How One Contractor Eliminated
the Chaos and Confusion in His
Company by Using BuildStar
Rick Town
“With BuildStar we have been able to significantly increase the number of projects we build and at the same time decrease my overheads. It truly has paid for itself.” – Rick T.
Rick T. has many construction companies he manages and juggles a lot of documentation and subcontractors.
Before BuildStar, the systems Rick was using were sporadic and it was extremely challenging to manage everything and everyone through the chaos.
There were stacks of papers. It was a mess.
Rick had spreadsheet printouts and handwritten notes.
There wasn’t a repository for all the documents, so a lot of time was spent searching for what was needed, and some of the documents were misplaced or taken.
Because of this, it was harder to stay on top of things.
It was harder to see the overall picture of each project, which made it cumbersome and risky.
Financially, it was a huge risk not knowing where they were in the process of a project and they lost a lot of money and time because of it.
Getting BuildStar changed everything for Rick and his team.
The hands-on aspect of the software was extremely useful to Rick because he was able to see the broad scope of a project, the costs involved, and have all the documentation and pictures for each project.
Rick said, “After getting BuildStar, I only had to go one place for the majority of our work and management and then we could take the system and customize it for [our projects]. …I could manage 90% of what we did from that one program as opposed to many programs and systems.”
One of the greatest benefits to using BuildStar was the peace of mind it gave.
It reduced costs and increased efficiency and Rick has been able to take on more work because of BuildStar.
For Rick, the budget vs actuals is a favorite part of BuildStar. It’s very detailed and it paints a high-level picture of the project from a financial standpoint.
There are many aspects of BuildStar that Rick loves.
BuildStar has also saved Rick and his team a lot of headaches with disputes.
On one project, one of the subcontractors was left alone, or thought he was alone, and tried to claim he needed to charge more because it was taking longer than expected.
But Rick was continually taking photos of the project and documenting it in BuildStar. He was able to prove to the subcontractor where they were along the process.
When he showed the subcontractor the proof, the subcontractor never brought it up again.
BuildStar really saved their bacon, and has multiple times.
