Episode 4: Creating Buildertrend With Dan Houghton

In this episode of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, our host, Bosco Anthony is joined by Dan Houghton, CEO and Co-founder of Buildertrend. Dan shares the history of how Buildertend started and how the software he created continues to help thousands of builders worldwide.

Buildertrend is based in Nebraska, United States, and has over 400 full-time employees. The company offers cloud-based software for builders who can log into a desktop and/or mobile app to access nearly 30 core features that help them better manage their construction businesses in the field, from the office or from home.

The construction management software provides real-time 24/7 access to construction scheduling, change orders, documents, photos, warranty management, home buyer selections, and much more.

Tune in to the full episode to hear Dan share his story and offer advice to other builders to be better prepared for the future of construction technology. 

Dan Houghton 

Dan Houghton co-founded Buildertrend in 2006 and now, as the CEO, he oversees Sales, Business Development, Strategic Partnerships, HR and Culture. Dan is credited for leading Buildertrend’s expansion in the global market. Buildertrend now has more than 1 million users worldwide. 

Connect with Dan

Timeline

1:00 How Buildertrend was born.

9:41 Smart tech in the construction industry.

11:25 Buildertrend’s international expansion.

13:12 Buildertrend’s innovation.

17:19 Small business growing pains.

21:16 The future of Buildertrend.

25:12  How automation is changing residential construction.

27:04 Builders risks and weaknesses.

30:20 How Buildertrend helps builders.

35:29 Dan’s advice to builders.

Links, Resources & More

Buildertrend Website
Buildertrend Resources
APB Website
APB on Instagram
APB on Facebook
APB on YouTube

Join the Professional Builders Secrets Facebook group for builders & connect with professional builders world-wide.

Bosco Anthony: 

This is Professional Builders Secrets, the number one podcast to help you grow your building company safely and securely, brought to you by the Association of Professional Builders (APB). Join us every week as we talk to industry experts and your fellow professional builders on everything you need to know to generate more leads, more sales and higher margins while improving the building experience for your clients.

Bosco Anthony:

Hello and welcome to the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, a podcast by APB for building company owners, General Managers, Vice Presidents and emerging leaders. Here, we discuss all things running a professional building company, from sales processes, financials, operations and marketing. I'm excited to have Co-founder and CEO of Buildertrend, Dan Houghton, with me today. Dan, welcome.

Dan Houghton:

Thank you so much. Glad to be on the podcast.

Bosco Anthony:

Well, Dan, let's start off with how did Buildertrend start? How did the brand come to life? Take us down memory lane.

Dan Houghton:

It's pretty wild. It was over 15 years ago where our headquarters are here in Omaha, Nebraska. It's my hometown where I was raised and where I've had my professional career. In my first job out of college, I worked at a technology company in what we call ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) business that was in the insurance industry and then had two Co-founders of now what is Buildertrend, Steve and Jeff Dugger, two much smarter guys than me, who were very entrepreneurial, and were doing tonnes of cool projects and were software consultants. They were helping small businesses build websites, but they were also building backend tools for these companies.

Dan Houghton:

In 2006, home building across the United States, especially, was on fire. It was the peak of more home starts in 2006-2007 than any year prior to that. They had a handful of builders asking them for the same tools here in Omaha, Nebraska. Where I came into the picture was, we were 25 and I don't think any of us had any girlfriends at the time. So, we were sitting around the basement office and I said, "There's a lot of builders and I think we can sell this." 

 

Dan Houghton:

I went to a couple of meetings and that was the beginning of Buildertrend. The name Buildertrend's kind of funny. People always ask, "Where'd you get it?" It was just the domain. We had probably 10, 20 names that we'd picked out and Buildertrend's domain was available here on GoDaddy in 2006 for $12. So that's how Buildertrend became Buildertrend.

Bosco Anthony:

I actually have a fond memory of Nebraska. My sister went to Creighton University and I am a big Steelers fan. So, there's a lot we have in common there.

Dan Houghton:

There you go. That's awesome.

Bosco Anthony:

What inspired the need to develop this sort of cloud based digital platform? I don't even think we called it that back then, but what are some of the core unique functionalities that come with the product?

Dan Houghton:

Cloud was a term that was not used when we started this product, and one of the largest barriers that we had to get over with customers in 2006 was this is an internet-based program, so you have to have an internet connection to utilise our software. You don't download anything. Probably for many of our listeners who are younger than us, they don't remember downloading a CD or a piece of software to their desktop back in the day. 

Dan Houghton:

That was actually a hurdle for us early on, but obviously our biggest strength is how we've become who we've become over the last 15 years. If you think about what I always call vertical market software, you realise there's a lot of vertical healthcare, construction, you could say property management, some of that's a little close to our space, but those are different vertical markets. There wasn't a lot of software available to the small to medium sized business, that really catered to construction companies.

Dan Houghton:

Then if you think about it, most of our customers are home builders, remodellers, commercial contractors and specialty contractors. We just saw this niche that was being underserved. It seems like real basic things, but they are actually critical parts of their business; I call it mission critical. So, things like scheduling, customer communication, all the way into financial tools like purchase orders and estimating bid management. But we're also doing things that I think are kind of table stakes for a contractor, like change order management. 

Dan Houghton:

Many contractors are just really good people and somebody might say, "Hey, I'm willing to pay $10,000 if you do this and that," and they don't have a contract for it, there's no approval process for it, so there's a good chance that contractor will get taken advantage of and won’t be able to actually collect the money that they earn. Those are the things that we're helping our customers with. Today, now, Bosco, it's pretty wild. You've got 27,000 customers globally who use our product to manage their business every single day.

Bosco Anthony:

When you look back at where you were and where you are now, what's really contributed to the growth and allowed you to become the gold standard in the building space as well? 2006 was around two years before the great American recession at that point. So obviously, there were a lot of obstacles to come through over the years, too.

Dan Houghton:

Yeah. I think it's interesting. In hindsight, I think in the financial recession, obviously America was on the forefront, but it was a global recession in a lot of ways, but the lending standards in the United States had become so loose on new home constructions. That's really where the bubble was. But I think the great recession really helped us as an organisation. 

Dan Houghton:

I talk to contractors about this all the time and really all business professionals, because one, it gave us an opportunity to really take a look at what's happening in our industry, what's happening in our business. How can we make our customers more successful now? Our clients, folks who were building 50 homes a year, all of a sudden were doing 20 remodels a year and they were becoming pool builders and they were going into different trades or different markets within the construction vertical.

Dan Houghton:

We had to adapt our market and how we built our product, because we weren't just building our product for a single family home builder anymore. We were building our product for a larger audience within the construction industry. So, I think that was a really good thing for us. 

Dan Houghton:

We weren't venture capital backed either, which a lot of people thought we were. For the listeners who don't really understand what that means, it's basically somebody gives you a bunch of money for a piece of your business, and they will do that with a lot of companies. The goal of that is maybe that 10, 20, 30 of the investments you make get a 10, 20, 30 times return.

Dan Houghton:

So, a lot of companies get pushed into moving really fast and chase growth, growth, growth, growth at all cost. Since we were bootstrapped, we didn't have that mindset. So, we were financially really stable as an organisation. What that ended up doing for us is that all the competitors that we had in 2007, 2008, 2009, somewhat disappeared. I always used the analogy of the ‘Forrest Gump’ scene. We were the last shrimping boat and then all of a sudden after the hurricane, we started catching shrimp. It felt a little bit like that for us during the recession.

Bosco Anthony:

How has the partnership between all the Co-founders been? How has it transformed you guys? And what does that leadership look like to you today in the building industry?

Dan Houghton:

The Co-founders and I are still active in the business. I act as the CEO and they're still Co-founders. They're here every single day. If you’re going to start a contracting business and you're thinking about bringing on a partner: one, it is a lot like a marriage and there's going to be tough times and there's going to be really great times to celebrate good things that happen. But I think trust is a big part of that. I think that’s what made us a successful partnership.

Dan Houghton:

But also, finding a partner or partners who don't have the same skill sets as you is a big advantage. My strengths, in many ways, are not the strengths of my partners and vice versa. So, Steve and Jeff, again, are way smarter than I am, have skill sets that I never have, or probably could never get. So, we were able to lean on each other throughout the last 15, 16 years and be great partners.

Dan Houghton:

Over the last 18 months, our world's changed a little bit because we brought on capital partners. We brought on bank capital, but we also made one of the largest acquisitions in our industry. We bought what some people look at as a competitor – CoConstruct. We acquired CoConstruct. So, we've become a much bigger organisation, almost a thousand employees now. It's become a different business, but it's a great business. 

Dan Houghton:

As we think about thought leadership, Bosco, we believe we have an opportunity to support our customers. There's a lot of great thought leaders in our industry, whether they're product marketers because they're putting products in your homes, or they're folks like you at APB.

Dan Houghton:

I think that's the one thing I love about what's happened in our industry over the last five or six years. I think because of technology, because of podcasts, because of blogs, there are more voices than there were 10, 15 years ago when we got in. Ten, 15 years ago, you had to almost be like a celebrity, someone really special to have your voice heard. 

Dan Houghton:

Now, we're seeing some of our customers who are great thought leaders, who have 100,000 plus followers on Instagram because they care about what they do, they care about the industry and they don't need some fancy credentials behind their name to be a thought leader. We think we have a place in that, because we're the largest technology provider in this industry. But I love, personally, listening to our customers and the contractors, whether it's Australia, Canada, US, you name it, tell their stories. Those are the real thought leaders, in my opinion.

Bosco Anthony:

You seem to keep your eye on the pulse. You seem to be paying attention to the front lines. Tell us about the landscape of smart tech. Before Buildertrend, there was obviously a gap, and now the space is transformed even so much more with the evolving landscape of technology. Where do you see it going?

Dan Houghton:

I think it's endless, honestly. Fifteen years ago, we were living in a world without iPhones. Think about that. I didn't have an iPhone 15 years ago, and if you walk anywhere around the world today, all you see is people staring at their iPhones. Can you imagine a world without an iPhone? So, it’s hard to imagine what’s going to come and change our industry, specifically our industry, or the entire world, through technology. But I do think we solve a business need. We help our clients run a better business through efficiency, through managing their finances, through customer communication. 

Dan Houghton:

But overall, if you look at the industry, you're starting to see some of these homes, 3D homes being built. That stuff seemed pretty far away, three, four, five years ago, but it's happening today. So how does that change the landscape of our industry?

Dan Houghton:

I'm not a visionary. I can't tell you how it's going to change with something like 3D homes, but I do believe the amount of technology and the amount of investment that's going into technology in our industry is at an all-time high. We've got some real problems. We've got obviously labour issues. It's really hard to find quality folks who come out and want to do some of these jobs. We've got product shortages. I don't know if that's just a function of the COVID pandemic, but is that going to stop anytime soon? I don't know. 

Dan Houghton:

Whenever there's a problem, there's usually someone behind the scenes trying to solve that problem and that's what I think, especially in the modern world we live in, that's what's so great about our world. So, a lot of fun things are coming our way.

Bosco Anthony:

Yeah. It seems like it's an unpredictable landscape and everyone's sort of trying to find their way. What's contributed to the success of the international expansion of Buildertrend?

Dan Houghton:

I think that our world's become really small, right? It used to be, in our world as a software company, if I wanted to sell software to someone in Tanzania or Australia or Canada, I usually had to have an actual physical presence. I had to be able to see someone, shake someone's hand, and have an office in that country. Today, that's not the case. We're signing up well over a thousand new customers every single month and those customers are finding us because it's easy to find things online. 

Dan Houghton:

Just like how a prospect's going to find a home builder in Brisbane or a remodeller in Vancouver, they're going to go online, most likely. They're going to ask their friends. They're going to ask people they trust about who they should potentially work with, and the same thing happens in our industry.

Dan Houghton:

We do benefit from the network effect, but it's amazing how small our world is. Somebody halfway across the world can find us and can start using our software within 24 hours. We have made a big effort around certain markets like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Commonwealth countries, primarily because they're mostly English speaking, but also because we've found them to be really good markets for us. 

Dan Houghton:

We do have what I would call like a second and third shift that comes in and only works with New Zealand and Australia. Those folks actually work out of our home office in the United States, but they're coming in when everybody else is going home. So, they're just waking up where you're just getting up in the morning. Our guys are just showing up to start their day.

Bosco Anthony:

The time zones definitely are different for us, but we still operate on the same pulse, as they say.

Dan Houghton:

Yeah.

Bosco Anthony:

What are some of the current trends in the building and residential construction space and industry, and how does Buildertrend really keep up or accommodate these trends? You mentioned that you're spending a lot of time on the front lines, listening to your customers. How do you keep up?

Dan Houghton:

I think the one thing I continually hear from our customers is they want to do things faster. It used to be, "I want to create a plan or build materials or connect with my vendors to build an estimate. I want to do that faster than I was doing it. It took me all day to do today, to accomplish today, and I want to do that in an hour." So, I think it's all about speed and how we can make our customers more efficient. That's one thing I always see. So that relates to a lot of things. 

Dan Houghton:

If you think about how we utilise data and artificial intelligence, AI [Artificial Intelligence] is a fancy buzzword, but it's also like predicting what people can do because of the way they have behaved in the past. We've got interesting data sets because we have so many customers.

Dan Houghton:

So, we know if you're building a 3,000 square foot home that requires a basement in the Midwest, we have a pretty good idea that should take you X number of days and it should take you X number of days to frame that house. So, those types of things, us being more predictive to our customers and showing them where they have gaps in their business is where I see the future going. 

Dan Houghton:

We have some of those capabilities today, but – to use an American term – I'd say, “We're still in the batter's box on that.” We still haven't really swung and got out in front of it yet. But I think you’re looking for any way you can make your customers more efficient, make them do their jobs faster. Again, you look at what the iPhone has accomplished for so many of us and what the internet's accomplished, it's the same for our industry.

Bosco Anthony:

Our listeners are builders from different parts of the world and some builders embrace innovation. Some people are a little bit more hesitant. How do you spark innovation at Buildertrend? And any advice for people that are on the fence thinking about embracing the new age?

Dan Houghton:

Yeah. Our industry gets a hard time for being late adopters. There's plenty of studies from very fancy consulting firms that show us being last at technology adoption. And part of it, what a lot of people don’t understand is our industry is also really fragmented. So, what a home builder does in Brisbane or Sydney versus what a remodeller does in New York, those are two different businesses. 

Dan Houghton:

There are some foundational things that they may be doing that are similar to how they operate or how you build a schedule, but there are some major differences in someone building a skyscraper versus I'm building 20 custom homes a year. I don't think a lot of people realise how big of a difference it is when you're running a civil engineering construction business versus a home building business.

Dan Houghton:

Our industry has been late adopters. But I've said this before: my grandmother messages me on Facebook. She's 91 years old. The world has caught up in a lot of ways with technology. So, if you're comfortable using a mobile phone, an iPhone or an Android, or you're comfortable using the internet, you should be comfortable using software. 

Dan Houghton:

The biggest challenge I see with our industry, Bosco, is commitment. Part of that is just most of our clients, most of your listeners and most of the folks that are members of APB, are small businesses. The challenges that you're facing every day, it's like, “What fire do I put out? How do I build a strategy to make my business double in size in 18 months or two years?”

Dan Houghton:

It's not necessarily about what technology to pick. It's about the focus you put on what you want to be as a business and how you're going to get there. Technology plays a part. Buildertrend, CoConstruct, we play a part in that, but it takes focus and it takes energy to build a great business. And that's the one thing we talk about to our customers a lot, especially when we see them is, “Know why you make money. Know why you want to get a job done in 90 days and not 120 days.” If you know the reason behind these questions, you'll be successful. Don't just make money because you hope to make money. Have a purpose behind it.

Bosco Anthony:

I'm going to ask a hard question here, but what are some of the pain points that come with a company that's grown and been on this growth path? What are some of those pain points with the cloud based platform as well?

Dan Houghton:

I like talking about small businesses because we were a company of three people. Today, we're a company of 900+ employees. So, I wasn't born to lead a company of a thousand people. It happened and evolved over time. A pain point for us is having too big of a focus. So, you're trying to do 20 things instead of just focusing on doing one or two things really well. It's easy to chase shiny objects, whether you're building a technology company or you're building a construction firm. It's like the contractor who takes on seven different types of jobs and doesn't do any of them all that well, versus putting a focus on: “I just want to do swimming pools, but I'm going to sub out the landscaping.”

Dan Houghton:

I think focus is a big, big part of it. I will always say this: people are the best part of my day, every single day – and also the biggest challenge of my day. We are a very people focused organisation, putting people first, but it's hard. It's hard when you have people. It was hard when we had five, six employees. 

Dan Houghton:

It's hard when you have 900 employees, because people come with real problems and the problems most of the time are a lot bigger than you're going to have in any kind of business case scenario, because it's real life. I think for me, they’re the two areas I always try to give advice on: be ready for those problems, attack them with grace, love your people and then put as much focus and energy on probably less things than more things.

Bosco Anthony:

Speaking of a large workforce, you were recently recognised as the best place to work in Omaha. Also, you've had a lot of recognition on a national level from having that strong workplace culture. How has the workplace culture shift really contributed to that success of the brand? How does it play a role today?

Dan Houghton:

I think it's been a huge part of it. We have to build a product that makes our customers happy; it makes them efficient and good. The only way we do that is if we have people who are happy building those products. So, there's this cycle between we’ve got to build our product, we’ve got to serve our customers and we've got to have the team behind it to make it all work. 

Dan Houghton:

We've made plenty of mistakes. We're not some perfect organisation; we've got a lot of growing pains. But I think at one point what we really did, Bosco, in my opinion, was probably four or five years ago, we really put a stake in the ground. We sit in meetings all day long talking about marketing. We talk about finance. We talk about our sales strategies. We talk about our product updates and we just went a month, if not a quarter, and we never once talked about the people of this organisation.

Dan Houghton:

The people of this organisation are the foundation of doing all these things that we hope and that we want to dream of doing, and we didn't spend any time talking about what it's like to work at our company. What does their career path look like? How do we show someone that they start in this role and can finish in a different role three or four years down the road? We didn't think about that. 

Dan Houghton:

When we think about culture in a modern world, you look at our tech company, we've got a bar, we've got ping-pong tables, but all that stuff is a facade for culture. Nobody's sitting at the bar talking to a stranger or a colleague and nobody's playing ping-pong. It's all a facade.

Dan Houghton:

I think real culture is about supporting the people next to you, owning your mistakes, celebrating your successes and just being a champion of all things people. If you can put your focus around that as a leader of your organisation, whether you have three employees or you've got 300, or if you've got 900 employees, I think usually the outcomes are going to be more positive than negative.

Bosco Anthony:

I think it's an interesting insight, because even as builders, they're going through these growing pains, trying to hire people and growing the business as well. Growth comes with its own set of pains as they say. So, I think let's really get insight for the builders who are listening out there as well. What does the future of Buildertrend look like? I know it's a hard question to ask during an unprecedented time, but if you had to look at the next 12 months, what's the key focus?

Dan Houghton:

The key focus is probably for us, it's how do we unify the organisation? We're living under a couple of different brands right now. We have a town hall and I give this advice to anybody who has more than one employee: have a town hall meeting once a month or every quarter and say, "What are we going to spend our time and energy on? How are we going to dial in our focus? How are we going to celebrate our success? How are we going to own our failures?" 

Dan Houghton:

At this upcoming town hall, I'm going to talk a lot about our shift and our mindset. For a long time, it was about how many sales are we getting? And what's our revenue? Our product's awesome and our product's amazing, but I don't want to have an awesome product. I want to have the absolute world's greatest product. And that product, we want it to be the best product every day.

Dan Houghton:

We believe we have that, but the only way we can continue to have that every single day is if we just have laser focus on building the best product every single day. What I love about cloud based software, the software we're developing is changing every single day. Again, it's not like it was 20 years ago where we send you a disc once a year and you update your software. We can change and we can update and we can make our software more beautiful and better every single day, and we're spending a lot of time and energy on doing that. 

Dan Houghton:

As we think about the future, always a product focus being number one, but two, how do we bring more things into the product fold that are going to make our clients stronger but more efficient? So, whether it's bringing financial information in, material management where we can integrate products and get more real time pricing. Those are all things that we're focused on for the future, especially 2022.

Bosco Anthony: 

Let's talk a little bit about the building industry. What's the industry dealing with obstacle wise in your insights from the front lines, and how does the industry recover from this unpredictable time in history?

Dan Houghton:

The scariest thing I see right now is the changing of pricing – for someone who does an estimate and then all of a sudden, they go to actually buy the product and the prices and things that they signed a contract on are 20% higher. So, there's a lot of risk around that and not having guaranteed pricing. Going back to the labour piece, I think finding really good people, which is becoming more challenging than ever especially in our backyard in the United States is challenging. Our unemployment in the part of the country I live in is 2%. It's the lowest anywhere. 

Dan Houghton:

It's not that people aren't working. It's just you can't find people to come and work. There's just not enough people. We have a supply/demand issue, but that's happening everywhere. That's happening for restaurants. That's happening for a lot of hospitality companies. So, it's not unique to the construction industry.

Dan Houghton:

I would say the pricing thing scares me the most, for two reasons. One, it's really hard to control a bid or an estimate if you don't have secure pricing. And two, I get worried that we are going to out price the market. If material prices just get too high, people are going to take a step back and say, "Look, I'm not ready to do this project until it becomes more affordable." I think in many cases, a lot of contractors who were smart, over the last 18 months or two years have had the ability to say, "I get to pick the work I want to do, and I can throw any price I want out there." Well, it will shift.

Dan Houghton:

That's a great place to be today and you can pick who you want to work with and you can throw any number you want out there, but that won't be forever. So, having our clients and our customers and our folks that we support building out some consistency on how they want to attack a new contract, I think, is going to be really important for the future.

Bosco Anthony:

You talked a lot about the shift in digital and the tech space as well. We've talked a little bit about the emergence of artificial intelligence, as well as a frontier of where things are going. How does automation play a role and transform the building industry moving forward?

Dan Houghton:

I'm only an expert in a small area of this, which would be software automation, but I think it's all about labour, honestly. So, automation for me and the way we look at that, obviously we are trying to make our customers way more efficient. So, if it takes you eight hours to do something, how can we reduce that to two hours? If we reduce that to two hours, does that mean you need to have fewer employees, or you can maybe re-shift your staff somewhere else? 

Dan Houghton:

As I think about technology automation for software, it's about getting our people to move faster with more accuracy. If we can do that, our clients win. If you think about automation for building materials and some of the other things that we're seeing in the market, it's pretty crazy that 3D homes are a real thing. I didn't think that was possible a few years ago.

Dan Houghton:

I'm hot on this topic just because I was watching the videos over the weekend on YouTube of 3D homes. But I just think it's really interesting. Is it still in its infancy? Yes. I think there are going to be pieces of things like that that all builders will be using for certain parts of their projects. It's not what we think it's going to be, like some printer comes in and builds a house, but it may come in and build a countertop for you, stuff like that. So, I'm pretty excited to see where that goes. 

Dan Houghton:

But if I was a contractor today, I'd be most focused on how do I keep my really good people? I want to make sure I have the best people and I want to be really thoughtful about being planned for the good times and the bad times, and not just excited about what's maybe happening right now.

Bosco Anthony:

Dan, in your illustrious career, I'm sure you didn't get to where you are if you weren't good at assessing risk. All leaders look at risk management as part of their forte. What are some of the risks builders should be paying attention to today? What should they be aware of moving forward?

Dan Houghton:

I think people get a little careless with their contracts and their estimates, and there's a lot of trust out there. So, I think risk, when you don't have a firm contract and you're not handling your change orders and your selection approvals the right way, it will absolutely bite you where you don't want to be bitten and it's going to hurt you. You'll make less money. 

Dan Houghton:

A lot of people just say, "Well, this is the way I've always done this. I've always done it this way and it's always worked." But if there's a better way, you should do it a better way. Simple as that. That's for any business, whether you're a contractor or you're a doctor. If you can find a better way of doing it, then you should always be looking to progress and be better in your job.

Dan Houghton:

I think that's always our risk. I do think a lot of builders who start their company, just like you and me, we have strengths. We have strengths, we have weaknesses. A lot of the strengths that I see a lot of our customers have, maybe they got into this industry because it's a family business, or maybe they were a craftsman or they were in a particular trade and they shifted into owning their own business, then they became their own general contractor. 

Dan Houghton:

Again, find people to help you do things that you're not good at. If you're not good at managing people and handling HR issues, don't just try to figure it out. Find an expert to help you figure it out. Hire someone who can do that. If you're not good with customer service because you have a quick fuse when somebody calls you out on something you don't like, don't handle the customer service calls. Find someone who's really patient who can do that. I think that's where the biggest weaknesses are that I see within our industry right now. It’s that a lot of times as business owners, I'm one of them, I get in my own way. 

Dan Houghton:

You can't truly allow yourself to grow if you try to do everything yourself, because no one's that good. You just don't have the bandwidth and all of a sudden, you're going to be taking warranty emails and calls at 10pm at night and you're going to miss your kids' sporting events and you're just going to be miserable. So, find help if you can get it.

Bosco Anthony:

It's amazing because a lot of builders work the extra hours. They work the weekends. They're trying to wear all these different hats as well.

Dan Houghton:

I know. Most companies have hours, right?

Bosco Anthony:

Yeah.

Dan Houghton:

We're doing this within hours. It's okay to tell your customers, "You can text me any time you want, but I won't be replying to text messages after 5:30pm or 6pm. One way we can avoid a lot of this back and forth is we can have a meeting for half an hour once a week on Tuesday over a cup of coffee and check everything off the list that you want to check off. Any questions that you have, we'll take them on that Tuesday.” 

Dan Houghton:

Instead of chasing around a million things at night or during the day, be the boss. Be the boss of your business. Tell your customer what the process is going to be instead of letting them control the process. You can utilise software like Buildertrend for that, obviously, but at some point, you're the boss and you've got to communicate verbally with your customer about how this process is going to work out.

Bosco Anthony:

Take us through Buildertrend's suite of products. If I'm a new builder or I'm a builder that's coming to your world, what are some of the first tools that would really make me a better builder for tomorrow? Would CoConstruct be one of those first products that I would be coming to?

Dan Houghton:

Buildertrend and CoConstruct are both great products and do similar things. I think for us, we offer a lot of what we call quick wins. So, I think a quick win for a lot of our clients is really basic. It's called a daily log. A traditional daily log would be on a pen and paper and you'd write down what you did that day. You'd write down who was there. 

Dan Houghton:

In today's world, through Buildertrend or CoConstruct, what a daily log is, essentially, you're using your phone and you're typing this is what happened. You can do voice so you don't have to type anything. It's going to pick up the weather. It's going to pick out who was on the job site. It's doing a lot of that work for you. You can take pictures, you can take videos and you can share that with your staff. You can share that with, I think most importantly, your customer.

Dan Houghton:

If you spend five minutes doing a daily log on a project and let's say you're managing four projects. So, let's just call that half an hour. Twenty minutes to 30 minutes of your day are these daily logs. Your customers are going to be so happy, so happy because you took time to tell them what was happening. It takes almost no effort on the contractor's part to actually do it. It's documenting everything that happened. There's pictures. There's videos. It's showing that you actually did something. 

Dan Houghton:

If you didn't do anything, it's okay to say, “We didn't do anything today. We had no subs. We didn't have that on the calendar,” but you still gave them an update. And I think for me, that's one of 50 things we can do for a customer.

Dan Houghton:

But day one, Bosco, if you were going to sign up for Buildertrend, you could be doing that tomorrow and make an immediate impact on your customers and on your business. So, I look at that as a quick win. There are great little tools like To-Dos. If you have hourly employees, they can clock in, clock out so you can track and that's all tracked by GPS. 

Dan Houghton:

You can actually see if they're on the job site when they're clocking in or not clocking in or all that good stuff. So, there's a lot of things you can do really quickly. But at the foundation, it's about project management and communications, building a schedule and sharing that schedule. It can alert folks. It can alert your trades, your subbies or whoever you want. So, there's a lot there for sure.

Dan Houghton:

For a lot of our customers, again, it can be overwhelming. I am not a high-tech person. I'm not a gadget person. I don't go buy the first gadget that comes out. I'm a late adopter in a lot of ways. So, whether it's Buildertrend or another software program, there's always going to be a lot there. If you can take advantage of 10%, 20%, 30% out of it in the first year that you get it, you're winning, because you're doing more than you were doing in the year prior. If you're not maxing out 100% of it, that's okay. We've got clients who have used our product for over a decade and they're not utilising all of it, but they're utilising what they need to utilise to make their business better.

Bosco Anthony:

What are some of the initiatives that you're involved with that are preparing builders for the future? Obviously, the next three to five years are going to potentially look like a very different playbook. So how do you get them to start preparing for that and get builders out of working in the business and get them on the business?

Dan Houghton:

We do quite a few things. Obviously, we've got something called Buildertrend University that we take on the road, but you can also come to our hometown, Omaha, Nebraska, and we get crazy attendance for this and we sell out every month for it. This is about thought leadership. It's a lot about the conversation that we're having right now, but then there's some really tactical things where you can send your Project Manager or your Bookkeeper to come to actually do the hardcore training in a specific area. But a lot for us is listening. 

Dan Houghton:

You're asking me a lot of good questions. I don't have all the answers obviously, but we're asking our customers a lot of questions too, and we're watching them and their behaviours in our software, but we're also asking them, "What makes you worry? If there's one thing you could change today, what would you change?" Some of the things we're talking about today.

Dan Houghton:

The beauty for us is we've got a sounding board of 27,000 plus customers across the world. It's consistent on some things, but in some areas it's like we're hearing completely different things in Australia to what we're hearing in Canada. For us, we've got to listen to what our customers need, but at the end of the day, if you don't take advantage of what your competitors are taking advantage of, they will beat you. Simple as that. It's a fair game. 

Dan Houghton:

If you want to keep track of everything up in your head or on a piece of paper, you're probably going to lose, honestly. So, you've got to take advantage of tools and technology, for the same reason why you have a nail gun instead of just a hammer. It's the exact same thing because it makes sense. You're going to be more efficient with it.

Bosco Anthony:

Yeah, I know those nail guns really come in handy when you're trying to do your own home renovations as they call it.

Dan Houghton:

Yeah, exactly.

Bosco Anthony:

Dan, I could be talking to you for ages. We've got to get you, Jeff and Steve altogether sometime and do a hangout session. My final question for the day would be looking at your amazing journey and looking at the past as well, what advice would you give a younger version of yourself and what advice would you give builders out there listening to this?

Dan Houghton:

I think as an entrepreneur, my advice would be to probably listen more, talk less, and don't be afraid of some of the hard conversations. Some of the hard conversations are telling your customers, "No." You have an obligation; anytime you have someone giving you money, you're in customer service, but it's not okay to be bullied by a customer. And it's okay to drive the conversation and to manage their expectations. I think especially first-time entrepreneurs, younger entrepreneurs have a really hard time managing their customers’ expectations because they're not quite sure what they should even be.

Dan Houghton:

In many cases, you don't even know what you want your customer to feel, and it's okay not to know, but you should really focus on, “What do I want my customer to feel during this process, while they're in the middle of it, and what do I want them to feel when they're done working with us?” And it's okay to ask them, "What do you feel right now?" 

Dan Houghton:

Sometimes I think what I failed at doing personally was I was afraid to ask questions, because I knew the answers might not all be positive. Part of that's an ego problem more than anything else. But getting negative feedback from your customers, ultimately, is what makes you more successful in how you change things. So that would be my small piece of advice.

Bosco Anthony:

Sage advice as well, Dan. Look, we loved having you on the podcast as well. I look forward to speaking to you again and doing some more of these. Potentially, we'll get all of you guys together. We could potentially have a big leadership roundtable as they call it in the future.

Dan Houghton:

That'd be great. I appreciate it. Cheers.

Bosco Anthony:

Thanks so much for your time.

Bosco Anthony:

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