The Printer in the CFO's Living Room: How Construction Really Buys AP Tech — Eric Pratt

But one of the things, Rishi, that you're probably not expecting me to say is I think that AI, the way we're using it right now, is creating more work at every stage of the funnel Welcome to Finance at the Jobsite, the podcast where construction finance meets the field. I'm your host, Rishi Srivastava, founder of Beiing Human. In each episode, I sit down with construction CFOs, controllers, owners, project managers, IT leaders, ERP consultants, and industry experts to uncover how they connect the back office with the field, choose and implement technology, manage cash flow, and drive profitable projects.

Whether you are running the numbers, leading the team, or designing the systems that keep projects moving, this is your place to learn what's working, what's broken, and what's next in construction finance. Today, our guest is Eric Pratt. Eric, welcome. Rishi, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. My pleasure. The first section is the marketplace guy, your career arc. You call yourself, quote-unquote, "the marketplace guy" at Trimble. What problem is Trimble App Exchange trying to solve that most construction teams don't realize they even have yet?

Well, uh, I, I don't know if I would call myself the marketplace guy just yet. I think that that term or that, that title belongs to Mike Caesar right now, my, my manager. Um, but I do know that he's constantly looking to build up the team and, and, uh, bring people up with him. So maybe one day I'll be the marketplace guy. I do, I do, uh, consider myself the, kind of the AP partner guy when it comes to, like, the finance and, and, uh, fintech partners. Mm-hmm. But when it comes to Trimble App Exchange, I think that that problem that App Exchange has been, is looking to solve has been the same problem that they've been solving since back, I think, in, in their inception back in twenty seventeen.

And it's that, uh, just creating a more friendly ecosystem for Vista. Viewpoint Vista was really the, the reason that Trimble was very interested in acquiring Rivet, now App Exchange, is because they wrote the APIs for Vista. So obviously, there's a need to be able to connect, uh, more partners. The ability to generate software is get– like, growing the market. So just being able- Mm-hmm … to, to bolt on and just fill gaps where our products have gaps, uh, through third parties, I think kinda all the stars aligned and, and all the, uh, signs pointed to an IPAS, so, like, that integration provider as a service.

So having them in-house is very helpful. They're very knowledgeable. Again, they've been around our ecosystem for a long time. We use them for our own products. So when it comes to, like, Trimble Pay, for example, Trimble Pay, they've been s- building out that integration through App Exchange. Um, and then I think what it does is it allows for simplicity, right? What- Mm-hmm. When you think about integrations, you can deploy them many different ways, right? You can Whether that's an API or that is some type of SFTP tr- file transfer. Obviously, we're, we're trying to get away from the directed database and the, uh, ODBC connections in the SQL, the direct SQL connections for, for plenty of different reasons.

But the problem that we're solving before teams hit a wall is really scalability, right? Making sure that as your technology stack grows, your data flows securely and reliably without breaking your ERP. So we're gonna update those ERPs, right? You might not… You, you're busy, you're a contractor. You're not, uh, waking up every single day going, "I wonder if they're going to update Viewpoint Vista today. I wonder if they're gonna- Yeah … update Spectrum," right? So I think having that in-house at Trimble with folks that are very connected to the product managers and things like that is, is very helpful for all those reasons.

So I think it's solving the same problem it's been solving for a while while, um, adapting based on what, just the, the robust ecosystem that we have at Trimble. Yeah. So you, you have access to so many different products, so many different folks that have come from the industry or come from one of our customers. Trimble is filled with, uh, professionals that have come from customers. Some of them I've become very, very good friends with. And I mean, that kind of goes back to how I ended up here in the first place. I, I wasn't necessarily in con- like, at a construction company, at a contractor working there, but I've grown up, my dad's an ironworker.

All my family's in the trade. We have a, a family business that sells power tools and machinery, industrial arts programs, and things like that. So I grew up doing the account, like helping my grandmother do the accounting, and just, uh, really counting inventory. Back in the day, you had to go one by one and count all that stuff. So I think having that perspective, seeing that small business that w- it was, is still on a lot of paper, but being able to see kind of how they've stayed tried and true and stayed stoic and been able to be successful coming up on 100 years, while also be working for a technology company that is sole purpose, and my sole purpose was to get folks away from those processes.

So I can't say I've been able to, to convince them of, of all those changes, right? 100 years is a long, long time to argue with. But I think, I think that, that experience and kind of like the, I, I think my career arc leading up to where I'm at now in this platform team, I think it's just all, looking back, it's kind of all built off, each step is built off the, the previous, if that makes sense. Yeah. Actually, we are a Trimble App Exchange customer too. Um- Sure … we're listed in your marketplace. It's a good platform, but it's, it's a lot of work to make these integrations work, even with App Exchange.

We've been trying to go through and build all the validations that they're not obvious to, like, even App Exchange. We have to go and talk to customers and figure out what, what that application layer, layer of Vista wants to do. I feel like there is opportunity for App Exchange to improve and give us those validations upfront. What do you think? Well, I would be lying if I, if I said that I didn't think that there was room to improve there, right? And I think that that's, that's a widely known, I guess, insight. It's not, it's not a secret, right? Mm-hmm.

But again, having access to such a h- uh, robust ecosystem and, and developers and just being able to see how things have integrated, how other divisions have partnered programs that have built those integrations and scaled them. I, I think that we have a lot of experience and data and information to go off of, and the better we are at using that information and data to figure out how to tweak, I want– I don't wanna say like rewrite, but, but just adjust in s-small blast radius to where it's, it's less of a friction point to install the agent on the server, for example, the Vista agent.

I think that, is that a extremely complex thing to do? No. But when it's not something that you do all the time, and you're most likely the controller or, you know, somebody that handles support, that is typically the person that's interacting with Trimble, and that might not be the best person to go through that process. I think there's some challenges there in itself that we can just clean up with feedback, of course, Rishi. You know, I, like I have, uh, a few strategic partners that I, that I manage. One of them is EarlyTrade. I've been working with them a lot to help them navigate some of those same challenges.

And again, I think it's just knowledge, passing knowledge to the customer and removing the friction behind some of those things they're just not used to doing, right? Yeah. Submitting a support case for professional services to whitelist an IP address is not typically the thing that they're doing on a daily basis. And like, I think about it like those quarterly strange, obscure tax payments that you have to make to a certain municipality that you don't do all the time. So every time it comes to doing that quarterly, you kinda have to jog your memory and make sure you're se– you're not second-guessing yourself, and you're putting in the right account number and, and just things like that.

I think that there's an extra element to that that makes it a little bit more difficult now that we're constantly getting information and requests and I mean, you, you feel it, I'm sure. I mean, I, I use AI just to, to distill a lot of the information that comes, uh, in my inbox and in my direction before I even dig in, just so I have an idea of like what I'm, what I'm, uh, up against. So I think we could do a better job there, for sure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I don't wanna say that the… I don't wanna say like, "Oh, we can… We'll, like rally the troops in support." Like I'm, I'm not gonna make… I'm not gonna talk for, for other folks, but I do know that there are folks that do care and are working and making the best attempt at improving those things.

Some of those things I got talked about. Looking back, what part of your background uniquely prepared you to work with construction finance teams even though you did not start in construction? Yeah, I might have jumped the gun a little bit earlier and started talking about that. But, uh, you know, my grandfather and his brother, those were the two that I really learned business from the most. And- Mm-hmm … their approach is not the typical approach. Uh, if you challenge them and try to scare them into doing something, they tend to hunker down and, and, uh, basically say like, "Watch me do it," still.

So I, I had to learn how to share my ideas and make them their ideas if, if I was- Mm-hmm … going to help them understand like what the benefit was, and especially if it's something that they've been doing for 40 years manually. There are processes and it's just there's connection and, and like hand o- like, all of those things, nervous system connection to that manual process that when it came to what I was doing with e-payments, it's like I'm getting people to say, "Hey, don't like pay millions and millions of dollars out of your in-house AP process. Let's just send it over here and they'll send the millions and millions of dol-" Like, you have to re- Like, I'm sure you realize like that's a, that was a difficult conversation for a lot of, uh, controllers that I've… a- and CFOs and presidents that have been used to doing things the way they've always done them, and it's, it's not broken necessarily.

So I think that that aspect of it, along with the accounting. I mean, I… Uh, obviously it's not construction accounting. I will say when I got to Viewpoint in 2020, thank goodness they, uh, had us read that book, Construction Accounting 101. And we, we took a course on it because I was not familiar with WIP and not familiar with, like, realized revenue and, and just certain things that mattered- Mm-hmm a lot more than, than buying a tool for this price and turning around and selling it for this price. You know? Mm-hmm. There's a lot more involved, as you know, in construction accounting.

So, but, but at least my background in being necess- like, a full charge bookkeeper, I guess, alongside my grandma, who is v- a very similar persona to a lot of the customers that I, I had a chance to work with and still have a chance to work with. So I just… It, it just always feels comfortable. I tend to, uh… I think I tend to relate more to the customer and, and, uh, they tend to… I tend to understand their descriptions of things a little bit better than I would- Mm-hmm … just talking to another, like, tech person because I, I can picture it. I can, I can picture the environment they're in.

I can picture the conversations that they're gonna have. I can picture the feeling in their gut that they have when they go and know something needs to change, but they know that the response they're gonna get when they go t- like, bring up that change, depending on what type of day it was and, and you know, and for very any, any reason. So that, having that understanding and being able to put myself kind of in their shoes and, and realize that, uh, it's not… Like, they said that they were gonna have the meeting on Wednesday And it's a group meeting, and maybe they– it didn't get to them, right?

And, or maybe they were a little nervous. Maybe they didn't feel confident enough that they had all the information they needed to bring it up. So all of those things kind of stack in your mind if you're reflective and you, you're constantly asking yourself how questions. How can I make this, uh, easier to understand? How can I put myself in, like, the way of these conversations? I think that that just environment experience was more important than anything else. So the next section is trust, references, and how construction really buys software. You've said construction buyers don't move on logic alone.

They move when someone they trust is already using it. Which trust signals actually matter? Peer calls, CFMA presence, pilots, references, something else? Gosh, great question, and all of the above. And I think it depends on where you're at in your go-to-market or where your business is at, where the product is at from a adoption standpoint even. When I got to Viewpoint again back in twenty twenty, we had just rolled out the e-payments program for Spectrum in January of that year. So you, you essentially had the early adopters that jumped on there, right?

So maybe one or two in- at that time was live and, and kind of mature enough to feel comfortable talking about their experience. So that was a pain early on with twenty customers, and I'm, I'm just getting over here. I know the, I know the conversation really well. I had been selling virtual card and, and I was partnered with Comdata before, so I knew that really well, but it was, it was that element of, okay, I'm selling it, I need… Uh, and I, again, realizing where I came from, I need a peer to back me up here. And th- like that, when I got to that point where I could text one of my customers that I worked with, and while I was on a call with another one or doing a demo live and say, "Hey, hold on one second, I'll text them and see if they, they can jump on with you later today or tomorrow," that was a major change, like a, a major momentum, uh, builder.

Because at, at that point, you start building community, right? And then I think, like you– if, if you're, if you're building– If you take ownership of a product and you're building out, building it out like a business inside of a business, then you understand that taking care of your customers and word of mouth is extremely powerful. In construction, like I– it's been a relationship business forever. I would imagine it's– if it didn't, if it went awry for a moment, it's gonna be back. Relationships matter. They always have and always will. So those peer connections matter, too.

But br- uh, bridging the gap, Rishi, between the events and your references, I think is such like a powerful way to compound reference and building community and product awareness. And I, I think that snowballs into customers helping each other, helping each an- answer each other's questions, which leaves you more, uh, time to not have to jump in and answer those questions. So I, I, like what we did really early on, and I'm really grateful that I, uh, was able to bring a customer with me to my first Dimensions back in twenty twenty-two But one of our customers that, uh, was on ePayments or had signed up for ePayments that year was a customer that I had worked with in the past for virtual card and, and things like that.

So I was really excited to move them over to ePayments. It was something I kinda set my sights on right away when I got to, uh, Viewpoint. But when the time came for her part of the discussion at the end of the session, that's when everybody lit up. That's when everybody was asking questions, and I– like, that was when I realized, like, this is more important than me saying anything, is hearing it from a peer. Because the peer can handle the objections in a transparent way from experience, right? Those things that you hear in the market when you're at an event or on whatever, the, the cafe or whatever forum it is, or you hear through the grapevine things, right?

And most of the time, when we hear those things, it's people venting. Those are outlets, right? But if you reached out to them, a lot of times those problems were already solved. So I think what the customer can do is sp- like, close the gap between actually validating that that issue is not that big of an issue if you know this Right? And if you don't have that, you don't have that reference, then that becomes maybe one, two, three meetings. Anything can happen in a month, like, you know, it's construction. It, it could change in, at the drop of a hat. So, um, I, I think that the reference just speeding up the trust layer in the sales process is, is a really, really important part.

But then, like, when, once you get so many customers, then, then the data starts to drive those decisions, right? You don't necessarily have to rely on the, uh, one-to-one references as much- Mm-hmm … when you can show data over, over a long period of time. So if a, if a startup only has one or two references, how should they use them strategically to unlock the next 20? Yeah. Basically, exactly what I just said. I would work with them, take care of them, make sure that you prep them ahead of time. Like, "Listen, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make you a reference.

Like, that's my goal, is to make you a reference." So they know that you're gonna ask, right? If you do your job like you say you're gonna do, and they agree to that ahead of time, and they become that reference. Then from there, I- it's like how can we help each other grow? And I think one of the best ways to do that is public speaking, whether that's a podcast like this, a webinar with CFMA, a CFMA session. Be a moderator, open, do an intro at CFMA. Speak at Dimensions. Speaking at Dimensions with the customer, again, changed, like it just compounded after that, after that first Dimensions, and it was something that I set my sights on every year, and I started asking earlier and earlier, um, to make sure that I had those customers there with me.

So work together. Like, ask them how… Not, not just like how can we grow this, this, like, integration or how, how can we work better to- Like, how can we help each other grow in our careers, in our, in our industry? And I think that it goes back to that, like, if you wanna go fast, go alone, but if you wanna go far, go together. And I… That's, that's what a reference, a good reference will do for you. And I think that that's… I wouldn't wanna say use them that way, but I wanna say cultivate and, and build that relationship that, in, in that way with that mindset that you're gonna… If it, if it does work, let's share this.

And what I've found, construction folks, is if they find something that works, they're not afraid to tell you That they found something that actually works, right? Mm-hmm. So I think that that's a, a really big part of it. Selling the ERP ecosystems, integrations, and scale reality. You've worked across the Vista and Spectrum ecosystems. What's the biggest difference in how those customer bases think about AP and back office modernization? Gosh, I would say the difference between Apple and Android. Hmm. Okay. At le- at least early on. Hmm. If you know the history there, Dexter and Chaney and Viewpoint w- like, were pretty much direct competitors for a long time, and if you chose Vista, Viewpoint Vista, you, you probably chose against Dexter and Chaney for a reason.

And, and then, uh, so there's that element of it, right? But then if you start to dig into the software, if you're a tech person or you're like maybe a millennial that's just been in every UI possible, you start to see, okay, this one's a little bit more complex, right? Mm-hmm. Right out of the gate, this one I'd have to really look to start moving. Which one is more complex? Spectrum or- Vista … Vista? Vista. Vista. Okay. Vista by far. Yeah, yeah. And, and, uh, obviously the, the customers that use Vista can be on the larger side, right? General contractors tend to be a little bit more complex, need a little bit more flexibility, so Vista has been the more complex, at least in my mind.

But also much more customizable, and customers that maximize it love it, right? Spectrum, to me, is easier out of the box, right? It's easier on the eyes. You can look at Spectrum and if, if you're used to being in software, you can start to figure out Spectrum pretty easily. I've spent hours, and hours, and hours clicking around in Spectrum and I… And there's just, I think even from a visual UI standpoint, it's, it's, it's easier to work with if you don't need customization Along every step of the way. It's a little bit, it's a little bit more rigid, I think, or it has been historically.

I think we're doing things to change that. Uh, we've made some major upgrades to the Spectrum infrastructure. Uh, shout out Geoff. Uh, he's been working just diligently for the past five years, uh, pretty much ever since I've known him on some of these projects, and I know he's excited that, uh, that 2026 is here, and we're getting near the end of some of those, so. And, but at the same time, he's been developing on top of Spectrum. I think one of the things I like about Spectrum and customers like is that they, they have open APIs, so I think it might… it's a little bit easier to integrate to.

Now, they don't have, I think, as many endpoints- Yeah … and their, the APIs are not as robust as, as Vista's through AppExchange. But I think if I was to put one thing on it, I would say that if you chose Spectrum, you're, you're more, you have a field presence, right? You're maybe an MEP. You're, you're self-performing. You're a specialty subcontractor, and you, you are growing, and you wanna get going. I think Spectrum's probably that, that ERP accounting system where Vista is, "Okay, we have, like, 15 divisions. Some of them are on different payroll products.

Some of them are on different field service products or estimate." You know, it starts to be, okay, we need to… this to be a little bit, uh, or a lot more, uh, customizable. So I think that's where Vista comes into play, and you'll see Vista customers, I think, have more of an IT presence in-house. Again, it's a more of a, a technical stack, I think, on the Vista side. Actually- Not that Spectrum's not, but… This, uh, when we've been selling to Vista customers, so there is always… most of the time, there is an IT person in the room judging you from the customer side Yes.

And, and I think on the Spectrum side, you'll find that it's more often there'll be one IT person that you work with on multiple Spectrum cust- for multiple- Right. Right … Spectrum customers in an area. So yeah, it's interesting. Exactly. One CPI I work with and he says, like, he loves Vista. And a lot, and a lot of folks do. I think Trimble did, and I think that that's ultimately what led them to make that acquisition was the Viewpoint Vista product. You've talked about economy of scale. What breaks first when an integration goes from 10 customers to 400?

That is such a good question, and I was thinking about how to answer this question because I… And I think there are, again, multiple doors that all lead to the same path at some point or another, which means- Mm-hmm … like, what is the integration? What does it touch? What fills up first? And I think it's really difficult to know all of those things. Like, where, where those… Like, where you could get overloaded, where you bottlenecks could be created. I think the first one that I saw was we scaled e-payments so quickly that we weren't able to… Like, we needed additional resources that weren't necessarily Spectrum and Vista and ProContract for specific implementation people.

So in the beginning, you have your people that are, like, they were in the room going through, they have the context, they were with the developers, right? They're the, they've been trained by the developers on this implementation process. And then you start to scale so quickly that, okay, we, uh, we have to do this or we're just not gonna get customers live, and if we don't get customers live, then they're gonna think that we don't know what we're doing. And so you, you have… I mean, that's the economy of scale, right? And I think a lot of times one of the first things that happens is the, the, uh, the context of the first line of support or conversation isn't as much as what we want or what we're used to, and I th- that's probably one of the first bottlenecks that you see.

But I mean, gosh, so many things happen in construction. A, a new product could come on the market and you have to… Everybody wants to use it, like, and you gotta rework and, and kind of re-scaffold it, and replace some of the foundation in, in it. So yeah, I, I think that it could be anything in any area And it depends on, gosh, Rishi, again, my, my brain is just going to town. So it's like, for example, AC- Well, let me take, let me take it even a step further back before I even got over here, like this just came to mind. I was working with Sherwin-Williams back in the day, right?

And virtual card was this thing that we were using, right, in AP to get rid of checks, make payment transactions a lot smoother, enroll vendors, just that, that whole technology play. Well, when it comes to Sherwin-Williams, I met with them, and they were like, "Eric, we're not gonna do that AP thing, but we're getting them, and we have a problem because we're getting thousands of them a day now." Right? So their economy of scale issue became, "Yeah, these payments used to be easier for us to, uh, accept and acquire, but now that we're getting thousands of them a day, it's becoming a burden, and we don't know how to handle it." So I think that that's a really good example of a good problem to have, right?

'Cause you're getting a ton of payments in, they're coming in easier, they're more secure. The- there are, are rebates going back to the customer when they're using that, that form of payment. It's the most secure form of payment available, but at the same time, r- you're causing bottlenecks because of the volume. And in payments, that's typically been the driver of innovation is vol- anytime you look back, either volume or security. Those two tend to be the driver of payment innovation, so. Makes sense. The next thing- That's the scale I'm used to Yeah. It's tough to scale that fast.

The next section is selling inside the org. Champions, managers, and white space. Trimble's data showed you were often winning with AP managers and directors, not always CFOs. How do you arm a non-executive to sell upward successfully? It's a really good question, and under- I think it's understanding who that person is that you're working with. What, what are their strengths? What are they looking to do i- in this industry? Are, are they looking to grow to be that, uh, controller, AP directors, maybe CFO one day? Because I think that that, that tells you the type of information that they may want to have a handle on before they go sell upwards.

But I also think it's, like, when it comes to your product, like what are all of the objections that you've been given? Like, uh, like how many do you have, right? At some point you've heard them all. Write them all down and do, like knock… Like draw a line through each one with a specific piece of content or type of artifact that you can share on what we like to use, our Seismic digital sales room pages. I, I think that, that was a huge, a huge win when we started using those for e-payments. I would actually have that digital sales room page come up with all of that curated information.

Just again, racking my brain over how do I make this easier for the customer? How do I, uh, help arm– Like what do I need to arm them with to be able to sell upwards? A lot of times it could have been as easy as just making sure that they understood what the data needed to look like, so when they had that conversation, uh, upwards, they could say, "Hey, look, our data's ready." And I, like we took that strategy and made it an entire, uh, Dimensions series for, for, uh, the presentations at Dimensions that year and like that carrying that idea into the digital sales room page based on that data that we got from Gong that said we were winning with folks without power, which told us that it was the people that are actually in it every single day.

And when they don't have power, the only way, like I said earlier, if they're gonna bring it up in a meeting, they're only gonna bring it up into a meeting if they are confident that they have the answers for the questions that they're gonna get asked that they might not have thought about in the conversation with me. So that is, I think, kinda taking all of those elements that I just talked about and wrapping them- Mm-hmm … up into like a, whatever you wanna call. I think it's, uh, there's other ones out there. Hot… It's not hot pages or something like that.

I mean, there's plenty, right? Link– Think about your LinkedIn the same way, right? You're, you're, you're providing value, you're providing the information that they need. Maybe being a little entertaining, keeping their attention, and you can do that in a very, like, engaging landing page like you talked about, and I think that's, that's the best way to arm those people. Makes sense. Thanks for talking about the digital sales room. You say you, quote-unquote, "live in the white space." Give us an example where noticing what wasn't being said won or saved a deal.

This is such a good question. I Feel like I, I was able to get very good at noticing when status quo had something or, or the objection of we're just not gonna do something right now had to do with a previous experience. Mm. So I think one, one of the trainings that they put us through, uh, at Viewpoint and, and Trimble were the challenger sales method and the Jolt Effect, and that Jolt Effect book really talks about the status quo objections that you get and how to distill them into one of those things, right? And I think the one that I was able to, to see the most was when there was something not being said, and it had to do with a previous experience or based on just the overall experience in accounts payable automation.

When people negotiate, like contractors, God bless them, they're negotiators. When they would say something like they got a different price or like I, I… It's pretty easy to know if they actually did based on how they said it. Because if, like, if you've priced these things and you've had these conversations about basis points and, and blended rates and all this, like, you understand what a– what pricing is and, like, that was one of– that was, uh, one of the examples of, of what I could decipher and see the white space. But again, I'm a outside of the box guy, Rishi.

You know this. Like, I think it's important to zoom out and when you're in the partnership, when you're on the partnership team, Trimble, and I think in the ecosystem, it's important to zoom out and kinda say, "Okay, where is this going?" Like, they do a great job of telling us their long range plan, and I think it's important to zoom out and just look at the white space. Where do these things connect? What are the common denominators and, and how can I help bridge the gap between those things? And I've, like, I will always pride myself. I've been preaching procure to pay since, uh, back in twenty twenty-two I believe.

Just seeing supplier exchange and how you could bring the invoice, like invoice, uh, automation and hierarchy of approvals in the ERP and then paying through e-payments, and that becomes a, a loop, right? I was a big AP and P2P guy, so a-another example of that is just saying, "Hey, guys, we don't necessarily have a, a product for AP and P2P, procure to pay sup-like supply chain finance, but we have multiple products that make up that loop if we really take a, a step back and look at it." And I, like, just being a payments person, it took a while to see that come to fruition over here, but this year they've, uh, really dove into the pro-whole procure to pay conversation, and I think it's really paying off for our customers.

They don't– There's some of those things in the white space like supplier exchange, maybe Trimble Materials, Trimble Connect, that they just might not be, uh, aware of because it has historically been white space. But I think it's becoming very obvious that we are, we are filling in the gaps of the white space and data and clean, accurate data tends to be that White space, and the best way to fill it in. Makes sense. Data. Data- Data … everywhere. Yeah, like Rishi, like think about this. If you're, if you're an AE and you're prospecting and you wanna send messaging out, are you gonna send messaging out to an accounting, a junior accounting person about changing the ERP?

No. I, I mean, you could- Of course not … but like they're not gonna, like, they can't. They know that they c- their first thought's gonna be like, "Great. I can't." They're not, they don't care. Like I've been there, right? We've all been there. Like why should they care? But what you could send to that person is the value add that they get out of learning that technology, right? Or being or understanding how the software works and being that person at the company that's the accounting IT hybrid. I've m- I've worked with a lot of those people. You know 'em when you find 'em because the, the stuff just happens.

You're like, "Wow, I… You're my next reference. I hope you know that." I, I think that that is like, that's- that's super important. A lot of times teams think this is just how construction works. Which manual back office behaviors are actually optional now even if they don't feel like it yet? We're getting… I feel like we've done a good job of, at least if you're, if you have made the transition to a- away from those kinda archaic an- what's that? Analog processes. I… There's probably not much left, but I think that still paper. Still paper. I mean, there's still paper in the process.

Even when folks wanna move to e-payment, sometimes they'll still say, "Hey, we still wanna deliver that stack of invoices t- on the desk," and, I mean, there's plenty of ways to handle that, right? You could send it to a shared file folder. Like with, shoot, with AI now, I'm sure that you can make it a beautiful dashboard by just s- dropping it into a folder and having a skill that can extract that information and, and reformat it. So but you still see that, right? So I think it's those matching processes. It's the, the context, the instead of having a, a remit to address as one of the locations for a vendor, you still put the slip in with every check or, or the account number with every ACH payment.

Things like that I think are still, still happening, but optional anymore. Yeah. We have a, let's say a customer. Actually, I'm saying customer, we are trying to convince him to get off paper. He's got like so much paper stuff. You know, I, I was talking to him the other day, like behind his desk is like- Piles of invoices and all these kinds of papers that they're working with Yeah, and, and actually I know somebody very close to me that's like that. About every six months, the stack will fall over, and it gets cleaned up, and then the stack rises again.

You know? A, a creature of habit. God bless him, those… He's probably a machine. You know, just like that's been the routine for 40 years, so break- breaking that part of the rou- routine might cause the whole thing to crumble, you know? So it's, uh, a, a hybrid maybe. Like, I, I'm a Kindle Scribe person. Mm-hmm. Right? You like the Remarkable. I- you know, I still… It's, it's not white paper, blue ink, which I would prefer if I'm trying to remember stuff. But yeah, that's so tough. That's so t- I always tried to make sure that there was a way to f- like, accommodate that person, right?

You have to accommodate that person, and there, there, there's a reason why they are objecting, and it's not our p- place to judge. It's our place to take that challenge and say, "Okay, am I as good as I think I am, and can I, can I make this person comfortable while providing the solution to the folks that know they need it o- more than the paper?" And I think that- Yeah … that is, uh, uh, one of the things that I always try to pride myself on, and still do, is just like, "Let's figure this out," and I get it. Right? I've heard some crazy objections It's like there's a way.

Yeah. There's always a way, you know? You know, the market adoption curve, with the early adopters on any technology, they move quickly. Mm-hmm. But there's gonna be people who wanna do the things the old way. They're gonna be buying those CD drives until they become obsolete. They, they're gonna be almost forced to come to the future. You know, Rishi, uh, you just reminded me of a story I heard at a CFMA lunch one day a couple of years ago, and it was a story about when, when COVID and the lockdowns happened, a customer, the s- the owner leased an industrial printer, it, it, for the CFO's house so she could print the checks and then the AP person could drive over and get the checks.

She'd leave them outside, and then she'd drive the checks to the CF- or the, the president who would sign them. Mm-hmm. And then he would take them back outside. She would take them to the post office and then mail them. And the whole time I'm the e-payments guy. Like, I know your software. It's a direct API, one single file, straight-through workflow. Like, we're, we're not just cleaning up processes, we're saving. What is this process? This is like a… Right? But that made more sense. Yeah. So, you know. Actually, uh, on the payments, though, a lot of the CFOs and owners wanna send the check because they wanna keep the money for extra few days in their bank, right?

It's their float, right? They don't wanna, like, do an e-payment right now, and the money leaves today. No, send a check. It's gonna be a week before it gets cashed. Yes, yes. So that, I mean, you– as you know, that, that depending on the market, right? The, the interest rates, whether that is, uh, it's worth building your processes around that or going with new solution like an early trade, for example, like Shameless plugged early trade. They're one of our newest strategic partners, and they- they're scaling, hyper-scaling, as, as they like to say, um, and, and being pretty successful.

But their whole model is offering the invoices up for discount for early payment, right? Which unlocks a whole lot of opportunity for kind of cash flow and, and creative financing in, in that maybe general contractor's ecosystem that they work in, which I think is great. But I think we're at a point where we can do the math Right? If we're, if we're actually– If we actually care and we're actually trying to see is this problem, is this solution better than the old school one that I'm using, which, I mean, I'm– I've read the Farmer's Almanac. I know La Niña's coming, right?

I know, like, some of those old school processes- Yeah, yeah. It's hard to beat them, right? Uh, you're gonna trust the farmers to know what, what's going on with the weather. So yeah, I, yeah, I think it's, um, again, I think it's just building that relationshi- actually building the relationship and getting at, like getting on the same page with the people that you're working with. 'Cause it help– I think it helps you get the actual transparency that's needed to s- come to terms and, like you s- like, I think that we have to be able to agree to disagree sometimes.

And I think that some of the best solutions come out of the most tense situations. Right. And, like, that's, that's one of the reasons I'm in the seat that I'm in right now. I was in a, a meeting as an, as a, on the sales side. I enjoying my blue pill, right? And then I got to experience a meeting on the other side, and it was one of the most intense meetings I've, I was ever involved in, and I just, I don't think I blinked, and I just, I was just, I felt just locked in. And it was, it was awesome, and it completely gave me a paradigm shift of, of what I wanted to do and what I thought I could do.

And so I think, like, those mo– And then afterwards, what happened from that, like, is it went in a positive direction as well. So I think that you need to be able to have those, those kind of difficult conversations as well. So challenge. You c– You have to challenge, but you have to, if, if you're gonna challenge, you gotta know what you're talking about. Yeah. Right. Going back to the early trade example, I mean, they're just, in my view, just a factoring company trying to take an arb out of, uh, the cash flow situation between a sub and, uh, GC, right?

And the sub is the one who's paying the, uh, the interest rate, right? Or tell me, like, I mean, how early trade is different from factoring? Yeah. So there's no third-party finance involved, right? Mm-hmm. So it is the payment. If the invoice is available and the subcontractor bids a discount for that early payment, what happens is that discount flows back into Vista, and that payment is then put into a batch to be paid the next day. Mm. So there's no, there's no financing involved, and that's one of the bigger– the biggest differentiators that, that I think is a, a win for early trade or at least one, one of the places that they can start to build their mode around is not having to worry about the factoring part of it.

It's, it's really a- Okay. Even, even though, even though there's no third party involved, there's a discount that, that the subcontractor is taking. That's, that's the financing right there, right? Even so they're putting, I mean, their own money, maybe somehow using it. Yeah, I mean, so that would be the subcontract. Like, like if you think about it, the market's tough right now, right? It's not as easy to get financing. I see it not, not as a way for a general contractor to just like get more out of their subcontractors, but a way, if it's done properly, I think it p- can be done in a way that strengthens the ecosystem that those, that GC and subcontractors work in.

If they can feel comfortable, they're doing it anyways. It happens. Like they're- Yeah, yeah … they'll go, "Hey, I need funding. Like I, I'll– if you pay me tomorrow, if you write me a check right now, I'll, I'll, I'll take a two percent, uh, hit," and they'll do it, but it's can we standardize that and just make it a normal business process so it doesn't feel like that, and it just feels more like a creative way to, to get the funding that you need to be able to get the materials you need to get that job done or make payroll. So I think if we look at it from that perspective, it can be a very, or it will be if it's not already, a very effective tool to strengthen- Yeah, yeah … the financial ecosystem.

It makes sense. But of course, there's always risk involved in, in payments, Rishi, you know? Yeah. And I'll let them tell you how much. I don't like– I, I think it's very little for them, but, um- Yeah. This is game of risk, right? Construction. It is. It is a game of risk, yeah. So last question, Eric, is you jumped on AI early and have been candid that you built plenty that didn't matter. Which AI workflows genuinely help partnership and sales roles today? What's overrated, and where should someone listening go to find you and what you're building? Okay, so what workflows– The first part of that question, what workflows work?

And I think work– defining work is important. Mm-hmm. It's very easy to keep building and building, especially when it starts asking you, "Hey, do you wanna do this? Do you wanna do that?" But I think starting reali- like realizing the best thing to do is start with an outcome that happens often or that needs to be produced often, whether that's some, uh, maybe a QBR or a monthly brief or maybe a, a prep for a discovery call or even like a midday email summary that Gemini can extract for you. I think that those are the biggest kind of ways to eliminate administrative drag or reduce it, 'cause I, I truly feel that that's, that's the biggest place for AI right now in our workflows is where is there administrative drag?

And one thing I found that's very helpful is actually going to Gemini or going to my LLM that been pointed at the shared files system that I'm working in and reverse prompt and say, "Find the bottlenecks." You know, like if, if, if you have a user MD and you have some kind of structure and infrastructure, a charter for the LLM you're working with, it, it has some instructions, it kinda knows who you are. So what I've done is just prompted it, reverse prompted to go into my drive, go into my Gemini or my Gmail, my chats, and just tell me what you see. And one of the biggest unlocks this year for me was it told me that whenever I was asked it for information that was on the outside of my expertise, it took longer, obviously- Mm-hmm … to get that information back.

And like you would think, like I have AI, how could it be taking me longer to get these answers still? And I realized that it's the confirmation from the expert for the AI's response that I needed that was taking the… So like bi- BION approvals, I always call 'em believe it or not approvals. I've been working on my knowledge graph on Google App Scripts that I built for my, my Drive. Mm-hmm. 'Cause after six years of Trimble, that thing is jammed and packed to the brim. So I found it kind of difficult to just point Gemini at Drive and say, "Go to town." It's got a bunch of stuff from my previous role that I was in, right?

Some of it's valuable, some of it's not for right now. So just digging into AI in my personal life for the past four years and being almost a vampire for a little while- you start to realize that, uh, your– when it's your tokens- Yeah, yeah … you gotta find a way to limit the amount of tokens that are being generated and context and like just giving it better instructions and governance and just again, reverse prompting until you have this thing that actually works and works- Often that can, you can maintain. And I think one of the only ways to do that with data is some type of graph, some type of, of index that you can actually go in and clean or maintain or have processes built around it.

I'm getting into the weeds a little bit, but, uh, you start… Y- you see where I'm going with it. Like, it- I think each phase builds on the next one. Once you maximize the phase you're in, you start to say, "Oh, this can't be it." Like, I see people that are getting bigger responses, like their, their systems are connected. Like I… So what am I missing, and what's the next level here? And like the one that I've… The one I think everybody's still in right now that I've got through was the just overload of chats and decisions and- Mm-hmm 'cause that starts to be like, I don't even remember which chat that… Was that a Gemini chat?

Was that an actual chat- … with a person that I talked to? Did I send that email or did, was it, is it still sitting in the session somewhere? So I, like, I, once you, again, volume, economy of scale, the more you use it, the more you try to do with it, uh, and the, the more you actually start to unlock, I, I, you… It's pretty easy to see what your next step is. And it's been fun to, to kinda learn and, on, and make little breakthroughs, and also daunting at the same time 'cause it's like, is this ever gonna end? Is, is there an end to this, uh, what we can create here- Yeah … in the amount of ways?

But one of the things, Rishi, you're probably not expecting me to say is I think that AI, the way we're using it right now, is creating more work at every stage- Hmm of the funnel. Hmm. I mean, like, more work, but I mean more mental work, more paragraphs, more verbosity, verbosity, like, uh, very well-written and complex memos instead of an email with three bullet points, you know? So I think, I think we're- You get these really long emails from people. Like, it's like full, a story, like somebody copy-pasted stuff from AI. Absolutely. What I'm, what I'm, what am I doing?

Gemini, can you summarize this, please? Make sure, make… Is that it? Is that everything? So, but even then, Rishi, people are doing that. So we re- I realize that, and I'm like, I'm gonna put… I'm gonna structure this email to put things in there for the LLM. Like, if this is an LLM, this is the most important part of this, this copy to make sure that you highlight this, you know? 'Cause- Mm … and I th- I think it does work. You can start to steer the context for the, for the person you're sending the information to if they, if you know that they're using, uh, AI.

It's not a injection, you know? It's not an injection. It's just making sure that the AI hits on the right points. And I don't know how smart yours is, you know? Yeah. Nobody knows Eric, it was a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for coming on Thank you for having me, Rishi. It was awesome. It was awesome. Thank you for, um, bearing with me while I navigated some of those responses. But there's just, there's so much, right, that you could talk about. I mean, you and I are both in the CFMA. We have… I think one of the… I think I was better at e-payment selling before I worked with all the customers, 'cause I just didn't know what I didn't know, you know?

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