“All of a sudden, it seemed like the greatest thing in the world,” he says. “It gave us a ton of notoriety.”
Truitt & White’s customers then asked to see their invoices, which Pearsall was happy to let them do.
“That really made sense to me,” he says. “The sooner they could see their invoices, the sooner we got paid. It immediately improved our cash flow.”
Recently, Pearsall turned the system over to BuilderLink, a Springfield, Ore.-based company that has expanded it and is rolling it out nationally. President Steve Killgore describes BuilderLink as a web-based platform targeting smaller builders and remodelers who aren’t big enough customers to have an account rep assigned to them.
Rolf Pedersen is a good example of that kind of small customer. The self-described “low-cash-flow, one-man band” does remodeling and handyman jobs in Oakland, Calif. He also is a BuilderLink user and Truitt & White customer. Pedersen uses a combination of an older generation smart phone and a netbook; he regularly connects to BuilderLink’s estimating module. BuilderLink has dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes for him to put together estimates, he says, because he can look up everything himself. Plus, he can do it any time of the day or night.
Streamlined Delivery
“I can compose an estimate on the website and get an idea of what I’d be spending before I present a quote to my client,” Pedersen says. “It streamlines the whole process.”
On the jobsite, BuilderLink users can quickly put together orders or make changes to an order via their iPad or smart phone and have instant access to Truitt & White.
The system also helps Truitt & White inform customers about new products in a faster, more effective way. “We’ve struggled with this,” Pearsall says. “We bring in new products all the time. How do you communicate what you have, what it replaces and why it’s better? Typically, you buy it, put it on shelf and maybe put a piece of literature on it. We can list new products on BuilderLink and shoot customers an alert.”
About 750 of the roughly 2,000 users are Truitt & White customers, while the rest aren’t tied to a specific supplier. “They’re using it as a research tool,” Killgore says.
We had trouble finding apps that are specific to building and remodeling. Most of the builders, remodelers and dealers we talked to made good use of several general apps, including weather and traffic reports, Red Laser for scanning bar codes for product price comparisons, and GPS navigation. But they couldn’t identify many–and in some cases not any–favorite apps from construction-related manufacturers or dealers.
There are exceptions. Curtis uses Construction Master Pro, a mobile version of Calculated Industries’ construction math calculator. Allen Hanahan, owner of Carolina Lumber and Supply Co. in Atlanta, likes the Velux app that lets users take a picture of the ceiling they’re working on and overlay a Velux skylight to see how it would look.
“We get people coming in here all the time who have done their homework,” Pearsall says. “They know more about the products than we do. They know what they want and they know what they should probably pay for it. It’s instructive for us.
“We’re an industry that’s probably late getting to the party,” he adds. “If you don’t take advantage of what’s out there, you’ll be left behind. I can’t afford to do that.”
