When Your Systems Don’t Match Your Strategy with Dirk van der Velde

Dirk van der Velde, co-founder of Momenta, opens up about the early missteps in aligning business structure with execution—and how tightening operations led to meaningful gains. From auditing underused software to designing a high-output team culture, Dirk shares lessons on building a company that actually runs the way it was envisioned.

https://momentasize.com/

Video Notes: 
Introduction and Guest Background (0:00)
Dirk's Background and Momenta Size (2:47)
Challenges and Solutions in Construction (6:49)
Adoption of Adaptive Software (19:58)
Impact of Adaptive Software on Business Operations (23:39)
Emotional and Tactical Advice for Business Owners (32:01)
Final Thoughts and Recommendations (38:22)

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to another episode of builders budgets and beers. Today. We are joined with Dirk vandervell from momenta size up in Bend Orkin. I feel like I said this on the last few intros, but I feel like the guests just keep getting better and better. Dirk and his team, they've been customers of ours for the last three months, and yeah, we talk about adaptive and applications and use cases, but it was very tasteful. It's very tactical. It was Dirk talking a lot about the problems that he had encompassed in his five year journey all the way from before adaptive, just talking about, you know, not having a clear vision on culture, not being a great leader, hiring anybody that's just going to come in and work and really self centering himself around what is the mission of the company to help the greater good. And you'll hear it from Dirk. He is massively passionate about his team, very humble guy. And this is going to be a great episode for you to tune into to understand a little bit more about what is a broken process look like. What does a solution oriented process look like for tracking, bills, receipts, budgets, draws. Dirk talked a lot about draws on here. So if you're trying to find just words of wisdom from an adaptive user, someone who really prides themselves in strong company, strong process, strong execution, this is the one for you. Let's jump in. You. Alrighty, everybody today, we are joined by Dirk Vanderbilt, Owner, co founder of momenta size. Dirk, thanks for jumping on the show. Reese, what is going on, my man, thanks for having us on, dude. Of course, of course. I was, I was, I was skimming your guys's Instagram, looking at your content. A you do a great job premium production, but the energy is just electric. So I'm stoked to have you on let's talk a little bit about momentum, size. But before we do for the listeners, give them a little background on yourself, dude. Just a quick 235, minute spin on yourself, your company and what you guys do, yeah, well, I'll definitely get into that. The before that, though, we were just chatting offline, pretty fun. How even this conversation comes adaptive, our team was at the builder show, and adaptive had a really cool, really clever, really cool, you know, setup going on, a booth going on, and it was for 1000 beers. So that's what drew the momenta sized team in there. They put in for the raffle. Hey and lo and behold. Lo and behold. Yes, we brought we also, we bought the software, and it's been great. And second, we got the beers. And so the team now is stoked about that. We got a great picture of 1000 beers. If you ever watch 1000 beers show up in office, it's quite the experience. And and now we have this upcoming Friday, we have a bereo cart tournament all on adaptive. So thank you very much. We appreciate it. Of course, dude, all you need is, all you need is 1000 beers to draw on a little momentum, get the momentum size, and what better way to get rid of them than a than a bereo? That's it. Yeah, we're exactly, I mean, what? There's no, no better team building than that. So we're looking forward to that one, and just to go in on momenta size. So myself, I'm far from a self made man. I was very blessed, very grateful for an infrastructure of opportunity. You know, my family, we came over from the Netherlands. I grew up in the Netherlands, in a small, little town called for Howard, and then my father was a dreamer. My mother was a huge supporter of those dreams and an operator. And so I've been extremely blessed with an infrastructure of opportunity. And about five years ago, when I had my own child, my wife and I, we had our first child, we we looked at that. We had a really this, what I would call this paradigm shift moment. And anyone who has kids probably can share this type of thing. It's something that you can only feel, not describe when you have your first child, just your whole mindset changes, and your whole perspective on life changes. And so that was the, what I would call the moment that the idea of starting our own thing was born, and it's been quite a journey since then. Like I said, we're far from a self made company. We have had so many blessings, so much support, and we're really, really grateful for both the team and the talent that has come in. Dirk, I love it. I love it. Like having the support, the infrastructure, the people putting them before you, having the motivation from your from your family. That's great, dude. That's great. Okay, so what are you guys? What are you guys building? Over at me, where are you guys out of yeah, we're headquartered in Bend Oregon. We've got projects around all around Oregon, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon. We've got a beautiful project on the Oregon coast, but our headquarters is in Central Oregon, and so we build primarily single family, and I'd call it mid size, multi family. That's really been our big, our big, our main focus we have. We've grown now to a company of 12, so we're really, really excited about that. For us, that's big. For others, that's small, but for us, that's, that's, that's big. And it's been a great five year journey, just going from wearing all the hats to trying to figure out how to get clarity on what the future would look like. And you know now we're headed into year five. Of and finally, after a ton of ups and downs and challenges, we're catching this momentum now and and really feeling like we have a chance to grow. Dude, I love it. Okay, so don't let me forget about Oregon. I have a comment about Oregon, yeah, but dude, five years I'm looking at the product you guys put out that is a very high end, very quality product to be five years into the game. How did you start? Did you start big? Did you like or, I guess, tell us about how you got into the level of product you guys are building. Yeah. So, like I said, far from being self made, I was able to, my family developed a resort called tether resort. It's a beautiful, stunning resort. They started, started with a dream, and then over a 15 year period, they were able to bring that to life. And it's a it's just a stunning resort. Learned a ton from what it takes to have big dreams. First and foremost, right? Like to have such a big dream to make that happen, that's step one, and then step two, to actually execute on that. I got to watch my parents do that over time, and that taught me both work ethic. It taught me vision, and it just taught me what it takes to actually go after something and to have an extremely high standard, right? You don't become the number one resort in the Pacific Northwest by not by having this an average standard. So they set an extremely high standard, both in the product that they built, in the operation that they brought and I just got to watch that unfold. I got to be a small part of it on the operational side as well, but mainly just got to see what that looked like. And and so having mentors like that helped set a really high standard, and then we just followed that, and really worked to become a little bit better every day is really the ultimate goal. We try to live the growth mindset, try to hold a really hard, high standard for ourself. And so it's, it's been far from an easy journey, but it's definitely been worth going through that. And, you know, again, it's, it all comes down to having both great mentors and then great people as well, right? Having people who are far better than I could ever be in the position that they're in, dude, totally. And that's not, um, it's not an uncommon story, right? Or, like, I guess we could call it a plot, right? Like construction, family owned businesses passed down lots of like mentoring and learning on the job sites, and then feeling that inclination to go out and start your own thing based on the impact that the the industry has had. I mean, dude, good on you to do it so well. But again, that's just like a testament to the people that you surround yourself with, your family, your colleagues, the people that are helping you on a daily basis. So very cool. The organ comment, I do want to get back to before we jump in. I was just so I'm from Denver. Okay. Well, Denver, okay. And this last weekend, we went out to the western slope. Are you familiar with the term No, no, no. Western slope is like the western side of the Rockies. So we're on Denver, the eastern side. The eastern slope, you go all the way through the Rockies, and right before Grand Junction is a place called palisade. Okay, familiar? No, not many people are, it's Colorado's wine country, okay, yeah, I mean, whatever. It's like, it's Colorado wine not really known for anything. You're in Oregon. Where are you at? In reference to the Willamette Valley, yeah, the Willamette Valley, exactly. Willamette. You like your pinos, huh? No. Like anything. No, you're, yeah, you'll take it all. No, it's, we're about two hours, just two hours central of that. So, and it's a great valley, and a lot of great wine gets produced here in Oregon. You know, a lot of great Pinot specifically get produced here. So if you know, maybe we'll have a momentous eyes booth one day, and we'll be set, we'll be you'll come to our booth, and maybe you'll get 1000 bottles of wine. You just never know what's gonna happen. You know, that's a hell of a trade. 1000 PBRs for 1000 bottles of you know, that would be a good win. That would be a good deal for Reese. Yeah, that is, I love it. Okay, dude. So let's get into it here a little bit. So obviously, you guys are adaptive customers, and you talk a lot about, like, your background and your family, and it wasn't easy, and it was like, a lot of mentors and stuff like that, like, what's just a hard learned lesson that you have learned running and supporting a construction business obviously tied to financials, if you've got it, Yeah, yeah. So I think for us, every, you know, everyone, if I look back at the just the run that we've had over the last five years, you start any business, you start it starts with an idea, like I told you about. The idea came really when I had my first son, as I said, Hey, what? What skills do I have that I could start to build something with and where we could build something that could become a generational legacy, right? That I could start, that could become a generational legacy. And construction was really the only thing I had to had much experience in, was really the only thing I saw opportunity in. But my skills were pretty low. To be real with you, right? I mean, it's one thing to have been a part of build. Something. It's another thing to now have to really lead the entire experience. You have to, if you're gonna run a business, it's not just having one skill. You have to be a generalist in each component. You have to be good at marketing, at operations, at the finance side. You have to understand how to put, like, bring together a team, right? There's many components that you have to learn. And I would say, when we first started it just like anything you go from I was working at w2 now we started our own thing. And interestingly enough, when you first start your own thing, now you're not capped by a w2 so at first, you're making more money than you'd experience, right? So you're making more money than than you'd ever had, but you're also bird. It's like a self employed wild situation. You're you're hitting full burnout because you have to wear every single hat. And so we went through that classic thing where, okay, sure, we're making more money, but I'm hitting, I'm working more hours, and hitting level like this isn't sustainable. Then you we went through the cycle of, okay, now we finally have enough jobs to where we can have some people come in and support, but I didn't have clarity on culture. So we went through two cycles, which was all my fault, where I just took anyone who was willing to help me, right? Anyone that was willing to help I was going to bring him in. We were good to go, and I wasn't a good leader. I didn't have a good understanding of what we needed. I didn't have a good understanding of what cultural fit needed to happen. And so I went through two cycles, which is very costly, right? If you don't have clarity, one of the lessons trying to point it there is before you go and just react. I think a lot of entrepreneurs will quickly react. I need this, and they'll just quickly react. A key thing I'm learning as I'm getting a little bit older and a little bit smarter is clarity is the most important thing. So once I went through two cycles because I didn't have clarity on what I needed and what culture, what kind of culture we were going to have. So clarity is one of the key components. And once we finally had that after two cycles, we started attracting employees, and we started being able to say, okay, hey, you know now, now, well, I got clarity on the culture, now I can attract the right people into the culture, and that started to unlock, unlock some capacity. But one thing that you'll you'll see is, sure we can bring people in. But the challenge is, even with people, it's very costly. And even if you have people now in this new world, it's like, what technology can we bring in as well, on top of that? And one of the heavy lifting things, Reese, you know very well, and this is why you guys created the product, one of the heavy lifting things on the office side of buildings. If you're building a lot, you have hundreds, if not 1000s of invoices that you're processing a month, and that drop process is massively intensive. Like a standard situation would be what we had before we had adaptive would be everyone would submit their invoices into a centralized accounting email, right? Classic. Then this was our process. Reese, I'll tell you, this was our process for the first four years of the business. Everyone would submit their invoices by the 25th right into the centralized accounting. We would then go in there, and we'd have to take the invoice, put it into QuickBooks. We'd have to take the invoice, put it into our backup, where we're going to put our backup, and then we'd have to take the invoice and code it to our draw, which was in Excel, right? So three inputs, one from one side, I had we went three inputs. So each invoice we got had three inputs. There was a triplicate process. Yes, I would call it an extremely inefficient process that takes a lot. And as we grew, so that's fine when you have a couple projects, but as we grew, we started really hitting this capacity challenge. And I remember nights, so when we had four employees, I remember we'd work all day, because, you know, no matter what, all your other operational things are still there. We'd work all day, and then we would remember, we'd come in. Let's say it was the 25th had so we'd usually come in around like the first, let's say the first is that we have to get these draws out by the fifth so we can get paid, right? And so we'd work all day, come home, go to go home. I'd eat dinner, put the kids to sleep, I'd go drive to the gas station, grab a couple Red Bulls, and boom at nine, at 9pm me and my right hand guy, Connor, who's also my best friend, we'd start working from nine to 12, doing those inputs, doing exactly what we said, into the inbox, into QuickBooks, right? Because there's no way around it. There's no way around it until we found actually, until we found adaptive, and we finally found a way to leverage that super manual input. We found a way to now leverage it, and adaptive actually does it all for us now, which is pretty dang good. Now, instead of having to go each input, we're just running, we're just doing, we're just using adaptive as our main brain, and going through that cycle once, which is pretty phenomenal, dude. I love it. And that's like, I mean that is, that is just a process that has plagued the industry, right? And like, whether it's adaptive, another product, Excel, manual, whatever it's like, the way to think about it is, is, how can I accomplish the end goal, which is a healthy, cash flowing business with. As little manpower and manual process as possible, right? And I think that goes into kind of the first piece was like a like you identified like, one of the hard lessons was like you were lacking in leadership. Part of that was like a lack of clarity and culture that hurt when you were bringing people in. But you finally got over that hump, you gained clarity. You started to have employees that might not have been the good fit, and then you had, kind of like, your ride or dies, who you were putting in those situations, what was kind of like the big motivator for you guys to just like, jump on a solution. Like, was it top of mind? You guys sitting around the boardroom saying, God, our back office process is so out of whack and so manual, we need to look for a solution. Or was it you saying, like, hey, I want my people to be producing high yielding work and not doing this stuff? Was it just a happenstance? There's 1000 beers for raffle. We want to talk. What was it? That's it. I love it. It's a, I'll say two components of it. We realized the way we hired and run our construction company is we have what I would call like a younger office. So tech based, younger office, because we want to be able to produce use technology to our advantage, to produce things, and then everybody in the field. So all of our superintendents have 25 plus years, 2025 plus years of experience leading the in the field stuff. That's how we structured it. But when we looked operationally, even though that was how we set up the business, our performance on that was, I would call it a c minus or D. So our technology adoption was really low. For having that be called the business strategy, the execution was really poor. And so we just decided to actively start working on that. Are we using we're paying for Procore, are we using all the tools properly? And we just audited that, and we said, No, we're c minus, so we got to take this. We want to be the best. We're going to take it to an A we did that. And then we looked, we looked around quite a bit, because we did identify the the main, one of the main heavy lifting components, just manual input components, was that invoicing, and we have our SOPs for it, right? What we wanted done daily, weekly and monthly for that, but it was all mainly based still on a manual input. We had our Excel sheet, we had our QuickBooks, but it was still just manual. And we tried. We looked at different, different things that you could do office. 365 has you know, you could self automate things. We just weren't quite there. Weren't quite able to make it happen. There's a couple other technologies that claim to use AI properly, but the problem with some of that AI stuff was a big claim with little execution, right? So, like, supposedly it's going to help, but then when you actually get into it, the integration doesn't work properly. You have to rework everything. It's just, it's a big promise, but the actual execution of the technology is really difficult, and so we were very hesitant to that, because we tried that a couple times, and then you're like, this has taken more time, like, This is crazy. And then finally, when we found adaptive, it was one of those things where the technology we'd seen that the technology was working for a lot of people, and then it just becomes a quick calculation. Like me, personally, it's a quick calculation. I always ask, like, will this actually work for us? And then what does it look like from a calculation side? So if we're spending 10 hours a week, right? Let's say we had our project engineer spending 10 hours a week at $28 an hour, working on just doing these manual inputs, right? We if we can get those 10 hours back. It's a quick calculation. You just do 10 times, you know, 10 times 28 for the whole month. And very quickly you start to understand that leveraging this technology can add to a huge advantage. We can get those 10 hours back. I can have the project engineer working on something that is useful for the actual project, that's billable, and off we go. So, dude, totally. And that's like, so that there are so many good little steps in there. Because that's, again, that's something that the market can empathize with. A lot of technology. You look at a lot of the reports out there, McKinsey did one where they had deemed the construction sector the most antiquated from a technology adoption standpoint out of any other sector in the economy, right? And then you look at that as a product of, like, where's the money been invested? Has the money been invested in good technology for this sector? And the answer is no, but you start to get this market that's like, software. I'm a business owner. I got to play that game. We got to explore, we got to try. And to your point, you get to own with this like, like, you've been burned, right? It's like, you try it sounds great in theory, but you try it, and the solution just isn't there. And when you think about it, it's like, okay, well, I can't do that 10 hours a week times four weeks a month, 40 hours a month times $28, an hour, right? To get that two grand back a month, if I'm still entering data, right, it's like, I'm trading Excel sheets for software that promised the world, and it's still not really getting I had more flexibility with Excel, right? Like, those are the conversations that go so it's really interesting to hear you say, like it was, you start looking at, where can we make the team more lean? Is a project engine? Your best use spending their time sitting at a desk with a stack of invoices, coding and approving them, checking budgets that are in an Excel sheet that they have to update to then pass to someone else to enter. Or can we streamline that process with a AI native product like adaptive that's going to streamline that entire process, something that you can trust as confident as growing and learning on your data, and you're getting the outputs that you're looking for with a fraction of the effort. Yeah, and exact that's it's really well said, Reese and does it work properly? And one thing I'll give adaptive a lot of credit for is it, it's a really good AI software that focuses it like, knows what it's good at, doesn't try to, like, spread out too much. I think that's probably why it's, it's getting so much market share, in my opinion, is because it's, it's one pointed, it's focused. It knows exactly like, it's solving a what I would believe is a big problem in the call it just the manual inputs. It's, it's solving a big problem there, and then it's staying one focused on it, at least for right now, and and it works really well for us. I mean, the sinking is the other problem. Sometimes you have right like we looked at other ones, even in Procore. So you can do, you can do the Procore financial tools, and it's no hit against Procore. They're a great software, but to even have that integrate into QuickBooks, you have to use smooth link, and then to use a smooth link. Now it's not instant, right? It's just the the there was too many barriers that goes back to, like, that whole talk. It's, it's a big promise, but then there's too many barriers. So now I gotta to make this work. To make it work with QuickBook online, I gotta add smooth link in there. Now I got another it's just like, that's where, that's where I start to get to, like, Okay, now we're almost getting back to the same we're gonna have the same issue we already have, and you're not actually solving it, you're just adding more layers of the operation. And so I, I think adaptive has been great, and it's, it's one of those things, like, anytime, as a business owner, you're going to introduce a new software into your business. It, there is a cost to it, both financially and just operationally. You have to learn it. And my hat will be, is tip to adaptive, because it's been very intuitive. I would say I'm not the best tech savvy person. Like, it takes me a little bit of time, like, I got to get in there and understand it, but it's been very intuitive. I really, I really, like, I one of the things that matters a lot to me is the way that things are presented. So it's really important to me, right? Like to if you want to have a company that's going to grow, perception really matters. And I even like the way the draws come out. The formatting of it is very nice. The hyperlinks that come in are very, very nice. So that before, let's say we were to provide all of our backup in Excel, we made it look as good as we could. But if we would say like this, like check line seven for the invoice, you got to scroll all the way down manually to the invoice. It's just not as nice. Now we've got this beautiful cover sheet. It's it looks really good. And if I want to click to what was in the draw, boom, I just click the hyperlink takes me straight to the invoice. And it's a beautiful, very functioning software that that is actually instant. With QuickBooks, that's what I like, too. It's instant. I want to touch on that. So I think, like, the ins, like, Okay, that sounds great. Like fast instant, in a world of instant gratification, right? Everyone wants it. But what does that actually mean to you from a business value standpoint? And what I mean by that is, is like, we'll use the smooth link as an example. Or we can even just take like, a process and another product, where you have to get the invoice, you have to type the invoice, and you still got all this paper passing. We just did a post on Instagram saying, I think the average time for like, to get an invoice from processed, approved to paid is, like, three days. Yeah. And it's kind of like, how do you even factor that in? But what does that immediacy mean to a business owner, the access to information, the access to your financials, being up to date in your general ledger, in your project financial product, immediately? Yeah, I think for me personally, as we grow, it becomes more and more important. So when you're just when you're when it's just when it was just me. I was doing everything. It was already in my brain. Now it's not me anymore, my overhead has grown substantially, right? I mean, my overhead, if you looked at what it was just even a year ago versus what it is today, the main thing I rely on to make sure that we are hitting, our forecast is QuickBooks and there, and it's and the P L's, the monthly P L's, that's how I'm tracking. Are we hitting our numbers? Where are we at financially? And for that to be up to date and for that to be accurate is one of the most important things, right? And so for me, it's been huge. I went from doing all the inputs myself, so it's sort of all in your own brain and, like, it doesn't really matter to now, my one way to check on how the business is doing and the heartbeat is happening is to use that P L and for it to happen instantly. Like, I can now go in and this is, I'll tell you exactly. We just finished our closing cycle. So the way our the way we run our business is, you know, like we talked about, all the invoices are due by the. 25th for that month. So work that's done, let's say was work that was done. We're in April or in May. So work that was done in April, you have to submit your invoice by the 25th then our team starts to work through adaptive now starts to work on bucketing those and the AI is getting smarter. I think we're like on our second or third month. It's doing a good job of now already, like reading the invoices, bucketing where it thinks it needs to go. It's actually really nice. So it's speeding that process up. It's learning, and it's learning nicely. Then we submit our invoices by the fifth, is our deadline. So by the fifth, we want all those invoices submitted, and then we're also working on closing out all of our general expenses during that same time, by the 10th, our our cycle is by the 10th, we need to have all of our stuff cleared out, because on the 15th, I'm going to review our P L. And what's so nice about the way that adaptive is flowing. When I went to review the P L, we're very quickly. I could say, Hey, what's going on with this? This, this, and this. And we spent a one hour working session, clearing it up and adaptive. And boom, instantly it cleared up the P and L, and now all of a sudden, I can look at it more. I wouldn't call it like 30,000 view, but on a high level, I know what to expect. On my P L, I could see when something was off, and very quickly we could correct it so it was, it was, it was huge. It's very important for that to sync right away, because I'm using QuickBooks as my main beat, my main reporting system, of course, and that's like, again, it's a common story for builders, for business owners, but like, when you say, like you you were, let's call it the 10th, right? Or like you're evaluating the P L, and you see something, yep, we talk a lot about cash leakage, profit erosion and adaptive it's really fun to talk about like the immediacy and the time savings and the overhead reduction that you would typically allocate to those functions in the business, but cash leakage, bills that we get that we didn't categorize out, right, that are bucketed in the general ledger, and it's making poor financials look poor, or profit erosion, right, not having enough cash to cover the bills that we're paying for CO mingling funds across jobs. Right? When you make that comment of like, you caught an example? What is that typical? Like? What's a specific example of something that you catch when you're evaluating a P, L that starts that conversation to square up your books? Yeah, I think on this one, it was specifically the way we were the way we were bucketing one thing we were actually using adaptive, we were archiving certain things that weren't supposed to be and we were able to get that very quickly to clear. But one of the things I would say I really like about adaptive, to piggyback a little bit, is it takes away human error, because now it gives us a second idea, like the one of the features on adaptive that's really nice is it will give you a warning if there's either a double invoice that's been been put in or potential double payment. So it flags, it actually flags it for you. And it also gives you a warning if you don't have something coded into the draw. One of the nightmares I have, and one of the things that we would always really double check before, was sure an invoice, like an invoice from a subcontractor, let human error is inevitable. An invoice from a subcontractor, if they got missed or didn't get paid, you're going to hear about it, but if we had fronted it, so if it was on our you know, we probably have 200 300 300 transactions on our credit cards. If we miss something that was supposed to get billed out that month and it did not, that's a big, big big problem, because that's just, we're just losing. That's just money that's gone. Because once that month is closed out, it's gone. It's gone. And I guarantee you that, before we had implemented adaptive, even though we had manual inputs to check it, I guarantee you that things were missed. And what I love about adaptive is it just takes that. It gives you almost a computerized warning sign, right? It sort of blocks, I'm sure there's still going to be some challenges, but it blocks that human error of missing something, and I really, really like that part of it specifically on the credit card coding, because that's where you can get really, really hurt. If you've got big volume, 200 300 transactions, and you don't actually build that out, that's where it hurts totally, totally. And dude, that's that cash leakage, right? That's that profit erosion. It's like, we'll just talk about the credit card transactions, right? It's like, we ran a study on our customers, and it was like, I want to say, and I could get the actual date on here, but I think it's like 80% of the transactions that are made on credit cards make up 20% of the cost volume. And when you think about that, it's like, that's a lot of receipts. Sure. You could be like, it's only 20% what's the big deal? But 20% of cost. Call it a million a year. Like, dude, if you're missing 50 grand, 100 grand in receipts, or they're getting categorized wrong, and it's misrepresenting profitability on jobs, and you're reflecting that poorly in p and Ls and in your business, that's a big deal, major deal, that's going straight to your overhead, pulling out of your bottom line, your net, net. And it's like, that's why it's important to have these mechanisms. That's why it's important. I love it. That's a great point. And on top. Top of that, it's also very important, because think about one of the big expenses general contractors have in general is the your general liability, and you're always going to get audited on that, right? So exactly what you're saying, let's say we have, for example, a project specific insurance policy, meaning that it's not going to go on to our general liability if we weren't properly coding, or we weren't properly taking care of that. When we get audited by the company, they there might be a premium adjustment. And so it's extremely important to have have this integration. In my opinion, it's been huge, and to just not leave it up to human error, it's really nice to have a gut check. And it works really nicely, like it works really, really nicely. And so I Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a big deal. And the credit card one, I think, like you said to me, makes me feel better than ever, because now it takes away. Before we were just, you get the credit card memo, and we were highlighting, like, General, General, General project, general project, and some there, there. Of course, when you grow and you have hundreds of transactions, there's gonna be leakage, like you said, Dude, it happens all the time. I bring this up regularly. It's one of my favorite case studies. We're gonna get Chloe brown on. She's one of our partners at Wilder streams. I I still struggle like, hit her title a because I think she's just like, humble, and she's like, not that type of person, but really what she does is it's more like operations consulting through the lens of accounting. Okay, yeah. So she'll get, like, she's an accounting background, very operationally minded, like, very process heavy. How do we do things? She loves adaptive but with one of her customers, she did, I'm gonna call it like a forensic accounting on it, okay? And she was going through their books, and she uncovered $5 million in unbilled cost over the course of the company's career. And you think about that, you're like, dude, 5 million in unbilled costs. That's just the unbilled cost, right? That's not including the markup. That includes the margin, right? So you throw 20% on that, not a math guy, but it sounds close to 7 million in top line, right? And you like, you start to think about that, you're like, Dude, there's a lot of Miss year over year over year. Has nothing to do with Are you making enough money? This is not a hobby that we're monetizing, but a business. Are we making what we should be on these projects? That clarity is, it's huge, and I think it's just broadly been adopted and accepted by the by the building communities. Like, just the cost of doing business. Like, what else are you going to do? You don't have to do it now. I think, do you have anything else you want to throw on that? Dirk, no, no, I couldn't. Maybe Chloe needs to come check our business. Because I don't want, as we grow, I don't want 5 million that would that would make me puke. Devastating, truly, and this was an individual that had a similar reaction, because this person's going, Dude, I'm making money. Like, I'm making money. Things are moving. We're paying people, we're paying bills, we're winning work, we're growing a business. But it's like, that's the unsettling part, is like it has nothing to do with what you think you should be making. It has everything are you making? What you should be making? That's it. That's it. Yeah, no, I that's, that's that now that if you want, if you want to, we'll, I would love that. Yeah, just have a conversation, see where it goes. But um, question for you. So five years, I mean, this has been, like, just a blitz scale for you, and you've had a lot of, like, really strong learnings, I would say, a lot of learnings that our listeners can identify with. But for someone that's listening and is feeling overwhelmed, what's one piece of advice that you would want them to hear regarding scaling, growing, running a healthy financial business? Yeah, it'll be. It's more of an emotional piece of advice than anything. And it came I learned it from being in athletics for a lifetime. But it's to not get too high and to not get too low. Everything's going to come in cycles, right? You're going to have good times. You're going to have bad times. The key is to when things are really good. Celebrate what we want to see more of so we do want to celebrate. Celebrate what we want to see more. But don't ride so high on that emotion that when things start to turn and when things are bad, don't ride so low. Try to stay even keel. If you study the best competitors in the world, the best professionals, what do they do? They control their emotions. They don't get too high and they don't get too low. And so I would say, as you continue to grow, the only way to, you know, to get to it is to go through it. And I would just say, keep yourself as much as you can. Keep yourself riding as consistent as possible. Don't get too high, don't get too low. Know that things come in cycles, and if you're in a bad time right now, as long as you don't quit, it'll only get better. And if you're in a good time, inevitably, things are going to turn again. It's a cycle. So totally, I love that, by the way. Do you have any, like, tactical example of you applying that? Yeah. I mean, yeah. I. Is, I don't always do it. I don't always do it right. But, you know, I would say that. I would say a tactical example of us, even like last year, I would say would be a great example of not getting too low when things weren't going our way, not, you know, not freaking out necessarily, when something bad would happen. And we had and we had some really challenging things happen, not getting so low that we're like, hey, let's I'm not saying the thought doesn't come across my mind, but I would just say we had a tough year, or I'd call it just like a stagnant year last year, and we didn't let our emotions get the best of us. We just kept turning over every page, saying, Hey, we know the time's coming, and let's just keep trying to get a little bit better every single day. Reflect. Ask ourselves, what went well, what didn't go so well, and what are we going to do to improve on it? And then let's just wait for our time, for the momentum to come. And lo and behold, sometimes momentum comes, and it comes fast, right? Like you have to put action behind it. You can't just make new wishful thinking. You have to make sure you're constantly reflecting, creating positive pivots, and then when the momentum comes, be ready and act fast. Because that's what that's exactly what happened for us, and we're just riding that momentum now that we came forward. But I would say all of last year, we were fighting the call it, not getting too low on the momentum, not going where we wanted it to go, right the year, not being the year that we wanted it to be. We underperformed on what the forecasts were right. But I just just don't get too low on it. The whole year was essentially like that, and then out of nowhere, one relationship, one person, can change everything for you. And that's exactly what occurred. Jess, you gotta pop. You gotta pop. Dude, that's awesome. I mean, I'm just, what I'm taking away from that is just like, there's, there's a term out there. Maybe you can help me with this, or maybe not a term, but a phrase. It's not like, it's not called ridiculous optimism, but it's just like, it's just like optimism, where it's like, it might be like, you're just constantly optimistic, right? Like riding that wave, but persistence and consistency is like, hey, like, this thing's and if we start getting down, we're not going to be, to your point, making the positive pivots that are going to compound that are going to start developing those wins. So dude, I think, I think that's great. Dirk, I think this is a hell of an episode. I think there's a lot of tactical, applicable takeaways for the listeners here. Thank you so much for jumping on this was this is a great little episode here. I appreciate it. Reese. I really, really enjoyed it. I hope that when you come to Oregon, we can take you to the Willamette Valley, get you some good wines there. And you know, one thing I will say to any of the listeners, if you're just thinking about adaptive and you're trying to understand whether or not implementing the technology is worth it, it has been. We've had it for three months now, and it has been huge, huge improvement for us. It's been one of those technologies that I would say has been a major difference in how we are running the business side of our building company. I highly recommend it. I think that it's well worth the monthly cost. And we get out probably tenfold, tenfold, actually what we pay actually correct. And thank you. But be three months and you're running, did you say you're running your third draw cycle through this product? Yeah, we're running our third one. And I'm extremely and I'm, I am, I'll say I'm pretty hard to please on those things, and I'm extremely pleased, you know? And this is not a paid anything. This is just a happy customer who is really appreciative for adaptive and what it's doing sometimes, AI has big promises and lots of letdowns. And, you know, I'm, I think it's, it's a really strong software, plus the customer service, you know, the integration, the customer service has been phenomenal. You know, the couple things, couple pieces of feedback that we had provided for specifically around having AIA formatting is being worked on as we speak. That's coming, and yep, exactly we know about that. That's probably about the only piece of feedback we had. And so I just, I think the customer service as well has been really strong as you're integrating, if you're nervous about integrating a technology, the customer service is really, really good, really strong. I think, not to cut you off, Dirk, but I think it's important to quantify for the listener, because you actually kind of brought this up in the beginning of the podcast, the implementation. And this is the Midwestern in me, saying goodbye and picking the conversation back up. But so again, three months, third draw cycle. How? If you know, maybe your team implemented, I don't know. Yeah, they did. How long did it take for you guys to get adaptive, bought, set up, using it, getting value, yo, super fast. Now we've got a really tech savvy team, and so I'll give I'll tip my hat there. And then Mallory, she's been our, the person that was. But she's just been phenomenal. She she never makes you feel like any question is silly or dumb, and then she always makes additional time for you if you need it. And we had as many integration calls as we needed. You know, we try to, when we decide on something, we try to create momentum moment decide right and adapt. Was never in the way of that, even on, I think Mallory was on vacation, on spring break, and she was still helping us out. Was really cool. So, you know, we it would pro it was probably like about a two week, a two week integration all in, all right? Because you got to work through all the different little kinks, yeah, and then, you know, and then you just gotta, it's user error stuff. But I would say both the chat, also the team, even when Mallory wasn't available, the chats really, really good. And yeah, we're we were just really, really happy. And again, this is just a customer giving a five star review for a technology that's really helped us operationally. Other thing I really like is from a pricing structure. Anyone else who uses technology and construction, right? You use, like a Procore as you get bigger, so too does your bill. And I like the adaptive, just monthly subscription component. It's nice. It just incentivizes you to continue to grow. And it's just a huge tool. I mean, I highly recommend it for anyone that's considering it, and if you want, just reach out to me. I'll give you we'll give you some more additional information. Love it. Derek, that's great. We are actually we're rolling out. We're calling it the adaptive ambassador program, okay? It's really for, like, our champions and the communities that are just advocates, a of like, running healthier businesses, but advocates for stronger financials in the construction sector. I'll reach out to you about that cool, and we can get you involved there. But dude, this was great, hand on the Bible. Final, goodbye. This was great. I appreciate all the time. All the kind words, all the lessons for the listeners. I think this is massively applicable. You have a great rest of your week, dude. And obviously, let us know if we could do anything for you. You two, Reese, great company you guys are part of. I look forward to continuing to use the software and watch you guys grow. Awesome. Sounds like a plan, dude. Likewise, we'll see ya. We'll see you.