, he's, you know, built and sold numerous companies. So he's kind of like the, the gray hair in the boardroom, if you will. Even though I'm starting to now get, get gray hair about.

Make sure he sees this whenever we get up. Make sure he hears that one. That's, that's pretty awesome. I don't, I don't think that's really possible for a lot of people. There's so much, you know, once, once the son gets old enough, he's like, hey, I'm going to do things my way. And the fact that you can work together I think is pretty amazing.

He's always, he's always been the, in the, in the CFO role, you know, so he's sort of been used to, you know, kind of letting somebody else sort of go be the CEO and run, you know, the company and the vision and yada, yada. So like, you know, I mean, it was, you know, obviously when I, you know, hired him my first time, and now this time, I mean, he, you know, him and I both have a very kind of, you know, there's that mutual respect for each other, you know, where, where, where we know our strengths. You know, we very often we play good cop, bad cop in whatever scenario we need. Like, I'm like, dad, I need you to come in and, you know, hold the line here, you know, Whatever it may be. But it, you know, it is very, very rewarding to be able to work with my dad. I mean, he's, you know, like I said, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur because my parents are entrepreneurs. You know, I grew up in that environment, and so, you know, I give him a lot of credit for that. And, you know, at the end of the day, he. He's an awesome, awesome resource to have on our team. And, you know, a lot of the people call him Uncle Don. You know, that's. That's kind of how, you know, again, family oriented we are.

So that's pretty cool. It sounds like a place I'd be pretty cool at working with. If you were to put yourself in your customer's shoes, what would you say they believe is the biggest problem you solve for them?

I mean, helping them get organized, you know, is probably one of the things that, I mean, immediately comes to mind. You know, again, a lot, A lot of times, you know, companies don't know their numbers. They. They don't know their costs. They're. They're kind of, again, just living paycheck to paycheck, invoice to invoice, you know, just trying to sell at whatever, you know, thing that they can, you know, and I think helping them with a tool to organize that, whether it's, you know, organizing their catalog and all the, you know, all of the materials and all of the services and the labor and everything, like having that in one place, you know, having all of their, you know, their customers and the CRM and their leads and, you know, all their jobs and like, keeping track of everything and just having that system to organize their business is huge, you know, and I think that's, you know, kind of, if I had to, If I had to guess the number, one thing that they would say is just helping them get organized. And then, you know, but also it's helping them become, you know, a better contractor. It's helping them, you know, step. Step it up a notch and become more professional. You know, having those, those proposals and being able to collect the E signatures and collecting online payments. Like, you know, having that digital, you know, that. That customer portal where the customer can be engaged. Like, you know, some of those things that, you know, you know, if a homeowner is looking at two different contractors, you know, one of them gives them a written estimate, you know, a piece of paper. The other one gives them, you know, a digital estimate where they can, you know, come in there, you know, it's interactive. They can make their selections and I want to add this, I want to do that and then they can sign it. You know, it's a whole nother level of professional.

I mean, as it really is, the expectation of the consumer out there right now is that they don't want to have paper. I know, I'm one of those guys. Like I, my printer hasn't worked in three years. Like, I just don't even use like whatever. It just sits over there now holding down a spot on my, on my desk. I want to be able to go on. Like today I went on and I had to sign a release for my prescription stuff and it was like, boom, boom, done. See you later. There was no like, hey, I got to pull up a PDF and fill it out, save it. Like that would be high tech for some of these contractors. There was no, like, I have to go into an office somewhere or I have to meet somebody or there's a fax machine or any of that kind of stuff. I haven't seen a fax machine in like 15 years. Yeah, it's crazy to me that the industry hasn't gotten to that point fully yet. It was just so far behind. And it was really and truly, it's a big reason why we exist. We help them from the strategic part. Like, okay, strategically, what does our process look like? Like, get that nailed down first. Okay, so this is our process. Now how do we put that into a CRM? Because CRMs are fantastic. They do get you organized, they do make you more profitable, they do make you more efficient, effective. But they don't cover everything. They don't cover like, hey, this is the proper way to set up your ladder. This is how you should approach the door. These are the things you should say. And we need to have it that detailed because that's how it becomes the well oiled machine. Because you eliminate 80% of the questions that you would normally get asked. How do I do this, how do I do that, how do I do this? And so do you, do you do that inside of your own company as well? The stuff beyond just the, the work part of it, like the how to part of it. Do you do any of that?

Yeah, I mean it's, it's it's all about, you know, again, you got to, you got to set up processes, you got to train your people. You know, it's, it's same deal, you know, it's.

Yeah, yeah, that's, it's pretty awesome to see people doing. We work with a lot of CRM companies because what happens is we go through, we get it all down and we say, okay, here's all the spots in my process where I would like a CRM to be involved, to handle this thing or to automate that thing.

Yeah.

Then based on that, we can take that criteria to the various CRMs out there and go, which one fits? Which one actually fits? This thing? Which. Walking into it that way, you are in much better position to choose the right software for what you do. Because I see that a lot. The mistake of choosing the wrong thing and then going, all right, I've been using this wrong thing for me for the last two years. I haven't used it very effectively or efficiently. Now I got to get out of it. You see any of that, like, somebody having to move from one to you and, and do you help facilitate that?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and when I tell people, like, you know, I think the number one thing you can do is, like, you know, before you go out shopping, like, you need to know what you're looking for. Like, what, what challenges are you having? You know, when I, When I. When I took over that construction company, the first thing I did was I sat down with each person and I just spent, you know, half a day or maybe a little long with them and said, hey, I just want to shadow you. Like, show me what you're doing every day. Show me your processes. Like, where are your bottlenecks? Like, where do you feel like you are spending the most time, that you're just, like, frustrated, that, like, you feel like it's a waste of time, you're having to do something manual? Like, you know, just, if I could take away anything that you don't, you know, think is a good use of your time, what would that be like? Understanding where those challenges are for your people will help sort of, you kind of map out those problems, processes and find those bottlenecks where you can come in and improve them. You know, and it is. It can be hard, though, you know, when people don't, you know, know what their options are. They don't. They don't always. You know, it's hard to know what you're looking for if you don't understand your problems, but you also don't know what potential solutions may be out there. You know, you got it. You got to type something into Google and know what to, what, what to, you know. Yeah.

What are they searching for? Exactly. So we actually experienced that a lot where a contractor kind of lives with blinders on, like, how they do things, and they don't really have a Whole lot of interaction with anybody else out there, even going to a conference and stuff. While you might see the things you don't know, how they relate to you, and then they make the mistake of getting the wrong thing because somebody was a good sales guy, then they didn't go in with the right requirements for whatever it was that they were looking for. That's a big part of what we help with, is like trying to get that kind of stuff put together.

Yeah, absolutely.

So if somebody wanted to get a hold of you guys at Job tread, do you, do you do demos? What do you do to let people know about how you do it and so they can kind of see it and make sure that it's the right fit for them?

Yeah, absolutely. So you just, you go to our website, www.jobtread.com. you know, there's, there's tons of content on there. You know, all. A lot of the features have, you know, kind of photos, videos, you know, screenshots, things like that. You know, there's a, there's a schedule, a demo button right there on the website, though, you can schedule a demo. It'll show you all of our, you know, available times and days and times there. So, you know, you can, you can directly schedule right through there. You know, you'll, you'll essentially get a live, you know, person on the phone. You know, we'll, we'll do it via Zoom, you know, where we can share our screen, walk you through it. You can ask any questions, you know, so, so that's a great way. You know, again, we want to invest the time up front to make sure that this is going to be a good fit for you. Because the last thing we want to do is have people come on who, you know, just don't understand what, what it is or like, you know, because that, because that's going to take up our resources on the customer success side, you know, so, so we want to spend the time to help you learn and understand job tread, how it'll work for you, how it can address, you know, your current, you know, challenges and pain points there. Our YouTube channel is also a great place. I mean, there's tons of content. You know, we basically publish, you know, everything I do, you know, usually monthly or quarterly, you know, customer town halls where, you know, all of our development updates, the things that, you know, that we just released or working on or, you know, coming up, you know, we publish everything on our, on our YouTube channel. So highly recommend that as well. That's a great way where you can you know, some of the content may be older, right. Like it might be outdated or you know, a little bit old. You know, it's hard to kind of.

It's a fun thing with YouTube, right?

Yeah. With, you know, I mean, and with software. Right. You know, things are constantly, you know, you're, you're adding, you're changing, you know, so, so you know, obviously kind of take the date into account there. But you know, there's, there's a lot of content out there as well to learn more. But yeah, pretty easy to get a hold of us just, just through the website, you know, schedule a demo. You know, there's, you know, all of our contact information's on there as well.

So I got one last question for you. So this is one of the hurdles that we had, especially with me being sales director out there. I would show people accuracy and they would get the concept right. Like concept cool. I like that. I'm talking to the owner, right. And sometimes small companies, sometimes bigger company, I'm talking to the owner. Owner's like, yes, I want it. Sign me up.

Yep.

And get them signed up. And it would fall flat on its face because that owner wasn't as engaged with it as he needed to be likely. And so do you guys run into any of that and what do. I heard you say you have customer success people, but how do you avoid it on the upfront? What do you set any expectations along those lines?

Yep. So. So I think one of the coolest things I've seen our, you know, see our team do. So my. She's actually a former customer, a three time customer in my first company went, got a degree. She actually has a PhD so she's doctorate in organizational change. Management ended up getting her to come over. She first started off as our in marketing, kind of director of marketing. But end of last year she's like, look Eric, I'm really passionate about helping people with learning and development. And she's like, I want to move over to the customer success team and I want to create training curriculum, a whole training program to help these contractors when they came on, you know, to learn, you know, start off at the basics and work their way through. So we now have this like full blown like every single day you can, there's like two to three live trainings every day that new customers or existing customers they can just easily sign up for, they can sit in on, you know, go through this live training program. You know, all that's also recorded and available to you as well. There's a whole Getting started program that we've built out directly in our application. So there's this help desk. It's got, you know, kind of, it walks you through all of the getting started stuff, you know, where you can kind of check it off as you're completing it. You know, they've got a whole video library. Help desk is all that. But every single customer gets assigned their own, like, dedicated customer success manager. And so directly in the app, you can see their cell phone, their email. You can like schedule a time if you want to have a one on one meeting. You know, you can schedule that time right through the app, you know, puts it on both your calendars, you do a zoom meeting. And then we also have, you know, what we call, like, you know, open office hours. And so, you know, every single day, each customer success manager has, you know, a dedicated, you know, hour, you know, and they usually do like Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning and Tuesday, Thursday afternoon, or vice versa. But every day, you know, anyone can drop into those office hours and so they're able to just like immediately get help, you know, right there. And like, you know, you might have other people in there too. And. And it's so cool though to see like the collaboration where other customers are like chiming in and being like, oh, well, here's how I do that. Or, you know, have you tried this? And like, you know, it's just this really neat environment. But like, our goal is essentially to also build this community around Job Tread. You know, we have a super active. We actually just like right before this call, we hit our 1,000th, you know, job Tread Pro is what we call the Facebook group. So we got, you know, all of our customers who, you know, who are on Facebook and want to engage in that way are in our, in our, in our Facebook group. And it's just super active. And like, you know, our goal is to create that community so that, you know, you're not having to like, you know, basically go at it alone. Like, we want to help you get set up, we want to help you succeed. And you know, a lot of times it is contractors who maybe, you know, we're on the tools, you know, say, hey, I need some software. But they don't have a lot of experience. They might not, you know, be as organized. They may not have, you know, templates set up and they might not know their numbers. And that's where, you know, you can tap into our team who we've done this now, you know, over a thousand times with contractors, you know, where we can Leverage our experience as well as just tapping into that community of others. Like, it's. It's so awesome to see people who, you know, may have a similar business but are all the way across the country, but they're all down to help each other, you know, And I think that's, like, the really neat thing about this construction industry is that, like, everyone's like, really, really open, you know. Now they may not be if, like, you're my competitor right next door, you, you know, but, like, that's the cool thing about being able to bring all these people, you know, from across the country and really across the world together is that we can, you know, do this together as a group and help each other out. And, you know, I think just making sure, though, that, you know, we're. We're always there as a resource and we've. We've got these training programs. You know, it's something that, you know, really nobody has to, like, feel like they've been sold some software and then given a pat on the back and said, good luck. You know, we want to be here to help you to make sure that you get it set up the right way.

That's super cool. Yeah, I like the idea of the pro. Like, I think that's important. We. We would call it a champion. We have multiple different softwares we use here in our coaching stuff because we're running meetings and we're doing marketing and we got all these different things. We have our own CRM that we use. And I learned this while I was in the software world is I had to find somebody to be the champion of that thing. Like, they own it. Like, you're going to make sure that everybody else uses it. You're the one behind this. Because I couldn't do all of it. I also knew that wasn't one of my strengths. That's not. That's. I'm not good at that. And that's a hard thing to say about yourself, right? Like, okay, that's not my strength. I got to get somebody that. That's strong for. Do you see a lot of your companies doing that? Like, okay, owner says yes, but so. And so, please, you're in charge of this.

Kind of like the, you know, the train, the trainer, if you will, you know, or, you know, whoever's going to be the owner of it within the company. You definitely need a champion, Somebody who is going to be that person who's going to get it all set up, going to be that. That point person. You know, the neat thing, though, is as we've seen this grow too, like, you know, we now have, you know, what we call kind of like implementation partners who, you know, if you do want to, you know, hire someone or they'll come out, you know, come out on site or maybe, you know, we got, you know, a couple people who have a lot of experience, you know, with one particular product or another. And so they now have set up programs where they're basically, they'll help you migrate, you know, and get all of your processes, get all of your team, get everything set up. You know, there, there are, you know, now kind of this like, ecosystem being built around it. You know, same thing with like your bookkeepers, you know, with coaches. Like, you know, it's, it's, it is a great opportunity. Like, if you ever do need to tap into and get more, you know, resources and help, you know, that's, you know, that that's always an option.

Awesome. Eric, great interview, man. We found out a lot about Job Tread. We found out a lot about you. Congratulations on 30 under 30. I think that's something you should be proud of. I hope there's like a big plaque or a trophy or something on the wall somewhere. That's, that's pretty cool. You guys listening? Watching. Wherever you may be getting this on our podcast or our YouTube channel, jobtread.com click the demo button and get scheduled for a demo. Check it out. Sounds like they are passionate about helping you get better at what you do and do it more efficiently and effectively. Eric, thanks for being on the show, man.

I appreciate you having me.

Awesome. So, guys, that was Eric Fortenberry from Job Tread. What a great story. Just this, it kind of went from software to contracting, back to software because of contracting and seeing a need out there. And really that thing of the remodeling thing is a challenge. It's a bigger thing than just kind of the one off type of situation. Although their software does all that too. But the thing I saw about it that I really liked about is it kind of brought a bunch of things all together in one place. Your normal standard CRM stuff. But the photo documentation was in there, video documentation, the customer portal, invoicing, signing contracts, like all in one place instead of having a bunch of different pieces of software to do that. Which is why I wanted to have them on here and talk a little bit about Job Tread. I hope you guys enjoyed today's show. Again, if you're looking for some help in getting organized in this way and being prepared to install CRMs to put great processes into place to ramp up your sales or increase your marketing. You want to get control of that business so it can grow and scale. And to help you get to those dreams that you had whenever you started your business, check us out@contractorcoachpro.com scroll down a little bit, click the Take assessment button and fill out the assessment. It's going to take you a minute. It's going to be 15, 20 minutes. It's not a joke. It's a real assessment. And from that assessment, we'll do a free coaching call with you. Not a sales pitch, but an actual coaching call, because we're going to know a lot about you. After that assessment, we're going to do that call and we're going to give you two or three things that we've identified that would help you level up in your business. And that's free. It doesn't cost anything. If you like coaching, you want to work with us, great. That would be wonderful. If not, we hope we've served you well and that you can take that next step in your business, because that's what we're here to do, is help contractors succeed. Thank you for hanging out with us on another episode of Contractor Radio. Looking forward to seeing you again next week with another amazing guest. That's it for today. We're out on Contractor Radio. Sam.