Q & A Episode 39 - What I Learned at Buildertrend University (And Why You Should Go Too)
Episode #39 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | What I Learned at Buildertrend University (And Why You Should Go Too)
Mark recaps his trip to Buildertrend University, where he and his team got a serious reality check on how they’ve been using (and under-using) the platform. Hear what stood out—from smarter use of templates to powerful new AI features—and why team buy-in is the secret ingredient to any business upgrade.
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About The Curious Builder
The host of the Curious Builder Posdast is Mark D. Williams, the founder of Mark D. WIlliams Custom Homes Inc. They are an award-winning Twin Cities-based home builder, creating quality custom homes and remodels — one-of-a-kind dream homes of all styles and scopes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your current space or start fresh with a new construction, we build homes that reflect how you live your everyday life.
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Mark D. Williams 00:04
When there's a lot of technology adoption, when there's a lot of new things, we tend to get basic. We're like Neanderthals, like me, want stick me, want knife me, want fire. Like we can do better than that. And so I think that's where, when you are spending money, when you're taking the time to fly your team down that you realize, as the owner, like we are putting an investment into this. So you should really double down on your investment and implement it.
Mark D. Williams 00:36
Welcome to the career spirit Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host, and today is a Q and A, and we're going to talk a little bit about builder trend University. So last week, I took my team down to Omaha, Nebraska, a couple months ago, our friends at builder trend had reached out to us. We're doing some training. We had just hired a new project coordinator here at Mark Williams custom homes, and they said, you know, your health score is actually pretty low. And I said, What's a health score? And we were a 17 out of 100 which is pretty darn low on a scale from zero to 100 and I said, Well, tell me more. And they said, Well, there's a number of things that you're not utilizing. That's why we have build a trend University, would you want to bring your team down? I said, Sure, let's do it. So we flew down. We were down there for two days and two nights or three nights, I guess, we flew down a day early, and it was really great team bonding experience as well. On top of it, that's something that I'll maybe talk about a little bit later in the podcast. And I think one of the reasons why I think the the university was so successful now, having been back and kind of reflecting on what we learned was, you know, we've probably been using it builder trend for probably six, seven years, something like that for a while, but long enough to either set bad habits or to basically like once you know what you're doing and you know how you're doing it, as it works great. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just that there's not really a reason to on our team side, to innovate or change because, you know, it's working. Clients like it. Our team likes it. Sure there's things that we see that we could implement more on, but without like a driving force or a reason to people don't really change. And so understanding that our health score was so low, it was really kind of eye opening for me. And I could have gone down there alone and then learned all the things that we learned, and then come back and then tell my team about it. For any business owner, it's sometimes hard to get your team to buy into some of the things that you're really passionate about. Trust me, over 21 years, when I go to conferences or I get new I quote, ideas, the team is probably less thrilled about my ideas than I am. And I think that's a pretty common owner thing that an owner story that happens to us all. We get inspired, we come back. We think everyone else should be just as inspired as us. Sometimes they need to be there. So anyway, we went down there and builder trend has changed so much over the last four or five years, really, probably two to three right now, they're implementing AI. They're just releasing it. I don't know. I think it's been just a few months now, but their daily logs, well, there's a AI generative language model that basically takes your daily logs, takes in pictures, and we'll do a weekly recap, or however you want to recap it that's really sharp looking. It basically like what a lot of us do when we use chat GPT to help us write Instagram posts or LinkedIn posts or marketing posts. It does that automatically within builder trend, which is really cool. And what was really fun is to meet with our one on one account rep in person and really go through, like, where are all the metrics they can show you? You have to ask them. So for those out there, everyone should have a builder and representative. Ask them what your health score is. Ask them what are some things that you can do to get better. And so as we left builder trend, I'll talk a little bit more about what we did while we were there. But one of the things that we did when we left is we actually set up, like, four or five meetings over the next four months to have accountability and have check ins with their account rep. It's what they're obviously there for. Their support staff is amazing. But I think us builders probably don't utilize them as much as we should, especially if we really want to utilize the full depth of the software. And so for us, it was just really amazing to see. There are certain things that we did really well, but a lot of them we just there's so much more capability that we can be using. And so I think it was eye opening. I brought my project manager, my project coordinator, and my controller down with me. I use it mostly on the sales side. So when I'm meeting clients, sometimes the first one hour meeting, when if I'm meeting people at our office, or if it's a remodel, if I'm meeting them at our house, I'm showing how we use builder trend, how we show them, you know, how we use our scheduling software. And I'll even show, like, the weekly reports, all of it, the financial tabs, just really showing them. This is what you can expect. This is how you're able to stay up to date. And I feel like when I lead, especially in that intro meeting, it really takes it really helps them understand that, yeah, that's a professional business. I mean, obviously we have a great reputation, and our homes visually look great, but I think this shows the systemization and the organization that we're supported by. We have lots of partners like this, but builder trends is one of the bigger foundational tools that we use, not only with how we interact with our subs, but also. With our clients, and so really leading on the sales side. That's really important to me. I love the daily logs, because, let's say I'm going to drive to a client's house, I might quick pull it up on my phone see what's happened that week, if there's anything that I need to touch base on. But it really helps demonstrate my knowledge, especially if you have multiple jobs going and as the owner, if you have five or six homes going on at the same time, you don't have as much knowledge as like a single pm who's focused on one or two jobs. And so it helps bring the team together. It helps the client get stay up to date. They ask us less questions. You know, I think there's that old adage, you can either inform your client or they will ask you to be informed. It's obviously much more professional if you are informing them so they don't have to ask you for it. And so if you can lead the narrative, it puts them at ease. It puts you in the driver's seat, and it's just gonna have a much more efficient job. So when we're down, so the first day one, they have a shuttle all prepared. They book a block of rooms at a nice hotel called the element is where we stayed, that's about 20 minutes out of downtown Omaha, and I get to the building, get in beautiful breakfast spread. Second breakfast for me, I went to actually running with Charlie burtwistle. He's one of the hosts of the building code at builder trend. So Charlie and I go back aways. You've heard me talk about him before. He's part of our hard 75 group. So shout out to Charlie. He's always game to get up early, pick me up and explore Omaha together. So that was great and and then really, we just, they have a really good organized itinerary. So every hour you're basically, they've got, usually two people teaching a small room of like, 15 to 20 builders from around the country. And everyone's talking whatever you might be talking about, change order, management, you might be talking about scheduling. A lot of them is showing you how to implement some of their new technology changes into your existing portal. So everyone has their computers open. I learn better by doing. And so you can keep your computer open. You can be access your own client facing or your own internal user facing account and work on it right there in the workshop. They can come over and ask questions, or you can ask right off of what you're working on right in front of them, and then just write down all the things. And what was neat for our team is everyone was able to sort of write down what they like. We've got a meeting set up next week for about an hour and a half where we're going to take our top 10 things that we took away, and then we're going to prioritize them, and then we're going to implement them as a team. And so a big part of it is we need to utilize templates. That was the first thing that we saw, was we vastly under use the amount of templates that they have. And a lot of them are already they have so many users across the country, let's call it 20,000 builders, using builder trend. They're taking that information and they're pre loading templates that we can use so we don't have to recreate the wheel. And I know sometimes those templates are a little bit daunting, if you're like me, sometimes it's easier just to hack together a schedule off of one you've already done, which is like a loose template, but to have a very sophisticated template, you're gonna have to devote a significant amount of time. But the things once you do that now, the thing is set. And so one of our top takeaways is and they have estimating, budgeting, schedule, they have so many different templates for how you can utilize it. And we're about to send out for a couple bids, and we have not utilized the bid presentation side to our subcontractors nearly as well as we should. And so I'm really excited. We always use it for data management, the QR codes all over the different folders. But again, you can set up all those folders in templates. Once you make a master template, they're all the same. And this isn't rocket science. I'm sure a lot of people listening. Is Mark, that's not that genius. You're right. It's not so why are so many people not utilizing it, myself included. So I think a lot of it is that when there's a lot of technology adoption, when there's a lot of new things, we tend to get basic. We're like Neanderthals, like me. Want stick me, want knife me, want fire. Like we can do better than that. And so I think that's where, when you are spending money, when you're taking the time to fly your team down, you realize, as the owner, like we, are putting an investment into this. So you should really double down on your investment and implement it. I think the tragic outcome here would be to go down there to learn about it, to come back and then do nothing with it. That would be, that'd be tragic. First World tragic, not that tragic.
Mark D. Williams 09:15
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Socials specializes in Pinterest marketing, blogging and email strategy for luxury home brands that help you turn your beautiful work into a strategic SEO driven content that drives real traffic and connects you with your ideal clients without burning you out ready to grow smarter and not harder. Visit olivin socials.com and tell them the cures builder set to you just so you know, I've been working with Alyssa over at olivin for three years. She helped us launch the podcast. She's helped us grow our brand at Mark Williams custom homes. I could not do what I've done without her help, and I'm more than happy to announce that she's our latest sponsor for the curious builder podcast. So as you go throughout the day, you break for lunch, ask questions, a lot of it was networking, too. You're talking to their builders all across the country. It was funny because half the room was from the upper Midwest. We had Michigan, we had Wisconsin, some Ohio, and then the left side of the room was like all the south east of the country. And anyway, just different you're bonding over different building practices. We all have similar client issues. It's like everything we talk about on the podcast. Turns out, as a business owner, we all have similar clients. We all have similar issues. There's a lot of chatter around tariffs, how we're navigating that, how we're implementing winning jobs, how we communicate with our clients, what our expectations, the people that are there, in my opinion, are already in the upper percents of builders, because they're if you're prioritizing your education, if you are focused on getting better, you've already probably been doing it for a while, and the cream rises to the top. So you're surrounded by a lot of builders that you should know. And I remember handing out just a ton of cards, obviously, from the podcast side of it, but also just as a builder, connecting with other builders, it was really fun to over lunch and over dinner just to talk about how things are going, and I feel like you take you don't really have a specific agenda, but when you're surrounded by excellence, you learn so much in those conversations. I had one, but there's a builder, Jeff from Peak three. He they build an aspen, I think they have 30 employees, and we must have talked for two and a half hours the last night, builder tune took us out this great wood pizza. Wood pizzeria place that was great. We just sat and talked for hours, and we had so many, we're both cost plus contractors, both doing high end work, and they're in Aspen, so they're a little bit higher end than us. And they had two remodels that were, I guess, I won't share what they are, but they were very high up there. And then a few new homes. And he had a homeowner that had a very difficult situation, and they had just, it was a cost plus remodel. And they had made, was a new home, actually, and they had some foundational work that they had to do. And anyway, long story short, they had to upgrade the drainage pipe. Let's call it 10 grand, and the homeowner didn't want to pay it, because he said, Well, you should have known this. And Jeff was like, it's a cosmos contract. We didn't know about this ahead of time, so you asked us to go on for permit early. We are. We're basically modifying this on the fly versus mainly because you wanted to go. And now they're arguing at the very beginning of the job. By the way, this guy's a lawyer, so that's great. And this is very common behavior. Raise your hand right now if this has happened to you multiple times. And so we just talked about, what would we have done differently? What would he have done differently? And like a lot of us, he said, I probably we probably should have told the homeowner they need to wait. Let's get the specs 100% dialed in, and then now it's, what is your path forward? How do you navigate this? Because you're at the very beginning, like there's going to be way more change orders, and if you can't come up with a way to navigate this, the future is gonna be a lot more difficult, like this should be one of the more easy ones. And so we were just talking about different scenarios, how to solve the problem. And I think this is what it is to be builders that collaborate. I shared a number of experiences that I've had. I've shared them on the podcast before, too, if just very similar situations, and sometimes you win some, sometimes you lose some, but as long as you're learning and then implementing them, I think that's the key, and realizing you're not alone. I mean, that's why we have the podcast. That's why hopefully you're listening and you're like, Okay, that makes sense. I've had this similar situation. So anyway, those kinds of conversations are very abundant. So anyway, that was day was that day two, and then one night, it was really fun. We went out, we got some recommendations on different places to eat, and we hopped around, tried a few different things, and almost cool. We didn't, I think the one, one gentleman it was, I think it was during the but the Masters is playing right now. So they rented out their house, because he's in Augusta, Georgia, and he had his whole family there. And they went to the Omaha zoo, which I think it's the San Diego Zoo and the Omaha zoo are, like the two top zoos in the world. So I guess next time, I guess I'm gonna bring my kids to builder trends so we can go to the Omaha Zoo. But yeah. So anyway, that was just high level what we were doing. I think what was really neat too, is you get to meet so many people that not only your account manager, but you get to see if you're I like brand, content creation, marketing, and so I've interacted a lot with CBSA as well as build return over the last couple of years. And so to see some of the people again in person, I've seen them at the International builder show at CB USA, which was in Minneapolis last fall. So it's fun to see a lot of familiar faces reconnect and just talk about, what's the state of the industry. They work with builders all over the country, what's a. Common consensus, what are you seeing? And so I think anytime you can attend things like this, like contractor coalition, like the curious builder collectives that we have in several different states, like the International builder show these are all things that you're investing in your business and investing in your in yourself and your team. And I think for me, I was so glad I was one of only a few people, a few other builders did it as well, but bring your team. That was, to me, was a real win, is having the team see firsthand all the things that that you can apply to your business. So anyway, that was, I'm sure there's a lot more I could talk about there, but that's just high level. We won't make this a complete builder trend puff piece, but it was pretty impressive. And they run a great operation. I know so many of us do use builder trend, and so it was fun to even reach out to builders that have already been there before. And they said, How's your experience? Or this is what I learned. And so now we're back back in Minnesota, and I've got to apply these lessons to our business and see how they grow. I think what'll be really fun is if you follow our social channels on Mark Williams Custom Homes, as well as the curious builder, will be posting probably once a month, or once every two months, our health score increase. So I'm really curious to see by focusing on, you know, the and it's not, we're not just doing it. Just have healthier score like that's it's fun to have a competition or a milestone out there. We're doing it because it'll make us a more efficient business. It'll make us better, more more systematic to our clients. It'll make our jobs easier because we're using more of the tools. It'd be like if you got a Ferrari and you only ever drove it in first gear, you're missing all the other top end high speeds because you're just stuck in first gear. And I feel like there's so many more gears than what we were even aware of. And so that, to me, was the big takeaway. The other thing that was really cool, I guess I will mention this is, and I'm going to adopt this into our business, because one of their key people was just talking about, they've been at builder trend for five years, and after five years, you get four weeks off of paid vacation. That's your sabbatical. That's your perk for working there for five years, saying, Thank you. You can go work on yourself, go travel, go build something. And I just thought that was really empowering and really cool. And so I haven't figured out yet. I've just, like, I said, I just got back, but I want to implement something like that in my company. I think it's very important that we think about how we can empower our people. I know IBM years ago, I think in the 60s and 70s, or whatever it was they, I think it was like, if you worked 15 years for them, you got like, six months off, and but it was mandatory. You didn't have an option. You had to take it off. And they knew that after working 15 years for a single company, if you didn't do it, maybe you'd get burned out. And so it was a way to for people to just take a time out. Go travel the world, go work on a project, go volunteer your time. Just do something for yourself. Learn something new. Go learn how to play a musical instrument. Sign up for, you know, an Iron Man. Train for it. Just do something different. Then you'd come back to work a better person. I think, I believe IBM has since done away with that, but I really like the concept we try to do a small version of that every Christmas and Fourth of July, where we give our whole team two weeks off at Christmas and a week off around the Fourth of July, just to kind of reset, refresh and avoid burnout. But I love this idea that building trend is giving their people, after five years, you know, four weeks off. I think that's really, really cool. So anyway, I think that not everything you learn, as you would imagine, is in the classroom. Sometimes somebody will share a cool idea with you that you want to adopt. And so I know, I guess I would challenge the business owners out there is not only how, as the builder, how, as the owners of the companies, how do we handle that? And I know I talk a lot on the podcast, because it's something I'm very much in earnestly trying to figure out which is to have a business that I can work in, versus the business working on me. And for 21
Mark D. Williams 18:41
years I've had a job, and now it's about time that I have a business and setting these milestones where, you know, for one of my goals, for instance, is when so may is nine, so when May is like 13 or 14, then my youngest hate will probably be like nine or 10, like I would like to take four or five months off and travel with them. It was something that we did when I was 12 and 13 years old, and it had a huge impact on my life. So I've got four years of runway to shape the business around that time off, and I want to be very deliberate about setting up the team building in the layers, so that my team can obviously operate without me. And that was something that I certainly never could have done before, and it wasn't really something I was interested in before, because I just thought scaling, you know, more people, more problems, but I realize now that scaling offers freedom in that by empowering your people. I know this sounds simple, but it's probably simple in concept, hard in the execution, and I'm just really excited for having the goal of having this time off with my family is a way that I can reverse engineer, build a better business. And I think when you partner with people like builder trend and other partners that we have, I think that's how you become a better business. You adopt the things that they adopt. You use the technologies that they supply you. And there's so many great partners out there that we partner with. Up and down the chain. So anyway, hopefully this episode was helpful, and if you're interested to hear more about builder trend university, you can certainly reach out to me, DM us on our social channel, send me an email. Obviously you can contact your local buildertrep as well and tell them the curious builder sent you. Thanks for tuning in the curious builder podcast. If you liked this episode, do us a favor, share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in. You.
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