EP120: How The Right Data Can Change Everything With Isaac Barlow

I'm not prior military.

Yeah, thank you. No, but the greatest respect for our military, you know, part of, so number one, I just love, I just love this, right? It's just awesome. I bought it from a, I'll give them a plug. I bought it from a company called Nashville Metal Art. It's out of Tennessee. Okay, yeah. And it's just awesome. I just, I wanted a flag, but I didn't want it to look like a city office building. And so I got this because it's just like metal art and then it has the Pledge of Allegiance in it. So I just like it.

No, I'm in Utah. St. George, Utah, which is actually closer to Las Vegas than it is Salt Lake City. So you might have heard Zion's National Park. We're right near there. Where are you located?

That's awesome.

absolutely so busy busy it's basically it's it's time tracking yes you know so you're recording people's hours that they work and but the more important thing is you're recording what they worked on and how much they accomplished and stuff like that so You think of it like on the least level of busy, busy, it's a time card. So it's a real easy digital way to process your time and hours and get your employees paid. On the highest level of it, it's job site intelligence. So you can get all the data from the job site you need to make better decisions on how you're estimating or running your project or managing your resources, scheduling, all those things. So it can start out pretty simple and then it can get into almost project management tool.

Yeah, thanks for the question. So, yeah, the problem I had really was getting information from the field to the office. And every contractor, there's a lot of contractors that still do it the way I used to do it, which is basically just paper, you know, paper time cards, and they're collecting that data and pulling it in. And it's the reason Busy Busy started with timekeeping, because if you look at what do you get from the field, you mainly get their time cards because that's how they get paid. So they're motivated to give you that information because they're like, hey, this is how much time I need to get paid for. That's what you can count on getting. And so traditionally, we've tagged into that time card a whole bunch of things. Like when you use paper, you say, okay, give me your time and then tell me what you worked on. Let me know if you got injured, sign off if you had your safety meetings or if you didn't get. her, you know, whatever the information is, we usually kind of compiled that all into the time card because that's the data we could count on getting from the field to the office. You know, I did that, of course, back in the day. And the great challenge there is it's not very good way of collecting information for many reasons. You know, I had a secretary that three quarters of her time was just trying to gather and interpret that time from the office because everybody's. probably experienced this, you know, she collects the time in and then she can't read it. She can't quite tell what job it's for or a lot of jobs are missing. So she's contacting the field and trying to find out, okay, what is it that you did? What did you accomplish? And then if I wanted more data, like what work got accomplished is even harder. So that's pretty challenging and frustrating that that takes that kind of time. And then the other problem is by the time you get it, then you're almost too late to act upon it. If you've got problems, it's not real time. It's not happening very well. Sometimes you'll end up fighting with people over their paycheck because maybe you didn't read it right or they didn't report it right. There's just a plethora of problems. And then the biggest one, even if you were perfect at time, the information you collected from the field on paper, you still have no way to really measure it and manage trending data. Unless you're taking that paper home and entered into some spreadsheet or something, it's really difficult to manage trending data. And so really, you know, I knew all these problems clear back, you know, decades ago before smartphones even came out. And my opinion is that the construction industry should have celebrated all across the world when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone. Because it was like, finally, we've got a way to collect mobile data from the field. Like before the iPhone even came out, I was trying to get them to. you know, go into their trailer and fill out stuff on a computer so that I could get data. But now we can get it so easily. And then you can take that data. It's not only real time, but it's managed properly. It's kind of like, you know, in your school, you have essay versus multiple choice. If someone says, hey, what's the answer to this question? And they just leave a box. You're like, well, I don't know this, this, this. But if you have multiple choice, you know, you've got one right answer in there. What's the same with time tracking? If you've like, I'm busy, busy, you set up the project and you've got, let's say you've broken your job down and you've got your project and you've broken down maybe into five different categories. When they click into the project, then they have those five categories to pick from. So it just makes it easier to get accurate data because you're giving them those easy choices. And then the app just kind of helps walk them through things. GPS stamps them. That's not just for managing the employees. Like a lot of people are afraid, like, hey, are you not trusting? Are you big brother in the employees? No, we actually don't think that. People or employees are inherently bad. But what you're doing is you're getting better data. When the employees even start seeing what they're doing, they actually start changing behavior because they're seeing, the employees see all the data too. Like now they've got this digital time card. They can see what their paycheck's going to be. They can see all that stuff. The GPS stamping helps you. Like, you know, you're probably familiar with pre-liens when you're pre-liening the project, or if you go back and have to collect your money, one of the issues is, well, when were you on the job site last? both busy busy you have photos you have time punches all these things that are all gps verified so you have all this verification that you can go back to and so really it's all about data and analytics and you can save a crap ton of money using it

correct and and it wasn't they were added working with the market but The original vision was even bigger than we are today. My original vision was really just solving the problems of getting that, what I would call a job site P &L, to where you know your costs and you know your income that's coming in. And we're trending towards that today. We started with timekeeping because I studied the industry and basically the data that comes out of the industry is 70% of contractors fail. They go bankrupt within seven years. That's just a reality that's existed for as far back as the U.S. Census. data tracks, right? So I got into the why behind that. And the why behind it is basically they have insufficient information to make good and profitable decisions, right? So we looked at that data and we said, okay, well, what's killing them the fastest? Well, all contractors can pretty much agree on this. The most difficult thing is your labor data. So if you look at an estimate, that's where you start. You estimate a project and you have your materials and you have your labor. And if you're in the equipment industry, you also have equipment, right? So you have the material cost and then the time it takes to get that done and the cost of that time, whether it's manpower or whether it's man and tools or man and machines, whatever it is. And usually when you get done with the job, if you went back and tried to evaluate and said, okay, did this job go according to my estimate? What's the hardest thing to find? It's the labor data. Usually materials are pretty easy to check and compare. And so we started with timekeeping because that was, in our opinion, it was like the number one bleeding thing. Like if you looked at contractors as being in trouble and you think of yourself as triage, it's like someone's coming into the emergency room, what's bleeding the fastest? It was all about time. And so that's where we started. But as we do that, we're continuing to add to it other points of information. Like I mentioned photos. We had a customer in the Busy Busy app, you're clocked into a project and you're doing a task. If you take a photo of your work. it automatically tags it to that project and that task so that you've got that all sorted. We have a customer that simply because they were taking photos of the inspector on site, this was an earth moving contractor, showing that testing had been done, they were able to save themselves out of a $100,000 lawsuit just because they had documentation of photos. And so, you know, you just kind of combine all that information into that mobile application because your people out there doing the work, they've got the mobile phone in their hand, they can do so many things and you... You collect all that data and put it together. And then to make it not complicated, which is probably our number one reason people like Busy Busy is we're so easy. And that's because we actually understand what it's like to be in the field and to be dirty trying to get this stuff done. But to make it not complicated, we let you manage to the exception, not check everything. So for example, you can have all your guys sign off their safety. Like every day they can sign up and say, no, I wasn't injured today. well, you don't really want to review, like, let's say you have 10 guys or a hundred guys. You don't want to go and say, oh, I want to make sure everybody signed off. Right? So what we do is just show you the exception. If you've got a hundred guys, we say there's three guys that didn't sign off today. You know, now you can look at that or there's three guys that said they were injured. And that way, all the other data is just really collected in the background for if you ever need it, if you ever get into a lawsuit or if you ever get into a dispute, you've got all that, all those records and data behind you.

The biggest thing I see that they do wrong when they start with us is trying to be too complicated. To your point of making it simple, I'm an advocate of what I would call super codes. And I know that's not necessarily a well-known term in the industry, but you have cost codes, right? So if someone wants to sort a coin cost codes, like I looked at one company and they're showing me their cost codes and they got like 120 cost codes on this project. And I'm like, that is just way too complex. I get why you're doing it, but I think... I think you end up, you know, trying so hard to get down to the very finite details that you miss the bigger picture. And so what I try to do is get contractors to group tasks together that are done together. Like I'll use my background. Excavation is my background. If you're doing sewer line or water line, I would recommend grouping it to sewer line and water line, not breaking down to, you know, fire hydrants and valves and, you know, meter boxes and like all the different. individual components, but just break it down to there. Because as an estimator, what you're looking at is you have the whole job. So that's your first question is, was my whole job profitable or not profitable, right? Did that come in the way I planned? If it didn't come in the way you planned, then now you're breaking it down to your major segments. So you might have like, if you're a stucco contractor, you might have like stucco and lath or whatever. If you're in my world, it might be, you know, mass earth moving a sewer line, water line. But if you've achieved breaking... tracking your time and getting your cost benefit down to a project level, just the project. You're better than 50% of contractors out there. 50% of contractors out there only know how to manage whether they're profitable on a month-to-month basis. If you've gotten yourself to a by-project basis, you're already winning, right? If you then break that project down to like, let's say four or five major segments, you're winning really well. I think it's a total mistake to try to break it clear down to the nats, but because then you're You end up frustrating your crew. They end up now starting to think that it doesn't matter and that they can't really wrap their head around it. And then I think you start getting false data. So that's my best. That's my opinion is keep it simple for your crew.

Yes. In fact, I apologize for not forewarning on this, but this might be one of my soapboxes.

So nationwide data, you have somewhere between 32% and 37% of labor time is spent on non-revenue producing activities, things that don't produce activities. You're probably already aware of this, right? And in my opinion, it's one of the most important things business owners should focus on. You mentioned earlier how people can get so granular. They're so worried about this and this and this. I think it's actually the most important thing. If a company wants to get more profitable, the most important thing you can do is start making sure that your people are focusing on revenue-producing activities. And my soapbox is people often will blame the employees and say, man, they should be. working more. The non-revenue producing activities, if you look into the data, it's actually all about management. It's not about labor. It's usually that people aren't lined up or scheduling is not worked out or other subcontractors or trades that are supposed to be there before them or after them is not worked out properly. So they end up with all this time that they're trying to work things out, or maybe they're not clear on what they're supposed to be doing. Non-revenue time is really primarily the burden of management to fix, not labor. Because I would argue that labor wants to work on revenue producing activities. If you think of it, most guys, you know, they want to work. They don't really want to sit and figure everything out. And so my own personal experience back way before Busy Busy, when I was running an excavation crew. I quickly became the most profitable crew in my company, and I was earning margins around 25%, which for the excavation industry is just almost unheard of. And the reason was simply this. In our world, you know, you had, like, as I worked my way, you mentioned in my bio, I did actually do that. Like, I started in the trenches. My brothers, I worked with my brothers, and just like all their brothers were, they immediately gave me the worst jobs, right? So I started in the trenches. I laid pipe. I repaired live sewer lines. I don't even want to hardly fess up to, like terrible things. If you've never repaired a live sewer line, you have no idea how bad it is. Because there's one rule for sewer, and that is it doesn't stop. It's a gravity flow. You have to deal with it while it's flowing. You can't shut it off. That's the reality of sewer. So anyway, as I work through these different positions, in the excavation world, the honor position was like, hey, the main guy on the crew, he kind of runs the nicest machine, right? And are you a sports fan?

Some of the concepts, like I'll just use a basketball analogy. So the world I grew up in, it was like the best guy runs the best machine, and you'd almost think of it like a basketball team. That was the team captain or whatever. They're running the best machine. When I discovered how many things were not lined out ahead of us, how much things were... how much we were waiting, just waiting and waiting on things. Then what I did is I shifted myself out of the honor position. You might say I'm running the nicest machine and I put myself in more like a coach. And so I made sure everything was lined up ahead of my crew. I also would track everything for them. I'd let them know how much they produced yesterday. I would establish their goals for today. And I would make sure that every part was lined out. Every decision was lined out that I was coordinating. And this is all, this is not new to anybody who's done construction. It's just that sometimes we get caught up in, oh, I've got to produce work. Like I'm such a good producer, I've got to produce work. And we don't realize the value of keeping your crew producing work. And so when I shifted to that and I started making sure I lined out my crew, we started producing at levels that the company hadn't seen before. And we were producing the highest profit margins the company had ever seen. We were moving so fast that we would have surveys done, you know, where the engineer would come and stake our sewer system. I would call them for water, which the sewer has to be done before the water. And they would say, we just staked your sewer two days ago. There's no way you're done. I'm like, we're done. Get out here and look at it. And they were surprised. And the main reason was I would just keep the crew lined out ahead of them. So non-revenue producing activity, I think, is one of the most important things to focus on as a company. So sorry for the soapbox.

Thank you. So, yeah, the software is... You know, of course, you've heard the 80-20 rule, you know, like 20% of our customers use 80% of our benefit and 80% of our customers use 20% of our benefit. The software will absolutely help you, you know, track the time and find out whether you were right or wrong on the total amount of time that you're going to spend. And then you can analyze it and see whether that's from non-revenue producing time or not, depending on how you've set up the structure of the application. So it can absolutely, it can do whatever you want. One of the keys is to get the buy-in from your team because as they're using it, you don't want them to just put the time in the wrong bucket just because they've got a budget there, right? That's one of the big weaknesses people do is they establish like this much time, you know, here's your goal. You're supposed to spend this much time here, this much time, this much time here. And if you don't, you get penalized, right? One of the most important things I think a business can do is talk with their crews and let them know like when you're using Busy Busy, we're trying to... collect this data so that we can be better at our jobs and better at the work. And the most important thing for us as management is that you give us the right data. We're not penalizing. We're not anything. We just need you to give us the right data. And if part of what the data you're trying to figure out is how much time are they spending on non-revenue producing activities, then you make that part of how the application works. So they can clock into the project they're working on or they can clock into a standby. But the standby... To me, again, it points more at the foreman, like you're saying, you know, like, why are you standing by? You know, what's the issue here? And I'm not trying to put any blame game. I'm just saying as management, that's what you want to know. Like, what can we do? Maybe we're stringing the foreman out so far that he can't line up everybody. You know, that's, and I'm giving you more of the side of tracking, okay? Now I'll jump into optimization. I don't believe that you can optimize much better than 85% efficiency, you know? The industry is 32% to 37% waste, and so that's like a 63% to 68% efficiency. I think full utilization is 85%. That's a target I would use. And so I don't think you eliminate non-revenue producing activity. I think you try to measure to it and manage it and try to get it into an acceptable range, is my opinion.

agree. I'm going to jump back to the sports analogy for a minute. So if you can imagine basketball, if you had various teams that were playing and you had some teams that were tracking data, like points scored, you know, percentage of free throws. you know, all these different passes, steals, all that stuff. You have teams that are tracking that data and then you have teams that are not. The problem is afterwards, like, how do you coach? You know, how do you say, here's what we need to do different? You know, how do you do that review? And the reason I like to bring up this analogy is sometimes employers or managers will use this data against their employees and then everybody hates the data. It's like, I hate that I'm being tracked when really I think you should use the data to become more of a team. and say, like you said to Lowe's, like, okay, guys, look, this last job, we had 26 trips to Lowe's. What can we do different? You know, I'm not pissed off. I'm just working with you saying, what can we do different next time? Because I think this is making us to where we're not winning. And you want to surround yourself with people that want to win. You want to surround yourself, of course, with A players and B players, you know, people that want to win and use that data to coach. And so that's, to me, the biggest problem is how to even know what to work on. You know, it's like the old adage of what gets. What gets measured gets managed. When you don't measure it, you don't manage it. So you don't even know if you're not tracking data, what the problems are. You're really just going to Vegas and betting on black. You're like, well, you know, we've got money in our bank at the end of the month this month. So I guess we made money. But you don't know how to react to the problems or the successes. Like even if you're doing well, if someone says, oh, no, I'm making money. I don't need to worry about data. No, actually, you need to know where you're making money because the biggest. thing you've probably heard a million times than I have. Someone will say, yeah, when I was smaller, I made more profit and then I grew my company and I make less profit. Well, there can be a lot of reasons for that, but maybe you grew in the wrong direction. If you were tracking your data, you'd say, okay, these jobs, these kinds of jobs make me the most money. So that's what I'm going to grow into. And I mean, you know, again, it's really a coaching mentality, learning to take that data and use it to make decisions and use it to build a team, not to beat up a team.

Just hit on it. Like to me, like when people say, what can I do to be more profitable? You just nailed it. Like if I was going to go out and compete in any region, in any trade, I know I could win if I just focused on data first. You know, because people tell me like, well, this is a lot of work for us to collect data. We need to just be doing the work. If I was to go start any company in any trade, in any region, I would hire guys and tell them your first job is to collect data. Your second job is to do your work. to just eliminate all arguments, like collect the data. Because if you're not, how do you make improvements to your business?

You're exactly right. And in the end, you'll win. I mean, and I really think the competition's with yourself mainly, but you'll win if you're focused on data. Just having that attitude of, I'm focused on data. What that, you know, the adage a lot of you've heard, everybody's heard, you know, are you working in your business or on your business? The moment you start collecting data, you're working on your business. You're now fine-tuning that thing and making it a fine-tuned machine and finding out what's working, what's not working, and where to make your improvements. And tools like Busy Busy, you know, I'll just throw a plug in there. We're cheap. I mean, we're literally almost nothing. The cost, in my opinion, is irrelevant. Like, we're $10 a month per employee. That's basically what it is. It scales up to $15 if you get a premium package. you know, $10 a month, $15 a month. To me, it doesn't matter if, if it was $75 a month, I'm looking to get the right data for my employees. I spend so much more than that on my employees. I still own part of the excavation company. We do $12 million a year and we spend like $4,800 a year on busy, busy. It's literally nothing. And it's, it's just, you, you need to have tools like that. Why can it be so cheap? The only reason Busy can be that cheap is because we sell across the United States, Canada, Australia. We have 80,000 users. That's why. We've spent well over $30 million on this system. And individually, you can never do that. It's just impossible. You have to kind of spread it out like that in order to make it work.

Well, the most important thing, I would say it like this. It's measuring your estimate versus your actual. To me, that's the most important thing. It's not usually what people start with. People start with just a better way to collect their time. And you'll make, on Busy Busy, your ROI on what you spend on us. You'll save like 10 times the amount of money that you spend on Busy Busy just by collecting your time because everybody's time will get more accurate. Everybody will start making sure that they're putting in the amount of hours they want to get paid for and they'll stop rounding and all those things, right? That'll save you 10 times what we spend. But we have companies that literally use us and they're spending, you know, five,10,20 grand a year and saving a million and a half dollars. that's because they're doing what I said about comparing estimates to actuals. When they start taking that data, it's how you use that data that really makes the biggest impact on your business. You can take Busy Busy and you can make 10x on what you pay us. You can also take Busy Busy and make 1,000x on what you pay us just because you're using the data that's coming from that system.

absolutely. So, of course, time tracking and labor allocation. So, you know, not only how much time people work and what they're doing. A lot of compliance things like the safety sign-offs and the people verifying that they did work the hours they're saying they work so that when you pay them, you never have Department of Labor disputes. So it has all the compliance built into it for that and safety. But you also have things like daily reports, which include all the photos and notes for the day. The daily reports and busy, busy can be automatically generated in 15 seconds. When you're clocking in, you're collecting photos. you're doing that through the day busy. I'll just assemble it all for you and automatically spit out a report. So if you can report with the general contractors, like if you're working for a contractor or an owner, you can just send them your daily reports that shows the time spent, what was accomplished, the photos, the notes, and the people on the job shows the weather, all that stuff, all auto-generated, um, easy. Like it's super easy. You have scheduling. You can literally schedule out your crews and they can clock into their schedule. So it's super simple for them. You can schedule your crew and say, this is what you're scheduled to do and what you're scheduled to work on. And they can show up and say, oh, that is what I'm working on. And they can just say start, right? So we make it super easy. We have three ways to collect time. You can have them individually do it themselves. You can have the supervisors do the time tracking for them, or you can do a kiosk mode where they all show up to the job site and punch into a common screen. We have the, like I say, the daily reports, but we also have daily progress. So they can also, you can set a budget on your project. Here's how much Time is supposed to be in this project. People are tracking against that budget. You can also set here's how much units of measurement are supposed to be done. Like, you know, and they can also enter progress against that so that you're seeing the hours spent and the progress getting done on a daily and weekly and, you know, project by project basis. So, and that's even just the main features. There's more and more and more as you get into it. It's actually a pretty amazing system. Of course, I think that because I was working on it, but I even think that in relation to, man, if I had this back when I was doing this business 10 years ago, it just makes you so much money if you will utilize it for that purpose.

I know we've offered that before, so I'm guessing you're right on it. But yeah, Bracken, our partnership person, has probably worked that out.

Brecken is awesome. She lines me out. She's just like, hey, I've got everything worked out. Just show up at this time and talk.

Great question. Great question. And I'm going to give you two answers and I apologize for that, but it's just based on two different things. If you're looking for managing your company with efficient systems, okay? I would highly recommend E-Myth for Contractors. E-Myth Revisited is a wonderful book. I would recommend that, of course, all day long, but also there's one specialized on contractors. E-Myth Revisited is on Audible. I don't think E-Myth for Contractors is, so I would read both. That's if you're looking to optimize your management skills. If you're looking to optimize your leadership skills, which I think a lot of people should be focused on, how are they improving themselves as a business owner and as a leader? I would recommend 21 Laws of Irrefutable Leadership by John C. Maxwell. And it just helps.

Fantastic book. And it really gets contractors thinking in the right way. Like your business should be a machine and you should be optimizing it.

Yeah, I love it. It gets you focusing on yourself.

Thank you, Brad. My pleasure.