How to Supercharge Your Construction Business with AI (Game-Changing Tips!)

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ℹ ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Discover how AI can actually transform your construction business operations—not just in theory, but with real results.

Wade reveals how he eliminated $25,000 in software subscriptions while building a unified Business Operating System that chains AI automations together. 

Learn practical strategies for connecting your estimating, job costing, CRM, and billing systems into one powerful workflow that gives you real-time visibility and control over your cash flow.

⌚️ Key moments in this episode:

• 00:00 AI Finally Pays Off
• 00:46 Recap and Big Promise
• 02:46 Business Operating System
• 04:55 Burn the Boats CRM
• 07:42 All in One Workflow
• 12:17 Operations Data Automation
• 13:45 Field Receipts and POs
• 15:47 Job Costing to Tax Flow
• 17:17 Surety and Real Time Books
• 18:39 Marketing Automation OS
• 22:30 Chain Automations Together
• 24:23 Start Small and Next Steps

The Contractor Profit Blueprint is a complete guide that breaks down exactly how to identify where your money's going and start keeping more of it. This isn't theory. It's the same framework I use with contractors I work with every single day.

Head to profitfirstconstruction.com/blueprint to download your free copy. 

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Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/CarpenterCPAs
   
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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Transcript

Wade Carpenter: [00:00:00] This is the episode where AI finally pays off. Not in theory, not in demos, but in actual business operations. Because when you connect the pieces, that's when AI stops being impressive and starts being useful. You're not gonna want to miss this one.

This is the Contractor Success Forum. I'm Wade Carpenter with Carpenter & Company CPAs, alongside Stephen Brown with McDaniel-Whitley Bonding and Insurance.

Stephen, this week, we're continuing from the last conversation about AI being useful, and hopefully today we're gonna help take the conversation to what it looks like when the system actually starts working to where it actually can see some major productivity gains.

So before we start, can you recap what we did last time and give me any thoughts you have on making AI really useful in business today? 

Stephen Brown: Yeah. Last time, Wade, we were talking about what you're doing at Carpenter and Company CPAs to integrate. You got rid of roughly $25,000 worth of subscriptions that you were paying for. Not to mention what you call the Frankenstein [00:01:00] stack of technology, where all the parts are not working. They're not talking to each other, and they're not communicating, and they're all disjointed, right?

So how do you incorporate that in your business? How do you use AI to do that? And how did this become a game changer for you at Carpenter and Company CPAs, and how is this gonna help our listeners? 

Wade Carpenter: Well, what I'm hoping to do is show you some of the stuff that we're doing and obviously, a contractor or whatever business that might be listening to this, you got different moving pieces than we probably would. But I think that you can take the idea and run with it.

This is where AI has been promising stuff. These AI agents, yeah, they can do pieces of it, but when we start putting the infrastructure together where they talk to each other...

I think you were actually giving me the example of having to go through your own emails. Can we put the AI with the emails and run through a whole list of things, where, what's really going on with this client? That's a simple example, but, where [00:02:00] we're going with this is what does it look like when the system's actually working together?

I think that's the next step that we're gonna be seeing in the next couple of years is a lot of this software is going away. It really has gotten to the point where you can build your own, and you don't have to be technical.

I was talking to somebody just last week about learning some of this stuff, and they felt like they were so far behind.

My journey of learning all this automation has been years in the making, and I do think it probably puts me ahead of the game. But knowing what I know now about AI, you could almost tell it, this is what I want, and give it a screenshot, and just really build it.

So that's what I want to talk about today, and hopefully our listeners will gain something about the direction of their own business. 

Stephen Brown: Okay, Wade, so what does it look like? 

Wade Carpenter: Well, I talked last time about one of my contractors that had all these disjointed systems, which I see more than you would believe.

We do estimating in one program, and then we do payables and [00:03:00] accounting, and then we're trying to keep up with customers and those kind of things in another. Not that it's broken, but we're very, number one, disjointed, and it doesn't lend itself well to having something very productive.

And so that's where I'm finding some real examples as we started building this stuff out, and we're seeing major changes in that.

I'm calling it a Business Operating System. We're not that far off from building these things. Our contractors may be a little behind, you know, the curve on the technology. But in general, I talk to contractors all the time and it's like, okay I'm, thinking ChatGPT is gonna revolutionize my business, and it has made us a lot more productive, but has it really moved the needle?

And that's the question that I'm talking about today. And I just wanted to give some examples of what we did, and hopefully you can see, by the time we're done, how this actually can start working together. 

Stephen Brown: Okay.

Wade Carpenter: Last time, we kicked around, you know, you got data living in different programs. We've got CRM software, and then we've got [00:04:00] something with our time and billing, estimating is done in a different way, and then we've got keeping up with job costs in Excel.

A lot of times the processes are one of those things that we've talked about for years, we want to get the processes down. This is one of the things I see a lot of times when I go into a contractor's office. You back up and, okay, well, you do have all these disjointed pieces.

For us to be efficient at it, that's where we developed our best practices for contractors that makes us a lot more efficient and gives them visibility where they can see these numbers in real time because they are talking to each other.

The problem is there's a lot of programs out there that promise, "Hey, we're gonna do everything." And you got a good program that will do one thing well, it probably is worth its price. But where I'm going with this is if you can build your own, not just cheaper, but when all the systems can talk to each other, that's the game changer.

I wanted to sort of start off with one of the things that I built that I [00:05:00] got team push back on. That started with the CRM software.

What we need to keep up with as accountants is different from a contractor, but it's the same principles. If you've got a general contractor versus a flooring contractor versus a grading civil-type contractor, they've got different systems and they have different needs. What we find with all these different packages that are canned out there is we have to customize them to our own needs.

So what I started doing was, there was one that's costing me like $70 per person per month, and that's if I pay it for a year up front. It seems like May is when all these things hit. I got tax software renewals, I've got about 30 to $40,000 worth of software, and that's where my Profit First drip account, like I drip it in there all year. Before that I was scrambling and getting credit cards and that kind of stuff. I guess I'm getting off topic here.

But I started with this one program that controls our workflow. And it's supposed to have all these other bells and whistles, [00:06:00] but the way a lot of these programs are built, they're built for somebody that does accounting once a month.

Our processor, we're in there daily, weekly. And that's my model for contractors is that we've got to have always up-to-date numbers and job costing, and our system really didn't... I mean, it did parts of it and we adapted it and I used that same term, "Frankensteined" it together. I also had a separate database system that was doing other parts of this.

I had the idea a year ago to put these things together. I felt like I could have done it a year ago, but I finally pushed forward with it this year, be cause it renews like May 18th or something like this.

And so I said, you know, "Cortes, burn the boats." I cut off the software and said, here's what we're doing. You're gonna have to start using this thing.

From this building of this CRM and building it to be able to merge the two systems, that's where a lot of the data and things that we've added together [00:07:00] to put it in one place and make it a lot more efficient.

So let me take a breath and make sure that you're following what I'm talking about. But number two, I want to talk about all these different things we've added into it afterwards. 

Stephen Brown: Okay. So you implemented something that your team was used to using, and you got pushback for it, but it was the only way to move forward. And you're talking about CRM, which is Customer Relationship Management, type of goals. That's what you're trying to accomplish here.

As a CPA in accounting services, to give good advice to people, you have to get good information in to your systems in order to analyze it and get the answers back to your customers with your advice.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. That's where it started, and then I started adding some of these things in there. Because we were talking, between the shows, you know, knowing where your customer is. And so we've built in to where the team comes in to the same system and we can see everybody's email back and forth through this.

And we [00:08:00] got AI, where we can just scan the last 25 emails and say, "What's in there?" As well as our CFO-level clients, we've got shared emails, and we brought all that in the same system. None of this was in the old system. A lot of this sort of morphed into that.

The shared emails, their system was like, was it read versus unread? Now we got claimed and then did somebody do something with it? We're getting a lot of productivity gains from that.

 Scheduling, we put some stuff in there to where we can schedule the client in a heartbeat from the same screen. The whole workflow being tied to that this is what's going on with this project, and we can see the emails as well as now we've got team chat that is just dedicated-- we can chat with both with the client as well as the team about what's going on with that particular thing.

We also had this other $60 a month subscription where we had a firm text line. There are cheaper ways to do it, but this solution we've had for years, and [00:09:00] we built that into the software. Now, they don't have to leave that software and go, we need a code for a bank or something like that, or we just need a quick answer. Yes, we can send it through the portal and they may answer when they get around to it or email, but we can text right in that same program.

And then came the documents. That first software was probably about $10,000 a year. Then when I started figuring out okay, I wanted to integrate the existing document software into it, and I was trying to get, I'm not gonna use the vendor's name, but, you know, a developer account, and they dragged their feet so much.

And then I was like, "Okay, I can actually build this myself, and make it secure and do all that stuff." And now that is embedded into right where they work in the CRM software. We've also got things like getting bank information, that kind of stuff, one click. It's all right there.

I'm just trying to think of all the different pieces we've added in there. The Zoom meetings, we can schedule a [00:10:00] request right there. We can go right through the text. We can schedule the things with the calendar, and we know when things drop for a client, and it's all baked into it.

We had our billing software in a separate program. We brought all that in there.

Our proposal software was separate, and now we've got all that tied in the same place.

We've got some of these tools that we had built specifically for contractors, and the portal part where we can communicate. Well, the one that we had, people would upload things like pictures of their documents, and we needed it in PDF. We built in an automation that we don't even have to touch it. It automatically converts it to a PDF. We've got that in there, and it's all tied to the project.

There's all these different tools that we've built, like they're working on Excel and PDFs. We've got a chatbot in the bottom right corner, and if we're on that client's screen or the project screen, we can ask that chatbot to go in there and look at the data and say, "What's going on with this client?"

This has really been the game changer [00:11:00] part. We built in there a little chatbot that I had separately, for say a 1040, we got a, like a 1099-R. Where does it go in our tax software? They can do the little chat bubble, ask that specific question. There's a lot of these things that we were building into it.

Signing tax returns, like the DocuSign. We've implemented that where we can go straight in the same program. We don't have to go out to DocuSign. We don't have to go out to the document software either. And so that document software was costing me $10,000. The DocuSign stuff was a few thousand dollars a year as well.

Yes, obviously this has been some big cost savings, but, the fact that we can put all this stuff into one place. That's a quick overview of what we've done, but there's so many different tools that we've built into this that is just making us more and more efficient.

From there, I started building some other ones.

Let me take a breath and let you talk for a minute. What are your thoughts on this?

Stephen Brown: It sounds fantastic, Wade. It's what every business owner dreams [00:12:00] of, is using technology in an easy way that accomplishes what you want it to accomplish, and that allows you to be professional and helpful and also faster in response to your customers' needs and questions. And that's what every customer wants as well.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, and like I said, having the back-end database, number one, it lives on my system and I can control it.

We had all these other automations. And I guess let's stick from the operations side. We also have data that we need to get, and a lot of stuff was still manual. We would have to go pull it, download it, screenshot it, send it to an accountant, bank transaction data, pulling images of checks, things like that.

Now it's all built in. We ended up creating a separate software for this, but one that talks to their QuickBooks file, whether it's the desktop or whatever, or their other accounting system. But we can extract if they got new job data.

Before, we had built all these systems that [00:13:00] lived in a different program, like doing the pay applications. So we would get pay applications and it would keep the running... I mean, I thought this was a big game changer at the time, that we would run that through and then we'd keep the running total of the contract amount, retainage and what's billed and what's been paid, and we can tie it back to the ledger.

Now we've got all that in one system, and they're not having to go to a separate application for that. And yes, those kind of automations in themselves helped. But now, that particular system, we would manually have to set up the contract, the estimate, did they change their chart of accounts or their items or vendors?

A lot of these things have been built where we're gonna need those things to tie into the system, like receipts. It's one of the main things I've gotten requests for all the time, and there's not a good one out there that really... in my opinion, the ones that work with these receipts--

I'm not gonna use any vendor names, but you look at [00:14:00] the chart of accounts level, and we're needing the cost code level, the item level. 

And so we had a couple of different systems for that, for payables, and now we built our own for receipt management because we constantly have a problem like guys out in the field they wanna get that receipt, and it doesn't make it back to the office for three weeks , and then they can't remember what that receipt was for.

We've got it where, number one, I've got a particular one that we started this way is okay, they've got to get a purchase order number. They were calling the office and getting a purchase order, and somebody wasn't there because after hours, it was a problem.

Now, they can go on their app on their phone that we built, and it's tied into your purchase order. You have to pick the job right then and there. This is the vendor. It gives some kind of information. It gives them a PO number, and then from that, they make the transaction, and they can snap a picture right there that goes straight with it, saves everybody more time. 

Stephen Brown: There's nothing worse than receipts and papers that just keep building up, and they're not being communicated [00:15:00] to your system, and they just stack up. You don't know where they are or who's dealing-- you know, here , you're able to capture it quickly and get a hold of that information. I love that. 

Wade Carpenter: There are ones that will tie into your QuickBooks Online or whatever you're using, but they didn't do what we wanted to do to get to the job cost level. Not to mention they're really not built for somebody out in the field. I mean, some of them, yeah, you can snap a picture, but they're chart of accounts level.

Our problem was we can do that, but we'd manually have to load the jobs. We have to load a vendor and stuff like that. So now that's where I feel like we've got a competitive advantage to where we can do this really quickly and efficiently .

I throw this out all the time, but 30 to 50% cheaper than hiring in-house. I feel like we give a better value. Those are just a couple of the ideas of things that we've built.

The job schedules. That's something that you know, we were manually compiling. We have our firm spreadsheet that I've had for 25, 30 years. It's been adapted and improved over the years, but collecting that information.

There's so [00:16:00] many things that we've built onto this. Our trial balance comes out of our QuickBooks software, whatever it is, and we put it in a different program. And we had a automation that would actually extract it to an Excel, then it had to be converted, and then we'd pull that into the trial balance software, what we're gonna do on the trial balance software, export it to another Excel, and then import it into our tax software.

And it was so much faster and a lot more productive to do it that way. But now, we've got it where we can completely skip the import step because it goes straight into the software. We do what we need to do, and then export it in a format we can bring it straight into our tax software.

Same thing with our financial statements. We pull it out of their system, make adjustments, and we can knock out a financial statement fairly quickly.

So again, I know this not be our listeners' tech stack. But you think about these systems we build where, okay, it starts with we've got an estimate, and then we're building out our estimate, and we're also looking for pricing [00:17:00] information, and we gotta get pricing information. If we can get that tied in, we build our estimate, and then it's not in Excel. We pull it out of Excel and then give it to accounting. It's all interrelated.

We start a job and then we got all these purchase orders for subs and all that stuff, and there's no tracking and it's manual.

Stephen Brown: I mean, as a bond agent, I'm sitting here thinking, Wade, about the standard of a review or an audited fiscal year-end financial statement for surety bonding. How important that is. But all you're getting is verification of stuff that you should trust all along.

You have systems in place for your clients that provide this kind of information. It's just gonna make their surety program jump. I just applaud you for it, because this is what everybody wants, real-time information of how you're doing.

In the surety industry we have to deal with, do you have the information that can tell you whether a job's on fire or not and whether you need to put it out? Do you? And when does that occur? At [00:18:00] what point can you realize you've got a problem and react to it?

So anyway, as you were discussing what you were doing, I was thinking about how it affected me, and I appreciate it. 

Wade Carpenter: For bonding, we know that you gotta get information quickly, and I think that was the differentiator for me, is the fact that we're offering a service where we can provide as close to real-time books as we can get.

And for me to fulfill that promise, technology's come a long way, and we've done our things to improve that over the years, but now it's sort of game-changing.

Stephen Brown: Mm-hmm. 

Wade Carpenter: The message is not necessarily my tech stack, but how can our contractors really approach this?

One other operating system that I built separate from this, is our marketing automation system, which, our contractors, whatever they're marketing, their bids or whatever, keeping up with estimates and all that stuff.

We have different YouTube channels, we have the podcast, we have social media. And to be sure, we did have it [00:19:00] in some databases. There was like four or five or six, and there was I don't know how many automations that were done, and it was a lot more efficient than somebody ever doing this manually.

But now we've built this other system to where it's all in one place. We can use AI to string these automations together. We don't necessarily need something like a Zapier or Make or N8N to do it now. We've got the workflow. That's the game changer. We got the workflow in one place. We got a calendar that we can see what's going on.

Generating the content, distributing the content, those kind of things. Again, it's not about me, it's more like, okay, this is what we're doing, and I hope our contractors are getting the fact that looking at your systems and getting in there with Claude or Codex and asking, "How can we tie these together?"

I talked a little bit about the CRM side, but we're reducing our software costs on the other side, as well as getting so much more productive.

Stephen Brown: I think it's fascinating what you've done now [00:20:00] and how you see things looking five years from now. And I think about, I don't know, Wade, was it one or two years ago that that we did that podcast on what would it look like if AI ran your construction company?

And it was a story, remember? About what it would look like. And of course, we got AI to write the story. We just read it to everybody and commented on it. But now when you talk about integration of software, doing things better, smarter, faster, it is such a game changer as far as getting what you need and de-stressing your life.

This doesn't have to be stressful. And just the fact that you made up your mind you were gonna do this for Carpenter & Company CPAs, and you moved forward with it, and also you have good IT staff there that can help you while you're doing your work for your clients, it's a game changer for me.

I'm seeing surety companies now offer credit scoring [00:21:00] type bonds for up to $3 million now, okay? This is just brand spanking new, credit scoring, okay? That means they're not so hung up on the review, or the audited financial statement, unless you're doing larger projects.

So now I'm seeing your ability, they're still requiring up-to-date in-house financial statement. They still want to have a work in progress. They still want a snapshot of how you're doing at the time they're approving the bond. So the faster you can do that with credit scoring, the faster I can make your bond headaches disappear. 

Wade Carpenter: I know you were also telling me a story about somebody that was sending you lot of new things every week and trying to keep up with that kind of stuff.

Again, my business is different from yours, and everybody that's listening has their own quirks to it.

But like, financial diagnostics tools that are coming from that, building into that cash flow MRI thing that I had shown a few weeks ago. We also did this back in December, my HR reviews. I built a [00:22:00] chatbot that asked questions, and I got stuff out of my team's head that they would never express to me.

I didn't talk about this, too, but the meeting assistant, things like Otter.ai or meeting recorder, Fathom. We've replaced that and put that into the CRM, and then it will keep the transcripts right there with that, and we can ask AI.

So many things like the scheduling, signing.

What I'm hoping our contractors are getting is if nothing else, ideas and start thinking about how to move this forward.

We want all these automations and these AI agents to do all this work. But if we don't have the workflow in one place, it's still a disjointed concept. This chain concept.

This is my key idea here. If we got one automation that's in isolation, it's more productive, but if we can chain them all together, there's so much more things like our onboarding process, how do we produce financial statements faster and quicker?

It seems to be working for us and not make light of it, I mean, [00:23:00] the team pushed back and they are still pushing back on parts of it, but when they see some of the game-changing stuff, they're like, "Wow, okay, now I get it. I get why you're doing this."

Having the tools available that are game-changing tools as well as not only the knowledge in one place where they can get to it quickly and not have to go out to another system to where this is our Wiki knowledge base. It's just so much more efficient, I think.

So I know I've talked a lot this time. For the contractors, if it gives you better visibility in your job costing, your cash flow, your bonding, I know it's like, "Okay, can we reduce all these internal staff?" I don't know that you're gonna be able to do that in construction as much as you think, but, maybe you can rely on the internal staff and they can do stuff that's more important to you than flying down the hill hanging on by one finger and just feeling like you're about to lose control.

I mean, that's where I'm going with this, so-- 

Stephen Brown: Okay.

Wade Carpenter: This is something I've really got into, and I'm sorry if I geeked out on it too much. But if people [00:24:00] have ideas or thoughts or want me to do follow-ups and demos, I'd be glad to maybe do a future episode on it if people are interested.

Stephen Brown: You were cranking on what you wanted, how you felt about it emotionally, and what it was doing, and the stresses that you had internally with your team, and how it's paying off. And that's what I think our listeners are really gonna enjoy hearing from this podcast.

Wade Carpenter: Well, I hope they take something from it. The thought of waiting until AI just does it for you, I think people are waiting for that to revolutionize their construction company.

Everybody's out there saying, "Okay, the one-person AI business." I don't think it exists. And whether it ever will truly, especially in construction, the goal is we want a system that runs without ourselves and we're not, you know, getting out of the chaos.

You don't have to go as far as we did with it. Start small and start chaining these things together, and the productivity gains I think you'll see are amazing.

So with that, appreciate it if you stuck with us this [00:25:00] long and I do hope you got some good ideas out of this and maybe start changing the direction of where your company's going.

We would love some comments, thoughts, put them in the notes below. We do this every single week, and we will see you on the next show.