As you focus on the day-to-day operations of your small business, you can’t lose sight of the bigger picture: developing relationships, increasing profitability, and growing your company. There’s no magic wand that can do everything for you, but there is a software that comes close! Here’s how STACK’s comprehensive preconstruction platform can help your small construction business.
1. Speed up preconstruction tasks
You’re only human, and there is only so much you can do in one day. If you or a single estimator is searching for projects, performing all takeoffs, and creating every estimate, you need a tool to make this process sustainable.
Manual takeoffs won’t work for long if you want to grow. The cost of printing plans alone is prohibitive, especially for jobs you don’t win or decide not to pursue. And if it takes an entire day to do a takeoff for a job you don’t win, that day is lost. If you want to grow, you have to hire more estimators, which comes with its own set of costs and risks.
But with STACK, one person can do what it might normally take multiple estimators to do, so you can bid more work without added staffing costs. You can make your takeoffs up to 10 times faster, increasing your chances of winning more work. Use this calculator to determine the difference STACK can make for you.
2. Avoid burnout.
When you’re starting your business or aggressively trying to grow, you’re generally burning the candle at both ends – but you can’t do that forever. Your business needs to work for you, not you for it. And you have to be able to delegate some tasks, whether it’s to employees or to tools.
When you do takeoffs with STACK, you can stop spending your evenings with blueprints and start spending them with your family. STACK removes some of the burden of doing it all so you can do your work in the field and come home at the end of the day.
3. Reduce wasted time on jobs that aren't worth it.
When every takeoff takes a big chunk of your time, you’re already invested in the project and can feel pressure to compete for it. But once you speed up takeoffs so that they aren’t such a large part of your workload, you can take a step back and quickly identify which jobs are simply not the right fit for your company.
Quick takeoffs give you a clear picture of the profit you can expect to make from a job, after factoring in your costs, materials, driving distance for your crew, and other considerations. If a job is just too far away or otherwise not a good fit, you’re in the clear to pass on it and move on to the next available project without wasting any more time.
4. Learn and grow from your mistakes.
STACK stores all of your plans and documents in the cloud, making it easy to plan for change orders and to look back on previous estimates. When you finish a project, you can compare your actual costs to your estimate and identify where you need to account for additional material waste or labor next time.
The ability to learn from your past jobs to better predict future costs ensures that your judgment will become more refined from project to project and you’ll be better prepared to anticipate surprises that come up on each job.
5. Increase your accuracy.
Transferring takeoff data to Excel to create estimates is a common practice among small business owners and single estimators, but it can open you up to unintentional errors. A simple distraction can cause you to skip a line or misplace a decimal point, resulting in hours spent tracking down the mistake – or an inaccurate estimate, if it’s not caught.
Eliminate this time-consuming, error-prone process with STACK. You can perform your takeoff and then create a complete unit cost estimate or get more granular with a materials and labor estimate. All of your data remains in one platform, so there’s no risk of introducing errors – plus you can account for overhead and even adjust your profit margin to ensure the job meets your growth objectives. Increasing your estimate accuracy is a guaranteed way to win more profitable work.
6. Look professional.
A professional-looking proposal can go a long way toward impressing a general contractor. GCs want to know that you can pay attention to detail and that you’re thorough and exact in your work. Make a good first impression with a clean, branded proposal that includes your stated terms and conditions along with your bid.
STACK allows you to generate a proposal that includes your company logo directly from your estimate – there’s no need to worry about typing up a Word document to then converting to a PDF. STACK does the work for you.
7. Get ahead of the competition.
While everyone else is out there scrambling to complete bids on time, you’ll be looking ahead to fill your pipeline in the coming weeks and months. If your competition is still doing manual takeoffs, you have a significant advantage with STACK – you now have the time to look at upcoming projects others don’t even have the bandwidth to think about yet.
You can be proactive, gathering all the information you need to submit a thorough, accurate bid well ahead of deadlines, which shows GCs that you’re organized and on top of your game. Developing a reputation for staying ahead of deadlines gives GCs a good indication that your field work will also be on time.
Win with STACK
STACK’s functionality makes it an ideal fit for single estimators, large preconstruction departments with dedicated estimating teams, and everything in between. We have a soft spot for small businesses, and we want to help you succeed. Let’s have a conversation about your business size and special small business pricing options.
Grow with us! Schedule a demo today.
