ONE Mistake Costing You MILLIONS in Construction (and How to FIX it!)

Chris Kiefer (00:00.94)

Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and I am here with Eric Fortenberry, who is the founder of JobTread and JobTread is a construction manage or construction software. I will let Eric dive into the details on that as we're going to be talking about today, but before we do that, Eric, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time to do this and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Eric Fortenberry (00:25.514)

I appreciate you having me on, Chris.

Chris Kiefer (00:27.552)

So for, here's your elevator pitch, what is job tread?

Eric Fortenberry (00:33.118)

Yeah. So, you know, when I, uh, back in 2018, I was running a construction business and we were struggling just to really organize the business, manage, you know, all the paperwork, all of the subs, the trade partners we had, you know, are estimating budgeting, you know, syncing up with the accounting office. I mean, it was just a huge hassle and we're very unorganized that it was a buddy of mine's company who I ended up taking over as a CEO for a year and built out, you know, what is now job tread. But

Basically, JobTread is a construction estimating and project management software for any type construction business, really from residential home builders to remodelers to pool builders, deck builders, up to commercial GCs and developers. Any construction jobs-based business is able to use our software to get organized, manage all their jobs, their budgeting, proposals.

the whole operations from scheduling, kind of managing all the crews into the accounting side, with the invoicing and cashflow and things like that.

Chris Kiefer (01:36.292)

That's awesome. And so for the listeners, just to give context, and it's also helpful for you as well, Eric and I, uh, our paths crossed because I'm an automation consultant. So I work with home service businesses, usually painting companies. Um, but in this particular case, uh, former estimator from a client of mine, uh, went to a construction company and reached out to me and said, Hey, we need to automate our processes. So as part of that, I always do research and I'm looking for, you know,

I always approach any automation project with the perspective of there's got to be something that exists out there that solves 60, 70, 80% of the problem. So I, I won't mention any software names, but I have done research deeply in the construction world. Um, there's some big players that have been around for a long time that are pretty expensive. There's other ones like, and a bunch of new softwares that I feel like are popping up. You're probably aware of many Eric.

But the thing that stood out to me, because I haven't interviewed any other founders, the reason I reached out to you to chat is because it appears from the outside that JobTread is the most integrated or integratable software in the construction space that I've come across. And in particular, I was very impressed with the work that you guys have done on your Zapier integration to make it easy for data to come in and out of your business. So I'm.

That is kind of like a starting point for the conversation. I'd be curious whose strategic decision influenced that. Why is that a priority for you guys? And yeah, just talk to me about that.

Eric Fortenberry (03:13.182)

Yeah, that's a very keen observation you've uncovered there. You know, so my co-founder and the head of our product development, my CTO, Kasey, he is kind of the mastermind behind the application. You know, when I was running the construction company, I built out the first version of what is now JobTread, but after that year ended up basically recruiting some of my developers from my last software company, partnered with Kasey.

You know, he essentially rebuilt everything, you know, set it up to be, you know, multi-tenanted, able to, you know, build it out for many companies and scale it and, uh, you know, his, his big thing was, you know, this is, this is an API first application, you know, so at the beginning of my first software company back in, you know, 2007, like it was all about mobile first, you know, making sure that, you know, you design your software to work on any size device, you know, but this day and age, it's, you know, it's really now about creating a connected ecosystem.

you know, of all the different applications because so much software has come about and, you know, there, there really isn't one, like, you know, one software that can do everything for construction business. And so being able to, to play well with others is, is really important. And so, you know, Casey had the kind of the forethought to really think about, you know, the, the API.

Chris Kiefer (04:11.181)

Hmm.

Eric Fortenberry (04:31.546)

And that is like the core application of JobTread. And then our user interface is like built on top of our own API. And so that really has enabled us to, you know,

basically just have this open API that anyone can build on and develop for. You know, but then we also like with Zapier that the great thing about that is that, you know, that's like a piece of middleware software that, you know, enables, you know, any of the apps. I think there's like over 5,000 applications that are integrated with Zapier. It allows people to kind of create their own automations, you know, without having to write any code and just kind of their, their nice little, you know, user interface, drag and drop type, uh, setup that, you know,

We very early on decided to have a very in-depth integration with Zapier. And that has just opened up tons of possibilities, being able to make it as easy as possible for people to get data in and out of job thread in real time, kind of leveraging, you know, those, those triggers and actions that Zapier provides.

Chris Kiefer (05:25.728)

I you have no idea how excited I was when I came across like look I'm not kidding I probably looked at a dozen and they're all every single one is the all in one you know we do it all we do estimating we do like accounting project management all of it could team communication photo documentation like it's all in this app and

I don't know if you've heard of a book, it's called Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Groves, who's the founder of, either the founder or CEO, I don't know if he founded it, but he was at Intel back in the 90s as they were heading into the dot com. And so one part of that I think is starkly identical or very like, what's the word, another analogy for the period that we're going through right now with software apps, is he was talking about the verticalization

or the horizontalization, if that's even a word, that existed at that time. So when computers were coming out, people were, businesses were being created and they're like, all right, we're gonna go make the processors, make all the components, the boards and all that stuff, build them, make the screens, do everything and be completely verticalized from like, almost literally to like, we're gonna source silicone for the

or silica for the silicone processors. Like they're people were trying to do that. And there was the shift that happened right around 2000 where companies were like, this is so specialized, every single piece of this that we need to pick which aspect of a computer we're gonna do. And so Intel, obviously everybody knows they went with microprocessors and they went from a vertical to a horizontal company that then was like, we're gonna make the best processors and anyone else can use them at once.

You can put it in your computer or your device, but we're going to be a horizontal company that stretches across and solves this problem for lots of industries. And I feel like that's what's happening right now with software is that, well, some companies are like you, are seeing this and you're saying, all right, there's a need in construction, we need a better solution. And the problem that I see is that there's all these companies that are trying to do it all. They're saying like, hey, we're gonna be an all in one thing and

Chris Kiefer (07:45.864)

I could not agree more with your CTO that you in today's world, you have to pick which problems are we going to solve, solve those problems really, really well, and then integrate to the extreme so that if someone's like, I don't really like that, I can just tack on this other software that does that really, really well. And the, just the fact that there are thousands of softwares that cost 20 bucks a user, 50 bucks a user, a hundred bucks a user per month. And it's like the

Eric Fortenberry (08:04.652)

Yep.

Chris Kiefer (08:13.996)

heck that you have access to for pennies would take millions and millions of capital to build on your own. And so anyways, that's kind of my rambling of I love that's why we're here. That's what we're talking about. So tell your CTO that I am very big fan of how you guys have built this. And yeah, I don't know if you have any other comments on that.

Eric Fortenberry (08:21.142)

Yeah.

Eric Fortenberry (08:35.818)

No, I mean, I think you're spot on. And I think the neat thing about it is that, it's also been a way for just us to partner with tons of other applications out there where, we can both promote each other. And it's just helped us to continue growing, just by having that kind of connected ecosystem. And we also have a marketplace, right there in JobTread to kind of help you find other complimentary, businesses, services, integrations that,

construction business could benefit from.

Chris Kiefer (09:06.98)

That's awesome. And then my follow-up is, do you or have you made a list of which components you guys are not gonna try to solve when it comes to construction?

Eric Fortenberry (09:19.104)

Uhhh...

You know, it's kind of tough to say for certain. I know some things that early on we decided that we weren't necessarily going to try to do like a takeoff, an onscreen takeoff. We're kind of circling back around to that, though, and may actually look at integrating, kind of building our own simple version there. I've heard a lot about, specifically with commercial GCs like,

you know, the AIA, like the G7, 702, 703, like kind of the pay app. I know there's a lot of requests for that, that we just haven't gotten to. You know, so I don't know if I necessarily kind of trying to think like off the top of my head, like what might, you know, we very much not plan to do. You know, I see things as kind of more just, it's all a function of time. And, you know, the challenge is that we have to take

you know, and we listen very heavily to our customers. And so like directly in job trade and our help desk, there's a feature request board. And so at the end of the day, like, you know, if the majority of our customers are asking us to, you know, to do something, you know, or, or voting on a particular feature, you know, even if it's something that we thought maybe we weren't going to do, but you know, everyone's saying, Hey, this would be a great value add, you know, we, we very much like, you know, take that feedback and, and heavily consider that, you know, for our development.

And I mean, it feeds directly into our development roadmap. So I don't necessarily know, I don't think we're like ever trying to like be an accounting system. We're not trying to replace QuickBooks, Xero, things like that. That's where it just makes total sense for us to integrate with them. But it's, again, I see things as all a function of time and kind of what does the market really deem as something that needs to be

Eric Fortenberry (11:16.714)

within the project management software.

Chris Kiefer (11:19.42)

So flipping it around to, of all the things that JobTread does, because it does offer, still is a, I would, again, in my own words, it has the option to be an all-in-one, pretty much, if someone wanted it, but what would you say the components, like of all the features that you guys, I'm looking at your site, sales and estimating, project management, finances, customer experience, what are the specific pieces that are like, this is like,

a masterpiece of usability and the UI of how this part works.

Eric Fortenberry (11:53.462)

Yeah, it's definitely our budgeting tool. The very first place I focused on when I took over that construction company was the budgeting. Making sure for every single job, we know what is it going to take to deliver on this project. So flushing out your costs for your materials, for your labor, equipment. What I found when I took over is that a lot of times the estimators were kind of just

sort of making things up really. I mean, they could, you know, I had a decent understanding of what it might take to accomplish a project, but you know, they didn't really kind of detail out a scope of work, you know, build out a budget, you know, and ultimately what I uncovered is that some people were using markup to calculate the sales price and other people were using margin. Well, we were targeting a 30% profit margin and someone who's marking up their costs by 30% is only gonna get you a 23% profit margin. So we're pretty much shooting ourselves in the foot right out of the gate.

And that's when I realized like, man, we got to have a good handle on the finances for a job. And it starts with building a solid budget. And then the way that like everything after that, whether you're sending out proposals, whether you're, you know, creating work orders and purchase orders, or you're doing invoicing or billing, like it just reuses all of the same information that you created in the budget so that you're not having to reenter the same info over and over and over again. You know, and our budget tool like

You can completely customize all of the columns. You can sort it and group it. If you wanna look at everything by cost code or if you wanna look at it by cost type or if you wanna look at it by room, there's so many different options that, I'd say the core of JobTread, it's really built on that budget tool. And that's what I've never really seen any other software out there be able to come anywhere close to doing what we can do.

Chris Kiefer (13:41.572)

And so how, and again, this could be an ignorance question because I'm not deep in the construction space as far as running a job. I'm very deep in painting, which has some analogies, but definitely not near as many variables as construction. How would you, or how is the estimating component related to the budgeting tool? And is an estimator building the budget essentially and then just sending a, you know, a summarized like.

without as much detail to the customer, is that how that works or am I thinking about that the wrong way?

Eric Fortenberry (14:12.286)

No, you've actually, that's exactly right. I mean, we've got hundreds of painters on here where, again, you're flushing out, okay, what materials do we need for this job and how many hours or what's it going to take for us to be able to do this from a labor standpoint and material standpoint? And then again, whatever the company's target profit margin is, we're going to automatically calculate the price based on the cost that is going to go into this job. And so the budget is the starting point. That is where you're building out the estimate.

and then you're just basically saying, okay, we're ready to send a proposal. You just select it all, add it to a proposal document, and then you got a lot of control. I mean, how much detail you share is totally up to you. I'm really not a big fan of giving a breakdown of your labor, material, every single line item. Like, I think you're just opening up a can of worms for them to say, well, I can go to Home Depot, I could buy this for cheaper. Why, you know, it's, you know, kind of however much detail you wanna share with the homeowner, with your customer. You know, if you just wanted one lump sum,

one price at the bottom, by all means you can do that or you can give a more detailed breakdown. I mean, if you wanna give unit price and quantities and things like that, you can as well, but it's very flexible on how much information you wanna share, but it all starts in that budget.

Chris Kiefer (15:29.496)

Hmm. Yeah, I would say the, I just completely, I think that the idea of, well, I guess I would be curious what integration, so back to this integration conversation, which apps, and just if you can pick one or two random ones, what was the first app that you guys did integrate with, and was there like a validation of like, oh, this is really great, or we heard positive feedback from our customers that were like,

Oh, I just this integration works great. I love this feature and it's complimenting your software. So when were you guys first able to get that feedback on the strategic decision to be an API first company and be like, Oh yeah, we're definitely going down the right path.

Eric Fortenberry (16:10.222)

I mean, I'd say pretty early on, if not like almost right away, but like, you know, basically the first major integration was with QuickBooks Online. It became just very, very apparent that if we didn't integrate with the accounting system, which I mean, probably call it 85% of our customers use QuickBooks Online, that it was going to create duplicate data entry. And so, you know, being able to, you know,

essentially run your jobs in job tread, you know, you've got to be able to do the invoicing, you know, we've got to be able to manage the bills and the expenses to really truly understand how we're performing on a job. And so in order for us to get people to use our system to do that, we had to be able to integrate with QuickBooks to push the data over so that they weren't having to do duplicate entry. Otherwise, if they had to go and enter it in QuickBooks anyways,

then they might not enter it into job trade. And so it doesn't give you that full picture. So I would say definitely with QuickBooks, I mean, and that really opened the door for us to be able to even start working with construction companies. We did end up also integrating with QuickBooks desktop, which is hopefully kind of on its final stint of life here. Yeah, but I mean, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (17:29.856)

You and me both, yeah, hopefully not much longer. Hard to integrate with desktop apps.

Chris Kiefer (17:37.908)

I'm curious, so the, like what is your describe like, and again, yes, you could say construction companies or painting companies, but like what's the ideal customer? Like revenue size, how many employees, what key office staff or managers do they have in place? Who are you building JobTread for?

Eric Fortenberry (18:00.518)

Sure. So from a company size standpoint, I mean really any small and medium size business, right? If you're a huge, doing 20, 25 plus million in revenue, you're probably looking at a Procore. We're definitely, and really early on started on very small businesses, but as we've grown and added to our feature set, it's enabled us to start working with much larger.

companies, but I would still describe them in the small and medium sized business, anywhere from a couple hundred thousand in revenue to probably up to maybe 15, 20 million is probably towards the upper end of our largest customers. But definitely the sweet spot is a couple of employees, maybe two to 10. And then if you're having employees that are kind of clocking in and out,

you know, doing, you know, they're W2 employees and, you know, those, we probably see companies around 10 to, you know, 30 users might be the average. But we have some with, you know, hundreds of users. It really, you know, spans the gamut. We have very specifically designed JobTread to work for any construction, you know, jobs based business. So whether you're a painter or, you know, a pool builder.

Chris Kiefer (19:08.762)

Right.

Eric Fortenberry (19:23.574)

you know, or an electrician or plumber or deck builder, like, you know, if you are, you know, managing jobs and maybe even more specifically, like if every job you're having to custom bid, you know, it's, it's not like, you know, like, uh, you know, a recurring, you know, service type work, you know, we're, we're mowing lawns and it's going to be 50 bucks every week. You know, that, that is, that's not really our bread and butter. I mean, that, you know, jobber would be very good for that.

There's other kind of service-based companies. I mean, we're more so on the, you got a custom bid every job, you have to build out a budget, typically probably a little bit longer of jobs. And then certainly as you get into the larger remodels, home builds, I mean, you've got to coordinate with so many different trade partners that it takes even more effort to be organized and to manage all of that. So that's where I see a lot of job trade customers.

Chris Kiefer (20:09.339)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (20:20.112)

That's awesome, I was gonna say from the CRM side of things, I'm a big fan of HubSpot. I happen to be a HubSpot certified partner and we help customers implement HubSpot. I'm curious, you guys do have a CRM component as well. Do you, I don't know what your knowledge is in this space, but when would you say, or when are you seeing customers not use your CRM and use an external CRM instead?

Eric Fortenberry (20:49.618)

Yeah, so that kind of maybe brings me back to one of my answers from earlier. I mean, things that we know that we're probably not going to do, at least anytime soon. I mean, if you need email marketing where you're running campaigns, heavy HTML, kind of want to set up a lot of those texting or email automation campaigns, that's where something like HubSpot is a great solution. We have tons of customers who integrate.

HubSpot with JobTread. And so, you know, a lot of the data can be kept in sync, but the nice thing is that they can tack on that HubSpot to kind of do those drip campaigns and that email marketing, you know, and then kind of at the right moment in time when they're ready to build out a job and build out their budget, you know, just maybe dragging it from one deal, you know, stage to another can trigger creating all of the information and pushing it into JobTread. And then, you know, as you send your proposal, that can automatically go back and update the deal.

And so there's really nice ways to kind of close the loop on it if you will, but being able to tap into, you know, something for your email marketing is, you know, definitely a good idea from our standpoint.

Chris Kiefer (21:59.388)

That's awesome. And then as far as like the vision of where JobTread is going, what is the, when was JobTread started?

Eric Fortenberry (22:12.554)

Yeah, so it was 2018 was when I was running the construction company. And then early 2019 is when I left that to officially start up Job Tread. So we built for a few years and then we started selling our product in 2021. You know, we took it to about 200 companies that year. Last year we got it to around a thousand. This year our goal was 2000 and we're sitting at over 2200 now. So yeah.

Chris Kiefer (22:35.708)

Nice, that's awesome. So what is the, and you, so you were in, I'm just thinking for building a software, you partnered with a CTO who's doing the actual dev work. You did not have experience in software or you did?

Eric Fortenberry (22:51.802)

No, I did. I built and sold my first software company back in 2015. My co-founder, CTO, he worked for me as a software developer there. We sold software to colleges and universities, took it to around 650 universities in 13 countries, had over 20 million users on our web application when we got acquired in 2015. My undergrad was in finance and accounting.

And then towards the end of my first software company, I ended up going back and getting a, I did the undergrad computer science work, and then I got a master's in software engineering as well. So I've, you know, and then I built the first version of what became JobTread while I was running that construction company. But at this point, I don't really build on the product. I do development from a, you know, from a kind of an operation standpoint and setting up all of our systems, but.

Yeah, Casey and the development team, they own the product.

Chris Kiefer (23:50.884)

That's awesome. What has been like just in this journey since you started Job Tread, what has been the thing that has surprised you the most?

Eric Fortenberry (24:02.234)

Well, I would say probably it's really how quickly this thing has really blown up on us. I mean, we're seeing exponential growth. At this point, the entire business is inbound, inbound leads coming to us, people who are likely using another system who we don't have to name names, but kind of not very happy with them and sort of how they're...

going about building out their company. And so, but they're one of the largest players out there. And so we're getting, I mean, we had over 220 new customers signed up last month alone. We've just total inbound. Like we don't do any outbound cold calling or prospecting. We do go out and do a lot of trade shows where we try to meet people and just kind of be out in the community. But other than that, it's just entirely inbound. And so I've been very surprised at that and how quickly we've been able to grow it. And I mean like

We, you know, to this point, like we hadn't run any advertising or anything. Uh, it's just people finding us and coming to us, you know, and it's all of our customers, you know, if you go look at all of our reviews, I mean, it's just five star reviews everywhere, you know, both for the product and for the service, you know, that, that we provide, uh, with them. But, you know, I think my, you know, my, my biggest takeaway for my first software company was the, it was a tiny market. There were only 5,000 universities in the U S another five to 10,000 worldwide.

And so I really, I wanted to come to the other end of that spectrum, you know, where we got, you know, maybe almost a million construction companies, you know, in America alone, you know, depending on how you kind of define that, but like, I mean, it's just an enormous market. And so, you know, I think that's been the thing that's just been very, you know, exciting is, is to see kind of all that inbound, uh, you know, without having to do too much, uh, you know, advertising outbound type stuff. I mean, we, we did just hire a digital marketing specialist who's going to help us start running ads for next year. Cause our goals.

Go from 2,000 to 4,000 next year. So it'll be a big jump, but we think that just we've got a lot of momentum.

Chris Kiefer (25:59.964)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (26:05.456)

That's awesome. Yeah, I think that the focusing on building a good product and making sure that it works and does what you say it's gonna do is the first step. And now you guys are in the, just let's pour gasoline on the fire and get this thing bigger.

Eric Fortenberry (26:20.062)

Yep, that's right.

Chris Kiefer (26:23.612)

What else is like, yeah, you've got, we got another 10 minutes or so here. What else is like top of mind or critical, like that you feel like people need to understand either about job tread or the construction industry, unique differentiators, key problems that people are experiencing that you guys solve. Yeah.

Eric Fortenberry (26:46.27)

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think at the end of the day, it, you know, in this day and age, like if you're not leveraging technology, if you don't have, you know, the right systems and processes in place, as well as the right team built, you know, you're gonna struggle. And especially as technology continues to evolve, as automations come into play, like you have to be able to be efficient in order to build a successful and scalable business.

And so I think that's where job tread has been a huge impact. I mean, I've seen, again, thousands of customers on here who are growing their business at rapid rates where before they might've been stagnant and struggling. You know, it just being able to leverage technology to help you get organized and then to make sure that you're selling profitable jobs. And then once you sell that job, being able to execute on it.

is the other half of that battle. And so, in order to do that, just having a tool that can help you is gonna pay dividends. And again, software is not expensive relative to how much it would cost you to hire another full-time employee.

You know, if you find yourself feeling like you're, you know, what I described throwing bodies at problems, like where you're having to keep hiring and keep bringing people on, you know, that's where you need to stop and look and say, how can we automate? How can we be more efficient and effective, you know, instead of just kind of continuing to do what we're doing, like, you know, by, by having a great, you know, estimating software.

you can win more jobs and you're gonna be way faster at it. Giving customers the ability to make selections and just interact with you throughout the process with a client portal, like making your business and being easy to work with is very important these days to win more jobs and so.

Eric Fortenberry (28:37.514)

You know, the reality is this industry is still lagging in technology. The majority of construction businesses out there, they're still, you know, using pen and paper and spreadsheets and like, that's just not scalable. You know, and so I think as, you know, kind of what, what I see, you know, in the direction that, you know, where we want to go a job trade, I mean, our, our goal is to become the new standard for construction management.

Chris Kiefer (28:41.963)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (28:51.226)

Mmm.

Eric Fortenberry (29:01.75)

You know, and we're going to do that by getting job tread to tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of construction companies. And we're keeping our price super affordable. I mean, it's 199 bucks a month, you know, plus 20 bucks per user. And it even tears down as you add more users, like everyone's like, well, you know, your competitors are a thousand plus dollars a month. Why are you so much cheaper? What are we missing? You're not missing anything. We've got everything they've got, but our strategy is to keep this affordable. I don't believe.

that software needs to be a super expensive thing. Our profit margins are through the roof, even at $199 a month. And so at the end of the day, I believe if we do what's right, and we make sure that our price is always affordable, and again, I want a small one to two person business shouldn't pay the same thing as a 10 or 20 or 50 person business. That's why it has to be some lever that you pull that a larger company is paying more than a smaller company.

Chris Kiefer (29:38.864)

Hmm.

Eric Fortenberry (30:00.51)

But at the end of the day, this should be just a very small expense relative to your overall budget. And if we can save you from losing money just on one job, we could have just paid for the software for the whole year.

Chris Kiefer (30:12.664)

It paid for itself. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. I think that also goes back to the reason that other softwares cost so much is because, well, first of all, it could be that they're targeting a larger company and there's some other nuanced features that it's like you're solving the problem of the zero to $20 million construction company, like you said. Could someone bigger than that use you? Of course.

but you know your niche and you're going after that market. And the other tools that are thousands of dollars a month are probably built for different organizations. That's giving them the benefit of the doubt. The other thing that I think could be the problem is a term that you probably are familiar with in the software world of just technical debt. These companies have been built and they've existed for 10, 15, 20 years. And I, like again, from the software side of things,

because I'm a software guy as well, when you, like things are done differently. Like you built a software and you started building it in 2019, right? It's like the technology that was available in 2019 was very different than the technology that was available in 2005. And so like obviously there's going to be different like efficient ways to build software, just like we have more efficient ways to do everything else in our life. And so I feel like there, to me, I always look at

how like, for like, obviously, you want to work with a company that has some track record, right? Just for confidence that they're going to be around. But a software company that's been around for 25 years, I don't think that's the end they don't know me if they're smart, they're not marketing that. Because I'm thinking, wait, when was the last time you had a major overhaul of all of your code? Because things are different now, you know, I just feel like that honestly is probably a big factor is that they have the all this technical debt of literal, like

Eric Fortenberry (31:57.872)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (32:11.484)

stuff and people using these systems and in order to overhaul and do what they see as the most logical thing, they would be disrupting and upsetting 10,000 customers that are currently using this dated system. And so they're literally in like a just a bind of do we swallow the cost and just invest heavily and revamp everything or do we just milk it for what we can because you know, we have a system that's quote unquote working.

Eric Fortenberry (32:39.254)

Yeah, you've nailed it right on the head. I mean, I tell people all the time, we're not reinventing the fundamentals of managing a construction business. That hasn't changed. We're leveraging modern technology. We're creating an easier to use, easier to learn, much faster application. And it's, exactly, some of these softwares have been around for so long.

that they've got all that technical debt. And yeah, they've got thousands and tens of thousands of customers, you can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater, they're kind of stuck with it. You gotta build a very, very strong foundation. And everything after that is just kind of getting put on top, but if you got a weak foundation, you can have all sorts of challenges later. And I think the other thing that you gotta look at is who are the owners of these other companies?

You know, a lot of times, you know, software companies go raise a ton of money. They got a bunch of professional, you know, institutional capital, venture capitalists, private equity firms who at the end of the day, their goal is to maximize the return on their investment. And so that is what ultimately leads to, you know, jacking up the price super high, trying to squeeze every last penny out of, you know, every single customer that you've gotten and my last software company I learned.

from experience because I ended up selling it to a private equity firm. I watched what they did and it was kind of, it really, I'm not a big fan. I won't be selling this one to a private equity firm. We're very fortunate that I really don't even need to, not even thinking about building and selling. We wanna create an awesome company, but we can afford because we have self-funded this. Me, my family, my friends.

you know, even our own employees, like at the very beginning, we all put in the capital that we needed to get this thing off the ground. And we're very fortunate that we're way past, you know, breakeven, we're over the hump. Like this thing is cashflow positive, you know, definitely have no issues. We are, you know, growing very healthy and take every dollar that we make them. We reinvest it into the company, into hiring, you know, more people to help us continue building it out and to help us servicing it. And, you know, I think a lot of times you these other, you know,

Eric Fortenberry (34:49.358)

A lot of times, bigger, more older companies can kind of get to this point where you got massive overheads. You got a lot of inefficiencies. And that in turn increases the price of the software for their customers. And so we're just extremely efficient. Half my team or so, we all worked together at the last company. We describe ourselves as a well-oiled machine. We are very, very efficient in what we're doing. And that helps us to keep the price as affordable as possible. And...

Chris Kiefer (34:57.168)

Hmm.

Eric Fortenberry (35:18.206)

We're undercutting the market. I mean, that's what we're doing. And that's why one of the many reasons that people are switching over is because they're gonna save a ton of money on their subscription. And our product has got all the same features. We're targeting all the same customer bases. It's just, we got modern technology, much more efficient. And we're not just in this for the money. We're not trying to squeeze out this ROI and looking to sell it every five years to a new owner. We wanna build a very great company with awesome culture.

We love the customers, we love the space, the product. We're just very, very passionate about what we're doing. And we look forward to disrupting the entire industry.

Chris Kiefer (35:55.684)

That's awesome. Last question, and then we move to wrap up, is how are you guys planning or discussing AI and how that's going to be affecting your software, the construction industry? Are you guys building in any AI-related features? How's that discussion happening at JobTread?

Eric Fortenberry (36:16.01)

Yeah, I mean, we're certainly kind of taking a look at everything and how we might be able to incorporate that. You know, kind of what has come about so far, and I mean, we use it as well. I mean, I think, especially from like a content generation standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, it's been tremendously helpful. I think there's going to be even more opportunities to be able to try to kind of use the machine learning to really understand very large data sets on how we might be able to start making recommendations.

you know, and saying, Hey, you know, we see you just built out this job budget. You know, it looks like it might be, you know, a little bit under relative to similar types jobs that you've already run or, you know, Hey, you might need to think about increasing your, you know, your price here, you know, padding this cost because of other issues you've had in the past. I mean, I think the, the possibilities are really, you know, endless here. Um, but it's also about making sure that, you know, we, we kind of do it at the right time and, you know, again, we, we very heavily collaborate with our customers.

And so, you know, at this point, you know, we could put some stuff in there where it's like, you know, we're going to generate some, you know, the kind of the basic email templates and messaging and things like that. But like, you know, when we, when I asked our customers, Hey, you want us to do that, like, yeah, but we can just, we can just do that over here and copy paste it in, we'd rather you go focus on these top features, you know, that you're not going to be able to do with AI, you know? And so I think there's kind of this balance of, you know, once it gets to the right point, we'll certainly look at incorporating it even more, but I do think a lot of companies right now sort of tout.

Chris Kiefer (37:30.918)

Mmm.

Eric Fortenberry (37:44.042)

AI as a marketing thing, at the end of the day, it's an algorithm. And everything that, all code is algorithms. It's a set of processes and looking at things and making decisions and then how you take that and use it. And so to some extent, you could say there's tons of AI built into here. And to some extent you could say, well, we haven't incorporated the full gamut yet. But I do think over time it will continue to evolve.

And we'll be adding it as forward-facing features to the customers, but even our developers use some of it when writing code and things like that.

Chris Kiefer (38:18.924)

I would be curious, this is maybe like a challenge to you or to your product team. So my philosophy is just like back to that verticalization versus a horizontalization of a company. I have this thesis of companies that are trying to do it all are going to ultimately end up struggling.

So I think you guys are hedged in the fact that you have an API that's very strong, so someone can swap out anything that they don't like, which I think is why you guys are doing that. But I think it's interesting, and this could be an absolutely terrible idea, but I'm like, it would be interesting to know, you might not put this on your website, but to know what are the features or components of a software or of a construction company that we are just choosing to be really bad at and not spend any time on.

And it's like, hey, we're not just so everybody's clear. We're not spending any time building out this thing. We have like whatever version exists in the software, but like go use some other tool to do that piece. And I'm sure, like you said, there's accounting for sure. But I just think it's an interesting thing of like the depth or the room for optimization of any particular feature, like if it's budgeting, to me, I'm like, there's an opportunity to take budgeting to.

you know, 10 times improvement of what you have, if it's necessary is a good question, what's the cost benefit, all that. But I just feel like there's so many companies that are trying to do too much, and it ultimately ends up to people being dissatisfied. So that's just my, more of like a curiosity challenge, I'd be curious in the next months or so to know like, yeah, we're choosing to not do these things. And here's the reason why is because we think the core of a construction business is budgeting.

and whatever other three or four things. But anyways, that's just my two cents from the peanut gallery.

Eric Fortenberry (40:20.546)

Sure.

Chris Kiefer (40:22.609)

So moving to wrap up questions. What are the three books that you recommend?

Eric Fortenberry (40:30.874)

I'd say probably one of my most recent reads and my new all-time favorite, probably about 10 or something copies of it and gave it out to everyone is Marcus Sheridan's book, They Ask, You Answer. I think it's a phenomenal book that is basically like, look, go sit down with your sales team, figure out what are all the questions that they're getting asked. They're answering the same questions over and over and just start publishing the answers that.

Chris Kiefer (40:42.236)

Mmm.

Eric Fortenberry (40:58.39)

Publish them in blog posts, put out videos about it, address all of the elephants in the room, just be transparent. The things that you don't do well, put those out there. Just answer the questions. And I think that he has just really inspired us to just open everything up. Like I just, earlier today, did a big job tread, live product update. It's kind of like a town hall with everyone. We used to only do those with our customers.

But then I read this book and he's like, you know, if you're not doing something because of your competition, or because for whatever reason, you don't wanna share it with others, you're doing yourself a disservice. And he was 100% right. And so now we just open up everything. We let anybody and everybody join all of our webinars, all of our product releases. It's just, we just put it all out there. We have put out tons and tons of content on YouTube because of this book.

Chris Kiefer (41:40.131)

Hmm.

Eric Fortenberry (41:54.95)

I highly recommend it. I think it's one of the best, greatest books, and especially in this day and age, being able to really kind of take your sales and marketing and leveraging videos to a whole nother level. Mark has shared in spot on with that. I'd say...

Chris Kiefer (42:08.728)

I love that you suggest that because I read that book in my previous job and I think it is leveraging the internet in the way that it was designed and that it had its full potential. I completely agree.

Eric Fortenberry (42:22.798)

Yeah. I think Good to Great is obviously a staple, really great book, and one more. I read this book at the very beginning of my first software company. It was called Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good by Sarah Lacey. I ended up actually traveling to San Francisco, or I was there to go visit some university and then ended up tracking her down and had coffee with her and got to meet her in like

You know, it just, the book really explains how all of the whole, you know, the whole web 2.0, everything over there in Silicon Valley, like they, they all knew each other and invested in each other's businesses. And so they, they got lucky one time and then they turn around and they basically just, you know, helped each other and, and really created so many more companies from a much smaller group of them. And so like, I've just always found that to be a very motivational.

You know, thing for me, I do, I feel like I was very fortunate, very lucky to have, you know, built and sold my first, you know, my, my first company, you know, right out of the gate. And I'm now working on my second one, uh, you know, that, that I've, that I've started from scratch. And, you know, again, it's just a really, really interesting, uh, book that, you know, I dunno, maybe a little bit dated now that, you know, it's, you know, maybe, I don't know, we call it web three or I don't know what, what version we're on here of the web, but, uh, it was, it was really interesting to see how, you know, all of kind of those, those early, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Chris Kiefer (43:39.389)

Yeah.

Eric Fortenberry (43:45.474)

you know, all those same people were very connected and created so many more companies after that.

Chris Kiefer (43:50.52)

That's awesome. Are you still in contact with her?

Eric Fortenberry (43:54.486)

Uh, you know, little bit, but, you know, I, I have been thinking about, you know, at some point I will certainly, uh, you know, reach out to her and thank her for, you know, being part of my motivation to, to start all over and do it, do it again, uh, you know, certainly really inspiring.

Chris Kiefer (43:56.077)

loosely.

Chris Kiefer (44:11.052)

Yeah, that's awesome. I'd love to get her on the podcast too. I was curious if you have an email or something. I always love, I'm gonna read that book for sure, but seems like someone that would be right up my alley, my interest. And then movie recommendation.

Eric Fortenberry (44:27.094)

That's a good question. I certainly love a good movie. If I had to think back, I probably think about one of the ones that really inspired me at the beginning of my last company. Actually, the day that it came out, it was the Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg's story. The day that it came out, I took the entire company out. We all went to the movies. My mom and everyone was there. We walked out and she's like, Eric, that's your story.

You know, like I had started my first company at the same time that Mark started Facebook, except, you know, he created this, you know, this open, you know, social network to everyone. Ours was, you know, more like a white labeled, you know, kind of private network that we sold to universities. But again, just like the whole founding story and how it got built, you know, I don't know, it always just kind of gets me excited thinking back about earlier days, we bootstrapped my first company out of a five bedroom house, ended up getting another one right around the corner and yeah, I kind of like lived it.

Chris Kiefer (45:10.143)

Ah.

Chris Kiefer (45:22.308)

That's awesome. That's so cool. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what is your recommended way that they do that?

Eric Fortenberry (45:30.538)

Man, I'd probably say find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or obviously just go to www.jobtrend.com. You can reach out that way. If you're interested in seeing our product, I definitely encourage you to schedule a demo through our website. We'd be happy to get on, kind of walk you through it, make sure it's a good fit. But you can feel free to email me as well, eric at jobtrend.com. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (45:54.5)

Sounds good. Well, Eric, thank you so much for coming on today. This was a fun conversation and keep up the good work over at Job Tread. And yeah, we will be in touch.

Eric Fortenberry (46:04.182)

All right, appreciate you having me on Chris, thank you.