Using manual processes to produce quotes for your construction projects has a place. Excel spreadsheets are an excellent, utilitarian tool. Pen and paper can be one of the most flexible and useful systems there is. But at a certain point, pen-and-paper math isn’t going to cut it. The manual systems that got your company off the ground won’t continue to work as you grow to multiple regional branches or multi-million dollar contracts.
If you resist changing your quoting systems, problems will creep up and fester as you grow. It’s a well-documented phenomenon. In business, in personal endeavors, heck, even in nature, you have to evolve or you’ll die.
When you want to scale your company, it’s simple: you need automation.
Side Effects of Growth in the Construction Industry
Rarely is the decision to scale your business made on a whim. But even the best-laid plans can have some ugly side effects.
Maybe your decision to grow arose from a natural opportunity to expand into a new region or business line. Or perhaps it’s been a long-term goal you’ve been working toward for a long time.
Either way, negative side effects can crop up when you look at your books. There are two main things to look out for:
1. Dwindling Funds
First, your new business is unlikely to be profitable right away. The costs of opening a new location, adding staff, and attracting new business are expected expenses. But what happens if you don’t keep a close eye on that? Your business won’t make money over time.
And what’s worse, the new business might start draining money out of other branches or business lines, making your company’s P&L statements for the year look … well, scary.
2. Less Oversight
With growth comes the addition of staff. If you’ve scaled rapidly, you may have hired staff rapidly. If you’ve opened a new location, you might not be on-site to supervise new operations. Unfortunately, this lack of oversight creates opportunities for negligence, or worse, bad actors.
Solid systems and audit trails are vital. It’s hard to notice if a little bit of copper pipe goes missing from a recent delivery if you are charting the numbers in a spreadsheet. But over time, those losses add up. Whether it’s an employee knowingly turning a blind eye, or simply failing to secure a job site, access control and loss prevention can become costly problems.
Combined, the losses from out-of-control costs and lack of oversight can really hurt your potential and be demoralizing to boot. At the end of the day, you might see that you have doubled the revenue year-over-year, but somehow, your bank account balance is lower than ever.
We always say, “Revenue is for show. Profit is for dough.” Simply put: it doesn’t matter how much you are making if your profit levels are dropping off at an unsustainable pace.
Have You Outgrown Your Manual Quoting Processes?
The most serious sign that you’ve outgrown your manual processes is that you’re losing your mind. However, that can be tough to quantify.
On a more serious note, profitable growth is truly impossible without automation. There’s a point at which you will find your company with its back in a corner, in need of serious remediation, unless you get on board with automating some processes. Here are a few clear indicators your company is on the precipice of needing non-manual solutions:
1. You do a lot of the same, repetitive task.
If you have one 400-row spreadsheet that needs to be translated into a quote, it’s fine to have your administrative team handle the data entry. It may take them 8 hours. If you have a 400-row spreadsheet that needs to be inputted into a system every single day, as part of your quitting process, it’s no longer reasonable to have a person who’s full-time job is just inputting data.
When tasks are simple yet highly repetitive, automating that process is less expensive, more accurate, and less of a headache.
2. You have highly complex projects that require an even higher level of consistency.
The same rules apply to projects that are highly complex but require a lot of consistency. It’s more accurate to automate processes than rely on human data entry. Though excellent creative thinkers and problem solvers, humans are not as accurate as an automated system when it comes to completing a complicated process the same way hundreds of times a day.
For example: If you’ve expanded and are now quoting projects in different locations, you still need to be sure your estimating system is consistent. It’s bad for business if one sales guy alters his numbers to lowball a job, and then in a different region, someone accidentally transposed the lines in Excel, and is charging copper prices for PVC. In the first instance, you’ll win work, but you lose money. In the second, your quotes will be insanely high, and you’ll lose business. When you have a high level of complexity, but no room for inconsistencies, automation is your friend.
3. You can’t finish your jobs, no matter how many people you add
If you feel like you are living in the movie Groundhog Day, and having the same problems over and over and over, no matter how many people you hire, there’s a larger issue causing the symptoms.
You can’t throw more people at a problem and expect it to resolve itself. If you are not having luck moving the needle despite adding your best and brightest (and maybe everyone in your office), it’s likely your problems stem from systemic issues that can be resolved through automation.
Automating Your Construction Quoting Systems Is a Requirement for Growing Your Business
Automation isn’t a silver bullet. It takes time to implement, it takes effort to keep it up to speed with changes in the business, and it’s going to have occasional errors or downtime. A foreman on a job site once said, “paper doesn’t crash.” Which, while true, doesn’t allow for growth. Paper doesn’t evolve with your business.
Once the line of growth is crossed, and your business has gone beyond a certain scale, automation is needed to ensure sustainable and profitable growth. You will be able to do more with fewer people and deliver a more consistent experience across a broader enterprise.
Messy and manual is how most businesses get off the ground. But automation is how businesses achieve their growth goals.