Garrett Guthrie is a third-generation builder, continuing the construction efforts his father began in 1967. But he’s the first generation in the family business to make use of technology in a major way — helping Guthrie Construction take on many more projects with ease and grow revenues. The company, which serves Marin County, California, has come a long way since Guthrie and his brother founded it in 1974. Here, learn about the tech solutions that made it happen.

Taking the First Tech Step

Although he did some construction work with his dad early on, Guthrie felt a stronger calling to technology back then, and ended up at Apple doing systems integrations. But he re-upped in the family business when his dad began planning to retire, and knew just how to bring the company more into the digital age. 

“Coming from the technology space, I just knew that things could be done more efficiently,” he says. “Not that there was anything wrong with the way [my father] was doing things, but if we were going to grow and expand the business, I just knew immediately we’d have to start with organization.”

His first step in that direction was adopting an all-in-one cloud-based program. “Basically I started with Google, tried to find out what systems were available for small businesses specifically,” Guthrie says. “I know there’s a ton of construction management programs, CRMs, out there that we could have chosen from, but I really needed something that was going to be a one-stop shop.”

He landed on Houzz Pro. “Houzz checked all boxes when it came to scheduling, CRM,

task management, delegation,” he says. “And then something that kind of stood out to me was also involving our subcontractors.”

Tech Makes the Team

At Guthrie Construction, “we as a team are all individual project managers,” Guthrie says. “We’ve all done businesses on our own as project managers. So one of the challenges we came across immediately was that we’ve all done this in our own way and successfully. But then we adopted this single system for all of us to use. Houzz Pro made it very easy to create a workflow that we could all adopt across the board.”

He elaborates: “We went from basically a sole proprietorship, very uncollaborative type of business to running three project managers immediately on three separate projects, and everybody’s doing it the same way, which made a pretty big impact immediately.”

Clients are also part of the team on the company’s projects, and both they and the subcontractors find Houzz Pro’s Dashboard feature particularly helpful. “In construction, your product is very ethereal,” Guthrie says. He wanted to give clients a better sense of the final result as well as where the project is at during every stage. “Houzz covers all those bases with the Client Dashboard,” he says.

Feedback from clients was immediately positive. “It’s not something they’d seen or experienced before,” Guthrie says. “They would usually get updates on schedule by text or by email. The communication could be scattered. And this allows them one place to go and stay on top of their project.” It’s a win-win, in fact. “[We’re constantly presenting clients new information, and their asks and needs for us go way down, because they feel like we are on top of it,” Guthrie says.

Tech Tidies Up Accounting 

Guthrie harnessed the power of Houzz Pro’s QuickBooks integration for bookkeeping right away, and says it saves him “a huge amount of time.… Immediately the benefits were visible to us, because by putting our project data into Houzz Pro, it can actually complete the entire project life cycle without a single person touching any of that data, which is pretty unique. And it gives us a sense of accuracy all the time. The numbers that we’re working with are correct because they’re constantly in sync with Houzz. So, it puts our bookkeeper's mind at ease and it also frees up their time for more strategic conversations.”

As for other finance-related matters, “Immediately the benefits were that we were billing on time for the first time all year; we were job costing for the first time probably in the entire business.… We’ve had spreadsheets and tried to stay on top of them — collect all of our receipts, try to stay on top of our time. But Houzz allowed us to immediately have all those items in place, and as long as we put the good data in, we were immediately getting that good data back.”

Being able to see money-related matters in a project at a glance has made a huge difference for his business and clients too. “It’s the first time in 20 years that we’ve been able to be this close to our numbers, or see in this close to real time where we’re at in a project,” Guthrie says. “And we’re pretty transparent with our clients about the project financing as far as where we are with our payments, where we are with current progress.… They know when their payments are due, and they also know what those payments are for. It clears any ambiguity from their minds and just gives them a lot more peace of mind as far as project progress and where their money is going.” 

Other Favorite Houzz Pro Features

Centralized communication: “That central place for communication allows the client to see everything happen in real time in front of them, whether it’s communication with your subs, or it’s communication with clients, all that has saved us so much time, energy, miscommunication.… And it gives you a lot more control over the client experience.”

Schedule: “I think probably everybody’s favorite feature in the Dashboard is the Schedule.… This is a really great way to let everyone - project managers, subcontractors and clients - visualize the entire project as it’s going to unfold.”

Templates: “Houzz Pro almost lets us exponentially grow projects, because they’re templated out.” Before, his team of three could take on only one project each at a time. Now, “we’re able to take on at least three projects each. So that’s a pretty big impact to our bottom line.” Templates for estimates and proposals “have been a game changer,” he says. “Our projects and our standard pricing feel the same across the board, so we’re able to consistently deliver the same experience to each client, as well as guarantee faster turnaround time, which is a big, very big deal in our business. Sometimes putting in the first bid has a big impact.”

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