Systems, People, and Profit with Isabel Affinito

Isabel Affinito and Reece discuss the critical importance of having clear job descriptions, robust systems, and disciplined financial practices to drive success and minimize risks in construction businesses. They highlight the emotional challenges of change management, the judicious role of AI, and the need to implement foundational processes before scaling operations.

https://www.isabelaffinito.com

Show Notes:
Introduction and Background of Isabel Affinito (0:00)
Implementing Job Descriptions and Organizational Change (6:51)
Emotional Aspects of Business Ownership (15:12)
Opportunities of Focus for Builders (22:35)
Implementing AI and Technology in Construction (40:29)
Conclusion and Final Thoughts (52:56)

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

If you're not making money, scaling will not fix it. All you're going to do is you're going to have more volume of not making money if you can't make money on one, project two, project three, projects, you're not going to make money on 50. You have to figure out how to be profitable at a small scale before you blow it up. Welcome to builders budgets and beers. I'm Rhys Barnes and I started this podcast to have real conversations about money in the building industry, the wins, the mistakes and everything in between. I believe builders deserve to feel confident about their finances, and that starts by hearing from others who've been through it too. This industry can be slow to change, but the right stories and the right tools can make profitability feel possible. Let's get into it. Alrighty. Isabel, mics are hot. We're rolling. Let's go. Thanks for jumping on. Absolutely. I'm excited. Yes, I am too. I think this is going to be a very insightful conversation. But to preface, let the listeners know who they're going to be hearing from today. Absolutely. So I'm Isabelle afinito. I'm an operations consultant in the construction space based in Austin, Texas, and I love solving problems in businesses through systems and processes. I love it. And there are there that's been like a general theme on the podcast recently is just like the importance of processes. The builders that have struggled with it, but have finally started to get a hold of it and what it's done to their business. So I'm super stoked to have somebody with your background jump on the show and shed a little light, if you would. What is your background? Isabel, oh, gosh, so heavy in real estate development, construction. So I exited college and immediately went into the real estate world. By the way, is my mic in a good spot? Yeah, you sound great. Clear as a bell. Wonderful. Clear as a bell. Okay, okay, so got into college, right into real estate, right into real estate. Started in commercial for a hot second before I jumped over into residential real estate. Then, over the years, I built my own residential real estate practice and then ran sales teams. So my favorite thing to do was to take new real estate agents and get them from floundering to producing. And during that phase of my career, I realized how much I liked systems and processes, because I would build systems for my clients and I would build systems for the agents on my team. And I was like, over designing systems. It was just way more systematic than it needed to be for what I was doing, sure. Then eventually I pivoted. This was around 2021. Pivoted into my husband's business. He had started a construction and development business in central Austin, and I decided to go over there and help him ultimately evolved into the COO of that organization and navigated through, you know, the intense market changes that have happened in the last couple years in Austin, and turned over a construction team. So I became a director of construction, which was never a plan, but I learned a lot about how construction worked, learned a lot about development, learned a lot about financing, all of that kind of stuff just got like an absolute baptism by fire and development and construction. And during that period, figured out how much construction and development companies need systems and processes and how much just the nauseating amounts of money that can be lost when you don't have your system. The process is dialed in, nauseating is the only word. What? Okay, so I'm actually curious. Okay, so your husband's a builder. You jumped in. Obviously had a background in residential, some commercial real estate, but just like, would you say, baptized by fire? Is that the term that you used? Yeah, that's hilarious. Um, so what? Like, what were some of these nauseating numbers? I imagine that you saw these in your husband's business, or, like, just even clients, like, like, what? What were some of the big zingers that you guys came across? I mean, I'll just give you. I mean, there were so many examples. It's not even funny, but just one of them is of failure to reconcile structural plans with architecturals, with the framing plan. And that was just one mistake that cost us, like$50,000 because there was a housing lvl or something. I don't even remember exactly what the issue was, but it was something like that. Got it. Okay. So then in that situation, what would you just go back to the client and change order them for the missing lvl, or would you just eat it? Was a spec house. So, okay, yes, yeah, yeah, so, and that's just one of many, yeah. I mean these kinds of things. And anyone who's in construction, I'm sure, will be nodding their head, because that's just happens all the time. Totally it shouldn't happen all the time. I know it's absolutely heartbreaking, but then it's just like, you basically like, build this industry of people that are like, well, that's just like, the cost of doing business. It's like, they just like, anticipate to lose five, six figures a job. And they're just like, how do I prevent as much of that as possible? So I guess, like, in that situation, we could use, would you say, like, the end the engineering plans with architectural plans? And like, not reconcile, I'm trying to remember exactly what happened. And this was one of those things where I was ramping up into construction, trying to figure out what had happened over the last nine months and then fix it. And this was a completed house with drywall and sliders in and everything. And then we had a slider that wouldn't open and close right? And it was because the house was sagging on top of the slider. And it turned out that that was because it was not properly beefed up at the framing. And that was because there had been a discrepancy between the structural the architectural, I think the foundation was a different size in each of them. And so then the framers, kind of, like, did the best that they could on site, but also the order from the trust company wasn't quite right. And, like, whatever field adjustments happened weren't right. And so we had this huge, one of those huge luxury sliders, you know, that would not and so then we had to pay somebody like, $10,000 to come take it out without breaking it. And then we had to fix the I don't even remember what question you asked now, but that's, does it? I'm just getting anxious talking about this, because you've got to think, when you when you think about like building a home like that is the stuff that's like, stuff that happens so early on in the process that didn't get caught impacting something that's so close for you to get ready to CO on the house or sell the house put on the market, yeah. And then you just, like, find these little pieces. And we don't have to get into the specifics of like, the like, the missing lvl, right? But I just think, like, generally, what are just, like, some immediate things that builders can look at, or like, a frame of mind that they can get into to start preventing this type of stuff from happening. Well, I mean, these are the things that keep owners of construction companies up at night, totally should. I mean, it kept me up at night. Because the fundamental question you're asking yourself is, can I trust my eyes and ears in the field? Can I trust people? Am I allowed to curse on this podcast? Of course, yes. Can I trust can I trust people to give a shit? Like, do my people in the field give a damn, or are they gonna go and just like, continue down the line? And so, you know, some fundamental things I think that you absolutely have to have in place is job descriptions. So people need to know what their job is, what the pathway to success looks like, and how they're being measured. They need to know which pieces of the project, which pieces of the process they own. So if nobody's really clear on whose job pre con is, then you're going to be building blind in the field, because nobody did the reconciliations. Like no one thought it was their job to make sure everything matched. And people need to believe that they could get fired, like if they believe that they work for a company that's not going to fire them. It's a real problem. So people have to believe that, like, I have this job description, I'm supposed to perform it, and if I don't, there will be consequences, like you got to start there. Before we start talking about any checklists or softwares or anything else. Like you got to start there. How many builders do you think are operating with job descriptions, and we're talking like sub 100 million dollar year builders, not experiences, very few, very few. Are we talking like 5% all I'll say is I have yet to have a client contact me. Who has them? Why I just I and, like, granted. Like, I like, I, like, got out of college and worked for a big organization. Then I worked for a smaller company. Now I like, work for, like a startup, and it's like, that's just, like in the business world, like just an expectation, like applying for a job, like you'd hope there's, like, a job description in place, and like, an outlined expectation. Why don't they do this? I think it's a combination of things. I think one piece of it is that very often, owners of construction companies, these are smart guys, typically guys. I'll just use gendered language, because it's usually men. Sure, these are typically smart guys, but they're not typically guys with a whole lot of education. So you know, most owners of construction companies that you run into maybe didn't go to college, probably almost certainly don't have, like, an MBA, have probably never worked in a corporate environment. You know, very often the trajectory that these guys follow is that they themselves are good at something in the field, like they're a good plumber, or their dad was a builder, and they have learned to build from their dad, and then they start hiring. I need a helper. I need another helper. Now I need a guy to run this other crew. Now I need another guy to run now I'm running five crews, and it's like, it kind of happens. They don't set out, typically, to build a scalable business. They set out to do construction work, and before they know it, their business owners running a complex organization. And so it's one of those things where it just kind of sneaks up on them, sure, and not having had the experience of being held to a job description, having somebody put you on a pip, you know, doing performance reviews. Like they didn't go work for KPMG for however many years, like they didn't go work for, you know, a big four accounting firm. They didn't go work for IBM. Like, they haven't been working at those places, right? And so it's just unfamiliar territory to them. So in the same way that for a lot of people, like looking at a house and understanding how it's built is a completely black box, but to these guys, it's second nature. It's the opposite problem when it comes to, like, your run of the mill. HR, totally, totally. I mean, that's, that's a great way to put it. But I mean, like, how, like, how difficult is it to write that ship, if you will. And that's where we can get into, like, how you approach these things. But writing the job description is the easy part. Implementing the job description is the hard. Part, yeah, because this is the other the one thing that stops people is just the lack of familiarity. The second thing that stops people is that implementing a job description requires organizational change, and it requires upsetting some people, because if you don't have it written down like this is one thing that I say, if it's not on a page, your team is not on the same page. Yeah. So if you don't have a job description written down, that means that you have one assumption about what Joe does. Joe has another assumption about what Joe does. The people who report to Joe have a third assumption about what Joe does, and his peers have a fourth assumption about what Joe does. So it's like no one is actually on the same page about what Joe does. So when you put that on a piece of paper and you say, Hey, Joe, here's your job, you're going to get some organizational pushback. Joe might say, this isn't what I signed up for. I didn't think that was my job. His peers might say, well, that's not what I thought that was my job. Why is Joe now he's stepping on my toes. So you have to navigate that organizational change, and not everyone is, like excited about doing that? Yeah, totally. And I mean, like, I'm just like, you could, you could totally think it, but that that, like, that alignment, that putting, putting the job description on paper, starts those conversations. And do you think it's more like an eye opening moment for builders to, like, recognize how, just how chaotic their business is. Because I'm thinking, if I have, like, like a project manager or a director of construction that was, like, flying by the seat of their pants and like, nothing outlined, nothing on paper, and then all of a sudden people are like, well, that's what I was doing. And like, Joe told me to do this. And now, like, what does Joe do? Like, you could just see how disjointed everything is and how little actually gets done, what is usually the outcome after you start getting these parameters and like, bumpers in place, yeah. So the outcomes are usually a mix. So for some people in the organization, they're going to be relieved to have the clarity. And they're like, Okay, thank goodness. Like, and there are people in the organization who are annoyed that it's chaotic, and they don't want it to be chaotic anymore, and they anymore, and they know that the organization can do better work, and so they're relieved to have it happen, even if there's a little bit of, kind of like, there's a little bit of resistance with them at the end of the day, they see the value, and they're willing to kind of push through and get on board. The other thing that happens is that there are, unfortunately, some people in almost every organization who are hiding behind chaos. So there's a lot of smoke in the organization. No one's really sure what's going on, which means that underperformers can fly under the radar because no one's shining a bright light everywhere. There's not a standard. Yeah, there's not a standard. And so often there will be some turnover. It's, it's very uncommon to put real standards and job descriptions into place without it revealing that somebody is not a good fit. And that's another reason that owners resist doing it, because they're they don't want to turn over their people. Why? I mean, I, I think that that kind of goes back to your comment of, like, these guys didn't get into, like, necessarily thinking they were business owners or trying to build a scalable business. They just wanted to do construction work, and then, like, they just kind of, like, wind up with the with their business. But I think, like, as soon as you, as soon as you identify the Bloat as a business owner, understanding what a business is, it's a living, breathing, growing organism that that's just like, the ugly part of business is like letting people go or addressing these types of issues. But in the construction industry, it's so prominent for that to be the issue. I mean, we hear it all the time in software, like the change management thing, right? It's like, we're here. We are, like, we built a piece of software that's very intuitive, very simple to implement. I am biased, but I also have a really good pulse on the market and what other products take and like, adaptive is like, a very easy to introduce piece of software. When we're bringing this up to builders, that's like, the number one thing they talk about is, like, the change management component, and they're just like, deathly afraid of changing, of like, it took us 10 years to get onto an all in one project management software, and we are finally here, and now we're opening up a conversation of how like, redundant and manual and time delayed and error prone those products are, and they're just, like, doesn't matter. Like, this is what we're going to do, like, to help with your efficiency. What's your take on that? In terms of, like, I know that was kind of like, a long way around, like, letting people go, but just like that change management and like, terminating people is just brutal. Yeah, well, let me ask you this, Reese, have you ever had to fire somebody? I have, unfortunately, yes. Okay, so you know, you know what it feels like. And the longer you've been in an organization, the more sort of crossover you have with this person, the harder that is. It's easier for me as a consultant, to come in and see, hey, did you know that Joe's not performing? I can see. It faster because I'm not attached, right? Yep, I can see, hey, we're trying. You're trying to achieve this goal. There's resistance. I found where the resistance is coming from. The resistance is right here, right? That's just easier for me to see, because I'm not in it every day. And Joe's not my cousin, or Joe's not the guy I started the business with. He was my first, you know, report, Joe's not the guy who, like took care of my family when I got in a car accident. I mean, there's all these like, interconnected things happening within an organization that make it. It's an emotional thing, and there's some, there's some leaders out there who don't have an issue firing, I guess, but most people that I encounter have personal feelings about it's a very emotional, personal thing. And there's also the piece of it where sometimes you've kind of allowed somebody to hold you captive in your business, because, like, they're the one with all the email logins, and they're the ones with all the two factor authentication, and they know where everything is and your business is so disorganized that you're like, If so and so leaves, like, do we how do we get into builder trend? Who talks to builder trend? If something breaks? Who they have all the two factor authentication on their phone. I don't even know how to factor authentication works. How am I supposed to reset that? And that's one thing that I find myself doing a lot of, actually, is off boarding. Yeah. So a lot of my engagements have been when someone comes to me and they say, Hey, someone I've had with me for a decade is moving on. I don't even know where to begin. I'm scared they might not say that, but, like, that's what they're saying. They're like, what is going to break when this person leaves? And so I'll come in and just make a checklist and be like, Okay, we need all the email logins, we need all the two FAS. We need all of the, you know, I need a list of all the software. I need to know who has access to it. Talk to me about everything you're working on, and I'll just help offboard them. It's like, I have the patience to get all of that out of this person's head so that we don't find it all after it breaks. Yeah, I again, like, I think, like, even back to, and this is, like, kind of gone to, like, a super negative, like, buzz kill, talking about firing people and, like, off boarding, people. But hey, guys, that's not the only thing I do. I have other services. Yeah, we'll talk, we'll talk about the fun stuff here in a minute. But I think this is so crucial, because I think you're opening up, like, a very like, this is, like, a plaguing issue in this space, and, like, even just with the off boarding, and it's like, you just, you create this, like, like, false job security, or like this false excuse to keep people when you're like, we're like, That's seriously what's holding it up that just again, shines light on, like, how weak or how shallow the processes and systems are, ie, how dependent you are on specific individuals And, like, performing a function and fewer processes you have, the worse it is, because think about in the construction space, if you're thinking about letting go of like a superintendent, for example, if you don't have good reports on what's happened in that house, you're done your super knows that. They know all the weird little quirks. They all know all the weird little side agreements that you have. They know all the weird little change orders and all of this stuff. And, like, maybe the list that the custom client asked for that isn't actually written down anywhere. It's like, on their yellow notepad, right? Like, letting get that person go, even if they're doing a bad job, letting them go is painful, because you can't just pop open your software and go, here's the all of the reports and all the photos, which is why, like, these are where the processes come in. Like, yes, you need before and after pictures of your plumbing. Like, you need pictures of the plumbing at rough and you need more pictures at the end. Because when there's a dispute, you need to be able to look at the pictures and say, Here's what it looked like. We know who messed it up, because the arguments that happened was it the plumber? Was it the electrician who messed this up? When you don't have pictures behind the walls. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to pin that down, totally, totally. And I think that's like, again, just going but that also that requires someone who's not necessarily driving, like an emotional business, right? Like that takes someone who's eager to do it. I mean, I was talking to a builder out of Lincoln, Nebraska here not too long ago, he was on the podcast, and he was, like, he basically just summed up exactly what you had talked about, of, like, it built this little tile company, and it was going well, and it was, like, higher margin, but it was just such a pain to scale. And he decided he wanted to go into construction, and he ran that thing for, like, I was it was, like, three or four years with, like, really no processes and systems. Started getting involved with coaching, and now he's like, the process and system guru, and he's just like, totally like, this is mitigating risk. This is ensuring that the work is getting done. We're seeing better margin out of the deal, like, we have better data to work with as a business. But it took, it took this, like, this mental shift of not being tied up, of like, Oh, if I let this person go, then they know all the passwords. Like, what am I gonna do, right? Yeah, bummer. I don't know. I think how much of the the emotional side of running a business is just tied to the sub $50 million a year organization. I don't know. I was thinking about even just like a massive. Property that I was thinking about, they run pretty emotional. I mean, do you think there's a correlation to that, or do you think that you see builders that are like, one,$2 million a year shopped, and they're doing it right, and they're not emotional and like, they're just like, everyone's emotional. I mean, there's, there is, there are no people who aren't emotional. We're like, we're all being driven by our emotions. And one of the questions is, how honest you are with yourself about that? If you're trying to convince yourself that you're not an emotional business owner, yes, you are. You are an emotional business owner, it's just about embracing like, Am I aware of what I'm feeling? Like, am I being honest with myself about what I'm feeling? Yeah, there's actually brain research that, like, we are incapable of making decisions without emotion. Like when people have a brain injury that injures the part of their brain that's responsible for emotion, they can't decide anything. They cannot make decisions about, like, what time to put on their calendar for a doctor's appointment, what to eat. Like they are incapable of deciding anything, because all of our decisions are driven fundamentally by the emotional part of our brain, yeah, yeah. I feel like I just went off on, like, a tangent on that. No, that was great. I mean, because I think, like, even when you tie it back in, is like, I think maybe that's part of the hurdle. Is, like, I think people go through kind of this, this transition of trying to build processes in their business, or just put together job descriptions or or expectations on a piece of paper, and like, this is what I need you to do exceptionally well. And then they try and draw the emotion out of it, which, frankly, like, I may have been like, guilty of just even, like, on this podcast, of like, why can't you just cut all the emotion out of it and just run like, the perfect, most analytical, data driven business decisions? But I think you can kind of find some peace and like that you are, you are an emotional being. It's about, like, the self awareness more so. And like, how do we make decisions based off of this? And that goes back into, like, the off boarding or the terminating, and like, how detrimental that is to the growth of your business. And being like, look like the people that I've terminated. It's never been like, I didn't like them as individuals. Yeah, it's it's always been like, like, here was the function of the role. This is what was going on. And like, you're not meeting expectation so, but it's because those expectations were set and conversations were had that that conversation, it's never easy. Like letting someone go is not easy, but you can still have those conversations and know that, like, it's for the health of the business. And that's where I think, like, when builders are making these decisions that aren't documenting processes or aren't documenting descriptions and aren't holding people accountable out of fear, like this was my buddy, and like, we're business partners now, or this is my so and so, and they're running the office now, it's like, well, everybody needs to be working towards the betterment of the business that period. And if you're not, if the team isn't operating in that motion you were alluding to that earlier, of like, do people actually give a shit about your business? Then that's just like, your first inclination. Of like, I've got the wrong people. And I will say that I do think that the right systems and processes can take some of the emotion out of it, because it's not nobody wants to have, like, wildly unbridled emotions at work, like, that's not good for anyone. But when you have gotten clear on your job descriptions for people, and then the next point that people tend to miss is then actually using them over time. Like, if you just make them and then you don't use them, it doesn't matter, like you you need to actually look at them, you know, once a month, or bring them into one on one meetings. Hey, this you know, A, B and C are going really well, D, E and F. We could use some improvement. Here's the job description. Let's talk about it like they have to become living documents that you use. But if you've done that, and then you realize, hey, this person's not a good fit anymore. They're just not performing at the level that we need them to. You can have your emotions about that. It might be, oh, man, I like them personally. Oh, this is gonna suck to let them go. I'm really disappointed that they didn't rise to the occasion. I feel like I was clear. I thought they could do it, and then they didn't. I don't like it, but it's going to be time. It's time for me to let them go, right? And those you've now, those are your emotions. You've had your emotions about it. Then when you sit down in the room, it's not a conversation about how they're a bad person. It's just, hey, we talked about this here with the expectations. We've had several chances to meet them. We have not met them. This is no longer a good fit, correct? And so to a certain extent, like that is an unemotional conversation, because it's just you didn't fire them. They fired themselves like they knew what the expectation was, and they didn't meet it, right? But that doesn't mean that you don't have emotions about that, right? Totally, totally. It's, it's just like, the the difficult part of being the business owner, it's like, everyone wants to be the CEO until they're the CEO, right? The burden of leadership, I will say, also, like, it's not fun to let people go. But I also very much believe there are not bad people. They're just bad fits. And so if you're not happy about that, how this person is performing, this person is also not performing to their highest potential, 1,000% the longer they sit here in this role that is not a good fit for them, and you're get feeling resentment and all of these things, like they're not thriving where they could be. You. Could be releasing them out into the world to go and find their superpower and the thing that they're great at, and so it's also, like, it's also kind of a privilege to get to lead people in that way. Yeah, it totally is. And I think when you have that clarity, I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I frankly wanted to as well as like, it's as much as like, it is like, a really tough situation for the individual, or maybe like an immediately presumed difficult situation. You always hear the stories of like, you know, after I got fired, like my world, like completely changed, and like, I felt all these great opportunities. Inversely to the business too. It's like, when you do get rid of those people, or you do get them off your team, you typically see a growth spurt that happens, and you can start to, like, really focus on what's important. And like, maybe it was like, and this comes back to the self awareness, but the ownership side is, like, if you have somebody in a seat that's not succeeding, then, and you do end up terminating them or letting them go, it's in your best interest to take a step back as a business owner and like, do a post mortem and like, really evaluate. Like, did we have everything we needed in place to be able to support this individual to succeed? And if you didn't, that's a part of business. But don't let that become the normal, and just keep hiring people, firing people, hiring people, firing people. Like, take a second to step back and be like, What would have done? What? What could we have done that would have made this more successful? Would it have been a more more well discussed and outlined onboarding, right? Would this have been, to your point, like, weekly check ins, monthly check ins, going over, KPIs? Was it clear on, like, what success looked like? Was it was, were we actionable from a leadership standpoint, when they were coming across challenges and like, they needed our help, whatever it might be. So I think even just to pivot off of this is, like, when you do it's the kind of the nasty side of business, but it's so crucial. I do want to talk about more of the fun stuff. Yeah, I guess where, like, what are some of the biggest, like, low hanging opportunities aside, we kind of talked about it from, like, a job description thing is, like, we can talk about all the processes and systems, but you don't have job descriptions. It doesn't descriptions. It doesn't matter. What are some of the other areas that, like builders could see, just like immediately listening to this podcast or hearing from you that they can be like, focusing on Yeah, so what I always do with new customers, when we're talking about working together with new clients, is to talk through a handful of categories, and I'll have them rate themselves on a one, two or three. So one would be, this is a disaster, like, we don't have this under control at all. Two is, like, it's okay, it could be better. And three means we've got this. We don't need to worry about this. This is going well. And so the things I'll ask you about are accounting. Do you feel like you know where your money is coming from and going to, are you making money? Are you able to track your expenses? Do you have reports that are meaningful to you? So that's the first category. The second category would be your people. Do you feel like you have the right people in place? Are they clear on what they're supposed to be doing? Is it written down? Do you have a good cadence for giving them feedback? The third thing that I would ask them about is quality. How do you feel about the quality of your product? Do you feel confident that you're putting out a quality product that your customers are happy with? Do you trust that the right things are happening in the field? The third thing that I asked them about are schedules. Do you feel like you can trust that things are going to happen on time? The what number are we on now, I don't remember what that would be. Third. This is fourth. Okay, great. So accounting, people, scheduling, oh, quality was the other one? Quality? Yeah, so then the next one, let's just throw the numbers out the window. The next one would be customer satisfaction. Are your customers happy? Do they recommend you? Do they come back to you again? And then I think maybe my last one would be like mission and purpose. Do you feel like you have a good story for why you do what you do? Are your people clear on why you do what you do? Are you able to create good branding messaging around that? Are you all clear on where you're headed and why you're headed there? So I look for the ones and the twos, and if people or accounting are a one or even really a two, we're going to start there, yeah, because before we do any of this other stuff, we need to know, are you making money? Is your money safe? Is anyone stealing from you? Are you losing money in places you don't understand? Are you can you even tell if you're profitable or not right? If you need to take out a loan, can you pull together the right documentation, like money. Let's figure that out. And then the next one is people. Do you trust your people? Are they clearing what they need to be doing? Are they mostly doing it? Yeah, if those two things are off, I don't care about your punch list checklist. Yeah, you don't need to be doing that. We don't need a pre con checklist. We don't need any of that stuff. We need to know if you're making money, and we need to know if you've got the right people. And then from there, we can talk about other low hanging fruit for sure, for sure. And I would imagine, like, actually, I shouldn't assume here, how many of the builders that you do talk to, like, struggle in that one, or the money, the accounting and the people side, most of them, most of them. And what commonly leads to. We could just, like, bucket these out, because it's builders, budgets and beers. We could talk about the accounting side, like, what is typically the like, when you open up a set of books and you look at it and you say, like, wow, these people are struggling. Why? The things that I'll see are an accounting team that just isn't the right team or isn't properly empowered. So a lot of times you'll have a bookkeeper that's a family member who isn't necessarily, like super experienced in accounting, and they might be doing okay, but they're they're not, they're just not rising to the level that you need them to be rising to for the amount of money that you have moving through this company. And it might be that maybe they can perform with clear guidance on what what they need to be doing. But I think part of that's coming from the the business owner isn't often very sure what they need, either. Because if they're not an accounting major, like they're not a business major or anything, they're kind of like, I don't know someone showed me this report, like someone exported a P and L out of QuickBooks. I think this is supposed to make sense to me. I feel kind of dumb that it doesn't make sense to me. So I don't necessarily want to, like, really make a big deal about how it doesn't make sense to me. So I'm just going to kind of not really, yeah, I'm just going to kind of bury it. And so one thing that I do as a consultant is come in and help these builders understand, like, look, you're smart enough to understand accounting. This report isn't making sense to you because this report isn't well formatted for you. We need to get clear on what do you actually need to see to make meaningful decisions? These should be reports that you look forward to, looking to looking at once a month, because you're planning on making meaningful decisions based on it. And if this ain't it, then we need to rework it. Yeah, maybe it's because we need to reorder the categories. We need to redo your chart of accounts like I'm not going to make you get in the weeds on that. I just want to understand what roadmap do you need to feel like you have control over your money, and then I will figure out how to work with the accounting team to make that happen for you. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so and like, and that even goes back to like, because it's also common, right? Is like having like, a family member or a family friend, or like somebody in the area, just like, taking care of the books. We all know the construction accounting is, like, extremely nuanced and, like, extremely challenging. Like what you mentioned, categorizations, changing Chart of Accounts, getting reports in a meaningful way. How do you work with an accounting team internally that might not be like the right group of people, the right individual, or have the right skill sets? Like, what is the other recommendation I'll make? I'll tell them if I think that their current accounting team is up to the task or not, right? And how do you determine that? Basically, I'll go to the accounting team and say, Hey, here's, here's what we need to have happen. Can we make that happen? And then over 30 or 60 days, we're going to see, you know, if we're still, if we're just pulling teeth trying to get chart accounts updated, if we're pulling teeth, trying to get checks, you know, coded at a if they can't close the books once a month, like, that's one of my things I'm looking for. Can the accounting team close the books once a month? Yeah, if they can't close the books once a month, after a month or two, we got to make a pivot. I'm laughing because I've, I've, I've learned that in construction, like, closing books out at the end of the month, just like, isn't really a thing. It should be. It should be. It 1,000% should be. I just did, I did a podcast with, with a gal out of Houston. She works for a larger accounting firm, and she made the same comments, because, like, it's so crucial to close your books out and then, like, review your financial statements and ideally review a whip report, so that you can, like, really have a pulse on your business. And I'm I'll talk to builders that are doing 2030,$50 million a year, and they'll be like, Yeah, I'll sit down, I'll categorize my costs once every six months with my bookkeeper. And like, we'll close the books out at the end of the year. And, like, that's that. It's like, what is the outcome of that a failing business, a business is not cash flowing, it'll be okay in an up market, and then as soon as it's a down market, you're just, you're toast. Yeah, because, because, if you're not closing your books once a month, there's no way for you to tell which of your jobs are profitable and which ones aren't. You cannot get numbers on which of your crews are really inefficient. I mean, you should be able to look at your numbers and say, Why is this? Why am I building so many more man hours at this project than all the other ones? Is it because my guys are sitting around for three hours for lunch? Like, what's going on here? You should be able to see if somebody's stealing from you, which, unfortunately, is kind of a common thing in construction. You know, how do you know if you your guys are over billing for gas and Home Depot and all kinds of stuff, if you don't close your books once a month, and you're certainly not getting any receipts, I can tell you that if you're not closing your books once a month, I can say sure as shit, your field people are not sending you receipts for Home Depot and gas, which means that then you have trouble writing that stuff off, and you don't know if they went and bought a bunch of stuff for their own house there, or you can't code it to a project, because there's no record of which project it went to. I mean, it's just like you end up with this slush fund of money that moved that you don't know where to categorize it. So you actually don't know if 123, Main Street or 456, south. Street was a loser or a winner, you know? Like, yeah, because you don't have the costs, you don't you don't know how it actually shook out, right? And I know that to a lot of people, like, who aren't operationally minded like me, they're gonna be like, Oh my God, this woman is stressing me out. I don't want to think about any of this stuff. But the thing is, like, sometimes business owners get caught believing that they have to be all things to all people, right? And you don't like you get the right team in place, and you should have somebody delivering you a report that makes sense to you. Like you shouldn't have to be pulling teeth on accounting every month. We should get to a place where it's something that just happens, right? Totally, yeah, if you need the owner to sit down and code, code transactions with you, then, yeah, it's not going to happen every month, right? And it's also, but that's also, like, a part of I have this conversation often with, like, with other because adaptive does so much of the categorizing where, like, 75% of the transactions that run through adaptive don't require a human to categorize them, which effectively as they're accurate. And when I'm talking to builders that don't have that product, right, and they're sitting down, they'll be like, Yeah, well, my project managers, they sit down and they code everything, and it's like, okay, well, so you effectively have, like, bookkeepers that are doing or you have project managers that are doing bookkeeping functions, right? It's like, how many project managers do you know that love bookkeeping, right? You have project managers that want to be in the field, that are driving production, that are wanting to maintain quality, and they're focusing on budget, making sure that they're providing the value that they've sold to the client, or whatever it might be. And when you have those types of conversations like, Okay, well, of course, it's going to be delayed because you have a project manager that needs to come in, and they're faced with a stack of invoices that they don't want to go through, but then they have to critically think and categorize out on the level. It's gonna make sense to get back to somebody else, to type into software that then is gonna go into QuickBooks. It's gonna affect like, get pulled out into Excel and manipulate into a report. Doesn't make sense. It's exactly your point, right? It's like, of course you're gonna have delayed data. Of course you're gonna have delayed information. If you don't have the right people in place. Is because, going back to the earlier conversation. You find out how many people are actually performing one job and not. They're not performing one particular job particularly well, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's frustrating and scary because there's a lot of risk for a business owner, right? Weirdly, though, I like, I love it. Like, I the thing that I get so excited about is just solving I'm like, show me your big, scary, ugly problems. Like, let me see them, and I want to fix it. Like, where most people like, Oh God, I don't want to look at it. I'm like, let me see all the details. I want to see everything. Yeah, for sure. I just, I don't know I like it, no. And that's that's important. There's definitely people that do it. People that do it, and that's where I think, you know, even with these services, like, I think, I guess, what would you say is, like, prevents builders from using these services. Like, are you talking about adaptive or, like, somebody like me? No, someone like you, for sure. Well, I'm new to the market, so, I mean, who knows how many of them are gonna hire me? Of course, hopefully a lot. In all seriousness, what stops people is to do this kind of work does require that you're willing to look at like the dark underbelly of your business. And there's a temptation to be like, if we just don't look at it, maybe it'll be fine, right? And you do have to be willing to have a conversation with somebody like me and go, Yeah, you know, we are doing it that way. And you're right. That is really dumb. And like, yes, we have been losing money doing that for the last 10 years. You're right. Like, I was just talking to one of my clients this morning, and he said, you know, this whole process has been really uncomfortable for me, because you're asking me questions. Like, his name is Wayne, and he's like, like, Wayne, why'd you do it that way? You idiot? That's not, certainly not how I mean to come across, but I am kind of direct, and maybe that is how I come across. But what I'm really saying is like, hey, help me understand why you've been doing it this way, so we can decide if that's best or fix it. But to some people, it feels triggering. Yeah, it's like being naked, you know? Yeah, yeah. Just like, totally, totally up for judgment, which is, like, again, I think, like, the pride thing, like, my question was, like, Why do builders not go to these services? Because I do, I and this is I have, I talked to people like you regularly, right? That are doing, like, providing these services, and they, like, have a huge passion for it, and they just want to, like, provide all this value. And I sit here, I'm like, how do you not have just, like, 10 years of work lined up, knocking at your door, ready for this. And I think it like it can come down to pride, is like, like, assuming that what has been built is perfect, or maybe not perfect, but is like, it's been working. But then when you really lift up the hood and you're willing to, like, make that vulnerable commitment, to really understand, is it actually working people just they shy away from it? Yeah. Well, change is scary. I mean, as much as it is difficult for employees to navigate change in an organization, it's difficult for the owner to navigate change in an organization because the employees are all looking at them, going, Is this really what you want to have happen? This is uncomfortable. We don't like this. We think. And you have to worry about turnover, and are people going to leave when you change things? Are you gonna lose clients when you change things like sometimes there's a step back to leap forward, and that, that step back scares a lot of people, right? They're they're afraid of losing ground, yeah, and even if you're going to leap to something that's significantly better, there is that, that moment, that moment of faith that you have to be willing to break a couple things to fix them totally. That scares people. Sometimes the change management is huge. Let's talk about that before we wrap up here. It's like, okay, like, the change also, we got to talk about AI. Okay, I was gonna Okay, we and I think we could, like, okay, let's talk about AI first. Let's do that. And then, if we have time that we can go into, like, implementing software, like the change management, and like the change management around that. Yeah, because I think that's like, a very, like, reasonable conversation on this. Go ahead, AI. We're, let's you kick it off. What do you want to talk Okay, so I wanted, I was so excited to talk to you about AI, because obviously you're an AI software company, and there's so much chatter right now about AI every I feel like every I feel like every business owner that I talked to is like, why aren't you wearing the AI necklace that records everything you say? And I'm like, I'm not doing that. I also, I also will not be somebody, oh, necklace, everything I don't even know about this. What is it called? What's it called? I don't remember. I reckless. I'm gonna look it up. Go ahead. Okay, so I also will not be somebody who installs like a chip in my brain. I'm not doing it. I know they're going to come out with them in the next in our lifetime, and I will not do it. Okay? So I think AI is great in a lot of ways. I use chat GPT regularly to help me take my messy thoughts and clean them up. I've taught it to think and write like me, so that I can just tell it the conversation I just had with a customer and what I think needs to happen, and then it can spit out a job description for me, or can spit whatever I use AI daily to help me as a as a thought partner and as an editing software. But I very much believe that there are things that computers and technology are good at, and that there are things that are human, human beings are good at, and anyone who tries to tell you that AI is going to just like, solve everything, take over everything, transform companies just by itself, it's not going to like, we still need human beings to do the deep thinking and the deep work. And what I see when I have leaders tell me, Oh, well, just get an AI necklace and just record all your conversations that you have with people, and let AI summarize it all for you. Or like, I'll hear that as a way to solve the fact that, like, your people aren't performing well. If we just had a list of everything we talked about, then it would be fine. It's like, no. AI sometimes becomes an excuse for people to avoid the deeper work of leadership. So, like, my question for somebody that I had a conversation with this about recently was like, Well, wait a second, why are your employees relying on you to tell them the important things that you said during the conversation with them? Like, why aren't they sitting up straighter and taking notes about what Brad said needs to happen, right? Like, so I don't know, I want to get off my soapbox for a minute. I just see issues where people see like, it's a shiny new thing and it's going to solve everything, and it's like, it's not back to basics. There's a time and a place where it will be very valuable, but if we're not careful about how we use it, it's just going to spit out slop and it's going to add a bunch of crap for all of us to wade through. It's going to be, like, beautiful, well edited AI crap that doesn't mean anything. Yep, totally agree. And I think that it's like, even just like, for my own experience with AI, it's like, I think everyone starts with chat GPT, right? But I think when you really start to look back at like, what, the, what the actual ability of AI is, like an adaptive for example, like, we use optical character reading, we use large language model. Language models, we use agentic AI, all to augment workflows within the back office for construction companies. Okay? So, like, when you're talking to somebody and they're like, Well, why would I need someone else to perform this work? It's like, okay, we've, like, very intentionally designed adaptive to have control mechanisms and checkpoints within flows that require critical, deep thinking from a human that's going to consider so much more context of what AI is. But if I get a Verizon phone bill with my company address on it for the same amount once a month, and I always categorize it to this code, that is a great use of AI, right? Like, I don't need someone who's like, physically doing this, this thing on top of it. Same thing for an invoice from a plumber, right? If I always code this bill, or 90% of the time code a bill from this vendor with this contents in the description to plumbing rough, rough in that's a great use of AI. If this information is already there, that's where it is. But that's not the critical thinking side of the job, right? The Critical Thinking side of the job is, is okay. Now I have all of these costs that have been preliminarily job costed, right? The majority of them I'm not going to have to touch. I'm still going to go through and review and analyze, because. I might want to allocate half of a line item to a couple of different codes that the AI didn't shift. And that's going to add into a much more detailed and clear and accurate depiction of that job. Right? Human involved for an approval workflow? Right? It's like the AI is just surfacing the information from the rest of the product to come in and say, hey, if we start to approve these bills, it's actually going to put you over $10,000 on this line item. You should have a conversation with your subcontractor or build a change order that you missed before you do anything with this invoice. Right? That's the application of it's just surfacing these tedious tasks at the volume that builders struggle with. So then you can start solving these problems and missing $50,000 missed lvls and conversations. So I totally agree. It's like it's intended to reduce or eliminate the tediousness, the mundane side of a function. And it's it's to elevate individuals to lean into what you're suggesting, which is the critical thinking, the high value skill. Let's take a step back and do some more thoughtful work here. Right? Are you familiar with the like, 1080, 10 idea about delegation. I've definitely heard it. I have to look it up to like, actually get specific on it. Go ahead. The idea is that when you're delegating something, the best way to do it is me. So if I'm the leader and I'm the leader and I'm delegating. I'm going to be intentional about the first 10% meaning I'm going to set this person that I'm delegating up with good information. Hey, here's the resources I want you to use. Here's the goal I'm trying to achieve. Here are my parameters that I'm giving you now. Please go figure this out and bring it back to me at the end. So then they do the 80% of the work in the middle, and then the last 10% is the approval process and the Tweak so that I make sure, like, for example, if I'm a consultant and I want to make sure it fits my standards and meets my brand voice and what my clients expect, I'm going to do that last 10% to go, okay, yes, this is in the right voice. This is what I was trying to achieve. This makes sense. Here's a couple tweaks. So I'm on the front and the back end, 10% somebody else is in the 80% I think this is a good way to think about technology too. Like, this is a good way to think about how to use AI. You cannot. You have to be intentional at the first and the last 10% delegate away. But like, if you let go of that first and last 10% or you don't have good processes in place to control for the first, last, first and last 10% you're going to get swap. And I'm very worried about AI slope, like I totally, I would love to hear your opinion about this as somebody who's in the industry. Oh, but AI slope 100% and I, I'll just tie it into, well, okay, not so this is, like, totally adaptive centric, unless I can go down that path if you want. But like, even just, like, for something as rudimentary as, like, chat GPT, right? Is like to the 1080, 10 rule, and the application of that with technology is, I totally spot on, because that's effectively what you're doing. Is, like, 10% of the work is writing the prompt, right? And like, being thoughtful about the prompt. And like, what do I actually want GPT to be doing for me? And then GPT is putting together the copy or the email or recapping notes and highlighting whatever, blah, blah, blah, and then you're going through and reviewing and tweaking and adjusting. It's 100% the case. But if you have people that have no idea like, then they're not exercising better prompt writing and sending AI down that path, then they're going to, like, constantly be getting like erroneous outputs from the GPT. More specifically for like adaptive, my thoughts on slop is, is 100% like the number of clients that we've got on adaptive that will sync adaptive to their QuickBooks file, and will it'll automatically surface the errors that were just buried in books. Is like, we can't send you down this path right now. Like, you need to clean up your books to prevent the slop, right? And then, alternatively, like, if you don't have solid Chart of Accounts, solid cost codes, and you're not, like, on it on a daily basis, then you're, yeah, you're going to get, like, a lot of error prone Job Costing in there. I think that's the biggest thing, because, like, what our software is doing is it's learning based on the functions that humans are doing. Like we literally have, like, an Ask AI button above categorization, you just click on it, you can make adjustments, and then it will learn based on that. It'll say you changed a line item that had trim in the description from the lumber yard to finish trim categorization. We'll focus on that next time. If you're not doing that, and you're not making these adjustments, and you're just, like, ramming costs through adaptive it's not solving any problem. So I think, like, yeah, slop was 100% going to be an outcome because you're effectively, like, the the value of adapt, or of adaptive, the value of AI, is really just going to be based on the data that you feed it. And if you're feeding it slop, you're going to get slop. Yeah, for sure. So anyway, I just had to get on my soapbox, because I'm so tired of people, whenever I bring up anything having to do with management, they're like, Well, what about AI? I'm like. AI can't do everything for you, like, you still have to be a leader. Totally. 100% 100% and I think, like, when you look at AI, you should again. You should be looking at it like taking away that just the manual, the tedious, the mundane, the stuff that's just like constantly day in, day out, having to get done that's getting in the way of the meaningful work. That's a great application of AI, right? It's like, if you have KPIs and you have expectations with your business and your employees, and you're wanting to, like, pull together like a recap of their performance over a week, that's a great use of AI, right? If you're if you're maybe, like, in a product, like adaptive, because there's not a lot of AI and project management out there yet, at least. But just from like, a financial standpoint, it's like, I'm wanting to pull a cost report. Wanting to pull a cost report. Like I was talking, I had a dinner down the south shore Boston last week, and they were literally talking about, like, doing a two week cost audit with a vendor. And I'm sitting here, and I'm like, adaptive could have gotten that done in like five minutes. Those are great applications of it. But then it's like, how do you actually use it? From a management standpoint, it's getting you the data and the insights that you can, again, cross check and say, Is this right or wrong drill in much more quickly to find the issues if they are, and then start to roll that out with your team. That's my take. Great. I think it's fantastic at like, reducing the tediousness of day to day tasks. Well, we have, like, five minutes left. You want to talk about change management. We can. We can. I was just like, I think that that's going back into the processes and like, like, even just something as applicable as software. Like, where do you see most builders getting scared to implement software? I imagine it's because of the change management. Yeah, um, I think that's true. I mean, I think that most business owners have been burned by software in the past, where they are given a pitch and it sounds great. And then they tell their people, like, we have this great thing coming, but then they don't want to sit there and implement it. And so they look up a couple months later and they're like, why is nobody using this thing? I told them that they should be doing reports. Why aren't they doing the reports? Why? And then eventually they're just like, Ah, screw it. And so now they've got this thing that they paid for, maybe they paid a lot of money to implement it with like a team of implementers, and now it's just kind of dead. And so I think that you do that two or three times, and you become really hesitant to spend more time, money and resources. And also it's like you get this kind of fatigue of being the one who's, like, cracking the whip on your people all the time, sure, and your people are like, Oh, another software. Great. Totally. I think that's all that all plays into it. Yeah, I totally agree. I hear, I hear it's, it's like, a fatigue or, like, like a PTSD, almost, of like, God, we've done this in the past. This was so terrible and, like, it didn't really do what it didn't really do what it was actually supposed to, and I have learned that I actually really love this piece of it. I'm trying to figure out, I'm still trying to figure out how to brand this and how to explain it to people, but it's almost like, like, software implementation architecture, or something like, I'm not going to be the person who's sitting there doing the coding, or, like, messing around with the API or the Zapier or whatever else needs to happen. Like, I'm not going to do that, but I have enough of an understanding of how that stuff works that I have found that I can really effectively stand between the owner, who's like, here's why we bought this thing, here's what we want it to do here, where is my vision for this, and then the employee on the ground, who's like, way to in the weeds, and they've kind of lost, they've lost sight of what the owner actually needs to have happen. And they're like, did you know that it has this completely obscure feature we could be using? And they're like, the owner, like, cannot stand to talk to this employee, because they go cross eyed, right? And I have learned that I'm actually really good at standing between those two people and forming a bridge so that we can actually bust through the problems totally. And it's just one, it's like, one thing at a time. It's like, okay, have the employee sit me down. Show me how they enter a job in here. Show me how they enter a PO, okay, does everybody enter a PO the same way or not? No, we're gonna write an SOP for how you enter. Po, okay. Now, what happens with Po? What happens when you know that thing gets done? Do we market complete? Does everybody know you're supposed to market complete? Do we have an SOP for how you market complete? Now? What happens? Does it sync up with QuickBooks? Okay, great. It syncs up with QuickBooks. Does the account know they're supposed to be doing something like that? I literally just like, get in there and I follow these little they're almost like ant trails. Yeah, tiny little. And it's like, that's something that most people don't have. The patient, patience to do. And I get it, but actually, really like it. It's like a little puzzle, and to stay in there until we fixed it, yeah, well, for sure. And I think that's, that's where it typically breaks, is like, How intuitive is the product, right? How helpful is it, actually? And then when they get, like, sold this bag of goods, of like, yeah, it's supposed to change the world and do all this stuff, and do all this stuff, and then it doesn't. And there's like, I'm gonna cancel my subscription. It's like, well, because they didn't have the time. And, like, arguably, so like, Is that the best use of time, or is there someone that was run on point on this to communicate it and roll it out? Like, the answer is no. And then, and then you're like, what does this fall like, the office managers back, right? There's like, all. Ready, like managing an office and probably picking up some bookkeeping, and like trying to, like, help with procurement, like managing subs and like answering the phones and doing all these things like now they have to, like, tackle this, like software implementation. You know, Reese, from talking to me, like when we first connected and we were talking about whether this could be useful for my my clients, my reaction was like, that, all sounds great. Reese, I love that. I need to see if this does what you say. It does totally you. And I spent, what, a full hour in the back end of this thing. And I'm not even looking at buying it for myself. I'm wondering if I should even mention it to my clients. I wanted to get into the back end and see how does this thing work. Totally, totally. And I think that's where, like, I think a lot of this is and, like, we work on this, like, pretty diligently and adaptive, but it's more of like getting the right stakeholders in place, like doing like I always call like the sniff test, like, get the owner of the company in front of like, a 30 minute demo to go over the high level things are typically going to be more like budgeting receivables and reporting driven individuals, right and going in and understand what it takes for them To get what they need. Show them what adaptive can produce. And they say, Yes, this looks helpful. Now talk to my accountant, my controller, my whoever, and then that's when we go into, like, a technical deep dive, because it really is like you're effectively starting a championing process, right, of like an owner who's bought in, and they can see where this is going to solve high level business needs. Get the individual who's like boots on the ground actually executing to go technical and deep and like, what does your flow look like like? We start every demo of that. Like, when it comes to tracking bills from the very beginning, what does that look like? I get the invoice email to me, and then I print it out, and then I organize it in Job folders, and I put on the guy's desk, and I go, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we just, like, show them how it actually works. That is by design, to help with the change management side. But again, this doesn't have to be like a huge adaptive plug, because, like, just generally with software, it can just be a beast. I don't care if it's pro core builder, trend job tread any of them, frankly, like, if there's just so much resistance to it, and I didn't know if you had, like, more of more of an opinion on that. If it's like just options, just a lot of it has turned it has to do with people. You're the people who are working for. You have a lot of competing pressures going on. So if they don't believe that learning to use the software is actually important, then they won't do it. So they have to believe that their performance and their their job security and their paycheck is tied to them using this. That's number one, that's going to go a long way toward them getting on board and figuring it out. Number two is sometimes people just need to be shown. I mean, how many times have you been kind of overwhelmed and somebody sends you like, hey, like, I would prefer to talk on WhatsApp. And like, let's say you don't have WhatsApp, and you're like, oh god, what's another one? Like, I already have slack, and I've got text messages and like, now I have to get WhatsApp. Is it easy to set up WhatsApp? Yes, but sometimes it just takes somebody being like, sit down, open your phone, download WhatsApp. It's not because you're too dumb to do it like you're capable of doing it, but we just are. So it's so much like overload, information overload, decision fatigue. So a lot of, in my opinion, a lot of like getting these softwares properly implemented is having somebody there whose job it is to sit down and problem solve with people, right? I agree. I agree. I think, I think, and like, even part of that is like, whether that's like an actual dedicated individual, or even just like a leader at the company, the company, is someone who goes into a buying cycle, or a shopping cycle, rather, with, like, a clear problem that they're trying to solve. And I think that that's probably one of like the biggest gaps that I see. And like, we have builders all the time, I'll be like, what project management software do you suggest? Because we don't do project management software. And I'm like, I worked at builder trend, like, I know job tread, I know rezio, I know all these other products. And like, frankly, they're like, kind of a dime a dozen. Do they, of course, do things differently, of course, like, they all have their little niche, their little thing that they do different. But it's like, you really need to sit down and ask yourself, like, what project management problem am I trying to solve before I go start seeking solution. And I think that goes back into your comment of like, having somebody sit down with a pointed goal, of like, this is what we're trying to solve. This is why we're going to get the solution, and this is how we're going to implement it. Well, I'll give you an example of a team that I'm working with right now. I also end up doing some work with sales teams, because I have a sales background, and this particular team is a home builder. They're like, you know, you drive into the neighborhood, there's a model home production type of build, sure. So they're one of my clients now, and they have actually pushed me into their sales side rather than their construction side. I'm excited to get into their construction side. I hope I get to right now, I'm working with their sales team, and they use a software called HubSpot, which is a very like advanced CRM that can do a lot of marketing tracking and all that kind of stuff. So their HubSpot adoption was like, abysmal. So sure, people were not logging phone calls in there. Their emails weren't connected. Their data about like how many phone calls it was taking to convert somebody. Were garbage. And so we started out. I started out by asking the president, what's the most important problem for you to solve right now? He's like, we need more contracts. We need more contracts moving through this company. I said, okay, the way that we're going to get there, because I've been a salesperson I know, is we need to track phone calls, meetings, contracts. And initially there was all this chat. Company about, well, you know, there's all these capabilities, and HubSpot can do 5000 different things, and has all these automations, and has this and has that. I was like, whoa. We're not doing any of that. We're not doing any of that. We're going to put together a form that sales people complete once a week where they tell us how many phone calls they made, how many meetings they had, how many contracts they wrote. It's just going to be a form and be like, Well, why would we do that when there's so much automation? And I'm like, because we need them to report their goals once a week. I don't want it to be automated. I want them to have to go do it. And I got the president on board with the fact that he was going to care about this. And we told the sales team, we care about this. You are going to be your performance is graded on this. It is required. It is not optional. So first we had them do that report. Just I made 55 phone calls. I had four tours. I wrote one contract. Here's notes on my hottest lead, simple, simple form. Then the next thing we said is, okay, your logged information, and HubSpot needs to start matching this. So if you tell me that you had 100 conversations, but HubSpot shows that you made five phone calls, that's a problem. Why don't they match? It needs to match. So then they started logging, and it's like just chipping away one at a time, like to the ownership. What's actually going to get you a return? The immediate return was that their contracts went through the roof. Yeah. So we don't care about whether the workflows in HubSpot are perfect. We don't care about whether we're using HubSpot to its greatest capacity. We care about contracts, and how do we make this software serve that over time? Can we start using fancy stuff? Absolutely. Let's do it. But first we just need to know the sales people to know how to log a freaking call, like they just need to know how to log their calls, and to start doing it every week. So it's like, you just start somewhere simple, totally and that's that's like, effectively, what you're doing is you're just, like, stripping everything away, all the noise, all the confusion, away, and you're getting it down to an expectation and a very easy to follow process. And then from there to your point. That's where, like, once the foundation is set, then you can start going crazy. And that's where I do I hear, like, even all these builders, and again, I might be biased, but I hear, I'm like, well, we need project management software. We need this. We need that. I'm like, how many projects are you running? They're like, we're doing like, three or four. It's like, how many project managers do you have? Like, I have, like, one or two, and then, like, I'll manage the other ones on my own. It's like, okay, well, are you confident that you're walking out with like, a net eight to 12% on these projects. And they're like, that'd be great. But no, it's like, well, what are we trying to do to scale all these, like, further complexes and throwing on volume when, like, the opportunity is here today to iron out what the process is to accomplish building this product, to sell it at this margin, right? And it's like, that's effectively what you're doing with the sales team, right? It's like you're just stripping it away. Like, what are the basics? Like, here's the blocking and tackling. What does it take for me to get more contracts? I need to know, how many calls am I doing? What are the outputs? And then, what are the or the inputs, what are the outcomes? Right? And you just touched on such an important point that I think people miss all the time. If you're not making money, scaling will not fix it. All you're going to do is you're going to have more volume. Of not making money. Making money like you. If you can't make money on one, project two, project three, projects, you're not going to make money on 50. So like, you have to figure out how to be profitable at a small scale before you blow it up. It's just going to get worse. It just magnifies the chaos. It's It's like what? Every, not every, a lot of builders you mentioned hot markets. And like, frankly, it sounds like we're, like, coming out of a hot market and like it's Austin. Austin has been a disaster since like, 2022 maybe, yeah, yeah. Well, Austin is like, its own little like, real estate ecosystem use case or case study. Yeah, we've been out of a hot market for a while. Yeah, yeah. But the point being is, like, all these guys, like, they would run out and be like, holy shit. Like, money's free, and people are going like crazy, and inventory is non existent, like, we got to fill the gap. And then it was like, they would go out and they would do a 200x business, and they would just scale it like crazy. And then it's like, they look at their balance, or at their at their statements, at the end of the year, they'd be like, I'm not making any money, any more money than I was at a quarter of the volume. I was like, it's not that's not something for you as a as a career entrepreneur, to take a step back and say, I'm never going to do that again, is to look back and say, What could I have done differently? But 100% I feel like we could talk all day. I know. I know. And this is, this is we're running up there on the record for the longest, longest episode. But no Isabel, I thought this was great. We talked about a lot of really good stuff. I appreciate you coming on. And if there's anything that we can do, certainly let us know. Wonderful. Well, I would love to just end by talking about who I work with, yes, who you work with, and where they find you. Okay, wonderful. Well. So I like to work with residential construction companies with less than, I would say, less than 50 employees, five less than five zero employees, yeah, yeah, less than five zero and who are making, like, less than 75 million in revenue, maybe 100 million in revenue, somewhere in there. So everything from a home builder who's doing, you know, a couple of homes a year, up to somebody who's doing some solid production building volume. But I like smaller companies, because I like being working working directly with the owner. I like being nimble. I like being able to make change without it taking multiple years. And I like the problems of small business. So those are people I like to work with. And for people to find me, they can find me at Isabel affinito.com and I'm also, yeah, that's probably the best place. Just find me at Isabel afinito.com Okay, beautiful, are you building social media presence? You know, I, I should, maybe will in the future, I was gonna say I'm off of all my social medias right now, I have an Isabel dot affinito Instagram, but I'm not on it, so if you message me there, I won't see it. Yeah, yeah. And frankly, so far, all of my business has been by referral, and so I've been thinking a lot about what it's going to look like to scale my own business and to start to get into thought leadership. But for right now, I'm not feeling a huge urge to, like, go on the prospecting like war path, but I am very interested in meeting a few new people. So if anybody wants to talk, I'd love to talk beautiful, beautiful, awesome. Isabel, this was great. I appreciate you. And, yeah, we'll just catch up soon. That sounds good. Cool. See ya. Thanks. Bye.