Construction Company Owners - Product Validation

[brcseac]

Hi all,

I’ve been working in the construction industry for many years and currently own a security company. We’ve had several challenges with finding a single software solution that solves most of the problems we face, and I believe a lot of other owners of specialty trade companies face similar problems and so I’d like to get input from others in the industry about whether a solution I’m working on would be of interest to them and whether they’d be interested in purchasing a software like it.

If we were to build a software solution that solves the problems listed below, and offered the features listed below, which of these problems would be the most important for you to solve and which are not a priority for you?

Bonus points if you can tell me how these problems impact your business and what it would look like if we could solve that for you.

Problem List:
1. Lack of access to information by anyone who needs it, whether details about an estimate, project or service call, etc.
2. No schedule or constantly changing schedule making it hard to manage
3. Communication issues between departments - for example billing not being aware of changes to a projects scope
4. Lots of manual communication between direct reports - for example updating on where project is holding, or what was done at that service call, what still needs to be done, etc.
5. One place to keep track of all our open projects, service calls, fire inspections, etc.
6. Keeping track of all the info related to those listed above. For example, current project status, latest updates, tasks that have been completed vs still pending, due dates for project milestones or fire inspections, etc.
7. Having to manually dispatch techs to jobs every day by either calling or texting them individually
8. Cross department collaboration issues - for example the office knowing when we can send someone to a service call, or when the job was completed, or extra materials were used, etc.
9. Tracking site visits and open estimates
10. Customer communication - lots of updating customer manually, whether about scheduling, updates, changes needed
11. Manual follow up of estimates with customers
12. Increased callbacks due to inefficiency or things being missed
13. Delays in payment collection due to manual payment processes
14. Lost revenue due to extra work not being tracked properly
15. Lost revenue due to lack of insight into actual project costs
16. Multiple trips to suppliers needed since techs or PMs don’t have a written equipment list with all the details, or because they forgot to get something
17. Lack of insight into different types of metrics - for example, time from service call creation to completion, or various sales metrics
18. Alarm account details are spread across multiple platforms, making it difficult to find the correct accounts right away
19. Business owner needs to be involved in everything to make sure things run smoothly
20. Business does not have resale value since the owner is involved in everything and removing him would cause everything to stop
21. No idea how long techs are spending traveling to site and how long on site
22. Undercharging due to inaccurate quoting (missed materials/equipment needed, underestimating labor, etc)

Features List:
1. Sales CRM
2. Estimate Tracking
3. Project Management
4. Service Call Management
5. Technician Scheduling
6. Automated Deposit Collection
7. Change Order Management
8. Contract Management
9. Invoice & Payment Tracking
10. Auto-Dispatch Technicians
11. Automatic Time Tracking
12. Customizable Automated Text Notifications to Customer
13. Alarm Account Tracking
14. Quickbooks/Zoho Books integration
15. Analytics & Reporting Dashboards
16. Pricing Calculator
17. Track Client Equipment/systems
18. Material List Generator
19. Inventory Tracking
20. Support Ticket System
21. HR System Management
22. Automated Customer Feedback System
23. Job Costing & Reporting
24. Automated Invoice Collections & Reminders

Please let me know your thoughts, and if you have any questions, please comment below and I will do my best to answer them.

Thanks in advance for your insight!

 

[follower3]

@brcseac Something like this? Jobber Looks like a validated idea to me.

 

[brcseac]

@follower3 Yeah jobber is very similar to what we’d be looking to develop, but our USP is that we’d be customizing the software to fit the company’s individual needs, kind of like how salesforce can be customized for each company

 

[albert05]

@brcseac How many employees do you have? I know if a company at that can do some of this in one software, granted they are using APIs for different softwares to communicate, but they can make it happen. I have a buddy who works there and I can set up a meeting for you if it makes sense and he can demo it and quote it out for you

However you must have a certain number of employees for it to make sense.

 

[brcseac]

@albert05 I doubt we would qualify since we are a pretty small shop, but I was thinking of doing this not only to solve our problem, but more so that other companies would be able to solve the same problem, and I wanted to validate whether this would make sense to invest more money into it.

I’ve already invested time into developing a solution that works really well, but we’ve hit a roadblock that will end up costing us upfront for developers, so before I go all in, I wanted to get some feedback from people, rather than assuming it’s something they would buy, even if it’s a reasonable assumption.

 

[albert05]

@brcseac What do you consider a small shop?

To give a little background on this I have a buddy who works for ADP and they have developed a way for their HR platform to work with construction companies to help with job costing, time tracking, HR, pricing, communication and I’m sure other things on your list.

I’m not saying to not go after it and build it because people need competition and you may be able to do it better but other companies are working on it.

 

[brcseac]

@albert05 We’re less than 10 people altogether, but I’ve already built a solution that works for us so we wouldn’t be looking to adopt another software. However, in order to scale what we’ve built and get it ready to launch for others, we would need to hire devs to build it out a bit differently. Obviously that would require significant investment though so that’s why I’m looking for the validation that people would be willing to pay for a software like this.

 

[albert05]

@brcseac Yes people would use it. It’s a huge selling part for the construction vertical. I don’t know how much they spent developing it, but it was a large roll out with many incentives.

You could probably Google it and see what they are offering and how it works.

 

[brcseac]

@albert05 Thanks, I will definitely look into it, I appreciate the feedback!