Your firm runs on six rented systems.
Website, project management, CRM, leads, ads and accounting. Six bills, six logins, and a name retyped at every handoff. How to audit yours in thirty minutes.
Ask a residential builder what software they run and you will usually hear one name. The project management tool. That is the one they think of as “the software.”
Then walk the office with them. The website is with an agency. The leads come from a marketplace. Someone runs the ads, often a second agency. The sales pipeline lives in a CRM, or a spreadsheet, or the owner’s phone. The books are in an accounting package with a payroll add-on.
That is six systems. The firm rents every one of them, and owns none.
What the six cost
These are the ranges we see when we do the stack audit on a fit visit. They are the same ranges on our pricing page.
| What you need | Who you rent it from | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing website and hosting | An agency on retainer | $800 to $3,000 / mo |
| Project management | A construction PM subscription | $300 to $800 / mo, plus seats |
| CRM and sales pipeline | A separate CRM | $50 to $150 per seat / mo |
| Leads | A lead marketplace | $30 to $100 per shared lead |
| Ad management | A second agency | $1,000 to $3,000 / mo, plus a cut of spend |
| Accounting and payroll | An accounting subscription | Monthly, plus a payroll add-on |
Add the low end of each fixed line, with one CRM seat and no paid leads, and you are past $2,150 a month before accounting. Add the high end and you are past $6,900, still before a single lead and still before you pay for the seats on the PM tool.
Most builders have never added it up, because it arrives as six bills on six dates from six vendors. Nobody owns the total. Do it once with last month’s statements. The number is usually bigger than the owner guesses.
The cost that never shows up on a bill
The subscriptions are the visible cost. The bigger one is the retyping.
Follow one homeowner through the firm. They fill out a form on the website. Someone copies the name and number into the CRM. When they sign, someone types them into the PM tool as a new job. When the first draw goes out, someone types them into accounting as a customer. When a change order is approved on site, someone re-enters it in the books.
That is the same name typed four or five times by different people. Every handoff is a chance to drop a digit in the phone number, miss the change order, or bill the wrong amount. None of it is anyone’s job, so all of it is everyone’s job, and it happens after hours.
Then ask the obvious question: which ad produced the homeowner who just signed a $900,000 contract? With six systems, nobody can answer it. The ad lives in one system, the lead in another, the contract in a third, and the money in a fourth. We wrote about that one in cost per lead is a vanity metric.
What renting means the day you leave
Each of those six vendors is integrated inside its own walls. The PM tool talks to itself. The CRM talks to itself. Some of them sync to each other, and the sync breaks a few times a year.
When you leave one, what it held leaves with it. Leave the agency and the website may be on their hosting account. Leave the marketplace and the lead flow stops that day. Leave the PM tool and you find out what “export” means to them. We covered that in you do not own your builder software.
Do the audit yourself
Thirty minutes with last month’s statements:
Why Yglu is one system
Yglu replaces the six with one: website, CRM, construction and accounting, on one login, on accounts the firm owns. A name is typed once, on the website form, and it flows to the pipeline, the job and the books. No seat fees, month to month.
We do the audit above on the free on-site fit visit. If the numbers say you should keep what you have, we will tell you.
Written by Kol Dorney, founder of Yglu. Field Notes drops when there is something worth putting on the record, not on a publishing schedule.