At the end of every construction project, files, warranties, and other materials need to be handed over to the owner - a process that is often difficult, expensive and hard to do satisfactorily. In today's hyper competitive construction market, solid handovers can be a competitive advantage, and Buildr was designed to make that easy and efficient. Co-founder Caleb Taylor takes us through their process and the launch of their new CRM for new business at Buildr.
Caleb Taylor
[00:00:00] Hugh Seaton: Welcome to Constructed Futures. I'm Hugh Seaton. Today I'm here with Caleb Taylor president and co-founder at Buildr. Caleb, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:11] Caleb Taylor: Thank you Hugh. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:12] Hugh Seaton: So let's start with what Buildr does and what market you guys serve.
[00:00:17] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So Buildr's a software company that really provides tools to general contractors both before the construction of a building and after.
So we've got a construction specific CRM platform customer relationship management, as well as at the end of construction, a handover product where it helps automate the closeout process and manage the warranty phase after the building's turned over so that the clients of the GC can create a warranty claim, pings the GC, they're able to assign it to the correct trade partner to get that item fixed. So those are the three main tools that are a part of the Buildr platform.
[00:01:01] Hugh Seaton: Awesome. So talk to me about why you guys created the company. I think you've, you know, on your team is some pretty good pedigree in terms of construction software.
So what made you want to do this?
[00:01:13] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm one of the co-founders, I've got two other co-founders and they were actually both pretty early employees at Procore. So they were there back when Procore was still a 40 person startup, I think and played a big role on their product development side. So they played a big role in building out that platform helped create the APIs that everybody uses to integrate. They were directors there. Things like that. My two co-founders are Ed Gonzales and Michael Stock. And then we've since hired a bunch of other people that have been in the industry for quite a while, some from Procore and some not.
But most everybody has been in this industry that we care about for many, many years. And initially the problem that we set out to solve was that of close out. I still think it's safe to say that I have not talked to a project team member that's done close out in the past that says, "man, that is my favorite part of the job. That's what gets me up in the morning... it's just collecting warrantees and O&M manuals and then renaming documents and then hyperlinking them together is why I went into this industry," right. That's not usually the case, it's a painful process. And so we set out to help automate that. Our Closeout tool now saves at least 140 hours on average per project by automating that.
[00:02:39] Hugh Seaton: And let's dig into that. I mean, I know there's a couple of products we're going to want to talk about, but this idea of, of handover know I've heard horror stories from the FM side, the facilities management side about what gets handed over, what happens without you. What's the non-Buildr version of this.
[00:02:58] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So the non-Buildr version of this process is a project team member, Whether it's a PM, a coordinator, a PE, will most likely sit down and go through the specs, right. And say, all right, what is it that I'm required to hand over to the client at the end of this project? Once we get to substantial completion, what do I owe them?
And so they'll then create a big spreadsheet. And they'll list out all of the trade partners and subcontractors that are on this project. Typically like on the left-hand side of the page, and then across the top they'll list out all the items that they need to collect O & M manuals, as-builts, attic stock, workmanship warranties, manufacturer warranties, so on and so forth, right? And then they put the check boxes next to the item saying, okay, this trade partner owes me these seven things. This trade partner owes me, these three things. And then they start emailing the different trade partners. So they'll say, “Hey, this is what you owe us for close out. Please provide these.” And typically it's not a one email process and then everybody sends you everything. It's a continually follow up until you collect it all. And then as those items come back in, you back to your spreadsheet, check the box saying I received this O & M manual from this company.
Then you download that document to your computer, probably rename it, drag it into Bluebeam and start hyperlinking everything together so that you have one PDF. One document with a table of contents, pretty cover sheet, everything hyperlinked together that you can then put on a hard drive and hand to the client saying, “Hey, here's all the data, all the information from, from this project.”
[00:04:42] Hugh Seaton: And needless to say that's a ton of work. Yeah. How long does that process usually stretch out?
[00:04:50] Caleb Taylor: Man, it's hard to say. We've had, you know, billion plus dollar projects run through Buildr and, you know, a hundred thousand few hundred thousand dollars projects run through Buildr. So obviously there's a discrepancy and it changes with the size of the job.
But the numbers that we've seen over the years is based off of a $10 million job Buildr will save at least 140 hours. So when you're looking at all the time to create the list of items, the follow-up reminders to trade partners, renaming of documents, organizing of everything, hyperlinking everything together.
A lot of GCs out there are actually, to over deliver for their clients, they will recreate the deep hyperlinks on drawings, right? So let's say, they're saying they're handing over as-builts or whatever it might be with their drawings. And typically you've got that RFI linked on there, or that photo or another drawing. A lot of systems when you export drawings from your project management tool, if you keep those links on the drawings, it'll try to link you back into that project management tool. Which means, of course your client then has to have an account. And it's not locally linked. And so if there's any team members that are doing that manually, now, we're talking about an additional weeks of time because it's very tedious and Buildr automates that as well.
Yeah, it's hard to say an exact number, "It always takes this long", but when you're talking about a few hundred million dollar project it's months. It's months of work just to build that close out package.
[00:06:29] Hugh Seaton: And do you find that sometimes it's actually smaller jobs and smaller GCs that find value because they don't necessarily have as deep a team to be able to handle it?
[00:06:40] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we've got an awesome wide range of clients, right. That are in the few million dollar range all the way up to, you know, McCarthy's or Turner's that have big projects, right? Hmm. Those smaller companies might not have exactly, like you're saying one person that can just focus solely on closeout, right.
And most of the time, whoever is focusing on a closeout of a project has already started on, has already been placed on another project. Right. And so the idea is, if you use Buildr as this tool to help manage this it'll save you time so that you can do more. And so if you have less people, you should be able to do more with the team that you have.
That's absolutely why a lot of people come and find us.
[00:07:29] Hugh Seaton: I assume also at the end of the job, you know, whatever money is left is thin. And you're saying every dollar that I spend is profit I'm not keeping. So I got to imagine people look time saved at the end of a project as being more valuable than time saved in the beginning.
When you've got a big pot of money to draw from, I have no idea if that's something that people ever talked to you about, but I would assume you have a thought there.
[00:07:52] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, when you're getting down to the end of that project, you're nearing substantial completion and everything's tense, you know, the budget's tight, we're trying to hit the correct timeline that we anticipated all of that matters right. And to go over budget is a thing that we want to avoid. I've actually found more people search after our warranty tool because of, and in light of thinking about the I guess profit margin of each project, because that's one thing that they know for sure is any warranty item we have is a direct hit on profit margin. Right?
And so with a warranty tool like Buildr offers, we can now have insight into what was typically a black hole, as far as the process. Typically, if a warranty item came about the facility management team or owner would just pick up the phone and call a PM and say, “Hey, this thing happened, it broke it's under warranty” PM would say, "perfect, I'll get it fixed." Call the trade partner, schedule it, get out there and fix it.
And that item is never recorded anywhere most of the time. And so we have no way of improving processes that impact this phase. Now with Buildr, we can run a report that says, "Hey, over the last three years, it looks like these trade partners have had the most warranty issues out of anybody.
And it looks like every time we installed this thing, Over these projects, it actually broke early and now we can change this and the specs and adjust this to protect our profit margins as a GC."
So that's, I guess in terms of the profit margin thought process, that's what I've seen most people bring up to me when they're thinking about the warranty phase.
[00:09:36] Hugh Seaton: Awesome. So you're having customers after, you know, after some period running reports that then changes how they would do whatever, whatever it might be, like who they choose to work with, or even going into the submittal process. That's really interesting.
[00:09:52] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, I have not. I have not seen, at least we've been told by our customers that there, there really isn't a warranty tool out there that's specifically designed for the GC from that perspective to equip them with the knowledge and the data they need to be able to make improvements if necessary and yeah. Again, to shed light on this area that really had no tracking beforehand, but the data is helpful, right? That protects the profit margin. But everything with this handover side of the product, which is close out and warranty, I think the overarching benefit is the over-delivery method that it is for our customers' clients, right. For the GC's clients, because those are the last two phases, your last two interactions and touch points with your clients. And we've seen... there's tons of studies out there that show, if you can finish strong that increase in repeat business is significant.
And so the closeout not only helps the GC save time, but now instead of just giving the owner of the building this hard drive with the linked folders and files of all the closeout information, now that you can also give them access to the whole closeout package online, on the web or through the mobile app.
So that facility teams can now walk around with their phone or tablet. Have global search and type in, you know, air handler unit, roof, whatever, any document associated with that word is just pulled up right there. And they have the ability to create warranty claims on the web and on their mobile device.
And so that's where they start to get addicted to how that GC has set them up for success when it comes to managing their building in the future.
[00:11:38] Hugh Seaton: I love that idea. I got to imagine that as you, as you were out there talking to prospects and companies about what you do, the ability to end well has got to be a big part of this, cause it's, you know, I I've heard GCs talk about, PM's usually, talk about how, you know, They're the, they're the, they're the warranty.
Like the GC is the warranty. It doesn't matter what's in the paper because it's just so much like they know to call them. And as a result, they'll do anything to make it end well, and that can be really expensive if you're picking up after everything and you don't really have an easy way to, to manage it, which it sounds like, you know, that's a lot of what you're offering.
It's gotta be enormously attractive to be, to be able to say you can end well without having to lose your shirt.
[00:12:22] Caleb Taylor: Yes. That's exactly right. Is you need to be able to, yeah. And again, if you end well, if you can, over-deliver for them in this last interaction with closeout, and then the warranty phase, the chances of you winning that next project that they do it astronomically increases.
It really we've seen it time and time again. They say, you know, that last touch point, the way you set me up for success was amazing. I want that again.
[00:12:48] Hugh Seaton: How much do you guys talk to the owner side, the facility side to hone your, your offering and make sure that what's being handed over really ticks the boxes that are on their end.
[00:13:00] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, that's a great question. A lot.
So we actually have intentionally from the beginning of Buildr thought well about each role and each person that would be interacting with the platform. Right? So what I mean by that is our customers are general contractors, right. But we have to collect the documents from subcontractors, which means they are getting an email through our system that looks like it's coming from the GC. It has a link in that email to upload their documents, but something we care really we care a lot about is ease of use for everybody involved. And so there's no login for subcontractors, right? We did not want them to have to remember another username or password.
It needs to be as simple as possible, so they can literally receive an email from a GC forward it to the correct person at their company, click the link, drag and drop the documents, they're done. The response from subcontractors actually is, has been amazing. They say, this is the easiest close out process we've been through.
But then on the other side for the owners, we've created a full account for them. So they have their own account management. They can add and remove users. They can add their facility management teams. They have one place to see all of their projects, right? So if a GC provides multiple buildings to them, they can see all the buildings in one place online, they can click on it.
And then we have everything sorted by category and trade. And we, with all the development of our products really rely on our customers. Like I'm sure many tech companies do. Right. But are the, the facility management teams and owners that we've worked with gave us a lot of feedback over the years.
What are you looking for? What do you care about? How do you want this structured? What info do you want pulled in? But that's, that's a big part of it, for sure.
[00:14:50] Hugh Seaton: That's great. And, and what is it, I mean, while we're here, what is it that the that you find the facilities managers need, that was maybe surprising.
Like, was there anything in, in your discovery where you're like, oh, I wouldn't have thought of that, but yeah.
[00:15:03] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So the biggest if we look in the past, right? The not too long ago, the standard was actual binders. Physical binders were handed to the owner and the facility teams. Those were then put in a closet and most likely.
Right. We all knew it. We didn't like to think about it. If you're spending months building this, this binder, you really didn't want to think about the fact that nobody's going to look at it. But the reason that was happening is because the owner wanted confidence that they could get to their data. Right.
So that's why initially when you start to tell an owner, "Hey, I'm going to give you your closeout package online." That can be scary. They're saying, what are you talking about? I don't have that data. And so the first thing that everybody articulated was we need, we still want that hard drive of all of the data, and they love that it's locally linked.
Nothing is ever pointing to another project management tool or anything. Every link is local, so you don't need wifi. You don't need, you know, Buildr or any other software to access at all, it's there, it's in your hands. But then from that, once we convinced them, you have your data, you can be confident in that.
Now we could cast this vision for them that says. "All of this other information in your life that you need, that you care about is accessed through your phone and online. That's because it's much easier than walking down the closet to the hall, to the closet, to get the binder or plugging in a hard drive.
Right. And so then ease of use became the next important thing once they could be sure they had their data in their possession, ease of use and accessibility was, was big. But then the other was the transparency that came with the warranty tool. So the fact that facility teams can see all of the warranty claims that they've created, they can see the statuses of each of those items.
They now have more confidence that nothing will fall through the cracks. And that's how GCs tend to describe it to their clients. "Hey, we don't just want you to have a great customer experience working with us when we're building your project. We want you to know you have the highest level of customer experience when you work with us all the way through the end of the warranty phase."
So those are a few things that I think owners and facility teams really cared about that we, we didn't know, they would until we kinda got in there with them.
[00:17:33] Hugh Seaton: I love that idea that, that the confidence of having it was a big deal. I wonder if did the mobile app also helped because it's, it's just feels like, okay, it's right here.
You know what I mean?
[00:17:45] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. I think all of that helped with just the ease of use and access to the data they felt they loved. Right. But, and again, both the closeout and the warranty piece and the mobile app, all of that is under this overarching idea of, we want to equip the GCs to over-deliver for their clients and so that they can increase repeat business and grow their business if they want.
And that's actually how we, found ourselves in this CRM world. Uh, to be honest, we had really focused on post-construction handover. And general contractors were, were loving how they could over-deliver for their clients. And then they started to say, "Hey, what's the best way for us to know what the cadence is to follow up with our, our past clients to see what upcoming projects they have."
And as we started doing like a year plus of just investigating, diving into this learning as much as we could about this process, we realized a massive amount of, of general contractors don't have a CRM or a database for all their contacts for everyone they've ever worked with. They really, a lot of times we'll just have a spreadsheet of their upcoming projects that they're trying to win and then keep track of the activity in that spreadsheet. Saying, "Hey, reach out to Tom next week because we're four weeks away from the bid." And they would just review that at a weekly meeting. A lot, a lot, a lot of GCs don't actually have one centralized CRM platform. Again, is that the customer relationship management tool.
[00:19:27] Hugh Seaton: That's great. And so I would assume that, you know, some of the functionality and some of the lessons you learned in trying to go get subcontractors to give you the materials that you need. You're like, hang on a minute. This looks a little bit like a CRM. I mean, we're good at that now. So let's go see if we can't help them out somewhere else.
Is that some of the thinking.
[00:19:49] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, that was part of it. I mean, you've got your directory, you've got a lot of parties in here. We had the general contractors clients in there, right. The owners. And so they were starting to ask what's the best way to follow up with my owners to make sure that I'm in the know of any future projects, that's what piqued our interest.
And I mean, it's funny because if you look at CRM, like CRMs as a whole, 91% of all companies in the United States out of any industry. So any company that has 11 employees or more 91% of those companies use a CRM, it's just like a standard guaranteed thing. It's not an optional thing in any other industry.
If you have customers, then you need a CRM. Now, obviously construction trails behind. Almost all other industry in tech adoption, right. And CRM is even further behind than project management tools and stuff, but we've seen that. With how the industry's shifted over the last five, 10 years moved away from hard bid moving towards this design build partnership that really sales or business development are becoming a higher priority for GCs across the country, which has been exciting to see. And so then, then we started doing the deep dive into, okay. What would a construction specific CRM look like? There's tons of CRM platforms out there. Great CRM tools. But we felt like there could be value in having a really simple, easy to use construction specific CRM.
[00:21:27] Hugh Seaton: Really interesting.
So let's go back to the handover real quick. And I want to ask you, when do people in a project. When did people start using Buildr?
[00:21:37] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So that does vary because you could add Buildr at the very end. You could pull everything out of your project management tool build your list, send everything out to subcontractors and wrap everything up in a couple of weeks.
We've had people will say, Hey, I'm a month away from substantial completion. They purchase Buildr and they do their closeout.
Most people you'll talk to say that they want to start the closeout process early on. Right. And then a lot of times they'll laugh because they'll say, yeah, but that never happens.
And so Buildr is the tool to help you start that earlier. So even when you're setting up your project, you can set up your closeout package so that you have it structured to know exactly what items you need from who, right. That way, when you're, you know, concrete team is finished. Go ask for them, go ask for their warranties right now.
Why wait a year until you're done with the job, it's going to make it that much harder to get their attention. So you should be closing out as you go. So we, we always recommend to start as early as you can and close out as you go. That's what makes sure you can actually hit that substantial completion date.
[00:22:42] Hugh Seaton: And I'm assuming that happens more often with repeat customers than with first time customers.
[00:22:47] Caleb Taylor: Yes. Yeah. Once they have decided, Hey, we want a standard process for how close outs are done at our company. We don't want there to be variance between the closeout package that so-and-so provides, as opposed to this person that's brand new to our company.
We want it to always look the same. We want to ensure that anyone interacting with our brand as a GC has the same experience. So once they've made that decision, "Hey, this is how we're going to do close outs." It it trickles down into starting that close out earlier and earlier, which is great.
[00:23:20] Hugh Seaton: And so how do you guys integrate from a process standpoint with some of the PM software? We've talked about Procoree on a couple of ways, but how does, how does that work?
[00:23:31] Caleb Taylor: Yeah. So we have we have clients that use all different types of PM softwares out there. But the integration that we're most proud of is our Procoree integration.
I think that that probably is unrivaled just because the, our entire development team came from Procoree. And so we know that API well, we know that platform really well. And so
[00:23:51] Hugh Seaton: It's also a really, really good API, I mean, great. They really are good to work with that, that whole team is pretty amazing, so I can imagine.
[00:24:01] Caleb Taylor: Yep. Yeah. So we've we've really planted our flag in that partnership, which has been fun. We love we love our partnership with Procore. And so for any, any GC out there, that's said, Hey, Procoree is going to be our platform. Then Buildr comes alongside. And helps you manage the projects that you're trying to win with our CRM.
Once that project is won, it then starts the project for you in Pro-core. You manage it in Pro-core through completion and then close out. We would be able to extract everything out that you needed drawings, RFIDs submittals, daily logs, photos, whatever it might be. Create the whole closeout package and then have the warranty management tool as well.
So it sits on either side. But as far as the integrations go, it's really the Procoree one that I think we're, we're most proud of.
[00:24:53] Hugh Seaton: That's great, but you do work with other PM software as, as appropriate.
[00:24:58] Caleb Taylor: We do, but most of the time, the integrations, a lot of times, it's just a matter of, Hey, the way you're using this PM tool.
Go ahead and extract your, your directory and load it into Buildr. That's what a lot of our customers do that are not Procoree customers. That's what we see most commonly.
[00:25:14] Hugh Seaton: Yeah and again, I don't want to make this a Procoree commercial, but one of the things that they do do really well is their, their marketplace is, has been very well. I actually built something in integrated with them a couple of years ago, and I was pretty impressed.
[00:25:28] Caleb Taylor: It's pretty great process. They've got an awesome team. I think honestly, we were, we were one of the very, like earlier people on that app marketplace, it's getting full now, which is really fun to see all these different companies popping up.
[00:25:40] Hugh Seaton: Yeah, it is. And it, it, yeah. And I mean, it just speaks to where the industry's going, right. Is that you can build a really full featured product like yours and integrate it seamlessly into a bigger ecosystem. Uh, which I think just makes, makes everybody better off. Very cool. So talk to me about where you see yourselves going and how you see the industry evolving.
I mean, obviously it's general or specific as you feel comfortable talking about, but you know, where do you see all this going?
[00:26:08] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I think that right now, a lot of, I guess, where my mind is at is, is how the industry has changed when it comes to business development, right. With, with our CRM tool.
We've like I mentioned, every other company has uh, a customer relationship management platform. But it's not the priority or hasn't been in the past of general contractors and our team actually went on to LinkedIn and saw we were able to look retroactively of what the most common construction titles and jobs were five years ago, as opposed today.
[00:26:48] Hugh Seaton: Interesting.
[00:26:48] Caleb Taylor: And yeah, it was really fascinating to see where anything that had to do with sales or business development was I think it was right around the nine or 10 mark as far as the most common and it was like ninth or 10th on the list and this year it's actually third.
So we've seen more and more general contractors hiring their first ever business development team member. Because it's no longer just a matter of owner has posted this project, everyone bid we're taking the lowest job. Now it's building this relationship with your owners, right? Which means it's harder to meet new potential owners to work with. And so you have to invest more in how you find these new jobs and you have to invest more in this ongoing partnership and relationship with developers out there. And in order to do that, well, you have to have a database that structures it, that keeps track of your different tasks, that orders your priorities, that shows you what's your win rate or your hit rate is on education jobs versus commercial jobs. So that we can say, all right, we're sitting here in middle of 2021, but I can tell with my pipeline that I have some gaps in 2023 revenue, because I'm winning 20% of the jobs that I'm bidding. But based off of that information, I'm going to have a lull here in 2023, in order to keep everybody employed, we need to fill up our pipeline for projects that are starting in 2023.
None of that's possible without this platform. That allows you to do that. But I think that general contractors are starting to shift their mindset and think almost more like a SaaS company when it comes to sales, which feels weird to say, but it's instead of software as a service, it's construction as a service, right.
It's, "Okay, we have to invest in our clients, like never before we have to think proactively about where our new business is coming from and how to win more jobs, as opposed to, again, just getting a list of bidding things and then just them taking the lowest bid. But that's some of the changes that we've seen that are exciting.
[00:29:11] Hugh Seaton: I love that. I think, you know, data is becoming a part of every aspect and the fact that it's becoming part of, you know, revenue and sales is, is great. And I think it's just going to be better for the industry overall.
[00:29:25] Caleb Taylor: Totally agree.
[00:29:26] Hugh Seaton: Caleb, thank you for being on the podcast. I got a lot out of this and really learned a lot about the, you know, the front and back half or parts of a, of a project.
[00:29:35] Caleb Taylor: Yeah, thank you Hugh. I'm a, I'm a big fan of your podcast, the construction tech quarterly uh, meetings you hold. So I appreciate everything you're doing for our industry. I'm glad I got to be a part of this.
[00:29:45] Hugh Seaton: Thanks man.