September 17, 2025 • 57 mins
Ever wondered why your profitable projects aren't reflected in your bank account? The answer lies in construction financial management, specifically, the disconnect between traditional accounting software and the unique needs of contractors.
In this revealing conversation, Sy Kirby speaks with Caleb Smith, Co-Founder and President of ControlQore, about the financial visibility gap plaguing blue-collar businesses. Caleb, whose team combines construction experience with software expertise, explains how their platform was born from frustration with QuickBooks and the cumbersome patchwork of spreadsheets contractors typically rely on.
"We were hitting this wall of challenge around having visibility and control over our project financials," Smith shares, describing the pain point that drove ControlQore's creation. The solution? A comprehensive financial platform built specifically for contractors that connects every transaction to specific projects and cost codes.
What sets ControlQore apart isn't just the software itself, but their approach to implementation. Unlike other platforms that provide minimal onboarding and then leave users to figure things out, ControlQore's CEO personally oversees customer implementation. This hands-on approach helps contractors overcome the typical hurdles of adopting new technology while running daily operations.
The most compelling takeaway comes when discussing real-time job costing. As Sy points out, knowing you're losing money on manholes at installation #2 rather than #20 can be the difference between salvaging profitability and watching margins disappear. This visibility allows contractors to make corrections while there's still time to impact outcomes.
Whether you're a general contractor managing multiple trades or a specialty subcontractor focused on a specific craft, ControlQore offers adaptability without sacrificing power. The result? Owners report gaining back 20+ hours weekly while increasing net profit, time, and money that can be reinvested in growth or simply enjoying the fruits of your labor.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey, guys, welcome to the Blue Collar Business
Podcast, where we discuss therealest, rawest, most relevant
stories and strategies behindbuilding every corner of a blue
collar business.
I'm your host, cy Kirby, and Iwant to help you in what it took
me trial and error and a wholelot of money to learn the
information that no one in thisindustry is willing to share.
(00:34):
Welcome back, guys, to anotherepisode of the Blue Collar
Business Podcast, brought to youand sponsored by our wonderful
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Guys, if you've owned yourcraft and you care about your
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(00:56):
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(01:16):
Guys, we're heading off into thesoftware space today.
I, as you guys know, I'm verypassionate about software.
We talk about it a lot on theshow.
But, guys, I'm dealing with alittle bit of a tickle in my
throat, so I apologize.
I've been trying to drink alittle bit of water here.
But, um, software in the bluecollar space there's three types
(01:39):
.
I believe I've categorized afew videos about them.
You've got the front of thehouse, you've got estimating,
you've got sales, and thenthere's, you know, your project
management softwares, and we cango off into all of those and
what they try to generalize inand try and capture for your
project management needs.
(02:00):
But then there's always thatback backend software that, most
generally, that we're speakingto an audience of entrepreneurs
I bet you guys are runningQuickBooks, if I had to guess,
currently Now there's probablysome percentage of you running
Sage, I believe is the otherlarge one.
But today, guys, I am joined bya gentleman that has used his
(02:25):
wizardry of a team thatBrainiacs, and they have
produced a product that Ibelieve is going to change the
game here and help you guys.
And it's not just one of allthree, it's one all three in one
is where I was going with that.
It's one all three and one iswhere I was going with that
(02:46):
Today.
Gentlemen, I follow on LinkedIn,been following this company for
a little bit, checked them out.
I would like to say I'm an avidcustomer currently, but during
our project management, changesand corrections, as I've been
sharing with you guys over thepast couple months.
Changes and corrections, asI've been sharing with you guys
over the past couple months.
Didn't think that was an exact,perfect time to be switching
(03:10):
softwares as well, as you guysknow, implementation and
retraining of your guys it's oneof the most expensive things we
deal with.
But today, guys, I am joined bya gentleman who has an MBA in
leadership, and that issomething that needs to be
(03:34):
shined.
To follow that path and to beon a part of a team that
somebody has that kind ofaccolade is pretty incredible.
But avid, car enthusiast,traveler, family man and the
co-founder of Control Corps myman, caleb Smith how are you
doing, sir?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I'm doing well.
Si, it's good to be here.
I can't dude, I've got to matchyour enthusiasm for life, man,
just getting to know you more,this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Well, guys, we had a brief intro call.
Usually when I bring guests on,we take 15, 30 minutes and try
and talk about maybe what we'regoing to talk about through the
show, and I kind of picked hisbrain a little bit.
But, guys, I'm going to belearning just as much as you
guys today and I'm going to kindof give the floor up to Caleb
(04:26):
to talk about a product that isso unique.
As you guys know, I'm verypassionate about job costing, as
we have learned how importantthat is and how important it is
for the three words in our worldis know your cost.
And you know there's companiesout there 10, 20 years still
don't know those three words.
(04:46):
And you know I just went throughthe pride and the ego shot of
taking a step back and going hey, you don't know everything like
you think you do, so get to theright people.
But I went software chasing.
As you guys know, I've done theProcore game.
We have also done usedMicrosoft Teams, as we started
(05:06):
small iterations of what wethought we needed for project
management.
But it's not just a projectmanagement tool that you guys
have built.
What you shared with me in theintro was almost relieving to me
it's the replacement forQuickBooks in construction.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Couldn't have said it better, Si.
Talk a little bit about it.
My guy yeah, yeah, you bet.
So, just like you said, we are agroup of general contractors
and project-based accountantsthat really, as we were scaling
and building a DC firmparticularly my co-founding
(05:50):
partner, JD he still operates asa general contractor Just
hitting this wall of challengearound having visibility and
control over our projectfinancials, really understanding
where the heck we were as acompany related to projects, and
just having that transparencyover when you're transacting
(06:14):
dollars in your company do youknow where those are going and
how much you're spending?
And so not only having thatvisibility for your company but
at a project level andQuickBooks just wasn't cutting
it and, in addition to that,just having a lot of frustration
around having this financialtech stack.
That was just getting reallycumbersome.
You had to tie in a bunch ofspreadsheets, maybe a few other
softwares make it work withProcore, um, figuring out what
(06:38):
to do there, and so really wedecided to to set out to build
this, solve those problems, beenbuilding it and making sure we
get as much industry feedback,both from the field experience
with software like thisbookkeeping teams, anybody and
(07:07):
making sure we build a solutionthat is aligned with the
project-based world from a coreaccounting standpoint.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You hit it home and that's where I was hoping you'd
go with.
That is that this team is notonly super smart coming from the
techie world and the softwaredevelopment world, but you guys
also build things for a living.
You also ran into the sameproblems that we ran into the oh
my God, I've got to go to thisprogram to get this sheet, to
(07:39):
get this cut and fill, to matchit against this Excel sheet.
And you know my estimator stillhas four screens and we get it
all spread out.
And you know we build thisschedule in this program to
throw it's so all over the place.
And as you're scaling andgrowing, you're like, why is all
of this so hard?
You know, and if you jump offin into the software, software
(08:04):
world like we were doing, man,we were just tiptoeing.
And man, the first couple ofprograms, the implementation, it
all sounded so good in thesales call and I might poke at
you a little bit today.
I hope you're ready for it.
But the audience literallywanting to hear this because
we're talking about it a littlebit in the intro, like the
(08:28):
stigma of the software incontractor base.
Like, guys, if you don't,everybody's basically got an
accounting software, that'spretty much standard.
But if you have tried to scaleand grow and you've got multiple
crews, job documentation,scheduling, daily logs, all of
(08:52):
that wrapped up into, of course,once it gets to the next level,
is those project financials.
And when I've been throughthese softwares, man, where
they're not even set up forcontractors, it doesn't even the
terms don't even make sense.
Like where's a place to put achange order?
(09:14):
What do you mean?
It's not just.
I wish I could just go hey,everything's 300 bucks and they
pay me in two days.
You know it just doesn't happenlike that and they pay me in
two days.
You know it just doesn't happenlike that.
Things happen and changethrough the project but there's
no way of properly documentingit.
That's not to take your words,man, not just completely
(09:35):
cumbersome, right?
So software and contractors arealready a battle.
But from what I'm hearing, man,you guys are literally built
this product from where.
What phase do you guys kind ofstart?
Do you start in the estimatephase?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So we actually don't start in the estimate phase.
We start generally once there'sa contract in place Okay, and
that's when the transactionoccurs.
So we are bidding andestimating is in the product
roadmap.
Um, we, we, we, with a littletongue-in-cheek, say, like
(10:15):
control core is, we have builtit.
Every column of what controlcore is.
It took billion dollarcompanies just to do like 20 of
what we've done in the last 18months.
Now were we able to build itoff the backs of, like what they
all got wrong?
Yes, absolutely.
So we have an advantage there,right, but the component is like
(10:36):
we have to get all of thefoundational inputs correct
before we can continue buildingout the full stack.
And so that started as the coregeneral ledger covering all of
the accounting components andthen making sure you had
pathways to be able to manageand track and job cost every
(10:59):
financial transaction that youhave in a company.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
No, I really.
Actually, our model right nowis set up that CRM.
We call it fantasy land upthere in the estimation world
because it's like, till thatpoint of contract it really
doesn't matter.
Nobody past that office reallyneeds to know about it, unless
we need somebody to go take someshots or go build a quick
(11:26):
surface or something like thatto have an edge on some certain
situation.
But it's very, very slim tonone that anybody outside that
office.
So we are currently set up on aCRM software upfront and it
does very well.
We've got some processes builtwithin the what I call fantasy
(11:47):
land of the hopeful land, theland of heartbreak.
But past that point is, once ithits, contract is okay.
When the contract gets put intowhat?
And that's where we switch overto our project management
software.
We run our project and ourproject management software and
(12:07):
then we transfer over into ourfinancial software and that's
where it sounds like you guyshave really linked and it needs
to be linked without it beingsome ridiculous process of input
output.
So it's a major problem.
So talk about how a project.
We've got our contract landed.
(12:29):
We've got our subscription toControl Core.
What's our first steps?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, so once your project agreement's in place,
one of the frustrations that Ithink can happen in a system
like pro core is it requiresthat you have all the
information, um, before you cancontinue to move forward.
And how often is that the casein contractors world?
Never, my guy, so.
(12:57):
So that's a key difference thatwe wanted to make sure we
started, just like giving thatperspective like we live this
problem Right, we know that thisis not a solution.
When you're like you know, maybeyou have a phone number and an
email and like one line ofinformation and that's your,
your start, right, likeliterally going, and then, and
(13:18):
then the owner you know, cowboyJoe was like had his
conversation and wrote the noteson the back of the napkin,
right, like you got to work withthat, right, and and you know,
of course, I'm sure he's the dadof, like the new person who's
trying to take over all theoperations, right, and so you
know, that's just kind of whathappens in life and anything in
(13:42):
between.
And so we want to be able tostart working with financial
data, even if it's incomplete,related to the contract and the
agreement, so that you can beginattaching transactions or
attaching information to that,and so basically, you'd set up a
(14:04):
project in Control Core andyou'd be able to begin working
with that.
Whether it's in like, even ifit's at the pre-construction
level and not much is going onthere, you can at least begin
tying any cost associated withthat to the project right.
(14:26):
So now you're actually able toget that visibility of how much
do we actually spend in thepre-construction of this project
.
That's like hammering yourmargins rather than.
Well, we actually didn't haveany visibility until costs came
later, until costs came laterand we had no idea that 40% of
(14:51):
our margin was taken outactually getting this project
off the ground.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah yeah, literally it happens all the time.
There's a lot of guys probablylistening going man, what are
they talking about?
They're just now learning aboutI'm just trying to figure out
my overhead percentage and myindirect cost and trying to
figure out how to bid for that.
(15:14):
And you know they're justcompiling it all into that.
But the more you can get offindirect and the more you can
job and correct me if I'm wrongconjumbled, maybe, potential
project that could be gamechanger.
They ain't got no information.
Cowboy Joe just keeps callingyou every Tuesday wanting a
freaking number.
The plans are halfway drawntogether.
There ain't no topo, thereain't no geotech, but it's a
(15:56):
raging opportunity.
But at the same time you'veonly got his phone number.
He won't email, he won't doanything.
The engineer sends you.
I've been in those situations.
But a lot of times we call themthose pie-in-the-sky deals is
what our estimator loves to callthem.
I love those opportunities.
Putting those together andmaterializing them all the way
(16:18):
down to a point of contract.
It can be absolutely tiresome.
A lot of estimators don't likethat.
They want a set of drawings.
They want them to be the bestpotential possible when it does
hit that point of contract andthey hand it off and they can't
watch it anymore.
If they run up on that gravelline item and they've spent all
(16:40):
their gravel in day one, they'relike, hey, what were you
estimating on?
But a lot of these guyslistening too, man, they're just
finding out that, oh, I need toget that production data back
to the estimator as quick ashumanly possible so he can
estimate fairly to a productionlevel that we've produced.
(17:00):
Yeah, exactly, and it's a cycle.
But I'm so glad that you guysare.
I get it.
That bidding and estimatingit's really cool to hear it's
coming down the pipeline.
But man, there's so many CRMplatforms out there that do it
really really well.
And you're right, it's all.
Yes, that's great, but a pointof contract moving forward, but
(17:20):
still being able to take thosepie in the sky deals, start
adding information, boom, pointof contract.
Here's the dollars, brass tacksand move on how we would break
that job down in control core.
Because job costing issomething I just have really
(17:43):
recently known about.
That's one of those blue collartopic killers.
Because job costing they'relike oh I job cost, you know my
gravels.
There's no job costing throughthe project.
You have estimated job costs,but what are your known job
costs and talk a little bitabout how that contract is broke
down and how the job costingprogresses through.
(18:06):
You know invoicing and kind ofhighlight job costing for these
guys.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, great, great topic.
In Control Core we try tocreate an environment which you
can capture every transactionthat's coming into the company
and manage and tag those, movethem through an approval-based
workflow that aligns with theright people on the job and into
(18:30):
your back office staff, and so,during that process, you need
to have a structure that enablespeople to allocate costs
associated with their, their,their correct um buckets,
essentially, and so, um, youcreate cost codes, right, and so
, uh, for, for a generalcontractor, that could be
(18:50):
hundreds of cost codes.
Um, you know, our, my, my,co-founder, jd, is his firms,
they've got over 600 cost codesthey run through, um, yeah, my
gosh, yeah right um, he uses theCSI format.
So, um, go ahead and, you know,do a google search on that,
(19:13):
learn up on on what that means.
But it's kind of a generalizedformat.
But, that being said, so manycompanies are nuanced.
They they customize off of that, they do their own thing or
they build out their own.
We help a lot of companies kindof come up with their own thing
and we use a template as wellif they want.
But fundamentally, if you're asub or specialty contractor, you
(19:34):
might have maybe just 20, rightit?
It's significantly differentpicture.
Now, what's very important is toknow that how you're breaking
down your costs enable you todrill into the specifics of
those related to any part of theproject.
So it could be at architectureand engineering, or it could be
(19:58):
in concrete, it could be dirt,it could be finished work, any
of that, and then you drill downin.
You know, is this like thewiring associated with that and
what's type of can say, okay,man, we're getting killed on?
You know, maybe there's sometariffs or there's an increase
(20:48):
in steel pricing or this onevendor just randomly decided to
increase their prices orwhatever, and you would have no
idea if you're looking at thegeneral picture of your project
around how profitable it was.
Uh, when you say, okay, well,this is where the expenses are
going so far and this is where,um, you know we projected this
(21:11):
would be as far as like theoriginal budget cost, but you
didn't have any idea that thatone vendor now it's just like
increased their cost by 50% andmaybe there goes your margin,
maybe it doesn't, but either way, um, if you don't have that
visibility when project agesblows it out the door with it
being awesome and profitable,but project B just tanks to you
(21:34):
and you had no idea that thathappened to either of those
projects.
When you get to the end of theyear and your CPA says, man, you
guys made 2 million bucks thisyear, and you're like, that's
nothing.
What I was in my bank accountright now, you know, and you're
just feeling the pain because itdoes not translate at all
across that.
And so one of the other corethings that we do is you have
(21:56):
the job costing and, through thecost codes on those
transactions, that allows you toget super granular in your
projects.
But then we bridge that intoyour company financials where we
do a cost type, where you arenow, and this goes into the
Procore thing, where Procore hasbeen challenging.
Procore looks for that, and soin order to get information
(22:20):
working well with pro court, youneed to be able to uh have a
cost type, and so what that isis uh it.
If we have um drywall, forexample, as the cost code, the
cost type might be labor ormaterials, and so then now at
the company level, you canreally draw, drill in and
(22:42):
understand where are my costsgoing at a labor level materials
and you can get a really goodpicture from your P&L without
having 600 cost codes screwingup your, your charter accounts.
And like when you as an ownertry to go in there, you're like
I have no idea what's going on.
I mean, we just saw somebody'schart of accounts.
Where they were, they wereliterally taking cost codes and
(23:03):
putting them in as um parts oftheir chart of accounts and they
had over 300 line items on thechart of accounts to just try to
understand it and bucketeverything.
And we're like, oh my gosh, youknow and and, yeah, and, and
we've seen that that kind ofmethod is kind of being taught
on youtube as like a way to dothings and it's it's tough
(23:23):
because it's like guys, if youdo that, you're gonna be in a
heap of of uh trouble in termsof understanding where you stand
as a company let me tell yousome.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I am an avid youtuber myself.
Shout out.
But I mean there is things thatI will definitely get
perceptions from, but fromfinancial and the way you run
your company, man, I would notadvise you guys to be following
(23:52):
anything from YouTube.
I have been very ill-advisedover the years by people that
were very close to me, even CPAs, and if I was looking out and
(24:12):
making sure I was seeing allperceptions of the market, I may
have been paying a little bitmore attention.
My guy is is you're hitting thenail on the head with job
costing and you brought up theProcore thing and, man, we did a
couple of years worth ofProcore and we actually got hit
in the head with cost codes.
Man, we were a six, seven yearold company.
We didn't realize we just gotgiven this ginormously powerful
(24:39):
tool that we were nowhere evenready to strap on to our tool
belt because we didn't even havethe basics.
Like, how's your implementationdoing at the implementation
level to integrate this softwareand get it live?
(24:59):
Because I will tell you, thewhole first year of Procore I
dang sure didn't even get itfully live and then by the
second year we were comingthrough thought it would really
pull together and we stillcouldn't get past cost codes and
all these.
Oh, we'd reach out for help andthen it would be another person
(25:21):
and another Zoom call and I'mjust sharing you with the
frustration that we all feel inthis market.
That builds that stigma, my guy.
But what's the implementationlike with Control Core?
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, it's a big challenge in the industry,
especially around software.
It's a big challenge in theindustry, especially around
software.
Like it really doesn't matterhow cool the tool is if it can't
be implemented effectively.
I mean, the GC firm on our sidetook two years to get Procore
(25:54):
going right and it's, like yousaid, a big lift, tons of work,
right, and you know, you guyshave, you guys have your
businesses to run, um, you havefires put out, you have um
projects to run and so the like.
Just getting bogged down andgetting the value out of the
(26:15):
software you're spending, as isnot something you want to be
having a headache with.
So that has been one of the keycompetitive advantages that we
look to take to the market interms of the time and the amount
of touch points you have withus as the founders and with our
whole team.
Every one of our customers hasour cell phone and we're getting
(26:37):
calls at seven o'clock at night.
Hey, dude, like, tell me, likehow do I do this thing?
Or whatever.
Like we will answer yourquestion right there.
We also have, like we have afull implementation and
migration process.
So we'll, we'll migrate yourgeneral ledger and we, our team,
handles that.
So you're just business asusual doing your thing and we,
(27:00):
we get that all taken care of.
We build out the backend as faras all of your project data,
your job codes, job um, yourcost codes and your and your job
uh information.
We work on that and the thingis is along that way, we set up
um every week at least 30minutes of your time.
We set up every week at least30 minutes of your time.
Brian Solomon, my co founder,our CEO.
(27:21):
He oversees all customerimplementation.
So the CEO of our companycompany that's how high we we
prioritize that and so he willmeet with you for 30 minutes a
week at least.
If you need more time that week, we'll make that time and um,
we will meet with you as long asyou'd like.
So there's no like well, youget like six weeks of
(27:43):
implementation and then you'reon your own.
Like, we will train your team,we'll help them set up and what
we do is we do it on like realstuff.
So you say like, hey, I got thisbill in.
Okay, let's take a look at thisbill and let's get this process
.
So, okay, we um tagged it, weput the information in, we job
cost it.
We moved into the next stage,feel comfortable with that, yeah
, let's try another one.
(28:04):
And then, okay, now you're good, let's, let's move on to the
next segment.
But either way, we'reconsistently enabling our
customers so that, like thissystem, just like it, it feels
like it's designed for them.
Right, it and um, fundamentally, um, we, we, we, just we don't
(28:25):
we want to be your key financialpartner for 10 plus years,
right and um, just handing youlike a robust software like
control core is not going to bethe best thing there.
So control core is simple andto be the best thing there.
So control core is simple andit's fairly easy to use.
Um, it's not like a legacybased software that's just gonna
(28:47):
, you know, you're like I haveno idea what the heck's going on
in this software.
Um, it's not overly simplifiedso that you can't accomplish
what you need to, but at thesame time, it's robust.
There's a lot going on in there, and so one thing that's cool
is our team really focuses onoptimizing the personas who are
(29:08):
logging in under their roles,and so if there's a project
manager, an estimator who doesneed to engage with Control Core
, or there's a controller, orthere's an owner, they only see
what's relevant to them and sothat when you have approvals
coming through for transactions,you only see those approvals
for your projects that you workin right and you know what's
(29:28):
what you need to handle.
So that's, that's, that's partof it.
We also we try to kind of applya dial to this where, like, if
you're super comfortable andyou're like dude, I can handle
any software that's having greattake it.
We'll still do implementationhowever you want, but you run
with it.
But others, like dude, I havebusinesses to run, I have people
(29:49):
to manage.
Let's turn that dial up.
We'll help you with yourbookkeeping.
Our team specializes in projectbased accounting.
We know, like how to handlethat.
We'll bring in fractional CFOtype engagements, but in a
package where you're not payingfor a fractional CFO, you're
just getting their insights andguidance without having to pay
(30:11):
the monthly retainer.
So you have cashflowforecasting, you have job costs
and you're reporting all of that, but built for a small business
Because and because you stillhave the complexity that, like a
really large business does youjust don't have the budget and
the bandwidth right.
So that's how we want to help.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Dude.
It's definitely a gap in themarket.
Dude, I have again been allover the map with softwares and
I haven't really shared what Iuse currently.
But we have integratedbuilder's trend.
I think this is our second year.
Are we super happy from thestandpoint of it being billed
(30:50):
directly for subcontractors?
No, it's not.
And here's the thing with us islike we GC some land development
stuff, so we need the GC stuff,but a lot of times we're either
a utility sub or a dirt sub onthese commercial projects or et
cetera.
So it can be a wide plethora ofrange.
(31:12):
But builder's train has beengreat.
There's some things I wouldlove for it to go further on.
And we don't use any of thefinancials.
I've already covered that.
We use it directly for aproject management-based
software because we have foundit.
It's about the only thing wecan actually get results
(31:33):
consistently back from the field.
Because I don't care how goodthe daggum tool is, if you're
not getting consistent flow backfrom the actual end point and
back up to estimation, then it'sall design flaw to begin with.
Buy GCs for GCs.
(31:58):
It sounds like this is theproject financial tool that
every general contractor shoulddefinitely get a demo call and
to have your CEO say take thetime and implement because it is
that big of a deal.
Like you're, you're pausingsomebody's life business.
(32:19):
A lot of us it's.
It's everything you know, otheroutside of our families, and um
it, it.
It puts so much strain andextra stress because it's not
just running like normal.
It gives the owner or operatorsor whoever's involved, the team
involved, it's just so muchextra headache.
(32:40):
But to hear that level ofimplementation is did.
I hear you say you would helpbuild cost codes.
Yeah, 100%.
Man, where were you three, fouryears ago?
But to your point, man, there'sa massive gap in the market.
For you do want to be, you wantto have that back end ability I
(33:05):
guess we would call it of thosebig boy companies, but at the
same time, you don't have theirindirect budget.
Yeah, nope, you have to besparingly, but at the same time
you don't have their indirectbudget.
Yeah, no, you have to besparingly.
But if there's one thing you'regoing to be sparingly on, it
doesn't need to be yourfinancial software.
You need to be able to.
I love the word visibility andtransparency that you use.
(33:28):
Man, you've got to be able tosee that, to be able to see that
, and it sounds like not onlywill you guys help get it
established and up and runningand live, but it sounds like
you'll also explain a little bitalong the way.
You know bookkeeping serviceand trying to help these guys.
Because I can't tell you, caleb,the amount of guys that are
(33:50):
probably sitting here going man,what's a cost code?
Guys that are probably sittinghere going man, what's a cost
code?
And don't feel any way, guyslike, literally, don't feel any
way.
You don't know what, you don'tknow, I didn't know what I
didn't know.
I didn't until Sarah looked atme.
And we can't go any furtherwith Procore integration until
we have cost codes.
Do you know what a cost code is?
I'm like I'm going to go get ajob, love you.
(34:16):
Like what was I?
Who's I going to reach out to?
We would have already had thatperson in place, if you know
what I mean.
So the, the level ofimplementation is always going
to be, I believe, the stigmakiller for you guys as you move
forward, because if you cancarry that out, man, um, it
sounds like the perfect toolthat you can track from point of
(34:38):
contract to job closeout.
And, yeah, is it decentlyuser-friendly?
You're hitting around about it,but the the one thing I
couldn't stand about, pro course, how unforgiving it was once
you went live with something.
You know what I mean.
Right, quickbooks has gotten alittle bit from.
We just recently switched fromdesktop.
(35:00):
Over the years we were toldthat we had to have desktop and
finally we moved back to online.
That was a whole process initself but, like I've always
heard, quickbooks is veryunforgiving.
I used to run our books fromfirst year to, you know
QuickBooks online very, very,very high level, but it was
there, you know, yeah, so yeah,that's a.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That's a great point, and so I would say this like To
use Control Core, you need tounderstand what it means to like
a business.
That's.
That's it like.
If you don't know that, thenlet's, let's go back to like,
(35:43):
let's go and, um, you know, do alittle bit of learning.
But I fundamentally like that's.
I think one of the biggeststigmas that, like the blue
collar world gets is that peopledon't know how to run
businesses.
And yet I sit down with umprospects and customers every
week and these uh owners, uhoperators, are some of the most
(36:04):
sophisticated uh people that Iknow and they actually know
their software.
They know their processesreally really well.
Um software, they know theirprocesses really really well.
Um, and so like knowledgearound that is is rarely like a
challenge.
What, what is the thing is like.
Control court um covers a lotof ground for your company, and
(36:26):
so that's where it's like we dohave to kind of show you through
the software.
We have to do some some somekey uh setup for you to make
sure that the data that's comingin is correct.
But outside of that, what we dois we try to replicate muscle
memory in the system.
So when you get credit cardtransactions coming through.
You've got the opentransactions, you review those,
(36:49):
you job cost them, you tag themto a project, you apply the data
that you want, link thereceipts and then it's submitted
.
Now it moves to pendingapprovals.
You go through that process.
Guess what the bill managementsystem looks like?
The exact same structure.
You have the open bills, you gothrough the job costs, you tag
moves into pending approvalright, and so you don't have to
(37:10):
relearn every step of thesoftware every time.
You can get into a new moduleand be like oh, I know where
this is because it's the sameprocess, and so that's like we
have a full mobile applicationand that's great for the field
staff.
You're spending $500 at HomeDepot and you can easily split
(37:31):
that $500 across three differentprojects and apply the receipt
there and job cost that and I'vedone this and it takes like 20
seconds on your phone and you'redone.
And so we tried to optimize forfield staff and what's important
there, as well as optimize foryour back end.
There's so many owners that Italk to.
(37:52):
They're like, yeah, dude, we'redoing good and stuff.
And I'm like, hey, let me talkto your accounts payable
specialists and they're justdying and I'm like, well, you
have a really good accountspayable specialist or controller
because they're making yourlife really easy and they're
creating a lot of deliverables.
How they do their job might be,they're going insane, and so
let's talk to them about youknow how we can make that
(38:14):
process better, but either way,I would say it's user friendly,
it's streamlined, it makes sense.
That's one of the biggest thingsthat points of feedback we get
about QuickBooks Online,particularly around like trying
to use that in a job costingenvironment, project based
accountants, like it doesn'tmake sense, it doesn't, it's not
intuitive, right?
(38:35):
So, um, you know again, I say,like, control core is not like a
basic software, it is, it isaccounting.
So if, like you, just hateaccounting, no matter what, no
matter what tool, then let'stalk about our bookkeeping team
and things like that.
We can just get this done foryou.
But if you'd like to getinvolved with that and you love
(38:56):
those systems and you want atool that's even better and more
optimized and makes sense andsimple to use, then ControlCore
is a great fit there.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when
you said I've met a lot ofowners that are super
sophisticated blue collarentrepreneurs, visionariesaries
and man, I've met them too.
They're unbelievable people.
It's not from the lack ofeffort, it's just from the lack
of somebody sitting downspeaking their language for an
hour or two.
It's not that they didn'tretain the knowledge, but it's a
(39:27):
lot of times.
You know that I have found,especially, you know, doing this
show and sitting down withwhite collar professionals that
are, um, extremely decorated andhere I am a ditch digger, you
know what I mean but trying tosit down and embrace that
conversation so they canunderstand that.
(39:48):
Hey, look, yeah, you need alittle bit of bookkeeping
knowledge and they may have gone.
Man, I remember that time thatCaleb said on that one podcast
you know, I need to put a littlebit of time.
My wife's been after me or, youknow, lady in the front office
really needs some help on thebookkeeping.
Yeah, get a little fractionalhelp, man.
I'm doing the same thing, man,get it to a point.
(40:08):
But what it sounds like controlcore is is when you're ready to
take that next step and you'rescaling and you're growing and
you need the visibility aboutwhere your money's going,
because there comes a point, man, when you're.
I grew fast, my God.
I don't recommend it, um, butat the same time I did it and so
(40:28):
I wish I had something likethis in place three or four
years ago that I could have hadthe visibility through the
growth per project.
Because, back to another pointman, a lot of these guys you're
giving a tool of accountability,because I had some dump trucks
(40:51):
that were just eating us alivebetween payroll and drivers and
maintenance and payments and Igot these guys over here
carrying the mail on the pipecrew and then my dirt guys over
here he's doing pretty good fora couple of months and he just
absolutely had a terrible month.
Whatever the case may be, buthow do you know what your
(41:14):
business is doing?
And a lot of these blue collarguys you may have HVAC company
and you may be sitting theregoing.
Man, I do a lot of my monthlyreoccurring cash flow to be able
to fund these large projectsthat I want to chase more of.
Maybe if I ramped up more of my, you know, reoccurring cash,
(41:43):
it's all about what I'm gettingat, guys, not to go too far off
in the weeds.
There comes a point in timewhere strategy becomes a thing,
becomes a thing, and whether youthink it's not a thing, but
budgeting, cashflow projections,forecasting the things I say
(42:04):
that I didn't highlight, focus alot when I was building a
PsyCon in the first seven yearsout of the 10, and then I
finally hyper-focused on it, butby then it was too late.
I'm trying to build a freakingairplane as I'm flying it and I
don't recommend that at all.
And you know, sometimes itcomes crashing and you've got to
do everything you can to gether back in the air as fast as
you can and it's.
(42:25):
It's that rollercoaster ofvolatility, but volatility.
I think I said that wrong, butthey fact check me and they
spell check me all the time onhere.
So anyhow but that next, youknow you have a team of girls
and they're trying on thebookkeeping level, but they need
a software.
They're scanning through allthese Excel sheets every single
(42:47):
time.
You're like, hey, give me this.
And they're producing thesedocuments.
Give them a program like this.
Maybe not jive off all the wayto the pro core level, don't you
know?
You may have a small.
You're maybe like I starteddoing just literally project on
Microsoft teams and we allshared it and that's where the
job data went Okay.
But how does that all transferand tangle up?
(43:09):
Get them a product like controlcore where they could start at
the point of contract andvisibly see every.
The guys didn't for some reasonorder concrete out of a truck
and they went to the dadgumLowe's and bought a pallet of
Quikrete.
That kind of stuff affectsmargins after a while.
(43:30):
And the one thing, the biganalogy on job costing that I
like to share, and a shout outto Mr Nick Peters.
He was on episode 20, somethingof the blue collar
wwwbluecollarbusinesspodcastcom.
You can listen and watchcompletely free from there or
any of your beautiful podcastsstreaming services.
(43:52):
Drop a rating and followShameless, plug there real quick
.
But the number one thing thathit home with me is a blue
collar guy.
I'm an underground contractor.
He sits down with me and hesays all right, cy, you say you
know your cost and say I've gotand the audience is probably
tired of hearing me say this,I've shared it several times but
(44:15):
it's stuck with me and it'sperfect for the topic Say, we've
got two guys bid to go do 20manholes.
Okay, they're bid at two daysper manhole.
Well, their crew has beenrained out for a couple of weeks
and Johnny said let's hop overbilly's crew with the manhole
(44:36):
guys.
They needed the help.
They you'll.
It'll make it easier on them,okay.
So now we got three guys right,so then spin around.
It took him on the first fourmanholes.
It took him four days a piece.
Okay, when did you know thatJohnny hopped on Billy's crew
(44:57):
and made it a three-man crew?
And when did you know that ittook them four days of labor per
man hole instead of your twodays?
Is it at man hole number two?
Is it at man hole number five,10, 20, six months after the
job's complete?
Never, I was at that, neverpart of the meter and I've
(45:17):
slowly been working my way backand it takes time, guys all the
way back down to live trackingand going hey, we're on our
second manhole.
The work in progress reportshows us that we're bleeding a
little bit here on labor, andwhy is the concrete bill on this
so high?
Oh well, they were going tolows.
(45:37):
Whatever the case may be, guys,I'm just trying to bring light
to it is that you've got to knowit's your survival of your
company.
You've got to know it.
Manhole Two to ten somewhere inthere where you still have
control over it, where 50% ofthe job is there to still make
up and you can do somethingabout it.
And if you have a tool and theright people doing exactly what
(46:01):
we've been talking about throughthis show and giving you that,
it's very easy for the guy thatknows how to go pour manholes,
to go fix the guys going andpouring manholes, than it is for
the CFO putting us six monthsafter and going hey, here's your
report.
You lost your butt on that andthis is why you know what I mean
(46:21):
Yep, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
And I think you call it a good point on the labor
tracking and timekeeping too.
Right, that's a big part ofthis, and we have some great
partners which enable us tobring in the full circle Um it
uh has, have innovative toolsaround uh timekeeping and job
costing at the labor level, sothat then you can know when you
(46:47):
hope change those brought fromproject A to project B and
allocate those expensesaccordingly at the labor level.
And so it's uh, it's a lot andyou know it, it I, I, I
understand why it doesn't getdone, because you know we joke
that it's like eating yourvegetables.
(47:07):
I mean you, if, if you don'teat your vegetables, you know
where are you going to end up.
But at the same time, sometimesyou got to make the effort to
do it.
But the cool thing is is thereis tangible business outcomes
from this.
I mean I was sharing with yousome of those that we've had
(47:27):
with our clients and you havetangible increases in net profit
, right.
This is profit that goes to theowners, profit that goes to the
growth of the company, to thenew office, to the nicer
computers, to the cooler truck,right, all of that stuff that
everybody wants and the progressthat they want like that can't
(47:49):
happen if that's getting allsucked back into the projects
through their margins.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Dude, you're hitting the nail right on the head, my
guy.
It's definitely been adifferent perspective to hear
about.
You know a number one.
Thank you for you and the teamfor putting this product
together, pushing it out thereand go hey guys, there is
another solution out there toQuickBooks.
(48:16):
Solution out there toQuickBooks.
Yeah, we don't own 80% of themarket and gobble it up every
chance we get as soon assomebody else starts.
But hey, we're doing this builtby contractors for contractors.
And I think the last question Igot here well, I got two last
one that I always ask everybodyon the show and it'd be kind of
(48:37):
interesting from a software guybut the other thing was is we
definitely we can hear that it'sbuilt for general contractors,
but are you guys willing to takethe time during that
implementation and tailor it formore subcontractor based and
move the modules around, orhowever that may be, to get it
(48:59):
to what they need to look like?
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, 100% and I would say actually 50% of our
customer base are subcontractors.
So we work with epoxy guyspainters we have one of the
premier painters out of Chicagowe love.
We have restoration companies.
(49:22):
We have all kinds of specialtyand subcontractors across the
United States and the dynamicnature of their specific, really
regionalized subcontractingcompanies.
That being said, control Corpsis highly adaptable for their
processes.
The only thing that's not asideal right now is our lean
(49:43):
waiver management system.
So we have lean waivermanagement in Control Core and
it's built from the GCperspective.
We're working to release asubcontractor directional
experience there from the leanwaiver management side as well.
We were GCs first, so we werelooking to solve that massive
(50:09):
headache we had around managinglean waivers in there, and so we
can do that and that'sprimarily a GC experience.
That being said, everythingelse is highly adapt, adaptable,
flexible for many differenttypes of specialty.
Um, you know, sub segments ofthe industry, um and uh.
That's kind of why we haven'tgotten into like the crm, like
(50:30):
estimating thing.
It's because of, like one, likeyou said, there's a million
other softwares out there thatdo these well.
And two, how nuanced thatprocess is.
You know everybody's estimatingsheet and bidding sheets is
like so unique to their ownbusiness um, but like the core
financial and job costaccounting things are highly
like, relatable across, evenjust being a gc and and a sub um
(50:53):
and so, yeah, like that we weare fully positioned.
So I would say like, honestly,our customer base is pretty much
split, like we have half aboutGCs and half in the specialty
and subcontractor side.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Perfect.
I would have felt like I wasdoing these guys a douche.
That's the other main question.
Number one of course,implementation struggles, but
the other thing is the softwaresI see often that are built for
GCs subcontractors that aredealing with GCs every single
day are trying to be accustomedto and tailored to what they're
(51:32):
using as well.
So then they jump and they buythe same program because they
think it's going to be tailoredthe same and it's just not, and
so I wanted to get that questionanswered.
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attention to the honest workdone in blue collar industries
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They specialize incomprehensive digital marketing
(51:53):
services, from paid advertisingon Google and Facebook to
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I started working with Ike andthe team earlier this year and
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Their expertise in digital admanagement, website development,
social media and overallmarketing strategy has been an
(52:14):
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to bcperformancemarketingcom.
Backslash bcbpodcast or clickthe link in the show notes.
Slash description below.
(52:35):
Thanks guys.
Man, I ask everybody thisquestion at the end of every
single episode my guy and theseblue collar guys, and I think
you've probably dealt more fromthe mental pressures of this
question.
But what's the takeaway forthat blue collar worker who was
(52:57):
just sick and tired of beingstuck in the mud and that could
be taken from the guys coming toyou so frustrated about not
being able to see, you know froma project overview, or you know
, emotionally or maybe evenphysical?
Speaker 2 (53:14):
yeah, um, I know it, it wears on you.
Um, I, I don't have to spend mydays out in the sun.
Um, so I, you know, my firsttax paying job was as a, uh,
concrete foreman for basements.
I, I, I formed basements andhomes.
Dude, it was waking up at 2 amto get ahead of the sun so that
(53:38):
we could get off work at 12 andnot just die, right, and you
know that that's it's.
It's challenging work and thenand then moving that into, like,
trying to run your company andall of like the cash flow,
weight and requirements aroundpaying people salaries and and
bills every month and everythingit weighs on you and what I
(54:00):
would say is like, you know,we're a startup too, we're, you
know we're, we're small businessand we, we live those pains as
well that you guys do and, um,one of the things that I is one
never under invest in the teamthat you build around you.
Um, it's, I mean, I mean youcan't do it all.
(54:22):
You, you literally can't do itall, and I think that is a a
stigma that gets carried in thecontracting world.
Um, that you know they try tojust cover all the things right,
and maybe, maybe you did wellthat year, cause you did that.
But then you got done with thatyear and you're like dude, I
(54:44):
can't do this, this company,anymore, because I'm just dying.
You have to find good talent tobuy back your time and you will
see, after a slight dump in themargin that it takes to pay for
that, that you will see revenueincreasing, net profit
increasing, time.
One of our customers got 20hours of their week back as the
owner um implementing controlcore and in our um in our
(55:07):
partnership with josh.
So, um, uh, you know immenselike benefits there to now open
up your bandwidth to work on thethings that fill up your bucket
, rather than just dragging youdown in the mud.
Dude, I hate doing thisbookkeeping, I hate doing this
stuff.
I'd rather be out selling orworking with my project teams,
(55:27):
things that I want to be doingas a professional that I, you
know, grew up to be or wouldlike to be.
And so think about the thingsthat don't fill up your bucket
and how you can bring in goodtalent that will allow you to
just keep moving forward.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
Yep, be an expert in what you're an expert at and
once you're not, bring theexperts in man.
Very well said, but very hardconcept for a lot of us in the
blue collar space to grab a holdof man.
Caleb, I really appreciate yourtime today.
Where where can we find controlcore?
Where can they find more about?
Speaker 2 (56:04):
you, you bet, yeah, you can find us at control
corecom.
Um, if you're interested insetting up demo there, just
click on the get started button.
It will go straight to me.
You get a demo with with me.
Um, also reach out to me in myemail.
C as in charlie smith smith atcontrol corecom.
(56:25):
Find me on linkedin, uh, calebm smith.
Um, uh, so, yeah, happy to chat, always available.
Um, text me whatever.
We will meet you where you'reat.
So, um, we, we love.
I don't think there are peoplethat think about job costing and
a project-based accounting morethan our team.
And so if you're, if you havequestions and you don't even
(56:48):
want to be a control corecustomer, like that's totally
fine.
If you just want to say like,hey, how can I do this job cost
process better, we're happy tohelp you and provide value
anyway.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Only for you avid listeners of the Blue Collar
Business Podcast.
I really appreciate you guystuning in for another episode
this week.
If it's giving you some value,don't mind giving it a share.
Drop us a like, drop us afollow on, wherever you're
listening or watching us.
Mr Caleb, thank you so much foryour time, really looking
(57:23):
forward to shaking hands downthe road at some event somewhere
, I'm assuming 100% Cy.
Speaker 2 (57:28):
It's been a pleasure man.
Speaker 1 (57:30):
All right, man.
Guys, till next time.
Y'all be safe.
If you've enjoyed this episode,be sure to give it a like.
Share it with the fellers.
Check out our website to sendus any questions and comments
about your experience in theblue collar business.
Who do you want to hear from?
Send them our way and we'll doour best to answer any questions
you may have.
Till next time, guys.
Hey, guys, welcome to the Blue Collar Business
Podcast, where we discuss therealest, rawest, most relevant
stories and strategies behindbuilding every corner of a blue
collar business.
I'm your host, cy Kirby, and Iwant to help you in what it took
me trial and error and a wholelot of money to learn the
information that no one in thisindustry is willing to share.
(00:34):
Welcome back, guys, to anotherepisode of the Blue Collar
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(01:16):
Guys, we're heading off into thesoftware space today.
I, as you guys know, I'm verypassionate about software.
We talk about it a lot on theshow.
But, guys, I'm dealing with alittle bit of a tickle in my
throat, so I apologize.
I've been trying to drink alittle bit of water here.
But, um, software in the bluecollar space there's three types
(01:39):
.
I believe I've categorized afew videos about them.
You've got the front of thehouse, you've got estimating,
you've got sales, and thenthere's, you know, your project
management softwares, and we cango off into all of those and
what they try to generalize inand try and capture for your
project management needs.
(02:00):
But then there's always thatback backend software that, most
generally, that we're speakingto an audience of entrepreneurs
I bet you guys are runningQuickBooks, if I had to guess,
currently Now there's probablysome percentage of you running
Sage, I believe is the otherlarge one.
But today, guys, I am joined bya gentleman that has used his
(02:25):
wizardry of a team thatBrainiacs, and they have
produced a product that Ibelieve is going to change the
game here and help you guys.
And it's not just one of allthree, it's one all three in one
is where I was going with that.
It's one all three and one iswhere I was going with that
(02:46):
Today.
Gentlemen, I follow on LinkedIn,been following this company for
a little bit, checked them out.
I would like to say I'm an avidcustomer currently, but during
our project management, changesand corrections, as I've been
sharing with you guys over thepast couple months.
Changes and corrections, asI've been sharing with you guys
over the past couple months.
Didn't think that was an exact,perfect time to be switching
(03:10):
softwares as well, as you guysknow, implementation and
retraining of your guys it's oneof the most expensive things we
deal with.
But today, guys, I am joined bya gentleman who has an MBA in
leadership, and that issomething that needs to be
(03:34):
shined.
To follow that path and to beon a part of a team that
somebody has that kind ofaccolade is pretty incredible.
But avid, car enthusiast,traveler, family man and the
co-founder of Control Corps myman, caleb Smith how are you
doing, sir?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I'm doing well.
Si, it's good to be here.
I can't dude, I've got to matchyour enthusiasm for life, man,
just getting to know you more,this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Well, guys, we had a brief intro call.
Usually when I bring guests on,we take 15, 30 minutes and try
and talk about maybe what we'regoing to talk about through the
show, and I kind of picked hisbrain a little bit.
But, guys, I'm going to belearning just as much as you
guys today and I'm going to kindof give the floor up to Caleb
(04:26):
to talk about a product that isso unique.
As you guys know, I'm verypassionate about job costing, as
we have learned how importantthat is and how important it is
for the three words in our worldis know your cost.
And you know there's companiesout there 10, 20 years still
don't know those three words.
(04:46):
And you know I just went throughthe pride and the ego shot of
taking a step back and going hey, you don't know everything like
you think you do, so get to theright people.
But I went software chasing.
As you guys know, I've done theProcore game.
We have also done usedMicrosoft Teams, as we started
(05:06):
small iterations of what wethought we needed for project
management.
But it's not just a projectmanagement tool that you guys
have built.
What you shared with me in theintro was almost relieving to me
it's the replacement forQuickBooks in construction.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Couldn't have said it better, Si.
Talk a little bit about it.
My guy yeah, yeah, you bet.
So, just like you said, we are agroup of general contractors
and project-based accountantsthat really, as we were scaling
and building a DC firmparticularly my co-founding
(05:50):
partner, JD he still operates asa general contractor Just
hitting this wall of challengearound having visibility and
control over our projectfinancials, really understanding
where the heck we were as acompany related to projects, and
just having that transparencyover when you're transacting
(06:14):
dollars in your company do youknow where those are going and
how much you're spending?
And so not only having thatvisibility for your company but
at a project level andQuickBooks just wasn't cutting
it and, in addition to that,just having a lot of frustration
around having this financialtech stack.
That was just getting reallycumbersome.
You had to tie in a bunch ofspreadsheets, maybe a few other
softwares make it work withProcore, um, figuring out what
(06:38):
to do there, and so really wedecided to to set out to build
this, solve those problems, beenbuilding it and making sure we
get as much industry feedback,both from the field experience
with software like thisbookkeeping teams, anybody and
(07:07):
making sure we build a solutionthat is aligned with the
project-based world from a coreaccounting standpoint.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You hit it home and that's where I was hoping you'd
go with.
That is that this team is notonly super smart coming from the
techie world and the softwaredevelopment world, but you guys
also build things for a living.
You also ran into the sameproblems that we ran into the oh
my God, I've got to go to thisprogram to get this sheet, to
(07:39):
get this cut and fill, to matchit against this Excel sheet.
And you know my estimator stillhas four screens and we get it
all spread out.
And you know we build thisschedule in this program to
throw it's so all over the place.
And as you're scaling andgrowing, you're like, why is all
of this so hard?
You know, and if you jump offin into the software, software
(08:04):
world like we were doing, man,we were just tiptoeing.
And man, the first couple ofprograms, the implementation, it
all sounded so good in thesales call and I might poke at
you a little bit today.
I hope you're ready for it.
But the audience literallywanting to hear this because
we're talking about it a littlebit in the intro, like the
(08:28):
stigma of the software incontractor base.
Like, guys, if you don't,everybody's basically got an
accounting software, that'spretty much standard.
But if you have tried to scaleand grow and you've got multiple
crews, job documentation,scheduling, daily logs, all of
(08:52):
that wrapped up into, of course,once it gets to the next level,
is those project financials.
And when I've been throughthese softwares, man, where
they're not even set up forcontractors, it doesn't even the
terms don't even make sense.
Like where's a place to put achange order?
(09:14):
What do you mean?
It's not just.
I wish I could just go hey,everything's 300 bucks and they
pay me in two days.
You know it just doesn't happenlike that and they pay me in
two days.
You know it just doesn't happenlike that.
Things happen and changethrough the project but there's
no way of properly documentingit.
That's not to take your words,man, not just completely
(09:35):
cumbersome, right?
So software and contractors arealready a battle.
But from what I'm hearing, man,you guys are literally built
this product from where.
What phase do you guys kind ofstart?
Do you start in the estimatephase?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So we actually don't start in the estimate phase.
We start generally once there'sa contract in place Okay, and
that's when the transactionoccurs.
So we are bidding andestimating is in the product
roadmap.
Um, we, we, we, with a littletongue-in-cheek, say, like
(10:15):
control core is, we have builtit.
Every column of what controlcore is.
It took billion dollarcompanies just to do like 20 of
what we've done in the last 18months.
Now were we able to build itoff the backs of, like what they
all got wrong?
Yes, absolutely.
So we have an advantage there,right, but the component is like
(10:36):
we have to get all of thefoundational inputs correct
before we can continue buildingout the full stack.
And so that started as the coregeneral ledger covering all of
the accounting components andthen making sure you had
pathways to be able to manageand track and job cost every
(10:59):
financial transaction that youhave in a company.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
No, I really.
Actually, our model right nowis set up that CRM.
We call it fantasy land upthere in the estimation world
because it's like, till thatpoint of contract it really
doesn't matter.
Nobody past that office reallyneeds to know about it, unless
we need somebody to go take someshots or go build a quick
(11:26):
surface or something like thatto have an edge on some certain
situation.
But it's very, very slim tonone that anybody outside that
office.
So we are currently set up on aCRM software upfront and it
does very well.
We've got some processes builtwithin the what I call fantasy
(11:47):
land of the hopeful land, theland of heartbreak.
But past that point is, once ithits, contract is okay.
When the contract gets put intowhat?
And that's where we switch overto our project management
software.
We run our project and ourproject management software and
(12:07):
then we transfer over into ourfinancial software and that's
where it sounds like you guyshave really linked and it needs
to be linked without it beingsome ridiculous process of input
output.
So it's a major problem.
So talk about how a project.
We've got our contract landed.
(12:29):
We've got our subscription toControl Core.
What's our first steps?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, so once your project agreement's in place,
one of the frustrations that Ithink can happen in a system
like pro core is it requiresthat you have all the
information, um, before you cancontinue to move forward.
And how often is that the casein contractors world?
Never, my guy, so.
(12:57):
So that's a key difference thatwe wanted to make sure we
started, just like giving thatperspective like we live this
problem Right, we know that thisis not a solution.
When you're like you know, maybeyou have a phone number and an
email and like one line ofinformation and that's your,
your start, right, likeliterally going, and then, and
(13:18):
then the owner you know, cowboyJoe was like had his
conversation and wrote the noteson the back of the napkin,
right, like you got to work withthat, right, and and you know,
of course, I'm sure he's the dadof, like the new person who's
trying to take over all theoperations, right, and so you
know, that's just kind of whathappens in life and anything in
(13:42):
between.
And so we want to be able tostart working with financial
data, even if it's incomplete,related to the contract and the
agreement, so that you can beginattaching transactions or
attaching information to that,and so basically, you'd set up a
(14:04):
project in Control Core andyou'd be able to begin working
with that.
Whether it's in like, even ifit's at the pre-construction
level and not much is going onthere, you can at least begin
tying any cost associated withthat to the project right.
(14:26):
So now you're actually able toget that visibility of how much
do we actually spend in thepre-construction of this project
.
That's like hammering yourmargins rather than.
Well, we actually didn't haveany visibility until costs came
later, until costs came laterand we had no idea that 40% of
(14:51):
our margin was taken outactually getting this project
off the ground.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah yeah, literally it happens all the time.
There's a lot of guys probablylistening going man, what are
they talking about?
They're just now learning aboutI'm just trying to figure out
my overhead percentage and myindirect cost and trying to
figure out how to bid for that.
(15:14):
And you know they're justcompiling it all into that.
But the more you can get offindirect and the more you can
job and correct me if I'm wrongconjumbled, maybe, potential
project that could be gamechanger.
They ain't got no information.
Cowboy Joe just keeps callingyou every Tuesday wanting a
freaking number.
The plans are halfway drawntogether.
There ain't no topo, thereain't no geotech, but it's a
(15:56):
raging opportunity.
But at the same time you'veonly got his phone number.
He won't email, he won't doanything.
The engineer sends you.
I've been in those situations.
But a lot of times we call themthose pie-in-the-sky deals is
what our estimator loves to callthem.
I love those opportunities.
Putting those together andmaterializing them all the way
(16:18):
down to a point of contract.
It can be absolutely tiresome.
A lot of estimators don't likethat.
They want a set of drawings.
They want them to be the bestpotential possible when it does
hit that point of contract andthey hand it off and they can't
watch it anymore.
If they run up on that gravelline item and they've spent all
(16:40):
their gravel in day one, they'relike, hey, what were you
estimating on?
But a lot of these guyslistening too, man, they're just
finding out that, oh, I need toget that production data back
to the estimator as quick ashumanly possible so he can
estimate fairly to a productionlevel that we've produced.
(17:00):
Yeah, exactly, and it's a cycle.
But I'm so glad that you guysare.
I get it.
That bidding and estimatingit's really cool to hear it's
coming down the pipeline.
But man, there's so many CRMplatforms out there that do it
really really well.
And you're right, it's all.
Yes, that's great, but a pointof contract moving forward, but
(17:20):
still being able to take thosepie in the sky deals, start
adding information, boom, pointof contract.
Here's the dollars, brass tacksand move on how we would break
that job down in control core.
Because job costing issomething I just have really
(17:43):
recently known about.
That's one of those blue collartopic killers.
Because job costing they'relike oh I job cost, you know my
gravels.
There's no job costing throughthe project.
You have estimated job costs,but what are your known job
costs and talk a little bitabout how that contract is broke
down and how the job costingprogresses through.
(18:06):
You know invoicing and kind ofhighlight job costing for these
guys.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, great, great topic.
In Control Core we try tocreate an environment which you
can capture every transactionthat's coming into the company
and manage and tag those, movethem through an approval-based
workflow that aligns with theright people on the job and into
(18:30):
your back office staff, and so,during that process, you need
to have a structure that enablespeople to allocate costs
associated with their, their,their correct um buckets,
essentially, and so, um, youcreate cost codes, right, and so
, uh, for, for a generalcontractor, that could be
(18:50):
hundreds of cost codes.
Um, you know, our, my, my,co-founder, jd, is his firms,
they've got over 600 cost codesthey run through, um, yeah, my
gosh, yeah right um, he uses theCSI format.
So, um, go ahead and, you know,do a google search on that,
(19:13):
learn up on on what that means.
But it's kind of a generalizedformat.
But, that being said, so manycompanies are nuanced.
They they customize off of that, they do their own thing or
they build out their own.
We help a lot of companies kindof come up with their own thing
and we use a template as wellif they want.
But fundamentally, if you're asub or specialty contractor, you
(19:34):
might have maybe just 20, rightit?
It's significantly differentpicture.
Now, what's very important is toknow that how you're breaking
down your costs enable you todrill into the specifics of
those related to any part of theproject.
So it could be at architectureand engineering, or it could be
(19:58):
in concrete, it could be dirt,it could be finished work, any
of that, and then you drill downin.
You know, is this like thewiring associated with that and
what's type of can say, okay,man, we're getting killed on?
You know, maybe there's sometariffs or there's an increase
(20:48):
in steel pricing or this onevendor just randomly decided to
increase their prices orwhatever, and you would have no
idea if you're looking at thegeneral picture of your project
around how profitable it was.
Uh, when you say, okay, well,this is where the expenses are
going so far and this is where,um, you know we projected this
(21:11):
would be as far as like theoriginal budget cost, but you
didn't have any idea that thatone vendor now it's just like
increased their cost by 50% andmaybe there goes your margin,
maybe it doesn't, but either way, um, if you don't have that
visibility when project agesblows it out the door with it
being awesome and profitable,but project B just tanks to you
(21:34):
and you had no idea that thathappened to either of those
projects.
When you get to the end of theyear and your CPA says, man, you
guys made 2 million bucks thisyear, and you're like, that's
nothing.
What I was in my bank accountright now, you know, and you're
just feeling the pain because itdoes not translate at all
across that.
And so one of the other corethings that we do is you have
(21:56):
the job costing and, through thecost codes on those
transactions, that allows you toget super granular in your
projects.
But then we bridge that intoyour company financials where we
do a cost type, where you arenow, and this goes into the
Procore thing, where Procore hasbeen challenging.
Procore looks for that, and soin order to get information
(22:20):
working well with pro court, youneed to be able to uh have a
cost type, and so what that isis uh it.
If we have um drywall, forexample, as the cost code, the
cost type might be labor ormaterials, and so then now at
the company level, you canreally draw, drill in and
(22:42):
understand where are my costsgoing at a labor level materials
and you can get a really goodpicture from your P&L without
having 600 cost codes screwingup your, your charter accounts.
And like when you as an ownertry to go in there, you're like
I have no idea what's going on.
I mean, we just saw somebody'schart of accounts.
Where they were, they wereliterally taking cost codes and
(23:03):
putting them in as um parts oftheir chart of accounts and they
had over 300 line items on thechart of accounts to just try to
understand it and bucketeverything.
And we're like, oh my gosh, youknow and and, yeah, and, and
we've seen that that kind ofmethod is kind of being taught
on youtube as like a way to dothings and it's it's tough
(23:23):
because it's like guys, if youdo that, you're gonna be in a
heap of of uh trouble in termsof understanding where you stand
as a company let me tell yousome.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I am an avid youtuber myself.
Shout out.
But I mean there is things thatI will definitely get
perceptions from, but fromfinancial and the way you run
your company, man, I would notadvise you guys to be following
(23:52):
anything from YouTube.
I have been very ill-advisedover the years by people that
were very close to me, even CPAs, and if I was looking out and
(24:12):
making sure I was seeing allperceptions of the market, I may
have been paying a little bitmore attention.
My guy is is you're hitting thenail on the head with job
costing and you brought up theProcore thing and, man, we did a
couple of years worth ofProcore and we actually got hit
in the head with cost codes.
Man, we were a six, seven yearold company.
We didn't realize we just gotgiven this ginormously powerful
(24:39):
tool that we were nowhere evenready to strap on to our tool
belt because we didn't even havethe basics.
Like, how's your implementationdoing at the implementation
level to integrate this softwareand get it live?
(24:59):
Because I will tell you, thewhole first year of Procore I
dang sure didn't even get itfully live and then by the
second year we were comingthrough thought it would really
pull together and we stillcouldn't get past cost codes and
all these.
Oh, we'd reach out for help andthen it would be another person
(25:21):
and another Zoom call and I'mjust sharing you with the
frustration that we all feel inthis market.
That builds that stigma, my guy.
But what's the implementationlike with Control Core?
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, it's a big challenge in the industry,
especially around software.
It's a big challenge in theindustry, especially around
software.
Like it really doesn't matterhow cool the tool is if it can't
be implemented effectively.
I mean, the GC firm on our sidetook two years to get Procore
(25:54):
going right and it's, like yousaid, a big lift, tons of work,
right, and you know, you guyshave, you guys have your
businesses to run, um, you havefires put out, you have um
projects to run and so the like.
Just getting bogged down andgetting the value out of the
(26:15):
software you're spending, as isnot something you want to be
having a headache with.
So that has been one of the keycompetitive advantages that we
look to take to the market interms of the time and the amount
of touch points you have withus as the founders and with our
whole team.
Every one of our customers hasour cell phone and we're getting
(26:37):
calls at seven o'clock at night.
Hey, dude, like, tell me, likehow do I do this thing?
Or whatever.
Like we will answer yourquestion right there.
We also have, like we have afull implementation and
migration process.
So we'll, we'll migrate yourgeneral ledger and we, our team,
handles that.
So you're just business asusual doing your thing and we,
(27:00):
we get that all taken care of.
We build out the backend as faras all of your project data,
your job codes, job um, yourcost codes and your and your job
uh information.
We work on that and the thingis is along that way, we set up
um every week at least 30minutes of your time.
We set up every week at least30 minutes of your time.
Brian Solomon, my co founder,our CEO.
(27:21):
He oversees all customerimplementation.
So the CEO of our companycompany that's how high we we
prioritize that and so he willmeet with you for 30 minutes a
week at least.
If you need more time that week, we'll make that time and um,
we will meet with you as long asyou'd like.
So there's no like well, youget like six weeks of
(27:43):
implementation and then you'reon your own.
Like, we will train your team,we'll help them set up and what
we do is we do it on like realstuff.
So you say like, hey, I got thisbill in.
Okay, let's take a look at thisbill and let's get this process
.
So, okay, we um tagged it, weput the information in, we job
cost it.
We moved into the next stage,feel comfortable with that, yeah
, let's try another one.
(28:04):
And then, okay, now you're good, let's, let's move on to the
next segment.
But either way, we'reconsistently enabling our
customers so that, like thissystem, just like it, it feels
like it's designed for them.
Right, it and um, fundamentally, um, we, we, we, just we don't
(28:25):
we want to be your key financialpartner for 10 plus years,
right and um, just handing youlike a robust software like
control core is not going to bethe best thing there.
So control core is simple andto be the best thing there.
So control core is simple andit's fairly easy to use.
Um, it's not like a legacybased software that's just gonna
(28:47):
, you know, you're like I haveno idea what the heck's going on
in this software.
Um, it's not overly simplifiedso that you can't accomplish
what you need to, but at thesame time, it's robust.
There's a lot going on in there, and so one thing that's cool
is our team really focuses onoptimizing the personas who are
(29:08):
logging in under their roles,and so if there's a project
manager, an estimator who doesneed to engage with Control Core
, or there's a controller, orthere's an owner, they only see
what's relevant to them and sothat when you have approvals
coming through for transactions,you only see those approvals
for your projects that you workin right and you know what's
(29:28):
what you need to handle.
So that's, that's, that's partof it.
We also we try to kind of applya dial to this where, like, if
you're super comfortable andyou're like dude, I can handle
any software that's having greattake it.
We'll still do implementationhowever you want, but you run
with it.
But others, like dude, I havebusinesses to run, I have people
(29:49):
to manage.
Let's turn that dial up.
We'll help you with yourbookkeeping.
Our team specializes in projectbased accounting.
We know, like how to handlethat.
We'll bring in fractional CFOtype engagements, but in a
package where you're not payingfor a fractional CFO, you're
just getting their insights andguidance without having to pay
(30:11):
the monthly retainer.
So you have cashflowforecasting, you have job costs
and you're reporting all of that, but built for a small business
Because and because you stillhave the complexity that, like a
really large business does youjust don't have the budget and
the bandwidth right.
So that's how we want to help.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Dude.
It's definitely a gap in themarket.
Dude, I have again been allover the map with softwares and
I haven't really shared what Iuse currently.
But we have integratedbuilder's trend.
I think this is our second year.
Are we super happy from thestandpoint of it being billed
(30:50):
directly for subcontractors?
No, it's not.
And here's the thing with us islike we GC some land development
stuff, so we need the GC stuff,but a lot of times we're either
a utility sub or a dirt sub onthese commercial projects or et
cetera.
So it can be a wide plethora ofrange.
(31:12):
But builder's train has beengreat.
There's some things I wouldlove for it to go further on.
And we don't use any of thefinancials.
I've already covered that.
We use it directly for aproject management-based
software because we have foundit.
It's about the only thing wecan actually get results
(31:33):
consistently back from the field.
Because I don't care how goodthe daggum tool is, if you're
not getting consistent flow backfrom the actual end point and
back up to estimation, then it'sall design flaw to begin with.
Buy GCs for GCs.
(31:58):
It sounds like this is theproject financial tool that
every general contractor shoulddefinitely get a demo call and
to have your CEO say take thetime and implement because it is
that big of a deal.
Like you're, you're pausingsomebody's life business.
(32:19):
A lot of us it's.
It's everything you know, otheroutside of our families, and um
it, it.
It puts so much strain andextra stress because it's not
just running like normal.
It gives the owner or operatorsor whoever's involved, the team
involved, it's just so muchextra headache.
(32:40):
But to hear that level ofimplementation is did.
I hear you say you would helpbuild cost codes.
Yeah, 100%.
Man, where were you three, fouryears ago?
But to your point, man, there'sa massive gap in the market.
For you do want to be, you wantto have that back end ability I
(33:05):
guess we would call it of thosebig boy companies, but at the
same time, you don't have theirindirect budget.
Yeah, nope, you have to besparingly, but at the same time
you don't have their indirectbudget.
Yeah, no, you have to besparingly.
But if there's one thing you'regoing to be sparingly on, it
doesn't need to be yourfinancial software.
You need to be able to.
I love the word visibility andtransparency that you use.
(33:28):
Man, you've got to be able tosee that, to be able to see that
, and it sounds like not onlywill you guys help get it
established and up and runningand live, but it sounds like
you'll also explain a little bitalong the way.
You know bookkeeping serviceand trying to help these guys.
Because I can't tell you, caleb,the amount of guys that are
(33:50):
probably sitting here going man,what's a cost code?
Guys that are probably sittinghere going man, what's a cost
code?
And don't feel any way, guyslike, literally, don't feel any
way.
You don't know what, you don'tknow, I didn't know what I
didn't know.
I didn't until Sarah looked atme.
And we can't go any furtherwith Procore integration until
we have cost codes.
Do you know what a cost code is?
I'm like I'm going to go get ajob, love you.
(34:16):
Like what was I?
Who's I going to reach out to?
We would have already had thatperson in place, if you know
what I mean.
So the, the level ofimplementation is always going
to be, I believe, the stigmakiller for you guys as you move
forward, because if you cancarry that out, man, um, it
sounds like the perfect toolthat you can track from point of
(34:38):
contract to job closeout.
And, yeah, is it decentlyuser-friendly?
You're hitting around about it,but the the one thing I
couldn't stand about, pro course, how unforgiving it was once
you went live with something.
You know what I mean.
Right, quickbooks has gotten alittle bit from.
We just recently switched fromdesktop.
(35:00):
Over the years we were toldthat we had to have desktop and
finally we moved back to online.
That was a whole process initself but, like I've always
heard, quickbooks is veryunforgiving.
I used to run our books fromfirst year to, you know
QuickBooks online very, very,very high level, but it was
there, you know, yeah, so yeah,that's a.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That's a great point, and so I would say this like To
use Control Core, you need tounderstand what it means to like
a business.
That's.
That's it like.
If you don't know that, thenlet's, let's go back to like,
(35:43):
let's go and, um, you know, do alittle bit of learning.
But I fundamentally like that's.
I think one of the biggeststigmas that, like the blue
collar world gets is that peopledon't know how to run
businesses.
And yet I sit down with umprospects and customers every
week and these uh owners, uhoperators, are some of the most
(36:04):
sophisticated uh people that Iknow and they actually know
their software.
They know their processesreally really well.
Um software, they know theirprocesses really really well.
Um, and so like knowledgearound that is is rarely like a
challenge.
What, what is the thing is like.
Control court um covers a lotof ground for your company, and
(36:26):
so that's where it's like we dohave to kind of show you through
the software.
We have to do some some somekey uh setup for you to make
sure that the data that's comingin is correct.
But outside of that, what we dois we try to replicate muscle
memory in the system.
So when you get credit cardtransactions coming through.
You've got the opentransactions, you review those,
(36:49):
you job cost them, you tag themto a project, you apply the data
that you want, link thereceipts and then it's submitted
.
Now it moves to pendingapprovals.
You go through that process.
Guess what the bill managementsystem looks like?
The exact same structure.
You have the open bills, you gothrough the job costs, you tag
moves into pending approvalright, and so you don't have to
(37:10):
relearn every step of thesoftware every time.
You can get into a new moduleand be like oh, I know where
this is because it's the sameprocess, and so that's like we
have a full mobile applicationand that's great for the field
staff.
You're spending $500 at HomeDepot and you can easily split
(37:31):
that $500 across three differentprojects and apply the receipt
there and job cost that and I'vedone this and it takes like 20
seconds on your phone and you'redone.
And so we tried to optimize forfield staff and what's important
there, as well as optimize foryour back end.
There's so many owners that Italk to.
(37:52):
They're like, yeah, dude, we'redoing good and stuff.
And I'm like, hey, let me talkto your accounts payable
specialists and they're justdying and I'm like, well, you
have a really good accountspayable specialist or controller
because they're making yourlife really easy and they're
creating a lot of deliverables.
How they do their job might be,they're going insane, and so
let's talk to them about youknow how we can make that
(38:14):
process better, but either way,I would say it's user friendly,
it's streamlined, it makes sense.
That's one of the biggest thingsthat points of feedback we get
about QuickBooks Online,particularly around like trying
to use that in a job costingenvironment, project based
accountants, like it doesn'tmake sense, it doesn't, it's not
intuitive, right?
(38:35):
So, um, you know again, I say,like, control core is not like a
basic software, it is, it isaccounting.
So if, like you, just hateaccounting, no matter what, no
matter what tool, then let'stalk about our bookkeeping team
and things like that.
We can just get this done foryou.
But if you'd like to getinvolved with that and you love
(38:56):
those systems and you want atool that's even better and more
optimized and makes sense andsimple to use, then ControlCore
is a great fit there.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when
you said I've met a lot ofowners that are super
sophisticated blue collarentrepreneurs, visionariesaries
and man, I've met them too.
They're unbelievable people.
It's not from the lack ofeffort, it's just from the lack
of somebody sitting downspeaking their language for an
hour or two.
It's not that they didn'tretain the knowledge, but it's a
(39:27):
lot of times.
You know that I have found,especially, you know, doing this
show and sitting down withwhite collar professionals that
are, um, extremely decorated andhere I am a ditch digger, you
know what I mean but trying tosit down and embrace that
conversation so they canunderstand that.
(39:48):
Hey, look, yeah, you need alittle bit of bookkeeping
knowledge and they may have gone.
Man, I remember that time thatCaleb said on that one podcast
you know, I need to put a littlebit of time.
My wife's been after me or, youknow, lady in the front office
really needs some help on thebookkeeping.
Yeah, get a little fractionalhelp, man.
I'm doing the same thing, man,get it to a point.
(40:08):
But what it sounds like controlcore is is when you're ready to
take that next step and you'rescaling and you're growing and
you need the visibility aboutwhere your money's going,
because there comes a point, man, when you're.
I grew fast, my God.
I don't recommend it, um, butat the same time I did it and so
(40:28):
I wish I had something likethis in place three or four
years ago that I could have hadthe visibility through the
growth per project.
Because, back to another pointman, a lot of these guys you're
giving a tool of accountability,because I had some dump trucks
(40:51):
that were just eating us alivebetween payroll and drivers and
maintenance and payments and Igot these guys over here
carrying the mail on the pipecrew and then my dirt guys over
here he's doing pretty good fora couple of months and he just
absolutely had a terrible month.
Whatever the case may be, buthow do you know what your
(41:14):
business is doing?
And a lot of these blue collarguys you may have HVAC company
and you may be sitting theregoing.
Man, I do a lot of my monthlyreoccurring cash flow to be able
to fund these large projectsthat I want to chase more of.
Maybe if I ramped up more of my, you know, reoccurring cash,
(41:43):
it's all about what I'm gettingat, guys, not to go too far off
in the weeds.
There comes a point in timewhere strategy becomes a thing,
becomes a thing, and whether youthink it's not a thing, but
budgeting, cashflow projections,forecasting the things I say
(42:04):
that I didn't highlight, focus alot when I was building a
PsyCon in the first seven yearsout of the 10, and then I
finally hyper-focused on it, butby then it was too late.
I'm trying to build a freakingairplane as I'm flying it and I
don't recommend that at all.
And you know, sometimes itcomes crashing and you've got to
do everything you can to gether back in the air as fast as
you can and it's.
(42:25):
It's that rollercoaster ofvolatility, but volatility.
I think I said that wrong, butthey fact check me and they
spell check me all the time onhere.
So anyhow but that next, youknow you have a team of girls
and they're trying on thebookkeeping level, but they need
a software.
They're scanning through allthese Excel sheets every single
(42:47):
time.
You're like, hey, give me this.
And they're producing thesedocuments.
Give them a program like this.
Maybe not jive off all the wayto the pro core level, don't you
know?
You may have a small.
You're maybe like I starteddoing just literally project on
Microsoft teams and we allshared it and that's where the
job data went Okay.
But how does that all transferand tangle up?
(43:09):
Get them a product like controlcore where they could start at
the point of contract andvisibly see every.
The guys didn't for some reasonorder concrete out of a truck
and they went to the dadgumLowe's and bought a pallet of
Quikrete.
That kind of stuff affectsmargins after a while.
(43:30):
And the one thing, the biganalogy on job costing that I
like to share, and a shout outto Mr Nick Peters.
He was on episode 20, somethingof the blue collar
wwwbluecollarbusinesspodcastcom.
You can listen and watchcompletely free from there or
any of your beautiful podcastsstreaming services.
(43:52):
Drop a rating and followShameless, plug there real quick
.
But the number one thing thathit home with me is a blue
collar guy.
I'm an underground contractor.
He sits down with me and hesays all right, cy, you say you
know your cost and say I've gotand the audience is probably
tired of hearing me say this,I've shared it several times but
(44:15):
it's stuck with me and it'sperfect for the topic Say, we've
got two guys bid to go do 20manholes.
Okay, they're bid at two daysper manhole.
Well, their crew has beenrained out for a couple of weeks
and Johnny said let's hop overbilly's crew with the manhole
(44:36):
guys.
They needed the help.
They you'll.
It'll make it easier on them,okay.
So now we got three guys right,so then spin around.
It took him on the first fourmanholes.
It took him four days a piece.
Okay, when did you know thatJohnny hopped on Billy's crew
(44:57):
and made it a three-man crew?
And when did you know that ittook them four days of labor per
man hole instead of your twodays?
Is it at man hole number two?
Is it at man hole number five,10, 20, six months after the
job's complete?
Never, I was at that, neverpart of the meter and I've
(45:17):
slowly been working my way backand it takes time, guys all the
way back down to live trackingand going hey, we're on our
second manhole.
The work in progress reportshows us that we're bleeding a
little bit here on labor, andwhy is the concrete bill on this
so high?
Oh well, they were going tolows.
(45:37):
Whatever the case may be, guys,I'm just trying to bring light
to it is that you've got to knowit's your survival of your
company.
You've got to know it.
Manhole Two to ten somewhere inthere where you still have
control over it, where 50% ofthe job is there to still make
up and you can do somethingabout it.
And if you have a tool and theright people doing exactly what
(46:01):
we've been talking about throughthis show and giving you that,
it's very easy for the guy thatknows how to go pour manholes,
to go fix the guys going andpouring manholes, than it is for
the CFO putting us six monthsafter and going hey, here's your
report.
You lost your butt on that andthis is why you know what I mean
(46:21):
Yep, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
And I think you call it a good point on the labor
tracking and timekeeping too.
Right, that's a big part ofthis, and we have some great
partners which enable us tobring in the full circle Um it
uh has, have innovative toolsaround uh timekeeping and job
costing at the labor level, sothat then you can know when you
(46:47):
hope change those brought fromproject A to project B and
allocate those expensesaccordingly at the labor level.
And so it's uh, it's a lot andyou know it, it I, I, I
understand why it doesn't getdone, because you know we joke
that it's like eating yourvegetables.
(47:07):
I mean you, if, if you don'teat your vegetables, you know
where are you going to end up.
But at the same time, sometimesyou got to make the effort to
do it.
But the cool thing is is thereis tangible business outcomes
from this.
I mean I was sharing with yousome of those that we've had
(47:27):
with our clients and you havetangible increases in net profit
, right.
This is profit that goes to theowners, profit that goes to the
growth of the company, to thenew office, to the nicer
computers, to the cooler truck,right, all of that stuff that
everybody wants and the progressthat they want like that can't
(47:49):
happen if that's getting allsucked back into the projects
through their margins.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Dude, you're hitting the nail right on the head, my
guy.
It's definitely been adifferent perspective to hear
about.
You know a number one.
Thank you for you and the teamfor putting this product
together, pushing it out thereand go hey guys, there is
another solution out there toQuickBooks.
(48:16):
Solution out there toQuickBooks.
Yeah, we don't own 80% of themarket and gobble it up every
chance we get as soon assomebody else starts.
But hey, we're doing this builtby contractors for contractors.
And I think the last question Igot here well, I got two last
one that I always ask everybodyon the show and it'd be kind of
(48:37):
interesting from a software guybut the other thing was is we
definitely we can hear that it'sbuilt for general contractors,
but are you guys willing to takethe time during that
implementation and tailor it formore subcontractor based and
move the modules around, orhowever that may be, to get it
(48:59):
to what they need to look like?
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, 100% and I would say actually 50% of our
customer base are subcontractors.
So we work with epoxy guyspainters we have one of the
premier painters out of Chicagowe love.
We have restoration companies.
(49:22):
We have all kinds of specialtyand subcontractors across the
United States and the dynamicnature of their specific, really
regionalized subcontractingcompanies.
That being said, control Corpsis highly adaptable for their
processes.
The only thing that's not asideal right now is our lean
(49:43):
waiver management system.
So we have lean waivermanagement in Control Core and
it's built from the GCperspective.
We're working to release asubcontractor directional
experience there from the leanwaiver management side as well.
We were GCs first, so we werelooking to solve that massive
(50:09):
headache we had around managinglean waivers in there, and so we
can do that and that'sprimarily a GC experience.
That being said, everythingelse is highly adapt, adaptable,
flexible for many differenttypes of specialty.
Um, you know, sub segments ofthe industry, um and uh.
That's kind of why we haven'tgotten into like the crm, like
(50:30):
estimating thing.
It's because of, like one, likeyou said, there's a million
other softwares out there thatdo these well.
And two, how nuanced thatprocess is.
You know everybody's estimatingsheet and bidding sheets is
like so unique to their ownbusiness um, but like the core
financial and job costaccounting things are highly
like, relatable across, evenjust being a gc and and a sub um
(50:53):
and so, yeah, like that we weare fully positioned.
So I would say like, honestly,our customer base is pretty much
split, like we have half aboutGCs and half in the specialty
and subcontractor side.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Perfect.
I would have felt like I wasdoing these guys a douche.
That's the other main question.
Number one of course,implementation struggles, but
the other thing is the softwaresI see often that are built for
GCs subcontractors that aredealing with GCs every single
day are trying to be accustomedto and tailored to what they're
(51:32):
using as well.
So then they jump and they buythe same program because they
think it's going to be tailoredthe same and it's just not, and
so I wanted to get that questionanswered.
Blue Collar PerformanceMarketing's passion is to bring
attention to the honest workdone in blue collar industries
through effective,results-driven marketing tactics
.
They specialize incomprehensive digital marketing
(51:53):
services, from paid advertisingon Google and Facebook to
website development and contentstrategy.
I started working with Ike andthe team earlier this year and
they've had a huge impact on ourspecific marketing campaign and
trajectory of our overallcompany.
Their expertise in digital admanagement, website development,
social media and overallmarketing strategy has been an
(52:14):
absolute game changer for oursales and marketing at Sycon.
If you're looking to work witha marketing team who does what
they say, does it well and isalways looking for ways to help
your company grow, book adiscovery call with Ike by going
to bcperformancemarketingcom.
Backslash bcbpodcast or clickthe link in the show notes.
Slash description below.
(52:35):
Thanks guys.
Man, I ask everybody thisquestion at the end of every
single episode my guy and theseblue collar guys, and I think
you've probably dealt more fromthe mental pressures of this
question.
But what's the takeaway forthat blue collar worker who was
(52:57):
just sick and tired of beingstuck in the mud and that could
be taken from the guys coming toyou so frustrated about not
being able to see, you know froma project overview, or you know
, emotionally or maybe evenphysical?
Speaker 2 (53:14):
yeah, um, I know it, it wears on you.
Um, I, I don't have to spend mydays out in the sun.
Um, so I, you know, my firsttax paying job was as a, uh,
concrete foreman for basements.
I, I, I formed basements andhomes.
Dude, it was waking up at 2 amto get ahead of the sun so that
(53:38):
we could get off work at 12 andnot just die, right, and you
know that that's it's.
It's challenging work and thenand then moving that into, like,
trying to run your company andall of like the cash flow,
weight and requirements aroundpaying people salaries and and
bills every month and everythingit weighs on you and what I
(54:00):
would say is like, you know,we're a startup too, we're, you
know we're, we're small businessand we, we live those pains as
well that you guys do and, um,one of the things that I is one
never under invest in the teamthat you build around you.
Um, it's, I mean, I mean youcan't do it all.
(54:22):
You, you literally can't do itall, and I think that is a a
stigma that gets carried in thecontracting world.
Um, that you know they try tojust cover all the things right,
and maybe, maybe you did wellthat year, cause you did that.
But then you got done with thatyear and you're like dude, I
(54:44):
can't do this, this company,anymore, because I'm just dying.
You have to find good talent tobuy back your time and you will
see, after a slight dump in themargin that it takes to pay for
that, that you will see revenueincreasing, net profit
increasing, time.
One of our customers got 20hours of their week back as the
owner um implementing controlcore and in our um in our
(55:07):
partnership with josh.
So, um, uh, you know immenselike benefits there to now open
up your bandwidth to work on thethings that fill up your bucket
, rather than just dragging youdown in the mud.
Dude, I hate doing thisbookkeeping, I hate doing this
stuff.
I'd rather be out selling orworking with my project teams,
(55:27):
things that I want to be doingas a professional that I, you
know, grew up to be or wouldlike to be.
And so think about the thingsthat don't fill up your bucket
and how you can bring in goodtalent that will allow you to
just keep moving forward.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
Yep, be an expert in what you're an expert at and
once you're not, bring theexperts in man.
Very well said, but very hardconcept for a lot of us in the
blue collar space to grab a holdof man.
Caleb, I really appreciate yourtime today.
Where where can we find controlcore?
Where can they find more about?
Speaker 2 (56:04):
you, you bet, yeah, you can find us at control
corecom.
Um, if you're interested insetting up demo there, just
click on the get started button.
It will go straight to me.
You get a demo with with me.
Um, also reach out to me in myemail.
C as in charlie smith smith atcontrol corecom.
(56:25):
Find me on linkedin, uh, calebm smith.
Um, uh, so, yeah, happy to chat, always available.
Um, text me whatever.
We will meet you where you'reat.
So, um, we, we love.
I don't think there are peoplethat think about job costing and
a project-based accounting morethan our team.
And so if you're, if you havequestions and you don't even
(56:48):
want to be a control corecustomer, like that's totally
fine.
If you just want to say like,hey, how can I do this job cost
process better, we're happy tohelp you and provide value
anyway.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Only for you avid listeners of the Blue Collar
Business Podcast.
I really appreciate you guystuning in for another episode
this week.
If it's giving you some value,don't mind giving it a share.
Drop us a like, drop us afollow on, wherever you're
listening or watching us.
Mr Caleb, thank you so much foryour time, really looking
(57:23):
forward to shaking hands downthe road at some event somewhere
, I'm assuming 100% Cy.
Speaker 2 (57:28):
It's been a pleasure man.
Speaker 1 (57:30):
All right, man.
Guys, till next time.
Y'all be safe.
If you've enjoyed this episode,be sure to give it a like.
Share it with the fellers.
Check out our website to sendus any questions and comments
about your experience in theblue collar business.
Who do you want to hear from?
Send them our way and we'll doour best to answer any questions
you may have.
Till next time, guys.
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