Assembly Builders is a Bay Area general contractor with their own crew who self-performs a majority of their work. Business partners Dave Libby and Mario Romero started the business 7 years ago with a single fence installation job. Today the company performs both residential and commercial work and has grown to 20 employees.
Dave handles the administrative side of the business, while his partner oversees the field work. In the beginning, Dave performed all of the estimates on his own, but now he’s been able to hand that work off to a full-time estimator they’ve brought onboard.
The Challenges
As a GC working on remodels, additions, and commercial construction, Assembly Builders prices most jobs based on square footage costs, so they needed unit costs for just about everything.
Dave taught himself how to estimate and began with printed blueprints and a scale ruler but quickly realized the process was tedious and error-prone.
The Strategy: Take 1
Dave looked for a software solution that would make the manual process easier. He settled on Bluebeam at first.
“It was absolutely impossible,” Dave says. “It was extremely slow, and the interface was confusing – the amount of time it took made it not worth doing. It wasn’t fast, it wasn’t intuitive, it wasn’t easy. As soon as we found something better, we ditched it.”
The Strategy: Take 2
The second try was the charm for Assembly Builders. “STACK was really what we were looking for,” Dave says. ”It made estimating accurate and took all the guesswork out of it.”
When Dave brought on his full-time estimator, the new addition to the team was able to onboard with STACK easily and grasp how to use it right away, something that Dave can’t imagine being able to do with Bluebeam.
The Results
STACK has helped Assembly Builders in 3 important ways.
– Takeoffs are at least 3 times faster and more accurate.
– Document organization makes change orders and price increases simpler.
– Profitability has significantly increased.
Big Picture Focus
STACK has given Dave the space to focus his energy on the future of the business rather than the day to day, so he can be more strategic and so that Assembly Builders can continue to grow.
Learn more about how STACK works for Dave’s team: download the full case study.
Ready to see STACK in action? Schedule a demo now.
