Name: Grow Your Business With Confidence
Uploaded: 2025-08-19T18:46:17.816Z
Duration: 59 min 56 s
Description: Grow Your Business With Confidence

Transcript for "Grow Your Business With Confidence": On our ConstructConnect session on growing your business with confidence. We'll give it five more seconds for everybody to hop on in. Alright. I wanted to go through some introductions. Today's speakers, I will be hosting, the event today. We have some special guests with us. We have Brad Latham from Diversified Construction of Oklahoma. Brad comes to us, with a lot of experience in the construction industry. Started as a laborer, then skilled laborer, craftsman, foreman. If I could label label all the titles, that'd be awesome. But currently, he is president, and part owner of Diversified Construction of Oklahoma. We also have Orion Ledesma. He is a project coordinator at Diversified Construction with a degree in mathematics. So we've got you covered from start to finish on construction with Diversified. Joining us as well, we have Zach Woodson, who is a CSM with ConstructConnect. Zach will be going over all of the fun things that we can show you today in ConstructConnect Project Intelligence. And, of course, Kelsey Earhart, who works with the advocates of the ConstructConnect brand, to share stories and highlights of the great work they're doing in the industry. And, of course, last but not least, we have Amanda Moore, who has put all this together, planned everything, strategized everything to make a great, wonderful, presentation today for you. So wanted to go over a brief overview of how the session is gonna work today. We are going to be helping you understand how ConstructConnect Project Intelligence supports business growth. We're also gonna learn from current Project Intelligence users to hear how they found success, and, of course, get question answers answered, plus resources for exploring how Project Intelligence can help grow your business. Couple of webinar reminders. Lines will be muted, but you can use session chat to ask any questions. The webinar is being recorded and will be available, on this page after the event, and, feel free to respond to polls when they pop up. We've got a couple of polls throughout the, the session, and we'd love to hear your answers on them. With that said, here is our first poll question coming right up. So what is your primary trade? Drywall, concrete, electrical, general contractor, or other. If you take the next fifteen seconds to answer that, we'd love to hear your answers. Alright. Looks like the answers are coming in. We have a pretty diversified, group of contractors in our audience, and we're loving it. So with that being said, Amanda, can we show the results of who we have in the room? Alright. That looks like a pretty balanced, group here. Loving that there. Okay. So while we wait, we've got those answers posted. And to the next point, we're gonna go ahead and introduce you to Zach. He's going to give his take on CCPI. Zach, are you ready? I'm thank you, Young. I appreciate it. Thanks for getting everybody warmed up and ready for me to go through the presentation today. Again, I I'm Zach. I've been with ConstructConnect for just over seven years, currently as customer success manager. Today, we'll be covering ConstructConnect Project Intelligence with using the confidence that you have to have tools to help your business grow. Maybe you've identified some problems or some challenges growing into a new market or making sure you're covering the right projects or finding better projects than what you've been working on to really improve that profit ratio. So I'm gonna actually go ahead and start sharing my screen here, and we are going to jump right into ConstructConnect Project Intelligence. This will be a live demo, so give me just a second to get that going for y'all. If somebody doesn't mind, just throw me a thumbs up to make sure that I know the screen share is working, please. Thank you. So we've got ConstructConnect Project Intelligence pulled up here. I have a couple of things getting started to go through for everybody today. What we're gonna cover are a few different topics. We're gonna cover how you can grow your business through projects themselves, how you can cover them through expanding into additional markets, maybe a a market that's a weak spot or a new market that you're trying to get into for the first time, through contacts, so you'll be able to take a look at different companies and the individual contract contacts that are associated with them. And then we'll wrap it up with just why it's a a great tool for estimators, project managers, business development specialists, so on and so forth. So we'll jump right in here. For us to get started, I have a bidding project search set up just in my tristate area here. Shout out to the city of Cincinnati. So we've got Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky here. We have a host of different filters as you can see down the left hand side. I'm not gonna spend a ton of time covering the individual filters there, but you have just about everything. There there's a filter for anything that you wanna look for, whether you're focused on one specific trade, a group of trades, a project in a certain status, a size. You name it, we have a filter for it. If we don't have a filter for it, you can use keywords for it. So you'll have a little bit of everything to make it easy for you to identify the opportunities that are best suited for your business. As we go through this process, you'll see I do have this just set up for anything that's in a bidding status right now. And Sharknite Project Intelligence will cover projects that are pre bid as well. So anything that's in the early concept, out for design, and the final planning as it move towards bidding. We have just about everything for both subcontractors and general contractors here to find the right information behind what they're after. I am partial to just go ahead and use the first one here as an example because Blue Ash is about twenty minutes from my house here. So using a project as an example for us, we'll show you the project details page, and this is really where you're gonna start to see the meat of the information that you need to be successful. We'll see pre bid meetings, site walk throughs. If anything's mandatory, it will say mandatory, the bid date, the estimated start date. You'll have your plans and specs available here. If for some reason the plans and specs are not available in ConstructConnect, we'll tell you why and how to go get them. So even if they're not already loaded for you to access, we can get you right to them in a quick instant. Description of the project tells you a little bit about what's going on. So what are we doing here? We're renovating a rec center. So just to give you a little bit of information behind the project without going too far into the individual scopes, the bid documents, so on and so forth. We'll see here this is a a unique example. Maybe I shouldn't have picked the one that is close to home because it's bidding is prime. So it doesn't come to everybody, but it's a city job. They're looking for us for subcontractors for the renovation itself. You'll have your contact information here as is for all of our projects, and we'll show the trades that are represented so we know exactly what needs to take place for this job. Using the number of different filters in the project details page gives you a couple of different ways to target things, whether you're looking at the high level for focus on a certain size of the project or when new things are happening, what's out to bid tomorrow versus a couple months from today. Using project intelligence will help you have that full picture. Are you looking for a gap job right now? Are you looking for something six months from now because you've got a big job wrapping up? There's a number of different ways to get through all of those details, and we assist you along the way. This is not something where you just log in for the first time, try to go figure it out yourself. We will help you along the way to make sure that this is the right product for your company, and we have the goals to achieve that together. Now let's talk a little bit about just the, the companies themselves. So I have a search set up here too. We're gonna prioritize growing the business maybe through new companies. So the contacts with these companies that are involved in these jobs. So are they GCs? Are they owners? Are they architects, developers? Who's really your target audience? You have easy ways to get to those. If you already know of a company that's out there and you just wanna search that specific company name, you can do that. You can find out what they're bidding on, what they have been on the last couple years, or maybe what they're in the planning stages are. So, again, making sure we have everybody taken care of whether you're a GC, a subcontractor, a supplier, so on and so forth. We have a number of different resources for you to go through this process and find who you want to work with, what you wanna work on, and connect those dots together. So if I'm just gonna pick one as an example here, I'm just gonna click on a random company name here. Use Tom Plummer. So with the company profile information, you'll get a little bit of what they've done in the course of the year. This information will go back a couple years as well. So really targeting, hey. This is a company that I've worked with before, and I wanna make sure that I know about everything they're doing. Or this is a company that I know is big in my area that I've never worked with, and I want to try to get connected with them. We give you the resources to make sure that you have several ways to either get in touch with that company, just keep tabs on what they have coming out because it really lines up with what your business goals are for the future. So far, we've touched a little bit on just the companies and the projects themselves. So looking through the list of projects, right, if we go back to projects for just a second here, even just looking in the three states, what I've got out to bid here around my tri state area, there's 900 results. That that's a lot. Maybe a little if you're looking at the entire country, but there are number of different tools that you can use to really start to restrict that down to be what is most important for your business. We wanted to run a keyword search here. I know in the the poll there, so a lot of concrete and drywall subcontractors. So all you're after is concrete. Let's just use that for an example. Come in here, and I can just do I don't recommend doing a broad search like concrete because who knows what this is gonna pull back. But to give you the idea, it's utilizing the keyword to find sets of matching plans, specs, addenda, so on and so forth. And this is now telling you, hey. I have a number of matches in those bid documents for concrete. I can look at those matches. It will help me maybe qualify or disqualify a job. So, really, the whole idea of ConstructConnect project intelligence is speeding up your process. Right? If I come in to where these matching documents are found and see that, yes, and it does have concrete on it, but it's not what I do within that five seconds, I already know it's not the scope of work that I am specifically looking for. Can go on to the next one versus maybe some time that's being spent right now really looking through the entire set of documents or the entire scope for an hour or two hours and then finding it's not even the right fit. You can utilize keyword search to do that pretty instantly. So if we go through the process here, again, not gonna cover all of the filters or anything. I'll give you a a quick look through just to see what you've got there. It's all going to be related to what's the status of the project, what building vertical is it, what type of job is it, new construction, remodel, renovation, the total size, scope, value, so on and so forth. So whether you have a very broad scope that you're looking for or a very narrow scope that you're looking for, we have the tools to help you make better decisions faster. So as we're going through looking at ConstructConnect with the whether this is your first time looking at it or you're a long time customer, there are tools in here for you in commercial construction to really build that process out and save your time. Because if we're saving your time, we're saving your money as well. Now I wanna talk just a little bit for our general contractors just for a second. Here. I know we've been talking about project information, company information, so on and so forth. ConstructConnect also has a bid management tool that is very useful for you specifically on the market growth. Maybe if you're a GC that's tapping into a new state or you know a a certain project that is really up your alley, you already know that you don't have the coverage that you would normally have for those subcontractors. You can tap into ConstructConnect's bid management to find subcontractors that are actively raising their hand and saying, hey. I bid on projects that are these specific trades that I have covered in this area. And it's a very simple process. They're not gonna cover a lot of the heavy details. We're gonna use just a project as an example here because it works all the same for everybody. If I come into here, I look at this based on the bid timeline, the size, the scope on the GC, I need to find subs. All you have to do is copy the project. So it's a a click of a button. A copy is the project timeline, the broad scope of work, the trades, the documents that we have available here as well, and it creates your invitation to bid for you. At which point you can go ahead and start adding subcontractors and soliciting for bids. This gives you potentially an untapped resource. Maybe right now you're using an Excel spreadsheet of the people you've worked with for the last fifteen years, but you already know that, hey. This project is in an area. I already know I don't have this coverage for it. We will help you find that coverage. So, again, using ConstructConnect in a couple of different ways, whether you're a general contractor or a subcontractor, to make sure we're helping you identify the right opportunities to bid on to grow your business, maybe helping you find that one or two extra subcontractors so that you are not behind the ball a couple days before bid date. And then a little bit about takeoff too, we'll we'll talk just briefly for that. We do have a couple of different takeoff softwares through ConstructConnect being PlanSwift and on screen takeoff. Our documents can be pushed there. So you've all probably seen the button here. We'll go back into the the view documents as this example. You can open these set of plans and with OST or PlanSwift. So if you take the documents, maybe it's just a couple of plans that you need because you're a subcontractor concrete guy. All you need is the concrete and the foundation plans. You can send those right to OST or PlanSwift. Your general contractor, maybe you need the whole scope. You can send them straight there. So the cool thing is our content team behind this information has already formatted and organized these documents for you to, again, make that process smooth, fast, and easy. You don't need to worry about naming the documents, organizing them, putting page numbers in them. You click the button to OSC or PlanSwift, whichever one you're using, it's going to send those documents directly to that take off software so that you guys are already getting your bid out the door before your potential competitor has even known the job is there. So the the whole idea with ConstructConnect, even though there are several resources that exist outside of ConstructConnect, is consolidating this, making that a one stop shop. You find your information. You're ahead of the game because you found it a few days earlier than you might right now. You have it connected with OST. Your plan, so if your bid has started. So as we're we're wrapping up, just a a brief overview of ConstructConnect Project Intelligence, a little bit about bid management and some of our connections to our takeoff softwares. We have the resources that you need right now to be able to make sense of the senseless. So instead of having to keep track of different government agencies or different private entities, we consolidate all of that for you. We have a team of real human beings in our content reporting team that chases this information down for you so that you do not have to. Using ConstructConnect project intelligence gives you the tools to do whatever you want. Right? Set up your own filters, run your keywords, manage your process however you want to, whether you're one person doing this from start to finish or you're the person finding it, you need to share it with a colleague. We have tools built in for collaboration for all of our customers in here. So the the big points that we've hit today is is through the project search. With project search, you could set up daily emails. So if I were to show you how that works, come into here, you could set it as a default search if that's the one you're using all the time. You can set it up to send you an email report every morning because if you're on the road all the time and you don't have time to just be in front of a computer, nobody really has bad time. So we'll alert that for you. So you can set up a number of different searches that are really your top priority to come automatically your way. Save those. You never have to go through the process of checking the filter boxes or typing in keywords again. Do it one time. You're pretty much set from that standpoint. Through our markets, we we have coverage throughout all of North America, so The US and Canada. Whether you're in a small locality, you only service a couple counties around your business, great. We'll find that for you. You cover several states, the entire country, a specific reason, great. We're go region. We're going to find everything for you. Use those searches the way that you need to to know where your priorities are. For the contacts, be able to to track your companies, whether it's just people that you already work with and wanna make sure that you're involved with everything they do or new ones. Maybe you just use ConstructConnect and saw a name that you like. It could be as simple as that that company name. I like the name of the company. I wanna work with them. We'll connect you in every way possible, both from projects and companies and building new relationship relationships. So Project Intelligence is great for project managers, estimators, business development reps, really anybody that's in the business of bidding commercial construction. Doesn't matter what part of the process you're in. We have a tool for you within Project Intelligence to be connected with your colleagues, be able to connect outside of your direct company with new companies. And with that, I think, Amanda, we have something that we are going to drop into the chat. Alright. I think I just saw a pop up. Sorry. It might be a delayed for just a second here. If anything that I covered here today looks beneficial for you or if you're already using it, maybe I gave you more questions than answers today. We have a page that you can visit that will get you connected with the right person with the right department to have you taken care of. And, Young, I think I'm passing it back to you. To be able to, get more information from that. As I promised earlier, we're gonna have polls. Here's another poll coming up. Which one of these features do you see as most beneficial? And as the poll pops up, I'd like y'all to answer, please. Take fifteen seconds and answer those. We're asking, whether you like customized saved searches, expanding, into new markets, project contacts for building relationships, and, better project data and documents. We'll give it a few more seconds while everybody's popping in the poll, and Amanda will display the results here momentarily. Pretty exciting, Zach, with everything we talked about there. You know, you kinda touched up on some of the highlights of everything, but, great job with that again. So with that being said, it looks like we've got a pretty good mix. 18 votes for customized saved searches, 10 votes for expanding to new markets, 45 votes, project contacts for building relationships. Love that. And then, of course, 29 votes for better project data and documents. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Alright. With that, I'm going to pass this over to Kelsey. We have our special guests, both Brad and Orion, joining us for a little q and a on how ConstructConnect Bot Intelligence, helps their business. So with that, Kelsey, are you ready? I'm ready, Young. Thanks so much. Excellent. K. Awesome. Hi, everyone. My name is Kelsey Hart, and I work here at ConstructConnect. I've been at ConstructConnect for nine years, and my role at this time is I find customers great customers like Brad and Orion who are here on stage with me right now, who have, successful experiences with ConstructConnect and try to highlight those experiences to make sure that you know that ConstructConnect works, not just because we say it works, but from firsthand experiences from Brad and Orion. So, Brad and Orion, thank you so much for joining me today. Absolutely. Happy to be here. Thank you for having us. Awesome. Awesome. So firstly, I just want to know who are you and what is your role and where do you work? So, Brad, why don't you kick us off? Okay. Well, good morning. I guess, good afternoon depending on where you're at. But, so fellow contractors out there, but, I'm Brad Latham, president of Diversified Construction. I've been in the industry basically my whole life. I was raised in this, and I've done almost every role in construction you can patch in. So, so, yeah, that that's where I'm at. I'm I'm at this stage, I'm the president. I'm heavily involved in the estimating and the project, the upfront part of things. So and alright. At one point, Brad, didn't you do physical construction yourself? I did. Yeah. In the floors, digging ditches, running bobcats, skid steers, hammer forming, pouring concrete, all of it. So everything. Like, really everything. We've seen every part of the building being built. So I'm great to have you. Orion, let's hear from you. Hi. My name is Orion Ledesma, and I'm the project coordinator for Diversified Construction. And, I have a background in mathematics, and I I've been with Diversified for a couple of years now. And, it's it's a it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Absolutely. We're so grateful. So we have a really cool experience here between both Brad and Orion from the same company. Brad, as the pen president of the company, oversees ConstructConnect from a higher level, but Orion is what we like to call a ConstructConnect, a power user. Everyone you've seen on stage today has been so, gassing Orion up in our practice sessions for these webinars about how much he uses construct connect project intelligence. So we're very lucky to have, both of them here today. So firstly, Brad, from your perspective, as the president, can you share how ConstructConnect supports your team and the work that you oversee? Absolutely. So I'm sure every company is going to be a little bit differently different, you know, depending on your size or how you're structured. But for us, you know, I I don't actually personally have a ConstructConnect account. It's Orion and some of the other team members. I've got a lot going on. So regularly, probably every other day or sometimes more often, Orion will bring me a project. Usually, he prints it off from ConstructConnect. He gives me an opportunity to to review it, look at it. You know, if I'm not in the office, he'll just email it to me. And and there's another guy in our office, Skip. He does that as well. And so we discuss it and we say, yay, nay. You know, is this a good fit? You know, we'll look at it. Maybe we'll go to the pre bid, maybe not. But that that's kind of our first line of discussion discussing how we're gonna handle it. And then we go from there from Orion taking the project and, reaching out to more subcontractors or putting it on our or for sure to bid list. Great. Thanks for that. And, and, Orion, can you walk us through how ConstructConnect fits into your day to day workflow? Yeah. Sure. So when I get to the office, well, first things I do is get a cup of coffee and open ConstructConnect and literally go through the new the new jobs. I filter I use a little filter that Zach was talking about where we can filter the new jobs out and see what's been posted over the past day or two days, however long. And then I go through all of our watch list projects and make sure that there's, you know, if there's any updates to the projects, to the pre bid or to the site visit or, the due date, anything like that. And that kind of gives me that sets my day up and, lets me know what I'm gonna need to do for the rest of the day. That's great. Alright. You know, if you're not the only ConstructConnect products intelligence user that says that they start their morning off with a cup of coffee and CCPI. I I'm guessing and we'll get to this. I'm guessing it takes about the same amount of time to finish your cup of coffee as you're going through all of those projects at Project Leads in the morning. So it's just a a good a good start to your day, get you set up on the right foot. So Yeah. Thanks for sharing. So we've we've heard a lot about all the successes that ConstructConnect products intelligence can bring you. But we we totally understand that prior to using CCPI, you might have faced some challenges that you were looking for ConstructConnect products intelligence, which I'll also be saying CCPI, to solve. So, Brad and Orion, can you share some challenges you faced prior to using CCPI? Yeah. We just didn't have the the access to as many subcontractors and the ease of finding the projects as quickly. It's because because we used to have, a subscription with iSquareFoot, and it was a free version, and then there was another free version of a different ConstructConnect. And now that we're in the paid version, it just makes it so much more streamlined and faster and and more accessible. The the access to subcontractors has been, been really handy. It's been it's it's really helped us with confidence knowing that we're getting all of the bids out there that we need to get for certain scopes of work. Yeah. And, to add to that, you know, I I was before, I was going through, like, all the city websites, all the different government websites to to try to find all the bids, and ConstructConnect has done a really good job of getting all of those projects into one spot. And so, you know, and and other, entities can post their projects onto ConstructConnect and and just start right there. So really, it's really nice to just have everything in one spot. Yeah. And sometimes we'll get, you know, an architect or an engineer that we work with. You know, they'll call us, hey. Are you guys bidding on this project? And, you know, before we would have to reach out to, you know, city of Tulsa or whatever it was and and get on their website and and do all of that legwork, on our own. And sometimes that could take a long time, then you've gotta pay the deposit for the plan. It's just it's very cumbersome. And then this way, sometimes when they call us and tell us that there's a project on you know, that's out for bid, we already know about it. I mean, it's it's very quick. ConstructConnect is really quick about getting those projects on the website so that so that we can see what's come what's coming up. That's great. Yeah. That peace of mind knowing that you only have one site to check rather than, like you said, Orion, the hundreds of municipality websites, that that just sounds like a big stress. Yeah. I had so many, like, saved bookmarks and tabs and everything like that. I'd have to go through every single day. Yeah. You have so much more room on your toolbar now. Yes. Yeah. For all the places that Brad can take you out to lunch, you got all your menus kinda saved there. I'm at school right now. Then, next question is, what hesitations, if any, did you have prior or trying, trying ConstructConnect? I know you said you started off with a free license, which allows you some capabilities and and access into some projects. But, obviously, it takes that extra step to commit to a full, subscription. So what hesitations did you guys have? Well, for me, you know, in our role, there's somebody's always heading us up for some subscription. You know, if we sub if we picked up every subscription that we get solicited for, we can't utilize them all. We don't wanna pay for them all. So I just I didn't want the the to spend the money, and I didn't want something that was burdensome. I didn't want to spend this money, and then we feel like we're obligated to spend hours on it a day. You know, we we wanna spend money that makes us more efficient. And so this is money that that allows us to to streamline things and go quicker, not slow things down, which was very important to me. Yeah. We had, you know, obviously, the the price coming up front was gonna be it it need to be important. It need to be worth it. And, you know, also with the limited access that we did have, we just didn't know if it was gonna be able to give us the right jobs at first, you know, the right types of projects. And once we got into it a little bit more, we're able to to really narrow it down and and look for the types of projects that we like to do. Great. So when you were in the ConstructConnect platform, after you made that commitment to get a subscription, and I'm wondering how you saw those concerns play out. So specifically starting out with price, do you think that ConstructConnect is giving you that return on investment that you made? I do. Because, honestly, it really only takes one project for it to pay for itself. Because, you know, just yeah. Exactly what I said. One project can pay for itself because the swings in cost and estimating can be huge. And so and I know that we picked up at least, you know, two or three projects by having ConstructConnect because we've had better access to subcontractors and projects that we just wouldn't have had before. So it's it's definitely paid for itself. That's great. I think Orion shared that you might have even secured a project just this morning that you found out the truck. We did. We did that, last week, and we were excited that we we were successful. And we it was so the project was a little outside of our normal geographic area. Not really far, but it was far enough that a lot of our subcontractors that we normally utilize wouldn't go that far. And we were able to use, ConstructConnect to to contact and to find local subcontractors. And those local subcontractors are the ones that we use for this bid. So, this exact project was a we may have not gotten the project without ConstructConnect. Well, great job, Orion. I know that was you. Good job. Absolutely. Yeah. The example. And then the other side of it is we we've also, created a project on a room, that was given to us by an engineer that he can can you do this? And it was out of state. So we don't really it was I think it was in Texas, and we we didn't really know a whole lot of contractors in that area. So, we're able to create a project and and search for local subcontractors in the specific range, to know exactly what I was talking about earlier, and we were able to to complete that job as well. So that in itself was was another win. That's great. It's like the world's most convenient billboard. You can just post the project up there and get those, sub bids right in. So I'm happy to hear that was that was successful for you. So congratulations. Sounds like you're getting a lunch After that. So And then, oh, Ryan, since you're the power user, I'd love to know about the learning curve that it took to use ConstructConnect. Did it take you very long to kind of understand the ins and outs? Obviously, Zach's an expert. He ran through those software really quickly, but we'd love to hear from your perspective starting from scratch, your experience. Yeah. Well, I I don't have a whole lot of construction background to begin with, but I do have a little bit of computer savvy. So, getting into this website, I was kind of worried just that I would not know, like, what all these different terms mean and stuff like that. And and as I've gone, I may look I will just explore the whole website and click on every button and go through every little note and cranny. What does this do? What does this do? And and just kinda mess with it and take that time, to get to get to know it and see what works with for me and, how I like to search for projects and look at projects and things like that. So, I like I like the feature to be able to customize everything according to, you know, how I've done. And I've actually learned something today watching Zach's presentation. It was Yeah. It was pretty neat. That's awesome. What did you learn? That part where you could copy a project and and take that, take that project to help create a new one and search yeah. So that copy project, I think I'm definitely gonna use that. So thanks, Zach. Yeah. This is I think this is a good time to mention that all, ConstructConnect training is free. So if you have a subscription to ConstructConnect and you need an additional training, like Zach said, if he gave you more questions than answers, we're here to help you. We have a stellar training team to help. So if Orion, a power user, can learn something in just a five minute demo, imagine They construct you with surprisingly quick to answer and help. I think well, Ron, was was it that Texas project that was our first time to set up our own internal project? Mhmm. Probably next week, we'll do it. Because that was new territory for us. We haven't done that. And Yeah. The team was very helpful with that. Yeah. Put it out there, put the specs on there, and then the subcontractors in that area. And we can actually see what, users are able what how the more responsive users. So we can say, okay. These guys are gonna at least give us an answer yes or no, whether they're gonna bid on it or not. And so I wanna definitely reach out to those guys because we like to have an answer and not just, you know Yeah. Expand it more. So Yeah. Absolutely. That's yeah. That extra visibility just into are they seeing this? Are they going to respond? Are they likely to respond? I I can imagine how helpful that is for you. Sure. Yeah. And, so then I'm wondering, do you think ConstructConnect has provided you projects that fit your company's needs and, you've been able to find those jobs that you maybe worried that you wouldn't be able to find when you started with us? Yeah. Definitely. We we found Wilburton. There's a a Wilburton Airport project that we won, within the past month or so, and, we did not have any access to that job at all, other than non construction. It popped up and we said, hey. Let's go after this one. And so, we do win that one, so it's perfect. Mhmm. Great. That's great. Then I'm I'm also curious. Has we we kind of talked about it a little bit about ConstructConnect, increasing your visibility in the market. I think you were mentioning how maybe this product you just received this morning, you were able to find subs out in different states. Can can you kinda speak to that a bit about how it's helped you kind of expand your network in that way? Yeah. Like you mentioned, it's increases our our visibility. Our name is out there more often now. It's you know, the interface is is better so that the subcontractors can see us. And so our name is out there more often. And then like we talked about, you know, we we knew that we needed a dirt work prod a dirt work subcontractor and a steel contractor for this project that we just won, which is up in Northwestern Oklahoma. And, like I said, we we just wouldn't have had access to those subs had we gone. Yep. They're they're able to see it, reach out to us. You know, we've had other contractors, subcontractors that would that follow our company and, you know, say, oh, they're going after this one. Let's let's bid with them. And, you know, we we build better relationships with these with these guys because they know we're we're trying to work hard and we're trying to do a good job on these projects. So, you know, we we definitely build that, cohesiveness within our group. That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. So we're down to our final two questions. The second to last question is, what would you say is the most valuable benefit that you discovered after using ConstructConnect project intelligence? For me, it's it's I I don't wanna take a big risk on a project. You know, if we have a project that is I only have one sub number or none at all, and I have to get, you know, particular line item or I have to just have faith that that one subcontractor that we got a number from that I don't I may not even know is is an accurate number. That that's a risk that, you know, keeps me up at night. So if if we end up with two or three numbers or it's somebody that we know is just having that confidence that the numbers that I'm turning in are accurate and reliable because that's you know, it's a risky business that we're in. It's a difficult business, and the less risk we have, the the better off we are. So that that's where it helps me out the most is making sure that our numbers are solid on this day. Great. Great. Well, thank you for that. And then, our final question here is what advice might you give to someone on this webinar here today or someone who's interested in trying to expand their business? I'd love to hear from you guys what you think would be helpful. I'll let you take that one, Ryan. So everybody's everybody's learned about AI and how much AI changes the the game, and it's changing every aspect of of life nowadays. And that along with AI, you have the Internet and computers. And everybody that is gonna be on this platform is gonna continue to grow. And if you're not using something to, some sort of a management tool, then you're gonna fall behind. It's it just it is it is how it is. You can't be you can't do pencil and paper anymore or, you know, just basic, basic tools. So you're definitely gonna fall behind. And, you know, you really since everything's in one spot on this for us, you know, we're we're working smarter and not harder, that that anecdote that everybody always says, but it really is true. It does it does help and, you know, definitely recommend. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I've actually heard it said that AI or technology is not likely to replace your job, but someone using AI or technology, someone using it is likely to replace your job. So that's kind of what you were mentioning, Orion, is, you know, these tools are here to help. We're here to make you more efficient, save you more time, whether that's to bid on the next job, whether that's to add in another project or get in another bid, or if it's to just spend more time outside of the office. That's that's kind of what we need these tools to do, and that's what their purpose is. So I'm glad you found that. Yeah. As a construction company, you have to have some sort of bid management. You just don't have a choice. Once you once you have it, you you can't go back. It's it's a lifesaver. And in our opinion, construction, that's the best one. Well, thank you so much. I I can't hear anyone else, but I'm gonna give you a round of applause. And I think all of the other hundreds of attendees are clapping as well. So thank you so much for, for for doing this q and a with me and for sharing your experience. I'm gonna invite you to stay on stage for for a larger portion of q and a with, some questions we received, but thank you guys so much. Okay. Thanks, Kelsey. Yeah. Thank you. Alright. Such a great story. Wasn't that great again? From Radnorine. You know, there's another I've been posted in the chat if you like some more project intelligence, and see how we can help grow your business. So feel free to visit us and connect, for your own ConstructConnect walk through. Alright. We've got everybody on the panel, we've got Zach, Brad, Ryan, Kelsey, and myself for a little open q and a. We've got a lot of questions and a lot of, we have a lot of we have a highly inquisitive audience here. I love it. I love it. Alright. We're just gonna go through a couple of these questions. Any questions that we don't get to, we'll definitely reach out and get you some answers. But we've got so many here, and looking at time, we've got some time to answer some. Just, wanted to start with the first one. Zach, this one's for you. We have AI as a tool to collect initial project information and human verifying and updating the content with conversations to project owners. Who actually updates the contents of the projects? Yeah. So it I mean, it is both. Right? We we do utilize AI to make sure that we are able to capture everything that is hitting every source that we're able to get our hands on. The big separator from for ConstructConnect from a lot of companies is that we have people verifying that. So you have somebody to go back through and make sure, is this information accurate? Is it updated? Is it what our customers actually need? So the multistep process from our content team, I in my over seven years here, I can't plug them enough. They they have saved a lot of our customers and myself from time to time with customers, just making sure that we have humans behind the information that's being put out. Excellent. Excellent. Alright. Well, this one goes to Kelsey, Brad, and Ryan. For someone who isn't as tech savvy, what training options are available? Sure. Well, I think you could start off just by clicking every button available. That's what Orion did. That's that's option one. K? That takes very little communication with the ConstructConnect team. You can click on every single button. You're not gonna break the product, and you're not going to charge your company more money by clicking on any button. But all of the training that ConstructConnect product intelligence offers is free. We have webinars. We've got knowledge based articles that you can learn if you're more of a reader, and we have great trainers. You'll have to go on to our, Google at some point in time and check out our reviews about all of our amazing trainers. So that's what I would encourage. Orion, have you ever attended a training or are you truly just from your gut, knew what to do? So I actually, did, a little bit of training on the website, but, you know, we once we, paid for the subscription, then we got an account manager. And, they she and the lady and then another I had two ladies, and they really helped me learn a lot of things. It has a lot I had a lot of questions at first. And so and I was like, how do I do this? I I just email them, and then they would respond and say you can you can do it this way or, you know, you they they gave a lot of suggestions and helped me out quite a bit actually initially. So, the the account managers, there is definitely a human side to this behind behind the scenes. Yeah. I love that you mentioned that because if you, sign up with ConstructConnect and you have a subscription with us, you will be assigned a customer success manager like Zach. Maybe you'll get Zach. You'd be very lucky to do so. But all of our CSMs at ConstructConnect are amazing. So you will have that human person with their direct phone line and their email address that you'll be able to contact and, address all of your questions, comments, and concerns. Excellent. Next question is for Zach. Why wouldn't I go to a free public government site? Great question. So I think we heard in the testimonial with Brad and Orion that you can. Right? That that is an avenue that you can use, but what it becomes the matter of is your time. So are you spending your time going to the several government agencies that you need to where we can consolidate all of that information into one place and typically have it earlier than you would when it goes to that public agency? So I I'm never gonna discourage you from using all resources that you possibly can to make sure your business is successful, but we're here to make that process easier for you. And one additional point to that is if you go to these municipality sites, you might have to pay to have access or fill out complicated forms to get access to those construction documents, plans, and specs. With your subscription to ConstructConnect, you get those documents, included if you have that kind of subscription. So, you wouldn't have to go scouring the Internet with all these plans and specifications, and you wouldn't have to pay those fees. In fact, you'll see the dollar amount, next to those plans and specs if they did have a fee. Let's say there were $600. That's a $600 savings that you had by using ConstructConnect instead of going to one of those kinds of websites. Excellent. Excellent. This one's for Zach. How does this help me with my takeoff? I'm man, I'm popular. I'm yeah. And I'm I'm popular. Everyone wants to ask me questions. So I I did I highlighted it a little bit with some of the connections that we have to our OSC and plans with. But, ultimately, helping you and your takeoff, it's gonna cut the time out from the beginning. Right? You can open the set of plans using project intelligence to really qualify that job just by looking at it. Because everybody here has got experience breeding a set of plans, knowing if it's worth the time to do a full bid and a full estimate on. So by having that set of resources early to you and then utilizing the connections that we have with OST and PlanSwip, it takes care of your process start to finish. Finding the job, finding it earlier than your competition, having access to the bid documents and reading those faster than somebody else can. And, hey, if you're using us, then you just push a button and your documents are already over there for you. That sounds excellent. Zach, another one for you. How is CCPI different from CMD Insight? Short answer is it isn't. So Insight was a a product through the different mergers that we had when we became ConstructConnect. So at a certain point, they were different. The information between the two is the same right now. So what you find on Insight, you can find on Project Intelligence and vice versa. I'll say, really, the the biggest change there is that there are some tools in Insight that if you're a supplier, manufacturer, manufacturer, manufacturer's rep more really looking through finding specific products on a specific job, that's where insight has some things built into it that ConstructConnect project intelligence will in the future. So that's why we have both systems right now. Excellent. Excellent. Here's something pretty specific. Zach, are you ready to kinda look for something regarding, finding new clients that they Yep. Haven't worked with previously? Sure. Let's do it. Alright. The question is looking for ease finding new clients we have not worked with previously. How easy is filtering the specific companies and or specific jobs within ConstructConnect? Oh, I mean, it's really easy. Do you want me to share my screen real quick? Sure. If you would. If I don't mind doing that at all. So run me through the question one more time, Young, so I can address it exactly the way it was asked. Sure. The question is looking for ease finding new clients they have not worked with. I would imagine this question is ease. What's the ease of filtering to specific companies and or specific jobs? Cool. So, you have two buttons right here at the top. So you've got projects and companies. So those those two buttons are relatively self explanatory. Right? Are you looking to focus on the job? Great. We focus on the job. We can grab one right here. When we go to that project details page that I highlighted a little bit earlier, you scroll down a little bit. You'll see the company information for that job. Right? So your owners, your engineers, GCs, architects, anybody that's involved in the project at the time that we have it posted. Then if your focus is on those companies, we just change this. Right? We don't wanna look for the specific project to find the company on it. We wanna look for the companies and then find what they're working on. When we toggle over to companies, you can define it by a couple of different ways, the company role and the location of the companies. So if for this example, we're looking for a GC and we're looking for them, the only postal code I know is mine. So I'm just gonna put 50 miles in Milford, Ohio, shameless plug. There's one Tom Plummer again, which is based out of my backyard, basically, but really easy to do. You can look at the project focus or the company focus. So if we wanted to look at a and a safety, we have all of the company information housed right here, the individual contacts, what they've been doing this year as little snapshot for the portfolio, and then what they've done or what they are doing, planning, bidding, and post bid. So it's it's the toggle of two buttons right there depending on what your focus is at the time. That seems pretty weird. I like that. It can't be that easy, can it? Oh, it can. I I mean, I know I've done this for a long time, but it is that easy. And if you can't find the buttons, we'll show you where they are. Absolutely. Alright. I've got one final question before we wrap up the the q and a. Sorry, Brad and Ryan. Your q and a was so awesome. It's like you must have answered everybody's questions on the panel. So we got one final search question. This is interesting. The client says we have a niche product, LED video wall specifically, and we don't see our product often on the site. How do we rectify that or how do we get that information? Yeah. So, I can share my screen. I could do that real quick if we want to or talk about it at a high level. I think in the interest of time, I I don't think I'm gonna share the screen yet just to make sure that we can address anything else that comes in. But we do have a keyword search that can be done in several different places. So we would definitely wanna make sure that we're doing the keyword search through documents when you're looking through a product type there. And we've gotta get creative sometimes. So maybe the exact phrase that you're looking for, it can show up in a different fashion or it can show up with different words around it. So working directly with your customer success manager, probably a really good place to start to make sure that we have the full picture of of what you're trying to find. And if maybe it's a territory thing. Right? Maybe in your locality, it's not spec'd in the same way it is the rest of the country. We could talk about maybe expanding that to make sure that we're capturing it everywhere it could be found. Yeah. And I think I think it's important to know what spec that what spec section that falls under as well. Because a lot of times, the engineers that put the projects onto ConstructConnect, they don't, they don't mark the right spec section. So, it's it ConstructConnect does help with that as well. So I think it's important to know which spec section you your your, niche falls under. That's cool enough. Yeah. I I yeah. I I like work I we all like working with niche contractors. Right? If we if you can't find it, we're gonna do whatever we can to find it for you. Excellent. Alright. We are wrapping up. Thank you so much, Brad, Orion, for joining us today. This is a special treat, and we love to see the, the product in action with with actual clients and, get get your perspective. Thank you so much for joining us today. And Zach, thank you again. But, again, I promise polls. We've got, another survey, to bring up. I know we covered things at a very high level. If you need more personalized views of project intelligence, feel free to respond, and we'll reach out to you. But, the poll is about to drop here, and feel free to take the next ten, fifteen seconds to answer that. Alright. Alright. We got some great answers, and it looks like we are looking to get more information. Here we go. A lot of people like to learn more. That was cool, and I'll keep an eye out for your emails. Love that. And then, a fair amount wanted more information on takeoff. That's, excellent there. Excellent. Alright. Now we are on to wrapping things up here. We are asking you to fill out a survey before the end of the session. Feel free to fill that out. It's a quick survey. We'd love to hear back from you. And then, again, click the docs tab for more resources, from ConstructConnect. Wanna tell you guys about some upcoming free events to wrap things up. We've got continued learning, bid like a boss. It's a weekly series. Academy bid day, talking about the full suite of pre construction tools. Another webinar, the future of takeoff and estimating with AI, and, of course, economics. We've got a great construction economy outlook, coming up this fall. So feel free to join us there. We'd love to see you. Again, we'd love to have you become a ConstructConnect champion as well like Brad and Ryan. We'd love to gain visibility, credibility, and industry recognition. So if you're interested in becoming, a ConstructConnect champion, feel free to email us at customeradvocacy@constructconnect.com or type champion in the chat to learn more. With that being said, thank you so much for joining us today. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, but we'll call that a wrap. And thank you so much again. That's all, folks.