How GPS Auto-Clocking Cuts Construction Payroll Admin from a Saturday to One Hour | Construction Clock

0:00This episode is brought to you by our presenting sponsor Pizzant Building Products. Pizzant Building Products has been providing contractors and builders with the supplies necessary to complete their jobs since 1964. They have built a reputation of honest, helpful, and quality service serving the HRM for the last 58 years. Now with seven locations in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick, our team at the Atlantic Construction Podcast is extremely excited to announce our new co-branded partner Procore. Procore is the global leader in construction management software. We'll be conducting

0:29several podcast episodes with Procore users and construction companies across the country in 2023, among many other things. Stay tuned — we're excited. Okay, welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Very pleased to have our guest today, David Peters, the founder of Construction Clock. Construction Clock is a labor tracking app specifically for the industry. We'll talk lots about the details on that as we move into this discussion, but great to have you with us, David. I know your

1:08company head office is based, I believe, in Winnipeg, but you're on the road and I think tuning in from Dallas from an event that you're attending there. Thanks for having me, Dan. I'm in Dallas, Texas right now at the International Roofing Expo, and I'm so happy that you are having me on your podcast today. Yeah, it's great to have you, and really looking forward to having a discussion here. Lots of connections for us — central and local, local

1:38Atlantic Canada, if not all different size companies that — you know, a discussion that comes up a lot is tracking labor with ease and efficiency, and this is a really neat product. Let's start, David, with your background. Obviously it's very helpful — the company that you have, the intuition from being a carpenter and a roofer, I believe, and into sales and now into founding this company in recent years. Maybe just take us through

2:09the short version of your journey within the industry, and sort of when it came to your mind to use the frustrations that you had to solve that problem. For sure. So, Dan, I jumped into the trades very early on. When I was 16, my dad wanted to build a house, and I got roped into being the laborer on site with my brother and my dad, and we built that house start to finish. And

2:43after we made a ton of mistakes — learned how to frame and do concrete and do finishing work — we went on and built my brother's house, and I kind of got bitten by the trade lifestyle, where it was just like: you get to work outside, you get to work different trades every day. I mean, at that time we were doing everything. So I got the bug, and from there I went on to become a framing carpenter. I ended up all over western Canada.

3:21So I spent years on the road building barns and shops and houses and cottages, and that's the best thing to do in your 20s — just figure out what you want to do, and that's exactly what I did. I did a little bit of everything, and by the time I got to 30 I wanted to kind of hone in on one specific trade. I wanted to be amazing at something, and so we dove into metal and asphalt roofing.

3:53And that was an incredible journey — just to figure out how to scale that up, how to do it efficiently, how to do it profitably. In Canada we deal with harsh weather, really hot in the summertime, and it feels like there's never enough time in the day. So we grew that company up to 12 employees, and what I realized in that journey is labor is the biggest variable. You have very little control on material costs. I

4:33mean, if you buy in quantity, yeah, you can get a break, but labor is the only thing where you're building a culture that involves people, and labor is a massive part of that. And that's kind of how I got into building Construction Clock — we looked at how archaic the labor tracking industry was. I mean, we were using all these different apps and writing down hours, and most of the time we were inaccurate at best. So when I finally ended my

5:09roofing company, I decided I wanted to build a labor tracking app that didn't suck — something that made it incredibly easy and incredibly accurate for construction companies to use, so that they could maximize this biggest variable that they had on their job site, which is labor time. And so we started this about a year ago, and we launched a few versions of this app, and now we're to the point where the app is incredible and it's

5:47fully automated and it's fully hands-free, and we've built an amazing product that solves a really key problem in the industry, which is tracking labor accurately. Absolutely. One of the taglines for Construction Clock is: the first hands-free labor tracking app dedicated to the construction industry, using GPS technology — so an employee never needs to open the app or manually clock in; everything is automated. Obviously that's a big part of the offering. We'll get more into the

6:23details, but let's talk for context about the problem that you're solving. Like you said, if you're in the construction industry as a service provider — so many different trades — and even from different perspectives, from general contractors and developers with internal labor crews and these kinds of things, but a lot of companies — we'll talk with different size companies, whether it's a 20-man crew that's around a certain city, or if it's a couple

6:54hundred, or even more than that, that are traveling all over certain provinces and certain parts of the country. The cost just to track — and it's no secret that the industry, a lot of people that are running successful businesses, are still kind of using archaic, as you mentioned that term, and just old school methods of tracking labor. When things get the loss of communication and allocated incorrectly, and there's time

7:23theft issues with large companies and just all kinds of different variables that you're solving by integrating an app like this into your systems with your company. So yeah, I agree, this is a big issue. And in a lot of trades, depending — if you want to compare glazing and masonry on the structural side to drywall, where thirty percent up to fifty percent of the cost is material, but at least fifty percent to even eighty is your labor — whether

7:55you're non-union or union, residential or commercial — it's just a vast challenge for these companies. Jobs go a few weeks longer than expected, and hours are coming in incomplete or higher than they should be on different projects. I'm rambling on a bit here, but so many listeners within our target audience — professionals in ICI construction — are going to relate to this problem of labor tracking. Yeah, maybe just a quick

8:31discussion on some of these problems that you're solving with this app and how important it is to just have control — you know, what site someone's at for half a day even with a maintenance crew or something. Right. So the biggest problem that we're solving is removing that manual component of having to write down hours. No matter how you do it, if you're doing it in a book, you're still doing this manual task that's followed by somebody in the company — the

9:06administration person carrying all this up and then moving it into a payroll software or an accounting software where your project costs stay. And we're replacing that very analog type of system with an automated hands-free system. That is our biggest value proposition. The owner will be on the app a few times a day — he's adding projects, he's seeing where his teams are, and he's seeing how many hours have been accumulated on a specific job. And that's one thing that our app does really well

9:45for the employees: they show up at the project, it automatically clocks them in when they get there and when they leave, and when they're going to the lumber yard it's automatically tracking all their travel time between projects. Then at the end of the day there's a full itinerary of what they did that day, and it's all been tracked accurately. So that's what we focused on building this last year. Now we're at the point where we've done a really good job of solving that, and now we're solving the smaller

10:16issues, like setting the size of that geolocation. So if you're at a massive site you can set a massive perimeter, and when guys come into the site it's clocking them in on that big site. If it's a tiny little house where they're replacing the roof, you can set the size of that project to the size of your project. And so we're doing that. We're integrating — I'm at the Roofing Expo right now and we're working on integrations with companies like CompanyCam for photos, QuickBooks, Sage, all the different

10:49payroll softwares, so that we're going to take it a step further. We're collecting all this information, it's nicely on our app, and then the owner or the administrator presses the button and it automatically sends it over to the payroll software. So we're a startup company that loves this industry, and all I want to do is build the best labor tracking app for construction, and we're just honing in on that one specific thing — the same way that CompanyCam just focused on job site photos. It's doing a really good

11:22job building a very simplistic app for job site photos. That's exactly what we're doing for hands-free labor tracking. We're not building scheduling and estimation and all this stuff — there's a ton of apps that can do that. We're just focused on this one very specific problem, and we feel we have one of the best solutions out there for that. Yeah, absolutely. And there's kind of a level of simplicity to it as well. Hypothetically, as an owner, if a project isn't created in QuickBooks or any kind of accounting software other

11:55project management software outside of Construction Clock, and some guys are going to the site to get started on layout or footings or whatever — it's just like, that's all that has to be done. You can kind of set that up even if the project's not created in accounting yet, and the hours are going to start to be allocated. Just hypothetically for listeners: to set up a project literally takes five seconds. So if there's a guy on site and the project

12:24hasn't been created in Construction Clock, he goes to add new project — it automatically grabs his location and he sets the radius of that project and creates the project. It'll take less than five seconds to create a project. And since those guys are already there, since those laborers are already there, it automatically clocks them in because they're on site. So it's a very simplistic process, and that's our North Star for this app. We're constantly focusing on: how do we make it easier for employees, for laborers or sub-

12:59contractors to use? They don't want to fumble around on an app — go to settings, go to profile, figure out how things are done. You create a project, you go to that project, you're clocking in and out automatically. And we're really honing in on that key feature, which is just the level of simplicity around that for the user. Yeah, and I think the idea of taking it out of the employees' hands — it's another task, another, you know, just typing something in for a few minutes —

13:31but it's all automated that way from that end back to the office. You know, from site back to the office is really where the advantage comes in for the owners. It also makes me think about some subcontracting organizations that are heavy-labor — whether it's cladding or other trades like masonry — there's so much manpower required on the big sites, and on those sites there's a lot more governance from the company structure

14:00and hierarchy — authority-wise, there's a foreman in there, there might be a project manager above him or alongside him, and they're answering back to the office and they have the business's interest in mind. Whereas the employees — maybe 80 percent of them are great and the other 20 are pulled from here and there, a lot of turnover — and there's somebody watching those hours on the big sites. But then you have all your smaller job sites

14:24where there might just be a two-man crew and there's no one for them to answer to locally, or in their micro environment. And also, you know, maintenance crews that are hitting different job sites — maybe three different small jobs a day. So that's where I feel like: are you getting a lot of feedback for those specific scenarios from users of your product, where that's where they're saving that ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars of inefficient allocation and time theft and those kinds of things?

14:55For the largest job sites they've built out these systems — either it's a key card to tap in, I've seen commercial sites where you're tapping with the key card — there's all these checks and balances within these large job sites. When you're running small projects and as the owner you're sending out five or six crews, or even two or three crews, what our app does is it allows you to keep track of who is where at what time. Currently, if you're doing it with an

15:30analog system like writing down hours, you're not able to see how many hours you're into a job unless you tally it up. You're not able to see where your guys are or where your crews are unless you're calling them: "are you guys still at this project?" So what our app is really great for is for that smaller construction company with three to twelve employees where they have multiple job sites going on at once, they have multiple crews going out, and it's getting a little bit overwhelming to kind of manually keep

16:06track of everything. So a lot of companies that use our app are at that scale-up stage where now they've split off to two crews, or they've split off to four crews from two crews, and they're a little bit overwhelmed with how they're going to manage it all. And having an app like ours really does a great job of giving the owner the information that he needs at his fingertips. And I say that we're really great for three to twelve employee companies, but we

16:37have companies — we have 50 companies that use our app — and they are able to, inside our app, set crews up and move crews around, move people from one crew to another. And then it helps create that separation between all of their people. One thing that we're working on now is that you can start assigning projects to crews, so they'll just — if they have 100 projects going on, they can see only the projects that are assigned to them, to keep it simple for the crews. They know exactly what projects are in front

17:10of them, which ones they're working on now. So we're really emphasizing this app for the small and medium-sized construction company that's growing and becoming overwhelmed with how much administrative work it's creating to scale up at that size. Yeah, David, I wonder if we could drill into one thing you just explained there, a little bit, for context for our listeners. So you're saying from the office, management staff can send an alert through the app to an employee's phone

17:44who might be at a certain project, to let them know what project they're going to next or to assemble the crew — and that comes to these employees through the app via an alert or some kind of notification. Is that correct? One thing we're working on right now is that you can assign projects, so if the office staff are at the final stages of setting up a project and they know that this is the crew that's going to be going to that project, they'll assign

18:13that project to that crew. Everyone on that crew will get a push notification saying that this project has been added, and if they're doing half-day projects they'll know which one is in front of them. So you're absolutely right — they'll be alerted as projects are coming onto their docket inside the app, of where they're going next. Yeah, I mean, that's a really great feature. It makes me think of especially the service-providing companies within construction — trades mostly — where we're providing a

18:48labor service. From the accounting perspective, unlike manufacturing and wholesale retail, a lot of times you've got all your variables kind of wrapped up into one umbrella — here's revenue, here's our expenses, here's our allocation for margin and profit from an overall perspective. Especially in construction and service providers, you really want to look at those projects and dissect them from a project-specific standpoint, have a conversation with management: why did this one go so well, why did that one not go well — could we

19:24have done it with a two-man crew instead of four, or twenty instead of twenty-five or thirty? And just to have that accuracy of allocation for hours, especially if you're dealing with a workforce where there's not a lot of large revenue streams on one project — they're spread out across the board. I just see a ton of value there. It makes me think of maintenance crews for development companies, whether they're internal or third-party maintenance service providers. There's all

19:56kinds of trips to fix one thing, you know — for a morning more. Small two-man crews, you're necessary to have at least two guys to work together to put whatever task it is, and they're moving around from different jobs every few days or every week. And those to me seem to be — obviously there are other targets and other clients that can benefit — but those seem to be where you're really streamlining things with those specific companies, I think. Yeah, like

20:24one thing that we built out is: once the project's been completed, you get a PDF document of the cost — the labor cost associated to that project — and a full breakdown of who worked on that project and how many hours you're into that project for. So you can take our PDF document and put it next to your estimate and look at: okay, where did we go over? And you can start improving future projects because you have that post-project data in front of you

21:03where you can see: this is how many hours we quoted versus this is what the actual is; this is how long we estimated the project would take, this is how long it actually took. And one thing that we learned from that is a lot of companies are doing this — they're taking that PDF document after the project ends and doing that comparison — and they wanted to see a live view of where they were financially into that job. So one thing we're working on right

21:31now is a dashboard that shows you how many hours you estimated. So when you add that project, you put in that we estimate this project is going to take 95 hours, and it'll tell you how many hours you're into the project and what cost this project is at right now. So right on the app it'll give you a live feed of exactly where you're at on the project. And I think that this will be really big for small and medium-sized construction companies, where they can

22:08look at the project at any point in time and get basically a reference of where they're at compared to what they estimated. And I think this is going to be huge. Yeah, I mean, listening to that as someone who has experience as an owner and estimator and project manager of heavy-labor construction — one of the biggest variables in your business is that communication channel between estimating and the labor force, and getting accurate data back from the sites on allowances for hours,

22:44man hours — how much did you allow per linear foot, per square foot for this? And having accurate data back to estimating is huge. So that's another great feature there. Could we drill even further into — you know, beyond project-specific — are there any currently or plans to have task-specific allocation from the site, whether it be moving from wood framing to insulation and onto different layers of assemblies and whatnot? We

23:20spent a lot of time thinking about this feature and the benefits to it, and then how that offsets the hands-free aspect of our app and how to mix the two. And so we found a really comfortable middle ground where we're going to be bringing in tasks for the projects, and those can be laid out ahead of time — for this foundation project we're going to be doing some cribbing, we're going to be doing some setup, we're going to be

23:54pouring concrete, we're going to be doing stripping, and then some cleanup after. And you can assign those tasks into the project, and once the project gets started the foreman or the lead hand can keep track of exactly what we're working on today. And then those tasks can have hours associated to them, instead of just one complete hour set for the entire project. We spent a lot of time planning this out, and we feel like we have a really good solution for this.

24:29So we're really excited to add that into our app in the coming months. When I think about the target market — you mentioned companies from five to twenty employees, and then even companies of 50 employees or more are interested and currently using the app, and it's providing a lot of value for lots of different size companies. I think when we talk about automation, it's not just a luxury, it's a necessity once a company grows to a

24:59certain level. Avoiding that paper trail, avoiding tasks that are unnecessary — just automating as much as possible to free people up to do what they do best. Talk about what you're hearing from companies that have internal software, whether it be — there are so many choices out there now, specific to each trade — on the cloud-based software for project management and those sorts of things. But when I think about integration for

25:32internal software, a lot of companies are operating with estimating software that's integrated with accounting and integrated with other aspects of their business, and that's important and it's necessary. But I think — in some discussions that you and I have had in the past — there are companies that are using internal estimating software that's integrated with their accounting for payroll and whatnot, but they're still interested in adopting this app even though there

26:00might be a feature within their holistic software that does offer some labor tracking — it's just not that efficient, it doesn't have the simplicity, it doesn't have the construction-specific automation the way that you guys have set it up with your niche. So maybe speak to some scenarios where you're still able to provide value, these companies adopting your app even though they have other means within their overall internal software. I look at a company like CompanyCam as an

26:33example that honed in on this one very simple feature that all these other companies had, and I talked to the founder — he's actually here with me — and he basically said: look, every piece of construction software has this photo management

26:56but they're doing a lot of different tools, and we came in and we did it completely different and we did it the best way possible, and we're hyper-focused on this one thing. And so for us we look at the landscape and we talk to all of these software companies like BuilderTrend, and they all have manual labor tracking built into them, and some might have some geolocation — but there's a whole bunch of companies that do not use software like that. And even the companies that are using

27:34software like that, they're looking at Construction Clock as a way better version of what their existing software is giving them, because it's fully hands-free and because it is a dedicated app that does this specific thing. They don't have to open up their laptop and find the tool that does that. And so we feel like building an app that's extremely intuitive, building an app that's different — but we're working with all of the other software companies to integrate. And over this year we're going to be integrated into all these

28:21companies, so we're giving all of their customers the option of using the one that's built in or using Construction Clock. And I feel like that's going to make our industry better. I was speaking with Procore this last week and they said: well, we have a labor tracking app, but yours is significantly different than the one that we built into our software. And they're not gatekeepers — they made that very clear that we're going on to their Marketplace, and that'll allow all customers of Procore

28:57to use Construction Clock once it hits the marketplace. And I feel like that's such a great mentality for a large company like them to be doing — letting the best apps in construction come in, admitted by the industry. They want to work with those independent softwares, and we're very happy that we can work and integrate into a bunch of these software companies that have built amazing products and have built a big stack of tools. And we can go in and we can be

29:36integrated and we can do this one thing — which is labor tracking — extremely well, and tie it in with their existing process. Yeah, I mean it's a testament to the focus. You hear a lot of people in business kind of get outside of their focus, and they're not really focusing enough on the one problem they're trying to solve. And obviously yourself as founder and president of Construction Clock, and your team, have done a great job of focusing on just solving that one

30:06problem, which is such a big part of the construction industry — the labor side. And great design, business-wise, the collaboration with other companies — whether it's companies as large as Procore, or QuickBooks and different softwares that understand and are proving that they want to elevate the industry too, by letting other people do what it is they're focused on and integrating with their software. And that's really great to

30:35see. Also a good segue into the next area I wanted to touch on for our listeners, where you're solving a problem for contractors and business owners in construction. Some of these guys might be wearing tools themselves once a week with a crew of 10 or 20. Others are running big operations and they're on the white collar end. But what you're doing is

31:03solving a problem in the construction industry with a tech company. So tell us a little bit about the model, about the team at Construction Clock. I'm assuming there's a marketing manager, there's yourself, there's other management staff, and then lots of tech employees that are probably outsourced in different parts, and everyone working virtually. Just give us a 30,000-foot kind of view of internal

31:31operations for Construction Clock and what the team looks like. When I hung up my tool belt for the last time, I decided I was going to start a tech company, but I didn't know what I didn't know. What I did know is I needed to bring in people that were experts in their field — just like you would hire a drywall finisher or a painter. I brought in very key people to help me launch this, and we have built this incredible

32:03team. There's 19 people in our company — from developers, customer success, marketing, sales — we have this amazing team now. And I could have never gotten anywhere near this place without their professional help and them coming in. And most of them were at the height of their career at that time, and I had this vision: we're going to revolutionize labor tracking for construction. And for them to join me in this vision and band around me has

32:43been incredible over the last year. So we're a fully remote company, which is a new thing for me as a construction company owner — that was hard for me to swallow — where we don't have an office, we're not coming together physically, we're doing everything over phones. Okay, that was something difficult for me to accept, and now it's like that is by far the best way to do business, because we have our team entirely around the world — from Ukraine to the US. And

33:15at this point we are one year into a tech startup company and we are exploding — we're growing. I think the last time I talked to you, we were growing by five or six companies per day. Now that number is right around 11 companies that are joining us per day. And so we're really scaling up, and the industry is really starting to love what we're bringing to the table. And I think

33:43I don't feel like I've done a day of work over the last 365 days because I've just been loving every minute of what we're doing, and the impact that we're having. We have incredible testimonials from customers that said this is taking an entire Saturday off my plate where I can spend time with my family again — I'm not going through all these timesheets and doing all of this job costing. It's down to an hour a day now

34:15instead of an eight hour day on a Saturday. So that's the thing that keeps me and our team motivated to just keep building, making improvements on the app. And for all the companies that joined us last summer when we launched our beta and they stuck through all the bugs and all of the user improvements — I cannot thank those people enough. Those are the early adopters that allowed us to get this off the ground to the point where now we've got this

34:50robust app, we've got hundreds of companies using it, and we're growing rapidly. And without those early adopters that believed in what this could become — not what it was at the start, but what it could become — I am truly thankful that I met those people and that I was able to convince them to stick with us. Yeah, I hope that answers your question, Dan, but that's basically where we're at now. Absolutely, David. I can feel your passion when

35:21you speak about the journey over the last year. And as a fellow entrepreneur, it's so great to see that you've taken that step out and weathered that storm. You mentioned earlier the early adopters — I think for any startup it's so important to have those people that are willing to take a chance on it, because it is a leap of faith. You don't have a lot of data and stuff that you can show them from the past to assess their risk. But yeah, those

35:45early adopters are so important. They take a leap of faith, they put their faith in you and your company, they stick with you, and they kind of work through seeing problems. And those — that's so important to have that feedback. I'm thinking about yourself — we talked just before we went live here. You've been on the road for a couple of months, you're all over North America, maybe the world. I'm not sure — I know

36:10you're in Dallas now, and last time we spoke I forget what location you were in at that time. But yeah, when I think about the processes of your tech team — assuming there are all kinds of bug fixes and app updates — you're kind of riding this wave yourself as the founder and communicating with a lot of different priorities: people in the industry using the app and what are their needs. And even though you have

36:39a strict focus on tracking labor — everything kind of within that and simplifying it — I'm sure you've found some different pivots that you've made and updates to the app that you couldn't have foreseen. Just speak a little bit about what it's like to be that facilitator between the client's experience and your team — having the tech team there to make updates and be planning

37:10a few months out on what we need to do next, to keep riding this wave. Because I think that's a good analogy to use — riding a wave — when you're starting something that's effective and unique as an entrepreneur and you're solving that specific problem. Biggest thing I can look back to is building out maybe not a feature but a process inside the app that would suit one type of company, and then three other companies would call us and say: why did

37:40you do that? This makes it so much harder for us to use the app now. Like I'll give you an example — last summer we automatically did this thing where we would automatically delete the project if nobody had used it, nobody had walked into that project for 30 days. We'd automatically delete it and create a PDF document. And one company — it was a roofing company that had too many projects — said: I need these gone, they need to automatically delete.

38:09Well, ten other companies called me immediately after and said: where did all my projects go? I need all those back for the end of the year. And so for us, that's why it's so important that I come from the industry and that I have a deep understanding — because even I make a lot of mistakes. Talking to our early adopters, I used to react very quickly to everything that they wanted, and now I have to kind of look at the entire industry and say: how is this going to — if

38:38we're going to build this, how is this going to improve the entire industry, not just one sector of it? Because then you just get too niche of a product. And I'm playing this middle ground of talking to our customers — and that's super important, to constantly be talking and engaging with our customers — and then where our vision of this app is and where we want to go with it, and what that looks like down the road. And so

39:08it's been a huge hurdle to overcome — how to make this really user-friendly, how to make this powerful, and how to make it fully automated — and to put all three of those things together into a mobile app was a massive challenge. And now that we've done it and we've built this amazing product, I feel like a big hurdle has been overcome, and now we get to do the fun stuff: the integrations and the really fun

39:46improvements where we just take an already great product and build off of it. And I'm really excited about where we're at now going into year number two. Amazing. I want to just touch back on one of the points you made. As an owner with your labor force using Construction Clock, you're getting kind of a live map — a view of what employees are where and how many on each site — and that's kind of auto-populated in

40:18real time. Is that correct? This is a big point of contention when we talk to construction companies. We've very much considered the privacy of a user alongside the accountability for the owner of the company who wants to see where their people are at all times, and we found this really great middle ground where we are tracking and making sure that people are at the project, and when they leave the project we're not tracking them throughout the day like a

40:57there are driving apps where you can see a breadcrumb of everywhere they were that day. We're just asking the app if they're on the project or if they're not on the project. And if they're not at the project, then we have them as travel time. And I think this is a really important thing to talk about, because we want to be as accurate as possible without crossing the line of user privacy. And we also don't want to use a lot of data on phones,

41:32and so we found this really great middle ground where the owner can open up the app and see a map view of where all of their projects are and where all of their people are currently, without crossing that line of constantly tracking their location and seeing that they went to the 7-Eleven to use the bathroom and things like that. So we take that really seriously — the balance between user privacy and time accountability. Absolutely. And you have to think that a lot of the

42:05administration staff — some of these, especially in the smaller outfits — somebody's in charge of administration. It's very difficult: hours come in, paper trail, you're missing some here, not sure what site this guy was on, can't make out the handwriting. You're making phone calls every Monday or Wednesday or Friday when you're running payroll. You have to think it would really take a lot off the administrator. And as far as

42:35the hours put in and the added stress to get some of these weekly payrolls done — I'm sure you've had some great feedback from people in those positions. As much as we loved talking to our customers, we're also talking to the bookkeepers of these customers and the person that's running payroll and the administrator that's doing job costing. The transition between their current method and using Construction Clock is a massive improvement from their current system. In which now it does a full summary breakdown

43:10and it gives them exactly the data that they need. And it's not 15 pages long, it doesn't show every detail, but it just shows them exactly what they need to see so that they can run payroll within minutes instead of hours of calculating everything. And this has been really great — seeing on the administration side how much we've improved that process for people to run payroll, and for the bookkeepers that are tracking job costs. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're

43:46saving hours and tightening up allocation on both sides of every company — on the office side and the site side, the blue collar and the white collar side, if you will. So yeah, it's definitely — there are other options out there. I mean, talk about the competition. I feel like the competition for you might just be other tracking apps that aren't as specific or as drilled in and focused on labor

44:16tracking specifically. There are so many different options out there — from larger payroll outsource companies where they're offering these sorts of services but not specific to construction, not specifically for contractors from a founder who's got that background and intuition. Just tell us a little bit about the competitive landscape. I think the biggest thing that sets us apart is when I talk to customers they immediately know that I was a contractor, and it's so

44:49easy to qualify somebody that's been in the trades versus a company that just builds software that technically solves a problem but isn't specific to our industry. And there is a lot of software products out there that do track time — you can get an app as simple as Clockify where you're just literally punching in hours — and you can get really complex ones for job costing. And the biggest thing that I've found is we call

45:29ourselves the first hands-free labor tracking app dedicated to the construction industry, because what sets us apart from the competition is the fact that there is a massive amount of automation that happens — that replaces your teams having to manually enter a lot of data day after day, week after week — and we've replaced that with very intuitive, automated software that's sitting in your pocket, that's always with you. And I feel like we are leading the pack when it comes to labor tracking for

46:10construction. And our customers are a testament to that. We have lots of customers that have come to us from another software solution because of how simple our app is to use, how simple it is to set up, and the fact that we have solved this problem for the construction industry and not for every single industry out there. We're very project-based, and we want to focus on projects — and no matter if you're a

46:41service company or a construction company or a maintenance company, we're going to be the app that solves labor tracking for project-based industries. David, I think that's a clear and concise overall summing-up of Construction Clock. We've touched on a lot of different aspects and different scenarios — about your company specifically and about the service that you provide. And obviously our team at the Atlantic Construction Podcast — we share your passion for the

47:19industry, and it's great to have a guest such as yourself, and obviously your whole team, to connect with you folks at Construction Clock. We hope that our listeners throughout Atlantic Canada — I think there are a lot of companies that fit the target client who's going to benefit from having this app. I've got friends and colleagues and business associates that I can't wait for them to hear about the product

47:51that you folks are providing. So we hope that we can help you out in that regard. And it's been great to chat with you. Just from our team here on our end with our media company — we're also a startup, two years in — and like I said before, we share your passion, and hats off to you and your team for what you're doing, for solving that critical problem within the

48:19industry, and just for elevating the industry in your own way. It's great to chat with you, and we're definitely wishing you luck in the future. I really appreciate you having me on your podcast, and I'm excited for you guys as well as you're growing your startup media. Really excited to see how you guys can continue to grow and expand and elevate this industry that we all love so much. This episode is brought to

48:46you by Cook Insurance, your trusted insurance broker in Atlantic Canada for 50 years. Insurance is complex, and the Cook team focuses on delivering comprehensive solutions for your construction needs, including builders risk, wrap-up liability, performance bonds, and project-specific coverage. A Navacord partner since 2020, Cook is one of the largest construction brokers in Canada and offers national strength with a local touch. Whatever your insurance needs are, Cook has you covered. We would like to take this time to thank a long-time sponsor of our media platform, FCA

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