Uncovering Hidden Profits

Chloe Brown, founder of Wildest Dreams, discusses the importance of accurate job costing and financial tracking in construction. She highlights that many builders fail to recoup thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per job due to inadequate financial management. Brown emphasizes the value of using tools like Adaptive for better integration and efficiency, noting that Adaptive's user interface significantly outperforms QuickBooks. She also stresses the significance of optimizing the Accounts Receivable (AR) cycle to improve cash flow and financial health. Brown offers free consultations to help builders improve their financial operations.

https://www.thinkwildest.com

Show Notes:
Chloe Brown's Introduction and Background (0:00)
Chloe's Sales Consulting and Custom Solutions (1:45)
Transition from Custom Solutions to Adaptive (12:30)
Case Study: Uncovering Unbilled Costs (12:45)
Impact of Cost Codes and Financial Tracking (16:27)
Forensic Audits and Adaptive's Role (26:00)
Improving Cash Flow and AR Cycle (31:44)
Technology's Role in Construction (47:01)

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

Typically, what we find is anywhere from 1000s of dollars, 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of dollars on any given job that was spent but not recouped. I am so glad that you're on because I think you have a very unique and a very valuable perspective, specifically, obviously around, like, construction, accounting and operations. Obviously, you've been a partner of ours forever. So I say we just talk about, like, what you're seeing in the market, generally, that builders struggle with. We can do some of like, the easy, like basic fundamentals that they need to have in place, but even talk about some of the more strategic things that you're seeing the best builders do. So that's what a lot of this threat will be. But for the listeners, who is Chloe Brown? Chloe Brown, well, I think it's fun to say how we met, which was, I was walking around a construction Conference, which for any, any builders, any any partners who have ever walked around one of those. I don't know if you're like me, but you're, you're pretty much dodging every booth that's trying to reel you in. And I'm like a professional dodger. I'm very good at that. And when I walked by adaptive, I could not dodge you read like you pulled me in. So good. And we've been Yeah, friends and peers since then. Yes, I am a, I am a professional attention getter. And okay, but actually, what was it that pulled you in? What's the difference there? Pump my tires a little bit. What worked? Well, you I remember that you were just, you were asking really good questions, and it's a lot harder to just walk past someone when they're asking really good questions than somebody who's just kind of trying to pitch you the product right away. So, yeah, yeah, I guess we'll not that. I'm a Sales Consultant, but we can just slide a little sales tip in there. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's what it's all about, right? It's like, it's really hard to solve someone's problem if you don't know what their problem is, right? So no, that's great, yeah. And it's honestly, I think you were using what air table and like, kind of amalgamation of other tools and stuff like that. Yes, good memory. We were doing custom solutions through air table and some other lightweight tools. So I guess, introduce myself. I'm not a sales consultant. I am the founder of wildest dreams where we really our core focus is helping construction companies make more money on their jobs. That's where we start with companies, because we really believe that if your core product isn't making money, if the financials of that core product don't make sense then, like, it doesn't really make sense to look at like, can we grow the business, or can we create leverage somewhere so and the way that we do that is through one, very meticulous, job level, Job Costing, job level financials, and two, through leveraging the best kind of cutting edge technologies that the construction industry has to offer. So totally I love it, and that's I so I think, just like over the years, because I've just been doing this for almost 10 years now, of talking to builders, processes, Business Solutions, technology, you obviously, you talk to people that impact you, and you hear, you know, comments that they make and takeaways, and I probably got it from you or less, we're just organically that aligned. But point being is, why in the hell would you try and scale something if you don't know it's making money, right? Or even not even just making money, but you're making what it should be making, right? It's like any other widget. It'd be insane for Apple to be scaling iPhone building if they didn't know they were going to be netting X on each unit, right? So I think that transferability into home building is is easier said than done, just considering all the nuance with an 18 month product that you're building, right, or a 12 month, six month product you're building, but also just with the craziness and invoicing and accounts payable, receivable, stuff like that. So I probably got it from you because I pitched the same thing. It's like, what? Why? Why are we trying to, like, take on more units when we don't know what we're making on our current units? Yeah, well, and an idea that's definitely not new. And I think, you know, every anybody in accounting and construction says this and beyond, I'm sure is a lot of business owners will say, Well, I have money in my bank account, and that's kind of their litmus test. So, so I must be able to hire, so I must be able to grow. But what they might not be thinking about is maybe some of that money is a customer deposit for a job starting in three months, or maybe that's sales tax money that you need to pay out, or business tax. There's so much that's wrapped up in that bank account number that doesn't actually tell you really anything about whether or not the business is performing well, totally 100% well. And so let's, like, kind of thread into that. And I am curious, from like, maybe a more rudimentary standpoint, is there's a lot of tech out there. You guys are building custom solutions, leveraging, leveraging products like air. Airtable and other products. What was the big like aha moment for you to move off of building those more custom solutions, air table centric processes into something like adaptive? Yeah, so I will say we still leverage those tools extensively. So I My background is in startup tech, my sort of ethos that I'm that I'm bringing to our clients, is use the best tools for the job that you need to get done, just like they would do on the job site. So if there is a, you know, vendor, documentation, compliance tool there, which there are many out there, if they're not hitting the mark, we're going to still kind of use our tools and do it the way that we think is best when, in terms of an aha moment or making the switch, is when you do find that product that's doing not only what you had custom built, but But 10 times better than what you can do, which you know not to make this do sales pitchy for adaptive, but I mean definitely the case. Adaptive does what we could never build, kind of custom in a solution of ours so, and I think part of that is integration with your accounting software, integration with the general ledger, and it's hard, it is hard to maintain the systems that we build kind of in house for clients. So it takes a little more legwork. Totally, totally Well, and, yeah, certainly not to keep this as like a sales pitch, but I do, I think this is going to be like a good segue into large like. I'm wanting to, like, really get some more context to the blog that you did with us on I think it was like, you uncovered like, 5 million and unbilled costs. And I think this would be a good segue so we don't have to worry about this being like a sales pitch for adaptive but for like, the specifics you'd mentioned, like, integration, but like, was there anything else that, like, really stood out to you? You mentioned vendor compliance docs, which we obviously do, I don't know if you're using them with your clients, but like, what were some of the big pieces that you could, like, even advise builders to look at when they are evaluating tools, or even looking at Adaptive Yeah, I think I mean being able to really see the link between your expenses and your draws and and covering all of your tracks, knowing, if you're curious, oh, shoot, did I bill out? You know that vendor charge? You can look in your you can look at that expense specifically, and see right there in the expense what draw it's tied to, plus all of the reporting that you guys execute too, through draws. I mean, I think I could go on and on, but I off the top of my head, those are a couple things coming to mind. Is just being able to, sort of like, follow the thread of the expense to the draw, which is so important for a builder. And then maybe the second is the way that that all feeds into the job budgets page, so you know, you have the question about that expense, and now you can compare it to your budget and see if that cost code, so talking not even just about job performance, but like cost code level performance within that job totally well. And I think that's great, because, I mean, that's really, I think when people look at adaptive, or maybe even hear about it is like, I think it's really easy for them to glom onto, like, this time saving idea, which it does for sure. But I think, like, what you're outlining is the more valuable ROI, which is MIT, like, preventing those misses from happening. It's a cash flow management tool. It's a financial operations tool, right? It highlights those big misses that builders come across. I was just talking to another builder out of St George, Ron Jensen. Shout out, Ron. We'll probably have him on the podcast here soon. But point being is, I was just like, talking to Ron organically, naturally. And he was like, just totally off the cuff, and he was pitched on time savings when he bought and he's like, Reese, we're actually seeing like, an uptick in profitability, because there is not a single receipt that leaves this business or comes into this business that isn't properly categorized, right, that isn't late. We're closing books out on time. We're making sure that we're hitting our profitability. We're making sure that we have the income to cover those expenses and those costs, right? So it's beautiful. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, I think when you talk about time saving versus value, I think any construction or like skill, someone that started with skilled trade can appreciate this comparison is you shouldn't really get interested in doing something faster until you're doing it really, really well. So we need to make sure we're doing something really, really well. And then it's a it becomes about speed. Totally. What are some of the things that you see builders trying to do really fast, maybe not as much like an umbrella, but like tactical that you see that just like bites them, that you're you and your team might come in and correct, yeah, I think, I guess, to riff off of Ron, who I also know. So shout out to him. You know, Ron? Love it. Love it. It is the job. Job level financial coding, like the job costing, where it's like, okay, well, we'll just put this in this job code, because I don't remember, or I went to Home Depot. I don't even know what job that. For. So let me forget about that. And our ethos is really like, let's let's track every dollar. Let's track every dollar you're spending. Because if you know it's like, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So if you're really loose about this receipt, your team is going to see that. They're going to be loose about theirs. And then it just all starts to fall apart from there. And I think that's where dollars become 10s of dollars or hundreds or 1000s of dollars on a given job totally well. And so I love that point of like, how you do anything is how you do everything. Like, so when you're working with your customers, is this like coaching them on how to do it? Is it largely like creating a process for them to follow? What would you say you spend most of your time doing to prevent those types of well, just throw it here, and we'll deal with it later. Type, yeah, that's a good question. And something we as a business have evolved on a bit ourselves in in the beginning, which is still what we do, is we come in, we assess just what are the current operations? We will do a process flow, you know, map out every single step. I think that's, I like to think that's something that makes us different. Maybe some from other firms people will work with is that operational piece. So, like, how does the guy get from the gas station without the receipt back to the office? Like, all of those details. And then we look for opportunities to really optimize for the sake of data and making sure that data gets where it's going. So we do sort of that as maybe more like process strategic consulting side. And then in some cases, if there's a really sophisticated, you know, office manager or somebody in the office, then we can kind of train and implement on some of the processes that we've seen create a lot of success, but we have begun more and more actually offering monthly recurring accounting services for our clients to then support execution on those better processes. And we have found more success when we kind of like, stay involved on a monthly basis. Totally, totally. That makes a ton of sense well. And like, even, even when you've got, really, what I'm picking down you mentioned, like, a sophisticated office manager, and also, like, providing these services, like, I think it really has to do with, like, ownership and accuracy and like, what's getting done. And I think that's a good segue into, like, I'm just dying, and here we are, like, 12 minutes, and I'm just dying to know the details and like, actually hear the story on the builder that you ran the case study with. You do not have to share names, entities, anything like that. Like, I would love to know how you met them, what was their state when you started working with them, getting to a point of realization of what needs done. Right? Execute, like, what was the story? Yeah. So I think we can do this, like, you know, one of those based on a true story, where it's like, this is an amalgamation of several different characters. Because the reality is, this is the case with every single client that comes to us. That blog or case study was maybe the biggest, sexiest number. Yeah, it's, it's it's like that with every one of our clients. And typically, the sort of like story that happens is we start engaging with a builder or GC. They know something is falling through the cracks. They know they're not making as much money on the job as they should be. And when we start digging into the operations of, okay, well, how are you tracking these things? They're either tracking them in spreadsheets, or maybe handwritten in some cases, or it's like three or four different people that are all managing the data, trying to get it into one place. All that to say that when they really look into it, they actually don't know where all of the transactions are happening. If they're doing cost plus they they're pretty it's pretty clear that they are not recouping for all of those transactions. So sure when, when we assess that and we figure that out, we dive in a little bit deeper, and we've with the help of adaptive which has made made this process significantly more efficient and more accurate for us. We also have kind of an in house system that we've developed to do a very meticulous, detailed project audit, where we essentially, it's almost like a forensic job analysis, where we go back through the whole life of the job, and we re we piece together every transaction and every draw and make sure that, well, make sure and find all of the transactions that have not been billed back to the client. So in that process, typically, what we find is anywhere from 1000s of dollars, 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of dollars on any given job that was spent but not recouped. And for any builder out there who is hearing this and thinking, Oh, well, I you know, that would never happen. I would never miss out on hundreds of 1000s of dollars of transactions on one job, which was how we got to the 5 million with that one client, their high end custom home builder, several really big jobs. And that is, that is where we got at the end of doing project audits across. All their jobs. Anyone listening that thinks that that isn't happening to them? I will. I would love to take a look at your books, because I have not worked with any anybody yet, from very sophisticated to, you know, our more kind of, I'll say, like a junior level owners who, who doesn't have that problem. I think that's like, what I think is super powerful, because we see the same thing. And, like, it could be like, are we just, like, building this echo chamber? Is this problem, like, actually that rampant in the industry, right? You see it? And I think that the conversation is less about hundreds of 1000s of dollars, no way, or hundreds of dollars. Who cares? Right? Right? It goes back to that concept of, what are we trying to scale if we don't know what we're scaling, right? It's like it has nothing to do with are we making money. It has everything to do with, are we making the money that we should be and if we have these opportunities, project over project, year over year, that we're not capturing income on. We're not getting the money that we should be doing. We're monetizing a hobby less, running a business totally. And I love the way you said that, too, because even if it is the guy that or the business owner that's saying, well, if it's a couple $100 here or there, who cares? The question back is, okay, how much revenue are you doing this year? Oh, a million. Okay, what if in three years, you're doing 5 million now? How many now? Where does that $100 kind of land if you're using those same operations, it that is scaling your your success compounds and your issues compound as well. Totally fix, fix those issues, totally so for you mentioned cost plus, I guess when you're when you're looking at these builders, and you're pulling back, you know, the curtain really doing a deep dive, I do want to touch on the forensic side of things, maybe even, like, a little more tactical, how are much willing to share of that process you actually get into. But when it comes to these builders, cost plus is like, I think kind of the the poster child for it, because they're billing their customer directly for cost, with a markup, including their margin, right? But are you seeing, like, even this cash leakage or profit erosion happening with fixed price builders too? And what does that look like for them? Yeah, totally. So I think in the first couple years that we were working, even with adaptive, you guys even were like, well, we're really, you know, for cost plus, not fixed price. And we weren't working too much at that time with fixed price. And since then, we actually just did a huge cleanup and onboarding with an owner who owns several different construction companies all fixed price billing, and what I realized I was making that mistake early on. And I think you guys were too to think that there was no value, because even if it's fixed price, they have to be coming up with that price from somewhere. And if they can't look at their historical jobs and get a really accurate hold on how much did we spend and how much did we make, it's the same problem is a cost plus builder, like the data they need is the same. So, yeah, so we just did a big implementation for multi entity builder, and I know he's thrilled because he was tracking in spreadsheets. It just lacked that accuracy that now he will have on the job to moving forward so he can say, okay, you know, I thought I was going to make 30% markup on this job, but it looks like it was 25 and how do we tweak our estimates? All right. 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Okay, so you're finding for the fixed price builders, big entity guy, he's super stoked, I guess when it comes to like, the difference here, and you're talking about the historic side, how I pitched this to builders is whether you're if you're cost, plus you can't, plus what you don't cost if you're fixed price, it's a race to margin. You had mentioned. It's more of like a historical benefit to know, like, how are we actually doing on these jobs? Jobs. But do you see any of these concepts in this profit erosion happening in real time for fixed price builders during their jobs? Yeah, definitely mean, because they're always bidding that next job. So when we start putting those financials together on a job where it's fixed bid, the contract is signed. No matter what we show them they're spending. They are where they are on their revenue. You know, they're, they're continuing to put together estimates. So when I say historical, you know, it's historical, but it is in real time, because they can correct as they go. They don't have to wait, you know, months or even years to sit down and look at their data. They can just pull up the job budget right away and see, oh, shoot. These last three jobs I bid are underperforming by 5% I probably should bump this. This bid up 5% Yeah, totally. Do you see it being more of an aggregate bump for them? Are you a part of these conversations, like when they're actually bidding their jobs? We don't get too involved in the estimate side for us, it's more of a conversation around because, I mean, we're not construction experts, and we in terms of delivery, and we don't, you know, claim to be sure, but we are able to make these, see these kind of, like, trends, historical trends, and and provide some guidance there, like exactly what I just said, Hey, the last three jobs that you started, you're, you know, 25% of The way in, and this is how it's trending. Let's talk like, whatever you're bidding you might want to think about that totally, totally. And I was just curious, because I like, I imagine it's more of like, from a line item by line item basis, of like, when you're going through and you're doing these post mortems on jobs, and you're like, there was a 5% bleed on this, and it was largely because of these three lines, we need to take this in consideration on a future job or whatever. Yeah, definitely. And we look, I mean, we've talked a lot about just looking at the job budget, where we look at a range of different data sets, we look at that variance by vendor. So which, which vendors did you think were going to come out at x that came out at Y? We look at the cost code level to see, is there just a consistent cost code problem? Is there, you know, a certain like link to that, whether it's a particular project manager or team member, maybe it's a group of jobs managed by a certain team. So we look at the data in all different ways, not, not just right at face value, totally. I You mentioned the cost code thing, and that's wild to me, that it's still a conversation like truly again, it could be like an echo chamber thing, right? Like I'm talking to builders. Cost Codes are normal, but when you get into, like, the sales side of adaptive, and us talking to builders that are interested enough to take a call or see a demo, or they heard about us, so they want to come in, you start to peel the layer back. Like, how big of a problem do you think cost code structures are for builders? Well, I mean, you're kind of saying it what you're you're just as much. I mean, you probably talk to more than I do. Like, what do you what? What trend are you seeing is, is it that there's too many is that that they don't know? How do you like? What is the problem you see, I love that you're shooting this back to me. I truly, I love it. Um, my perspective is, is, I think there's just like a true gap in understanding the intention of cost codes. Agree, I don't think that. I think they know what they are, but I don't think they understand how they should be leveraged in the value that they can pose at a business. And I say that primarily there's there's one builder that comes to mind, and they're like, we can't ever stick to a set of cost codes, because the owner always likes to add new cost codes. And it's like, if that owner understood the intent of cost codes, they wouldn't be adding cost codes, right, right? They would understand that it's like, it's about consistency and building a framework to where you can actually track your costs consistently, month over month, year over year, yeah, and understand the health of the business. What's your take? Yeah, no. I think that was well said, and it's Yeah, because every time you add a cost code, that new bucket has nothing to back it up for, you know, until you build up all of the data behind it. So I push back. I don't, I wouldn't necessarily say there's never a reason to add. I think there are situations where, for you know, there might be, like a bank lending situation, where sometimes the bank actually requires certain line items to be broken out of certain so there are situations. I think everything you just said, I fully back up. I think what I would add on to that, that I see that drives me crazy, it's there's something about the industry that can be a little bit of, like a little bit of high school, where it's like, well, this person's doing this, so maybe I need to do that. And I that with cost codes, where it's like, well, so and so. And this build, builder group, elite builder group, I won't name, is using these, you know. And so what we do with builders a lot, there's certain things that can be templatized, but there are other things where we really need to talk about, how does your. Business operate. How does your team think about these transactions, and how do you bid the project? And let's make sure that the cost codes really fit your job, rather than having like, 500 Cost Codes. That's a list that you got offline or got from a up here. Totally Yeah, because then they implement those and they don't understand them, and then they don't use them properly, exactly, exactly, and that's where it even goes back to like, the wrong story of like, like, you've got, you've got to commit, right? I think you've got to commit. You've got to know what you're committing to. And if you can, that's when you're going to start to see those benefits come through. Definitely. Yeah, yeah. I have a client we've worked with for a really long time, who is very self made, and his cost codes are don't look like anybody else's. I'll put it that way. And I think sometimes he has that sort of like imposter syndrome, where he thinks they should be fancier or better or have bigger words in them, and we just his financials are really strong, and we just talk about how they're working for him, and why they're working and for their team, and that there really is no need to change them. Nobody's looking at them besides us, right? So, dude, I love it. I love it. I am curious on you mentioned the forensic side early on, and I've heard this from several of our partners, how they'll leverage adaptive to just uncover these types of nightmares, but also, like be able to execute on a forensic deep dive much more quickly and thoroughly. What are how are you leveraging adaptive for that? Or, I guess, how do you run that forensic side? And again, if you've got the secret sauce, you don't have to share everything, but I'm curious, like, what you guys do there? No, it's funny when you said that earlier, about, like, not uncovering secrets, I'm I'm like, I'm happy to to show anybody what we do, because it is freaking hard, like, it's, it's not easy, it's a lot of work, and it's a process that we learn and we perfect every time that we do it. So I welcome anybody to to attempt this as well, because I think it's very specialty that we're even willing to do it. But so I think I mentioned earlier. I mean, basically we are, it's like forensic in the sense that we're like rebuilding the whole crime scene piece by piece and trying to figure out where everything goes. We have to work a lot with the builder, obviously, to do that, where adaptive comes into play is if they've already been using it amazing. It gives us a ton of visibility if they haven't been using adaptive where it's really helpful, which I don't know that this is something you end up talking about a lot with adaptive, but it's it's probably so overlooked is the UI and the interface of working in adaptive supersedes QuickBooks by a lot. So it may be that there is a lot of this work we could do in QuickBooks, but it would, and this is where we get into time savings, it would take us a lot longer and it would just be a lot more painful. So all of like the filtering views, bulk editing of transactions, being able to look at transactions in different reporting styles by really any variable we want to look at, that helps us to do this extremely tedious work. Does that answer your question? I don't know if I like process necessarily explain the process, but no, this is, this is perfect, because that's like, even how I explain it, like, there I will there. You know, there's certain, like, certain builders that you never forget, um, especially like being in sales, right? Like the experience of, like, you know, them starting the conversation and then starting to see the light in the conversation, and then getting into the product, right? And then there might be, like, some friction, or some like, oh shit moments for him, right? There was one builder. It was in the early days. This was like, probably, like, May of 2023, and they were using another product that was synced to QuickBooks, and they were, like, skeptical of adaptive. They're like, we think we're getting this done, but like, we're com, it's compelling enough for us to try, like, we'll get into adaptive. And they'd sync their QuickBooks to adaptive, and they like, immediately shot back. Like, your product is trash. It's showing our books are total, a total mess. Like, there's no like, how is it even suggesting this stuff? And we're like, obviously, six months into go to market, like, digging into it, right? And we're like, let's look at your quickbooks file, and then we start to uncover it's like, no, you actually do have hundreds of bills that are still open from 2017 Right? Like, you do have dozens of bills that hadn't been synced properly with jobs, right? And then that was like, they're still customers of ours today. Like that was the like, you're the immediate enemy to the you're the Savior that quickly. And I think it goes into that, like, just my question originally to was a forensic process, look like? You aced it with the simple UI, right, and the thoughtfulness of the product, but it literally, for this guy, was syncing QuickBooks to adaptive and like getting this, like overwhelmed moment of I've got a lot of stuff that's wrong in QuickBooks, and because QuickBooks is so difficult to understand, and so few people at an organization actually understand it to a level of it being helpful. It creates this dynamic where, like, business owners will stick their head in the sand saying, this is this person's role. Everything's good. Did we make money this year? Yes, good. On to the next. Meanwhile, they've got these compounding issues that we've already talked about in the beginning of this episode that are just like just hovering over them until they get addressed totally and you just nailed it. It's like you said that so beautifully. Is like they make it one person's job because they know that diving into QuickBooks, they can't even begin to wrap their minds around that, which I totally understand. And then the fact, I mean, that's that's a ROI for you right there on using adaptive or a tool like it is, you plug it in, and in five minutes, you can suddenly see all of these things that we're hiding in your QuickBooks that you never would have really been able to see yourself and also maybe identify that this poor person that you have made it to be their job, perhaps that's not fair to them and that they really need more support, because I've had owners in that situation in the past, and they'll kind of respond and I'll explain the process of cleaning up their QuickBooks so that adaptive is accurate, they can see the data, etc. And then they might get overwhelmed and say, Oh, well, whatever. Like, we're making money, it's fine. And then if the explanation of, okay, well, that's your general ledger. That's like, literally, the kidneys of your business, if that's not correct, taxes, aren't, you know, and on and on. So, yeah, totally, totally, no. And I think that kind of to the point of the individuals. I mean, there's, like, there's certainly a lot of pride that comes with the money side of any business, right? Accounting, Finance, bookkeeping, controlling stuff like that. Rightfully so. There should be pride that maybe, maybe pride motivated by fear, right? And they want that control over the process. And it's kind of like a lose, lose situation for them, and in a manual world because of the reality of the volume. And not even, like just the volume and the quantity of the invoices, receipts, A, P, A, R, it's the volume and the zeros that come on these transactions, building these huge projects, right? And it's like, if there's just a single, simple error, it could be you hit the decimal instead of the extra zero, and it's throwing everything off, and it's impossible to go back and find so again, I think, like when you're talking about this a it's like, it's worth it, just to understand the the the the health snapshot of your books. But also, again, it's leveraging, to your point of what, while the stream is doing is like, leading, leveraging leading edge technology to assist the process. Yeah, yeah. I think it's technology. And it's also finding, like, not to promote, but find, and truly finding the right people to help you do that, not not putting the weight of your business, the financial burden of your business, on your office manager, or, in some cases, it's people's moms or brothers. It's it's unfair to those people. It's unfair to you as the owner. And there are people out there that are doing this very well, that can help you. And I am, I think, with what we're talking about, we're, like, ragging a little bit on the business owner. That's, you know, doing these things. But I am seeing, in the years I've been doing this a shift, like there is a new wave happening, I think, in the industry, and a turnover, case in point, the success of adaptive, or the success of wildest dreams. And I'm curious, because you've been doing this for a while too, even before adaptive being with prior construction software companies. Like, what, what are you seeing as the change, like, in what we're talking about? Like, do you feel like the clouds are parting? Yeah. So I think so. My answer is largely gonna be around, like, your comment towards, like, ragging on builders. I don't, I don't think that it's as much as ragging on builders as there's been more discussion and conversation brought up about the reality that they deal with, right? And sometimes the reality isn't pretty. And to answer your immediate question of like, how the market is shifting, is, I think that builders, after 2008 recovering from that, lot of businesses were born. A lot of businesses were failed there in construction. Get over that hump, then we see covid 2020, tons of supply chain issues matched with truly historical low interest rates. And you've got. The supply chain dynamic with the market getting flooding, with clients wanting to build, and a really hot market and a ton of appreciation, right? There's a lot of builders in 2020 that ran out there and thought that they were the best business people in the world because they could double, triple their top line revenue in 1218, months, right? So I think, like, kind of that perfect storm comes back into this huge emphasis being placed on, okay, I've seen it all right? I've you've got the business owner that started in early 2000s or 2008 and they weathered the storm, and they built something that was consistent, and they're making money and building families and employing people and impacting community. And they saw a dip, and then they saw an explosion, and then you start to get these people that pull back. I think the market is ripe and truly begging for an easier way to understand their business through the lens of a business. Am I making? What I should be making on these projects? I think from a technology standpoint, it's a super interesting time to be in construction, because a you've got a huge new wave, new generation wave coming into the sector. Much more tech interested, tech forward, um, and I think they, a lot of them. I mean, as you know, construction is a generational type business, right? Daughter buying the business from mom, dad, brothers, whoever right, and I think they saw those trials and turbul, tribulation, tribulations, not tribulations, turbulence. There was turbulence. But they see those situations, and they want to come at it through a little bit more strategic lens. And the opportunity that poses for technology is to provide legitimate, automated, compelling solution, not just what was typically bloating the market. From an option standpoint, historically, there's a ton of ton of products entering the space. I think I was talking to Nick Schiffer at the contractor coalition Summit, and he was saying there was like 200 new software products or something at the International builder show, and it's like it's just exploding, right? And I think again, you don't, you don't stand up a software you don't raise a ton of money, you don't take a huge personal financial risk to build a product, if everything was so great that was already being presented, right? So I think, like, my answer long winded, albeit, is kind of an accumulation of all those things. If you're a general contractor looking to scale your construction business and you're serious about treating it like a business, then this one's for you. The contractor coalition Summit is a four day all in no bullshit experience, hosted by Brad Levitt from aft and Phoenix, Nick Schiffer from NS builders up in Boston, Massachusetts, also the co host of the modern craftsman podcast. Tyler grace from TRG home concepts, also a co host of the modern craftsman podcast. Morgan molotar from construction to style. And Mark Williams from Mark D Williams custom homes, and the host of the curious builder podcast. Now I give you all that context because I want to highlight that these are real builders, sharing what actually works, and they are massively motivated to help the industry better as a whole. In this event, you'll learn everything from AIA documents, cost plus contracts, org charts, brand partnerships, how to position your business to be as healthy as it possibly can, and when as much work as Re is reasonable now there will be high impact strategy, real talk, great food, even better. People in attendance, and if you want a discount, hit me up at Reese at adaptive, dot build or go to my Instagram at Adaptive Reese, and we've got a promo code. The promo code is adaptive 25 for a 20% discount. Space is limited. Get in while you can. We'll see you in Chicago. Yeah, no, I love that history lesson that was, I think you said that really, really nicely, and it's a good way to sort of think of the snapshot. And I'm sure you just took some builders back through, back through time of their prior years too. I think the only other thing I would say that is, one thing that I see that is is really cool, is whether it's the new generation or people who have been doing this for for, you know, decades. Is the way that other technology they see, even just in their personal life, gives them that aha moment of, hmm, there must be a better way to do this in my business. Like, you know, whether it's their their own personal banking apps, I've had clients say that to me before, like when I'm in my banking app, or when I'm doing my my family's finances, I can do this or that. I want to be able to do that in my business, to which I respond, we can definitely do that in your business, and that's cool to see. Then, what I've seen is business owners starting to sort of bring those ideas from totally unrelated areas of their life and look at their business through that opportunity, which is exciting, totally, totally, I think, I think there's just like generally, there's just a lot more intent happening. Me into construction right now. And even, like, it's not even just like the new wave, that's certainly a big influence. You know, you get, you get a lot of younger people, more tech forward. I mean, they're hearing AI, they're curious and how they apply it to their business. But I'm serious. I mean, we've, we've got customers that are 6070, years old. They've been in the business for 50 years, and they're even seeing it. They're like, this is ridiculous. This has always just been status quo. It's always been it's a good enough process. There's options out here to make it better, and they'll adopt very quickly, very quickly. The problem resonates with them. When you talk to them, they say, who likes tracking receipts? Yeah, like, that's a no brainer, right? It's like, the shoebox method. It's like, okay, it's working, but it when you really break it down, it's like, what is the time it takes to process a receipt? And you look at the dollar amount on the receipt, and it's important to track every dollar, but you're like, it cost me more to process and track this receipt than it was actually worth, right? That's when you start to like, see those guys start scratching their head. They're like, let's talk. Yeah, yeah. I love it. Anything else that you think is tactical that you could share with builders, I thought this was great from a forensic standpoint, how to view your business, but anything else tactical that you would want to leave the listeners with? Yeah, I think something that's been very top of mind for me recently, that we didn't discuss, that it definitely is an aspect, a huge aspect, of adaptive and and I think a problem that I don't necessarily get to with my clients until we sort of put the fires out, is their AR cycle, which, for those listening, is how fast you are making that turnaround on creating an invoice, and then how quickly your client pays that invoice. I don't think enough owners are really thinking about that and also how that feeds into bill pay and the timing of how long does it take my client to pay me? When am I paying my vendor and how long am I just out that cash? So I don't necessarily have tips there, but it's definitely something I'm thinking about a lot, and encouraging all of our clients to also think about more and see how we can tighten up that part of the financials. Totally. I love that you brought that up. Happenstance, another builder. It was, he was actually out of Austin. Same conversation, he's in there. He's like, I'm getting ready to do this big project at the development dozens of units. He was like, I used to be able to float AP at a much smaller level of business floating AP for the listeners is you get 15,$20,000 in invoices. You can basically carry that as the lender to get your subs paid, waiting for you to receive the money into your business to cover those costs. Yes, it's basically lending yourself, lending yourself money. Essentially you're a banker, not a builder at that point, right? And point being is the conversation. There was, he was like, we've got to figure out how to speed this up. And like, the immediate side of that was, was like, quicker payments to the subs. But then there was, like, it takes us a week to get our draws together, and then it takes so the bank 10 days, and sometimes they gotta send someone out to inspect it, and then we've gotta get the money to the subs. And like, you're looking at like, it's almost like a 20 business day process, and you're like, this is absolutely insane. And that's where it's like, it's more about that immediacy and understanding. It's like, okay, here's all of my costs that I have coming in the pipeline, I can see a real time view of what my cash flow position actually is and what projects I need to be collecting from, and then how quickly can I get that invoice out to the customer or to the bank so that then they can fund confidently the cash that I needed to pay the cost that I have coming down the pipeline? Yeah, and then it's when you there's the the worst case scenario where someone is 234, months behind on invoicing their clients at all. And that's like, it hurts my heart because they there are, they're funding their clients projects. And then when you get caught up, and we're in this great place, okay, now we're invoicing every single month at the exact same time, awesome. Then becomes this fun game of like, how can we get that tighter and tighter and tighter so that you as the business owner are holding onto your cash for as long as possible, which you can then leverage in a variety of ways? So totally, no, I think that's great. I think that's like, the general theme wrapped up nicely in this conversation is like, you really can't get to that point until you've made a lot of the checkpoints that we had talked about right accounting operations. Chloe Brown, everybody you talked about not wanting to plug yourself. But let's just end on, like a little plug for wildest dreams, how they can get in touch with you where this process typically starts. What sweetest? Services do you typically provide? Yeah, you can find me at Chloe, C, H, l, o, e, at think wildest.com Our website is, think wildest.com and I truly I mean this so much. I love talking to business owners, and I would be happy to usually, I'll schedule a 30 minute call. We go an hour and I I just enjoy having those conversations, and even if we don't end up working together, just being able to shed some light. I do this because I love supporting small business owners that are feeding their families and feeding their team's families, and I'm super passionate about helping those business owners be more successful. So I would love to chat. Love it. Love it. I think that's great. And I think even just like to the early remark of the sales consulting pro bono that you provided, it's all about learning about the problem. Right to Chloe's point, she loves having conversations with builders, understanding the problems and situations you guys are in. She has, she's, we've, literally, we've had her bring us customers. We've sent her customers for the last two, three years, and they all have great experiences. Um, so hit Chloe up if you're wanting to do these deep dives and just get a little bit better financial pulse on your business. But, um, Chloe, this was great. You crushed your first Was this your first podcast? This is your first podcast. I don't think it's like my first first, but it's Yeah, first, maybe in a long time, it's I'm not, I don't think I was born for the stage. So you were great. You were great. Yeah, you were nervous about doing this. You you absolutely crushed. This was awesome. It was a good conversation. I love that you asked me questions. Normally, I'm the one just asking questions. This was good. It was a good dialog. Good. Well, that's what, yeah, I think with like, the sales process, especially, I always say I'm terrible at sales, but I make a lot of sales because I'm genuinely, like, very curious. And I think that's like, just the way like to sell, because if you're genuinely curious, you have a stimulating conversation with the person about the things they care about. And so I'm glad that that came across a little bit. You did great. You did great. Well, I'll let you get back to it and wait. Are you gonna be in some you're not gonna be a sun Bell. No, I'm going to that construction accounting, or accounting with Hector Garcia. It's like a small, small group doing, like a technology and construction Think Tank thing. So I will, I will talk about adaptive, I'm sure, yeah, yeah, well, whatever. Well, enjoy, and I guess, yeah, we'll, we'll see you when we see you. Okay, thank you so much. Appreciate you.