From BIM to CFO: The 4 Numbers Every Contractor Must Track (or Go Broke) | Stewart Bohrer

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Today our guest is Stewart Bohrer Stewart, welcome.

Stewart Bohrer (00:46)
Hi, happy to be here.

Rishi Srivastava (00:47)
First section is on your background and perspective. Your path into finance is unconventional. You came from BIM, prefab, and design. How did that shape the way you think about money in construction?

Stewart Bohrer (01:02)
So I guess I’ve always been interested in building things and kind of finding the best way to do it. And I think the biggest thing that really BIM, prefab and design all share in common is planning something, making a schedule and then executing that plan. So like we’ve all heard the phrase, plan your work and work your plan. Like that’s really, I mean, 90 % of what makes BIM and prefab work.

And then how that kind of got me into accounting, or like more into the financial side of things, is what goes on with the money behind the scenes to really make all that work and how the planning can affect that in the long run.

Rishi Srivastava (01:36)
Yeah, you money is connected to everything.

When you were running prefab, profitability suddenly mattered in a very real way. What did prefab teach you about how construction actually makes or loses money?

Stewart Bohrer (01:51)
So in prefab, it’s an area in construction that is, I mean, it’s not necessarily new, but it’s really gained a lot of popularity in the last probably five, 10 years. And there’s always an argument on whether or not prefab really does make money, or if it costs money, or if it really just saves schedule.

I think again with the right planning, it can save you money and the planning has to really go into like, what are we prefabbing? Why are we prefabbing it? How is that going to affect that schedule?

And how is that either going to save us money? Is it going to cost us more money? Cause now we’re storing something for how long if we prefab it too soon. So it really comes down to that ability to be able to plan and schedule things and just so everything is hitting at the exact right time in the process. And that’s where kind of the operation side of me is like,

in the construction where I think that kind of gives us gives a little advantage into the financial because a lot of a lot of construction comes down to exactly that is just the timing. So like prefab, for example, if I know I’m going to go and build a bunch of let’s just say conduit racks.

If I build, you know, a hundred feet of conduit racks and I ship them all to site and I can only install, you know, 40 feet and then I have to store those other 60 feet of racks on site for how long, that’s going to cost me something. Or it’s going to be in the way. It’s something we got to work around, you know? So it’s all about timing, planning, and sticking to that schedule.

Rishi Srivastava (03:18)
the accounting shows performance at the very end, but the schedules and other upstream things, they can tell you where the job’s a lot before accounting comes back and does things.

Stewart Bohrer (03:26)
Right.

Yeah, and the other nice thing in prefab is, is you can start to see some of those costs right away. So like if you know how much it’s gonna cost you to prefab all those racks, or you build one, and since you’re building in a controlled environment, you can build another several hundred the exact same way, and you know it’s gonna cost the same each time going up, so you can really plan out your project and predict how much it’s gonna actually cost you.

Rishi Srivastava (03:37)
Hmm.

Stewart Bohrer (03:54)
and start to see those, start to see where money’s gonna be tight before you actually get there in the field, allowing you to really just plan ahead.

Rishi Srivastava (03:55)
Yeah.

I was talking to another guest who was comparing construction to manufacturing. Manufacturing is a lot more predictable compared to construction.

Stewart Bohrer (04:09)
Yep.

And yeah, that’s the whole idea of PreFab is, you know, we’re trying to make a manufacturing department really for our whatever our widget is that we want to install in the field.

Rishi Srivastava (04:15)
Yeah.

That’s right. Many CFOs come from accounting or CPA backgrounds. What advantages do you think operators turned CFOs bring that traditional finance leaders sometimes miss? And you are an operator turned CFO.

Stewart Bohrer (04:35)
Yep, so I think really it’s just that experience with construction. It’s just a different industry as you kind of mentioned before. And a lot of that again comes down to the timing and the scheduling and everything. But something that when I kind of thought about this is in, when I was in BIM,

When we were looking for new hires, we would often look for, you know, the guy who was in the field who understood how this stuff actually gets built, how it actually gets installed, because it was easier to train them on Revit than it was to take someone who already knows Revit, which is the program we used to model for anybody who doesn’t know. then, so it was easier to train them that kind of complicated program than it was to teach them construction.

So I think the same kind of principle applies for someone who knows construction has been in and out of construction. And then you look at the money side of things, the end of the day, it comes down to just some math and timing, right? And the timing, like I was saying, is a huge part in construction. And I think that having that experience.

Really, I mean I’m not going to say that’s necessarily the best path, but it gives you a different perspective that I think is really needed when you’re looking at construction as an industry.

Rishi Srivastava (05:46)
Yeah, real world is hard to understand. it doesn’t make easily sense like, Hey, how complicated it is to build that thing.

Stewart Bohrer (05:55)
Right?

Rishi Srivastava (05:55)
The next section is the core problem, financial uncertainty. You say, quote unquote, most stress in construction is not knowing what you don’t know. What does that uncertainty usually look like day to day for subcontractors?

Stewart Bohrer (06:13)
So I know a lot of the subcontractors that we get, they’re all mostly they’re on QuickBooks and they don’t have a job costing built in at all. And so it’s, so they don’t really have a really good set way of tracking a job from start to finish on what it’s costing.

how are we doing overall? So there’s no cost to completes happening. And then no one’s looking to see if the cost.

is comparing to how they estimated the job because they just don’t have a way of tracking it. So you can’t find anything out until the very end, right? You just know like, okay, we made money or we didn’t make money, but there’s no why, there’s no explanation. So a lot of these contractors are like, they’re getting jobs, they’re having work and it’s constantly coming in, but it’s just that feeling of just uncertainty. Like we don’t know how we’re gonna do until it’s all said and done.

And then a lot of that, when they finally do reach out, it’s usually because like I thought we were making money, but now I’m looking at my account and unfortunately it doesn’t seem like I am. And I don’t know why, because once again, you don’t have, you have to have that job costing. It’s that feedback loop, right? You gotta have the job costing. You gotta have some way of repeatable estimating where, you know, you do it the same each time. So that way each one of those estimate.

amounts gets tracked towards a cost code.

Rishi Srivastava (07:35)
Yeah, actually, without being able to map the estimate of the job to the actual of the job clearly, it’s very hard to say whether you are any good or not.

Stewart Bohrer (07:48)
Right, and a lot of them it’s like it works, that method works when they’re really small and they’re doing small jobs with a quick turnaround. It’s not that big a deal and it works just fine, but as these companies start to grow, you start adding on new costs that maybe no one even looked at before. But if you don’t have a way to track that, you don’t notice that until it’s too late.

Rishi Srivastava (08:08)
What’s the most common moment when owners realize they’ve lost control financially? Is it payroll, cash balance, job profitability, or something else?

Stewart Bohrer (08:21)
I think

we think it’s payroll a lot and we do kind of hear that, but I think it’s really more the job profitability and it comes again from just that unknown. Like once you really start talking with the business owners especially, and maybe they’re not in the day to day on every single job, but it’s just that’s where the big unknown seems to come up is each job profitable.

And it’s often just, I’m not sure. I guess we’ll see when we’re done, you know?

Rishi Srivastava (08:49)
Yeah, like it’s not easy to make a course correction midway if you don’t have real good tracking.

Stewart Bohrer (08:56)
Right, and that’s what you run into is if you don’t know, how can you change it? Because you don’t know. And that’s what we try to help with is coming up with a plan and a system of how can you know ahead of time.

Rishi Srivastava (09:08)
Right. Also, these construction systems, they’re so old. Even the ones that are really dedicated to construction, it’s another problem that this industry has.

Stewart Bohrer (09:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (09:19)
You work mostly with subcontractors. Why do subs tend to feel financial pain earlier and more intensely than GCs?

Stewart Bohrer (09:28)
I think a lot of that comes from the subs effectively financing the projects. So they’re going out and buying materials and you know, they have guys on site before they’ve ever gotten paid. And some of that comes down to that’s the way it is, but a lot of it comes down to just over billing at the beginning of a project and not having a system in place for that. But I think that’s really the…

The main thing of what the subs run into is that they end up financing projects out of their business or out of their line of credit, and then they’re paying interest on that too, which eats into their profit by the end.

Rishi Srivastava (10:05)
Commercial contracting is a beast. There’s this 90 days, 120 days it takes for us up to get paid.

Stewart Bohrer (10:11)
Yep.

Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (10:13)
The fourth thing, framework. You’re very intentional about only tracking four metrics every week. Why is focus more important than dashboards in construction finance?

Stewart Bohrer (10:15)
Yep.

So I guess it’s easy to have a bunch of numbers that say something, but maybe they don’t mean anything. What we want it to do is mean something to our audience. And like we’re usually meeting with like the owner of the company or CEO of the company. So we want the four numbers to really give them an overview of how the company’s doing. And each number needs to mean something specifically to them. And I don’t mind sharing what we look at. We look at gross profit,

net profit, cash flow, and then revenue. And they’re obviously all tied together to some degree. But we’ll go through that with our clients, each one of those numbers and how it’s affecting their business overall.

Rishi Srivastava (11:05)
Yeah. Sometimes you have these fancy dashboards and you think you have control of the thing, you know, and then suddenly most of these numbers don’t even mean anything, you know, some complicated acronym.

Stewart Bohrer (11:10)
you

Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (11:17)
Without giving away proprietary sauce, what categories do those four metrics fall into and why those?

Stewart Bohrer (11:26)
So as I mentioned, it’s gross profit, net profit, cash flow, and then revenue. So gross profit is something that can mean something different to a lot of people. And what it is is it’s just, and we look at this on a project level and then as a company level, but it’s just what the project is making before you tack on overhead to it.

And then all that comes from how you job cost, what you job cost, and what that actually comes out to be. And then so after you take out what is left, or after you take out overhead, what is left then is your net profit. And this is the number that is really gonna matter to the owners. This is what makes the company either profitable or not. So that’s.

kind of the most, maybe the most important one, but right up there equal with it in my opinion is cash flow. Because this is where we’ll look at what money’s coming in, what money’s going out, what do we have in the bank account, and what’s it gonna look like at the end of this week? What’s it gonna look like at the end of next week? And we look at that as a 13 week forecast.

Strategize on how we’re gonna get through some of the hard weeks. Are we gonna be able to get through some of the hard weeks? Do we need to go into a line of credit? You know like this that’s why I say this is maybe the most important one because this is what keeps the business functioning because you might have that net profit, but if you’re not seeing that money until It’s too late. Then it doesn’t really do you any good and then revenues the other one we like to track and

And that’s really just to see how the business is doing as a whole. We compare it, you know, month over month, year over year.

Rishi Srivastava (13:06)
Yeah. Thank you for that explanation. Many contractors argue endlessly about what quote unquote gross profit really means. Why does that confusion persist and how do you cut through it?

Stewart Bohrer (13:20)
So gross profit is like, kind of like I mentioned, it does have a slightly different definition depending on who you asked. I guess the definition’s really just the same. It’s just what profit you have before you factor in overhead. So where comes in is how your job cost. So if, I know some companies don’t.

Allocate any time for a project manager for instance that just goes to overhead so then your gross profit on that project or You know if you’re that type of company your gross profits gonna have to be higher To cover that cost that you have in the background

I think the easiest way to cut through it is to have your set job costs and have a set way of doing it and job cost everything you can. Because the more you have set towards that specific job, the more you can hold that specific job accountable for making the profit. If that makes sense.

Rishi Srivastava (14:10)
And when you

have that set way, I mean, you can also compare the jobs. One job, one job, two.

Stewart Bohrer (14:14)
Yeah, exactly.

And that’s why something we do with our clients is we go through their cost codes. That’s one of the first things we do when we sign on a new client. We go through their cost codes and then we go after we have those established, we go through their estimating and how they all tie back to each cost code.

Rishi Srivastava (14:30)
I was talking to a guest, was saying the post-mortem of the jobs is so important, like seeing at least some jobs, estimate versus actual, it tells you so much.

Stewart Bohrer (14:38)
Yep.

Right, and if all you have at the end of that is just one number compared to another number, it’s hard to see. It’s easy to see, like, yeah, we made money. No, we didn’t make money. But it’s hard to see where and why. And that really starts to matter. When things get tight, you want to know where you’re spending too much. A lot of times what we’ve discovered is a lot of these companies don’t realize how much money they are spending on their overhead. And that’s why everything ends up being so tight.

Rishi Srivastava (14:52)
Yeah.

Right. If you don’t understand the past, how are you going to estimate the future jobs,

Stewart Bohrer (15:11)
Right.

Yep, and that’s part of what our system helps establish for our clients, is having that comparison tool.

Rishi Srivastava (15:18)
All right. Can you share a real example where tightening focus on just a few metrics immediately changed a client’s decisions?

Stewart Bohrer (15:28)
Yeah,

So some of our clients would try to track, you know, just anything they can, 15, maybe 15 or 20 different metrics. And at the end of it, they’re not really sure what they’re getting. So a specific example is, I guess it’s a specific example is probably trying to job cost.

without having a job costing system in place and tracking all these different costs on a spreadsheet of their own making. And then we took that over for them, got them into our program to job cost everything, which we use, it’s called Control Core. And it basically replaces QuickBooks for construction.

but it has the built-in job costing in it. So we took all that off of his plate and then now we’re able to look at the bigger picture with him every week and see, you know, looking at those four numbers like, you are making money, you’re not making money, you know, the big important questions.

Rishi Srivastava (16:21)
Yeah, yeah. What are like the typical sizes of your clients?

Stewart Bohrer (16:25)
So our clients, typically we target like the one to $10 million range, is like the way I kind of think about it is you’ve kind of outgrown that mom and pop type shop, but you’re not big enough where you want to like go full on corporate yet.

Rishi Srivastava (16:31)
Mm-hmm.

Stewart Bohrer (16:42)
And that’s where it’s like the old systems of just like figuring it out start to get stressed and they don’t really work as well anymore as like I was mentioning earlier where you need to have that the full system in place on tracking jobs all the way through cost to completes to figure out if you’re gonna make money before you actually recognize the profits. And then.

Like I said, they’re not big where you need like a dedicated team full time doing this, you know, day in and day out. That’s where like once you get over 10 million, and we do have a couple of clients that are over 10 million, that work with us. And the systems work pretty well, but I mean, once you get to a certain point, it is a full-time job and that’s where I want to be out of it. We’ll help them build the systems and get them set on their way. And then they can hire, you know, in-house to take over.

Rishi Srivastava (17:03)
Hmm.

die.

Stewart Bohrer (17:30)
kind of where we step off.

Rishi Srivastava (17:31)
Yeah, Over 10 million, it needs to be an in-house person. Yeah, probably controller. ⁓ The next section is here on cash flow, billing, and execution gaps. A common story you mentioned, backlog looks healthy, but there is no cash on Friday. How does that disconnect usually happen?

Stewart Bohrer (17:36)
Right.

Yep.

I think that just comes down to billing, honestly. And a lot of it comes down to underbilling versus overbilling. A lot of people aren’t well-versed in overbilling. So it’s something we train with our clients at the very beginning to figure out where we can bill more and then collect.

A lot of people, that’s one of the hardest things for people to do and I totally understand that is to ask for your money that you’re owed. But sometimes that’s all it takes is just an email that says, hey, I sent this pay app in, it was due, can you guys get that processed? And then the payment will come the next day. But I mean, I get it too, because it is hard to ask for money, but when it’s money you owe, you have to do it. And we help with that too. Like we’ve sent emails on behalf of our clients.

But a lot of it, I mean, yeah, it’s really just the billing. And like I said, collecting.

Rishi Srivastava (18:50)
I don’t know software business and some of our customers they don’t even respond to emails. You have to call. Hey dude, you owe me money. Please pay.

Stewart Bohrer (18:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, nope.

it’s hard to beat a phone call sometimes.

Rishi Srivastava (19:04)
Yeah, it sucks to make that call.

Stewart Bohrer (19:07)
Right.

But usually it’s just a, you know, out of sight, out of mind type of thing. Nine times out of ten, I would say that’s what it is.

Rishi Srivastava (19:12)
Yeah.

In your experience, how often is the problem underbilling versus overspending versus timing?

Stewart Bohrer (19:22)
I think the problem is typically gonna be under billing. Just because, and even going back to my previous example with like the mom and pop type shop, it works because there’s not as much on the line. But when you start having full crews out there working and you’re…

delayed on, or not delayed on payment, but you’re under billed and now you’re, like I said earlier, is you’re financing the project as the subcontractor. And if you don’t have that money in the bank, then your line of credit is financing the project and now you’re paying interest on it, which again, that’s eating into your profit. That’s why one of the first things we do is we look at the overbilling strategy for our clients when we go through all their accounts receivable.

and see where they’re at on each one.

Rishi Srivastava (20:07)
Yeah, so let’s someone’s doing a 10 million in revenue and is a subcontractor. How much of that do you think is accounts payable? yeah.

Stewart Bohrer (20:15)
Yeah, it we have we have quite the variance in our in our group of clients, but Let’s see you said 10 million so your accounts payables probably

So that’s labor.

It depends on the business, like I said, we have a couple that are real outliers with how much they’re making. But I would say it can be anywhere from, let’s say, two million to four million.

Rishi Srivastava (20:39)
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say to them. the labor is another 2, 3 million, something like that. What are the early warning signs owners should watch for before cash flow becomes a crisis?

Stewart Bohrer (20:40)
Yeah.

Yep.

So this is something that we pick up on in our cash flow forecasting, but if you’re not doing some kind of cash flow forecasting, not sure you’re gonna necessarily pick up on those very easily. But another good tool that everyone should be doing is a project cost to complete.

and I think you’re gonna turn up a lot of red flags in there. And then that’s where you’re comparing like how much have you spent on the project and how much have you billed and then how much have you collected. If you’re comparing all three of those numbers and you’ve spent way more than you’ve billed and then even farther down the line is how much you’ve collected. And that’s where you’re running into really financing that project.

Rishi Srivastava (21:36)
Yeah, makes sense. Good forecasting can be so valuable.

Stewart Bohrer (21:40)
here.

Rishi Srivastava (21:41)
If a subcontractor is doing five to $10 million in revenue and wearing every hat, what’s the first financial system or habit they need to put in place?

Stewart Bohrer (21:54)
I think it’s job casting because that’s how you’re going to figure out where your money’s going at the end of the day. And without that, that’s where you’re going to start running into not making money on the projects. And then more importantly, not knowing why you’re not making money on the projects.

I suppose that’s followed pretty closely by estimator. Being able to estimate with some system that’s repeatable so you can compare it to it.

Rishi Srivastava (22:12)
soon.

Right, nice.

Yeah, like, let’s say if I’m an estimator and you’re not giving me feedback, you know, like, hey, you estimated well this time. Hey, you sucked this time. Like, how am I supposed to improve?

Stewart Bohrer (22:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, I’m just gonna suck again next time because I’m still using the same form. Yeah. So that’s where the feedback loop is. It’s the game changer, really. I mean, you have to have that. I think you have to have it. I mean, you can go and say like, yeah, we didn’t make any money. Let’s just up our cost by X percent and then maybe it works on the next project. Or maybe it doesn’t.

Rishi Srivastava (22:33)
Yeah.

Stewart Bohrer (22:49)
But with job costing, you can really dig into why. Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t we make money? We made a lot of money on asphalt, but we lost a lot on concrete. So we need to adjust those specifically. And

Rishi Srivastava (22:49)
Okay.

Good.

Stewart Bohrer (23:00)
without some kind of tracking in that you don’t know so you can’t fix it.

Rishi Srivastava (23:04)
Right, right.

What you measure is what you can improve. If you’re not even measuring, you have no chance of improving, you know.

Stewart Bohrer (23:09)
Yes.

Rishi Srivastava (23:10)
The last section here is towards on scaling systems and the future. As companies grow, you talk about moving from people dependence to system dependence. What systems matter most first and what’s a mistake you see companies make when scaling?

Stewart Bohrer (23:23)
Mm-hmm.

So I think, like I said, when these companies start out and they’re small and it’s maybe a one or two man operation, the business kind of runs on effort. Like you put in a lot of effort, you make money, you get that back out. But as you start to grow, you have to have some kind of system in place to highlight what’s working, like we’ve said, and then what’s not.

That’s where the scaling comes into factor. You can’t just get another partner to come in and be a owner, operator, whatever it may be, and just keep doing that same thing over again. Yeah, just as you get that, you get the bigger jobs and you have more requirements, your scope starts getting a little bigger, you’re taking off a little more, then you can chew maybe. And without a system in place, you’re just, I mean the efforts.

Just putting in the effort, it’s only gonna get you so far. Even if you’re trying to pay attention to what you’re doing, you have to have something that’s repeatable, I guess. That’s where, yeah. And it’s like you just said before, you have to have a way of measuring what you’re doing or you can’t fix it.

Rishi Srivastava (24:29)
You know, I think human mind, we cannot keep track of more than like 20 people in our heads. It’s very difficult to keep track of too many things, you know, in an uncoordinated way.

Stewart Bohrer (24:42)
Right.

Yeah, agree with you there. Yep.

Rishi Srivastava (24:46)
Without a system, it’s very hard.

How should owners think about fractional CFOs versus hiring in-house?

Stewart Bohrer (24:55)
So that kind of goes back to what I said, like what our range is, where we’re in that one to 10 million. That’s where I think you’re kind of in between that point of this is something you can probably do yourself as the owner of the business versus do I want to hire someone full time. If you’re in that window, that’s where I think it makes more logical sense, financial sense to hire someone kind of part time. That’s…

expert in that field versus once you grow to a certain point I do think that you’re gonna want somebody full-time in that seat in-house but if you’re in that kind of that sweet spot like we say is you know that one to ten million that’s where I think it makes the most financial sense

Especially if you need help building the systems and setting the systems up getting someone who’s done it for multiple other people Instead of someone who’s maybe done it once or something like that, you know

Rishi Srivastava (25:41)
You know, one to 10 million, you’re really, really huge, but you’re still, you’re not very little too. It’s like there is enough chaos that it’s hard for the owner to control.

Stewart Bohrer (25:52)
Right.

And that’s where it’s nice having someone on the outside too, to look in. we can make decisions logically, because we’re not in, you know, even if you hire somebody, they might make it little more emotionally too, because now they’re part of this business, they need it to survive type of thing. And we can look at it overall from an outside perspective.

Rishi Srivastava (25:58)
Die.

Stewart Bohrer (26:10)
use more logic instead of emotion, because at the end of the day, humans are emotional creatures, and a lot of times emotions can go into how you make a decision. Right or wrong, I mean, it affects us,

Rishi Srivastava (26:21)
Yeah.

So do you end up telling the owners at some point like, hey, this business is not doing well, you may want to shut it down?

Stewart Bohrer (26:29)
Yeah, we actually just had a client that had that happen and I think he knew it kind of coming into it and it’s not fun by any means,

I would like to say if he would have came to us, you know, six months sooner, we could have maybe helped him pull out of it, but it’s hard to say that for sure. But he definitely didn’t really have the systems in place that he needed to be on top of all this. But once we brought out all the light, I mean, it was just a matter of a couple of weeks of us working with him that we all realized that it wasn’t gonna work.

Rishi Srivastava (27:00)
It’s so sad like these guys work so hard and like them losing their business, you know

Stewart Bohrer (27:01)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s, yeah. It’s hard.

Rishi Srivastava (27:09)
The…

How were you feeling when you had to do that?

Stewart Bohrer (27:15)
Not good. Yeah, definitely not good. I felt bad for him because I’m a very empathetic person anyways. And now being in my own business and putting myself in that position, if I had that happen, I’d be devastated. So I felt terrible.

And I think he had just recently purchased the business so he wasn’t all that far into it. And I think he might have got caught off guard with a couple things but.

Rishi Srivastava (27:36)
Mm.

Stewart Bohrer (27:38)
Hopefully he can bounce back with something. I know we’ve been in touch a couple times since then and I think he might want to try again once he gets through it all. So we’ll see. guess I’m hoping for the best for him.

Rishi Srivastava (27:49)
I mean, here in America, we big believers in giving second chances.

Stewart Bohrer (27:54)
Yep.

Yeah. I mean that’s that is

Rishi Srivastava (27:55)
That’s why

I think entrepreneurship thrives here, you know.

Stewart Bohrer (27:58)
Yeah,

true. And I mean, that is the one upside of having it, you know, like through the LLC and not through him personally is that, you know, it sucks. can go like, they take it away. It’s gone. Business, they lost the business, but you know, personally, he can still bounce back. And like you said, he can try again and lessons learned. Sometimes that’s the hardest way to learn a lesson. I mean, it is the hardest way to learn a lesson, but sometimes that’s what makes it really stick and makes you wanna.

And sometimes it makes you want to even try it again, you know, because you did learn a lesson.

Rishi Srivastava (28:30)
Yeah, and this time you’re going in with ⁓ more forethought and more knowledge. The last question here, Stewart, what excites you most about where construction finance is heading over the next five years?

Stewart Bohrer (28:33)
Right.

Yep.

let’s see here.

I think with… it’s interesting watching everything go digital and like it’s been happening for 20 years now probably but we saw clients that are you know writing checks for everything and how to track his checkbook in our software and like that becomes an issue but I think AI will be interesting how it helps.

or hopefully helps. think it could be used to help with the job costing, putting bills to the right cost codes. And I know our program uses it a little bit to sort out the bills. So that’ll be interesting to see. I think everyone’s kinda keeping their eye AI anyways for everything. But I think a lot of it’s gonna stay the same principles. Like.

Rishi Srivastava (29:21)
Mm-hmm.

Stewart Bohrer (29:27)
Like I’ve been saying, this is the job costing, tracking a project from start to finish, being able to cost to complete, compare that to your estimate. I think a lot of that stays the same. It’s just how we get that data and how we can use it. Cause I’m sure AI can probably go look at a bunch of your, like if you had a bunch of projects filled out on cost to complete or, you know, finished projects, if you have them filled out compared to their original budget, AI could probably go through and compare.

This is the place where you’re not making as much money. This is where you’re doing really well. Something that we would normally have to do manually.

Rishi Srivastava (29:57)
The world’s changing pretty fast, actually.

Stewart Bohrer (29:59)
Yeah, AI has been crazy. Just in the last… Has it even been a year yet? Since it’s really hit the market? I don’t know. I don’t think quite a year.

Rishi Srivastava (30:03)
So, yeah.

Yeah, I think

last one year has been so crazy. Software market has changed completely. Coding is such a commodity now.

Stewart Bohrer (30:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great.

Rishi Srivastava (30:22)
Stewart, thank you so much for your time and being on the show.

Stewart Bohrer (30:26)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you having me on.

Rishi Srivastava (30:29)
Mm-hmm.