The CEO and founder of busybusy time tracking, Isaac Barlow was interviewed by Melinda Yeaman from Outlier Magazine. They talked about how busybusy got started and how Isaac had to overcome several setbacks. The following are excerpts from the Outlier interview:
Isaac: The best way that I would interpret construction to you is, it’s kind of like organized chaos. We have a semblance of order, we definitely get things done, but there’s so much confusion and chaos and room for improvement. That was a continual frustration point for me.
Melinda: So how did you fix those problems along the way?
Isaac: That was the big vision for busybusy. Going through the process, I spent a lot of time trying to analyze and crunch numbers at night, so I could give good feedback to our crews. Because the best way to get performance out of people is to give them high expectations and measure those expectations, and then see the results. Kind of like the comparison that is often made between ice skating and hockey. An ice-skater goes and performs their best and then they wait to see their results, where in hockey the score is an ongoing process so if you’re down on the score, you can try to work harder to win the game. What you try to do in business is to give those measured results back to your team as fast as you can so they can increase their productivity and compete against themselves.
We had a lot of top-heavy administration, just trying to keep on top of the systems we put in place. Just to give an example, one year we lost three-quarters of $1 million just on equipment negligence. So there’s a lot of money at stake here, but the problem is it’s usually the norm not to systematize. The norm is; We just go through with our aggressive nature. We try to get things done and swallow up all the inefficiencies along the way. This creates a significant opportunity for improvement.
Melinda: So how are you able to stop and systematize some of these things that would create some of that automation?
Isaac: To tell you the truth, my number one gratitude would be to Steve Jobs, for introducing the iPhone to us. If the construction industry comprehended the impact of mobile technology on themselves, for systematization and how much it affected their profitability, we would’ve celebrated everywhere when iPhone was first introduced. Because that mobile tool gave us the ability to start collecting analytics and start systematizing our businesses in ways we never had the ability to prior to that.
Construction’s High Failure Rate
Isaac: If you study the construction industry history, 70% of contractors for the last 20 years have failed within seven years. So the trend is consistent, 70% of the time construction companies fail. That’s not so unique to construction, it’s more common in construction, but you go into different industries and you see numbers from 60 to 65% of failure rates. When I was managing these construction businesses it was overwhelming, and it took my entire life. From as much time I could put into it, and as much staff I could hire; and it still wasn’t efficient.
So on the way home from one of my projects one day, I was contemplating all these things in my mind, and thinking that there’s got to be a better way to this, because we were spending so much resources, and still not getting the results that we want; and that’s where the idea came to me. My brain started working on it so fast that I actually had to pull to the side of the road and start writing them down, and that’s where the idea of busybusy came from, and what I figured out, is we needed to automate everything. We needed to change everything in the system because, like many other industries, and maybe even a little bit more, construction is networked; we’re networked into each other big time.
Melinda: So tell me a little bit more about what you’ve developed with busybusy, and what’s evolved there?
Isaac: I believe we can change the world. That’s one thing that’s important for everyone to do. You’ve got to not only want it, but you’ve got to believe it, and it’s the people that are craziest enough to believe they can that do it. The way that we would change the world is by going back to the analytics of this contractor failure rate. I took it on as a research project and studied the root cause, and the root cause for this failure was never that they didn’t understand the skill set of their business, it was always business management that took them down. All their failure rate came from business management. And the amazing thing is with all the mobile technology we have today all business management systems can be automated, and that automation can replace all the administrative costs I talked about before.
The busybusy Tool Set
Melinda: So what kind of tools did you come up with? Are we talking time cards, what does it all entail?
Isaac: We started out with time cards because, when you look at these businesses, the number one thing that they need is information. When you study these failure rates, the reason they fail is they have insufficient information to make good decisions. So we started with the time tracker. Tracking employee time cards, and the attendance on the jobs they’re working on because that’s the core information business owners need to help them understand if projects are taking the amount of time that the owner or estimator expected them to take, so they can have better information to move forward with.
Melinda : So busybusy has timecard, attendance tracking, job tracking, what else?
Isaac: It also has the ability for employees to upload daily progress photos with GPS-stamped locations on the photos, and GPS-stamped timecards. So when employees clock in and out managers can see what jobs they’re working on, and also when you take photographs you’re keeping good records. We get into a huge liability issue with construction, when you work, it’s very important to photo document the work that was done. So to have a timestamp and a GPS stamp, all recorded in one place, is very important. busybusy put’s all that information into your project data, basically like a file on your project, that allows you to go back and look at that information later.
The busybusy Philosophy
Isaac: How will busybusy change the world? Because we all want to change the world, so I want to explain that. We have a fundamental philosophy, that at busybusy we empower the people that change the world, the entrepreneurs are the business owners, they are the people that change the world economically, and our job is to empower them. So if we can change the failure rate of companies from 70% down to 30% we will change the world. We increase the profits, for instance, in a construction economy from 5% to 10%, we know these people, their entrepreneurs, what do entrepreneurs do with their profits?
Melinda: They reinvest them into their companies, and they grow!
Isaac: Yes, almost without question. They hire, they spend, they’re the best economic stimulus package you can go after. Our vision of changing the world is we want to change the economy by empowering or strengthening the business owners that can change the economy.
Melinda Yeamen: So you’ve created this tool to help automate these companies and these business processes. So take us into how commitment and persistence fit in here, and how important is that in this whole process?
Isaac Barlow: If you analyze successful companies the primary ingredient that they all have is commitment. They have, you call what you want, commitment, persistence, sure grit, you know true grit. That is the most common thing among successful companies. So you’ve got to have that commitment and persistence in your idea to follow through with it. I saw a photograph on Facebook the other day where it shows a string having cut through a rock mountain, and it just explains that commitment and persistence, you know overtime that string, that water, will cut through that rock, and you have to be that committed and that persistent. If you’re really going to change the world and, if you’re committed to your idea, you’ve got to be willing to sacrifice, and you’ve got to be willing to press forward when nobody else will.
Melinda Yeamen: So that to me is kind of a very telling thing. But what’s the recipe there? When do we know when to commit to something like that?
Isaac Barlow: I’ll have to give you one of my philosophies on that. It’s not originated from me, and comes from an economist that I admire, his name is Henry Hazlitt. He wrote the book “Economics One Lesson”. What he explained in there is the only true path to wealth is through increasing efficiency or improving quality of life, and I think if you consider your idea, and do it, do those things. Does it practically improve somebody’s life? Does it improve the quality of their life, or increase efficiency, or brings them more success in their life? I think you got something worth pursuing.
Customer Service
Melinda Yeamen: So tell me what’s in the future here? You have clients in nine states, is that right?
Isaac Barlow: When we studied the industry we were marketing towards, we discovered that they really needed a lot of customer service, to be taken care of right. So we modeled after the insurance agent model. So basically, we’re bringing on agents in many different states, and right now we’re in the process of recruiting, because we found that the product that we’re selling sells very well. And it can make a significant amount of money for our agents. So now we’re in the process of recruiting those agents in different states.
Melinda: If this resonates with someone who is listening and they say, “Hey, I need that for my business,” does there need to be agent where they live in order for them to use this software, or can they just download and start using it?
Isaac: They can just download it and start using it. We just found for it to really start affecting their bottom line, it helps if we have someone that walks them through the the process.
Melinda: Do you ever do that virtually?
Isaac: We do that quite often with customers right now, for instance, we have customers in Connecticut and Hawaii, and both of them are taken care of virtually. We don’t have agents in those areas.
Melinda: Is easy to use? I imagine it doesn’t really take a techie to use it.
Isaac: It doesn’t take a techie to use it, it’s really easy to use. The main reason we like an agent to be there to help them set it up is so they don’t encounter frustrations, because really they’re switching their mode of thinking. They’re switching up from the conventional, where we turn in our paper time cards and keep track of things on paper, and now we start to keep track of everything on our smart phone. To rely on that, and take full advantage, we just like to have someone walking you through it, if they can.
Contractor Adds $5000 Per Month to Bottom Line
Melinda: So how long have your users been using busybusy, and what kind of results are you seeing?
Isaac: That’s a really good question. The longest users have been on for about a year, and the highest result I have seen is about 30 times the amount we charge them. So we have a customer for instance, that pays us $140 per month, and they added $5000 per month to their bottom line using it.
It’s a direct result of systematizing your business. Like this customer told us, “it’s actually more of the way busybusy got me thinking, because it got me thinking more in a systematizing way and it actually permeated through my company, until finally everything started becoming more profitable.” Their busybusy tracking gave them the analytics to make those decisions, but he’s still the one responsible to make those decisions. So he is using it to its full potential.
The Next Step for busybusy
Melinda: So what’s the next step for busybusy as a software?
Isaac: Basically the next step is working and continuing to move forward to the vision. We started with time and attendance, but we are going to automate every process that is in the construction industry. So one of the important things for the construction industry is to use labor analytics to tell them different things that affect their profit margins, for instance, their worker’s compensation, their workers comp charges. We can use labor analytics to help them discover what the correct rates are that they should be paying under general liability insurance and workers comp, and so forth.
One thing I’d like to mention, is if I’m a contractor I want busybusy to continue to innovate and make that silver platter good for me year after year. You know I would rather pay busybusy their charge per month, the software as a service model, rather than try to invest a lot of money upfront, and have it be outdated for me in the next few years.
