December 10, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode, we sit down with Eric Hellitzer, Founder and CEO of SubBase, to discuss how his background in construction inspired him to create a technology platform that’s transforming material management for contractors. Eric shares his journey from field operations to founding a tech company that’s simplifying and centralizing workflows across the construction industry. We explore how SubBase streamlines communication between field and office, integrates real-time data, and leverages AI to improve efficiency. Eric also discusses the future of construction technology, from computer vision to VR, and how innovation is helping attract and retain the next generation of construction professionals.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All right, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of COPOD. I'm your host, Caroline,
and today I'm joined by Eric Hellitzer. Eric. How are
(00:21):
you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey, Caroline, great, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, of course, hopefully I didn't butcher the last name
too much.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
No, you said it perfect. Actually most people don't get
it right the first time.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
You did.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Great. Good start.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Well, and that's why I asked before the podcast. But
I mean with that what five seconds I had already forgotten?
So awesome. Well, Eric is joining us today. He is
the founder and CEO of sub Bass. So Eric, let's
get into it. Who are you?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, I would love to so. My background lends itself
more towards construction than it does technology. I'm a University
of Florida grad who studied construction management. Spent nearly two
decades in field operations pre construction between both the specialty
trade contractor world, working for a very large concrete contractor,
(01:22):
and then also worked on the general contracting side. That
led to the third phase of my career, which was
jumping into technology to solve many of the material management
and equipment rental management pieces of the manual workflows today
for trade contractors. But background is primarily construction, learned the
(01:43):
technology through just learned experience in the field and also
building with the team that we have now. So my
background now combines both, but really started from construction operations.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, and that's a really strong background to have, especially
when we're talking about technology and everything. You know, coming
in to an industry with a background that you already
have in that industry just gives you such a leg
up and kind of thinking about when you first started
sub base, you know, how did that experience that you
already had kind of transition into how you started this company.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah. So we we actually started the company out of
a construction company, and the reason it started out of
there was because we we had seen from just experience
on the job site the pain points of materials management.
So we had a first look into the day to
day aspects of theirs manual workflows that many subcontractors face today.
(02:42):
So for us, you know, doing a lot of discovery
was already in front of our face. We saw where
the pain points were, we understood where the adoption hurdles
would be. We also knew what other you know, software
was out there. In the world, specifically in the in
the in the trade world that wasn't solving some of
the problems. So we had a first look into that,
(03:03):
which is what gave us, I would say, the competitive,
competitive advantage to move fast to build something that actually
would make sense for how trade contractors would look at software.
And we saw it every day just from experience in
the field and the back offices in accounting. So we
had a first look under the hood before we even
really started building. We saw what the problems were.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That probably helped out a lot with the R and
D phase, didn't it.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
R and D was literally we were building. We were
building in job site trailers, but also iterating fast to
see how and what was being used, and so R
and D I would say, it was expedited by years
having that.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Oh I'm sure. I mean you look at you know,
some startups, and that R and D phase, you know,
really takes a long time. It's not a fast process.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
It's typically tons of interviews. It's people coming from outside
trying to break into a job site.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
We did have to break in.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We were we were on the job site, we were
had connections to other you know, influential people in the markets,
we already had, you know, a background and how to
speak to the field, how to speak to the office,
how to speak to accounting. So it was more just
about you know, making sure that we had the right
partners that wanted to build early with us, more so
than you know, figuring out what the problem to solve
(04:22):
is exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
And you know, you kind of mentioned earlier that you know,
you guys already had that insider information about what some
of those pain points were. But you know, just for
our audience who may not know what are some of
those pain points that you guys are addressing.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
So the the interesting thing about what we address is
it does it's more complex than what people think as
far as oh, I just you know, pick up a phone,
call a vendor or email a vendor my materials just
miraculis you show up on the job and this just
feeds into my accounting system. So yeah, yeah, well that's
what we're trying to do. But it's much more complex
(04:58):
in that. So, so depending on where you start in
the life cycle of materials management, the pain the problem
we solve or starts in the field. Right, what are
field team members struggling with? Well, they're struggling with visibility.
They're struggling with a lot of the manual processes that
it takes for them to make sure that their materials
will arrive on time to a job site. They struggle
(05:19):
with sending in material requests. If they're in a centralized flow,
they have to either write on cardboard boxes right now,
send pictures, attachments, they type emails. They don't have a
material database, a catalog of items. They lack a lot
of the communication back and forth between a vendor, between
the office, between their warehouse. They may not know what's
(05:39):
in stock. So that's like from the field lens from
the office lens. Right, there's a lot of data flowing
with materials. It's pricing, it's understanding, you know. Again, if
I have inventory, what's in stock, it's understanding for my
vendors is that actually going to arrive tomorrow or was
back ordered? Because sometimes my vendors, you know, like to
(06:00):
sell a lot more than maybe what they currently have today.
But we want to make sure that there's a streamline
and communication flow. And it's also budgeting, right, how where
am I in my budget today? When it comes to
materials and equipment, cost coding right, cost coding each line
at them is a very manual process. If I have
to do one by one and check every line at them,
(06:23):
that takes time. And on the accounting side, it's getting
that information into an ARP or into my budget to
see what my spend is in real time, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, and you know, kind of to back it up
for our audience. You know, we're talking about these pain
points and you know what you guys at sub base
do to help solve these pain points. But I just
realized we didn't even talk about it. What the heck
is sub based? Let everyone know?
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So what what what is sub so?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Sub Base is an all in one platform that streamlines
how materials are procured through the entire life cycle of
a of a company, either a self performing GC or
a trade contractor who is handling materials right we handle
the request from the field to either a vendor or
inside the office. We handle rfques by streamlining pricing coming
(07:13):
into a system where they can speak to their vendors
in real time. We're handling the delivery tracking, We're handling
invoice reconciliation, inventory management, accounting integrations, and we handle the
vendor workflows to streamline that entire process, which is primarily
done with Excel, email, text, drop box, folders, very disparate,
a lot of flowing data. We centralize it all and
(07:36):
really give clarity and visibility to a very manual process today.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
That's incredible, And I know, I feel like when we
talk about construction, the construction industry, there's so many manual processes.
It still baffles my mind that it can be, you know,
twenty twenty five and we're still doing all of this
stuff manually. Like even when it comes to you know, payroll,
all of that, there's still people that do that manually.
(08:02):
And you know, I mean, I guess that works to
an extent. But then once you think about, you know,
how you're going to be scaling your business and all
of that, it's, you know, it gets a little tricky.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It like it works, right, So people have been running
businesses forever with their same processes. Materials have been making
it to the job site, time cards, labor tracking has
somehow made it back to an office for payroll. But yeah,
but exactly, But what you mentioned is the scaling part, right,
there's more work out there that we see. The companies
(08:37):
we talk to have backlogs that are through the roof
job site, restrictions on schedules are getting tighter, you know,
budgets from owners are getting tighter. There's you know a
lot of noise out there with tariffs. How do you
actually scale the business to the next level with the
lack of people as well? Is really the overarching theme
that we're hearing and physically seeing.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
So I would say.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
That you know that the next way of where businesses
are headed is looking at technology to streamline not just processes,
but to streamline their businesses from an overall approach of
finding the right people. Because every business we talk to,
they're all growing, they're all scaling. We talk to very
few businesses that are not growing. So that's really what
(09:18):
we see in that in that kind of ROI piece too.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, and another thing you know when it comes to
technology can also help streamline communication, you know, especially from
out in the field to in the back office. And
you know that's sometimes in those manual processes that communication
sometimes gets lost. So you know, what do you guys
do at sub base to help, you know, streamline kind
of the communication between office out in the field or
(09:47):
anywhere else within the company.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So the simplest thing we do to really dumb it
down is it's centralized. So why is that important? Most
people think that today they're centralized because they use email
or those centralized because they have the text message WhatsApp
group that is firing off on all cylinders with requests
coming in. We actually centralize it to a spot where
(10:10):
at any moment of any time, no matter where I am,
I can actually have real time updates on where my
materials are. Right from a workflow perspective, from a communication perspective,
from hey, is this actually in my budget? Right from
a Linelin perspective, the communication is in one spot. It's
very hard to do that right when you have all
these other systems out there that people are using today.
(10:31):
So that's what we solve. We have the ability for
you know, an iPhone to be turned into a real
material management platform, either through our mobile interface right or
like through you know the browser, connecting through the web.
We can do it in multiple ways. But centralizing is
the first place to get great communication. It's got to
be centralized a lot of the companies, and it's not
(10:54):
just about the internal communication, it's all of the external vendors. Right.
You've got companies that are managing hundreds, if not thousands
of vendors. You've got all these different types of reps
out there, products, catalogs, material databases. Without it having a
structure or a centralization, it's very hard, if not impossible,
to track in real time.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
It honestly, as you're talking about it right now, kind
of gives me a headache thinking about trying to track
all of that manually.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, that's why we like the space is because the
headaches when you really get to the problem, right, it's
a really big problem that most people that don't come
from the industry, it's hard to articulate. So that is
like a big, big piece of what we're solving for.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, and you know, we're talking about all of this
in theory and how amazing it is. But you know,
I was wondering if you could share any examples about,
you know, how sub base has made a difference for
your users, whether that be through the communications streamlining or
just anything. I want to know more.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, I mean, look, we can start in a couple
of different areas, right, so when you start in the field,
how have we helped the field right the field today
without sub base or without any type of like real
management platform here is typically drowning with emails and text
messages back to vendors. They're picking up the phone to
understand from their material supplier, Hey is this coming today?
(12:16):
I didn't get an update? What's going on? So our
system can actually talk in real time to update where
that specific item, material or order is in real time
in a real workflow where they can see, Okay, great,
the office is already sent out a quote or great
the order was confirmed. Awesome, and they're looking at it
in real time without having to make that extra phone call.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Do you know how many people I've talked to that
that would be such a huge benefit for That's insane And.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's where we started was solving the problems to the field.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
And the second piece of the.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Field problem is, you know, when I want my materials
and I need to either you know, call, text or
email someone for those specific items, it takes a lot
of time to do that, right, It is time consuming.
So how can we make it so simple that either
you're speaking into your phone, you're actually finding things on
the fly, not just from a text perspective, but very
(13:09):
visual in the field, right, I want to see this,
is this the right piece? Boom find it, send it
in and do it without all the manual typing. Is
like a big problem we've solved for on the office side,
the centralization of just the flow of not just the orders,
but the data of the material so that they can
see in real time what's being bought against their budgets
(13:30):
in real time. Are we pulling this from inventory or
are we going to reorder this ten times? Right?
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Was this even order? Does this make it the job site?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
If it didn't make it the job site because someone
didn't mark it as being delivered or it didn't show up,
I'm reordering it. And a lot of the reorders we
caught one hundred percent of the reorder because we can
show you where it is or if it had not
been ordered, you would know in real time. And then
on the accounting piece, the number one problem is invoice reconciliation.
Am I ready to pay my bill? Is this cost coded?
(14:01):
How is this getting in my budget? And one of
the biggest problems is if I'm an owner, or if
I'm an executive, or if I'm a project manager, looking
at my budget at the subcontractoral level, your budget is
primarily made up of labor and material.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
The material component of it means that an.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Invoice has to come in, be approved, be cost coded,
and get into my ERPR accounting system. When you're running
budget updates right, a lot of the times you're looking
at information that's not up to date and you could
be hundreds of thousands of dollars out of whack and
you don't know that until your invoices are inside of
that system, approved and ready to go, not paid, but
cost coded to a fact that it actually hits a
(14:37):
lot at them. That's one of the biggest things we
hear is, oh, yeah, like now we can get real
time budget updates without me having to chase down the
field to approve these paper invoices to get into my
accounting system. It can be done in a much more
streamline fashion, which is exciting to see because we can
catch mistakes. That means and see where you're going to
overrun your budget from a material faster than it was,
(14:57):
you know, being a manual process.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
This is so innovative. I mean, I'm just listening to
you talk and I'm thinking about, you know, how many
people I've talked to that need something like this, and
you know, just I'm almost blown away, but by all
the different capabilities that you guys have, and of course,
you know we're talking about technology here, I have to
bring up AI. It is a huge thing going on
(15:23):
in our industry right now. You know, there's a lot
of different softwares out there that are really utilizing AI
in incredible ways to not only improve the lives of
the people out in the field, but also in the
back office. So, what, if anything are you guys doing
with AI.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Yeah, it's a lot of AI.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So there's a lot of AI in our platform built,
but coming from the industry, right we understand it's capabilities,
we understand where it's limitations are. And so what I
mean by that is, you know, AI is phenomenal for
some of the you know, pieces of the platform that
we're using for distraction and.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Reconciliation and using.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
A conversational piece where you can talk into it almost
like a talk to text where it really can recognize speech.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Tie to a database.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
We're using a lot of artificial intelligence now for extracting
information off of a delivery ticket from a phone. That
all works and is really really amazing to see how
it can help streamline the process.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
But the biggest thing that.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Most people who don't see this don't understand is that
it takes. You've got to train it on the right data.
You've got to make sure that it's actually ready to
go in the field. Because artificial intelligence is great for
certain areas and it does lend itself to our platform
very very much so, but we're also cognizant of what
you know, owners and what businesses today and construction are
(16:45):
realistically expecting when they come into a system.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
To use AI.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
If you lose their trust upfront with it, you can
lose them as a customer. So we take a very
methodical approach on how we develop it, how do we
implement it, how do we train it right because a
lot of it has to do with the training of
some of the data that is either in the system
today or needs to get into the system. But I
will tell you it is. It is a phenomenal tool
(17:09):
that we use on not just seeing our platform but
in our business and we are doing a lot more
with it. But we're also cognizant of its limitations right
now in the early stage and what it takes to
actually get to a point where you can realize to
evaluate the uh, you know, the value of what AI
does inside the platform, but it's all over our platform
right now.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And so you were kind of talking one thing I'm
a little interested to know more about because everyone's using
it differently within their own companies and their own teams.
You know, how is your team using it? And you know,
are you you know, I know everyone's always scared that
you know, AI is going to take over and take
the jobs from people, but in reality, the AI won't
(17:49):
work without the humans behind it. So you know, are
you guys doing any sort of AI training, AI safety
even for your team, you know, kind of with utilizing
in your internal structure.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, we do, like from a safety perspective, training perspective,
Like you know, we utilize artificial intelligence for automated end
to end testing, right, So a lot of our code
that's being built instead of sub base is utilizing is
utilizing tools to test our code base. Because we're developing
product very very fast, a lot of things that our
(18:25):
users want, our prospects want, and so we have you know,
agents that have been built to test our code based
to make sure that when we release code and not
to get too technical, but when we release into a
production environment, that it's really tested fully. So that our
current users don't experience a lot of regression. And the
reason why it's important is because when you're ordering materials, right,
(18:45):
it's not like a it's not like a document that
can sit. It's I sometimes need it now, and it
could affect how the building gets built. So we want
to make sure that those that are heavily reliant on
our system have a streamlined ability to do so while
we build on the platform. So AI is use very
much so in our end automation of testing for our code.
But where else are we seeing it? Right, We're seeing
(19:08):
it in the ability for us to help from a
support perspective, right, Getting artificial intelligence to help users who
are new to the platform figure things out fast on
the fly is critical. Using it for learning and training
on where people are, you know, clicking, Maybe that could
help our designers on our team figure out a better
(19:29):
way to utilize how people are using the platform.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
For insights we're using it for. We're using it on
a lot of the insights we see and hear from
customers on our calls. Right, we're talking to so many
users and so many prospects that we're trying to take
the information see. Really, what's noise, but what also is
really going to solve problems? And artificial intelligence from that
operations perspective been very helpful to get a lot of
(19:54):
the information that is relevant to us and also what's
not relevant. Honestly, at the end of the day, like
there's so many things that are changing in real life
with this, So we're staying open with ears wide open,
and we're moving as fast as we can, but we're
also doing it in a way that's very thoughtful based
on what our users are asking for.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I love that. And I was actually having a really
interesting conversation with someone the other day and for the
life of me, I can't remember who. It always happens
that way. I can remember the conversation, but not who
I was talking to. And you know, we were talking
about how a lot more teams are using software such
as like you know, Chat, GPT, Perplexity to help answer
(20:35):
internally any questions they have with you know, whatever they're doing.
But then we are thinking about it and you're like,
you know, if we're using that for our teams, what
happens if we're using say chat GPT and we put
in you know, sensitive company information, where does that go?
How do we regulate that, you know, what training do
(20:56):
we need to provide our internal teams for a situation
like that with you know, security breaches, data breach and
all of that to be trusted by chat GPT, And
it was really interesting thinking about, you know, AI is
not going to take over our jobs, but we're going
to have to adapt how we train our team members
(21:18):
and everything to use that AI safely.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, we go through a lot of so right now,
like we're you know, we have soft two audits, we
have now AI audits, so we're we actually have companies
that we're working with that are sending us audits on
how we use our artificial intelligence. So's it's actually going
to a point where yeah, like people are definitely cognitive
that a lot of ways you can get to make
(21:43):
sure it's secure. We obviously pay for very expensive licenses
to make sure that we are on private you know,
in a more of a private setting so that that
information doesn't go out to the public. But it's honestly
also new to the construction industry and just any industry
in general. Right, it's very new, So are always listening
to the leaders in the space, especially these big construction
(22:04):
tech companies who have hired a lot of very smart
individuals to understand what are some of the risks. But
I would say that right now, the you know, the
the rewards are outweighing the risks, right Oh yeah. The
rewards of what we're seeing from a from a productivity game,
from a just a gain of like people being able
to do a lot more with little it is right
(22:25):
now a lot more beneficial than some of the risks
that people you know have seen or or are envisioning.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, and you know, there's even tech companies, construction tech
companies out there, such as lumber I me, you know,
I'm gonna have to throw in a little lumber plug here,
that have literally acquired AI companies and AI teams. So
I know, Lumbers acquired the former direct competitor of chat GPT.
(22:52):
They've acquired that AI team to then come into their
company build out all the AI and their software. And
I feel like we're starting to see that a lot
more now. And it's I mean just as kind of
like an outsider looking in because I'm very surface level
when it comes to AI, very surface level. You asked
me to start getting into it, it goes right over
(23:12):
my head. But I feel like we're starting to see
that a lot more and I feel like it's very
interesting as well.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah, I mean, look, we have teams.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
That's all they're dedicated to right now is just learning, testing,
saying the cutting edge because it's changing so fast, there's
a lot of options out there, So we have full
dedicated teams on our team. That's all they're focused on
is how do we make it better?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
What are we not.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Utilizing, what are we underutilizing, what works, what doesn't, And
it's not going to change in the near term.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So if anything, AI is giving people more jobs, I think, look.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
We've seen it. It's going to reduce a lot of
the manual processes that we've seen. We've already seen that
with some of the companies that we work with, but
it does open up opportunity. So when we see it
from the front lines, we have a lot on our
roadmap that's that that deals with just artificial intelligence and
from a business perspective right operating just the business companies
(24:09):
right now the construction space are using it, not just
for you know, on the construction tech software that buy,
but they're using it to operate their their business in
the back office. You know, so it's pretty interesting to
see the evolution. Yeah. I mean, look, we have teams.
That's all they're dedicated to right now is just learning, testing,
saying the cutting edge because it's changing so fast, there's
(24:29):
a lot of options out there, So we have full
dedicated teams on our on our team, that's all they're
focused on is how do we make it better? What
are we not utilizing, what are we underutilizing, what works,
what doesn't, And it's not going to change in the
near term.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
So if anything, AI is giving people more jobs.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Look, we've seen it. It's going to reduce a lot
of the manual processes that we've seen. We've already seen
that with some of the companies that we work with.
But it does open up opportunity. So and we see
it from the front lines. We have a lot on
our roadmap that's that deals with just artificial intelligence and
from a business perspective, right operating just the business companies
(25:11):
right now in the construction space are using it not
just for you know, on the construction tech software that buy,
but they're using it to operate their business in the
back office, you know. So it's pretty interesting to see
the evolution.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, and I know we've been spending a little bit
of time here on AI, but you know, there's so
many other incredible technological advances kind of going on right
now looking forward to the words the future. So you know,
is there any other like cool tech things that we
can nerd out about for a minute that you're seeing
that are really, you know, emerging in the industry, especially
(25:45):
when it comes to construction.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
I think something that's really cool to see is a
lot of the computer vision, which is somewhat related obviously
to artificial intelligence, but it's really getting good where people
are able to take photos of things and and really
capture a lot of information off of a photo.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And what's interesting about it is because you know, construction
is so physical and so customizable that I truly believe that,
like the next iteration of products that are going to
be built are gonna have a lot more of that
technology in it. It obviously layers with artificial intelligence, but
that's something that we're very very much interested in learning
(26:24):
more about because especially from our end not to plug
sub base, but from a material perspective, right, like we
don't just touch paper documents, we touch physical materials, and
some of the biggest learning curves for new people coming
into the trades in the industry is they don't know
a lot of materials. They have no clue of what
is a certain type of snap tie versus this, and
(26:46):
like what is that versus another piece of material And
so we're actually looking at that from a holistic lens
of how can we not only help you know, streamline
a workflow, but how can I help educate the next
you know, people coming into the industry with getting them
ramped up on these types of materials that are are
hard to learn unless you've been experienced there. So I
would love to kind of explore more on you know,
(27:08):
where does computer vision go in the future with construction,
because I do that most people are dreaming about now
and some are actually executing on it. It's something that
we're looking heaply into.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, and that kind of reminds me of you know,
the whole we're seeing VR virtual reality be used a
lot more, you know, to visualize you can put those
big futuristic goggles on and you can actually visualize the
entire job site, you know, go in more specifically and
all of that. So I think, you know, technology is
(27:38):
definitely playing a huge role, and especially in construction how
we visualize things, so you know, kind of moving maybe
away from those paper blueprints to who knows, like a
virtual reality blueprint that's three D. So some really cool
things happening here.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, and you know, part of part of the VR
is really interesting because you've got a lot of it's
it's the overlap between like VR and obviously like artificial intelligence.
You've got a lot of design professionals that are coordinating
their BIM models with you know, real operators in the field.
One of the hardest things to do right is to
(28:17):
look at a plan in two D and envision that
in three D and bring that to life. We did that,
did that for a lot of my career, and so
part of the excitement around getting the next generation of
people interested in this industry, which is kind of hard
to do because of how backwards other industries are are,
how we are compared to other industries. The hope is,
(28:39):
and I think that's that you could get there, is that,
like people are excited about some of that new technology
that would actually help them be more part of the
building process in a way that they can connect to,
which is what they're doing at home. Right, is being
able to connect in that way versus going to the
office and using tools that are super you know, super aged.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, and definitely, I think technology is also played a
huge role with attracting you know, gen Z younger generations,
because you know, those are generations they grew up basically
born with an iPhone in their hand, So that is something.
I mean. I was watching my two year old niece,
like she knows how to work an iPad and she's two,
(29:16):
So it's like using all that technology really to attract
them into this industry has really been fun to see.
But I mean, attracting that talent is hard. It's really hard.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It's hard because you're competing in so many levels and
attracting the talent is hard. But retaining it is also
something that I think technology does and we've seen others
utilize it to retain their people, to grow them, and
to make them have a better life work in the office,
because most people, especially in the construction industry, spend more
time at the construction office or in the field on
(29:54):
a job site than they do at home.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, and I know that because I did it right.
I spent days, hours, weekends on job sites versus at home.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, and you know, kind of thinking about that and
especially you know, I've talked to a lot of other
people about this, and you know, the demanding nature of
being in construction. It's hard for work life balance, you know,
and keeping you know, I mean just your mental sanity
to say the least. But you know, especially when you
gut when you were out in the field and thinking
(30:26):
about you know, everything that sub base is doing for
the industry, you know, how did you manage that work
life balance? And especially now as a founder and CEO,
you know, I'm sure there's still that issue there as well.
How do you manage that?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, So we we manage it because you know, when
we when we it's really dependent upon like the culture
you build with in the company, and our culture was
always Hey, the excitement around what we're building for and
our team sees it from where we were to where
we are today keeps that like energize motivation going because
of the progress and like everything we see. So what
(31:06):
we also realized was you need that clean, healthy work
life balance because sometimes when you go so hard you
don't you're not as productive. And so we're trying to
bridge both. In coming from construction right. It's very much
different because we were not remote. We are a hybrid company.
We have an office. We do go into an office,
but we also work a lot remote and we're always
(31:27):
traveling to different customers and prospects. But you know, it's
hard to you know, on one hand, you've got construction,
which was always in the office collaborating with people in person,
and then you got the other side of the technology,
which is not always in person all the time.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So it's hard to it's hard to balance the two.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
But what we do promote is that work life balance
because of how important it is to build a great
culture around what we're doing. But I have to say
that when you hit and find the right partners to
work with when you're solving a problem, it becomes exciting
because they you know, they realize the hard work and
you can see the rewards of what you're building thing
get used in real life, which was cool to see
in construction, right, when you work together as a team
(32:04):
to build a job, Yeah, it always came back and said, oh,
hey we built that. Right. It's something you can point
to and it's a tangible sense because you can always remember, oh,
I remember when we built this job. You know, these
are the problems. Same thing with software, right, which is, hey,
remember when we built that, and now you can see
it come to life, except it's more of a I
would say two D experience in that three D. So yeah,
(32:28):
it's kind of my take on that.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, and it's always so nice to see, you know,
the actual physical visual however you want to call it,
representation of all of that hard work, all of those challenges.
And you know, I mean, just looking at the software
you guys built, you should be incredibly proud of yourself
and your team just from my standpoint from everything that
(32:51):
I've seen about you guys, because it's truly amazing and
it really solves a lot of those pain points that
a lot of people in our industry are dealing with.
But you know, I kind of want to think back to,
you know, some of those challenges when it comes to
being a founder a CEO. You know, taking the leap
and actually starting a company and having the balls to
(33:14):
do that is a huge feat in itself. But you know,
how did you deal with some of those early challenges,
you know, when you guys were just starting out, or
even some challenges that arise.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Now, Yeah, the biggest challenge that we still see today
is like there's still a lot of skepticism in in
who we sell to. Right We we work with and
sell to and collaborate with specialty trade subcontractors. They they
don't buy technology a lot.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I know that very well.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So a lot of what we do is just you know,
really explaining educating the problem that they eventually will we'll
see once we get there. And I'd say the biggest,
the biggest, the biggest piece right now is you know,
you've got to have you got to thick skin in
this industry obviously to build, but you also have thick
skin to like understand that there's a lot of rejection
when it comes to software providers and construction. Traditionally they've
(34:09):
been you know, a lot of companies on the contractors
I had have been burned by software. So you have
to build up that trust. You have to really say
what you're going to do, you have to prove out
the ROI. There's so many things that happen to sell
construction software. That part of where we just you know,
execute it on and continue to do is like we
are constantly heads down thinking about how we can do better,
(34:30):
but taking that user feedback and really doing something with
it and not just saying oh, yeah, yeah, we got it,
we got it, and the next thing, you know, we
build something that saloes you into what we think you want.
So one of our competitive advantages is we understand how
to communicate with the end user. Why we've done it.
We understand it. And half of my day is training
(34:51):
our team on how the construction operations and the industry works,
by trade, by personnel, by people, like there's so much
going on there, you know. It was a leap of faith,
but it was also we had a lot of conviction
early on that we were the right people to execute
because we understood the problem. We can communicate it very
well from a superintendent in the field to a billion
(35:13):
dollar CEO of a company, and we wanted to make
sure that we can surround ourselves with really smart people
that can move fast, learn quickly, and obviously build a
phenomenal product that meets the needs.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
And then we also said, okay, you.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Can build a product, you can you know, hopefully scale it,
but how do you actually implement it and keep those
users happy? And that's where customer success implementation is our secret.
Sauce I will be honest with you. We overdo that.
We double down on that because of how important it
is to get not just the user feedback to iterate
(35:49):
on the product, but to make sure they have a
really phenomenal experience from the time they say yes we
want to go with sub base, to implementation to the
further you know, adoption of the product is a a
big key to our sexsess and something that we learned
very early on that we invested in very very early on.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah, that's incredible, and I you know, I think it's
kind of the same with lumber. You know, the customer's
success really is that secret sauce, the bread and butter
of the company, because you know, you have this amazing software,
but you know it's nothing without the right implementations, without
the right customers success team. You know, you can have
(36:25):
a great product, but if your customers are not taken
care of, are not happy, you don't have anything.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And to us, one like one bad client that doesn't
like what they saw is like could be a problem. Right, Yeah,
cotruction is very tight.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
They talk.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Oh, yes, they all talk.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
We're honest, they're raw feedback. It's it's a no BS
type of scenario. So we knew that going into it
that the stakes were very high, and the stakes were
even higher in the specially trade world.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Why because there's more risk allaber material. A GC right
operates on different types of margins, operates on GC that
doesn't self perform. Very different from risk perspective. The risk
at the sub level is if this software doesn't actually
do what it does, and I waste time and money
even if you get off the ground, not only does
it affect my people, but it will affect my bottom line.
(37:19):
The reverse is right, when you do a great job,
it's instant the ROI of what we're doing. You can
actually tangibly see it and touch it.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yes, I love that. I always say. I always say
the construction industry gossips more than journalists. And that's difficult, it's.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
One hundred percent sure.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
That's why we treat every person right, be it the
user that's in the field to the office, to a vendor,
as if they are part of our team. And that's
like the maantra we built from and the culture we
build is like it doesn't matter how big of a
problem is, how small of it is, Like we take
it seriously and we not only the problems, but like
we also want to hear about the successes so that
we can double down there too.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, and I think that's such a winning strategy to have,
you know, customer first, customer centric, and I just love
hearing that. So I think with these last few minutes here,
I have some you know, some fun questions for you.
They might be some of the hardest questions I asked today,
but you know, thinking back to the beginning of your journey,
(38:18):
what is some advice that you would give your younger self.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Oh, some of the advice I'll tell you.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, And I'll tell you what I would give.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Some of the advice I would have given was And
this is something that someone who I used to work
with told me, and I totally agree with them.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Is a.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Hard no. A hard no, right no, I'm not going
to buy this product is better than a soft maybe.
And I will tell you why. That's very important early
on when you're trying to find and figure out a
who's the right customer?
Speaker 3 (38:51):
What's the right problem?
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Song? For Maybe will kill you because maybe drags along
the process, devotes resources to engineering that may not be
good versus a hard no is gonna get you off
on to the next And so we we struggled with
that upfront because real early on in the beginning days,
we want to make sure we're building right, but we
(39:12):
were also looking very horizontal. Yeah, and so when we
started going from Okay, we're gonna just ignore the soft
maybe it's too hard nose, it actually dialed in the
ICP a lot better. So that was a big, big,
big piece. It was a hard no is better than
a soft A soft maybe or a soft yes.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
I love that. I'm gonna like continue using that. I
hope you know. That is awesome.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
It's legitimate, it's it's legitimate. And then the other thing is, uh,
what what I would what I would have done differently
is I actually would have started charging for our platform sooner.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
We were not charging sooner.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
We were not charging soon enough. And the reason I
say that is because most people like when you give
them software for free, unless it's so good in the beginning,
which sometimes it's not, they don't give you that raw feedback.
And you also don't know if you're soft real problem
without them actually paying for something. And so we would
have started charging a lot earlier in our journey than
we did. What was first started awesome.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
And then is there any exciting things on the sub
based roadmap that you can share with us today or
anything that you're excited about for the future of sub base.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
So there's some stuff that I can share, others I can't,
just due to some clients that are coming on board
that have signed you know, non disclosures. But I will
say the exciting piece is, obviously we talked about with
you know, artificial intelligence being the true companion and tool
to help really streamline stuff that people just don't want
to do right. People do not want to reconcile automatically,
(40:41):
people do not want to manually type things over and
over again.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
So that is a big piece of our roadmap.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
We're investing a lot of time and money in that space,
making the AI we have today great, and then introducing
new workflows that will help on.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
A lot of what we're hearing from customers.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Going deeper into the data, right, giving people a real
source of truth when it comes to their materials, predictively
showing them where pricing is going is a big piece
of our roadmap that we're doing already today. And finally,
you know, we're we're super excited about you know, other
pieces of the platform that I can share a little on,
but it's really making sure that both sides of our platform,
(41:17):
between the supplier and the subcontractor, can you know, not
just win more business, but can have and build onto
a better relationship. That's high level where where we're headed
is making sure that we're servicing both sides of that market.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
I love that, and I'm really excited to be following
along on your guys' journey and see all of this,
you know, in real time. But if there's any of
our audience here that wants to either get in contact
with you learn more about sub base, how can they
do that?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
LinkedIn is probably the best. We're super active, our whole
team's active on LinkedIn, so they can follow myself, Eric Elizer,
or they can check out sub base on LinkedIn. It's
pretty simple, or direct you through our website sub based
subbas dot io super super responsive, always here and open
(42:07):
to chatting with whomever wanted to connect. But that's probably
the best best way to find us.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Awesome, and then we will drop all of those links
for y'all down in the description down here to make
it really easy for you guys to learn more about
sub base, get in contact with Eric or any of
the other team members, but just kind of a round
it out here. Eric, do you did you have anything
else you wanted to add?
Speaker 3 (42:32):
No. I mean, look, I appreciate coming on.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
I think what you guys are doing as far as
educating and really bringing solutions to market in this realm
is awesome, and I appreciate you taking the time today.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, thank you so much. And I mean I appreciate
you taking the time to be here as well. I
clearly need more coffee here, so I'm going to be
headed to Starbucks after this. But thank you all so
much for tuning in today. This is a great episode
and we are looking looking forward to seeing you guys
next time.
All right, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of COPOD. I'm your host, Caroline,
and today I'm joined by Eric Hellitzer. Eric. How are
(00:21):
you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey, Caroline, great, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, of course, hopefully I didn't butcher the last name
too much.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
No, you said it perfect. Actually most people don't get
it right the first time.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
You did.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Great. Good start.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Well, and that's why I asked before the podcast. But
I mean with that what five seconds I had already forgotten?
So awesome. Well, Eric is joining us today. He is
the founder and CEO of sub Bass. So Eric, let's
get into it. Who are you?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, I would love to so. My background lends itself
more towards construction than it does technology. I'm a University
of Florida grad who studied construction management. Spent nearly two
decades in field operations pre construction between both the specialty
trade contractor world, working for a very large concrete contractor,
(01:22):
and then also worked on the general contracting side. That
led to the third phase of my career, which was
jumping into technology to solve many of the material management
and equipment rental management pieces of the manual workflows today
for trade contractors. But background is primarily construction, learned the
(01:43):
technology through just learned experience in the field and also
building with the team that we have now. So my
background now combines both, but really started from construction operations.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, and that's a really strong background to have, especially
when we're talking about technology and everything. You know, coming
in to an industry with a background that you already
have in that industry just gives you such a leg
up and kind of thinking about when you first started
sub base, you know, how did that experience that you
already had kind of transition into how you started this company.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah. So we we actually started the company out of
a construction company, and the reason it started out of
there was because we we had seen from just experience
on the job site the pain points of materials management.
So we had a first look into the day to
day aspects of theirs manual workflows that many subcontractors face today.
(02:42):
So for us, you know, doing a lot of discovery
was already in front of our face. We saw where
the pain points were, we understood where the adoption hurdles
would be. We also knew what other you know, software
was out there. In the world, specifically in the in
the in the trade world that wasn't solving some of
the problems. So we had a first look into that,
(03:03):
which is what gave us, I would say, the competitive,
competitive advantage to move fast to build something that actually
would make sense for how trade contractors would look at software.
And we saw it every day just from experience in
the field and the back offices in accounting. So we
had a first look under the hood before we even
really started building. We saw what the problems were.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That probably helped out a lot with the R and
D phase, didn't it.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
R and D was literally we were building. We were
building in job site trailers, but also iterating fast to
see how and what was being used, and so R
and D I would say, it was expedited by years
having that.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Oh I'm sure. I mean you look at you know,
some startups, and that R and D phase, you know,
really takes a long time. It's not a fast process.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
It's typically tons of interviews. It's people coming from outside
trying to break into a job site.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
We did have to break in.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We were we were on the job site, we were
had connections to other you know, influential people in the markets,
we already had, you know, a background and how to
speak to the field, how to speak to the office,
how to speak to accounting. So it was more just
about you know, making sure that we had the right
partners that wanted to build early with us, more so
than you know, figuring out what the problem to solve
(04:22):
is exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
And you know, you kind of mentioned earlier that you know,
you guys already had that insider information about what some
of those pain points were. But you know, just for
our audience who may not know what are some of
those pain points that you guys are addressing.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
So the the interesting thing about what we address is
it does it's more complex than what people think as
far as oh, I just you know, pick up a phone,
call a vendor or email a vendor my materials just
miraculis you show up on the job and this just
feeds into my accounting system. So yeah, yeah, well that's
what we're trying to do. But it's much more complex
(04:58):
in that. So, so depending on where you start in
the life cycle of materials management, the pain the problem
we solve or starts in the field. Right, what are
field team members struggling with? Well, they're struggling with visibility.
They're struggling with a lot of the manual processes that
it takes for them to make sure that their materials
will arrive on time to a job site. They struggle
(05:19):
with sending in material requests. If they're in a centralized flow,
they have to either write on cardboard boxes right now,
send pictures, attachments, they type emails. They don't have a
material database, a catalog of items. They lack a lot
of the communication back and forth between a vendor, between
the office, between their warehouse. They may not know what's
(05:39):
in stock. So that's like from the field lens from
the office lens. Right, there's a lot of data flowing
with materials. It's pricing, it's understanding, you know. Again, if
I have inventory, what's in stock, it's understanding for my
vendors is that actually going to arrive tomorrow or was
back ordered? Because sometimes my vendors, you know, like to
(06:00):
sell a lot more than maybe what they currently have today.
But we want to make sure that there's a streamline
and communication flow. And it's also budgeting, right, how where
am I in my budget today? When it comes to
materials and equipment, cost coding right, cost coding each line
at them is a very manual process. If I have
to do one by one and check every line at them,
(06:23):
that takes time. And on the accounting side, it's getting
that information into an ARP or into my budget to
see what my spend is in real time, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, and you know, kind of to back it up
for our audience. You know, we're talking about these pain
points and you know what you guys at sub base
do to help solve these pain points. But I just
realized we didn't even talk about it. What the heck
is sub based? Let everyone know?
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So what what what is sub so?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Sub Base is an all in one platform that streamlines
how materials are procured through the entire life cycle of
a of a company, either a self performing GC or
a trade contractor who is handling materials right we handle
the request from the field to either a vendor or
inside the office. We handle rfques by streamlining pricing coming
(07:13):
into a system where they can speak to their vendors
in real time. We're handling the delivery tracking, We're handling
invoice reconciliation, inventory management, accounting integrations, and we handle the
vendor workflows to streamline that entire process, which is primarily
done with Excel, email, text, drop box, folders, very disparate,
a lot of flowing data. We centralize it all and
(07:36):
really give clarity and visibility to a very manual process today.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
That's incredible, And I know, I feel like when we
talk about construction, the construction industry, there's so many manual processes.
It still baffles my mind that it can be, you know,
twenty twenty five and we're still doing all of this
stuff manually. Like even when it comes to you know, payroll,
all of that, there's still people that do that manually.
(08:02):
And you know, I mean, I guess that works to
an extent. But then once you think about, you know,
how you're going to be scaling your business and all
of that, it's, you know, it gets a little tricky.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It like it works, right, So people have been running
businesses forever with their same processes. Materials have been making
it to the job site, time cards, labor tracking has
somehow made it back to an office for payroll. But yeah,
but exactly, But what you mentioned is the scaling part, right,
there's more work out there that we see. The companies
(08:37):
we talk to have backlogs that are through the roof
job site, restrictions on schedules are getting tighter, you know,
budgets from owners are getting tighter. There's you know a
lot of noise out there with tariffs. How do you
actually scale the business to the next level with the
lack of people as well? Is really the overarching theme
that we're hearing and physically seeing.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
So I would say.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
That you know that the next way of where businesses
are headed is looking at technology to streamline not just processes,
but to streamline their businesses from an overall approach of
finding the right people. Because every business we talk to,
they're all growing, they're all scaling. We talk to very
few businesses that are not growing. So that's really what
(09:18):
we see in that in that kind of ROI piece too.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, and another thing you know when it comes to
technology can also help streamline communication, you know, especially from
out in the field to in the back office. And
you know that's sometimes in those manual processes that communication
sometimes gets lost. So you know, what do you guys
do at sub base to help, you know, streamline kind
of the communication between office out in the field or
(09:47):
anywhere else within the company.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So the simplest thing we do to really dumb it
down is it's centralized. So why is that important? Most
people think that today they're centralized because they use email
or those centralized because they have the text message WhatsApp
group that is firing off on all cylinders with requests
coming in. We actually centralize it to a spot where
(10:10):
at any moment of any time, no matter where I am,
I can actually have real time updates on where my
materials are. Right from a workflow perspective, from a communication perspective,
from hey, is this actually in my budget? Right from
a Linelin perspective, the communication is in one spot. It's
very hard to do that right when you have all
these other systems out there that people are using today.
(10:31):
So that's what we solve. We have the ability for
you know, an iPhone to be turned into a real
material management platform, either through our mobile interface right or
like through you know the browser, connecting through the web.
We can do it in multiple ways. But centralizing is
the first place to get great communication. It's got to
be centralized a lot of the companies, and it's not
(10:54):
just about the internal communication, it's all of the external vendors. Right.
You've got companies that are managing hundreds, if not thousands
of vendors. You've got all these different types of reps
out there, products, catalogs, material databases. Without it having a
structure or a centralization, it's very hard, if not impossible,
to track in real time.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
It honestly, as you're talking about it right now, kind
of gives me a headache thinking about trying to track
all of that manually.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, that's why we like the space is because the
headaches when you really get to the problem, right, it's
a really big problem that most people that don't come
from the industry, it's hard to articulate. So that is
like a big, big piece of what we're solving for.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, and you know, we're talking about all of this
in theory and how amazing it is. But you know,
I was wondering if you could share any examples about,
you know, how sub base has made a difference for
your users, whether that be through the communications streamlining or
just anything. I want to know more.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, I mean, look, we can start in a couple
of different areas, right, so when you start in the field,
how have we helped the field right the field today
without sub base or without any type of like real
management platform here is typically drowning with emails and text
messages back to vendors. They're picking up the phone to
understand from their material supplier, Hey is this coming today?
(12:16):
I didn't get an update? What's going on? So our
system can actually talk in real time to update where
that specific item, material or order is in real time
in a real workflow where they can see, Okay, great,
the office is already sent out a quote or great
the order was confirmed. Awesome, and they're looking at it
in real time without having to make that extra phone call.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Do you know how many people I've talked to that
that would be such a huge benefit for That's insane And.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's where we started was solving the problems to the field.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
And the second piece of the.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Field problem is, you know, when I want my materials
and I need to either you know, call, text or
email someone for those specific items, it takes a lot
of time to do that, right, It is time consuming.
So how can we make it so simple that either
you're speaking into your phone, you're actually finding things on
the fly, not just from a text perspective, but very
(13:09):
visual in the field, right, I want to see this,
is this the right piece? Boom find it, send it
in and do it without all the manual typing. Is
like a big problem we've solved for on the office side,
the centralization of just the flow of not just the orders,
but the data of the material so that they can
see in real time what's being bought against their budgets
(13:30):
in real time. Are we pulling this from inventory or
are we going to reorder this ten times? Right?
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Was this even order? Does this make it the job site?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
If it didn't make it the job site because someone
didn't mark it as being delivered or it didn't show up,
I'm reordering it. And a lot of the reorders we
caught one hundred percent of the reorder because we can
show you where it is or if it had not
been ordered, you would know in real time. And then
on the accounting piece, the number one problem is invoice reconciliation.
Am I ready to pay my bill? Is this cost coded?
(14:01):
How is this getting in my budget? And one of
the biggest problems is if I'm an owner, or if
I'm an executive, or if I'm a project manager, looking
at my budget at the subcontractoral level, your budget is
primarily made up of labor and material.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
The material component of it means that an.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Invoice has to come in, be approved, be cost coded,
and get into my ERPR accounting system. When you're running
budget updates right, a lot of the times you're looking
at information that's not up to date and you could
be hundreds of thousands of dollars out of whack and
you don't know that until your invoices are inside of
that system, approved and ready to go, not paid, but
cost coded to a fact that it actually hits a
(14:37):
lot at them. That's one of the biggest things we
hear is, oh, yeah, like now we can get real
time budget updates without me having to chase down the
field to approve these paper invoices to get into my
accounting system. It can be done in a much more
streamline fashion, which is exciting to see because we can
catch mistakes. That means and see where you're going to
overrun your budget from a material faster than it was,
(14:57):
you know, being a manual process.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
This is so innovative. I mean, I'm just listening to
you talk and I'm thinking about, you know, how many
people I've talked to that need something like this, and
you know, just I'm almost blown away, but by all
the different capabilities that you guys have, and of course,
you know we're talking about technology here, I have to
bring up AI. It is a huge thing going on
(15:23):
in our industry right now. You know, there's a lot
of different softwares out there that are really utilizing AI
in incredible ways to not only improve the lives of
the people out in the field, but also in the
back office. So, what, if anything are you guys doing
with AI.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Yeah, it's a lot of AI.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So there's a lot of AI in our platform built,
but coming from the industry, right we understand it's capabilities,
we understand where it's limitations are. And so what I
mean by that is, you know, AI is phenomenal for
some of the you know, pieces of the platform that
we're using for distraction and.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Reconciliation and using.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
A conversational piece where you can talk into it almost
like a talk to text where it really can recognize speech.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Tie to a database.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
We're using a lot of artificial intelligence now for extracting
information off of a delivery ticket from a phone. That
all works and is really really amazing to see how
it can help streamline the process.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
But the biggest thing that.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Most people who don't see this don't understand is that
it takes. You've got to train it on the right data.
You've got to make sure that it's actually ready to
go in the field. Because artificial intelligence is great for
certain areas and it does lend itself to our platform
very very much so, but we're also cognizant of what
you know, owners and what businesses today and construction are
(16:45):
realistically expecting when they come into a system.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
To use AI.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
If you lose their trust upfront with it, you can
lose them as a customer. So we take a very
methodical approach on how we develop it, how do we
implement it, how do we train it right because a
lot of it has to do with the training of
some of the data that is either in the system
today or needs to get into the system. But I
will tell you it is. It is a phenomenal tool
(17:09):
that we use on not just seeing our platform but
in our business and we are doing a lot more
with it. But we're also cognizant of its limitations right
now in the early stage and what it takes to
actually get to a point where you can realize to
evaluate the uh, you know, the value of what AI
does inside the platform, but it's all over our platform
right now.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And so you were kind of talking one thing I'm
a little interested to know more about because everyone's using
it differently within their own companies and their own teams.
You know, how is your team using it? And you know,
are you you know, I know everyone's always scared that
you know, AI is going to take over and take
the jobs from people, but in reality, the AI won't
(17:49):
work without the humans behind it. So you know, are
you guys doing any sort of AI training, AI safety
even for your team, you know, kind of with utilizing
in your internal structure.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, we do, like from a safety perspective, training perspective,
Like you know, we utilize artificial intelligence for automated end
to end testing, right, So a lot of our code
that's being built instead of sub base is utilizing is
utilizing tools to test our code base. Because we're developing
product very very fast, a lot of things that our
(18:25):
users want, our prospects want, and so we have you know,
agents that have been built to test our code based
to make sure that when we release code and not
to get too technical, but when we release into a
production environment, that it's really tested fully. So that our
current users don't experience a lot of regression. And the
reason why it's important is because when you're ordering materials, right,
(18:45):
it's not like a it's not like a document that
can sit. It's I sometimes need it now, and it
could affect how the building gets built. So we want
to make sure that those that are heavily reliant on
our system have a streamlined ability to do so while
we build on the platform. So AI is use very
much so in our end automation of testing for our code.
But where else are we seeing it? Right, We're seeing
(19:08):
it in the ability for us to help from a
support perspective, right, Getting artificial intelligence to help users who
are new to the platform figure things out fast on
the fly is critical. Using it for learning and training
on where people are, you know, clicking, Maybe that could
help our designers on our team figure out a better
(19:29):
way to utilize how people are using the platform.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
For insights we're using it for. We're using it on
a lot of the insights we see and hear from
customers on our calls. Right, we're talking to so many
users and so many prospects that we're trying to take
the information see. Really, what's noise, but what also is
really going to solve problems? And artificial intelligence from that
operations perspective been very helpful to get a lot of
(19:54):
the information that is relevant to us and also what's
not relevant. Honestly, at the end of the day, like
there's so many things that are changing in real life
with this, So we're staying open with ears wide open,
and we're moving as fast as we can, but we're
also doing it in a way that's very thoughtful based
on what our users are asking for.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I love that. And I was actually having a really
interesting conversation with someone the other day and for the
life of me, I can't remember who. It always happens
that way. I can remember the conversation, but not who
I was talking to. And you know, we were talking
about how a lot more teams are using software such
as like you know, Chat, GPT, Perplexity to help answer
(20:35):
internally any questions they have with you know, whatever they're doing.
But then we are thinking about it and you're like,
you know, if we're using that for our teams, what
happens if we're using say chat GPT and we put
in you know, sensitive company information, where does that go?
How do we regulate that, you know, what training do
(20:56):
we need to provide our internal teams for a situation
like that with you know, security breaches, data breach and
all of that to be trusted by chat GPT, And
it was really interesting thinking about, you know, AI is
not going to take over our jobs, but we're going
to have to adapt how we train our team members
(21:18):
and everything to use that AI safely.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, we go through a lot of so right now,
like we're you know, we have soft two audits, we
have now AI audits, so we're we actually have companies
that we're working with that are sending us audits on
how we use our artificial intelligence. So's it's actually going
to a point where yeah, like people are definitely cognitive
that a lot of ways you can get to make
(21:43):
sure it's secure. We obviously pay for very expensive licenses
to make sure that we are on private you know,
in a more of a private setting so that that
information doesn't go out to the public. But it's honestly
also new to the construction industry and just any industry
in general. Right, it's very new, So are always listening
to the leaders in the space, especially these big construction
(22:04):
tech companies who have hired a lot of very smart
individuals to understand what are some of the risks. But
I would say that right now, the you know, the
the rewards are outweighing the risks, right Oh yeah. The
rewards of what we're seeing from a from a productivity game,
from a just a gain of like people being able
to do a lot more with little it is right
(22:25):
now a lot more beneficial than some of the risks
that people you know have seen or or are envisioning.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, and you know, there's even tech companies, construction tech
companies out there, such as lumber I me, you know,
I'm gonna have to throw in a little lumber plug here,
that have literally acquired AI companies and AI teams. So
I know, Lumbers acquired the former direct competitor of chat GPT.
(22:52):
They've acquired that AI team to then come into their
company build out all the AI and their software. And
I feel like we're starting to see that a lot
more now. And it's I mean just as kind of
like an outsider looking in because I'm very surface level
when it comes to AI, very surface level. You asked
me to start getting into it, it goes right over
(23:12):
my head. But I feel like we're starting to see
that a lot more and I feel like it's very
interesting as well.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah, I mean, look, we have teams.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
That's all they're dedicated to right now is just learning, testing,
saying the cutting edge because it's changing so fast, there's
a lot of options out there, So we have full
dedicated teams on our team. That's all they're focused on
is how do we make it better?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
What are we not.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Utilizing, what are we underutilizing, what works, what doesn't, And
it's not going to change in the near term.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So if anything, AI is giving people more jobs, I think, look.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
We've seen it. It's going to reduce a lot of
the manual processes that we've seen. We've already seen that
with some of the companies that we work with, but
it does open up opportunity. So when we see it
from the front lines, we have a lot on our
roadmap that's that that deals with just artificial intelligence and
from a business perspective right operating just the business companies
(24:09):
right now the construction space are using it, not just
for you know, on the construction tech software that buy,
but they're using it to operate their their business in
the back office. You know, so it's pretty interesting to
see the evolution. Yeah. I mean, look, we have teams.
That's all they're dedicated to right now is just learning, testing,
saying the cutting edge because it's changing so fast, there's
(24:29):
a lot of options out there, So we have full
dedicated teams on our on our team, that's all they're
focused on is how do we make it better? What
are we not utilizing, what are we underutilizing, what works,
what doesn't, And it's not going to change in the
near term.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
So if anything, AI is giving people more jobs.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Look, we've seen it. It's going to reduce a lot
of the manual processes that we've seen. We've already seen
that with some of the companies that we work with.
But it does open up opportunity. So and we see
it from the front lines. We have a lot on
our roadmap that's that deals with just artificial intelligence and
from a business perspective, right operating just the business companies
(25:11):
right now in the construction space are using it not
just for you know, on the construction tech software that buy,
but they're using it to operate their business in the
back office, you know. So it's pretty interesting to see
the evolution.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, and I know we've been spending a little bit
of time here on AI, but you know, there's so
many other incredible technological advances kind of going on right
now looking forward to the words the future. So you know,
is there any other like cool tech things that we
can nerd out about for a minute that you're seeing
that are really, you know, emerging in the industry, especially
(25:45):
when it comes to construction.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
I think something that's really cool to see is a
lot of the computer vision, which is somewhat related obviously
to artificial intelligence, but it's really getting good where people
are able to take photos of things and and really
capture a lot of information off of a photo.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And what's interesting about it is because you know, construction
is so physical and so customizable that I truly believe that,
like the next iteration of products that are going to
be built are gonna have a lot more of that
technology in it. It obviously layers with artificial intelligence, but
that's something that we're very very much interested in learning
(26:24):
more about because especially from our end not to plug
sub base, but from a material perspective, right, like we
don't just touch paper documents, we touch physical materials, and
some of the biggest learning curves for new people coming
into the trades in the industry is they don't know
a lot of materials. They have no clue of what
is a certain type of snap tie versus this, and
(26:46):
like what is that versus another piece of material And
so we're actually looking at that from a holistic lens
of how can we not only help you know, streamline
a workflow, but how can I help educate the next
you know, people coming into the industry with getting them
ramped up on these types of materials that are are
hard to learn unless you've been experienced there. So I
would love to kind of explore more on you know,
(27:08):
where does computer vision go in the future with construction,
because I do that most people are dreaming about now
and some are actually executing on it. It's something that
we're looking heaply into.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, and that kind of reminds me of you know,
the whole we're seeing VR virtual reality be used a
lot more, you know, to visualize you can put those
big futuristic goggles on and you can actually visualize the
entire job site, you know, go in more specifically and
all of that. So I think, you know, technology is
(27:38):
definitely playing a huge role, and especially in construction how
we visualize things, so you know, kind of moving maybe
away from those paper blueprints to who knows, like a
virtual reality blueprint that's three D. So some really cool
things happening here.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, and you know, part of part of the VR
is really interesting because you've got a lot of it's
it's the overlap between like VR and obviously like artificial intelligence.
You've got a lot of design professionals that are coordinating
their BIM models with you know, real operators in the field.
One of the hardest things to do right is to
(28:17):
look at a plan in two D and envision that
in three D and bring that to life. We did that,
did that for a lot of my career, and so
part of the excitement around getting the next generation of
people interested in this industry, which is kind of hard
to do because of how backwards other industries are are,
how we are compared to other industries. The hope is,
(28:39):
and I think that's that you could get there, is that,
like people are excited about some of that new technology
that would actually help them be more part of the
building process in a way that they can connect to,
which is what they're doing at home. Right, is being
able to connect in that way versus going to the
office and using tools that are super you know, super aged.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, and definitely, I think technology is also played a
huge role with attracting you know, gen Z younger generations,
because you know, those are generations they grew up basically
born with an iPhone in their hand, So that is something.
I mean. I was watching my two year old niece,
like she knows how to work an iPad and she's two,
(29:16):
So it's like using all that technology really to attract
them into this industry has really been fun to see.
But I mean, attracting that talent is hard. It's really hard.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It's hard because you're competing in so many levels and
attracting the talent is hard. But retaining it is also
something that I think technology does and we've seen others
utilize it to retain their people, to grow them, and
to make them have a better life work in the office,
because most people, especially in the construction industry, spend more
time at the construction office or in the field on
(29:54):
a job site than they do at home.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, and I know that because I did it right.
I spent days, hours, weekends on job sites versus at home.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, and you know, kind of thinking about that and
especially you know, I've talked to a lot of other
people about this, and you know, the demanding nature of
being in construction. It's hard for work life balance, you know,
and keeping you know, I mean just your mental sanity
to say the least. But you know, especially when you
gut when you were out in the field and thinking
(30:26):
about you know, everything that sub base is doing for
the industry, you know, how did you manage that work
life balance? And especially now as a founder and CEO,
you know, I'm sure there's still that issue there as well.
How do you manage that?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, So we we manage it because you know, when
we when we it's really dependent upon like the culture
you build with in the company, and our culture was
always Hey, the excitement around what we're building for and
our team sees it from where we were to where
we are today keeps that like energize motivation going because
of the progress and like everything we see. So what
(31:06):
we also realized was you need that clean, healthy work
life balance because sometimes when you go so hard you
don't you're not as productive. And so we're trying to
bridge both. In coming from construction right. It's very much
different because we were not remote. We are a hybrid company.
We have an office. We do go into an office,
but we also work a lot remote and we're always
(31:27):
traveling to different customers and prospects. But you know, it's
hard to you know, on one hand, you've got construction,
which was always in the office collaborating with people in person,
and then you got the other side of the technology,
which is not always in person all the time.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So it's hard to it's hard to balance the two.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
But what we do promote is that work life balance
because of how important it is to build a great
culture around what we're doing. But I have to say
that when you hit and find the right partners to
work with when you're solving a problem, it becomes exciting
because they you know, they realize the hard work and
you can see the rewards of what you're building thing
get used in real life, which was cool to see
in construction, right, when you work together as a team
(32:04):
to build a job, Yeah, it always came back and said, oh,
hey we built that. Right. It's something you can point
to and it's a tangible sense because you can always remember, oh,
I remember when we built this job. You know, these
are the problems. Same thing with software, right, which is, hey,
remember when we built that, and now you can see
it come to life, except it's more of a I
would say two D experience in that three D. So yeah,
(32:28):
it's kind of my take on that.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, and it's always so nice to see, you know,
the actual physical visual however you want to call it,
representation of all of that hard work, all of those challenges.
And you know, I mean, just looking at the software
you guys built, you should be incredibly proud of yourself
and your team just from my standpoint from everything that
(32:51):
I've seen about you guys, because it's truly amazing and
it really solves a lot of those pain points that
a lot of people in our industry are dealing with.
But you know, I kind of want to think back to,
you know, some of those challenges when it comes to
being a founder a CEO. You know, taking the leap
and actually starting a company and having the balls to
(33:14):
do that is a huge feat in itself. But you know,
how did you deal with some of those early challenges,
you know, when you guys were just starting out, or
even some challenges that arise.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Now, Yeah, the biggest challenge that we still see today
is like there's still a lot of skepticism in in
who we sell to. Right We we work with and
sell to and collaborate with specialty trade subcontractors. They they
don't buy technology a lot.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I know that very well.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So a lot of what we do is just you know,
really explaining educating the problem that they eventually will we'll
see once we get there. And I'd say the biggest,
the biggest, the biggest piece right now is you know,
you've got to have you got to thick skin in
this industry obviously to build, but you also have thick
skin to like understand that there's a lot of rejection
when it comes to software providers and construction. Traditionally they've
(34:09):
been you know, a lot of companies on the contractors
I had have been burned by software. So you have
to build up that trust. You have to really say
what you're going to do, you have to prove out
the ROI. There's so many things that happen to sell
construction software. That part of where we just you know,
execute it on and continue to do is like we
are constantly heads down thinking about how we can do better,
(34:30):
but taking that user feedback and really doing something with
it and not just saying oh, yeah, yeah, we got it,
we got it, and the next thing, you know, we
build something that saloes you into what we think you want.
So one of our competitive advantages is we understand how
to communicate with the end user. Why we've done it.
We understand it. And half of my day is training
(34:51):
our team on how the construction operations and the industry works,
by trade, by personnel, by people, like there's so much
going on there, you know. It was a leap of faith,
but it was also we had a lot of conviction
early on that we were the right people to execute
because we understood the problem. We can communicate it very
well from a superintendent in the field to a billion
(35:13):
dollar CEO of a company, and we wanted to make
sure that we can surround ourselves with really smart people
that can move fast, learn quickly, and obviously build a
phenomenal product that meets the needs.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
And then we also said, okay, you.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Can build a product, you can you know, hopefully scale it,
but how do you actually implement it and keep those
users happy? And that's where customer success implementation is our secret.
Sauce I will be honest with you. We overdo that.
We double down on that because of how important it
is to get not just the user feedback to iterate
(35:49):
on the product, but to make sure they have a
really phenomenal experience from the time they say yes we
want to go with sub base, to implementation to the
further you know, adoption of the product is a a
big key to our sexsess and something that we learned
very early on that we invested in very very early on.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah, that's incredible, and I you know, I think it's
kind of the same with lumber. You know, the customer's
success really is that secret sauce, the bread and butter
of the company, because you know, you have this amazing software,
but you know it's nothing without the right implementations, without
the right customers success team. You know, you can have
(36:25):
a great product, but if your customers are not taken
care of, are not happy, you don't have anything.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
And to us, one like one bad client that doesn't
like what they saw is like could be a problem. Right, Yeah,
cotruction is very tight.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
They talk.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Oh, yes, they all talk.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
We're honest, they're raw feedback. It's it's a no BS
type of scenario. So we knew that going into it
that the stakes were very high, and the stakes were
even higher in the specially trade world.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Why because there's more risk allaber material. A GC right
operates on different types of margins, operates on GC that
doesn't self perform. Very different from risk perspective. The risk
at the sub level is if this software doesn't actually
do what it does, and I waste time and money
even if you get off the ground, not only does
it affect my people, but it will affect my bottom line.
(37:19):
The reverse is right, when you do a great job,
it's instant the ROI of what we're doing. You can
actually tangibly see it and touch it.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yes, I love that. I always say. I always say
the construction industry gossips more than journalists. And that's difficult, it's.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
One hundred percent sure.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
That's why we treat every person right, be it the
user that's in the field to the office, to a vendor,
as if they are part of our team. And that's
like the maantra we built from and the culture we
build is like it doesn't matter how big of a
problem is, how small of it is, Like we take
it seriously and we not only the problems, but like
we also want to hear about the successes so that
we can double down there too.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, and I think that's such a winning strategy to have,
you know, customer first, customer centric, and I just love
hearing that. So I think with these last few minutes here,
I have some you know, some fun questions for you.
They might be some of the hardest questions I asked today,
but you know, thinking back to the beginning of your journey,
(38:18):
what is some advice that you would give your younger self.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Oh, some of the advice I'll tell you.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, And I'll tell you what I would give.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Some of the advice I would have given was And
this is something that someone who I used to work
with told me, and I totally agree with them.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Is a.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Hard no. A hard no, right no, I'm not going
to buy this product is better than a soft maybe.
And I will tell you why. That's very important early
on when you're trying to find and figure out a
who's the right customer?
Speaker 3 (38:51):
What's the right problem?
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Song? For Maybe will kill you because maybe drags along
the process, devotes resources to engineering that may not be
good versus a hard no is gonna get you off
on to the next And so we we struggled with
that upfront because real early on in the beginning days,
we want to make sure we're building right, but we
(39:12):
were also looking very horizontal. Yeah, and so when we
started going from Okay, we're gonna just ignore the soft
maybe it's too hard nose, it actually dialed in the
ICP a lot better. So that was a big, big,
big piece. It was a hard no is better than
a soft A soft maybe or a soft yes.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
I love that. I'm gonna like continue using that. I
hope you know. That is awesome.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
It's legitimate, it's it's legitimate. And then the other thing is, uh,
what what I would what I would have done differently
is I actually would have started charging for our platform sooner.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
We were not charging sooner.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
We were not charging soon enough. And the reason I
say that is because most people like when you give
them software for free, unless it's so good in the beginning,
which sometimes it's not, they don't give you that raw feedback.
And you also don't know if you're soft real problem
without them actually paying for something. And so we would
have started charging a lot earlier in our journey than
we did. What was first started awesome.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
And then is there any exciting things on the sub
based roadmap that you can share with us today or
anything that you're excited about for the future of sub base.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
So there's some stuff that I can share, others I can't,
just due to some clients that are coming on board
that have signed you know, non disclosures. But I will
say the exciting piece is, obviously we talked about with
you know, artificial intelligence being the true companion and tool
to help really streamline stuff that people just don't want
to do right. People do not want to reconcile automatically,
(40:41):
people do not want to manually type things over and
over again.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
So that is a big piece of our roadmap.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
We're investing a lot of time and money in that space,
making the AI we have today great, and then introducing
new workflows that will help on.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
A lot of what we're hearing from customers.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Going deeper into the data, right, giving people a real
source of truth when it comes to their materials, predictively
showing them where pricing is going is a big piece
of our roadmap that we're doing already today. And finally,
you know, we're we're super excited about you know, other
pieces of the platform that I can share a little on,
but it's really making sure that both sides of our platform,
(41:17):
between the supplier and the subcontractor, can you know, not
just win more business, but can have and build onto
a better relationship. That's high level where where we're headed
is making sure that we're servicing both sides of that market.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
I love that, and I'm really excited to be following
along on your guys' journey and see all of this,
you know, in real time. But if there's any of
our audience here that wants to either get in contact
with you learn more about sub base, how can they
do that?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
LinkedIn is probably the best. We're super active, our whole
team's active on LinkedIn, so they can follow myself, Eric Elizer,
or they can check out sub base on LinkedIn. It's
pretty simple, or direct you through our website sub based
subbas dot io super super responsive, always here and open
(42:07):
to chatting with whomever wanted to connect. But that's probably
the best best way to find us.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Awesome, and then we will drop all of those links
for y'all down in the description down here to make
it really easy for you guys to learn more about
sub base, get in contact with Eric or any of
the other team members, but just kind of a round
it out here. Eric, do you did you have anything
else you wanted to add?
Speaker 3 (42:32):
No. I mean, look, I appreciate coming on.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
I think what you guys are doing as far as
educating and really bringing solutions to market in this realm
is awesome, and I appreciate you taking the time today.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, thank you so much. And I mean I appreciate
you taking the time to be here as well. I
clearly need more coffee here, so I'm going to be
headed to Starbucks after this. But thank you all so
much for tuning in today. This is a great episode
and we are looking looking forward to seeing you guys
next time.
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