Name: Win Bids Before the Paint Dries: How Painters Find Projects and Finish Takeoffs Faster
Uploaded: 2026-02-24T19:30:04.774Z
Duration: 59 min 40 s
Description: Win Bids Before the Paint Dries: How Painters Find Projects and Finish Takeoffs Faster

Transcript for "Win Bids Before the Paint Dries: How Painters Find Projects and Finish Takeoffs Faster": Awesome. Thank you. Alright. I'm gonna share my screen. And I apologize. My computer got a little stuck there. Hi, everybody. My name is Christina Rodriguez, and I work here at ConstructConnect, and I'm a product manager. So I'm super excited to be here today to show you how our ConstructConnect product intelligence can save you time in finding projects. So today, that's exactly what I'm gonna show you how to do is how to search for some painting projects. So everybody should see my ConstructConnect search page here. So just know when we first come into ConstructConnect and start a search, you're sitting on a ninety day filter. So you can see you have a lot of projects. That's a lot of projects to go through. We have a lot of useful tools here at ConstructConnect to narrow these down to exactly what you're looking for. So when I come in here, you'll notice I have a lot of different filters over here on the left panel. So these are gonna be your best friend some of your best friends. We also have some other tools that'll be your friends too. But just to start off, you know, again, I don't wanna come in here and see every project. So maybe I'm looking to fill my bucket with, like, projects bidding in the next thirty days. So you're gonna notice one thing that is Okay. Hopefully, you can hear me? Okay. Awesome. Can any alright. So hopefully, you heard that I selected bidding projects, and I apologize for the the mic issues here. But like I was saying, I don't know if you heard about the location filter, but I can narrow down my results based on location. So you do have a service area in your profile that you set up during your onboarding. You can also do it by city or postal code if you want, and you can also choose counties or states. So I'm gonna do it based off my service area, which I'm located in Ohio. I do have some other areas, but you can see here that my results are dropping as I filter. One of the important things for you guys as being a trade, being in painters trade sorry, got a little thrown off there I can select trades. So you'll notice I have a little trades option here. If I click Browse Trades, I have all the divisions. But I don't have to go through those and search them, even though I know I want to go to division nine. I can type in paint, and it will display everywhere that paint is. So if I go to division nine, I can choose painting and coding. You do have, I guess, obviously exterior painting if you wanted it, but I'm gonna just pick on finishes today. So I'm gonna go ahead and click apply, and again, as I choose those, it's gonna narrow it down even more. So now, if I feel like this is a good search, I could start scanning through these projects by simply clicking on the project name. So one cool thing you'll notice that when I come in here is I have a lot of information. I have all the project details with the location. I have description of the project. You'll also notice I have a button here called ask documents, which I'll get into here in a minute. You also have the ability to download and view projects, and obviously send your project to takeoff. A few other useful things that are on here again are the project description. If we keep going down, we'll see all the contacts on the project, designers, bidders, plan holders. But my favorite button here, and it might be because it's newer button, is the ask documents feature. So what's really cool about this is that when you click on it, what it's gonna do is it's going to I'm gonna ask it a question, and it's gonna search the specifications and any words on the plans. So I can ask it what type of painting is on here. So once we do that, it's gonna let you know it's thinking. Again, it's searching through all specifications, and if anything on the plans is written out about paint, it will read that as well. And here we go. So here it'll tell you where the paint type is. If it actually has the exact paint codes, that will be listed, which I'll show you on another project. But one thing when you're using this tool is that if you do find it useful, we actually have some feedback buttons here that we would like for users to click on because all your feedback drives what we do on ConstructConnect. So, hey, if you get the right answer, give us a thumbs up. If you're like, not really the right answer, well, you can provide us that feedback by clicking the thumbs down, and you'll notice we have a feedback option here. We have some standards here, but we also have a box where you can type it out, so that way you could tell us exactly what was wrong with that answer. And again, we take this feedback and we're just improving this. Now Ask Documents is using generative AI, but it's only looking at specifications and plan documents. It's not like a chat GPT where it's like learning from you. It's strictly just giving you answers based off the documents. Some other tools that you can use once you're in a project, let's say you like this project, you want to follow it, you have your little star icon up here which will allow you to watch this project. When you watch projects, what happens when there's any updates on these is you'll actually get an email notification, and those settings are underneath your name on the top right. If you go to notifications, can turn them on. But again, it's really useful because if I'm super interested in this project, if an addenda comes out and I wanna be aware of that, when I track it, I'll get those email notifications about it. Some other useful things that are on here is we do, again, have the design team, the bidders list, and plan holders. Well one cool thing with ConstructConnect is, let's say you like this project, you move it to takeoff, you do your takeoff, you're ready to submit your bids. You can actually submit your bids within ConstructConnect. So if you click on the submit bid button, it'll pick up all the bidders that are on the project. You can type in your dollar amount, you can put a description, and then you can attach those documents as well. Once you've checked off who it's going to and filled out that information, you can click review submission. It allows you just to preview what you're going to send, and then you'll click send, and those bids will go to those general contractors. They'll get an email with your documentation, and they'll also know exactly what project you're bidding on. So these are just some really super useful tools. But since I did watch this project, if I wanted to check on those projects and, you know, I'm like, hey, where are they at? Well, there's a little star icon over here that says watch projects. So if I come over here and go to my watch project list, you can see I have all the different projects here. So watching them is not the only way. I'm gonna show you another way so that you don't have to keep recreating searches. But I do wanna go into this Home Depot project, and just show you that with the Ask Documents, and I wanna say this one has a lot of paint, type of paint. And you don't have to be, like, super descriptive with your question. You can kinda be super generic. It's pretty smart that it'll go through. And again, if there's paint codes, it will list every paint code, the paint manufacturer like Sherman Williams or PPG, so you will have that information there. And again, we're always gonna let you know it's thinking. Well, it is thinking. This is a bigger project, so yeah, here we go. So you can see that it calls out all the paint, and here are the painting codes. So it actually tells you the color, who the manufacturer is. So again, just gives you a lot of detailed information. And you can ask follow-up questions. If you wanna ask another question in this session, you can just keep asking, and it'll just keep answering you. So if you wanted to narrow it down a little bit more, you could. So besides searching and tracking for projects, you can also save these searches. So if I came in here and I had created this great search, it's my painting search, it's bidding in the next thirty days, it's a bidding project, I can actually come up here and click on Save Search. So I'm gonna call this my painting search, if I can type today. The cool thing with saving a search is you can actually turn on email notifications. So if I click the little toggle here, it'll turn it on. And what happens every night is the system will scan through all new and updated projects, and if it hits on your search, in the morning you'll have an email with those list of projects. So it's really cool. You can also include a search tag. It's a color indicator, so here if I choose teal, it's gonna identify projects based on a tag, and I'll show you what it looks like here in a second. And if all I'm doing is paint, and I love this search a lot, I can actually set it as my default. So anytime I come into ConstructConnect and I go to search, that is gonna be the search that loads for me. So I'm gonna go ahead and click save. The page is gonna refresh because it did just create that for me. And hopefully I didn't make it too mad because I have a lot of search tags. But what you'll notice here is that when it does create the search tag, you'll see this Home Depot project has four tags, is because four of my different searches actually match. So it's just an indicator, and if you hover over it, it actually tells you what searches. So getting four matches on one project is probably some project I really wanna look at or keep an eye on. So again, we can track that with tags as well. So key to coming in here with ConstructConnect Search is just really narrowing down those searches, figuring out, you know, the best searches that work for you, and saving them. You can also search documents. So if maybe you wanna do a specific keyword, you can do that. I'm gonna be super generic and put paint in on my search. I just wanna show you what it does real quick. When I put paint in, you'll notice here that I have matching documents now. And when I click on them, it'll actually open up our document viewer and highlight the words that it found. So you'll see here that it found three matching words, and there's painting. It highlighted them purple. So when you search, just know that you have this dropdown here. You can search for a specific name. Maybe you know a project that's out there already. You can click that, search for specific name, details, and documents. But just always keep in mind, if you have any other filters applied over here on the left, when it does a keyword, it's also including your filters too. So, you know, if you were looking for a specific project name, and you typed it in, you're like, I can't find it. I know it's out there, just check your filters. You may have to remove one, and then it should pop right up. But I just like to throw that out because when we do keyword searches, sometimes we don't always notice over here on the left rail that we're actually filtering out projects. So with that, just know that you have the availability to create searches, save searches, and we have all kinds of tracking tools that you can use, along with our new Ask Documents, which again, I personally love, that you can ask questions and kind of qualify projects quickly, you know. If you're looking for specific paint, you can ask, it'll tell you, and you can move on. One thing with Ask Documents is that anytime documents just became available, or maybe some new documents have been added, this button might be grayed out and you'll see it loading. It's just letting you know that we're processing the new documents, and that this will be available in a moment, because we're always trying to make sure that, you know, when you ask a question, we're looking at the most recent documents. So that's something new that might occur if you go on a project, you'll see it spinning, it's just because it's processing the new documents for you to be able to ask new questions. All right, and with that I hope you guys are asking questions in our chat that we will address. But with that, I will go ahead and throw it over to Blake to show you all about takeoff. Everyone? Hello? Hopefully, you can see and hear me. Alright. Getting thumbs up. Great. So once you've found that project in CCPI, like Christina showed you, I'm gonna show you how you can actually take that and get an estimate out there to bed with. So let me start by sharing my screen here, and we'll have a few different plans we can go through. Alright. Looks like my screen's pulled up here. So I have a few different, plans I'm gonna walk through with you just so you can see all of the capabilities and how Boost can help, really boost your workflow, as a painter. So what I'm looking at is a floor plan right now, and I know that most of you are probably not doing your takeoffs on a floor plan. This is just a really good example to show you of, everything that Boost can do from the capabilities perspective. I also have some reflected ceiling plans, that I'm gonna go through here too. So, what all can Boost take off? Pretty much everything that you see on this on this floor plan that you'll need, we'll walk through each one of these capabilities here. So we got the green takeoff boost button up here on the top right, and we have three different types of takeoff here. There's our area takeoff, linear, so things like walls, and then counts. So the footprint area is the first thing that we can select here. This will give you the takeoff of the entire square footage of the plan. So maybe you need just the whole square footage of any given plan page. That's what the footprint area will do. The net area will give you the square footage of each individual room. So maybe you're doing, like, epoxy flooring or something along those lines. That net area option will give you every piece of square footage for every single room. Ceilings, I'll show you on the next page next couple pages on how that works. And then walls, this is really geared towards those floor plans that they have the the symbols on there. But if you're doing your drywall drywall and painting takeoff, you could use this plan. Or sorry. You could use this option to identify those different wall types. So in this case, if you can see here, this is a square shaped symbol. I mean, we'll zoom in here in just a second. You can see what that looks like. It's also like square. It's gonna identify all of those walls. Painting will give you, two single sided walls. So this room will get a single sided wall. On the flip side of that wall, you'll get another single sided wall here. I mean, we can show you what that looks like. If if you're working on, like, a renovation or an addition, there's existing walls on the page. I don't have that here. But but if we did, you could use those identifying existing walls option, and that'll just do what it's exactly like what it says. It'll show you where all the existing walls are. It'll take those off separately so you can choose to either incorporate that as your overall square foot adjustment or just get rid of them completely if you want. And then a new option, which I am very excited to show you, is our default heights option. So this is one of the most requested things that we heard from talking with customers. This should be available later this week. What this will do is, essentially, like, what you see in project notes where it'll say something along the lines of all walls are eight foot high unless otherwise noted. That's pretty much exactly how this this height option works as well. So on this floor plan, let's just give everything eight foot high height here, and then we'll go on to our accounts. So I'll just select everything here to get all accounts and our windows here. Our windows have a shape as well. So if there's different window types, you can select the shape for that. And then we're gonna get things like doors, plumbing fixtures. There's no elevators on this plan, so I'll just uncheck that. But it's gonna give you the counts for all of those things. So I'm gonna pretty much run Boost on or run everything that you can with Boost on this page. Hit run here. And while that runs, we can we don't have to wait for the results. We can just go right on over to the next page. So on this page, I've got a reflected ceiling plan, which is where you're probably doing a lot of your takeoff both for walls and ceilings. That painting option works just as well on this reflected ceiling plan, but I'll show you how that works. Ceilings, that ceilings option, what it will do is identify these different ceiling types you've got here. So acoustical ceiling tile, gypsum board. If there's anything that doesn't fit those patterns, we'll just give you a generic ceiling condition. We'll separate that out from the other net areas condition so you've got your floors and your ceiling separated. And if there's tags and other things on there, we'll also identify those too, which I will show you as well. So I'm gonna do just a ceiling takeoff and a painting takeoff here so you can see what that looks like. It remembers our options from last time. So if you're doing a lot of pages at once, you don't have to select different options every time. It'll just remember what you chose. In this case, I'll select ceilings. There's no tags on this plan, so it's just ceilings. We'll do painting. Again, we'll give that default height option of eight foot high here, and we're not gonna do any counts. So I'm gonna run this here for this plane. And you can see Boost is already starting to populate all these conditions over to the side here. So these these are all the counts. The linear is the area is everything that we've done. But before I go over to that original takeoff, I'm gonna keep going here, keep plugging away at some of these other takeoffs that we're doing to show you some of these newer capabilities that we've got. So I've got another reflected ceiling plan here. You can see this one does have tags. So we got, like, a c one here, a c two. Maybe there's kind of a special gypsum finish, but it's also got the heights. So if you remember, like I was saying earlier, that default heights option acts as kinda like those project notes that you've seen before. What we'll do if you're doing your takeoff on a reflected ceiling plan and it's got these heights listed here, we will go ahead and assign the height of that wall to whatever height is here unless otherwise noted. So in this case, we'll give you the nine foot high ceilings, eight foot high, whatever it is. And let me start at Boost to show you what that looks like. And this is one of the newer options. So if you're if you're using Boost right now and you're like, hey. What the heck? I don't have that option. It's because it's coming later this week. So be on the lookout for that, and you will see it. So in this case, our ceiling tag is an oval shaped here. I'll select oval. We'll do our painting option again. We'll select default height. And you can see these are there there's already some eight foot walls here, nine foot walls here. So we'll just make something crazy ridiculous so you can see what the the actual default height looks like. These are some very tall ceilings, 20 foot high, and we'll run the option here. Alright. One last plan to show you, just some newer capabilities that were released last week, is the ability to detect out of scope or not in contract areas. So if you have these areas that, you know, it's kinda got this hatched pattern and it's out of scope, Boost will detect this pattern and automatically take that off separately so it's not getting mixed in with the rest of your takeoff. So I'm just gonna do a super basic area takeoff on this plan so you can see that. Alright. Now we've done all of our takeoff. Well, let's go back to that first plan page and step through everything that Boost has done in just those few seconds that we've been walking through this. So you can see there's obviously a lot of takeoff here. We don't need to sit there and try and sift through all of this. We're gonna automatically create these conditions for you as well. I'm gonna just turn off everything, and we'll just step through this one at a time starting with the biggest thing here, which is the footprint area. So like I mentioned, this is just giving you that full square footage of the entire floor plan here. We'll turn that off. We'll go over to our net areas. You can see it's breaking up that square footage by the rooms here, even, like, these tiny little rooms right here. It will also show. So you can see I've broken out that little closet right there. If there's a corridor here, it's break it's broken that out. So that's what the net areas will do. And then if I turn this off and go over to our walls, you'll see that it's actually assigning the types here. So, like, there's this f type, this wall type f. It's given us that default height as well for that sign or what's been assigned to here. Wall type b. Wall type b. You can see sometimes there's a little bit noise right here, so it didn't quite get this. Boost knows that there's still a wall here. Right? So it's still gonna do that takeoff, but it didn't assign it that b type like it should. So we'll just go over here and reassign it to the b type condition. And then I can show you what wall surface looks like. So if you're doing those single sided wall takeoffs, it's gonna give you that exact same takeoff, but now it's producing two single sided walls everywhere that you would see one. And if I select this, you'll see it's given that wall type, also the eight foot high, default height that we inputted in there. Alright. Last couple things on here is what the counts look like. So I'll turn on my windows and my count condition so you can see that. It's going through and it's counting everything that we selected. So you can see it's got all of these sinks. It's identified that this is actually a double door, that this is a single door, that this is a a window type a. And anytime it didn't find the type on the window, it'll just give it a generic window condition. So this is really useful if you wanna just make sure that you're kind of, like, deducting the back of where a mirror is gonna be on this sink or you need to do some kind of extra coats around a a toilet for moisture resistance or something like that. You can use these counts for that as well. So that's what all of the counts look like. Now let's step through some of those other plans that I showed. This first one is that reflected ceiling plan. And if you remember, we did just the ceiling takeoff and the wall surface for the two single sided walls. And you can see it's breaking this out into different ace conditions. So we've got our ACT condition here for the acoustical ceiling tile patterns, and then we've got this red condition for the gypsum wallboard. Now if you'll notice right here, like Natasha was saying, it's not gonna be perfect. Right? We do not expect it to be perfect on every single plan, but we do make it easy to edit these results. So in this case, I just need to tighten this up just a little bit right here, and you'll see that it didn't catch this gypsum soffit. So we'll just bring this out right here to where it should be, and we can break this up. So I've got this selected here. I can come over here and then easily just split that off and then select that and reassign it to the gypsum board condition that it should be. So definitely don't expect these results to be perfect, but they are definitely a lot faster than trying to do this on your own and just making those little edits there. Also so like I mentioned, we did the painting takeoff here, and so you'll notice that it's actually doing the single sided takeoff just as well as it would on the floor plan. You can do it on the reflected ceiling plan too. And then if I go over to that reflected ceiling plan that actually had the heights associated with it, you'll notice that it is taking off all of those heights automatically. So we've got this eight foot high room right here. It's I am it's identifying that wall type eight foot high. And you'll if you remember, I put 20 foot high on for the default height on this particular plan. So it is actually detecting this eight foot high right here wall. Same thing for this one, this nine foot high wall here. And it didn't doesn't look like it quite caught this nine foot high tag here, so it did assign it to that default 20 foot height. But all we gotta do is highlight these walls here and then just right click and reassign them to that nine foot high condition that they should be. So that's it's automatically detecting the the heights within the rooms. And then if it doesn't detect it, it'll just split it out into the heights that it should be. It's also identifying the tags on there to get the gypsum here too. So you'll see that this is a gypsum c two to follow that c two pattern. There's a it didn't quite catch the c one here. It just gave it the ACT condition. We got the c on this one and then this one, so we can just go through and select all of those and then reassign them over to the ACTC one condition or merge them whenever we might need to do there. And then the last thing that we've got is the out of scope detection like I was talking about. So we've got our plan here. Let me turn the net areas back on. And I just did net areas. We didn't detect ceilings or anything here since this this is just a floor plan even though it kinda looks like a ACT grid. And it's given that net area condition over here to here where the actual work is being done. And then the net areas over here, it said, hey. This is not actually in scope, so I'll still take it off. But just to let you know that this is actually an out of scope area or not in contract in this case. So that is everything that Boost can do as far as the newer capabilities and all of the the existing stuff that you might be familiar with. And so it should be saving you a lot of time and gives you something to react to. You know, you can think of it, like, kind of the the the cliche that people use with AI these days is it's just a really smart intern. So we don't expect it to be perfect. It should be just something that helps you get going and get up and running a lot faster than you used to be able to. And with that, now it's time to bring on somebody that Bill, our painting customer has helped actually shape a lot of these features. So you don't have to take your take my word for it as far as how well this actually works. You can hear it from Bill himself and his experience with Boost. Blake, Hey. how's going? I'm good. How about you? Good. Bill, I know that Natasha gave you an introduction at the beginning, but I'd love if you could just kinda introduce yourself and talk a little bit about about what you and KBI do. Yeah. So I I'm the my name is Bill Brady. I'm the COO of KVI Painting. We're a union painting contractor in mainly the San Francisco Bay Area. Been in business for about fifteen years. We average anywhere from 60 to a 100 employees. Nice. Great. Yeah. Bill, you know, tell us a little bit about what your experience was when you you first started using Boost and and how it's changed since then. Yeah. So when I first started using Boost, I think I did a demo three or four years ago. It was when it was first coming out. It only did single sided walls. So I did a demo. I tried it. I tried reassigning conditions, you know, tried to make it work, and it it ended up just being a little too hard to reassign everything. So I kinda gave up on it for a while and saw some emails coming out about double sided walls and the painting feature and decided to do another demo, and I really liked it. So I've been using it since. Do a lot of the training videos on YouTube. I've watched some of the other webinars. Went down to Arizona, did a training on it, and gotten a lot better with it. So Yeah. That's great. You know, I I've been at ConstructConnect for almost two years now, and I I can say myself, we've we've definitely come a long way with, you know, where Boost started whenever I first joined to compared to where it is now. And it it's all it goes a long way to, you know, talking with customers like yourself and hearing about where those pain points are, like, reassigned flow. That was painful for me to to figure out to have to go back and remember how to do all that. So we've definitely made a a lot of strides with that and with just the general capabilities too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell tell us a bit about, like, you know, maybe a big project that you ran through with Boost recently and how much time you felt like it saved you compared to if you had to do it manually. So the last project I did, it was called the Pacific Workforce Housing Project. It was a teacher housing in Pacifica. It was 14 buildings, 70 units. It was about 96,000 square feet footprint. So very heavy takeoff. They on that one, they did different unit types, so I think there was five or six different unit types. So it probably saved me at least three to four hours just on taking the unit types off alone. So I'd take those off separately, then I do I run Boost on the floor plan, delete out the units, and leave the common areas because I'd take those off separately. So, yeah, at least three to four hours on that takeoff. Wow. Yeah. So what would you do with the three to four hours that you got back? Do more bids. Makes sense. Yeah. If you had if you had to go back to to manual estimating tomorrow, Bill, you know, what what would you miss most about using something like Boost? The time savings, you know, being able to free up a little bit, not having to work, you know, such late hours, you know, still working a lot. But definitely on budgets, you know, something you don't have to be as accurate for. You can run Boost on the majority of that to get a rough number for a budget instead of doing, the whole takeoff manually for something, you know, that you're gonna end up taking off down the road again with a different set of drawings. Yeah. That makes sense. Do do you have any you know, for anybody who's not used it before or just interested, do you have any maybe any tips or advice as far as how to get started? You know? You know, like like I showed on that first plan page, it can kinda throw a lot at you if you just give it everything. So do you have any kinda specific strategies that you use whenever you're doing a takeoff of Boost? So when I run Boost, I generally I I'll take my floor plan off and my ceiling plan off separately. So on my floor plan, I run the painting condition. I usually count the door on a multi residential. I'll count the doors and frames. And the ceiling plan, obviously, you know, a lot of the times, it'll take off the ceiling, the ACT ceiling grid, which typically doesn't paint some older schools, public works, jobs. Sometimes they want that painted, so it's a good feature to have. But, yeah, the I would just for anybody interested in it, I would do a demo, watch some YouTube videos. There's a lot of YouTube videos you guys have that walk through it. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thanks. You know, just tell us honestly, do you feel like you're you're getting the return on your investment with it? And if so, in in what ways? You know, you mentioned time saving or anything else. Time saving is the biggest one. You know, if you could save couple hours a week even, it pays for itself fairly quickly. Frees you up to to get more bids out, which is how you're gonna get your numbers higher. For me, personally, it's freed me up to do other things within our company to help run the company, help train some of the other estimators we have. So, yeah, definitely getting getting a return on investment. That's great. Yeah. Have your other estimators there? Have they been using it? Have they mentioned anything about, you know, kind of like a ramp up or a learning curve or anything? They have not been using it yet. I was trying I think I signed up for it about a year and a half ago. I really wanted to give it a I wanted to use it prior to other people starting to use it, but we've had that conversation internally. That makes sense. What was the learning curve like for you? There wasn't much of a learning curve. It's pretty simple to use. I think the biggest thing I had to get used to was a lot of re reassigning conditions. That was something I didn't do before. So that sped up a lot. That was the biggest learning curve. Once you get over that, it's pretty simple. Yeah. That that makes a lot of sense. It's kind of similar. You know, if you're if you're doing the takeoff, you know, obviously, you're gonna assign it correctly the first time, so you don't need a. much reassigning. Yeah. Last question for you, Bill. What what would you tell another estimator who's on the fence about just trying AI for their takeoff? AI is the way the industry is moving. So I would recommend getting in front of it rather than playing catch up because most of your competitors are probably using it. I would if I was someone else, I would just go I would watch some YouTube videos, do a demo with one of you guys, and I'm not sure if you guys still offer, but I think you guys do, a week trial before purchasing. So, you know, if you got a big project coming up, do a trial, run it on that and see if you like it. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Bill. Yeah. Natasha, Christina's here. I think we're ready to to go into QA now. The right ones. Oh, it's a great question. I think the challenge is, just well, with CCPI is running those right searches, maybe narrowing it down with the trades. Some people just do really broad searches and might use keywords. I think just narrowing it down using the actual trades, because when we create projects here at ConstructConnect, we go and we identify those trades on a project, and I think that would really be helpful. I don't see a lot of users using that filter, and I just think it's a big one that would really help because it's looking at your specific trade. It honestly depend depends on per customer. Right? Because you have some limitations with bonding, so it depends on the project type, which we have those filters on there as well. So if you are limited, I'll I mean, like, that's a big one, like, just the type of project that you're able to do. And we have lots of filters. We also have category filters, for instance. So maybe you're a retail person, and those are the type of projects you like to do. You can use those filters to narrow down those categories. Because maybe you're doing, you know, commercial buildings. Right? I mean, honestly, there's plumbers who paint pipes. Like, they look for that. Like, those categories really will help you narrow down those projects. Because, again, a lot of the times, like, retail person likes to do retail projects, and that's maybe all they focus on. So using that filter, saving those searches will definitely narrow down those projects. As far as, like, how Boost works, yeah, I mean, we're we are looking at things differently. Like, you you noticed with the the wall types option that I ran, that option really only works on floor plans because, know, initially, it was really targeted towards, like, drywall insulation where a lot of times that wall type is designated on the floor plan. But the painting option for walls works completely differently where it can work on reflected ceiling plans, floor plans, finished plans, because we know that painters are doing their takeoff a little in a little bit more diverse ways than you would see, like, a a drywall contractor do. So, like, from the boost perspective, we are certainly, you know, evaluating every time we bring a new option or a new capability that we're we're making sure that it actually fits in with with the workflow and doing the takeoff like you would expect it to. Bill, I'm curious of your questions or your your thoughts on that answer. Yeah. So different wall types. Typically, I don't change my wall types. I think what will help is the new features coming out with the existing wall types because sometimes we'll be bid jobs where they're you know, we're tying into existing walls, and maybe those walls only need one coat or a touch up. And, you know, the new wall will need three coats. So I'm excited to see the new feature. Just drawn out all the walls. You know, if you have a large floor plan with a bunch of small offices, you know, maybe that sheet alone will take you a half an hour when you can hit boost and reassign conditions in five minutes. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, you I I think this is gonna apply for any a AI tool that you use. You definitely are not don't wanna trust the results just as they're given to you at face value. You know, you want to go back and evaluate and make sure that it didn't miss anything either. But, I I will say, personally, it's a lot easier to edit than it is to start from, a blank page. So to me, it's a lot easier to see what Boost has done and go back and, correct the the mistakes that it might have made or an area that it might have missed as opposed to trying to to do it myself. Because then you you're kind of getting, like, two different interpretations of the plan. Right? Like, what Boost saw in the plan and then what you're seeing. So you're kind of getting that that collaborative effort from a takeoff perspective. Do a demo. Watch some videos. Do the trial. It will definitely save you time, so I I don't think you really have anything to lose. Oh, with CCPI, with the ConstructConnect projectiles. Sorry. I thought you were talking to Bill still. So if they wanna save time, with searching, definitely creating those saved searches, narrowing down those results, and just that will save you tons of time if you save searches. So you don't have to keep recreating the wheel every time you go into ConstructConnect. Like, I I push it so much, like, save your searches, save your searches, because you can just go in, you get your results right away. We have indicators to let you know if they're brand new projects. You'll see a little n to it, so you know those are brand new. I might wanna take a look at those because those are probably not in your list, or even updated ones. You'll see a little u next to those to let you know, hey. We recently updated those. We also indicate whether there's plans and specs, so you don't have to waste your time. It's right there in the column. So, you know, if you're worried about getting bids sooner, you're gonna focus on drawings and specifications, like projects that have drawings and specifications. So I just always encourage using the search, saving the searches. It'll save you a ton of time. And then also getting those email notifications, turning those on, because you'll get those in the morning and, you know, see something and click it and get get it right away. So, yeah, just really narrowing down those results, saving those searches, and setting it as your default, especially if you have, like, a super favorite one. It'll save you time. Yeah. Kind of building on a little bit like what what Bill was saying earlier about, you know, just trying it, getting a demo. I think that's, like, that's the biggest thing is to just get out there and try it. You know, we do offer trials. We offer a a middle tier that has, like, limited usage capabilities as well. And I think just one thing to keep in mind, know, Bill, you mentioned this earlier, which is that AI is rapidly changing, and I've seen Boost evolve so much over those last year, and it's only gonna continue to evolve and continue to get better. So even if you try it and it's, you know, it's missing that one thing that would really get you over the line to to use it, Try it again in just a couple months because I guarantee it'll probably be a lot different, the capabilities will be a lot better, and it's something that's always improving. Yeah. So, with ConstructConnect Progynet Intelligence, the newest feature we have is ask documents. That has actually been saving users a lot of time as well. I should push that. I've actually interviewed a few customers, and one specific person said it saved her four hours in a day. Normally she would be manually scanning documents, and instead of having to go through and manually scan them, she's using the ask documents feature and asking specific questions to qualify projects. When you questions, we do give you the sources where it found the answer. So she does verify, because just like Blake said, you know, you can't 100% trust AI, so we do encourage you to verify. But she actually has verified enough that she trusts it, so she kinda does just qualify it just moving on. And so it is saving a lot of people a lot of time using that new ask documents feature, so I encourage people to use it. Yeah. So like I mentioned, when I first started Boost, I really didn't like it. It was a couple years ago. So if there's anybody out there that's maybe looked at it in the past, I would recommend taking another look at it because a lot of features have came out. Welcome to Win Bids Before the Paint Dries, how painters find projects and finish takeoffs faster. My name is Natasha Saladino, senior integrated marketing manager for ConstructConnect, and I am so excited to have you join us as we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming one of the most time intensive and detail driven parts of the construction industry. If you're tired of chasing every job that pops up on the wall and spending your nights coloring in takeoffs by hand, you're exactly in the right room. Today, we're gonna show you how smart painters are picking better fit projects, rolling through takeoffs in minutes instead of hours, and getting more bids out the door before the competition even pops the lid on their paint can. We'll walk you through real workflows using ConstructConnect project intelligence and on screen takeoff with takeoff boost. Plus, you'll hear directly from a painting pro who's already using these tools in the field. By the end of this session, Thanks. we want your bidding process to feel as smooth as a fresh