Ever wondered how to take your building business from amateur to a profitable enterprise?

Look no further – Eric Fortenberry and his revolutionary software, JobTread, an innovative and refreshing way of organizing, managing, and growing your construction business.

This software is making waves with builders as an indispensable new tool to keep your jobs and business on track and on budget. If you’ve been considering an estimating and project management software, or, are looking for an alternative to BuilderTrend/Co-Construct- you’ll want to check out this interview.

Watch/Listen/Read on to discover how Job Thread can help revolutionize your home building and remodeling business!

To learn more about Job Tread visit https://www.jobtread.com/ and schedule a demo.

Builder Lead Converter ATTRACTS, CAPTURES & CONVERTS high-quality leads for builders so they can pick & choose their clients & jobs. Find out how at https://www.builderleadconverter.com.

 

Transcript:

  Rick: Today in our conversations, with Zach Convert, we’re meeting and interviewing Eric Fortenberry from Job Tread, and he’s gonna talk to us about a new way for builders to organize, manage, and grow their business. Let’s get started.

Welcome to Conversations That Convert. Every week we’ll spend about 10 to 15 minutes tackling relevant lead generation marketing and sales topics for remodelers, home improvement companies, and home builders. Conversations That Convert is brought to you by the Builder Lead Converter, your perfect sales assistant, and now here’s Rick and Daiana. 

Rick: Hey everyone. Welcome to Conversations That Convert. Diana is off today, but we do have a very special guest. His name is Eric Fortenberry and he has designed a new software project management program for builders. We’re gonna learn all about it here today. I wanna go ahead and introduce Eric, so we’ll bring him in. Eric, welcome to Conversations That Convert. 

Eric: Thanks. Appreciate you having me on, Rick. 

Rick: Absolutely. We’re very excited. I just found out about your company here last week and learning more about it and as, as I did last week, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about you here today as we interview you and discover your journey on starting this company and getting it to where it is today. But before we jump into that, tell me a little bit more about, you know, your background on yourself. Who are you? Where have you been and how did you get to be talking to me here today on Conversations That Convert? 

Eric: Sure. Yeah. I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. I did my undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, hook ’em horns. After that went into investment banking. Did a pretty short stint there all of nine months where I helped to basically sell this one software as a service company. I got, you know, really into the kind of, into the software space and the revenue model at that point. Ended up starting my first software company.

I was 23 years old. We sold software to colleges and universities. You know, sold it to about 650 universities in 13 countries. Had over 20 million users when we got acquired in 2015. And it was after that, that a buddy of mine was running a commercial general contracting firm here in Dallas, and asked me to come over and help ’em figure out how to scale the business.

And so I, you know, went in there and you know, essentially, Looked at how they were running the business. I mean, it was, it was pretty obvious. They needed some systems and processes in place. And ended up you know, took over that business. We built out the first version of Job Tread. And from that, you know, basically just running that business for one year, I grew ’em from five to 8 million in sales.

We increased their gross profit by 43%. And that was in 2018. 2019, I started up Job Tread, recruited some of my developers from my last company, and we you know, basically just started building and, they recreated everything I did, but did a much better job setting it up so that we could actually you know, sell it to multiple companies and, you know, scale it.

And you know, we started selling it in 2021, and got to about 200 active customers. Last year we got to about a thousand. You know, this year we’re sitting right at 1600. Right now, our goals, you know, 2000 for the year. So we’ve pretty quickly, you know, been able to capture market share and you know, just really fortunate for the opportunity to work with so many different builders, remodelers you know, specialty builders across the country that, you know, it’s been been a really exciting opportunity. 

Rick: Well and that’s really cool and I wanna get into a little bit more on the void, if you will, you saw in the marketplace. But you know, that’s really our, our next question is why did you start it? So you went to work with this commercial contractor, and I think the way you were explaining to me is they said, Hey, find us the best project management software out there and tell us the story from there. 

Eric: Yeah, so, you know, when I first walked in, I mean, it was just, again, it was apparent the chaos that was going on that I know a lot of construction owners are very familiar with, you know, I saw papers, you know, walking in the door, everyone’s time sheets going into these folders.

You know, we had expenses and receipts and you know, things flying around, you know, putting ’em into folders and binders and, you know, passing ’em from one person to, to the next, you know, and then they had a bunch of like Google sheets where, you know, someone would type it in in one sheet and then it would get copied over to this other sheet and then over to another place.

And then someone would, you know, type it into QuickBooks. Like, I think I found one place where it was like quadruple data entry. My mind almost exploded. So I was like, look, guys, like, you know, we definitely need to find some software for the business. And, you know, originally that was kind of my thought is I was just gonna come in here.

You know, help a friend out, you know, go find them some construction management software. You know, I looked at everything from, you know, Buildertrend co-construct, Procore, you know, the list goes on and on, right? Like, I created a massive spreadsheet. I tried ’em all kind of came up with my pros and cons, and looked at the cost.

And, you know, at the end of the day, they’re like I really, I struggled to make a recommendation form just because, you know, I, and, and you know, in my opinion, I thought it was, you know, either. Pretty antiquated software. You know, again, I came from a software background. You know, just thought that it looked like it might take a lot more effort to, you know, really customize it to meet our needs at our company, you know, or a super expensive, you know, and so, you know, I just, I struggled to make a recommendation on which one we should move forward with.

And, you know, they were like, well, you’re a software guy. Why don’t you just build us something like, well, you know, I don’t wanna create another one-off that, you know, we’re gonna have to maintain? And I, you know, I sort of pushed back for a while. But they kept pushing me on it. And so, you know, ultimately, I basically said, look, you know, I’m willing to do this, but you know, my conditions are I take over a CEO, you know, I give you one year and everything I build is my intellectual property.

So, you know, don’t be surprised if, you know, if this thing, you know, takes off and I, you know, I think Scott’s some legs and I may want to go and do that. And so, you know, I basically had the opportunity to take over the business and, you know, worked hand in hand with everyone on the team and got to, you know, that was really kind of my deep dive into, you know, construction and being able to manage that you know, kind of everything there.

And, you know, I basically just kind of started at the beginning and said, okay, well, you know, let’s get organized on the sales and estimating side and, you know, sat down. I shadowed the guys, tried to really understand what it was like as you know, a day in the life of an estimator and. You know, lo and behold, I find that you know, some of the guys are using, you know, margin to calculate the sales price.

And some of ’em were using markup. You know, we were targeting a 30% profit margin on every job, you know, and then I was trying to figure out, well, why are some guys always way under? Well, it turns out they’re doing a 30% markup, which is only gonna get you a 23% profit margin. You know? And so it was just kind of uncovering things like that, that helped me to create sort of this first version of job tread.

You know, where the guys could, you know, basically just figure out your cost and, you know, the budget will automatically calculate the price, you know, and so going through that exercise and working hand in hand with, you know, all the different people from the estimators to the project managers to, you know, the office people, you know, dealing with all the bookkeeping, you know, that helped us kind of learn and build out the first version of what is now Job Tread.

Rick: Okay. And tell us a little bit more about you know, maybe some of the main things. So you, they said, okay, go find us some software. Then you said, ah, it’s not really any good. What were some of the main things you saw were missing from what was available in the marketplace?

Eric: You know, it wasn’t necessarily that it was like missing. It was just like, it felt that it was gonna be more of a challenge to try to work within an existing software framework, you know, to customize it and to make it work the way that we want it to work and to organize it. You know, a lot of times what you find with software is that it’s, you know, it’s you’re kind of shoehorned into using, you know, the software the way that you know that they want you to.

And so when you have processes, it can be challenging to kind of map those processes to the software. And so that was kind of a lot of my concern was, you know, that wasn’t exactly how we were gonna do it. You know, some of the systems out there were set up for, you know, just for home builders or, you know, just for, you know, specialty trades or subcontractors.

And, you know, as a general contractor, you know, we often had different, you know, types of jobs and types of scenarios that we needed to be able to, you know, manage in the system. And so, you know, I just, again, a lot of it came down to it. It didn’t feel, you know, as flexible as we would’ve liked as customizable.

And again, like just the user interface, you know, I mean, you know, I’m sure everyone’s kind of looked at some pretty antiquated software, you know, looks like it was like, you know, back from, you know, the 1980s or 1990s, you know, very dos, you know, feeling, you know, compared to the things that we’re just used to every day.

You know, I mean, even things like Facebook and, you know, kind of having feeds and scrolling and, you know, just how things are a lot easier, you know, on the eyes than some of those, you know, older, older systems. And so I just kind of felt like there was an opportunity to, you know, have a more modern you know, piece of software created.

Rick: And let’s talk, You mentioned a little bit, but who do you serve? What types of businesses? 

Eric: Yeah, so we specifically designed job tread to be able to work for any, you know, construction, jobs-based business. So whether you’re a home builder or a remodeler, you know, a pool builder, a deck builder, you know, doing running plumbing jobs or electrical jobs or, you know, we specifically wanted to design job tread so that it would work for any size company, any size job, you know, whether you got one line item in your budget or you got a thousand line items in your budget.

You know, we felt that it was a, you know, kind of a unique opportunity to try to, you know, build something that was flexible enough to meet the needs of various types of companies. But the common theme here is that they’re all running construction jobs. You know, they, the need to be able to custom bid a job, you know, you know, whether you start from a template or not, you know, being able to get in there and really kind of customize each job, make changes, things like that.

It’s not your typical, you know, I’m gonna mow, you know, lawns and it’s, you know, either. You know, $40 or $50, and it’s the same thing over and over. You know, with construction, you know, it’s typically a very, you know, custom bid job. And that’s where you really need to have a solid tool to help you build out your budget and know what the job is gonna cost you in order to accurately price it. Yeah. And so that’s really where our, where our focus came from. 

Rick: Well, let’s move on a little bit. You know, you’ve obviously got, you started 2019, I think you said that was sort of where you put your dipped your toe in the water. No. You probably jumped into the water, right? And said, okay, let’s do this. That was four years ago. Approximately. Tell us about that, that journey, you know, what were some of the obstacles or setbacks you faced? What are some of the best decisions that you made, you know, to get the platform to where it is today? 

Eric: I. Yeah. You know, I’d say I definitely underestimated how difficult it would be to start up a business in the middle of the, the, the covid pandemic there. You know, and really like, at the beginning, just being able to, you know, get out there face to face, you know, is so powerful. And so, you know, early on, you know, obviously, we had to resort to, you know, calling and reaching out to people. But as, as soon as, you know, kind of the, all the lockdowns started to let up and we’re able to get back out there at the conferences and trade shows, you know, that that was, that was a huge relief. 

You know, it allows us to, to, you know, to kind of start creating that presence in the market. You know, talk to people, collect their feedback. You know, I’m a big believer in, you know, you always gotta have a good. You know, relationship with your customers and you know, in this case, when we didn’t have any customers, we had to, you know, meet people and try to understand what their needs were. And so, you know, it certainly was hard at the beginning not being able to travel around and do all the conferencing.

But, you know, at the same time, you know, I’d say probably one of the best things that came out of COVID was everyone learned how to use Zoom. And, it enabled us to then start kind of, you know, being able to quickly share our screen with people. You know, I could call someone in Florida and then someone in California.

You know, and so there are a lot of, you know, I think benefits that did come out of that. You know, obviously, just, you know, having to start from scratch, you know, you gotta spend, you know, several years kind of building and working your way towards you know, creating an application that is ready to be sold.

You know, we you know, self-funded the company, you know, didn’t take, you know, a bunch of, you know, VC or private equity money, you know, we don’t have any institutional capital here. You know, so, you know, it was something that, you know, basically, I mean, I, you know, I, in the very beginning, I started working at my, my co-founder’s you know, kitchen table, I’d, you know, drive up there every day.

And, you know, we just, we just worked from his house and eventually we, we, we could afford and we got a small little office. We, signed the lease on that office two weeks before the shutdown. But we continued to go there every single day. You know, and you know, I think it just kind of takes time to grow and be able to afford, you know, to build out a team around you.

So, you know, in the beginning, I mean, I was, I was basically doing everything other than writing the code. My co-founder was doing that. But, you know, I’m sitting there, you know, smiling and dialing, doing sales demos, you know, when we signed people up, now I’m helping implement them, support them, you know, coming up with the marketing content.

So, you know, I’m sure as most entrepreneurs are very familiar, you’re wearing a lot of hats, right? You know, but. I think at the end of the day, you know, we just, just, you know, kept at it very, very persistent. I was fortunate to be able to kind of recruit from, you know, my previous team.

So, you know, a lot of us here at Job Tread, we’ve all worked together. We were part of that first company, and so we’re a fairly you know, well-oiled machine and you know, just kind of slowly built the team up and, you know, as we’re able to start making a little bit of money and. You know, I mean, we raised some money from, again, friends and family and, you know, just kind of internally just to be able to afford our employees early on.

But, you know, we’ve grown now we’ve moved into a much, much bigger office in Central Dallas, Texas. We’ve got about 21 employees and, you know, 1600 customers, and yeah. So, it’s definitely taken off. And, you know, I think at the end of the day though, it’s certainly was a little bit of a rocky start with Covid, but, you know, I think there’s something to be said about, you know, kind of starting a company in those kinds of environments because it forces you to, you know, really think very hard about every single penny, you know, every single dollar that you’re gonna spend.

You gotta make sure it’s the right investment and, you know, I started my last company you know, 2007, 2008 timeframe. Same deal. You know, it was kind of a tough time in the economy. But you know, it helped us fight even harder and you know, just really appreciated everything that, you know, we’re able to get traction wise and, and customer wise and you just keep growing and going, and here we are. 

Rick: Alright. Yeah, that’s very true about Zoom as well. I remember going through that where I was working with custom builders and you know, if you would’ve asked me, would you be able to sell a completely custom home on Zoom where you never meet the customer face-to-face, the answer would’ve been not a chance. Right? 

And I remember, I think it was like, in May of 2020, 1 of my clients said, we just sold a million-dollar custom home. We did the entire thing on Zoom. And that’s, this blows your mind how quickly people adapt to that. So yeah, you gotta find the silver lining there. But so let’s talk about the big names in the industry. Buildertrend co-construct. We see those names all over. They seem to dominate the industry. Obviously, Buildertrend purchases, and co-constructs they’re continuing to acquire companies. But if a Buildertrend client asked you, Hey, Eric, how are you different now? How would you answer that question? 

Eric: Yeah, and it’s it’s a very common question we get. You know, I think at the end of the day, you know, it, it does come back to what I already said. I mean, you know, we essentially are, you know, entirely self-funded. You know, we have no institutional capital. I mean, you know, Bain Capital is you know, heavily running you know, the ship over there at Buildertrend and co-construct and you know, it’s a. I speak from my own experience having been bought once before by a private equity firm it becomes all about the numbers. It’s all about the profit. 

How do you maximize, you know, every single penny out of every customer? And I, I just you know, it’s very unfortunate when you watch your company get you know, get purchased and then, you know, they immediately came in and bought kind of our biggest competitor. And we were just one of, you know, competing with one of five of their products. And so, I’ve lived through this. I’ve, you know, they came in, they fired me one year, and one day on the day fired my CFO as well. So, you know, they came in, cut the head off the snake, you know, six months later they got the sales team.

Six months later after that, you know, marketing’s gone, customer service. So like, I think one of the biggest things is just like, you know, our company here is, you know, entirely, you know, self-run, self-managed. We have no, you know, timeline. We don’t have to, you know, get this five-year return on an investment, like, you know, the two of them will, you know, Buildertrend and Cogan truck will very likely be sold again, five years from, you know, the first investment date. And that’s just how private equity works. It’s, you know . . 

Rick: And that’s interesting to me. I don’t wanna interrupt, but I did not know. So they were acquired by a private equity firm Builder Tread was. . . 

Eric: So, Bain Capital is the is the primary investor behind the . . . 

Rick: Okay, interesting.

Eric: Behind the conglomerate. And they’re, you know, they’re rolling it all up, you know, and again . . 

Rick: Okay. So that’s for the capital to go out and acquire the additional companies to kind of where they’re creating their portfolio of companies. That’s very interesting. So essentially what I hear you saying is once that private equity comes in and buys you kind of have these overlords now that are looking at, Hey, every decision you make, is it improving the bottom line, even if it’s a decision that might be impacting your customer service or even the value of the product or the efficiency of the product.

Eric: Yeah. You know, so, we get probably compared more often to co-construct, and Donnie Dwight in the early days of co-construct. And you know, they you know, I think, again, very, very similar, but you know, when you know that they bought co-construct. I mean, I, you know, I’m pretty sure Donny’s not really involved at all and is, has kind of gone off.

And you know, I just, I think when, you know, and I’ve seen this again coming from investment banking before my first company, like. Time and time again, you know, private equity gets involved and just, you know, again, in my opinion, sort of sucks the soul out of the company. Yeah, right. You know, like we are so passionate about what we’re doing and, you know, we don’t have to, you know, we can grow as fast as slow as we want.

You know, we can just, you know, make what we believe are the right choices, you know, even if it costs us more money or even if it, you know, takes us longer to do something. You know, we’re in this for the long haul. You know, there’s no time horizon. I mean, I’m very fortunate to, you know, have already had a very successful exit.

I mean, you know, the, I worked for the first, you know, four years, you know, this thing, not paying myself a dime. And you know, really the only reason I’m taking any money out is just because my CFO my dad said, well, I think, we need to pay ourselves something just ’cause, you know, it’s, we’re cashflow positive, we’re, you know, very profitable.

I mean, the companies doing very well. And so, you know, at the end of the day though, like, you know, we have this awesome opportunity to just build a great company. You know, I want to have, you know, an awesome culture. You know, the people that you work with day in and day out, like, you’re gonna spend more time with your coworkers than your own family, you know?

And so it’s so important that you know, you have an awesome company, you know, with people that you want to be with you’re excited about, you’re sharing common interest. And we want that same, same relationship with our customers. You know, we’re really passionate about being able to help construction companies implement software and technology to improve their businesses.

And so, you know, I just, I feel like it’s, it’s a real blessing for us to still be, you know, small and able to be very agile, you know, and, and make changes. Like, we actively listen to our customers, you know, probably the number one thing, and we were actually just voted the number one construction management software.

And the number one construction estimating software on software advice, which is heavily based on user reviews, you know, and we were, you know, basically had five stars across the board in customer satisfaction and in usability. And, it’s because we listen to our customers, we take their feedback, they directly impact our development roadmap because, you know, we have a feature request section where, you know, people can submit feature requests and we let everybody vote on it. 

And, that’s how we decide what to spend our time, you know, developing, like we want to make the improvements that are gonna benefit the most number of customers. You know, we don’t play games with our pricing. You know, a lot of times, again, you, you’ve seen, you know, those two companies, they jacked up their price all the way to $1,300 a month. You know, and then, you know, we came in and just started taking so many of their customers that they had to back down, and now it’s $999 for that top tier.

But even then they’ve got, you know, different pricing tiers where you have to pay the most per month to get, you know, access to, you know, a lot of the features. And, I think that kind of pitch you at a point where now we’re gonna invest our development resources and our time only for, you know, a small subset who’s paying us the most amount of money.

You know, right here at Job Tread, our pricing is very simple. I mean, it’s $199 a month plus $20 per user. Yeah. And those are just internal users. Those are employees, you know, but everybody gets access to all of our features, and that allows us to make sure that we’re always focused on building things that are gonna make the biggest impact on our entire customer base because everybody has access to everything.

But the reason I like that model is because it means that a small, you know, solo owner operator, you know, with one employee is not gonna pay the same thing as, you know, a company with 20 employees or with 50 employees. You know, and I’ve seen a lot of different pricing models where, you know, it just doesn’t make sense.

You know, the pricing per job. You know, you might be an enormous home builder and you only build, you know, 10 or 20 homes a year. But you know, you’re gonna pay less than somebody who is, you know, a small handyman or remodeler who’s doing, you know, 10 or 20 jobs a month, you know? And so it’s like, it’s, you know, I just, I feel like we’ve got a, a much better pricing model and our relationship with our customers and our ability to, you know, just top-notch customer service.

You know, I still get every single support email, you know, I’m very frequently responding to them. I, we’ve got a Job Tread Pros Facebook group where you know, we’ve got over 1300 of our customers are in there, you know, very active in that. And I think our customers just really appreciate, you know, how responsive we are and how quickly we’re able to, you know, take their feedback.

You know, I mean some, there’s so many things that are just such low-hanging fruit. It’s like, man, let’s, can we just add this one field over here? And it’s like, yeah, that’ll take us five minutes. And so we go and we do it, you know, and we’re extremely responsive and that’s the thing that our customers, you know, hear, and see time and time again from us and you know, again, I think it’s just kind of the nature of, you know, we’re smaller, we’re able to be, you know, more agile and we’ve got much better technology that, you know, enables us to more quickly build out, you know, the features, and make you know, modifications. 

Rick: You know, it’s just a couple of things I just reading between the lines of what you discussed there. I think I just want to emphasize for the viewer or listener here, you know, number one, when you’re owned by private equity, that’s when ESG starts to creep too. And like you’ve got all sorts of cancerous crap going on in your organization that is gonna affect the organization’s internal culture. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a second. 

Number two is when I was, you know when I was managing construction companies, I remember always trying to find that software that fit the smaller custom builder. And it seemed like every platform I looked at was designed for the larger, more production-oriented builder, and we could never customize it enough. 

And then number three, it’s like if I’m a small builder and I’ve got, you know, less than 10 employees, which I’m guessing most of your clients do, how cool is it that, you know, one of my vendors, the main software that I used to run my business is that, yeah, I can jump in and I get that feedback and I’m talking to a company that’s small like me and understands my business versus the behemoth that essentially is going like, why would I pay, you’re right.

Why would I pay attention to you when you’re only paying me this much, where I going go to my larger, more enterprise-type clients? And really, you know, try to appease them ’cause they’re, that’s my essentially my primary revenue source, you know, are those guys. 

Eric: 100%. You know, and that’s, you know, our pricing strategy again is we want to keep job trade as affordable as possible so that we can get it into tens of thousands of contractors’ hands. You know, our mission is to create a new standard for managing construction projects. And, you know, there you’re if you just get hung up on trying to maximize every single dollar. You know, that you’re pulling out of every customer, like, you’re never gonna be able to hit that critical mass and that scale.

And so I think, you know, to the extent that, you know, we, we can keep this as affordable as possible for as long as possible, you know, and we look for other creative avenues of, you know, where we have a marketplace you know, with partners who have complementary services that they can come in and they can basically, you know, help subsidize the cost to keep the cost for us to keep building out job tread, you know, as low as possible.

Because, you know, we and them, we were relying that we both want to have the most number of contractors on job tread. And that’s ultimately how we can, you know, we can win it by, you know, creating that new standard where everyone knows how to use it. And, you know, I think probably another one of the big things, you know, big differentiators between us and a lot of the others out there, like our entire team, we have our entire customer success team, our entire sales team, you know, even our marketing team, like we have experience in construction. 

You know, we’re, we’re not just people that kind of came right outta college and, you know, are being trained on how to do things as we have been in our customer shoes. We understand what they’re going through and I think that’s really helped us to relate and to be able to help them. You know, get the software up and going and help them maximize it because, you know, we’ve been there, we understand how, you know, how things work. And you know, I think our customers just really appreciate that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s huge. That’s huge. I wanna jump in here, and, you alluded to it already, but it’s that company culture. And so you’ve got your 10 core values on your website, hire the right people, focus on culture, are your number one and number two, but, those core values that you have listed there, how do they impact your clients?

Eric: Yeah, I mean, look at the end of the day, I mean, a company is only gonna be as strong or as weak as the team of people that you put together. You know, and I’ve always been a big believer in, you know, you gotta hire the right people, you know, get the right people on the bus.

Sometimes, you’ve got to make those tough decisions and get the wrong people off the bus. And then you figure out how to drive the bus and where to drive the bus together. You know, it’s a collaborative effort. You know, and when I can hire, you know, A-players where, you know, again, nobody on my team needs to be micromanaged.

Like, we don’t worry about, you know, the small day-to-day things, whether they’re getting their work done, they’re showing up. Like you hire rock stars who are very driven, they’re motivated, they’re excited, they’re passionate about what we’re doing. You know, it just creates, you know, a great, you know, culture for everybody.

You know, and it also kind of creates a culture where, like, you know, if you’re an underperformer, you’re probably gonna be pretty uncomfortable here. You know, we have, you know, essentially, you know, dashboards all over the office. You know, we’re constantly, you know, striving to put up, you know, most, you know, new customers or, you know, most trainings or calls or conversations like, you know, we’ve gamified a lot of things where.

You know, it helps us to kind of just sort of enjoy that competitive, you know, environment here where we all wanna do our best every single day. And I think when you build an awesome team, you know, then that will in turn, you know, enable you to create an awesome product. Have, you know, great service, you know, do good things that, you know, ultimately all impact.

You know, your customers, your prospects, the market, the brand, you know, everything that you do is at the end of the day. It comes back to the people. And so, you know, I think, you know, we’ll, you know, we have a lot of positions listed on our website, but, you know, hire very slowly, you know, we take our time, we get to know people, we have ’em out to the office.

We have ’em meet with, you know, large groups of our team to make sure that you know, they’re gonna be a good fit, that they’re gonna be the right person to join our team. Because you know, when you bring on an employee like you, you gotta invest a lot of time into, you know, developing them and getting them, you know, to be able to be, you know, a hundred percent productive.

And so, the worst thing that can happen is you invest a bunch of time and money into someone to find out that they’re not a good fit or they’re not gonna be able to do the job. You know, and then, you know, it’s, again, it’s a huge, it’s a huge waste of time. And so, you know, we just, we really value, and we want people to understand that like, you know, when you get an offer to join our team, you know that’s a big deal.

Like, we’re bringing you into our family. And, you know, it’s at the end of the day, I mean, I’ll take my measly, you know, 21-person team against, you know, Buildertrend and Co-construct and Square. I mean, they got like 850 employees or something like that. I wouldn’t trade teams right now, you know, you couldn’t pay me enough to trade teams with them.

Like, I know that every single person on my team is someone that, you know, I would happily, you know, go into battle with. And I know that they’re an awesome team and you know, I think that’s just you know, it’s just so important to building a great company is to have great people. 

Rick: Talk about the future, or at least what you’re working on right now, what you see Job tread kind of evolving into what are some of those initiatives?

Eric: Yeah, so, you know, we’re you know, obviously constantly working on a lot of the different products. You know, the features that we’re working on. I mean, we just put out a bunch of updates to cost plus jobs so that you could better manage you know, all of your you know, whenever you got a cost plus job, you know, home builders, things like that.

Right now, we just kicked off a new project for to essentially add the ability to have formulas and assemblies. You know, created and managed and being able to just like, basically type in, you know, kind of your parameters and your takeoff, it’ll automatically calculate your quantity, you know, and even if you wanted to use it to adjust your unit cost, your unit price you’ll be able to use formulas for that.

You know, and again, I mean, a lot of our updates are driven by what our customers are asking for. So, you know, we’ve got some, some feedback that they’d like, some additional notification options and, and some more communication options. And so, you know, we’re looking at all that. You know, so lots of kind of specific feature updates, but you know, even bigger picture.

So, we just released it. You know, kind of an updated version of our, you know, all of our API documentation. We’ve got a whole bunch of developer tools, you know, and part of the reason why you and I originally met here is, you know, we want to enable, you know, other companies and other applications to build, you know, integrations with Job Tread so that we can further kind of create this ecosystem and be that end-to-end solution.

You know, for construction companies, like, you know, we know at the end of the day like, we can’t do everything and we can’t do everything great. And so, you know, to the extent that it makes sense to have partnerships, you know, with complimentary services, you know, whether it be a technical partnership or just a co-marketing partnership or whatever it may be.

You know, we want to continue to build out the ecosystem around job tread so that we can bring. All of those great offerings, you know, the things that are gonna help our customers be more successful. You know, we wanna bring that, you know, front and center to them and enable those things to be connected right there within job tread.

So, you know, a lot of awesome updates there. I mean, we’ve just rolled out an integration with a company cam that was widely successful. You know, we’ve got lots of, you know, other neat partnerships, you know, and integrations that are gonna be coming. And, today we also just, we just rolled out our you know, our tickets for Job Tread Connect, which is our annual user conference.

So, we’ve now made that available to all of our customers where they can buy their you know, buy their tickets to attend. Last year, or I guess last January, it was our first time doing this, we had over 200 people come to Dallas, Texas. It was a two-and-a-half-day event. This year, we’re extending it, we’re adding a pre-conference day where they can get basic training and then, you know, you’ve got kind of your two-and-a-half day regular, you know, sort of conference event where lots of networking, you know, an opportunity to meet directly with our team developers.

Like we all, you know, again, the whole team comes out. We take those days to really get to know our customers, to listen to ’em you know, and then just, you know, got some social events, fun activities like that, but lots of kind of ed sessions from you know, our customers sharing how they’re using Job Tread to our partners who can share how, you know, how they can help benefit our customers.

So, you know, it’s always a really exciting time. I think we, like right before I got on the call, like we just rolled it out and we’ve already had like 15 or something. Ticket sales just instantly came in. . . 

Rick: Oh, great. 

Eric: Put a little banner right across the top of Job Tread. So, all the people in the app basically got first, first dibs on the early bird pricing. But you know, once those tickets run out, it’ll be our regular pricing. But yeah, so that’s, that’s super exciting too. We’re, we’re always excited to have people come into Dallas and get to come check out our new offices now. 

Rick: All right. Well, fantastic. As we wrap up here I’m a builder. I say, okay I wanna check you guys out. What are some of the results that I could expect to receive if I fully get this fully implemented? 

Eric: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I think first and foremost, you know, we’re gonna help get you organized, you know, so if you’re out there still kind of doing the, you know, got a bunch of spreadsheets and got a bunch of papers, things like that, you know, we’re gonna help get you organized.

We’re gonna help you, from a CRM standpoint, tracking all your customers, your contacts, all their, you know, contact information as well as all your vendors, you know, from your subs, suppliers. Getting all that, you know, tracking their certificate of insurance, their W-9s, like you’re gonna get organized with all that information.

You know, our probably, our strongest, you know, feature, is our budget tool and it’s our financial management. You know, we built this from, you know, focusing on the finances of a job first. You know, a lot of other project management software out there started with, you know, the scheduling, and kinda the project management aspects.

Well, we really dug into the investment. You know, the financial side of things to make sure you know your numbers and you’re accurately pricing your job. So, you know, if you don’t know your numbers, we’re gonna help you get organized, you know, from, you know, from a catalog standpoint, understanding what you’re spending and being able to help you identify where you making money and where you’re losing money.

You know, like I like to share. You know, again, running that commercial general contracting company, like, you know, we for six months before I even got there, we kept doing these you know, these fencing jobs in Houston for a particular customer. And every time we did them, we would lose 10 to 12%.

And I, like, it just blew my mind when I first saw it and I said, how could that be? And then I started looking at all the other jobs before and we kept doing that. And it’s like they never stopped to do the job costing to understand how are they performing. And we just kept going on and on, you know, and it ended up turning out that we were just using, you know, we hadn’t updated our price of the material.

And so we’re using outdated pricing, you know, for our cost. And like, you know, like that’s the thing. Like you can’t keep making the same mistakes over and over. And so job tread will help you to understand, you know, where are you making money and where are you losing money so that you can quit making those same mistakes.

You know, our goal is to help you course correct in the middle of a job too. Like, don’t wait till 30, 60, or 90 days after the job to figure out, oh, we overran that budget and we should have sent a change order. Well, you know, you’ve already done the final invoice, like you’ve lost all your leverage.

Like yeah. You’ve got a course correct in the middle of a job. And so, you know, I think a lot of people would tell you, you know, that by joining Job Tread, we really help them to get organized and, increase their profits on their job because they’re gonna start to see it, they’re gonna start to understand where, you know, the biggest impacts. And then, you know, you can find all your bleeders and go plug those holes and quit making those same mistakes. 

Rick: Absolutely. Yeah. Know your numbers, right? Number one issue and that’s if you’re gonna go out of business as a builder. That’s exactly how it works, is that you have enough work in front of you. You can keep the doors open, but as soon as you slow down and the bills catch up, and then all of a sudden you’re like, I’m outta money and you know, the doors are shut and all of a sudden you get liens put on your jobs and you got a lot of fun calls. You get to deal with homeowners when that happens.

So, if this has been great, Eric, you know, help, really help me learn a lot. And you are right. Just as we have a common client here and we are going to build an integration between the builder, lead converter, and Job Tread. So that when the client is ready to start an estimate, we can seamlessly push that information into job training. 

Go ahead and start the estimate that way. So looking forward to to getting that set up, but if anyone here is interested in learning more, where would, you suggest they go? 

Eric: Yeah, I mean, I’d, I’d say just hit our website www.jobtread.com. You know, there’s a ton of information. You know, we’ve organized it by the type of builder, you know, whether you’re a home builder, remodeler, pool builder, specialty contractor, you know, or if you, you know, if you want to dig into the features, you know, we’ve got a bunch of content on there to help you understand all the features.

Tons of videos on the website. Our YouTube channel is also filled with a whole bunch of videos, that you could check out there. We’re super active on Facebook. Both our, you know, our main kind of job tread page, you know, or our job Tread Pros is our user group there. So, a lot of different ways to get in touch, but yeah.

You know, right on the website, you know, I’d encourage everyone to just schedule a demo so that you can pick the day and the time that works for you. You know, our team is happy to sit down and take, you know, 45 minutes to an hour to walk you through Job Tread. We wanna make sure it’s a good fit for you just as much as you know, you wanna make sure it’s a good fit. And we’re happy to take the time to help you understand what we can do and, how it would work for your business. 

Rick: We will go ahead and put that link in the description here below, or if this is, you find this on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll see it in the perhaps, in the comments section as well.

Well, Eric, it has been a delight to learn more about Job Tread and get your background. Thank you so much for joining us today and Conversations that Convert, and for everyone else, we appreciate you joining us as well. Go check out Job Tread and we will see you next time. Take care!