5 Core Systems with Greg Wilkes

5 core systems with Greg Wilkes

[00:00:00]

Greg: So welcome back to the podcast. Today’s episode, we are gonna be diving into the top five core systems. Every construction business needs to scale from one to 5 million. So system systems, that’s what we’re gonna be looking at today so that you can scale effectively, comfortably, and sustainably.

So these systems that I’m gonna be talking about, they’re systems that I implement in my own business, and they’re also ones that we teach to our clients as well. So we’ve got a lot of experience. These. And ultimately we just want you to be able to step back from all the daily chaos and truly be able to take control of what’s going on.

So this episode should be about 30 minutes or so. We’ll dive into each system each system, and it’s gonna go from everything from your lead management, your quoting and job approvals, your project management, your document and communication organisation, and then your finance and cash flow. And then we’ll have a little bonus tip at the end as well.

 

 

[00:01:00]

Stick with me because I think any one of these systems, if you’re not currently using them and you might just hear something in this, it will just unlock something for you which might give you, just some opportunities to be able to grow a little bit more sustainably. So let’s dive in.

Hopefully you’ve got a little bit of a pen and paper to take some notes here. Notes. Let’s start with your lead management system then. So this is often really neglected, actually amazingly lead management. And it’s crazy that it’s neglected. It because lead management is so important. You lead need the leads in your business in order to grow, but how many times have you maybe just jotted down a prospective client’s details on a scrap bit of paper only to misplace it?

Or you’ve got that big black diary that you’ve fill out and put all your client’s details in, and then you can’t find out what you put in there or you can’t find the right page. Or maybe you’ve promised a follow up and then you’ve got caught up in some site emergency and you’ve completed.

Completely forgot about it until it’s too late.

 

 

[00:02:00]

Well, look, if that’s familiar to you, you’re not alone because I think many construction businesses, they really rely on outdated and old fashioned methods of capturing and managing the leads. And really it just costs you some serious money down the road because every lead that slips through your fingers is that potential project and potential profit that’s ultimately lost.

And not just that, it also impacts your reputation and client trust, if if you are letting people down and you’re not getting back to them in time and you’re forgetting to quote you’re just never gonna get recommended by anybody. It’s just not a good look. But there’s a solution to all of this.

A nice, clear, effective solution, nice easy solution. It’s been around for a long time. It’s called your CRM system, your customer relationship management system. And yes, it is something you need for your business, especially if you are above 500 K. You need it no questions asked. So. Let’s just talk about what a CRM system does.

 

 

[00:03:00]

So first of all, keeping it nice and basic, it ensures every single inquiry is captured in your system and it’s logged. Every lead gets instantly tracked, it gets categorised, and then if you want it to more advanced strategies, you can get it to enter an automated follow up sequence, like an email sequence.

But just that alone, imagine. Having the power of knowing at a glance precisely what’s in your sales pipeline, you can forecast accurately. You don’t have to have any uncertainty about it. You know what’s in your pipeline. You’re gonna know what your conversion rate is, and you’ll be able to forecast how much of that work you should potentially win going forward.

So that’s just nice to have straight away if you know what’s out there. Secondly, the good CRM system will massively improve your follow-up. Speed and speed matters because client. Will choose a company that responds the quickest. And if you’ve got a CRM system, you can set up automatic reminders. You can set up instant notifications and clearly designed follow up tasks, things like that.

 

 

[00:04:00]

It will mean that you’ll never miss out on an opportunity because you’ve forgot about it or you’ve just delayed your response. Something else that a CRM can do, which is much more advanced, is that it can transform your entire sales process. So imagine just. For example, you set up like a drip campaign.

So what a drip campaign means is that you are automatically nurturing leads with strategic emails and updates, and you’re gradually building trust until they’re ready to commit. So they’re in a special drip campaign that’s dripping out emails to them over the course of 3, 4, 5 weeks, however long you want it to be.

And the good thing about these drip campaigns is that you can have them per client category. So let’s say for example, you’re doing loft conversions, or let’s imagine you do loft conversions. And extensions. You can have a specific drip campaign when you go and see someone about a loft conversion. And you can have a specific drip campaign when you see someone about an extension and those clients can go into completely different automations without you having to think about it.

 

 

[00:05:00]

So that’s really useful and it, as we said, it just builds trust until they’re ready to commit without you having to put all the hard work in. Or maybe some other advanced features is. You can have things like SMS communication on, or that’s all automated. You can have voicemail drops. Which can be automated.

So they’re really powerful tools and it just allows you to keep that constant engaging communication without actually having to manually intervene every single time, which is very difficult to do as the business owner. Other things you can do, which you may not use immediately, but you can build targeted funnels and automations and as we said, segment those leads based on their actions or their interests.

So say for example, someone opens. Your email, they could go into one campaign. If they read and reply to an email, they could go into a different campaign to show they’re a little bit hotter or warmer as a lead.

 

 

[00:06:00]

So it’s a really tailored approach, an individual approach that will increase your conversion rate dramatically because it will just give you a prospects exactly the right message at exactly the right time.

And that’s what a good CRM will do. You can build other things like dedicated landing pages or lead magnets if you use them and they can be downloaded. Loaded, like we think about maybe pricing guides or you might design a ebook for kitchen designs or something like that. That also can be really useful ’cause it, it increases the quantity of your leads in and boost the quality of your leads.

It makes sure that you’re getting the right type of leads that are downloaded this information so you can build all these lead magnets and landing pages within a good CRM system. Now, the CRM system that I use one called Flow Build, which we give to all our clients. All our members for free.

It’s actually a white labeled go high level software, which is really useful. So go high level’s, pretty powerful. But you can use other software like Active Campaign or Salesforce. They’re very good CRM systems too.

 

 

[00:07:00]

I’ve used Active Campaign in the past and was very happy with it. But the key really, it’s not necessarily about the system.

Them. It’s about how consistently you use it. That’s really what you need to do. So if you’re serious about scaling, you’re serious about your lead flow, then you can’t afford to neglect lead management because really your sales team or you as the sales person, are driving blindfolded without all that data at your fingertips.

So you will secure more projects for sure if you get a CRM system and use it effectively. Okay? So that’s system number one. The second system we want you to think. Is your quoting and job approval systems. So the reality with this is many builders will lose substantial time and money because they’ve got inefficient and inaccurate quoting processes.

So just think about your system for a moment. Are you may be manually creating quotes or are you going back and forth all the time with estimators?

 

 

[00:08:00]

Or maybe even worse, are you actually just. Guessing prices and putting like a bulk price down and just hoping it’s gonna be right. Well, if you’re using any of these approaches they’re inefficient and ultimately they could affect your profitability.

If you don’t price right and then you end up winning it, that’s really painful. So what are the solutions to this? Well, the first thing you wanna do is have a really professional and streamlined quote in process. So one thing that I would really recommend is hiring a an external consultant estimator that will.

Work for you on a per project basis. So there’s many companies out there, lots of specialists that will, that’s all they do. They specialise in estimating and quoting work. So they’ll be able to quote accurately, they’ll be able to quote consistently. They’ve got the detailed knowledge and that will just mean that your quotes are nice and competitive and profitable without burdening you having to do it all the time.

’cause it’s normally a bane of every owner’s, construction, owner’s life is trying to quote all the time.

 

 

[00:09:00]

So get yourself. Find yourself an external consultant estimator that can do it for you. If that’s too expensive for you and you can’t do that, if that’s not viable, or maybe you are quoting at really high volumes, then you really need to invest time into creating your own comprehensive estimation book.

And again, you could use a professional estimator to help you build that book out so that you’re gonna be quoting the same thing over and over again. And you’re gonna have like a schedule of rates and you really wanna document those schedule of rates. It needs to become your go-to guide of how you quote, and it will really speed up your quoting process dramatically.

While, of course, maintaining your accuracy and consistency across all your quotes. One thing you do wanna do once you get your pricing book together, then you want to then learn how to standardise your pricing based on your square meter rates if you can. And now square meter rates are always only a guide.

But if you can do that, it then means you can provide.

 

 

 

[00:10:00]

Prelim quotes or budget quotes, which just saves your effort and cost. Because there are gonna be a lot of people out there that are just after a rough guide at the moment. And then you can go, right, look, we charge, whatever. It’s, we charge 3000 pound per square meter.

This is a hundred square meters. You’re looking at where 30,000 pounds to do this. So, if I’ve word that all right, maybe 300,000 pounds. So whatever it is, you can work that out based on your your square meter. Guide and have a calculator. Don’t work out in your head like I just did. So Awesome.

That will help you filter out your tire kickers if you can do that. Have that square meter rate and just enables you to spend your valuable time quoting on the people that are really serious because you can give that square meter a cost and say, look, this is what we expect your project to come in at.

And if they go, yeah, that’s good. I was expecting. Something around that, then you can go in and get a detailed quote done by an estimator. So that’s how to estimate. There are, there is software out there that can help you with it, but I’m not gonna dive into that because I don’t think that’s a good use of time.

 

 

[00:11:00]

I, I’ve tested a lot of software out. A lot of clients that I’ve worked with have tried different softwares that are out there and all that ends up happening is they just spend ages, hours and hours trying to use the software and learning it. It doesn’t really save them any time. So often it’s just much quicker just to get an s.

Make to do it for you. What about quote presentations? So what we really wanna avoid is informal methods like email exchanges sending a quote out on an email. I’ve seen that in just in an email thread, a quote being sent. I mean, that’s just terrible. But we want a nice professional, well organised quote on A PDF that really impresses your clients and helps ’em make their decision making.

It needs to be a really easy and appealing format so that they. Can say yes, I understand that we don’t wanna overwhelm with too much information, but it wants to be nice and clear and transparent. So once you’ve done that and you’ve worked out a nice way of sending that quote across, you then want to have a nice, easy way for them to approve the process.

 

 

[00:12:00]

So there’s lots of digital approvals you can go and arrange now, where you can send a quote and then someone could just click a button and it’s digitally approved. No paperwork, no hassle, just fast, clear approvals if you’re doing high volume. Volume, you really need to think about doing this. If you’re not sending many out, then yeah, it might not be that important to do this.

Or maybe if you’re sending them to architects, yeah, you’re probably not gonna have a, a one click approval process. But if you’re a smaller company doing high volume work, then. Definitely just want a one click approval process so they can approve the quote, maybe even pay a deposit, a small deposit, and then that will go into your system, your CRM system, and you’ve got the job good to go.

So that’s your quote in an approval system. Something you really need to think about so that you can estimate accurately. The third thing we wanna talk about now is your project management system. So this is really important too, because if you’re finding that your jobs are overrunning and you’re making.

Lot of mistakes.

 

 

[00:13:00]

Well, it could be because you haven’t got a good and an effective project management system in place, and we want you to be able to have like a clear, repeatable rhythm every time you undertake a project. And this wants to include things like your site preparation. Every time a project starts, it wants to have clear checklists and protocols so you know exactly what’s going on from day one.

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You wanna have clear procurement systems in place, how do you manage? Manage the supply chain. How do you avoid delays? How do you keep records of all your orders and deliveries and schedules? You wanna have a system that can monitor your progress.

 

 

[00:14:00]

Are you reaching your milestones on time? You need to be able to keep a finger on the pulse of where your project is at all stages.

A good project management system needs to update clients, frequent professional updates to clients so they stay informed. And that just stops misunderstandings and disputes if they know exactly what’s going. Going on and how things are being resolved. And then probably the last thing a good system needs to have is like a completion or a snag list schedule so that you can do your final checks and then you could sort out resolutions nice and quickly get your snags done nice and quickly.

You can tick ’em off, client can tick ’em off, and then you’re good to go for your completion payments. So you need the right tools. There’s a lot of things to manage. You need the right tools to do that. Now I find that using. Internal management tool like Asana is really good, very user friendly. It provides clear task assignments, gives you due dates, straightforward project updates keeps everyone accountable, keeps everyone informed.

 

 

[00:15:00]

Asana is very good for some of the basic stuff and internal stuff, but if your projects are growing in complexity and they’re getting bigger, then you may need software explicitly built for construction management. And there’s a few out there. There’s no way I’ll be able to cover them all, but just to tell you about.

Two that I’ve seen and used and are highly recommended. The two that I’d probably recommend at the moment are Builder Trend and Procore. They seem to be the standout platforms at the moment. So Builder Trend that’s gonna enable you to do your project scheduling, your budget management, your daily logs.

Daily logs are really important ’cause you can, see what people have been doing every day and you can go back and look at that. And it, the good thing about Buildertrend has got a brilliant client portal in. There so clients can go in, it’s nice and visually appealing and they can track their progress, see what invoices are outstanding, view their updates, and they can even approve change orders directly within the system, which is useful.

 

 

[00:16:00]

Buildertrend allows you document management, so you’ve got a nice central place for storage of all your project documents. And it also integrates really well via API through accounting tools like, Xero QuickBooks. So that’s really useful too. But, so I would say Buildertrend is. Probably useful for builders and trades anywhere between maybe 500 k up to about 3 million.

Maybe even a little bit bigger than that. Buildertrend is gonna do absolutely fine for that sort of work. But then we find that a lot of people that are doing bigger projects, maybe you’re doing big million pound plus projects and you’re really scaling up to the 5 million mark. A lot move over from Buildertrend to Procore because it has more advanced projects.

Management features. It’s got some, real robust scheduling options in there. And comprehensive milestone management. It’s got some really good financial tools in there that are more advanced. Again, it’s got the same thing like document control and it has like your quality and safety management and lots of analytics and insights.

 

 

[00:17:00]

But what a lot of people use it for really well is the subcontractor management. So it’s very easy to manage subcontractors, compare their quotes against your bill of quantities and all of that side. Of things can be really useful within Procore. So that’s a really useful app to use. And like I say, you could start with Asana.

You may move on to builder trends, then you may move on to Procore. Depending on what you do, there may be another field management system out there that you prefer. But we found generally for most builders, these two apps work super well, and I’ve got no affiliation with ’em, but they’re just yeah, just hear really good things about these ones.

Okay, so fourth, let’s. Talk about your document and communication systems. So this is really important ’cause if you’re disorganised with your documentation and you’ve got poor communication both to your site teams and to your clients, it’s really gonna cost your business dearly. Maybe you’ve done the same as me.

 

 

[00:18:00]

I, I, I. Done this where you’re just spending hours and hours hunting through emails or text messages looking for that crucial document or that important piece of information where the client approves something and you think, I know they’ve approved it, but I do not know where that document is. So we, these might seem like minor things, but they really can snowball quickly and can lead to major operational headaches, especially on the bigger projects if you are not tracking this stuff.

And ultimately it’ll just cause you delays it. Increase your costs and it will damage your reput reputation. If you haven’t got good communication and document tracking. So here’s how you fit, wanna fix it? The first thing you wanna do is centralise all your document storage. So it’s really easy to do.

Now there’s things like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint make sure you’ve got one place to put all your plans, your licenses and permits, your photos, your contracts, everything goes. In one location and you can organise everything into folders and projects and dates and document types.

 

 

[00:19:00]

Very easy to do and your entire team should be able to find a project document very easily in seconds, which will stop confusion and waste time. So that’s your document storage. The second thing you wanna sort out is your team communication. So it’s really important to have a dedicated communication platform for your team so you know, right, if you’re, again, if you’re trying to find things in emails, it’s a nightmare.

So we recommend tools like Slack. Slack is one that I’ve used in my business. I love it. It’s got, as many channels as you need, which could be, a channel just means a project that you need. And so you can have like a marketing project. You could have an IT project, and then of course you can have your site project.

So 1, 2, 3 Smith Street and wherever other 10 down the street, whatever projects you’ve got going on, you can have them as channels within Slack. And that just allows. A really organised, searchable conversations in each project or topic.

 

 

[00:20:00]

So it’s really easy to find stuff and it just stops those misunderstandings and keeps everyone informed and accountable in real time with streamlined communication.

You can even invite your clients into Slack to, which is really awesome, so you can invite them into a specific channel. So that’s the only channel they see in Slack, which can be good also on communication. This is just a really simple suggestion, but it just really works, is use professional email templates so you can easily set yourself up a nice professional branded email template which covers regular things.

So maybe you are regularly sending a similar email out every time about project milestones or, your progress reports or completion notices or invoicing, things like that. If you’ve got specific templates for that, again, it just saves you time and it. Makes you look nice and professional for your clients on the other end.

And the fourth thing you wanna do with this document storage is make sure that you’ve got your SOPs or your standard operating procedures logged somewhere central.

 

[00:21:00]

So your SOPs will give detailed, documented instructions for the reoccurring tasks that happen in your business. Like how do we check emails?

How do we raise valuations? How do we do our Facebook posts? You wanna have an SOP for absolutely everything, and then when you bring new team members on board, or maybe you are auditing, maybe you’re doing a little bit of a quality check on how things are done the SOPs just reduce that guesswork and they give you that consistency and they cut down on errors and inefficiencies and really helping training new members when they join you.

So, so if you could implement those, four things there under. This section you are really gonna have a business operating with a really streamlined system. Every file, every message, every instruction is exactly where it’s meant to be, and that just helps your communication channels no end if you’ve got that in place.

Okay? The next system five is your finance and cashflow systems.

 

 

[00:22:00]

So this is make or break for any business, your finance and cashflow. So a lot of business. We’ll run into trouble because of poor financial management. And if you’re getting things like cashflow crunches or you’re struggling with late payments, or un having unclear financials and it feels like you’re blindfolded this is the section you wanna listen to.

So, what do we need to do here? Well, one of the first things is really define your invoice in terms that needs to be nice and clear. Like, what is your invoicing process should be really clear. It should be really predictable. Ball and really professional. And those payment terms need to be nice and clear and upfront.

So, tell your clients we need pain within seven days. And make sure you invoice promptly as per your agreed milestones and clearly invoice and make sure that you’ve got a system set up. If you’re using Xero, you can easily set up an automated system where it will keep reminding clients until they actually pay that invoice.

 

 

[00:23:00]

The second thing you wanna do is really track your pro. Gross payments all the time. Make sure that as you’re doing your jobs, track where you’re at financially. I know this sounds really obvious, but the amount of people I speak to that don’t actually track any of this and they’re just invoicing.

And they can’t actually work out where they are on a project. So really track your progress and milestone payments as you go through it. And in line with that, also look at your cashflow forecasting. So this is really useful. There’s a lot of tools out there that do cashflow forecasting, but personally I think it’s just as easy just to use a spreadsheet map out your own spreadsheet, work out how much money you got coming in over the next 12 weeks, and then work out what’s going out so you can, your overhead should be nice.

And easy because they’ll be averaged. So they should be the same every single month. But you can easily work out what’s going out by applying a percentage. So maybe if you spend if you’re invoicing 10 grand and you spend 70% of that on labor and materials, then you can just allow seven grand that week for your cashflow to go out.

 

 

[00:24:00]

And that’s not gonna be completely accurate, but they will give you a little bit of an idea for your cashflow forecasting. Okay. So, tools to use for cashflow and accounting. Xero is excellent. Xero projects is pretty good too because that will you’ll be able to track how much you’re making per project through Xero.

Some people use QuickBooks, which is okay as well. Some people use Sage. I’ll probably give you in that order though, Xero first QuickBooks, then Sage in my opinion. As for cashflow forecasting, personally, I don’t recommend any apps for. Or cashflow forecasting, just use a spreadsheet for that.

Alright bonus section. So they’re the five things you want to implement. The bonus section I wanna talk about, about is reviewing and improving your systems. Now this is really important because your systems in your business won’t stay static. They must evolve as your business grows or adapts.

 

 

[00:25:00]

So if you regularly review your systems, it will just make sure that they’re staying effective and relevant. So a few things you wanna do here. Firstly, look at your systems. I would recommend every three to six months, let’s just say three months, every quarter, put it in your diary to have a really quick review of your core systems.

And that could be a quick, 15 minute task. What’s performing well, what’s outdated, what do we need to optimise? Simple check. And make sure that when you are evaluating your system, talk to your team as well, because they’re actually using these tools. So, get some feedback from them.

What do they think is working and what’s not, because they may be more in tune to it than you are. So every quarter you’re gonna evaluate. Then you want to make sure you document what’s working really well with your system. So we spoke about SOPs earlier, but if you haven’t done that and you’ve got a system that’s working well document it because that will just clearly record and reinforce that procedure and keeps you nice and consistent going forward as you are reviewing things.

 

 

[00:26:00]

Pinpoint those weaknesses. So have a look be a bit critical and think, where is my system falling down a bit? Where could it be improved? Maybe you are seeing repeated errors or you’re seeing delays or inefficiencies. Look out for those things and really pinpoint it and document it. So you know, once a court you can address that.

And again with systems, prioritise and then implement. So really focus on your efforts on what’s gonna move the needle the most. Is gonna be the most impactful for my business and define those improvements first. It can be really easy as an entrepreneur to get used to like shiny object syndrome where you think, oh, that looks like amazing.

I think I’m gonna implement this and yeah, I’m gonna put this system into my business. Just really think about is it gonna move the needle where you might be better off? Just refining what you’ve got and focus on the big things in business and make sure they’re working really well before you start bringing lots of other things in.

 

 

[00:27:00]

Alright, so lots to take in there. Hopefully. Wrote some of that down and just picked up the odd tip or two. But we’ve looked at five big things. Lead management. That’s fi part, the first thing of your core system needs to be lead management. You have to have a powerful CRM system that’s gonna capture, track, and nurture your leads.

The second core system was you needed something in place for your quoting and job approval. We want something really professional to streamline that quoting process and get approvals. And that will just keep you nice and accurate and. Efficient. We spoke about having a good project management tool, didn’t we?

So tools like Buildertrend or Procore, maybe even alongside Asana for your daily task management. That’s really crucial as you start to grow. The fourth thing we spoke about was your document and communication. Centralise your documents, streamline the team communication and client communication. And the fifth thing we looked at was your finance and cash flow.

You wanna ensure that you maintain clear financial management and proactively.

 

 

[00:28:00]

Forecast your cash flow up to around 12 weeks out. That’s the recommendation there. So if you can consistently review and refine these systems, or even just implement them for the first time, that’s really gonna be crucial for you to grow and scale your business profitably.

So I hope you found that useful. I know there’s a lot there as we went through that. If you did find it useful, please leave me a review if you’re enjoying these. Solo episodes leave me a review or drop me a line. Let me know how you’re finding them. Please subscribe and share it as well to anyone else that you think might get some benefit from this.

But until next time, I hope you keep building those robust systems and confidently scale your construction business.