Automating Your Construction Company with Make com
Discover how to automate your construction business with Make.com! 🚧💡 Wade and Stephen share real-world examples of streamlining operations, from capturing receipts to generating reports. Learn to save time, reduce errors, and focus on growth. 📈
Watch now to boost efficiency and profitability!
Topics we cover on this episode include:
- 00:44 – Embracing technology
- 01:56 – Automation benefits
- 03:12 – Automation security
- 04:03 – Automation examples
- 06:41 – Automation tools
- 08:06 – Automation for contractors
- 09:49 – AI and automation
- 12:06 – Automation for sales
- 13:45 – Automation for accounting
- 16:27 – Automation for meetings
- 19:17 – More automation examples
- 20:19 – Automation for safety and HR
- 21:48 – Future of automation
LINKS
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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Wade Carpenter: Are you spending too much time on repetitive tasks that pull you away from growing your business? Have you ever wondered how much more efficient and profitable your construction company could be if you could automate those mundane tasks?
Today, we’re diving into the world of automation and exploring how you can streamline your operations to save time, reduce errors, and focus on what really matters: building your business.
This is the Contractor Success Forum. I’m Wade Carpenter with Carpenter and Company CPAs. Stephen Brown, my co host and partner in crime, is here from McDaniel Whitley Bonding Insurance.
Stephen, with the increasing demand of contractors to do more with less, what are your thoughts about using automation as a solution to reduce costs and be more profitable?
[00:00:44] Stephen Brown: Just think about all the technology that we use now, that you use. And we were talking earlier, I was like, Wade, the young folks in my office can’t believe that Mike and I were literally computer geeks when they first came out, and then everything just took off and we got busy doing other things, and it’s so hard to keep track of.
But originally I used the first word processor with two floppy disks to create invoices so I could bill my customers. It was crazy. It was primitive to think that we used typewriters, not Word documents. And now we’re talking about automating things so things run smoother. They run faster. It’s idiot proof.
One thing that a lot of contractors have said that are really good with technology. They always say, you just have to embrace it. Wade into it and don’t be afraid of wading into it. You did, speaking of Wade you’ve been using it and you brought up, make. com and how you’ve been using it to automate things for your CPA firm. And as you wade into this, as you delve into it, it’s just amazing what it’ll do.
[00:01:56] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, and make.com is just one of the tools out there, and we’ll talk about some of these tools.
How automation can help your construction business run more efficiently
[00:02:00] Wade Carpenter: But today, what I wanted to do was talk about some specific examples of ways we’ve helped be more efficient in my company, as well as working with contractors. And being in their back office, we need to be as efficient as possible.
And to work with contractors all over the nation, we’ve had to build some of these things. And we’ve made our contractors a lot more efficient. And it’s something that, as a bean counter nerd and a computer geek too, for me, that’s not a pretty picture, but, it’s something that we fell into and sort of enjoying because we’re saving a lot of time and effort.
And I just wanted the contractors to know about these things that are out there. and maybe give you some specific examples. We’ll be talking about that later in the program.
What are your thoughts on that?
[00:02:45] Stephen Brown: I think it’s awesome, Wade. What are my thoughts about doing something better, smarter, faster? It’s just a no brainer. When you’re a contractor and you’re building something and it’s done wrong and you have to tear it out and rebuild it, that’s big money. That’s a huge hit in your profit.
And anything that you’re doing over and over again to improve the efficiency of your company that you have to do twice costs you money. So I don’t see any reason not to embrace this.
I told you earlier, I was concerned about the security of all these different platforms. And you were telling me what’s available now to protect these applications. And I was impressed with that. See, I didn’t even know that. But I want to hear more about when you got started seriously thinking about this topic and what you’re doing now.
[00:03:32] Wade Carpenter: I guess where I wanted to go with it is, we basically started doing this many years ago. A lot of people know the, it’s called Zapier. com or Zapier, people call it different things, but they’re referred to as ZAPs, where it’s just some automation.
And, we had some level of success with that, but some of that is pretty clunky. And essentially where we’re going with this is like the cost of labor and hiring people in house to administer these back office tasks is just pretty high. And everybody needs to do more with less if we can.
These costs are increasing, and looking at some of the costs of hiring people. In the construction industry, that’s why it’s so expensive. And I think that’s quite frankly, why people love our outsourcing model to where we can usually provide a better value of full back office financial services at a less cost.
And that’s all we do, so we’re pretty darn good at it. But these kinds of automations have helped us reduce costs and be able to provide a better service, and we’ll talk more about it, but it increases the accuracies, too, in some cases.
[00:04:39] Stephen Brown: Yeah you have to be accurate in what you’re doing, obsessively accurate.
[00:04:43] Wade Carpenter: But like I said, it just, certain things that anybody could probably hire somebody to do it, but if you can get it automated and take it off their plate, you don’t have to have them going back and doing some of these things and they get done more timely.
We were all about trying to get our contractors better numbers faster, because you’re trying to run a job and you know how you’re doing, and something goes wrong on that job. That’s the goal of us. We’re trying to give you good information to be able to run your construction business by.
So again, I want to spend more time talking about the technology, but it does save time and money and it increases productivity.
We’ll get into specific examples because I want people to move into this. Zapier. com and then we went into Make. com and we’ve been building with this and we won’t go straight into it today, but bringing the AI part of it into it as well as, with Make. com has helped quite a bit.
Human in the loop automations
[00:05:44] Wade Carpenter: And the latest iteration of this is where we have what we refer to as human in the loop type automations. It’s hard to automate something that is 100 percent automated. And sometimes you want to say, well, these things are not infallible.
And, you may have a thousand different exceptions, but the latest iteration that, we’re not really dealing with make. com. We’ve got another app that ties into all this. That, say, we want an approval to look at the bid or something like that. So something is generated automatically and it comes in Slack or an email and it says we’ve got to look at it and we’ve got a link where we can click on it real quick and look at it. It’s saving a ton of time.
Or if I need some feedback and they need to fill out like just a couple of pieces of information to finish out that automation, then we can do that and then send it in and then the rest of it can be completely automated. What do you think?
[00:06:41] Stephen Brown: It makes sense.
How to get started with automation
[00:06:42] Stephen Brown: What I’m thinking about as you’re explaining the process, I think about, how you go about wading through to find what you want to accomplish, automating your process. Things like sales, marketing, accounting, human resources, and your regular operations, everything you’re doing that evolves. I think when we’re talking about automation, we’re talking about automating processes and doing it in a consistent, faster way. Is that correct?
[00:07:12] Wade Carpenter: It is, and that’s one of the things where, like, when I started down this road, it’s like, you can be overwhelmed. It’s like, I could do this and this. And what I would tell you is if you’re trying to figure out what to do first, what could save you the most amount of time? What could, free up things off your plate?
A lot of our contractors that are listening to this, probably, they have no work life balance. They work in the field all day, they come do paperwork all night, and they need to save time wherever they can. And especially if you’re in startup mode or some of these growth mode, you’re trying to scale, but you have no support.
And automation is a great way to get support and growth in your business without having to spend extra money or additional people to do it. So again, we’re going to talk about some of these specific things that we’ve built coming up, but just, I think that’s a great way to think about that.
[00:08:06] Stephen Brown: Sure. Well, that makes a lot of sense. You remember how important, for example GPS is to moving dirt. That, in itself forced folks that weren’t using it to say we got to do it and we got to figure it out. Somebody has got to figure it out in our organization. We’ve got to do it. That’s the evolution of things.
Examples of automations you can build yourself
[00:08:27] Stephen Brown: So tell me a little bit about how you’re using it right now at carpenter and Company.
[00:08:33] Wade Carpenter: Internally we have processes, and I think trying to figure out what the right tools are, it can be a learning process. And we’ve actually, again, started baking this into what we do with contractors. So we’ve actually developed several of these type apps that we can now deploy. And one of the biggest things that we hear all the time is about capturing receipts and getting job cost information in.
There’s plenty of these things out there that, used to be Receipt Bank, now it’s Dext, and some of these other ones, like Expensify. You can actually build those things yourself and have it come into your accounting.
One of the biggest problems that we saw with that was a lot of these tools that would do that only work at the chart of accounts level to where we just maybe put labor material subs as opposed to this is what this particular thing is. But when you got guys that run to the parts store, Home Depot, Lumberyard, you go to a restaurant and have a business meal. And bean counters like me, it’s got to have receipt or whatever. You snap a picture on your phone and we got an automation that will go in and it sends it into accounting. Those kind of things that can save quite a bit of time and now they’re getting easier and easier to build.
[00:09:48] Stephen Brown: Okay. I’m following you.
[00:09:49] Wade Carpenter: And just a extension of that, and again, I don’t know where this conversation is going to go. But for years, these programs like DEXT and, it used to be Receipt Bank, Expensify, and all those similar things that will capture receipts. They’re taking it and trying to, you know, what OCR technology, Optical Character Recognition, And they’re trying to read it and put it into like a PDF where they can read it.
Now, again, we’re not going to talk too deep in the AI part of it today, but now AI can actually have the vision on there and doesn’t have to go through the OCR technology. And, It actually does usually a better job of reading it. So we’ve built things with accounts payable and purchase orders and things that will come in and it’s actually more accurate and it saves so much time.
Like it will capture the information. We can say, put the invoice date and number, here’s the vendor, here’s the amount, and here’s the line item. And without anybody keying anything. And, sometimes you probably do want to verify it, but verifying it is a lot faster than actually keying it in.
And at least it’s captured. We capture it, and maybe it comes in from an email, and we’ve got it here where we can actually pull it up on screen and look at it and quickly go through. And when we can tie that directly into your QuickBooks or whatever, and tie those transactions in and look them up in a heartbeat.
Saves so much time.
[00:11:18] Stephen Brown: You’re excited about what you could do from an accounting standpoint for contractors. And what contractors can do for themselves. And I’m also thinking about project managers and all the headaches and reports that they have to produce regularly.
[00:11:33] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:11:33] Stephen Brown: This automation is really going to help them if they’re not already using it. \
Using automation for sales and lead nurturing
[00:11:38] Stephen Brown: I mentioned earlier what I’d learned from make. com about the different things that you can use it for. But I think about how you can use it for sales. For processing new orders, getting new sales in, and moving them down the road. For a contractor, getting a job started properly is a nine tenths of a lot of their problems.
If they don’t get that job started properly, it’s just not going to perform properly. And I see that. And then also using it for generating leads of people that may be interested in what you do.
[00:12:11] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, that’s a big part of it and I know we’re going to do a follow up episode on some of the stuff that AI brings into this. But, some of these things, exactly like what you’re saying, you’ve got an invoice that comes in from an email, and it’s buried in the email, as opposed to an attachment. We can capture that.
The lead capture we get some leads that comes in through an email, and it’s not well structured. Again, this is a combination of the AI and building a tool, like in Make. com. Where it will actually go through this email, and pull out, I’ve actually got like 25 to 30 things it’s looking for in this email.
And it will extract here’s the company name, here’s the people’s email address, whatever these factors are that are in there. And it’ll put it in a database for me. And so that’s where we can automatically turn all that into a proposal, a follow up email, which that part has been so nice for me to be able to send a customized booking link.
So here we’ve got all your information in here. If you’d like to talk to me, click on this one link and we’ve already populated all your information and all you have to do is pick a date and we can go.
[00:13:21] Stephen Brown: Wow. That’s certainly the way to get things done.
[00:13:25] Wade Carpenter: You brought up some good ones, like lead capturing, and follow ups, and again, talking about the AI, we get into, we could get into the chatbot thing, but a lot of these things where you can actually automate like, an assistant.
[00:13:40] Stephen Brown: Yeah. And I love the idea too, when I was studying it about lead nurturing. How do you nurture leads without being obnoxious and pesky? This system can help you do that in a professional, consistent way. If you’re interested, this is the next step. Do you want to talk some more?
That sort of thing.
[00:13:58] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. And that’s, I mean, you say nurturing too. And like I said, we’ve got captured in a database. We know when that email went out and we don’t get follow up, we can follow up in X number of days.
We’ve also automated in some of that like, well, go out and find out this person’s LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page or website and we get some background information on them without doing anything. The automation is doing it in the background.
Automation for Accounts Payable
[00:14:23] Stephen Brown: We were talking about accounting a while ago. In your world, there are so many reporting and compliance things you have to deal with. It seems like this would help with that tremendously. And then, just tracking and keeping up with your accounts payable, just getting the money moving.
We already talked about the sales process, getting the job set up properly. It’s going to help your cashflow.
[00:14:44] Wade Carpenter: I’ve talked about that before in past episodes. Most people don’t want to think about paying people, but when they get that invoice in, capturing that cost immediately, whether you’ve paid it or not, can help you figure out where you are on that job. So you know at least that you’ve committed that to that job and then if that’s in your system and you know what day it’s got to be paid, you’ve got that input that you need to build like a 13 week cash flow report.
[00:15:10] Stephen Brown: Yeah. And you’re building up your ability, too, for your credit and your relationship with the vendors and material suppliers and subcontractors, if you use them. That’s worth its weight in gold.
Some people get so short sighted about hoarding their cash. Oh I want to make sure I pay this that I owe this. We’ll just take our time. We’re going to push real hard to get the money in, but getting the money back out isn’t as important. I’d say it’s just as important.
[00:15:37] Wade Carpenter: Absolutely. Like I said, let me throw out a few more of these.
Automation for meetings, task tracking, and training
[00:15:41] Wade Carpenter: I think I’ve talked about this before, but things like capturing meeting notes, as opposed to writing out a bunch of things where sometimes I’m scribbling and I can’t even read my own writing afterwards, and I don’t know where those notes are, using something like Otter.Ai or Fireflies on a Zoom call, or even just on your phone. And capturing that and turning that transcript into this is the action items, this is the follow up tasks we need to do.
We’ve used it with clients and prospects trying to figure out what we need to follow up on, what details we need to know about. But in things like my team meetings, we’ve got specialized things that says this is a team meeting, and these are the people involved, and these are the tasks that we’re going to follow up on. And assign those tasks.
But also when we do team meetings, one of the biggest use cases I see for contractors as well is, we want our team to do things the same way. So if we do a training, somebody’s not there that day, or they come in, you hire somebody three months later. You gotta train them all over again. And so we’re taking these transcripts, and we’ve got prompts that are built into it. And we say, I want to extract the training from this.
And it can go through and, here are the steps to do it. This is what we went over. Without me doing anything.
[00:16:59] Stephen Brown: And you don’t forget also. The procedures for the meeting, and the procedures that you want to reiterate in each of these meetings.
[00:17:07] Wade Carpenter: Right. And, if we had something that like a tax planning meeting we come out of there, here’s the tax plan. We’ve got it documented, and, we say we need follow up. We need to do a last quarter estimate, we need to do a bonus out at the end of the year to pay off some taxes.
That’s another great use case.
[00:17:24] Stephen Brown: And how quickly can any of your team members pick up a customer file and make sure that you’re heading in the right goal for that customer? It’s fantastic.
[00:17:34] Wade Carpenter: Or, like I said, if I have the meeting with somebody and I’ve got to communicate, say to Amanda or Lori or one of my people on the team, if I don’t meet with them and tell them what we talked about, it saves me so much time.
[00:17:48] Stephen Brown: Sure. Absolutely.
Automation for purchase orders, calendar management and more
[00:17:50] Wade Carpenter: But again, I just wanted to throw out a few more things like purchase order creation, where, maybe you want to keep a track on what’s been, set up to buy or whatever. And you got somebody that tracks that in your organization, but they’re not there that day or, it’s after hours. We’ve done things like, creating invoices automatically through something like QuickBooks Online, or, any of these accounting products, we can say, get on your phone or whatever, and say, send an invoice to Smith Company, or whatever, and it’ll capture those details. And you probably still want to look at it before it goes out, but it can actually automatically create that in QuickBooks Online.
Calendar management. Just automating certain things where, you know, if there’s a follow up that’s going to go out, hey, we’ve got a meeting coming up, or it triggers something in our database, so where we’re going to have, The transcript for this so that we capture it and we make sure something’s getting done.
[00:18:50] Wade Carpenter: We’ve done things like automated reports and things like that where it will go out and extract from maybe the internet. There are some nuances to like things like that, but we have done some things where on the back end we can pull some things like bank balances and statistics from your QuickBooks and compile these reports automatically and give a contractor a dashboard without manually doing all these things.
So I feel like I’ve thrown out a ton of stuff.
[00:19:17] Stephen Brown: No, I think it’s good that you’ve done it this way, Wade, because it’s just making my mind real about all the different things that automation needs. For example, safety. Wow. Managing your toolbox talks for the jobs, being consistent in your log and OSHA management.
Also just incident management. If somebody gets hurt, something happens. How you manage those reports, how you follow up on it can save you thousands and thousands of dollars.
I think about human resources. And how many employees, especially labor employees, come through a construction company. I think about, outboarding an employee when you’re firing and laying them off. Not a very exciting topic, but you can make sure that you’re following the right procedures for that.
Managing employees performances. You can use it for that. And you can use it for tracking and keeping up with certain talented individuals you want to try to hire to your company.
[00:20:15] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. You threw out a whole bunch more use cases where, you know, if we can document these things without, we have a meeting or maybe we had a project meeting, and we told the subcontractor to do something, and we got it documented. You think about those implications.
If you had a meeting with your customer and they told you hey, I want to change this, you’re documenting your change order. We’ve got it either recorded or at least a transcript of this is what you told us to do.
We could have a workflow that says, okay, this is going to be a change order. Send it back to the office, draw up a change order, so we don’t forget it. There’s so many use cases like what you just said there.
[00:20:53] Stephen Brown: It’s fantastic when you think about what automation accomplishes. What is accomplished over the last century, what it’s accomplishing in the future. Wade, I think the future’s bright here. And one nice thing about automation is how it, it takes emotional decisions and helps you apply logic to them.
And in the business world that’s what you, that’s how you need to operate. And when you’re busy, sometimes you don’t have time to do that. So having all these systems in place. It’s a fantastic. I look forward to talking about it more, an episode of what our listeners and other people are doing to use this automation to help their company. This is something that we need to share.
[00:21:33] Wade Carpenter: Absolutely, and we will be doing a follow up episode including the AI part. You mentioned how far we’ve come, and you think about two years ago, chatGPT was not available to any of us, and it’s come so far.
So I think that’s a great way to close this out. If you’ve got any thoughts or feedback on today’s episode, how you’re using it in your business, I think our listeners would love to see that. . If you’ve got questions, insights, or topics you’d like us to dive into next time, drop them in the comments below.
Thank you for tuning into the Contractor Success Forum. For more resources, tips, and the latest updates, visit contractorsuccessforum.c om. You can also connect with us at the Carpenter CPA’s YouTube channel and ProfitFirstConstruction. com for more exclusive content. And if you found today’s episode valuable , don’t forget to like share and subscribe and join us every week as we explore new ways to help your construction business thrive.
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