The Tech Stack Upgrade Contractors Need With Connor Watumull

Reece sits down with Connor Watumull from Miter to talk about the biggest labor money leak most builders miss: getting every hour, burden, and benefit tied back to the right job. They break down what “contractor built” payroll and HR actually means, plus simple ways to level up onboarding, compensation, and performance without making it feel corporate. If labor is your biggest cost, this is the playbook for making it measurable, motivating, and profitable.

https://www.miter.com

Show Notes:
00:00 New generation
01:11 Connor’s path
03:21 Why construction
06:12 What is Miter
08:22 Labor tracking pain
11:00 Building great teams
15:21 How small matters
20:56 Values that work
26:08 Reviews that happen
28:49 Miter in practice
36:51 Who should call
39:33 Build better close

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast  Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

There's a new generation coming into the construction industry that's really exciting, that is technology minded, and we have this big opportunity to reinvent the industry in certain ways. It starts with us building great teams, attracting new talent into the industry. We're just absolutely pumped, and hope to support as many contractors as we can along the way. Welcome to builders budgets and beers. I'm Reece 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. Mics are hot. Connor, let's go. We're rolling. We're here. Having me, of course, that's an absolute pleasure. I'm glad, I'm glad you carved out the time. Um, so just for the listeners, as I as I go and do you listen to the podcast? Car, yeah, I love the podcasts. As I said, I'm honored to be here. Yes, okay, and I ask, because you might know how I start these out. I always like to get the listeners a little bit. Who is the guest, what's their background? How'd they get started? What are they building? And for you, you're not building homes, but you're building software. So Connor, the floor is yours, given the background, who are you? Where'd you come from? What do you do? What's the story? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna go too far back, but I'm a Texan by birth. Grew up in Texas, moved away when I was 18. I've done a bunch of odd jobs since I graduated from college with an econ degree, not knowing what I was going to do in life, I was a consultant for a little while. Hated that, and but I realized what I really did love doing is building building software, specifically so not building homes, but building software. And there's a lot of similarities. I think you're I think people who build homes and software probably both really like the craft of building something well, who love the finished product and who love to see people who, you know, really enjoy the finished product. But I found that I loved building software, and so I moved out west and begged for a job at a software company, learned the ropes there. Actually spent a little time as an investor, but really knew that I loved building software. I loved building software for people who do real things in the world. And, you know, fell in love with the construction industry. You know this, this really important industry, people who build real things that matter. And really the problem that I fell in love with, and my co founders also fell in love with, was around building, you know, a better platform to manage your team and manage people and manage payroll and projects. And so that's a little bit how we got to miter. And was a winding path that was, that was launched in 2021 so it's been, you know, four or five years at this point. Dude, I love it. Okay, so, and I mean, we share the mutual love for the fine Contractors of America. But did you have a background in construction? Did you have family in it? How did you how did you find to love this group of people? You'd mentioned that they build real things, but what like, gave you guys a conviction to really lean in? Yeah, there's actually, like, one thing in particular that gave us the conviction to lean in. So I, you know, at the time, I was getting antsy and wanting to build software for the next 2030, years of my life. I The the obsession of mine at the time was actually payments and accounting and automating a lot of the financial workflows within a business, there's just been an explosion of new technologies. I know adaptive in particular has been really involved in utilizing a lot of these new technologies to help businesses move their money around far more easily. That was a real interest of mine as well. And this was back in 2020, and so what I did is I actually got a job as an intern at an accounting firm as local in the Bay Area. Because I said, you know, it seems like a lot of these flows and a lot of these processes within your business are kind of broken like I want to go experience that firsthand. And what I did is I actually found a job as an intern at an accounting firm that served construction firms, and love it. I you know you didn't need to spend too much time to understand like, how broken a lot of the processes are. And then started to talk to more and more contractors, both residential contractors, commercial contractors, and in particular, found that there was just so much pain around technology in general. I have a software background. I worked in the tech industry for a while, and there's a huge disparity in the quality of software that the median software companies is versus the median contractor. And felt like, you know, the world needs. Leads the construction industry to build fast and build efficiently and build well. And what a better way to spend the next 2030, years of my life and to serve the industry with such a problem that I felt firsthand, I actually got fired from that bookkeeping role because I was a bad bookkeeper, but it did expose me to the challenges of Job Costing and prevailing wage, and a lot of these things that you know, miter helps contractors with, and adaptive helps contractors with. It's actually probably a good thing that you didn't have adaptive at the time, because the world would have had a lot less solution had you been great at bookkeeping with adapt. Yeah. No, it's, it's a, yeah, if I, if I had joined and was an intern and was using adaptive every day, I would have been like, oh, you know what? Like, contractors, like, have the technology they need. And, you know, which should, should find some other thing to build, but, but no. Job, costing was a big challenge. Like, you know, expense reconciliation was a huge challenge. You know, all those things were huge challenges. And then payroll, payroll is a big challenge as well, totally well. And with the payroll theme, let's, let's give the audience the the miter pitch. What is miter? Yeah, so miter today is a pretty broad suite of applications built to help construction firms manage their business. You know, I think miter is actually super complimentary with adaptive, where we do a lot of the things that adaptive doesn't and adaptive does so much that we don't do but our bread and butter, and really the core part of our platform, is a human capital management platform built for contractors, so things like HR benefits and importantly, payroll really designed for contractors. And often, you know, the biggest question we get is, what is different about HR and payroll for contractors, there's a lot of things. Number one is Job Costing. So for a lot of contractors, labor is either your biggest cost or your second biggest cost. And it's, you know, if you want to be a contractor making good decisions and growing your business, you better be able to tie every cent of labor costs to the right job, the right cost code, etc. And so we really help contractors with Job Costing. If you're doing commercial, civil work, you are probably subject to all kinds of regulation. Even residential contractors these days face more and more regulation. And so we automate compliance and labor reporting for contractors, whether you're employing union folks, whether you're doing public sector prevailing wage work, whether you're even producing safety or demographic reporting, we help with that. And then the final thing that's really different about construction HR Payroll is just the integrations that you have to manage. So you want to make sure that you're integrating with all of the construction time, keeping platforms and accounting platforms and Job Costing platforms. And so we do that as well. And then the other part of our platform is field operations. So we do help contractors with time tracking, daily reporting on the job site, equipment reporting, safety reporting, et cetera. So again, miter is this growing sort of suite of applications that help contractors manage various aspects of their business, 100% I love it. Okay, so and you made the comment, which is like, so true, and obviously the audience will be able to resonate with is that labor is the biggest, maybe the second biggest, cost to the business, like when you're talking to customers and prospects, what is the challenge that they face with making sure that every hour is getting tracked to a job in a cost code and properly job costed. Like, what's the what's the challenge? I don't, yeah, I mean, I like, I don't think there's any contractor out there that that isn't thinking like, Oh, I've got my crew in the field, and they're, you know, need to know what hours they were working in. In an ideal world like I should be able to very seamlessly track every, every cent of labor cost back to that in practice, though, it's just not happening, or if it is happening, it's super manual. And I'll give you a couple, a couple examples around that it's very rare for someone to have a very seamless system to collect time digitally, for that those hours to flow seamlessly into a payroll processing system. And then for all of that labor costs, not only your direct costs, so the wages that your crews are paid, but also the indirect costs, like benefits and taxes and workers compensation to then flow into whatever your source of truth for Job Costing is that's really rare. And in fact, we don't think it really existed before miter. And so, you know, what we often help contractors with is we try to map that whole process like, you know, where do labor hours come from? How do they get into your payroll system? How did. That get into your accounting or your job costing system. And you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of efficiency that we can typically find and help contractors with, and then the other one is just HR. HR is sort of a dirty word for a lot of contractors, you know, makes you think of like someone getting mad at you for breaking a rule, but HR is really about building a great team. At the end of the day, it's about hiring great people, giving them a purpose at work and in their life, you know, making sure they're compensated and feel rewarded in the right way, and then building a winning team, a team that feels like it's winning, and we have a growing suite of tools that helps our customers do that, which we think is maybe the biggest lever a lot of contractors have to improve their business, is to improve their people and culture. And so that's a huge focus of ours, is, is helping people, you know, roll out the tools to do that with their teams at scale. I love it. I love it. What are you seeing the best contractors do when it comes to successfully building these killer teams? Yeah, I think number one is just prioritizing employee onboarding. And culture is something that we see a lot, and so it's like, how do you give new employees, whether that's an apprentice that is, you know, really doesn't know anything and is going out to the job site, is going to need to learn everything on day one, to, you know, a senior PM, or to your back office sort of controller, giving them a great onboarding experience and being clear about why you exist as a company and what your culture is all about. What are your values? And making sure employees know that going in, and if you're crystal clear about that in your culture, it also helps you attract really great talent, because people want to work somewhere where they can grow. They know why the company exists. They know why they're there. So I think we see a lot of contractors with the best teams and best cultures, really prioritize employee onboarding and disseminating their values and how they operate early on, getting crisp about compensation. And you know, what is our compensation philosophy? You know, do we want to be at the median relative to other contractors in our area, we want to pay people a little bit more because we're really looking for the best talent. Should we have a bonus program? And what should that bonus program look like? So the best contractors we work with obsess over their compensation philosophy and their compensation program. They're often thinking about, how do we compete via the quality of our benefits that we offer in the 401, K, totally. And so, you know, they're thinking about all that holistically. And then they're also pretty holistic about performance management and ongoing feedback. So they have, you know, an annual performance review process. They sit down with every employee, and again, whether those employees are in the office for the field and say, here's how you're doing, like, here's how we see you growing within the company. And then, of course, they're also having really tough conversations, like, hey, this isn't working out. And a lot of contractors are better at that than then, then some tech companies are, but that's an important part of the process as well. Okay, so onboarding, then the next was, was compensation, Claire, compensation, yep. And then from there, we had, what was, what was the one right before the performance? Performance, yeah, performance, yeah. Go ahead. I mean, I have, like, the couple of more I would add, and I know this is a lot, but learning and development, so making sure everyone at the company feels like they know what their learning path is, that they have materials, you know, to learn the best contractors we work with have a training program where, based on who you are and your scope, there's a set of courses or trainings that you can learn from over time, and then maybe I tie it all together. Is like, the best contractors really have a firm sense of their values, values. That was the one yes and yeah. Like, Why do we exist? Who are our customers? Is our customer? A homeowner is our customer, you know, the government. But there's a lot of exciting, you know, conversation to be had around, why are we here? Why do we exist, and how do we operate 100% and I asked, I wanted to do the recap on this, because, like, I think you can bucket it into those, like, four or five, six groups, but that is all the stuff that can sound like, extremely intimidating to businesses, right? Like doing it well, like onboarding is going to be a direct reflection of, like, standard operating procedures and like, true reflection on the business, and who do we need, and what are they going to be doing, right, tying in like job descriptions, like the rarity of job descriptions and construction, even when you're talking. Getting, like, $20 million a year builders, right? It can be intimidating. So two questions, like, first, like, what's the best way, the most tactical way for builders to start getting on that path, to start developing onboarding, to get clear on compensation, to get clear on all these different things. But then also, like, what's too small? Like, when should they start focusing on this stuff? It's a great question. I actually think the latter question is really interesting and informs the first so the question is like, what is what is too small to be focused on? Up leveling your people processes. One way to look at it is like, how much better with your business? And can you quantify like everyone on your team being 5% better, and 5% is a low sort of a low estimate. But imagine what happens if everyone on your team is 5% better, 5% more efficient, sells 5% more the impact is really big. You don't have to be very big for 5% to be a big number, and often, you can unleash way more than 5% by inspiring your team, by properly enabling them, by, you know, building a compensation program that's super motivating and tied to performance. And so, you know, how, how small do you need to be for 5% to be or how big do you need to be for 5% to be meaningful? You don't need to be that big. So I'd encourage every contractor to start thinking about it. How do you get started? I think it is designated someone to own these things within your business, and so some contractors may be too small, or feel like, hey, hiring someone to focus on people or HR is not a great use of time, but someone it should be their explicit responsibility that they own. Hey, you know, you own employee onboarding, you own training, you own compensation review. Sometimes that's the owner. Early on, it's a great thing for an owner to think about, maybe the most important thing for an owner to think about totally but at some point, you know, it may it often makes sense to bring in a head of people, head of HR, an HR administrator, and so that that's different for every business. But again, you know, the way I'd be thinking about is like, what if you unleashed 5% more, 10% more out of your team. What is that worth to you in terms of dollars? And you can sort of easily justify hiring. And then, of course, like you know, would plug generally the HR software industry, tools can also help a lot. Tools can help you calibrate your compensation. Can help you design great employee onboarding programs that can help you develop learning programs. And so would definitely check out tools that help with that miter being one of one of many great softwares out there for that 100% and I think, okay, so I totally agree it's like, when's the best time to start thinking about developing processes and systems and thinking about onboarding and being more calculated methodical, moving these members through the business as they're growing. Like, I've never ran a construction company, right? So it's easy for me to sit on the silent and be like, well, you should be doing it from day one. But what I tell people is, is like, as you're as you're that solopreneur, right? You're starting the business. And typically how this works is there's someone, as I call them, bags on right? They were in the trades, right? They were in the field. They were working for a contractor, and then they run out and they're like, I could do this on my own. I could make more money. I want more autonomy. I want to do it my way. When you are building your company, correct me where I'm wrong. But when you are building your company, you should be thinking about all the different pieces that go into play and documenting those as you're going just simple documentation and do your post mortems. Like, take the time to sit down and be like, what does it actually take for me to get a proposal out? What does it actually take for me to get a project managed? What does it actually take for me to stay on top of the books? And then you can start sitting there, and once you have that documented, and that takes you a year, two years, three years of operating and like, finding what that sweet spot of getting your margin is on the product you're delivering. Then you can start backing into the stuff I don't like doing right, or it's the stuff of, like, I know what this takes, and I dread doing the books, or I need someone to estimate, because I love being in the field, managing projects, then you can slate somebody in on that v1 onboarding, right? And say, here's the actual Absolutely, this is what the day is going to look like. Go run with it. Yeah, yeah, 100% and yeah. I mean, early on, you've got to do everything. And you know, as founder myself. Like, yeah, early on, you're wearing so many hats, and you may not feel like you're good at anything, but there's no one else to do it, so it just falls to you. But yeah, you can specialize over time. But yeah, I'd point to like, there are more tools these days than ever that give you superpowers, and a lot of those. Areas that are really important. But yeah, documentation is so important one because like it, it is the record of how things should be done in your business. But also, the sneaky part about documenting things and writing things down is that it clarifies for you what is happening. Like, I find that when I go to write something down, I realized, like I thought I knew what I was going to write, but I don't, and the process of writing something down clarifies, and it's an important tool in itself. And that can be true for here is how we estimate. You know, here's how we submit bids, like all the procedures I would even say, when you're starting your business, write down why you exist and why? Why it matters. What are our values? How are we going to operate as a team? And and that that's often very clarifying and helpful. And if you haven't done it, there's, you know, it's never too late. It's important to do at any stage of business. Totally. I think that values piece is important. I've talked about this on other episodes lightly, but I like the values comment, especially in the building industry, obviously, knowing the personas and, like, who we sell to and how they think it might come off as, like, fluffy, right? Like sitting, anyone can sit down and you say, Okay, today is the day we're going to build our values, right? And you put down. We're going to be respectful, right? We're going to be held accountable, right? We're gonna do like, all these things. But what do you see builders doing, and what do you envision that process being, so that you actually in that exercise or that process with meaningful values that a group, a community of people can buy into and work cohesively towards those values? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I would say, like, you know, I think there's an outside perception of, you know, the construction industry, like, you know, values, do they matter? You know, do they matter? Like, we're out building things. The best contractors we work with are obsessive over, over their values and their why. And it's been really fun to learn how so many contractors have think about that. One of my favorites, just like bring us to life, example, is we work with a great contractor at GC in California named true Beck. And they're, they've got a list of values, but you know, one of their core ones, maybe their main one, is called raise the bar, and it, it basically means that, hey, we're not going to tolerate, you know, average ever. We need to get, you know, we're going to continuously improve. We are going to set the standard for how something should be done. And excellence is a part of our DNA. And everywhere you walk within the true back office, you talk to anyone, it's a raise the bar culture, and it sets the tone. When employees come to work like they're they know. They know why they exist. A lot of other contractors really lean into safety, and that's so important as your culture like, Hey, we're going to keep each other safe. We're going to make sure we, you know, can go home to our families feeling good every day. And so, you know, the why matters a lot, because it does also create, you know, cohesion, and it it helps employees relate to each other as well, and it's also just more fun. You know, we all spend a lot of time at work in our lives, you know, 40 plus hours a week, and so, you know, you might as well. It might as well feel meaningful. And setting your values and setting your why on day one, or, you know, at some point is so important for that, for sure, and you and that might, you know, be the attributing factor to a disjointed team, right, a disjointed organization. The top line number is growing. I'm hiring these people, but it feels like I've got four business owners that aren't business owners, managing the work, building the product. But it's like under one shell company, right? Resonates a lot, resonate, resonates a lot. And one, one very interesting thing we've seen some some of the contractors we work with do is they will tie performance reviews to their values in a really interesting way. So every year or every six months, every manager will have a conversation with you know their direct reports and say, you know, how did you do on on this value? So, like, for example, at Miter, one of our values is give a damn. And hey, what it means is, like, like, care and passion and attention to detail are not optional. You know, we we care, we don't leave people hanging. And so, you know, we talk about that every, every six months, and a lot of the contractors we've seen, they'll set up their performance review designed around their core values. I was literally just gonna say that it's like, when you think about like, all these different steps, like, you could honestly probably move like values ahead of onboarding, right? Because the values are going to help you recruit. Recruit the people and find the people to get them in. And then it's crucial that those values are not just explained, but they're seen in the onboarding by the team, right? And then when you go into this, like compensation conversation, and then ultimately, like your performance reviews, like it should be anchored around those values, and it just it makes it that much easier, right? So if you're a builder out there, and you're listening and you're like, God, it seems so intimidating, like this is like the true business side of running a business, and like, I just want to build houses, it's not as intimidating when you just sit down and think to yourself, like you're the owner of the company. What do you want this thing to be? If you have to employ them, you're paying them, you're paying them, you might as well want to work with them, right? What should they look like? And then how do you take that responsibility as a business owner all the way through the life cycle, to the point of the performance reviews? Like, I'm just, I'm going down this list of like, what are you seeing the best builders doing? But is it? Is it like a, like, a breakdown of, like, here are our values. This is how you're performing. And then obviously, like a KPI component, or what are you seeing from that, like a successful performance review with the best companies. Yeah, and it's interesting. I think in construction, it can look different because, one, it's a skilled profession. There's like, a set of hard skills that you know, you just need to be an effective carpenter as an example or and so I think one really important thing is to have role rubrics for each of your roles. Like, what does great look like? Like, what is good, better, best for each of your roles. That does take time, and that's not something that a lot of entrepreneurs have time with if you've got a crew of five to 10 people, but certainly, as you start to scale, is really important to do so that's the first thing. Is like, what does good better best look like for each role and for some of the your you know workforce, and for your crews in the field and your skilled trade people, often you can get help from that because there's certifications, there's industry standard, you know, skills that you can actually map to and borrow from. But I think that's that's an important one. And then the second thing is, just like making sure they get done, people get really busy, and so even if you sort of write down your performance review or your feedback process, and you say, Hey, we're going to do this every six months or 12 months, unless you're on it. People just don't do it because it takes time to think of this stuff. It takes time to and they're not always, like, they're tough conversations, like, even if the feedback is positive, it's just like, takes a lot of emotional effort to get to go out to coffee or to lunch with someone and be like, Hey, here's how things are going. But they're just so important. And so just tracking that they're happening and designated someone as the owner of this happening is really important as well. Totally okay. And so obviously miter is payroll, and then HR. What did you call it? It's HCM. Yeah, HCM is a dumb sort of industry acronym, human capital management, which also is really jargony, but, but yeah. I mean, I think one way we like to describe ourselves is we are the workforce or the people platform for contractors. So everything related to compliance, so all the gnarly like, what do we need to report to benefits, agencies, new hire reporting, safety, payroll taxes, all that, but also the more fun sort of actual people growth stuff. Like, how do I build a better team? You know? How do I recruit great people? What is a job description, etc, we help with as well. And that's exactly where I'm going with this is like, so now, how does miter make that easier for builders? Like, specifically, and like, obviously, this isn't like, a demo. And like, if you guys, for the listeners that are intrigued, definitely reach out to Connor and his team. But just generally, like, as a high level, like, how does miter help with all these different pieces and make it easier for builders to adopt and more controlled and more visible? How does miter do that? Yeah, good. Good question. So I'll talk about maybe the sort of payroll aspect, and then we could talk about HR aspects. So just on the payroll front, we're a full service payroll processor, which means, like we do, direct deposits, handle taxes, and, you know, really automate the entire payroll processing, and it's connected to time tracking. So we have a time tracking app that folks can use in the field to track their employees hours. And we're flexible. We have a kiosk supervisors can enter on behalf of their team. You can add whatever sort of time tracking dimensions or fields, obviously, the project, cost, code, other fields that you want and so. Or we can import hours from other platforms, whether you're using. Or builder trend, or if you do any service, miter flexible, there as well, all of your labor hours get posted into payroll without any CSVs or manual input. You process payroll and then, and then, we send your, you know, ledger entries as well as your job costs, into your job costing platform. And we automatically allocate all of your, you know, direct but also your indirect expenses to the job, right? So benefits and for 1k and taxes and workers comp actually end up being huge expenses for contractors. And we actually look at the hours that someone worked, and then we allocate all of those expenses, not not a burden rate, not an estimate, but the actual dollars and cents that you paid, the benefits agencies, that you paid, you know, your 401, k, that you paid taxes. And then we allocate those to jobs and cost codes and whatever reporting dimensions that you care about. And then we'll send that into the platform. So go ahead. Oh, go ahead. I was gonna say so even to, like, tie it back we'd mentioned as one of the four or five, six pillars that we had talked about, right? With, like, the compensation conversations, that's where that becomes easier for the builder, right? Instead of someone just coming in and, like, barking, like, barking, like, I want to make more money. Or you're recruiting and you're looking for something, you're like, how much should we actually be paying these people if you're running your payroll to that level and you're knowing what these costs are, now you can go into the conversation much more educated. And if you have all these other pillars in place and you're evaluating this employee, if it is a current employee, then you can sit down and say, you know, look, if you're trying to earn this, this is where you've historically come in at we're happy to pay you, but this is what it's going to require in order to get to that level. Am I tracking? You're tracking. And then, you know what's really interesting, and one, one thing that we started to see really savvy contractors do is design compensation programs that are motivating and rewarding. And so you can get really creative, hey, I want to give the team a bonus if they hit these metrics on this job. And you can, you know, design and administer those bonuses within miter. Or you can say, hey, for this type of work, or for this shift of work, you're going to get a $2 an hour extra bonus, you know, and that's outside of whatever overtime roles that may exist in your state. Like, hey, we're just going to reward people for certain types of work. So we think that's, that's really cool, and we think that's a huge unlock for team performance. Is to tie, you know, performance on the job site with real compensation. And you can track that in miter. Yes, like you can, you can design bonus programs within within miter That is very cool to performance. And we've seen again, or savvy, as contractors were, doing this sort of by hand, and like, tracking a lot of this by hand, but we think that's a huge unlock. And then, not to mention, like, if you're in the commercial space or the civil space, you're likely going to run into just some gnarly reporting requirements and rules, whether that's prevailing wage, you know, maybe you're thinking about employing union union employees and minor helps automate a lot of that work as well. So that's on, like, the time tracking and payroll side, yep. But then on, really, the HR side, we help from recruit all the way to terminate. So when you're deciding, hey, I do want to hire that HR director. I do want to hire, you know, a new apprentice. I do want to hire a new carpenter. We can help you post the role. So we have a way for you to create your job description. We help you automate the job description creation, by the way, with AI, so you can just say, I want to hire a carpenter in Ohio, and then miter will create the job description, and then we'll help you post it to indeed, we'll help you post it to LinkedIn. That happens automatically or to your website. You know we can integrate with your website so your role is visible. For candidates, they'll apply. You can screen them through miter, look at their resumes, and then when you're ready to hire someone, you click hire, and we'll create an onboarding checklist for you to onboard that employee into your organization. As part of that onboarding, you can assign them reading to do. You can assign them videos to watch about hey, often that'll include a video like, welcome to you know, miter construction. Here are our values. Here's what our customers do. Here's why people trust us. They can sign up for benefits. They'll have access to their employee portal. They'll get the miter mobile app if they want to use the miter mobile app for pay stubs or time tracking, and then they're good to go, and they're on your team. And you can use miter to administer performance reviews, you know, manage ongoing learning, ongoing benefits arrangements. And then, you know, if you have to let someone go, or someone's leaving the company, we close out, you know, their employee record. Close out their benefits. You know, you can have a off boarding checklist, etc. That's beautiful. I'm still, I mean, frankly, like, so my world isn't necessarily talking about this side of the business, right, like the HR side, the payroll side, but that seems slick. I mean, I'm thinking like, there's plenty of contractors out there that are going to benefit from this. I think so. I mean, I think, I think what we find is contractors are either not doing a lot of these things, or they might be doing these things with a system that wasn't built for contractors and doesn't understand job costing is not integrated with platforms like, you know, adaptive and so where, where we come in is, we bring, you know, world class sort of HR people management tools into a platform that really understands this, the nuances of construction. That's awesome, dude. So and again, like, I'm thinking, like, this is like filling a massive need. Good on you guys for focusing on this and committing to this. This is widely needed. Yeah, no, it's been, it's been really fun. We just crossed 1000 contractors on the platform. But, you know, yeah, there. We think every contractor should be investing a lot in their people and and, yeah, we're excited to be doing but thank you guys for the work that you're doing. I mean, adaptive is free speed as well. Like, I'm hoping that we'll see more miter adaptive collaboration. We've been talking about it for a while. Let's make it happen 100% it's, it's definitely in conversation. And good for you guys on crossing the 1000. That's, that's fantastic. Um, so to get over that hump, who is like, for the audience that's out there, and they're sitting here, and they're like, Okay, this sounds sweet, right? And Connor's broken this down, so it's not as intimidating. And these are things I need to focus on, especially with all the labor shortage conversations that are happening out there, right? If you've got good people, you want to keep them this is how you do it. Who, who needs to be reaching out to you. What is the size of business? What is the thinking? What is the structure? What is the end, like, the specifics of what they're building? Just so that the listener can say, That's me, I need to call Connor. Who is it? Yeah, so I'd say call us if a any of the processes that we've talked about our manual today. So if you're like manually or someone, someone, maybe not you, but someone in your business is managing any aspect of payroll or benefits or compliance manually, call us. Call us if you feel like you haven't put in place a learning or a performance program or your employee onboarding is super manual. Call us for sure, and then also call us if you just want a better handle on Job Costing and you feel like maybe your labor costs are dialed in. Labor costs is, again, huge portion of your costs. There's probably a lot of lurking labor costs that may you may not be out, you know, accounting for in your, you know, job cost, or in your P and L, you know, we're designed to help with that. And then, you know, final thing is, we see a lot of residential contractors maybe starting to grow their business rapidly and needing to hire a bunch of people. Maybe you're doing new project types as a commercial contractor, or maybe you're getting into commercial and you're like, holy crap, there's all these regulations and, you know, rules, and I need a way to manage the complexity. We're a good fit. We work with contractors as small as, you know, five to 10 employees. Our largest customers have 1000s of employees. And so from a size perspective, you know, we serve, we serve all kinds beautiful five to 10 employees, all the way up to 1000 if you're sitting here and your gears are turning, you got it. You got to reach out to Connor, or even myself, I'd be happy to make an introduction. But Connor, we'll just, we'll wrap up the episode with, you know, and you've shared a lot, so I don't mean to put you on the spot. You can take a second to think about it. Think about it. But is there anything that you would leave that we haven't already discussed the listener with that they should be considering the words of the wise from Connor? I Well, first of all, no one would ever describe me as wise, so we'll just say word. We'll just say words, no. I mean, I think the reason we're in business, and the reason we're, we're so excited to be doing this for several decades is like, let's, let's go out and build stuff. Let's, let's go build better. And the US needs all of us to build. Build more housing, you know, more infrastructure. And we have this opportunity right now. I think there's a new generation coming into the construction industry that's really exciting, that is technology minded, that, you know, teams in construction are getting younger. There's a new generation who's working the job site, and we have this big opportunity to reinvent the industry in certain ways, and I think it starts with us building great teams, attracting new talent into the industry. And so I'm just pumped. I mean, I think it's time to go build. And for any contractors out there listening, let's go build. We're just absolutely pumped. And, you know, hope to support as many contractors as we can along the way. I love it. I love it. We're we're here. As I've mentioned a couple times, it's kind of in like little coined phrase of mine is we're here for the fine American contractors. At least for today, we could be serving the fine Canadian contractors at some point. Yeah, the fine just the global contractors. We might change the global contractors here at some point. Sure, sure. Why not? But no, I love it. I love it. I love the energy. I love the pursuit that you guys are on. I appreciate you jumping on the show. Connor, thanks so much. Reece, is super fun to be here. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon, dude.