Laying the foundation: How to build a winning construction team

Zach Wojtowicz:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to “The Building Code.” I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Hope you’re doing well out there. Charley, how are you doing?

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m doing fantastic. How are you doing? I feel like the energy on that intro is a little low.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Wow. Just put me on blast.

Charley Burtwistle:

Are you feeling okay?

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s a Friday. I should be a little more jazzed up maybe.

Charley Burtwistle:

It’s been a long week.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, I need you to pick me up a little bit.

Charley Burtwistle:

We’ll pick you up, especially with the guests we have today. Today’s a special episode, because we have two guests joining us.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I think this is the first time we’ve had a double.

Charley Burtwistle:

It could be. Breaking ground, a historic episode. We have Ed Earl and Paul Sanneman from Contractor Staffing Source going to talk to us a little bit about how to build a good team, how to build a good company culture, how to build a good company overall. Ed has actually been on here once before, so we always like to give shout-outs to the returning guest members as an honor and a prestige.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That list.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Do they get their own t-shirt, Charley?

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, if we had t-shirts to give away, yes they would. We’ll put that on the list. But yeah, I’m excited. Zach, what are you looking forward to most here?

Zach Wojtowicz:

These are one of my favorite topics to get into. It’s kind of one of the things that you don’t always put all out of focus on in running a business is like, how do I get the right team? I find it really engaging, just because it’s kind of like the glue of how you build a great foundation of a company.

Yeah, I love getting this perspective, and learning some things about how to really motivate and find people to really help drive your goals as a business.

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, I think, too, we’ve had a few different guests on before that talk about how hard it is to find good labor. Hopefully, the guests we have today can give some solutions to that, and everyone listening can learn. I know I will. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and get them in here.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Hey, Ed and Paul, welcome to “The Building Code.” Thank you so much for joining us. Ed, it’s your second time here on “The Building Code,” but we’d love to hear a little bit about both of you and tell us about your story.

Ed Earl:

Sure. All right. I’ll start. I’ve been in construction for about 30 years, and I have been here in San Diego during that whole time. Started off really as an owner’s rep, and I still am. For those of you that don’t know what an owner’s rep is, I’m a professional advisor that’s hired by homeowners that are building a custom home, or doing a complex million plus dollar remodel. I help them build their team, select their builder, their architect, interior designer, and then I coordinate and integrate between all of the parties involved to keep the project on budget and on time.

I met Paul, oh, seven eight years ago. Actually, hired him as my business coach, and so he worked with me and then actually I started working with him. We currently are business coaches together. We do a lot of coaching exclusively with residential contractors, and we also have the business contractor staffing source, which I will let Paul describe how that came about, but that was a result of our work.

Then I’m also a public speaker. I speak at the International Builder’s Show every year, and various construction organizations, kind of combining the experiences that I have, both as working with homeowners, as an owner’s rep, and in working with residential contractors as a business coach. My presentations kind of see both sides of the table.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s amazing. There’s so much I want to ask, but I don’t want to cut Paul off.

Charley Burtwistle:

Paul, give us your story then.

Paul Sanneman:

I was going to tell them, Ed’s my biggest success and biggest failure. I won’t go into it in detail, but the good news is made $3 million in one day. The bad news is, I was never able to get his other business off the ground, and I wanted to, but I made up for it, so I’m good.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, I think I’d take that deal.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, that’s admittedly …

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s a pretty good day.

Paul Sanneman:

That’s a good day. I’ve been doing this for 40 years, makes me an old guy. When I started, sort of got contractors, but my cell phone was in the back of my car, like a radio thing. You’d call him and say, “Hi, operator, can I talk to so-and-so?”

Zach Wojtowicz:

Cord and all pjust hanging out the back …

Paul Sanneman:

Right, I had one of those. I’ve been dragging contractors through technology for 40 years. As I said, they’re luddites, and that’s just the way contractors are, but it’s fun. I use contractors because I used to work with doctors and attorneys and a bunch of things, but contractors are the best guys I know. Unfortunately, a lot of industries, lying, cheating and stealing is sort of like the norm. For contractors, they’re just great guys, really. I just got rid of all my other clients, and I just focused on contractors. I remember the cellphone was a big deal, and they said it was a fad.

Then I remember they had to get them off their pagers. The other thing I did was, I remember email. No, I don’t need an email. Excuse me. Then it went to websites, which were a waste of time. They were just kids things. I actually, I could have had the URL Loan.com, I’m that old.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, it would’ve been the best day ever.

Paul Sanneman:

That would’ve been the best day ever.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Printing money for eternity.

Paul Sanneman:

I go way back to the whole technology thing.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Man, off air, I want to ask you, what should I be getting into? Yeah. It’s just like what investments are we making?

Paul Sanneman:

Oh, ChatGPT.

Zach Wojtowicz:

ChatGPT, let’s go. There we go. We brought it all around. Oh, we got to save that content for a different episode.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, that’s …

Paul Sanneman:

That’s a different – that’s changing everything. It’s all that stuff stacked up. There was cell phones, then there was email. Then I remember, I knew Donnie Wyatt over at Co-Construct when he was in his garage, and I knew Dan Houghton when he had 10 employees. We go way back. I remember trying to convince people to go on web-based kind of software, and it was the same kind of thing, too much trouble, a pain in the butt, I’m not interested, blah, blah, blah. I finally got them on that.

My newest thing is trying to get everybody on ChatGPT and using AI, which is going to change everything again. That’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing is dragging contractors who I probably have worked with maybe 1500 contractors or better, anywhere between a million and a hundred million. I think I have some stupid number, like 150,000 hours of working with contractors a long time.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I love how you translated an hourly rate. Yeah, it’s like time and material, got to give a whole thing. Well, this is already just with so many threads to pull on. I want to focus on, we brought you on today to talk about the labor shortage in the construction industry, whereas there’s going to be, as the construction industry continues to evolve, technology gets adapted. We’re always going to need people out in the field to build.

Paul Sanneman:

Fortunately, I talked to a friend of mine, you still have to use, so until they get printed houses, which may be a while, you still have to have somebody build the house. Even if they can take all the paperwork side out of the AI, it’s one of those solid industries that you can’t export to another country.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Got to have the skills to do the work, right?

Paul Sanneman:

Got to have skills. Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

When you guys are working with contractors, I’m curious, how often does the labor shortage come up? Is this a primary concern of a lot of our builders?

Paul Sanneman:

Well, it’s an ongoing problem. I actually started the company contractor staff source because of that. I was a consultant for years, and I couldn’t find … I could build a company from a million to $15 million, but I didn’t have time to build a team. The contractor sort of sucks at building the team. My first idea was I got this really cool software, got an app, a tracking system, and I’ve got assessment system, all this really needs software. I gave it to my clients, and they totally screwed it up. They had no time. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

I literally put a guy named Justin in my garage, and that was about four years ago or so. Now, we have 300 clients. We have like 21 people that work for me. We went through 75,000 resumes to find 400 people last year, and we worked about, so it’s grown a lot. And all we do is construction. The reason we’re successful is because there’s this huge need, because contractors just generally aren’t good at it. They run an admin D, and then call the guy three weeks later. It doesn’t work.

Charley Burtwistle:

Something I’m kind of interested in is, we just had someone on the other day talking about how many different roles there are in construction. I think it was, we were talking about women in construction, and typically, you think construction, you think guy with a hammer going out and putting a nail on a board. Are you guys primarily focused on field crew workers, or do you look for office managers, designers, architects? What’s kind of like at the roles?

Paul Sanneman:

We found that we look for anybody. When you’re building a team, which is what we try to do, it could be the laborer, it could be the COO, or the project manager, or anybody on the team. We work with anybody between the labor to the owner. Now, obviously, we have a set of assessments, and the assessment for a laborer is way different than the assessment for a project manager.

In fact, I remember recruiting 350 framers for a large framing contractor. Nothing was in English. Zero. We did everything in Spanish, and it worked fine. It really depends on you’re going after, but there’s really maybe five or six basic roles. There’s not a ton. There’s the project manager, the superintendent, the carpenters, then they usually hired all the tradespeople, which is a whole different thing, but there’s not a lot of roles. Again …

Ed Earl:

You have the office staff as well, whether it’s some people, if they have estimators, purchasing managers, office managers, so depending on the size of the company.

Paul Sanneman:

We had something really good happen by COVID. COVID did have its good things. That was one of the things we’re looking for is like a project coordinator, or what do you call it, Ed? A selections coordinator. We found out wedding planners are killer at it.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I could totally see that.

Paul Sanneman:

Think about it. A wedding planner, you’ve got to get a bunch of fairly flaky people, the band, the caterer, all those people, and they all have to be at the right place at the right time. They all have to look good, and the bride has to be happy. The bridesmaid, all these very sort of upset people …

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s an important time in their life. They want it to look great.

Charley Burtwistle:

You have one shot.

Paul Sanneman:

You have to be to all these flaky people, they all have to be together one time and it’s all got to work. It’s pretty much like a remodeling project, right?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yep.

Paul Sanneman:

We found some awesome wedding planners that made killer people in the construction industry, and they work for way less because that hospitality industry doesn’t pay well. A lot of contractors don’t think, oh, I’m going to hire a wedding planner to be my office manager. They don’t even think that way. Jumping out of the box a little bit.

Ed Earl:

And we started that during the pandemic because we were trying to find people. Wedding planners were not very busy during the pandemic. People are not planning weddings. We found people there. We found hotel managers that we brought in as office managers. That really broadened our perspective to realize that you don’t have to just hire from within the construction industry, that you can actually, especially since the pandemic, I think it’s much easier, and to find related skills, but not necessarily have to have construction experience.

Paul Sanneman:

Another thing that’s really shifted is since the pandemic, people aren’t so stuck on people have to come into the office. We’ve got people that are actually office managers for construction company in Boston, and they live in Texas. That would’ve never happened before the pandemic

Charley Burtwistle:

They probably have some really nice cloud-based software that lets them manage all their products.

Paul Sanneman:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

There you go.

Charley Burtwistle:

If something like that existed.

Paul Sanneman:

Buildertrend has made that a lot easier, obviously, because you can see everything remotely. You can be an owner of a company and be in Hawaii, and manage your business in Texas, which you couldn’t do before.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right. I want to touch briefly on something, Ed, that you mentioned around the wedding planner and hotel managers and things like that. I feel like half the people Zach and I have on the podcast, their dad owned a construction business, and they took it over when he left. Then the other half grew up nowhere even remotely close to a job site, and just stumbled into the construction world, and are very, very successful in it.

When you’re talking to some of your clients and helping them find talent, how do you convince them, “Hey, there are people that can be very, very successful in this role that have never touched a hammer in their entire life.” How do you get them to have that perspective of finding top talent, regardless of what their background is?

Paul Sanneman:

Well, sort of depends on how desperate they are.

Charley Burtwistle:

Fair answer. They may hire Zach if they’re like, they really need somebody.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Do not recommend.

Charley Burtwistle:

Sorry.

Paul Sanneman:

We can hire an office manager who’s a wedding planner, and it’ll cost you 50 grand a year, but you can get somebody who’s run a construction office and it’s 75,000 a year. Take your choice.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right. Yeah, that …

Ed Earl:

Right, and I think too, we really try to emphasize with our clients through our assessment system, when we’re assessing our potential candidates that have applied for positions, we assess them much more on character, personality, temperament – who they are as opposed to what they know. Those are kinds of skills, you can develop those skills, but if they don’t have the right work ethic, if they don’t have the right temperament, they’re not going to be good no matter what.

That’s part of the way we get people to understand, that’s how you really should be hiring. Not on a skills-based hiring, but really based on personality assessments and aptitudes.

Paul Sanneman:

There’s who you are and what you know. We can’t fix who you are. When we do assessments, we were able to assess through very sophisticated AI kind of things, exactly who you are, you’re honest or you’re smart. I can tell more about you than your mom in about 45 minutes. If we do that, we know who they are as a person.

Now, the skills testing, whether they can lay out a foundation or not, we’re not sure. Obviously, if they’re not the right person, no matter how they lay out the foundation, if there’s not a good culture fit, it’s not going to work.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Do you see a lot of contractors using apprenticeships to address the skill side of it? That’s the story of construction is a lot of it is self-taught. It really rings for me, the people that have done really well, they do kind of have the it factor. There’s just something tenacious about them. They’re willing to keep doing more. They may not necessarily have the hard skills, but they kind of taught themselves. Is that what you guys talk to your customers about?

Paul Sanneman:

I would say the short answer is no.

Zach Wojtowicz:

No?

Paul Sanneman:

We need to do way better than that as a culture, because I have some kids or friends with kids, and I told them become carpenters, become electricians and plumbers. I think it’s a great career, but unfortunately our educational system does not emphasize the trades. It’s really hard to get your average kid in high school to decide, I really want to be a plumber. It’s hard to do. That’s unfortunate, because plumbers make 150 grand a year, and they do a great thing, but it’s just not in our educational system. It really doesn’t drive the trades very hard, which is unfortunate.

Charley Burtwistle:

I think something I want to touch on briefly is also once you have really, really good employees, how do you retain really, really good employees? Especially with the labor shortage and how hard it is to find them, once you have them, you have to keep them locked down. Is that something that you guys typically work with businesses on as well, as far as combating burnout, and toxic work environments, and making sure that people are happy in their jobs?

Paul Sanneman:

Well, I’ll comment first. We’ve developed a system called PAS, which is Performance Assessment System. Most contractors are really bad at human resources management. They just suck. The guys, they give them their tools, and say, “Go out and do your thing.” They’re not like building a team. When I think about it, the most important part of any business is the ability to build a team. Elon Musk is who he is not because he is really smart, because he knows how to build awesome teams.

Most contractors don’t think of team building skill as really important to being a contractor, but it is amazingly important. What we do with them is we put them on a system where they talk to their employees, they evaluate the employees quarterly, they come up with goals, they come up with performance evaluations, the way they’re going to get better. We even have a matrix we use, which it has the corporate fit as well as their ability to do the job, their performance. There’s a quadrant.

The idea is everybody should be able to do their job well and fit into the corporate culture. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be on the team. We know how to assess that. Most contractors don’t get that. They don’t understand how to build a team, how to assess the team, and how to make that team feel better. If you don’t have a good corporate culture, and people don’t want to work there, now they can work anywhere else. Also, it’s the best way of attracting new people, because you’re a great place to work.

Ed Earl:

Right. I’m a big sports guy, and I use the analogy of a sports team to our contractor clients all the time. You look at any successful sports team, and they do a few things. First off, they’re always recruiting, and they don’t just have their number one, I tell the story of the Eagles one year, and their top string quarterback got knocked out. It was their second string quarterback that brought them in, won them a Super Bowl. You always want to be developing your second and third string players. You don’t want to just have your star two project managers, and then be desperate when one of them leaves.

The second is that you have to be always assessing these people, and making sure that they’re continuing to perform and to grow and develop. If a professional athlete doesn’t perform, they’re gone, right? They’re on the bench. Pretty soon, they’re back down in the minor leagues or the G Leagues or whatever. Then the third thing is that you want to attract people, winners, to your team. Everyone wants to be on a winning team. You can see my San Diego Padres cap back there. This year, finally, we have a decent team. People want to be on our team.

Before, baseball players are like, “I don’t want to go play in San Diego and finish last place every year.” If you’re a great team, if you’re a good contractor, and you’ve built this winning team, people want to come and work with you. People on your team will tell their friends, “God, this is a great place to work.” That’s the concepts that you have. That’s what creates a successful construction business.

Zach Wojtowicz:

For the record, I’ll play in San Diego.

Paul Sanneman:

Just the weather, I’m …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Sure. Yeah, yeah. Not a bad place to be. I don’t know. You could be in Cleveland, no offense.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I love that. It makes a ton of positive momentum. You lay the foundation, you keep building upon it. What are some ways that you guys kind of talk to your businesses about showing that appreciation, so they do kind of become those qualified, it’s essentially an NPSs score, telling other people about why you want to be there.

Paul Sanneman:

Right? Well, first place, it isn’t about money. I mean you’ve got to play market, and you pay market value, and you’ve got to pay fairly. Just throwing money at things doesn’t make people want to work for you. Then if somebody offers them more money, they’re gone. It’s not really a good system.

Zach Wojtowicz:

The Yankee approach, keeping with the baseball analogies.

Paul Sanneman:

That’s right. You just pay the market value. Then you’ve got, people like to be appreciated. How to win friends and influence people, you know what I mean? People like to be appreciated. They want to feel like they’re making a difference. A lot of people, what happens to most people retire, they die. They die because …

Zach Wojtowicz:

There’s a little bit of …

Paul Sanneman:

No, but statistically, the numbers are not good.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s a top five comment ever on the building.

Charley Burtwistle:

We might have to put that on a t-shirt.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That one might not make it. No, keep it in.

Charley Burtwistle:

Keep it in for a t-shirt.

Paul Sanneman:

What happens is because they lose purpose. Purpose is more important than money. If people feel like they’re providing environments for people, they have a great team, they’re building a great product, they’re helping people live better because of their homes, and they love where they’re living, and they get focused on purpose, and there’s a reason to wake up in the morning and go to work because you’re making a difference in some way, that will keep people with you. If you’re just showing up for money, it doesn’t last forever, and you go someplace else.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I think that’s actually really resonating with Zach and I is like we, working at Buildertrend, have this hyper focus right now on the customer, and doing things that make our product better, to make our customers’ business better, to make the homes better, to make the people living in the homes better. If you just come to work every day for a paycheck, or thinking about my role and trying to be really, really good at that, that gets pretty boring, pretty quick. If you think, hey, people are going to build 20,000 homes on our software at this point …

Paul Sanneman:

Well, I remember I talked to Dan Houghton, he wanted to be Steve Jobs, too. The reason he was driven by that is Apple isn’t is a religion, not a product. In a sense, I think in Buildertrend, I think it was voted one of the best places to work in the country or something if I read right, it’s because the same kind of thing you want to do there because you’re doing something useful, you’re making a difference. That’s something contractors forget about.

You’re building homes for people, but you’ve got to focus on meaning and purpose in the day’s job, or you’re just going to lose them. That’s something that a lot of contractors, they don’t get it. They may have it themselves, but the minute it becomes just about money, people are going to leave. You’re not going to attract the right people.

Ed Earl:

Right. It’s kind of a two-part equation there. The first is that the company itself has to have a very clear purpose, a mission statement, and core values. Then secondly, you have to empower your employees to embrace those core values, and to feel like they make an impact in the company and with their clients that they serve.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’ve seen a lot of builders do things with tying the payouts to the worker, based on their margins on budgets and whatnot. Do you guys coach businesses on how to make the comp structure kind of fit market, but also to motivate?

Paul Sanneman:

I’m not a huge fan of that, personally.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Paul Sanneman:

I’ve seen it for especially, I’m giving example, the Christmas bonus or turkey, right?

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah.

Paul Sanneman:

You just did it because you’ve been there. Well, pretty soon, if you don’t give it, they get upset. If you do give it, they don’t do anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s the turkey at Christmas funny, or whatever the bonus is. It needs to be attached to something that makes a difference to them. At the same time, it still comes down to purpose. When you’re building a home, talking about how the happy the homeowner is, what a difference it made in people’s lives, a lot of contractors I know feel responsible for their employees as well as their families.

They feel like I’m keeping this together because I’m keeping pick a number, 15 people in their families working. That’s important to me. Especially when the pandemic came, a lot of people had a hard time because the work slowed down a little bit and they kept people going, which is not the best economic decision. Again, it comes back to purpose and the more you can focus on that. It depends. I remember, what was it? I tell a quick story. I could tell a story anyway.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I can’t wait.

Paul Sanneman:

There’s three people. You can always cut this out. There’s three people working on a pyramid, and they’re the slaving lane. The first person, they interview the guy who’s working on the pyramid, he swears, he says, “I’m doing this, it sucks. I’m sitting here, it’s hot. I don’t like what I’m doing. I’m doing it because I have to do it to feed my family, but I wish I was someplace else.” That’s the first guy.

Second guy says, “I am a skilled mason. I am like a quality guy. I love my trade, I’m really good at what I do of the best masons around, and that’s why I love doing this.” The third guy says, “I’m building a monument to God.” They all showed up for the same reason, but they weren’t working the same workday.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m stealing that.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, I actually love that analogy. I feel like, well, talking to you guys, I’m already a little admittedly overwhelmed with all the different things that you guys offer and the wealth of knowledge you guys have. You talked about all the different roles you’ve been, and the things that you could see. I want to circle back to Contractor Staffing Service a little bit. Could you guys maybe explain what all you offer? If businesses are listening to this and interested in it, what are some of the benefits that they can take advantage of? Not just from a recruiting standpoint …

Paul Sanneman:

That’s my new favorite person is ChatGPT. I’ll explain why that’s true for our business. We’re an HR company, and as well as we hire people, so we basically build teams. That’s what we do. We build teams. When you’re building a team, there’s two parts of it. There’s taking the team you have and making it a better team. That has to do with performance evaluations, and how you can do better, and tracking people, and all that kind of stuff, and just doing things better.

What happens is, in the past, building a team, writing all those performance reviews, there was a ton of stuff we had to do, and it was expensive. It took a lot of time and a lot of energy to offer all that. Plus, we had the software, plus the appraisal systems, and it took a long time. Well, that used to cost a lot of money. Now, I can actually do it for free for clients, which to me is an awesome value because I’ve got all this technology. I’ve got really good assessments, which I can do almost for nothing, actually. I’ve got good software. I’ve got GPT writing job performance evaluations.

We can go to a company and offer the process of building their team for free. The reason we do that is we know when they need somebody, they’re going to use us for recruiting. Our business model is to, we sit with the business, and the building team part and all that, we call it the PAS system performance, we do all that at no charge, knowing that when we’re their HR department, they’re sooner or later going to need to bring people onto the team. That’s when they pay us a monthly fee.

Having done coaching for forever, I think people should recruit all the time. Rather than offering 20% of the first year’s salary as a fee, we do it for a reasonable monthly fee. Pick a number. 2000 bucks a month, we’ll do all the assessments, all the stuff, recruit as five positions and all that. We become a part of their company because being a recruiter is fine because you’re sort of stealing from one guy and paying him to get hired by somebody else. It’s not the world’s best thing to do.

Whereas our model, we’re like a service like you guys are. We’re a monthly service that people pay for that makes our business better become part of the team. That’s why Before has shifted. What I’ve recently done is offered all those services at no cost, and then knowing that when we recruit for people, we will pay the monthly fee for the recruiting. That’s what we do.

Ed Earl:

Sorry, Paul, I was just wanting to mention, too, contractors have this project mentality, which works for building a home, there’s a beginning and a middle and an end. But they take that same approach to recruiting. They wait until they need someone, then they go out and hire someone, and then they stop recruiting.

We always tell people that recruiting is marketing. It is a continuous process, it’s not a project. That’s why as Paul said, that’s why we structure our pricing as that because it should be an ongoing process of any successful construction business.

Paul Sanneman:

It’s much like Buildertrend. I think it’s an ongoing service that let them do stuff better. I think that’s important. When you think about it, I’ve been doing this for many years. You have three people you have, what are your three Ps? I remember that they were useful in, what do they call them?

Ed Earl:

It’s product, process and people.

Paul Sanneman:

Right. If you’ve got good marketing, then you have good clients. Then if you’ve got good systems like Buildertrend, you’ve got good systems. Then if you’ve got recruiting people like us, you’ve got good employees. If you’ve got great employees, you’ve got a good process, and you’ve got good people working for you, this is a great industry to be in. Most people mess up in this industry, because they don’t market all the time. They have to take clients they don’t want, which is bad.

They don’t have the systems, they aren’t using web-based stuff like you’ve got. They don’t have the systems right, so it’s really hard to manage their business. Then they don’t know how to recruit, so they take people they shouldn’t. If you’ve got somebody you don’t want to work for, using a system that sucks, working with people you don’t like, it’s not fun.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s so simple. It’s just so simple.

Charley Burtwistle:

I feel like, like I said, you guys just a wealth of information talking to you, and we are getting up on time here. I want to touch on one last thing is I was looking at your website before we got on. You guys have podcast episodes on there. You have a ton of free resources. We’ll link to that in our shownotes.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Charley loves a good shownote plug and to plug Builder Trend. Don’t know if you caught that.

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely.

Paul Sanneman:

I’m trying. I do my best here, guys.

Charley Burtwistle:

No, you’re fantastic. I just want to say, for people that are interested in going out to your website for some of those free resources, is there a good place to start, or anything you kind of recommend them going and checking out?

Paul Sanneman:

Yeah. Go to Contactor Staffing Source. It’s interesting, you can see all our people which are live all over the world. We’ve, I think, got a unique thing in the way we do things. The reason we’ve grown from one person or where we are now, we have 300 companies, is because we’re providing, just like you guys, providing a valuable service to an industry that needs it.

As an industry contractor, no offense, the recruiting part is not something they’re really very good at. They didn’t go to become a builder because they know how to build a great team. That’s the skill that’s going to make all the difference in their business.

Ed Earl:

I would encourage everyone to come and sign up for our performance assessment system. It’s free, doesn’t cost you anything, and you can really see a difference in how it can effectively help to really build and develop your team, your staff. Then as I said, there’s always, on a sports team, there’s always the bottom 10%. Same thing in a company. There’s always people that can either be developed in, created to be better players or should be replaced by someone else. The performance system that we have can really help to clarify that, and then roll into using the recruiting services when you need them.

Paul Sanneman:

Yeah. I always use the analogy that you can still use a hammer instead of a nail gun. You can still use a shovel instead of a backhoe. You can still use a yellow pad instead of Buildertrend. That’s all options, but it makes a business really hard. Whereas if you use technology like you guys and what we’re providing to people and you’re providing to people, it makes the industry a lot easier. To me, contractors that don’t take advantage of that are just making life hard on themselves.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Couldn’t agree more.

Ed Earl:

Yeah, and it’s a great analogy, too. I just thought of this that really, if you look at Buildertrend uses technology to manage projects, and we use technology to manage staff and recruiting, it’s amazing. Basically, very similar.

Paul Sanneman:

We’ve got killer assessments that have taken years and years to develop, which I can know, I said more about you than your mom about 30 minutes. We’ve got great applicant tracking systems, which allow us to put it on 208 job orgs, plus search the budget databases. We can find, if the person’s out there, we’ll find them. 90% of the time, we find the right person, and they don’t have access to that. Then with the performance assessment system, we’ve got a way of putting it together that they can build the team and keep it there. It’s just not using technology in the construction business, it’s just not smart. What can I say?

Charley Burtwistle:

I love it. Well, you’re preaching to the choir here for sure. I think that was an awesome note to end on. Really, really appreciate your guys’ time.

Paul Sanneman:

Okay.

Charley Burtwistle:

I don’t have anything else. Zach, you got anything?

Zach Wojtowicz:

No, we really appreciate it, and you guys are always welcome back to talk more. I think we’ve unraveled a bunch of times …

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely.

Paul Sanneman:

I would love to do one on AI with you guys.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s what we should get that going. They’re looking at us like, “Hey, maybe we will.” All right.

Charley Burtwistle:

Zach and I won’t be here for it though. We’ll just have ChatGPT do the interview for us.

Paul Sanneman:

Really.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’d be awesome.

Paul Sanneman:

What does a hundred trillion parameters really mean?

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, let’s push the boundaries. Let’s figure it out.

Paul Sanneman:

That’s cool.

Zach Wojtowicz:

All right. Thanks, guys.

Paul Sanneman:

Thank you. Talk to you later.

Ed Earl:

All right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Charley, time for the outro. What did you think, Charley, of Ed and Paul?

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, Zach, I think that your outro’s a lot more enthusiastic than your intro was.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Well, the interview just, how could you not with Ed and Paul?

Charley Burtwistle:

I was, yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I’m …

Charley Burtwistle:

I was actually getting pretty fired up listening to him.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. Can you tell when I’m really feeling the interview. I feel like I’m just like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, I can.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Ed and Paul, I want to go to San Diego, just hang out.

Charley Burtwistle:

Well, Zach, we’ll add that to our list of places that, our bucket list of where we’ll record the podcast. No, they were great. They gave us everything that I was kind of hoping that they would going into the interview, with a lot of very, very solution oriented listening to those guys talk. I appreciate the perspective they had, both from where they’ve came in the past to what they’re building for the future.

I thought they were honestly preaching a lot of the same things that we preach here at Buildertrend, which was cool to kind of see parallel theirs as well. Definitely a couple guests that we need to schedule another interview, with because I feel like we got through a third of the content.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I didn’t walk into the studio today expecting to hit on AI when we’re talking about staffing.

Charley Burtwistle:

Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

What a great segue into the future of technology in the construction industry. I’ve seen that more and more. Good way to find replications for labor is technology and these different tools. I really love these industry veterans …

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Embracing these emerging technologies and really taking that to the next level and how you can use that even in a small to medium sized business. Yeah, great way to hit the weekend after today on “The Building Code.”

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, I have to dip out of here right after this to catch a flight. Otherwise, I’d sit around and debrief with you for a couple more hours. I will see you bright and early Monday morning, Zach, and I will see everyone else on our next episode, I guess.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Can’t wait. I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m Charley Burtwistle, and we’ll see you next time.