Contractor Success Forum
Tips and advice to run a successful construction business from two long-term industry professionals: Wade Carpenter, a construction CPA, and Stephen Brown, a construction bond agent. Each host has unique, but complementary views and advice from each of their 30+ years in the contracting industry. Their goal is to promote healthy, thought-provoking discussions and tips for running a better, more profitable, and successful company. Subscribe for new insights and discussion every week. Visit ContractorSuccessForum.com to view all episodes and find out more.
Contractor Success Forum
Productivity hacks for contractors to work smarter, not harder in 2025
Do you feel overwhelmed by the daily grind of managing your construction business? In our first podcast of 2025, Wade Carpenter and Stephen Brown share essential productivity hacks tailored for contractors.
Learn how to leverage tools like the Elgato Stream Deck, Superhuman for email management, AI, and low code automation systems to work smarter, not harder. Discover strategies for optimizing your workflow, creating effective templates, and using keyboard shortcuts. Save time and increase efficiency with these practical tips.
Join us on the Contractor Success Forum and make 2025 your most productive year yet!
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Topics Wade and Stephen cover on this episode:
- 02:06 The Elgato Stream Deck: A Game Changer
- 08:25 Superhuman Email Management
- 13:57 Voice Dictation and AI Integration
- 19:52 The Power of Templates
- 22:34 Automation Tools for Contractors
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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com
[00:00:00] Wade Carpenter: Do you ever feel like you're spending more time managing your work than actually doing it? What if you could save hours every week by using the right tools and strategies?
Today, we're sharing productivity hacks for contractors that can help you work smarter, not harder. We'll cover tools like AI, templates, automation, and low code systems to streamline your workflow and give you back your time.
Welcome to the Contractor Success Forum. I'm Wade Carpenter with Carpenter Company CPAs, and I'm here with Stephen Brown of McDaniel Whitley, Bonding and Insurance.
Stephen, seems like there are too many things contractors are trying to cram in their day. Any initial thoughts on hacking productivity?
[00:00:34] Stephen Brown: It sure is, Wade. There's so many things that I see that I could do faster, that I could do a little bit smarter. Just simple hacks that don't involve a huge learning curve. Sometimes we talk about a lot of technologies that just seem like well, I've got such a huge investment of something I really don't understand. And then it'll take forever for me to teach my folks how to use it.
This is something for you to start using for yourself and then eventually introduce it to the rest of your work team, because it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing how productive you can be with some of this, the simple hacks.
And Wade, you've done a great job of putting these hacks together. Thank you. I'm looking forward to getting into it with you. And, and, here we are, our first podcast of 2025. It's hard to believe, isn't it? And I just, You know, I told, I told someone, I said, I hope the motto of this year is thrive in 25.
Don't just survive. And making 2025 outstanding. This is the time of year Where everybody gets pep talks and gets themselves fired up for the year ahead. And what a, a great way, better way to do that than these hacks.
[00:01:45] Wade Carpenter: Well, um, like I said, These are some things that I just, I have started doing that saved me tons of time. And, I was thinking the same thing with people having New Year's resolutions and trying to do things and be more successful in 2025. That I thought I'd just throw out some of the things I've been doing that have saved me tons of time. And a lot of these sort of work together as we get into it.
The Elgato Stream Deck: A Game Changer
[00:02:06] Wade Carpenter: But no, let me just start off with one of the better ones that I've actually been using for a couple of years now. It's called the Elgato Stream Deck. It's a little thing you can hook to your computer and you can program buttons. And most people think it's for streamers.
I got one of these a couple of years ago and it has saved me so much time. And I'll talk about some of the ways it does that, but has nothing to do with doing a podcast or something like that. I'm using it right now on a couple of things, but, as far as hacking my productivity, it does things like, keyboard shortcuts or short little phrases. Things like that, or key combinations that I'll talk about in a minute.
But there's so many things where this can be easily programmed to do what you want it to do and, saves me so much time.
So, beyond that, as far as like things like filling out forms, I have some things like I fill out my email address so many times a day. I can hit one button. You may want to be careful about this, but, I'll program certain passwords that, maybe I have two factor authentication on. Things that, that kind of things like filling out the form or whatever, hit one button and it's done, as opposed to, no, it doesn't take you that long to type it out. But it saves you few seconds and minutes and, definitely hours over the course of my week. So just let me stop there. Any thoughts on that?
[00:03:27] Stephen Brown: The thing that I think so cool about the stream deck is it's. It almost seems like a remote control. Not only does it help you with repetitive tasks, but I would think you could also program it, and we were talking about this before the podcast, about literally creating a dashboard for each one of your construction projects. What does that look like when you push a button and pull up a certain project, when you have multiple projects running that you want to check every element of that project? You could program that to automatically include all that, couldn't you?
[00:04:02] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, depending on what program you're talking about, generally speaking, it will work with either cloud based tools or desktop tools. If they have like keyboard combination, things like that, that's one of the things I think is a lost art. People are learning computers nowadays are so used to using the mouse, but the keyboard shortcuts out there, there's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you can use that can save you a lot of time. And I, things like Excel I've used for years. But a lot of times there's more shortcuts than you realize. And, you can program those in Stream Deck and you don't have to remember them all. You can basically program the button to show whatever you want it to say so that you can recognize it really quickly. And I organize it so that Excel pops up and all the keys for Excel will pop up and say, I want to, you know, create a graph or something like that. I mean, you can program multiple key combinations. And it sounds like it's super hard. It's quite frankly, super easy.
[00:05:03] Stephen Brown: That sounds great. How many buttons does this thing have?
[00:05:07] Wade Carpenter: There's different models of it from like a six key to 15 key, but I've got the 32 key. I've got, I got them all over. My home, my office, every computer I got. I got one of the 32 keys on each one of those, as well as there's a few other ones that have a dial where you can turn things up or change programs with a dial.
But they're all like, have a little button and you can change the icon so that you can recognize exactly what it is. And it's, context sensitive. If you program it, say when Microsoft Word comes up that, the keys for Microsoft Word come up.
To your point about like pulling up a job or whatever. I mean, it will open things like a website or something like that. Anybody could do that with a bookmark or whatever, but if you use it all the time, you have it on the Stream Deck.
There's a lot of contractors using QuickBooks Online. And if you've ever known, there are some nice Chrome extensions out there that can get you to places a little faster, but like QuickBooks Online reports, going to pull up your balance sheet or pulling up your income statement. Those parameters are baked into the web address that you can program just as another key.
And if I want to pull up a balance sheet. I click a button. I want to pull up a profit and loss, or can't remember how to get back to my bank feeds. I just copy that URL, put it on a key in my stream deck and I hit that button and I can recall it anytime I want to. Does that make sense?
[00:06:33] Stephen Brown: It does.
[00:06:34] Wade Carpenter: Again, I could spend a bunch of time going into all the things I do with that. But I'd like to move on to some of these other tools because some of them actually I'm working with them.
I've already said the second one, but, rediscovering keyboard combinations for saving time. There's a lot of key combinations that people don't realize that they can do.
And sometimes it's just going to your software and pulling it up or Googling what are the key combinations for Google Chrome or something like that. So, again, I've paired that with the Stream Deck to save me a bunch of time, because not all of us can't remember. I mean, I've got my keyboard hacks with Excel that I've known for years, but ones that are multi step that you can program into a Stream Deck definitely will save you time.
But I think the keyboard shortcut is a lost art. Any thoughts on that before I move on to the next one?
[00:07:33] Stephen Brown: No, it's definitely a lost art. And in the early days of personal computing, keyboard shortcuts were everything. It took so long to, to change between apps, to find the information you're looking for. And you had a keyboard shortcut of something you were doing all the time. You used it all the time. And I agree. It is a lost art.
[00:07:53] Wade Carpenter: I still remember way back when Lotus 1 2 3, me and you guys go way back to that backslash and then the file save and all the stuff that is almost silly now. People don't even remember Lotus 1 2 3 after Excel came out. But, some of those keyboard shortcuts have just, they've saved me tons of time over the years.
[00:08:13] Stephen Brown: Oh yeah. My, my first computer had dual floppy drives, Wade one, one was the hard drive, the operating system, and then one was the software. And you regularly lost all the work you were doing.
[00:08:24] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.
Superhuman Email Management
[00:08:25] Wade Carpenter: Let me talk about another hack that I recently discovered, which I had looked at many years ago, and I'll tell you why I didn't jump on board years ago, but it's called superhuman. com. It's email management, and a friend of mine actually recently showed me he was using it. And they use extensive Keyboard shortcuts.
But let me tell you about this really quick. So superhuman. com used to be for Gmail only. And it also used to only work on Apple products, Macintosh computers. And they recently have got that for Windows users, as well as it works with Outlook, Office 365. So Microsoft products.
I don't think it works with other email programs, but it does work with Gmail as well as Outlook. So that covers a lot of business uses. And when they brought it to where you can have it on your on your Windows computer, I took another look at this and this has saved me so much time.
And it is a subscription. I believe it's something like 30 a month. for the subscription. And it sounds incredibly expensive to handle your email, but this thing has saved me so much time to go through my inbox and, some of the other features in it. It's just, it's well worth it to me.
[00:09:50] Stephen Brown: To me, the most fascinating thing about it, Wade, is just how you can quickly find information in old emails you're looking for, just beside email management. But it's something I can't wait to start using. It looks very exciting. And to say to someone, you need to spend 30 a month to do this.
I think when you realize how much you depend on your emails and your business, especially me, I do, I have six different email accounts. That I probably too many, but I depend on all of them and they coming in and every direction, and I want to make sure that I'm managing them properly and that I can find the information from them that I need.
And so many emails are tied into a search engine that only lets you look for a subject matter. And you have to remember what the subject matter or topic might be, and then hunt around through the emails to find the specific one that you're looking for.
What else are you using superhuman for, Wade?
[00:10:43] Wade Carpenter: So, one of the things that I first noticed was the thing about the keyboard shortcuts. It's built for speed. It's built for going through your email very quickly.
I've never been able to, I get hundreds of emails every day. And inbox zero sounds like a fantasy. You know, It's like, I don't see how I could do that. And I think a lot of people manage their inbox, if there's something they need to go back and do, they just mark that email back unread and try to go back to, and remember to do it later. They've got a different paradigm it's where, and again, there's a single keys you can type on your keyboard, or again, I've set up my own Stream Deck profile that when Superhuman comes up, it pops up the keys. I want to either manage my email or compose a new one or dealing with my calendar. But as far as letting you focus where, typically you could actually delete every email, but I'm, I never really have done that.
It's just, I don't have really time to go back and do that. If I can hit one key and just, it disappears from like my important email box. Or, things like subscriptions or, things that I may want notifications, I may want to look at, but it's not something I got to focus on right now. We sit there and set up a separate inbox that it will go to, and I can check that when I need to.
And most of that stuff, I can just quickly just scan through and hit, highlight them all, and mark them done. There's features like being able to say, Remind Me, and just and again, they're all keyboard combinations or they've got a short keyboard thing and, they call it the wizard or assistant or whatever they call it, that it will pop up and then you can type what you want to do.
And so, there's a lot of nice features and I'm probably not doing it justice here, but, it's saved me so much time.
And as far as, things like composing emails, we've all heard of, there's building in AI to everything now is, Outlook's got it you can pop your email and chat GPT and then say, reply to this email or write an email, but it's baked right into superhuman.
And again, there's other programs doing that, but I can just hit a key, and start composing an email or it will actually like pre write reply to it. Or calendar features. Again, there's a lot here to unpack in just a few minutes, but the calendar features, I can pull up the calendar and say, I've got an email that says, can we get together at two o'clock on Thursday? And I hit the calendar, I hit one button, and it's created an appointment on my calendar that I can say, add a Zoom link to and send right off. And it's again, amazing how much time it's saving me. It really has been a game changer.
[00:13:29] Stephen Brown: I can't wait to try it. I just watched a YouTube video, a couple of them on what folks are saying about it and what it can do. And I'm impressed. And then to hear how much time and how much stress it's taken off of you in email management. It just sounds like a great product.
[00:13:47] Wade Carpenter: And again, like the Stream Deck or the Superhuman, I'm not, we're not getting any money out of that. We're not paid to say this. These are just things that have been working for me. So I just wanted to share them.
Voice Dictation and AI Integration
[00:13:57] Wade Carpenter: Just a couple of other ones that, I think I may have shown a time or two on here, but, AI right now is, it's getting better and better.
But one of the hacks, like ChatGPT, if you've got voice mode, you can actually talk to your phone or whatever . But that was another hack that I discovered over, probably a year and a half, almost two years ago, is going back and putting all these together.
In Windows, like Windows 11 there's a key combination, like it's the Windows key plus H, and it will actually start dictation mode. So, sometimes the dictation is not great, but before the voice mode for Chat GPT came up, I would get in the little prompt box and just, I've got a button on my Stream Deck. It just automatically starts the dictation mode. I hit one button and I say what I want to say. And then ChatGPT, even though it's not perfect on the dictation, it gets the context of it. And it has, again, saved me so much time.
So again, I realize people are getting into the voice mode and I think ChatGPT does have a limit of number of conversations you can have in a day with it. But getting around that and just general everyday use, just having this keyboard combination to dictate, it's again, saved me so much time. It's just, there's all of us are just trying to find ways to speed up their task. And that's one of the big ones that I've done.
Thoughts on that?
[00:15:25] Stephen Brown: No, I think it's great. And I think you're exactly right. There's so many things that have evolved since I first subscribed to ChatGPT. There's just so many features. There's so many things that it does, that you almost can't keep up with it as a subscriber. Because every, if you're not into it every day, you're not seeing all the new features that are coming out and what you can do with it.
I think that's a great comment about the Windows key and the H shortcut to get you straight into a dictation mode. Now why it's not a Windows key and a D for dictation is totally beyond me the logic of these keyboard shortcuts, but that's great information, Wade.
And, you know, what about using AI or chat GPT for note taking in meetings? Do you need to announce to everyone, I'm recording or I'm taking notes on this meeting or is it just recording and transcribing the entire meeting? And how can you organize your notes from that? I'm sorry. I may have been throwing too many questions.
[00:16:24] Wade Carpenter: That's okay. I think we've talked about this multiple times. There are programs like Otter. AI is the one I use, but there are several of them out there that will plug into a Zoom meeting or a Microsoft Teams meeting or Google's Meets. And as far as notifying people, I think there's laws and they're different all over the country.
But I think they've just basically, all these platforms that I mentioned, Zoom and all this, they, they will pop up and say recording the meeting so that if somebody's on a meeting and it's being recorded, they're going to be notified.
But the thing I've done with Otter, like Otter AI, again, we could spend some more time talking about it, but we've talked about in the context of you going through your team meetings or having your project planning meetings or whatever.
What I use it for is multiple things. It's like exactly what I said. If I've got a team meeting and we go through that, we can say, this is what we talked about. These are the follow ups that I have to do, the team has to do, or if I have a client meeting or tax planning meeting, then I can actually quickly go through and, summarize the meeting, actually send this to my client, follow up items for me as well as follow up items for my client.
There are things like meeting with a prospect. Sometimes I'll start talking to a prospect and maybe they get back to me. Two weeks later or a month later. I don't instantly recall all these things that in, that we talked about.
And going back to taking these transcripts. Otter. AI, you can actually go back and type, just ask questions of the transcript, but I actually, and again, this is getting a little more complex, but it's really not that hard to implement. I'll take the transcript. And I've got it in another program called SmartSuite that I could actually talk about some of the things with that.
And, but the point is I've got it posted in SmartSuite and I've got different prompts. For like a team meeting and say in the team meeting, we went through how to do something. It sends a prompt that says, I want you to format it this way. And this is how we do it.
Versus prospect meetings, it's, I have specific things when I'm talking to a contractor that I want to know about their system and how they want to do things and those kinds of things. So I've got a very detailed prompt that says, did we talk about job costs? And did we talk about payrolls or accounts payable systems and those kinds of things?
So it saved me so much time. These meeting notes assistant, they're all over the place now. But getting beyond that the AI, just even the canned summaries that come out of most of these are much better than you've ever probably had.
And I know I was guilty of, I take notes all the time by hand, but do I remember it? Do I, can I find it when I need it? I never have been able to, and I've tried all kinds of systems like iPads with a pencil or the Remarkables and those kinds of things. And, I still will jot down a couple of things, but honestly, I don't pay attention to it anymore because I've got these meeting notes that I can refer back to and be very specific and find exactly what was said. So again, saved me so much time.
[00:19:35] Stephen Brown: Yeah. And if you're not doing it and someone else is doing it, you're missing some key things that you may need to be doing for your customer. And it's just fantastic. I can't. I can't wait to explore that more. More hacks for 2025, Wade. What have you got?
The Power of Templates
[00:19:52] Wade Carpenter: When you're getting into 2025, I would say if you're trying to change your game, your business, people forget just the power of creating a template. This is how we do it here. A form or whatever. Just because we reinvent the wheel all the time.
And just, using the example of like somebody calls to my firm and they want to find out about how we work with contractors who bought back office services. My team would just, some of them have been around the game and they know what questions I'm going to ask, but they're inconsistent because they can't think of all these things that I might bring up.
So, I've taken something like just using the Otter AI transcript. I ran a few of those. It's like, what do we talk about? And I created a form for them, before they talk to me that they can ask specific things and that has standardized a lot of things.
Templates can save you a lot of time and they don't have to be very hard to create anymore. With ChatGPT, you can just say, I need a form to do this. And it may not be exactly what you need, but it'd be a darn good start.
And I preached, from the book, The E Myth by Michael Gerber for all, 25 years now and the power of systems and systematizing your business.
But, in the last two years, when AI has come out there, all you got to do is go in and chat GPT. And you want to document your system. And like I said, you use your stream deck, hit your windows H key, dictating this is how we walk through accounts payable, and it can make it, write it and document it so much faster.
And you may need to tweak it a little bit, but so many people don't document anything. And so their estimator comes in, or their project manager comes in, and they all have their own systems. And this is, goes a long way to getting everybody on the same page, and quite frankly, makes it a lot easier for people to follow in their footsteps if somebody leaves or goes on vacation, somebody can pick right back up.
[00:21:50] Stephen Brown: There's no industry probably more ripe for need for templates and template management. Everything from safety to starting up a new project to a if you're a general contractor for kit for sub subcontractors to do business with you, to providing proper insurance certificate, safety protocols time management, that, that template, um, and your ability to access them, I think you're right, Wade.
Having these processes that aren't easy to use and implement and to share really aren't doing your organization any good, are they?
[00:22:27] Wade Carpenter: Not unless everybody's on the same page. It saves a lot of time if you're all doing it the same way as well as, knowing what to ask.
Automation Tools for Contractors
[00:22:34] Wade Carpenter: Last two, I guess, go hand in hand, but we've already touched on AI, but automation too. And we, still believe, we had Zapier, a lot of people know what Zapier is or Zapier, however you want to refer to them as Zaps, but some people pronounce it Zapier, some Zapier, but that, has been out there for years. And it was just like, connect one tool to another.
I worked on that for years, but it was only like really one step or one or two steps. And now the automation tools are getting so good. Make. com. There's another one that I love that's relay. app that has human in the loop automation. And whether you have time to learn this or the inclination to learn this stuff, it's not rocket science anymore.
These automations as well as tying these into, you know, AI systems where it can write something for you or, research something for you has saved quite a bit of time.
And so that's where I've spent a lot of time learning as well as, investing time to get these systems in place. And that's my message for contractors is if you will spend some time, and you may end up spending some money if you don't have time to learn it or whatever, but sometimes that time saved can pay for a person's, salary many times over in the time savings. So, a lot of these things are getting easier and easier to build. Did I hit all the questions or thoughts you had on that?
[00:24:00] Stephen Brown: Your subject matter was low code automation tools. Basically you're talking about Zapier make and Relay app simplifying your workflows. What do you mean by that?
[00:24:13] Wade Carpenter: And there's other ones like NADM there, they have these like little string of process together. You know, it's like, well, if we do this, we want it to change that. And maybe we could do another episode on that, but you know, it's like making decisions, researching something, writing up a summary of it. And then doing something with that information. That's just one simple example of how that could work.
But the time saved on like researching, researching prospects or how to do something is just amazing. So again, there's a lot of use cases, but I just, I wanted to bring that up that, whether it's one of those platforms or, you see these AI agents or bots, chatbots, all these things, they're super easy to build nowadays.
And that's where I think our contractors that are out there, a lot of them are a one man band, or they're trying to get off the ground. Or maybe they're a general contractor and they sub everything out. But I see everybody running around, it seems like they're, nobody has enough hours in the day sometimes.
And when, you can save some time by doing some of these things versus paying somebody to do it, it can be well worth it.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
[00:25:27] Stephen Brown: How would you wrap this up as far as. Building that system and developing a routine for how to use these new hacks to get what you want done, accomplished? It seems like there's a lot of moving parts.
[00:25:42] Wade Carpenter: Quite frankly, you can, I mean, whether you're watching this on YouTube, I mean, that's where I learned a lot of it. And as well as, what's funny now is you can go in chat GPT and say, how can I use this? Or, I want to design a process.
And it, some of this stuff, it'll actually do the coding for you. I don't want to get too deep into that and make everybody's eyes glaze over. But if you don't know how to use it, just get in Chat-- I'm not just pointing out Chat GPT cause there's several great models out there that Claude, perplexity is great for research. We're not going into that today.
But the. The learning curve, whether it's getting it from YouTube or getting on Chat GPT, it's give me the steps, the exact steps to do this can save you so much time in getting up to speed on this stuff. I hope that helps everybody. I think, I think we do need to wrap up very soon, but I any final thoughts from you?
[00:26:34] Stephen Brown: No I've really, wait, it's a great topic and I've really enjoyed it. And I think we ought to do another podcast on putting it all together. Especially along the topic of your automation tools. And all these are automation tools but how do you put it all together to work for you and how do you implement it for your business to help others understand how to work smarter and not harder, how to be more productive? Because not just your time, but your employees time is money as well and is your money as well.
We were also talking about doing another podcast on just basically all the technology that's out there, what is being used most by contractors, and what's barely being used at all? And research is showing how few contractors are really taking advantage of the technology that's out there.
So I, I get it. You can only be experts at so many things. But this is simple technology. And I love the fact that you are also talking about the different technology, how easy the implementation is. The learning curve of using it and having it help you immediately. That's my favorite kind of software
[00:27:43] Wade Carpenter: Again, it can be intimidating if you don't understand it, but the more you start walking into it, you realize it's really not rocket science. But anyway, I do hope that anybody listening to this, that you've gotten some value out of this. And I know I'd love for you to put your own productivity hacks, put that in the comments below. We'd love to hear it.
Or thoughts or feedback on what we talked about today. Just today's discussion. Or anything you'd love for us to talk about in the future. Drop them in below. Thanks for listening to the Contractor Success Forum. If you enjoyed the episode, please share, subscribe, all that stuff. We appreciate it. And follow us every week for new episodes as we post them. And we will look forward to seeing you on the next show.
[00:28:23] Stephen Brown: Happy New Year.