“Industrywide, I think everybody is dealing with fewer leads and the need to be more professional, offer more service, and be more prompt,” says J.R. Girskis, president of Suburban Construction, in Davenport, Iowa. “People demand it, and a glossy brochure doesn’t cover it nowadays.”
Contractors are “moving toward the Internet as a resource and jumping on wireless Internet access as quickly as they can,” says Dave Welch, an East Hartford, Conn., contractor and the developer of ConTracker EZ estimating software.
Welch sees evidence of contractors adopting more technology from the answers he received in a survey posted on the ConTracker Web site. The survey asks how respondents prepare estimates. When the site went live seven years ago, 70% of contractors said they were hand-writing estimates. Since then, contractors have been migrating to more automated solutions, first using word processing programs, then spreadsheets, and increasingly, software such as Welch’s. Now, only about 10% of the contractors he hears from write their estimates by hand.
“Just about every contractor I know owns a laptop, and if they don’t, they are asking me what kind to buy,” Welch says.
Welch developed software designed for field use because “as a contractor, we needed the ability to do our estimates quickly and professionally.” Once a contractor enters his own product and pricing information, using the ConTracker software he can “measure a roof, click a button, and the program can tell him how many square shingles he’ll need, how many rolls of felt, boxes of nails, etc., then create the proposal, and it is all done on site on a laptop,” Welch says.
By doing estimates as you go, he says, “you’re usually more accurate, you tend to forget fewer details, and you get quite a few kudos from the customer when they see a professionally printed estimate then and there.”
GIANT STEPS Suburban Construction took its giant step into the latest technology about four years ago. At a cost of some $40,000, the company consolidated its computer-based operations in a single, custom-written software package and, “upgraded all of our technology to make everything Web-based,” Girskis says. In addition, the company began providing smartphones and wireless Internet service to its salespeople.
As a result, using any Internet-enabled device — a laptop computer, a BlackBerry or other smartphone, PDA (personal digital assistant), or pocket PC — “we can get into company records via any Internet connection,” Girskis says. A salesperson can read e-mail, view his lead tickets, or deal with problems on a job from the car or any remote location, for example. Or he can retrieve information about earlier company projects on a prospect’s block or neighborhood in the middle of a sales presentation. Girskis can monitor the entire production process from anywhere in the field, any time.
The original development costs, he says, though “a significant chunk,” resulted in a capability that “handles all of our day-to-day operations,” with costs amortized over many years. But, he adds, those costs are insignificant compared with the added benefits of the technology.
Those benefits include tremendous time savings and fewer errors. “When everything is Web-based, you aren’t writing things down all the time,” Girskis says. With less paperwork, he was able to reduce the office staff from six people to four. Salesmen don’t have to remember to check for e-mail, since it is automatically downloaded to their phones. Girskis personally saves at least four hours a week on paperwork, and others realize similar savings.