Established 30 Year Old Asphalt Company Nearly Doubles Revenue in 2 Years
Our client was determined to grow and just needed the right software to increase their sales and productivity all without adding more staff or additional locations.
Case Study #1
The client is a well established 30 year old business with expertise in asphalt and concrete roadwork. Their issue was is they could never exceed 4 million (avg 3.8 million) in annual revenue despite having adequate sales staff and field personnel. This type of business, like many in the construction industry, are tasked based where completions mean milestones and milestones mean billing.
First, let’s look at what this business used to operate their business.
This business used the most popular accounting programs called, QuickBooks along with the Microsoft Office products for email, word and spreadsheets.
Why Qube was the perfect solution for their business.
Qube software is hosted on the Quickbase platform which means it is globally accessible from almost any computer, tablet or smart phone. Qube is also an ERP as it contains all the core functions of CRM and business modules that are needed create and manage projects, estimates, purchase orders, work orders, time cards, subcontract labor checks, bills, invoices and more.
What were the the clients obstacles to growth?
- The client used traditional paper, phone logs, note pads and email for lead management.
- The clients also relied heavily upon spreadsheets. We explained that while spreadsheets were great tools, they can also mean estimates easily get forgotten which are lost revenue opportunities.
- In short, even though they used QuickBooks; they could not get the program to do what they needed it to in order to grow. They needed integrated CRM, faster estimating and better tools to manage all the aspects of their business without having to turn to multiple solutions. They needed it on one program.
How Qube became a real solution for this business.
We customized Qube’s CRM to meet so that the 3 sales people they had could manage the hundreds of leads more efficiently. Now they were able to:
- Capture leads from their website, email and phone and sent them straight into Qube.
- We also tailored a data entry form which would verify if a customers was existing before adding a new one.
- Leads could be assigned by a round robin, or grabbed by the sales reps in their territories.
- Once “grabbed” leads could quickly be printed out and included a QR code that would provide map directions from the sales reps present location to the project.
- We further customized this solution to help them identify the most lucrative leads to act upon first.
Next step, we implemented Qube. We set up their items list and bid items to work with Qube’s AI smart estimating module. which has massive estimating power.
- Qube’s estimating system quickly creates bid items all while helping the user check for errors.
- Estimates for paving parking lots and driveways no longer got lost in spreadsheets and file folders, Once you had the total square footage of the parking lots, linear foot of curbs, striping and emblems, you could create an estimate in minutes.
- Plus with Qube’s AI smart features help you calculate the materials needed such as asphalt, gravel, limestone, base, and tack, along with equipment and the number of dump truck loaded needed to get materials from the asphalt plants to the job. It also calculated the number of man hours – you simply selected the crew size.
- We even implemented Qube time cards so time cards could be captured in the field keeping track of travel time versus work time with geo location and job pictures.
Results and Benefits: As a result of the software customization implementation year 1 results were positive as the the company grew from 3.8 million (avg revenue) to 5.35 million (40% growth). In year two, to 7.184 million for a respective 89% growth rate from baseline. In year 3, the abbreviated work year of Covid, sales were still very respectful at just under 6 million.
Year 2-3
In year 2 we began to add more AI smart features into starting with estimating.
Estimating: Estimates were now being enhanced as Qube’s enhance could automatically load the cost of the supplier’s materials from the asphalt plant nearest to the job which has numerous benefits:
- This meant they no longer needed to refer to a price book for different plants by hand.
- And able to maximize profit for each job. At the end of year 3 they brought up their profit by 4%.
- And competitively bidding against each job and closing more sales.
- With the AI smart features they could see all other supplier’s materials cost as well as drive time and mileage from the plant location to the job.
- When materials are delivered faster your crew is working and not standing around.
We also added new AI smart features into our software:
Purchase Orders – With the new features, users could now:
- Filter the materials they need to order by work area and/or task.
- They could also do a quick review for the cost of materials at different plants.
- For instance, if the previous job was near a plant that had a lower cost in asphalt the purchaser could decide to order from there first and increase the bottom line.
Scheduling – We also added new schedulers to increase productivity:
- The new release of Task Scheduler gave users the ability to schedule multiple jobs at once.
- The jobs could be filtered by task or work area.
- The jobs could be viewed on a monthly, weekly, daily or list basis.
- You could now see the weather at each job site as you were scheduling.
And we did not stop there either. We also released Smart Scheduler which would use AI smart technology to schedule jobs factoring in weather affected tasks, the availability of materials, matching the skillset of resources required.
Results:
At the end of Year 1 this company had a 40% jump in revenue going from 3.8 million to 5.355 million.
At the end of Year 2 this company had a 89% jump in revenue going from their baseline of 3.8 million to 7.184 million.
At the end of Year 3 this company had a 57.83% jump in revenue going from their baseline of 3.8 million to just 5.997 million and increased their bottom line profit by 4% during the year of Covid.
Conclusion: This company is now positioned for growth as they see fit. In year 4, this company attracted a bigger competitor who saw their growth and made the owner of this company an offer he could not refuse as it met his exit plan requirements. Question is, what will your plan be?