How to Level Up Your Business with DESTINI Estimator

“If a business doesn’t grow, it dies.” -Scott Clark, Washington Business Journal 

Why is business growth so important and what does it mean to level up?  

Leveling up puts your business in a better position than it is now and makes you stand out from your competition, which can help you win more work.  

Key takeaways: 

  • You must be willing to grow and change 
  • Data-driven decisions leads to a better owner experience 
  • Utilizing software made for estimating helps your company level-up 

What happens if your general contracting business doesn’t grow? In the best-case scenario, you’ll continue making the same amount of money you currently make. You’ll continue to have as many projects as you do now. And you might be able to remain in business for the long haul if your current input versus output is sustainable. However, it’s highly unlikely that’s the case.  

Why? 

Because, in business, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. As fierce as competition is in construction, if you don’t grow, you might not be able to stay in business. What happens if you don’t grow or level up besides possibly facing having to close up shop? If you chose to stay stagnant, your profit stays the same. Without more money, you can’t pay your people more. When you can’t pay people what they are worth, they’ll leave for greener pastures. With the current labor shortage, you can’t afford to lose your employees. 

A company's growth has two basic modes: growing and dying. If it is not growing, it is dying, because other companies will continue to grow and leave yours withering on the vine. -Scott Clark 

The problem is two-fold. Besides losing your best estimators, not having a plan for growth does nothing to attract the new generation of potential employees to precon.  

To level up, you must keep up with changes and trends in construction. Right now, utilizing technology to streamline processes and become more efficient is the key to delivering a better-quality product on time safely. If you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind.  

One of the best ways to grow your business is by being customer-centric and providing owners with value they can’t find anywhere else.  

We often hear from preconstruction teams that they often have only a few weeks to turn around a conceptual estimate from the time they receive plans to the owner’s meeting. This leaves very little time, if any, to perform value engineering.  

Estimators want to spend most of their time on adding value to the owner and not on creating the estimate.  

What do you think happens when an owner, who has an investor meeting in a day, calls you up, asks for an estimate and you tell them it will take up to a month?  

They are going to go somewhere else. You lose the job because you can’t provide deliverables quickly enough.  

Chart showing business growth If you utilize technology, you are already ahead of 78% of the other general contractors.

According to McKinsey & Company, almost 100% of construction projects “incur cost overruns or delays.” If you had a way to significantly reduce the number of change orders, budget overruns, and missed deadlines, you’d start building a reputation that your numbers are accurate, dependable, and quick.  

There is a way you can stand out by giving owners less than a one-day turnaround on your conceptual estimates and that is through DESTINI Estimator construction estimating software. Our estimating software cuts the time it takes to create an estimate in half. This integrated single-source solution for preconstruction teams includes built-in takeoff, cost history, comparison reporting, and multi-user access. 

An astounding 78% of general contractors aren’t utilizing technology that allows them to aggregate and analyze data but with DESTINI Estimator, you can. When analyzing the construction industry, Statista, a leader in market data, writes, “The modernization of a typically conservative industry will be important in the near future to support customer demands and to improve operation models.”

DESTINI Estimator automatically gathers and stores all your cost history. Using this data, estimators can anticipate risk and provide better project decisions because you can easily recall past projects and see where additional delays and/or costs have occurred on similar projects.  

When your conceptual estimate is defendable with data, you provide a significantly better experience for the owner, which sets you apart from more than half of the other general contractors who depend on spreadsheets to draft their estimates.  

To grow, you need to extend value to your customers. To provide them something your competition can’t. In this case, it is accurate conceptual estimates delivered in record time. Providing such a higher level of service than your competitor helps you win the next project, the next one, and the next. 

We haven’t spoken to one estimating team that doesn’t wish they had more time for value engineering. When you can provide your owners with the best solutions to anticipated problems AND can back those solutions up with visible proof, you’ve already leveled up from those teams STILL handing owners stacks of archaic Excel spreadsheets. 

If you're ready to help grow your company, request your demo of DESTINI Estimator today!

 

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